James Doig [ed.] - Australian Nightmares

[dem bones]

James Doig [ed.] - Australian Nightmares (Wildside, June 2022)

James Doig - Introduction

Mary Fortune - The Blighted Meadow
Charles Junor - The Silent Sepulchre
Ernest Favenc - What the Rats Brought
Ernest Favenc - On the Island of Shadows
Hume Nisbet - The Odic Touch
J.A. Barry - Told in the 'Corona's Cabin on Three Evenings
Rosa Praed - The House of Ill Omen
Morley Roberts - A Thing of Wax
James Edmund - The Prophetic Horror of the Great Experiment
James Edmund - The Precipitous Details of the High Mountain and the Three Skeletons
Lionel Sparrow - The Strange Case of Alan Heriot
Beatrice Grimshaw - The Blanket Fiend
James Francis Dwyer - The Phantom Ship of Dirk Van Tromp
Dulcie Deamer - The Devil's Ball
Helen Simpson - The Pledge
Vernon Knowles - The Watch
Vernon Knowles - The House That Took Revenge
Roger Dard - The Undying One

Blurb:
Literary scholar James Doig has assembled a thrilling new collection of rare and previously uncollected horror and dark fantasy stories by Australian authors, all from the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Made a start last night.

Charles Junor - The Silent Sepulchre: (Dead Men's Tales, 1898): Young, fantastically wealthy Vincent Russell summons his solicitor. Lawrence Musgrave, to Rockwood, "Sydney's gloomiest mansion," to discuss funeral arrangements. A recent mass-exhumation of a North London cemetery, confirmed that Russell's mother was a victim of premature burial. Her son, a fellow cataleptic, mindful that he does not suffer the same terrible fate, he writes Musgrave a generous cheque instructing him that, in the event of his client's sudden death, he daily inspect the sepulchre for signs of life. Russell also lets slip that he is to marry Miss Helen Travers. This comes as the bitterest blow to Musgrave, who has carried a torch for Miss Travers all these years. And to think it was he introduced the soon-to-be happy couple! How he despises them! That same night, a tragedy! Vincent Russell, to all intents and purposes, drops dead! Musgrave, torn between doing the decent thing by his client, or making a move of the love of his life, has the choice taken from him when he's knocked down by a cab. When he eventually reawakens from coma, Russell's funeral is long passed. So far so grim, but up til now, Junor was only warming up. Time to unleash sheer Gothic mayhem.

Ernest Favenc - What the Rats Brought: (Phil May's Annual, Winter 1903: Vault Advent Calendar, 2014). Set over Christmas 1919. The Niagara tows an abandoned ship to the Quarantine ground off Port Jackson, thereby unleashing a new Black Death on Australia. Reads like a miniature A Journal of the Plague Year with hideous flesh-eating vampire bats). The author appears enthused at the prospect of catastrophe.

Ernest Favenc - On the Island of Shadows: (Phil May's Annual, Winter 1900): Of the three convicts to escape from the New Caledonia prison, only one, Eugene Tripot, survives the shark infested waters. Two nights on a haunted treasure island and a raving Tripot surrenders to the first passing ship.

[dem bones]

"What's the good of anything? There's an end to a man some day and what does anything matter?"

Mary Fortune - The Blighted Meadow: (Australian Journal, Jan. 1888)

Gregory Jansen, thirty-five-year-old farmer, has set in heart on neighbour Greyson's daughter, but Millie, eighteen, is already spoken for; unbeknown to Jansen, she's agreed to marry his younger brother, Walter. On his twenty-first birthday, Walter approaches Gregory, announces his wedding plans, and demands his share of their late father's estate. In anger, a heartbroken Walter throws the old man's will in lover boy's face. He left the lot to Gregory, the only son by his wife. Walter, fruit of a fling with a servant girl, gets nothing! There, go tell that to your fiancé, bastard!

Eavesdropping at the window, Chris Daly, the farmhand, formulates a plan to turn the situation to his advantage. Alone with Walter, he lets slip that he just might be interested in helping him get even with Gregory if the price were to his liking. Encouraged by the treacherous employee, Walter batters his half-brother with a pick and buries him beneath a drain lid. Gregory dies with a terrible oath on his lips. "Fratricide! May the just God in Heaven curse you and the ground you stand on for — for ever."

No sooner has he slain his own flesh and blood then Walter bitterly regrets doing so, but, of course, it's too late, and, this being a Mary Fortune story, we're in no danger of a happy ending.

Hume Nisbet - The Odic Touch: (The Haunted Station, 1894). John Gray, tortured artist, is taken under the wing of a mystery generous benefactor. Dr. Grignor, occultist, ships Gray to London with a princely £50 in his pocket and the dubious ability to read the souls of everyone he encounters. We're none of us pleasant. Those who secretly begrudge Gray his new found fame, plot against him, or just look at him funny are systematically snuffed. Achieving "success" on these terms makes him no more content than in his too-poor-to-starve-in-a-garret-days. How can he be rid of this evil gift?

