McSherry, Greenberg & Waugh - A Treasury of American Horror

[dem]

Frank D. McSherry, Jr., Martin H. Greenberg & Charles G. Waugh [eds.] - A Treasury of American Horror Stories (Wings, 1985)

Hector Garrido

Frank D. McSherry, Jr., Martin H. Greenberg & Charles G. Waugh - Introduction: The Monster Tour

Ambrose Bierce - An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge
Jack London - Lost Face
Richard Matheson - Being
John S. McFarland - One Happy Family
Robert Bloch - A Return to the Sabbath
Michael Shea - The Autopsy
Robert Arthur - The Believers
Robert S. Phillips - A Teacher’s Rewards
Suzette Haden Elgin - Chico Lafleur Talks Funny
John D. MacDonald - The Legend of Joe Lee
Mary Elizabeth Counselman - Seventh Sister
Robert Louis Stevenson - The Isle of Voices
Babette Rosmond - One Man’s Harp
Mark Twain - Cannibalism in the Cars
Jeffrey Goddin - The Smell of Cherries
Barry N. Malzberg - Away
Tom Reamy - Twilla
Joel Townsley Rogers - His Name Was Not Forgotten
Kate Chopin - Désirée’s Child
Richard Matheson - The Children of Noah
Robert Bloch - The Man Who Collected Poe
H. P. Lovecraft - Pickman’s Model
Raccoona Sheldon [James Tiptree, Jr.] - The Screwfly Solution
Carl Jacobi - The Unpleasantness at Carver House
Harry Harrison - Mute Milton
Henderson Starke - Dumb Supper
William F. Nolan - Lonely Train a’ Comin’
Stephen King - Children of the Corn
Isaac Asimov & James MacCreigh [Frederik Pohl] - Legal Rites
Stephen Vincent Benét - The Devil and Daniel Webster
Algis Budrys - The Master of the Hounds
Edwin L. Sabin - The Devil of the Picuris
David Grinnell [Donald A. Wollheim] - The Garrison
Manly Wade Wellman - The Desrick on Yandro
Robert Adams - Shaggy Vengeance
Davis Grubb - The Horsehair Trunk
Zealia Brown Reed Bishop - The Curse of Yig
Bill Pronzini - Peekaboo
Nelson S. Bond - Bird of Prey
H. P. Lovecraft - The Haunter of the Dark
Manly Wade Wellman - Song of the Slaves
Ardath Mayhar - The Eagle-Claw Rattle
Jerome Bixby - Our Town
Whitley Strieber - Perverts
David H. Keller, M.D. - The Goddess of Zion
Stephen Grendon [August Derleth] - Alannah
Sterling E. Lanier - His Coat So Gay
Edward D. Hoch - Bigfish
Richard Wilson - Lonely Road
August Derleth - Beyond the Threshold
Wardon Allan Curtis - The Monster of Lake LaMetrie

Blurb:
The geography of terror is universal — no border or boundary can contain it. No matter where you live, the icy fingers of the supernatural will — without warning — reach out and clutch at you. In A Treasury of American Horror Stories, the editors take you on a tour of the United States, a holiday not recommended for the fainthearted. Fifty-one tales of horror and the supernatural are presented, one for every state in the Union and the District of Columbia.

From "sea to shining sea," famous authors give you their private vision of hell and introduce you to a world alive with the dead. Stephen King's "Children of the Corn" exposes the terrible price extracted from the Nebraska heartland for its agricultural bounty; Robert Bloch, in "A Return to the Sabbath," explores the horror of the undead in Hollywood; Richard Matheson delineates a motorist's nightmare under Arizona skies in "Being." Kate Chopin is represented by a Louisiana tale of exquisite tragedy titled "Désirée's Child"; John D. MacDonald shows the chilling side of a Florida speed demon in "The Legend of Joe Lee"; H. P. Lovecraft's Massachusetts-based "Pickman's Model" places artists' models in a bizarre light. And after reading Bill Pronzini's "Peekaboo," set in Oregon, you may never be completely comfortable in an empty house again.

No matter what the geographical starting point, when readers open A Treasury of American Horror Stories, they will all find themselves in the same state — a state of terror.

We've met maybe half of these in other anthologies, so will begin with the (to me) less familiar or completely unknown.

