Richard Dalby - Vampire Stories

[dem]

Richard Dalby (ed.) - Vampire Stories (Michael O’Mara, 1992)

Cover: Graham Potts

Foreword by Peter Cushing

Ivan Turgenev - Phantoms
Bram Stoker - Dracula’s Guest
‘E. Bland’ (Edith Nesbit) - The Haunted House
M. R. James - An Episode of Cathedral History
E. F. Benson - ‘And No Bird Sings’
D. H. Lawrence - The Lovely Lady
L. A. Lewis - The Author’s Tale
John Wyndham - Close Behind Him
Margery Lawrence - The Woman On The Stairs
Josef Nesvadba - Vampires Ltd.
Manly Wade Wellman - Chastel
David G. Rowlands - The Apples of Sodom
Anne Rice - The Master of Rampling Gate
Robert Bloch - The Undead
Ron Weighell - China Rose
A. F. Kidd - Saint Sebastian And The Mona Lisa
Jessica Palmer - Quiet Is The Night
Ken Cowley - The Last Sin

Includes:

L. A. Lewis- The Author's Tale: "He would kidnap the venomous swine of a woman and hold her captive in a secret place that he knew, flogging her daily until brute force brought her to absolute subjection."

He is 'Lester', usually an amiable enough fellow with a weakness for the ladies, and she is his third wife who has ruined him, while the remote spot is a deserted farmhouse where he has rigged up his apparatus, a frame with straps and pulleys attached easily capable of suspending his greedy ex until she sees the error of her ways. What he hadn't accounted for was the place being haunted - and by fiends of particularly sadistic bent who commandeer his torture device and use it to discipline one of their own with a savagery that has even the vengeful Lester. what he witnesses that night persuades him to make a significant amendment to his plans ...

Manly Wade Wellman - Chastel: Judge Pursuivant, now 87 years young, and Lee Cobbett, a latterday Wellman hero, join forces to combat an outbreak of vampirism centering around The Land Beyond The Forest - a musical version of Dracula - featuring Gonda Chastel, the 'daughter' of an actress Pursuivant had loved in his youth. The appearance of a pale, sharp-fanged face at his window heralds the vampire's first attack ...

John Wyndham - Close Behind Him: Spotty and Smudger make the mistake of burgling the premises of a black magician and trader in occult paraphernalia. While the robbery is in progress, Spotty is surprised by the owner who grapples with him and sinks his teeth into the thief’s leg. Spotty retaliates by bashing him with an iron pipe, killing him outright. He soon discovers that he’s being trailed wherever he goes by a pair of bloodied footprints. The haunting doesn’t last long, but only on account of Smudger braining him, whereupon the footsteps transfer their attentions to his partner in crime. At first the imprints remain five yards behind his own but soon they’re closing with each passing hour, and now bite marks have appeared on his neck … [/color]

Josef Nesvadba - Vampires Ltd: English setting for this story of a Czech in need of a lift who is gifted a magnificent racing model by a pale gent who promptly hails a taxi and sets off in the opposite direction. Behind the wheel, Nesvadba is the king of the road, the public falling over themselves to be of assistance, but there’s a price to pay for a dream car that runs on something other than petrol …

E. F. Benson - " … And No Bird Sings": Hugh Granger and his wife live on the verge of a patch of woodland wherein something terrible lurks. “It has to be kept alive by nourishment and that explains why every day since I have been here I’ve found on that knell we went up some half dozen dead rabbits.” Benson suggests stoats or weasels might be responsible but Granger sets him straight on that: “These rabbits have not been eaten, they’ve been drunk.” Excellent, suspenseful climax in which Benson is attacked by some cold, hairy, slimy thing. It extends a tube-like protrudence which fastens on his neck …..

Robert Bloch - Undead: Undead: Carol is about to close the bookshop when the customer arrives. His card reveals him to be none other than Abraham Van Helsing, great-grandson of the famed vampire hunter, and he's inquiring after the Dracula manuscript, a hundred pages of which - outlining the King Vampire's plans for world domination - were omitted from the published version.

Ken Cowley - The Last Sin: "The signpost that had been planted to keep Lolly quiet shuddered in the ground and tipped at a crazy angle in his path."