[dem bones]

J.A. Barry - Told in the 'Corona's Cabin on Three Evenings: (Steve Brown's Bunyip & Other Stories, 1893). As demanded by his favoured passengers, Captain Marion recalls the terrible experience of fourteen years ago which whitened his hair and horribly scarred his hand. A routine voyage aboard a trader bound for Singapore turns to nightmare when two sailors taking a lifeboat ashore on a tint island are sucked down five-hundred feet to the base of a volcanic crater on the verge of eruption. Barry's Red Warder of the Reef is a horrible personal favourite, this story, not so much.

Morley Roberts - A Thing of Wax: (Midsummer Madness, 1909). In heavy disguise, Jacques Landerer, 'the politician of delirium' to friend and foe alike, nightly visits the Musée Grévin to view the wax image of himself, until, to his troubled mind, it is as though they are exchanging places. "I must act quick for when the summer comes in hot I shall — melt!"

Rosa Praed - The House of Ill Omen: (Stubble Before the Wind, 1908). "There are two houses in Elchester which have a very evil reputation. One belongs to an old lady called Miss Crosson, who is said to deal in familiar spirits, and the other is Kingdon Lodge — the House of Ill Omen." Despite prior warning, newly-wed Henry and Beatrix Bray move into their miraculously affordable dream home, the bride less enthusiastic now she's learned Kingdon's recent history of murder, suicide and infant death. Beatrix's beautiful mane of flame red hair is the first casualty, closely followed by her sanity. The unseen presence directing events is understood to be the evil residue of a manservant who practised black magic. Misery fiends can read all on the Vault Advent Calendar for 2015.

The House of Ill Omen

Also:
Miss Crosson's Familiar

[jamesdoig]

Jul 22, 2022 19:30:33 GMT dem bones said:

J.A. Barry - Told in the 'Corona's Cabin on Three Evenings; Morley Roberts - A Thing of Wax: (Midsummer Madness, 1909).

I've got to admit, neither are the authors' best work, but I was keen to find something by them to include. Eventually I found a good nautical ghost story by Barry, Hulk No. 49, and included it in Australian Hauntings. Barry had appeared in a few horror anthologies with decent stories like 'The Blood Fetish' and 'The Fog.'

[dem bones]

Jul 22, 2022 21:32:38 GMT jamesdoig said:

Jul 22, 2022 19:30:33 GMT dem bones said:

J.A. Barry - Told in the 'Corona's Cabin on Three Evenings; Morley Roberts - A Thing of Wax: (Midsummer Madness, 1909).

I've got to admit, neither are the authors' best work, but I was keen to find something by them to include. Eventually I found a good nautical ghost story by Barry, Hulk No. 49, and included it in Australian Hauntings.

I preferred A Thing of Wax to Barry's Krakatoa adventure, though of the stories new to me, the stand-outs thus far are The Blighted Meadow and The Silent Sepulchre. Am also delighted to finally have hard copies of What the Rats Brought and the superb The House of Ill Omen.

James Edmund - The Prophetic Horror of the Great Experiment: (A Journalist and Two Bears, 1913). Detailed account of the culmination of "the most wonderful experiment ever made," a hush-hush twenty-year project to drill down seven thousand miles to the centre of the Earth. What will our explorers find: the "lost world" of legend? Dinosaurs? (tentacled monstrosities have yet to be invented, and it is likewise too early to worry about 'Greys'). Those few of the small party to survive the expedition cannot eat enough opium to forget what they — temporarily — escaped Down There.

[dem bones]

James Edmund - The Precipitous Details of the High Mountain and the Three Skeletons: (A Journalist and Two Bears, 1913). Deranged Ravings - or are they? - of a gold-prospector who claims to have come under attack from an ancient Aborigine tribe in the New Zealand Alps. A well aimed boulder left he and his two colleagues stranded on a ledge thin ledge with nowhere to go and no hope of rescue. Don't take his word for it - climb up there yourself and view the mouldering bones!

Lionel Sparrow - The Strange Case of Alan Heriot: (Australian Journal, July 1908). Love rival occultists take their feud onto the astral plane. With our narrator locked outside his "fleshy vehicle", his nemesis, Gregory Hawke, abandons him to the mercy of spirits debased and fiendish. Hawke next commandeers Heriot's vacant body to trick Poor Miss Alison Grant into his clutches! Unfortunately for the reader, Heriot has a Buddhist monk looking out for him.

[dem bones]

Oozes class, this one.

Beatrice Grimshaw - The Blanket Fiend: (Hutchinson’s, April 1929: The Beach of Terror & other stories, 1931). A Papuan cannibal tribe welcome the white pilot of a light aeroplane as the arrival of a God from the heavens. Their leader promises girls, potatoes and pig-tusk bracelets if the great one will but use his miraculous powers to rid them of the fiend of the ford, an aquatic monster to whom they pay homage by nightly throwing livestock and the occasional human into the tar black waters. The explorer baits his trap with dynamite. What will break surface?