Robert S. Phillips - A Teacher's Rewards: (The Land of Lost Content, 1970). Delaware. Fresh out of prison, Raybe Simpson pays a home visit to the long retired schoolma'am who belittled him before the other kids and rapped his knuckles for another boy's misdemeanour. It's not a social call.

Whitley Strieber - Perverts: (Whispers, Oct. 1983). Texas during the Depression. A ruined millionaire, friendless and destitute, is lured to the Garden of the Gods to co-star in tonight's live entertainment - a sex show culminating in torture-murder.

Harry Harrison - Mute Milton: (Amazing, Feb. 1966). Springville, Mississippi, circa late 'fifties, early 'sixties. Sam Morrison, a college professor, whose blueprint transmitter may ultimately provide a natural alternative energy source, gets talking to a fellow black as they await the Greyhound bus. Charlie Wright, a civil rights activist, is quitting town for New York having fallen foul of Brinkley, the town Sheriff, a Grand Knight of the KKK. Brinkley ain't planning on letting either man leave. Outstanding, this one.

Edward D. Hoch - Bigfish: Original to collection. West Virginia. Captain Bob Showcroft charges $1 a time to view his prize exhibit, "the world's biggest salmon." His parents distracted, the Caulkins boy sneaks inside the camper for a second look. He doesn't reappear.

Manly Wade Wellman - Song of the Slaves: (Weird Tales, March 1940). What weird chant sounded its blood-chilling message through the night? A British Navy ship on his tail, Gender drowns forty-nine chained blacks to avoid prosecution as a slave trader. The corpses rise from the sea to visit his South Carolina plantation after nightfall, groaning their nasty curse song the while ...

John Leone

[dem]

Babette Rosmond - One Man’s Harp: (Unknown, Aug, 1943). Gene Taft, Olympic skier, gambles and loses his share of Paradise to conman Harry Jordan, seconds prior to their both being killed in a train smash. Taft's idea of Heaven is Jordan's icy Hell. Another for the Winter Sport is Horror file.

Ardath Mayhar - The Eagle-Claw Rattle: (Bill Pronzini [ed]. Mummy!, 1980: Tales of the Dead, 1987). South Dakota. A trader in Native American artefacts loots the shrine of Sioux magic man, Thunder-on-the-Mountain. His client is prepared to pay handsomely if he can prize the rattle from the mummified Injun's grasp.

Bill Pronzini - Peekaboo: (Charles L. Grant [ed]. Nightmares, 1979). Oregon. In the aftermath of a failed bank heist, Roper hides out from the law in the abandoned house of Lavolle, a capable and unspeakably malicious Black Magician. In the five years since Lavolle death, the sparsely populated community has seen seven particularly horrible unsolved murders ...

William F. Nolan - Lonely Train a' Comin': (Gallery, Oct. 1981, as The Train). Montana. This time last year, Amy wrote her brother, informing him she was about to board a beautiful old steam locomotive bound for Lewistown. The train never arrived, and neither did Amy. Eventually, her skeleton and purse were recovered from a spur track in the Little Belt Range. The District Sheriff reckons she was killed by a "weirdo," a roving tramp, happens all the time. The steamer remains a mystery — "nobody runs 'em any more." Desperate to avenge his sister, Ventry resolves to lie in wait along the track. His patience is rewarded.

[helrunar]

Interesting concept for an anthology. The Ardath Mayhar tale sounds like a good one. I must investigate.

Off topic: I just added the William Croft Dickinson collection, Dark Encounters, to my electronic reading device (I'm trapped in Florida dealing with family stuff for two more weeks). There's most likely already a Vault thread for that. Looking forward to getting into that when I need a break for my current reading, a selection of the letters exchanged between Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire and Patrick Leigh Fermor. Very much a Princess Tuvstar volume, that.

cheers, Hel.

[dem]

Mar 30, 2024 16:19:03 GMT helrunar said:

Off topic: I just added the William Croft Dickinson collection, Dark Encounters, to my electronic reading device (I'm trapped in Florida dealing with family stuff for two more weeks). There's most likely already a Vault thread for that.

Swampi's thread for Dark Encounters.