Lolly, jilted by the insatiable rake Lord Ruthwen, slits her wrists and dies vowing that she will lie with him on the eve of his wedding. Ruthwen promptly forgets she ever existed and merrily goes about his usual debauched antics until, for the sake of his diminishing coffers, he proposes marriage to thirty-something virgin Catherine Beddowes who eagerly accepts. As good as her word, Lolly, surprises the master in his four poster; she's a bit fangy and her bones pretty much shrink-wrapped now but, other than that, still a looker by walking corpse standards. Far from expiring on the spot, his lordship is well up for it. "Wasn't it only yesterday that he had bemoaned the fact that he had completed the catalogue of sins? And now here he was, about to go to his bride with the stains of the ultimate skin clinging to his body."

More to follow ....?

[chastel]

I bought this as Finnish paperback called Vampires (I´m Finnish).. One of my first vampire books I ever bought - it was early 1990´s, so it´s almost twenty years ago - and my first succes. I had hated Blood is not enough and Sunglasses after dark, so I was so suspicious. Thank god this was delicious - a treasure!

[ripper]

Some familiar stories but as in many of his anthologies Richard Dalby includes a sprinkling of tales from contributors to Ghosts and Scholars, All Hallows and other small press magazines, which is always nice to see imo. A good companion to the same editor's Tales of Witchcraft.

[dem]

A fair number of vampire items at Spitalfield Market recently, most of it (smirk) "non-fiction", but also landed this US edition.

Dec 10, 2012 13:02:34 GMT ripper said:

Some familiar stories but as in many of his anthologies Richard Dalby includes a sprinkling of tales from contributors to Ghosts and Scholars, All Hallows and other small press magazines, which is always nice to see imo. A good companion to the same editor's Tales of Witchcraft.

Gramercy, 2006 edition.

The Haunted House: (The Strand, Dec. 1913). Like Weird Tales come ten years early. Desmond answers a newspaper advertisement to investigate a supposedly "haunted" house at Crittenden. The reality is that Professor Prior, MAD SCIENTIST, is surreptitiously using it to conduct sinister experiments. Prior has established that he can modify human behaviour patterns through blood transfusion - soon all mankind will be his slaves! It is early days and as things stand, he has just the two hired hands in his thrall, one of whom, Verney, has decided enough is enough. As Prior prepares to exsanguinate his guest, a corpse rises from the vault to tackle the human vampire ....

David Lloyd. The Apples Of Sodom, from Eye Hath Not Seen ..., Haunted Library,1980.

David G. Rowlands - The Apples of Sodom: (The Saints Preserve Us, 1961). The first published Father O'Connor adventure. Len James, the unofficial church sexton, disturbs the grave of a woman interred in 1747 with a stake driven through her heart, which has since matured into a full blown crab apple tree. In 1584, the Lady Alys Beaugrand, a staunch Roman Catholic, chose suicide over arrest for plotting against Elizabeth I and died unrepentent. Len's clearing operation has shifted the slab from her grave, releasing a hairy thing with yellow, rabbit-like teeth and a blood red slash for a mouth. The Lady Alys preys upon her hapless victim until O@Connor's colleague, Father Montagu intervenes on his behalf and sets the vampire soul to rest.

[ripper]

Prior to Vampire Stories, the only Edith Nesbit tales I had read were The Shadow, Uncle Abraham's Romance and Man-Sized in Marble, and possibly The Violet Car, all of which were basically melancholic tales of lost love; The Haunted House struck me as being so different to what I had associated Nesbit with that I had to make sure it was the same E. Nesbit.

[helrunar]

Yippee! A friend just gave me a copy of this book, along with a copy of Small Shadows Creep edited by Andre Norton. I'm particularly excited about this Dalby volume because there are some stories here I've never had the opportunity to read before.

I think next month will be five years since Mr Dalby's passing from this vale of tears. He left us with so many treasures to enjoy!

H.

[Swampirella]

May 6, 2022 21:39:06 GMT helrunar said:

Yippee! A friend just gave me a copy of this book, along with a copy of Small Shadows Creep edited by Andre Norton. I'm particularly excited about this Dalby volume because there are some stories here I've never had the opportunity to read before.

