|
|
Post by dem on Dec 14, 2021 12:04:04 GMT
The Toupée: "There's nothing odd about me at all, as I used to impress upon Ebenezer when he was still alive. And when I told him so more than once, he'd say, 'what a pity, my dear,' or something like that, with a nasty look in his eye suggesting he might have had more fun with one of those punky creatures that they make so much of these days."
As you maybe guessed, Melia and Ebenezer married late in life, having met at the Good Companions club. Ebenezer's days thereafter were a misery, not least due to his shrewish wife's insistence upon his concealing shiny bald head morning, noon and night. When, mercifully, pneumonia puts him in his grave, the wig comes back on a mission to put Melia in hers.
Déjà Vu: A little boy arrives at a house beyond the cornfield he knows so well despite never having visited before. An old man sits writing in a high backed chair. They recognise one another. The life cycle is complete.
Incident in the Mist: A newcomer to Carnforth is relieved to find a grocer store open at this late hour on so bitterly cold a night. There's something unsettling about the young woman behind the counter.
The Walk: Hiker witnesses phantom re-enactment of a train crash and its corpse-strewn aftermath while walking the old railway cutting.
|
|
|
|
Post by humgoo on Dec 14, 2021 13:32:31 GMT
Henry: Throughout her childhood, Georgina and family have spent their summer holiday at Windersley, a rambling, ivy clad, red brick house in the Norfolk countryside. From the age of six, Georgina has been best friends with Henry, the housekeeper's grandson, though he insists she keep him a secret as the adults wouldn't understand. Nasty imaginary friend? |
|
|
|
Post by dem on Dec 14, 2021 17:28:42 GMT
Henry: Throughout her childhood, Georgina and family have spent their summer holiday at Windersley, a rambling, ivy clad, red brick house in the Norfolk countryside. From the age of six, Georgina has been best friends with Henry, the housekeeper's grandson, though he insists she keep him a secret as the adults wouldn't understand. Nasty imaginary friend? No such luck. Benign as they come. Opening paragraph raise hopes we might have a contender for your photography is dangerous compilation, but Henry's too nice a fellow. Successful story on it's own terms, mind. Overall the earlier Chill Company has been the more consistent of this pairing. |
|
|
|
Post by Craig Herbertson on Dec 14, 2021 18:23:34 GMT
No such luck. Benign as they come. Opening paragraph raise hopes we might have a contender for your photography is dangerous compilation, but Henry's too nice a fellow. Successful story on it's own terms, mind. Overall the earlier Chill Company has been the more consistent of this pairing. It's that time of year.... |
|
|
|
Post by dem on Dec 15, 2021 15:26:44 GMT
The Open Door: Ghost of Miss Ellie, the doctor's sainted grand-daughter, who would deliver cute home made presents to the little orphan evacuees at Christmas, until the German's dropped a bomb on her.
Daisies: Death is ... a short boat trip across the river to meet cherished friends.
Ghostly Encounter: A little boy in a dinghy washes out to sea off the coast of Portbrea. Septuagenarian Dan Thomas sets out to the rescue in the small pleasure boat named after his beloved, late wife, Mary Ellen. Can man and ghost bride conquer the elements and deliver child to safety?
|
|
|
|
Post by dem on Dec 16, 2021 16:58:34 GMT
Great-Aunt Abigail: Miranda is invited to 'Thornflower' by her invalid potential benefactor, a fantastically wealthy former stage actress. Great-Aunt Abigail wishes to assess the child's suitability as heiress to her riches, insanity and community of family ghosts. Quite unsettling. Story features a parrot, which, for some reason, often bodes well.
|
|
|
|
Post by dem on Jan 15, 2022 20:38:36 GMT
Finally;
A Garden of Ghosts: Novella, told over several interlinked vignettes. A public recreation ground, haunted by those to whom it has been a much loved and important sanctuary over the past century; Sal the gypsy who served her probation skivvying at the vicarage next door; a blind youth who can sense the colours of the rainbow; a cracked widow who believes herself in contact with little green men; a guileless hippie fallen foul of wily pseudo-flower children at the local artist colony; a war widow mourning the love of her life; and Mrs. Markham, a nonagenarian who can remember the park in happier days, before pollution killed off the wildlife.
|
|
|
|
Post by dem on Jan 6, 2023 12:55:15 GMT
Mary Williams - Where No Birds Sing: Stories of the Macabre (William Kimber, 1978) Georgie's Hat
Where No Birds Sing
The Eyes to See
The Dark Lady
Ginny's Coat
The Statue
Aunt Agatha
Florrie's Long Johns
Requiem For StellaBlurb: Author of Chill Company and other volumes of ghost stories, Mary Williams is now well-known for her ability to switch from the fantastic to the flippant, from the horrific to the humorous in calling forth the ghosts that haunt her pages. In this new volume however, the emphasis is on the macabre, springing from the Cornish countryside in which she lives. But even the macabre varies in mood. Where are Florrie's Long Johns that used to fly so persistently from the washing line next door? And what is his dead wife's hat doing peeping coyly over the shoulder of a guest at the male model's second wedding? From the lighthearted she turns to the menacing atmosphere of the moors and the cliffs in Requiem for Stella, the story of a beautiful and talented dancer who disappeared.