Jeffrey Goddin - The Smell of Cherries: (Twilight Zone, Nov. 1982). Indiana. Taylor fills in as night security cop at a depot built on the site of a WWII army base and chemical factory. A fire at the plant exposed several workers to a lethal nerve gas. Their ghosts, insane and vicious, prowl the lot.

Sterling E. Lanier - His Coat So Gay: (MF&SF, July 1970: Alfred Hitchcock's Witches Brew, 1977). To mark October 31st, young Ffellowes is invited to participate in the annual special hunt on the Waldron estate.

Richard Wilson - Lonely Road: (MF&SF, Sept, 1956). When Mrs Spruance moves an aquarium that belonged to her dead scientist son, time and space slip out of sync and every man, woman and child finds themselves the last person on earth. Very Twilight zone and way beyond my limited powers of synopsis.

Donald A. Wollheim - The Garrison: (Magazine of Horror #8, April 1965; as by 'David Grinnell'). New York. Excavation of a subway extension beneath Manhattan unearths a rock fortress pre-dating human civilization. A journalist discovers that it's Keep is still manned by some "monstrous" trooper against (presumably) a return of the Great Old Ones.

Stephen Grendon [August Derleth] - Alannah: (Weird Tales, March. 1945). Any sensitive, imaginative child lives in a world of make believe — at least "make believe" is what the prosaic mind calls it.

Vermont. Mrs. Steward is a cold woman who denounces five-year-old son Maurice as a compulsive liar on account he insists there is a lovely lady lives in the black waters of the pool at back of their house. The governess, Miss Kerlsen, who is patient with the lonely boy, is far from convinced. The house's previous owner drowned herself when husband Jack ran out on confirmation she couldn't have children. The dead Alannah is desperate to embrace motherhood, no matter if the child belongs to someone else.

[dem]

Randy Jones

Robert Arthur - The Believers: (Weird Tales, July 1941). A million radio listeners had created It — seeing in their own minds Something that had never existed. Connecticut. The abandoned Carriday mansion provides an ideal location for a Friday 13th broadcast of Nicke Deenes hit radio show, So pure soap presents — Danger with Deene. To mark the occasion, the presenter invents a 'family curse'and a slimy swamp monster - misshapen thing with the face of a spoiled blue-grey oyster. As a finishing touch, Deene has one hand cuffed to a bedpost to prevent his vacating the premises before midnight.

John S. McFarland - One Happy Family: (Twilight Zone, Sept-Oct 1983). "... these ignorant, inbred mountain families, isolated from society and immune to the law, could be capable of anything." Arkansas. Newly arrived from the city, Dr. Ellison attends the home birth of Merrilee Knoss's fourth baby. This time she and Luther are confident it could even be something human. Not sure Hillbilly folk would be over appreciative of this one.

Mark Twain - Cannibalism in the Cars: (The Broadway, Nov. 1868). A gaga former congressman recalls his macabre adventure aboard a snowbound train during the winter of 1853. A week stranded on the line somewhere between St. Louis and Chicago, the starving passengers form a committee to debate which of them they eat first, second, third .....

[dem]

Carl Jacobi - The Unpleasantness at Carver House: (August Derleth [ed.], Travellers By Night, 1967: Disclosures in Scarlet, 1972). "I call her Necroya on occasion. It's a nickname." Minnesota. Sheriff Barson takes unkindly to the protagonist's experimentation with witchcraft and formaldehyde at the house overlooking Oak Ridge cemetery. We guess early on why sister Victoria has so little - make that nothing - to say for herself. From the lawman's reaction on forcing his way into the bedroom, she's even less pleasing on the eye than we'd anticipated. Not altogether sure what the three strangers from the east are about, but my guess is they don't smell too clever either.

Two for crypto-zoology corner. A very early-Weird Tales feel to the first.

Wardon Allan Curtis - The Monster of Lake LaMetrie: (Pearson’s Magazine, Sept. 1899). When fellow geologist Edward Framingham slits his own throat in despair of illness, Dr. James Lennegan deftly transfers his still pulsating brain into the skull of a self-regenerating Elasmosaurus. Framington's gratitude is short-lived. Told via journal entries. Predates the first of Bassett Morgan's several interspecies brain-transplant horrors by almost three decades.