I think next month will be five years since Mr Dalby's passing from this vale of tears. He left us with so many treasures to enjoy!

H.

That's a good friend, hold on to them!  Enjoy the books, Steve!

[helrunar]

Stray notes on some of the tales read thus far:

Margery Lawrence - "The Woman on the Stairs" -- Like Algernon Blackwood, Margery Lawrence had done personal occult study and experimentation (I think with a spiritualist circle), and her Miles Pennoyer stories seem to reflect what she was taught and the experiences she had had. Although this story was published in 1959, the style reflects the world of slick magazine fiction of the 1930s, particularly the London mags of the era. I was occasionally reminded of Sax Rohmer, or a story by Simon Raven written somewhat in the vein of Rohmer. You'd never guess that an individual thus described was, just possibly, oh, I don't know, perhaps a rapacious psychic vampire whose unnatural existence had been prolonged beyond the span of a century with her fiendish knowledge of the hideous Black Arts justly kept from the wondering eyes of an unwitting world... wouldjuz??

The door opened and in swept a tall and impressive-looking woman, white-skinned, red-haired, hook-nosed, clad in flying draperies of black, and carrying in her arms a bundle of books. ... Her eyes raked me from head to foot, sharp, hard dark eyes beneath a bush of rusty-red hair arranged in a forehead fringe a la Sarah Bernhardt ... The handsome imperious face was little lined, yet it had an oddly mask-like look, which might have been due to the heavy make-up she wore--pale powder thickly applied, eyelids darkened with purple fard and bordered with black mascara, and lips a vivid orange-red which, while theatrical, was undeniably effective with her tousled rust-coloured hair. She had the high cheekbones and faintly slanting eyes of the Russian, and she used her large white hands, with their nails painted the same orange-red as her lipstick, effectively to illustrate the points of her stories...

One has to wonder if a young Vali Myers had read this tale and decided that this was precisely the look for her. All this stylistic dress-up adorns a yarn of rather meager thrills, but obviously I enjoyed it nonetheless.

Robert Bloch - "The Undead" -- Short, to the point, and effective for what it is.

Ron Weighell - "China Rose" --  Rather similar to Margery Lawrence's contribution in that what makes it distinctive is not the story itself, but how he chooses to tell it. Set circa 1924.

Manly Wade Wellman - "Chastel" -- Touches said to have been drawn from New England vampire folklore give a distinctive slant to this otherwise routine outing from MWW--routine perhaps, but still pleasurable for this reader.

E. Nesbit - "The Haunted House" -- A Dornford Yates sort of yarn, but the payoff was worthwhile, I thought.

David Rowlands - "The Apples of Sodom" -- I was quite doubtful at the outset with this one, but found it surprisingly frothy. Clearly intended to be an homage to M. R. James with more than a token bow in the direction of G. K. Chesterton.

Hel.

[helrunar]

John Wyndham - "Close behind him" -- Smudger and Spotty, just two of your ordinary on-the-street burglar blokes, have the misfortune to choose the home of a dedicated Satanic ritualist to rob. The resulting mayhem in the wake of this fatal mistake is recounted in plain, but effective, workmanlike prose. A refreshingly robust interlude in this volume.

Turgenev - "Phantoms" -- I don't know if anthologists typically intend the lead story in a compilation to set the tone of what is to follow. This evocatively written story, originally published in 1864 and presumably presented here in Constance Garnett's translation (no credit is given in the volume acknowledgements), begins promisingly but soon settles into a florid, verbose astral travelogue. The "horrifying" climax doesn't really pack much punch. Garnett's versions of Turgenev have been given higher marks than some of her other work--one has to wonder what another writer would make of this Russian "brilliant literary masterpiece of the supernatural," to quote Mr Dalby's introductory remarks to the tale. As it stands it more or less exemplifies why Christine Campbell Thomson generally avoided more "literary" tales in her own collections.

H.