[dem bones]

James Francis Dwyer - The Phantom Ship of Dirk Von Tromp: (Breath of the Jungle, 1915). The captain, aka, "the big-nosed pirate," set his mind to plundering the treasure from an old grey monastery in the hills. On discovering the boy guardian of the vault has never seen a woman (his mother died birthing him), Van Tromp hires a gorgeous temple girl to bewitch him with her "dance of seven delights". Van Tromp lifts the treasure, though a lot of good it does him, as his ship is doomed to sail this stretch of the China sea for eternity. Nonetheless, the head priest is so furious with the distracted boy that he has him buried to the neck in sand. Seven days later, remorseful for what she's done, the dancer kills herself beside him. Buddha will release their souls on return of the stolen riches.

Overhearing the story, two adventurers throw in their lot with a green-eyed beauty bent on boarding the phantom ship when next it passes. Incredibly, the unlikely legend pans out - or so it appears when an unmanned vessel drifts along the coast. The plucky trio drop on deck only to disturb a horribly corporeal army of starving rats!

Dulcie Deamer - The Devil's Ball: (Vision: A Literary Quarterly, Nov. 1923). Halloween. Sidonia the witch's daughter strips naked, anoints her body in evil-reeking lotions, wills herself into the clouds for a trippy first flight to the Sabbat among hybrid and were-creatures. Similar dreamy feel to H. B. Marriott-Watson's eerie The Devil on the Marsh.

[dem bones]

Helen Simpson - The Pledge: (The Baseless Fabric, 1925). Miss Alquist moves into lodgings on Ship Street and systematically buys up rooms until the landlord's family, the Frants, are cramped into discomfort. It's not like a few basic items of "foreign furniture" and the big dark chest she's never seen to unlock require so vast a space. On a certain date, Miss Alquist pins a brooch of bird feathers to her drab dress, performs elaborate ritual before a photograph of a love lost at sea. Mrs. Frant grows concerned. "Not our look-out? 'T'll be our look-out if she comes over funny and tries to kill us in our beds one night."

Vernon Knowles - The Watch: (The Street of Queer Houses & Other stories, USA, 1924). Two days after it was pickpocketed from him outside the Piccadilly Ritz hotel, Henry Wardly has his precious timepiece returned anonymously by post. What a delightful birthday surprise! That night, he dreams of being strapped down on a (dissection?) table by grim, bearded men who don't seem to realise he isn't dead ...

Vernon Knowles - The House That Took Revenge: (The Street of Queer Houses & Other stories, UK, 1925). Narrator stops to ask directions of a man tending a garden. "I'm going there myself." On the way, the Good Samaritan explains how the garden came to be without house. Some years ago, young Rayner married against his father's wishes. He was promptly disowned and disinherited for his pains. Husband and wife duly died of starvation. In a fit of remorse, the old man moved into 'Highlands,' much loved by his late son, to curse it, and himself, around the clock. Each day the house creeps nearer the cliff edge ...

Roger Dard - The Undying One: (Operation Fantast, Dec. 1950). Fatal Limehouse adventure of John Parker, who recklessly investigates an ill-lit side street after dark. A cadaverous old man beckons him into a "strange crazy house" with an ominous "The mistress awaits you, John Parker." And she does. Princess Sadi, Sorceress of the Nile, assures him that they who have loved one another down the centuries, can at last be together if he will only perform a trifling chore.

So that's Australian Nightmares, Australian Hauntings, Australian Gothic and the Wordsworth Australian Ghosts sampler. Can't help but notice the glaring lack of an Australian Horrors. Any Chance, Mr. Doig?

[jamesdoig]

Aug 2, 2022 6:50:17 GMT dem bones said:

Can't help but notice the glaring lack of an Australian Horrors. Any Chance, Mr. Doig?

Thanks Dem. Certainly enough stories around for an Aus Horrors, but the hard thing is always finding the time. I've always meant to do collections by Aus authors like Mary Fortune, Lionel Sparrow and James Francis Dwyer, and must get around to those too.

[dem bones]

Have to admit, that is some work load!

I enjoy your introductions and commentary throughout this and previous books. On strength of Aus Nightmares intro, have added two particular anthologies high on wants list as a result of the former (I'm no longer mug enough to mention them on a forum lurked by book dealers, but I reckon you'll know instinctively which).

I like the sound of Operation Fantastic Operation Fantast fanzine (and it's editor). Did it run for long?

[jamesdoig]

Aug 3, 2022 6:29:25 GMT dem bones said:

I like the sound of Operation Fantastic fanzine (and it's editor). Did it run for long?

1947-1954. All of the issues are digitised and available here: fanac.org/fanzines/OperationFantast/index.html

[dem bones]

Aug 3, 2022 22:20:57 GMT jamesdoig said:

Aug 3, 2022 6:29:25 GMT dem bones said:

I like the sound of Operation Fantastic fanzine (and it's editor). Did it run for long?

1947-1954. All of the issues are digitised and available here: fanac.org/fanzines/OperationFantast/index.html

Thanks James - taken down some sample issues and the bumper 1953 handbook. The glorious rawness of them! There looks to have been considerable cooperation between the day's Aus & Brit scenes, too.

Scan by Joe Siclari