Edwin L. Sabin - The Devil of the Picuris: (The Blue Book, Nov. 1921: Sam Moscowitz [ed], Horrors Unknown, 1972). New Mexico. Twice yearly the Pueblos placate their God, the Thunder-Devil Bird — probably a leftover Pterodactyl — by feeding it live babies. Narrator 'The Captain,' a Spanish Christian, married to a tribeswoman, is sworn to destroy it.

[dem]

Janet Aulisio

James Tiptree, Jr [Alice Sheldon] - The Screwfly Solution (Analog June 1977, as by Raccoona Sheldon). "The Forsette Funeral Home regretfully announces it will no longer accept female cadavers."

Peedsville, Michigan. Anne Alstein's loving letters from home to her husband, Alan, a scientist, in Colombia, include several alarming paragraphs concerning a series of brutal murders perpetuated by Christian Fundamentalists. The Sons of Adam believe that it is God's will they prepare for his coming by ridding the planet of they whose evil destroyed the garden of Eden — womankind. Anne tries to make light of events — fad lunatic ideologies come and go — but the batch of newspaper reports and documents she encloses from Barney, Alan's best friend and mentor, reveal the phenomenal rise of a global femicide cult.

Alan catches the next flight from an ominously segregated Bogotá airport, only to realise mid-journey that he too has been infected with this urge to destroy. It's imperative that he warn Anne and Amy, their teenage daughter, to arm against him, kill him should he try to force his way into their home. Anne is by now wise to the very real menace posed by every man on the planet, but, Death Squads to the contrary, Amy refuses to accept that all the others might be killers, but Daddy could never behave horribly towards her.

Months later, we catch up with the surviving lead character, hiding out in the Canadian wetlands, resigned to imminent death. Can't be many women left now, and the Almighty has yet to appear with the promised new, clean method of reproduction. But who is that approaching through the trees. One of His angel's, or ....?

Synopsis hopeless. Story excellent, among the very best in a superb collection.

[dem]

Raymond Thayer:

Nelson S. Bond - Bird of Prey: (Blue Book, Aug. 1949). "White bird, Michael O'Halloran! Bird of Prey, indeed! Then it's on the fear of a silly superstition you'd be setting yourself up as authority against the men of learning? Now, pogue ma hone to you and your eternal tales of bogies and hobgoblins. "Tis bad enough that for months you've been filling the children's heads with such nonsense. Do you not be plaguing me with more of the same, when there are great needy things to be done."

Pennsylvania, 1919. On the run from the Black and Tan, Michael O'Halloran stows away aboard a ship bound for America, there to rest up at the home of his brother. The children love him, but, unsuited to regular employment, Uncle Michael falls foul of sister-in-law Molly who, with a family of five to feed on a pittance, has no use for a drunken dreamer. But O'Halloran proves his worth during the Spanish flu epidemic. Despite assurances to the contrary from a smug local doctor, Michael knows this night will surely be little nephew Dennis's last unless someone intervenes on his behalf against death's messenger — the crimson-eyed, great white vulture of ill-omen.

Raymond Thayer:

[dem]

Kelly Freas

Jerome Bixby - Our Town: (If, Feb. 1955). Smoky Creek, Tennessee (pop. 123) An elderly mountain community whose town was all but obliterated in a bombing raid, don't intend for it to happen a second time. Very good, but I prefer this next inspired selection - a youth cult supernatural classic.

John D. MacDonald -The Legend of Joe Lee: (Cosmopolitan, Oct. 1964). " I started work on it at about three thirty that afternoon. It would be a feature for the following Sunday. I worked right on through until two in the morning. It was only two thousand words, but it was very tricky and I wanted to get it just right. I had to serve two masters. I had to give lip service to the editorial bias that this sort of thing was wrong, yet at the same time I wanted to capture, for my own sake, the flavor of legend. These kids were making a special world we could not share. They were putting all their skills and dreams and energies to work composing the artefacts of a subculture, power, beauty, speed, skill and rebellion. Our culture was giving them damned little, so they were fighting for a world of their own, with its own customs, legends and feats of valor, its own music, its own ethics and morality."

Afaloosa County, South Florida. A police stakeout on an eighteen mile stretch of road through gator-infested swampland. Is this the night Sergeant Lanzeer and deputies finally ground phantom teen hot rodders Joe lee Cuddard and Clarissa May Farris?