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Post by Dr Strange on Apr 30, 2018 16:33:48 GMT
Here's another from Ramsey Campbell - Speaking Still, in NEW FEARS (ed. Mark Morris, Titan Books, 2017).
Excellent story - very creepy, and also very sad.
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Post by dem bones on Apr 30, 2018 20:57:39 GMT
.... and Barry N. Malzberg & Arthur L. Samuels, Calling Collect in Charles L. Grant's Shadows 4, 1981.
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Post by Shrink Proof on May 1, 2018 14:50:55 GMT
What about "The Statement of Randolph Carter" by H P Lovecraft? You can read it right here if you like...
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Post by dem bones on May 25, 2018 15:46:03 GMT
Robert Presslie - Dial 'O' For Operator ( Science Fantasy #27, Feb. 1958). (Pages 69-87). Proper phone terror, this. Reminds me a little of H. F. Arnold's The Night Wire.
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Post by Swampirella on May 30, 2018 16:40:40 GMT
Short stories about phones or stories where phones play an integral part in the plot. William F Nolan - Dead CallRamsey Campbell - Call FirstAnthony Horowitz - The Phone Goes DeadRamsey Campbell - Digging DeepLucille Fletcher - Sorry Wrong Number (although, perhaps this is more of a crime story). Also, I seem to remember Stephen King having an obscure short story called "Sorry Right Number" in which a woman receives a supernatural phone call... L. T. C. Rolt's "The Cat Returns". Newlyweds Steven and Myrtle stop off at an "ultra-modern" house after their car has broken down in a rainstorm. While their host is out of the room, he receives a call in which Steven is told " Just tell him I shall return in the morning. He'll understand." Well worth reading.
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Post by Dr Strange on Mar 31, 2020 20:45:32 GMT
Sam Dawson - Life Expectancy, Ninth Black Book of Horror (ed. Charles Black, 2012).
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Post by samdawson on Apr 1, 2020 10:44:05 GMT
Sam Dawson - Life Expectancy, Ninth Black Book of Horror (ed. Charles Black, 2012). The phone in that story is on a wall at home. I've got a bit of a collection of antique phones bought in junk shops or when I lived near Portobello road, or dug out of farmyards, ponds and cellars, so it made sense to write about one of them.
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Post by cromagnonman on Apr 1, 2020 17:04:07 GMT
"The Telephone in the Library" by August Derleth [Weird Tales June 1936]: reprinted in 1941's SOMEONE IN THE DARK.
Augie in mind numbingly inane mode.
According to the Augie of 1941 this was one of the score of ghost stories, out of the 200 or so he had written up to that point, which merited a second reading. I don't think he'd find too many supporters for that opinion personally. But even assuming it's true it causes one to wonder just how godawful the other 180 must have been.
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Post by Dr Strange on Sept 3, 2020 15:23:59 GMT
Robert Westall - The Call (1989)
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Post by dem bones on Jan 25, 2021 13:45:48 GMT
What about "The Statement of Randolph Carter" by H P Lovecraft? You can read it right here if you like... Andrew Brosnatch H. P. Lovecraft - The Statement of Randolph Carter: ( The Vagrant, May 1920: Weird Tales, Feb. 1925). "Carter, it's terrible — monstrous — unbelievable.". Live from the mental institution. Randolph Carter relates events surrounding the disappearance of Harley Warren, dabbler in the blackest mumbo jumbo, during an ill-conceived excursion beneath a sepulchre in the cemetery on Cypress Swamp. Carter was stationed beside the tunnel entrance for Warren to inform him of each horrible discovery via primitive mobile phone.
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Post by weirdmonger on Aug 10, 2021 14:30:47 GMT
Robert Aickman, "Your Tiny Hand is Frozen." YOUR TINY HAND IS FROZEN by Robert Aickman“The pink and blue children on the walls smiled at his plight, winsomely, cheekily, plethorically, according to character.” A literally eerie telephone story in an era when a telephone was “a squat black monster” with flexes stubby or lengthily coiled. A telephone (and its officious Exchange at number 0) that increasingly harasses Edmund St Jude (translator) who is staying in the studio of his girl friend Edwina Taylor-Smith (portrait painter of people’s children) while she is in a New Mexico sanatorium being treated for TB. (Aickman was reputedly a big fan of Mann’s Magic Mountain, a fact, if so, that often shows up in his fiction.) The nuisance calls and wrong numbers (intended for the Chromium Supergloss Corporation) and cracklings, multitudinous hummings or cacklings or rumblings and his frustrating inability, via a telephone with a short flex, to invite a woman called Queenie for Christmas Day dinner, suddenly give way to reveal the captivating voice of Nera Condamine (making “the telephone more and more to become a simple instrument of bliss, like the soup kitchen to the outcast, or the syringe to the drug-addict”) and (like people grooming each other on today’s social media) they fall in love with each other without ever meeting. She in fact becomes “roses in Edmund’s horizonless desert” amid the other “terrifying abuse and curses; at other times, groans and screams, as of the dying and the damned” — Aickman’s uncanny prophecy of our on-line things today. Nearer or further, Toby or not Toby, Nera eventually becomes an eerie embodiment of such exchange…? So who had been grooming whom? And no doubt Nera has a long flex on her phone. Still some mysteries, though, at clues given us — Why is the title of this story what it is? Who is the “flex purveyor” (if not each reader)? Why Extension 281? And how could anyone ever think that “Things mechanical are like the ladies”… Just waiting myself for the bread delivery.
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Post by Jojo Lapin X on Aug 10, 2021 14:35:41 GMT
Why is the title of this story what it is? It is a reference to a famous aria by Puccini, but that is about all I could tell you.
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Post by weirdmonger on Aug 10, 2021 14:46:34 GMT
Why is the title of this story what it is? It is a reference to a famous aria by Puccini, but that is about all I could tell you. Thanks, I know that aria. La Boheme, I think. But I don’t know why it should be the title of this story.
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Post by weirdmonger on Aug 10, 2021 15:26:27 GMT
It is a reference to a famous aria by Puccini, but that is about all I could tell you. Thanks, I know that aria. La Boheme, I think. But I don’t know why it should be the title of this story. The translation of the end of that aria I have now discovered is - Now that I've told my story, pray tell me yours, too, tell me frankly, who are you? Say will you tell? And Edmund, after all, is a translator!
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Post by PeterC on Aug 10, 2021 16:22:44 GMT
Dennis Etchison:
Call Home (from the collection: The Death Artist) Call 666 (from the collection: Talking in the Dark)
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