First published in the UK by Corgi, 1966
Foreword by Donald Speed
Promise me Tonight - Michael Baldwin
The Crack - Francis King
Incubus for Hire - John Burke
Not Enough Poison - Alex Hamilton
The Bird - Thomas Burke
The Continual Dew - Richard Nettell
Father and Son - Jesse Bier
A Time for Living - Stan Gooch
The Lake - Patrick Boyle
Such Stuff - John Brunner
Plague at Bergamo - Jens Peter Jacobsen
Quittance - Martin Ford
The Medusa Touch - Hugh Atkinson
The Gates - Richard Kenneggy
On With the New - Leonard Ansell
The Holman Candidate - Simon Gray
Promise Me Tonight by Michael Baldwin: “She loved it. Women love that sort of thing. She was eighteen and I was very good in that tent. But mainly it was the blood. I’d have blood on my arms up to the elbows, from the sheep, and I’d go down on her, and she’d lick my arms, and I’d go down on her. The stew would be out in the open, cooking with the rain falling into it, and the rain would fall onto the tent, and we’d be in there having blood. We had teeth together, too. She was torment. She said she’d never leave me. Then we’d eat.”
The boy and the girl have eloped, and when the money runs out, they decide to live on the moor and eat sheep. Now and again he thinks she’ll leave, but he kills another sheep, so she stays. But then she says that she wants her paints, so he knows what she really wants to do. This one reads like a prose poem and you’ll see where it’s going, but it's an entertaining journey getting there.
The Crack by Francis King: Sonia and Shimoda are talking with the old Buddhist priest on the mountain. Sonia is interested in Japanese culture, but can’t understand its attitude to suicide. The priest tells how sometimes he walks in the hills and finds corpses, sometimes the bodies of pregnant women and their lovers, lying hand-in-hand at the foot of a lovers’ leap.
Shimoda wants to go back to England with Sonia, but Sonia can’t see any future for him with an older woman and her disabled husband. Shimoda says that he’d leap off a cliff for her.
Then they spot what appear to be two bodies at the foot of a cliff.
This story seems to be about a difference in cultural attitudes, but I don't think it works because we don’t know enough about Shimoda and Sonia to sort out the cultural differences from the personal. I don’t think it really belongs in a horror anthology. Donald Speed writes that this story comes from the collection, The Japanese Umbrella, which won King the Katherine Mansfield Prize.
Incubus for Hire by John Burke: When their husbands are away on business, Margery and Susan often spend an evening together in spite of the fact that they don’t particularly like each other. In fact, Margery has suspicions about Susan. For some reason, Susan never seems to want to criticise Margery’s husband.
Just as she’s thinking about this, there’s a knock at the door and she opens it to Mr Jacobs, an encyclopaedia salesman. Specifically, these are encyclopaedias of the occult – and Mr Jacobs knows all about Margery’s interest in that. In fact, he seems to know an awful lot about both of them, and about their husbands.
Susan discovers that Jacobs isn’t what he claims to be, and that would be that, you’d think, if it wasn’t for the body in the well.
What body is that? In what well?
And Mr Jacobs leads them down to the cellar and the well, where, no doubt about it, there’s a body.
But...
This one’s great, spiralling into one of those ghastly downbeat endings and absolutely guaranteed to put a smile on your face.