This is another outstanding collection of stories to amuse and to chill which will leave the reader with a slight sense of unease about the peaceful holiday land of Cornwall.Didn't get along quite so well with The Haunted Garden as was the case with prior titles mentioned on this thread, so let's try our luck with another from the 'seventies. From the titles, this one has the looks of a Mary Williams fashion victim's special. Georgie's Hat: A year on from the accidental- ish drowning of his first wife, Georgie, narrator Walter, a male model and sometimes gigolo, marries money in the formidable form of Diana, Lord Cornlake's horsey, sporty daughter. The high life's fine, but the novelty of playing trophy husband to an aristo wife soon grows tiresome. If only Diana were to die and leave everything to him! Walter, the ghost of Georgie-of-insane-dress-sense, and that of her floral, multi-ribboned hat, conspire to ensure her ladyship meets with fatal riding mishap. Where No Birds Sing: "Where trees and luscious vegetation had thrived in the past, only barren, blackened red soil had remained ... that, and those few stark reminders of man's colossal greed for self-importance and power." When an explosion at a secret research station decimates the woods at Porthzakken village, the area is sealed off and local residents persuaded to move elsewhere. Only Elaine Verne, the "mad" recluse of Grassdale Cottage, resists eviction. Her ex-husband is among the scientists responsible for the ecological disaster, and Elaine is determined to put things right on behalf of the elderly couple killed in the blast. Between them, she and Pan decontaminate the soil and regenerate an entire wood. The Eyes to See: The ghosts of "queer in the head" Franklin Maddison, an artist of genius, and his beautiful granddaughter, Leonore, enlist young Roger to retrieve the painter's finest works from a skip, prior to the sale of their Handsley home at auction. Melancholy, and very lovely.
|
|
|
|
Post by dem on Jan 8, 2023 12:20:27 GMT
The Dark Lady: Tharne, Cornwall. On the eve of his wedding to Sheila, Larry falls for a mystery red head girl in black dress walking from a decrepit, abandoned house on the cliff. Sheila, watching from the boarding house, realising there is no prospect of theirs being a successful marriage, packs her bag. Larry stays behind for long enough to learn that he is not the first to lose his heart to the ghost of Ruth LeMerrilionne. Sold into marriage to a dissolute Cornish landowner, Ruth found the arrangement so intolerable that she cut husband's throat before throwing herself into the sea. It's believed locally that she appears only to those rushing into doomed marriages.
Ginny's Coat: Banged up for a robbery committed by her conniving lover, Ginny slits her wrists in the cell. So who is this look-a-like parading around town in a fur jacket and heels he could have sworn he'd hidden away with the rest of the haul?
The Statue: Personal best of today's batch is this crushing conte cruel. Tania, fine looking, much younger trophy wife of the revered philosopher, Lance Rosen, falls in lust with the stone sculpture of a naked youth in the garden of their Cornish mansion. Together, she and her lover schedule a fatal accident for her sexless, ill-tempered husband.
|
|
|
|
Post by helrunar on Jan 10, 2023 14:48:54 GMT
I started reading through this thread today, never having heard of Mary Williams. And then I got to the biting wit of your synopsis of "Trog" (evidently nothing to do with the Joan Crawford film) and I may have screamed out loud.
Thanks again for the giggle. It was needed today.
cheers, Hel.
|
|
|
|
Post by dem on Jan 11, 2023 13:23:51 GMT
She's surely due a revival? There's a tremendous 'best of ...' waiting to be compiled from her 'seventies work alone.
Aunt Agatha: All those years ago, Agatha lusted after Jasper's father, only for him to marry her sister. Now the nephew travels from London to Cornwall to meet the old woman who has made him a beneficiary of her will. Jasper marvels at her vitality, how impossibly young and beautiful she looks, while she much appreciates his resemblance to the man she never got over. She entices him to the bedroom ......
Florrie's Long Johns: Bickering neighbours, widows both, prove inseparable in the graveyard as they were in life. The crux of their dispute, Florrie's obsession with her laundry and insistence on airing her garish long johns in full view of her next door.
|
|
|
|
Post by mrhappy on Jan 11, 2023 18:57:05 GMT
She's surely due a revival? There's a tremendous 'best of ...' waiting to be compiled from her 'seventies work alone. If I remember correctly a publisher (Tartarus maybe?) looked at publishing a 'best of' collection a while back but found the author's estate to be somewhat difficult and the idea was abandoned. Mr Happy |
|
|
|
Post by helrunar on Jan 11, 2023 19:23:06 GMT
Maybe her heir/s are similar to whoever keeps putting roadblocks in the way of that old 1930s anthology from some authoress nobody has ever heard of, whose reprint has been "coming soon" for the past ten years or so... The mind reels.
cheers, Hel.
|
|
|
|
Post by mrhappy on Jan 11, 2023 19:42:48 GMT
Maybe her heir/s are similar to whoever keeps putting roadblocks in the way of that old 1930s anthology from some authoress nobody has ever heard of, whose reprint has been "coming soon" for the past ten years or so... The mind reels. cheers, Hel. Ha! We might have the collected works of Mary Williams in hardback, paperback, audio book and adapted to a three season Netflix series before THAT book ever gets released. |
|
|
|
Post by helrunar on Jan 11, 2023 20:18:22 GMT
I'm afraid from what I have been able to learn, you may be right about that, Mr. Happy!
Oh well. Happy New Year! This morning I re-read "The Treasure of Abbot Thomas" by M. R. James and it's still so excellent... I had only ever read that one once or twice years ago. I added the electronic edition of A Pleasing Terror to my "device."
chees, Hel.
|
|