[Swampirella]

Aug 27, 2022 20:37:24 GMT helrunar said:

John Wyndham - "Close behind him" -- Smudger and Spotty, just two of your ordinary on-the-street burglar blokes, have the misfortune to choose the home of a dedicated Satanic ritualist to rob. The resulting mayhem in the wake of this fatal mistake is recounted in plain, but effective, workmanlike prose. A refreshingly robust interlude in this volume.

I haven't listened to it (yet) but it's available to listen to here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6uF6_qWxDU

[dem]

Aug 27, 2022 20:37:24 GMT helrunar said:

John Wyndham - "Close behind him" -- Smudger and Spotty, just two of your ordinary on-the-street burglar blokes, have the misfortune to choose the home of a dedicated Satanic ritualist to rob. The resulting mayhem in the wake of this fatal mistake is recounted in plain, but effective, workmanlike prose. A refreshingly robust interlude in this volume.

Turgenev - "Phantoms" -- I don't know if anthologists typically intend the lead story in a compilation to set the tone of what is to follow.

I'm sure Hugh Lamb did. The Woman on the Marsh makes for such an ideal opener to Victorian Nightmares it might have been written to order, same with H. Rider Haggard's Was It A Dream? in Thrill of Horror opener. They're both short, hallucinatory, set you up just so for what's to come.

[helrunar]

Some final notes:

D. H. Lawrence - "The Lovely Lady" gives the reader a slog through pages of poorly-composed tripe, rehearsing Lawrence's favorite theme of an aggressively narcissistic older woman feeding off the vitality, attention and thralldom of the people unfortunate enough to be trapped in her orbit. The only thing remotely horrific about it is just how ineptly composed it all is.

Anne Rice, noted Catholic best-selling novelist, contributes "The Master of Rampling Gate," originally published in the American women's magazine Redbook. The tone in this one is reminiscent of one of the popular "Harlequin" romance novels of the period. Typical paragraph:

The core of my being, that secret place where all desires and all commandments are nurtured, opened to him without a struggle or a sound. I would have fallen if he had not held me. My arms closed about him, my hands slipping into the soft, silken mass of his hair.

Fifty shades of beige?

Otherwise unknown (to me, at least) author A. F. Kidd's "Saint Sebastian and the Mona Lisa" finally provides some decent vampiric action. This offbeat tale recounts two intertwined stories that run parallel in Venice of the 1460s and 1990s. Kudos for the Walter Pater reference and an eloquently nasty vampire revelation. Note: According to ISFDB, A. F. Kidd is better known as Chico Kidd.

Jessica Palmer - "Quiet is the night" An evocative yarn of a woman slowly revealing the truly horrific heritage bestowed upon her by her birth. Extremely well done.

Ken Cowley - "The Last Sin" is really just a bit of fun--a pastiche that is not really at all a pastiche upon Polidori's classic "The Vampyre."

According to ISFDB, this volume is just one of several anthologies with the vampire theme edited by Mr. Dalby. This particular book only occasionally hit the mark for me. My favorite tales in the book, by M. R. James and E. F. Bensons, are ones I've read several times before in other anthologies. The stories by Margery Lawrence, A. F. Kidd, and Ron Weighell were the most effective among those that were new. There were a number of tales that seemed like complete misfires, and I still find myself wondering why such a veteran campaigner in this field included those. In the end it must come down to temperament, and a reminder of just how subjective one's responses to tales in the horror and fantasy genres are. One man's bloody delight is another man's watery tin of factory tomato soup.

H.

[dem]

Following directly after his two Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories volumes (1990, 1991), I was most likely expecting something similar from Vampire Stories, which explains initial disappointment. The Benson and James may well be the best thing in here, but even thirty years ago, lovers of ghost anthologies were getting sick of the sight of them (see also Dracula's Guest, and, to a lesser extent Close Behind Him). Seem to recall talk that the heavyweights were included at the publishers' insistence, the argument being that no-one bought these books unless they recognised a name or two. Looking back, I realise how spoilt we were, as it's no "bad" selection - in fact, Vampire Stories might be a blueprint for a British Library Tales of the Weirds volume — old standards, a "forgotten" piece or two, recent works by contemporary authors, a 'what's this doing in here?' head-scratcher. The Apples of Sodom, The Last Sin, The Author's Tale, Chastel have all stuck. I really should revisit those which haven't ...