Wednesday 21 February 2024

The 14th Fontana Book of Great Horror Stories



The reviews of the stories contained in this collection are incomplete, as I do not own a copy of this volume.  Or to be strictly correct, I refuse the pay the silly price it is presently going for.  If anyone has a copy of the book they would like to loan me, in order for me complete this entry, I should be forever grateful.

Or even, when I think about it, a pdf or photocopy of any of the unreviewed stories.  💖  Ian


STARVATION DIET
By Ken Burke

Two men, Doc and the rather fleshy Andrew, are the only survivors from a shipwreck, and find themselves cast up on a tiny desert island.

The injured Andrew had just begun to believe "the only thing which could save them now was a miracle", when the Doc informs him of a crate of tinned soup and pork rashers which has washed up along the beach.

Oh, and by the way Andrew, your injured arm needs to come off.

I really have read too many of these stories now, I am sure.  For, just with the title and a couple phrases on the first page: 

"he used to be a capable man once"

and

"his injured leg - the Doc later told him it was broken

I could predict pretty much the route this one was travelling, right down to the fanciful reason for the sudden arrival of a food supply.

The only aspect I failed to divine was the sort of happy-ish ending.  I had thought Andrew may wake from his drug induced sleep to find Doc had deliberately allowed the passing ship to pass on by, so he could finish what he had started unhindered.

So - kudos to Mr. Burke for wrong-footing me at the death, so to speak.


THANATOS PALACE HOTEL
By Andre Maurois

Investment banker Jean Monnier has been more than a touch reckless with his investment choices.  And a concurrent financial crisis has lost him his job, his wife and his joie de vivre.

He receives a letter from the Thanatos Palace Hotel, which offers to take care of all his suicide requirements.  So the unhappy Jean checks in to check out, as it were.

But, on his first evening, he is introduced to the beautiful Mrs. Kirby-Shaw, and begins to have second thoughts.

A true indicator of a well-written short story, I feel, is when one turns a page to be disappointed to see the end of the yarn in sight.

Such it was with this one, for the author had drawn up such a situation ripe with all manner of intriguing possibilities, and populated it with characters about whom I wished to know so much more.

But then again, "Leave 'em wanting more" is another entertainment adage.


H. R. Wakefield - Blind Man's Buff


POLISH THE LID
By Terry Tapp

Boorish Earnest Perryman has managed to wangle his sensitive son Ian his first employment.....with a firm of undertakers.  Each evening Ian is badgered by his dad for gory details of what the job entails.

One evening, Ian tells him.  Dad doesn't ask again.

There is sufficient anti-funeral industry invective here to make me think the author was perhaps venting his spleen a touch, following a bad experience.  But that is not enough to save this from being a rather dull entry.

Ian is likable enough young chap - even if he is prone to unrealistic swings from cowed weediness to assertive aggression in his dealings with his dad.  A dad who is painted as just a bit too much of a stereotypical imagination-free pipe 'n' slippers man.

We are never quite sure, at the end of the tale, if the grosser details of the cremation gone awry actually occurred.  Or if Ian made them up just to shut his dad up.

In either case the outcome was the same.


LOT No. 249
By Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle

Abercrombie Smith occupies the top floor of an undergraduate residence at Oxford college.  On the floor below lives the rather unpleasant character Edward Bellingham, who appears to share his rooms with some unknown person, with whom he whispers away with after midnight, and who can be heard padding about when the rooms are supposedly empty.  

Rather more disconcertingly, it has recently become the case that anyone who has fallen out with, or has in someway irked, Bellingham appear to be being targeted.  One being half-throttled one evening, with another tossed headlong into the local river.

Coincidence, surely.

Whilst Stoker's Dracula helped popularise the notion of The vampire, I rather doubt Lot No. 249 would have done the same with mummies.  For this one is vastly inferior fare.

Incidentally, his was not the first yarn to have utilised the concept of a re-animated mummy; that honour generally regarded as probably going to Jane Webb's 1827 novel The Mummy!

It is an entertaining enough (if overlong) read, I suppose.  Even if, I am sure, few of us today would be able to relate to the lives led by the privileged toffs who inhabit the narrative.  

Who knows what most modern, or indeed most 1800s, readers would make of: 

"I row Mullins for the Vice-Chancellor's pot on Wednesday week", 

or (when describing a friend on the cricket pitch):

"Buddicombe is..... inclining to fast, with a work from leg.  Comes with the arm about three inches or so".

Even more anachronistically, we have another character, who knows the secret of Bellingham's "friend", and aware of the mischief it has been up to.  But feels he cannot properly warn his friend Abercrombie Smith why his life is in real danger, because he had given Bellingham "a very solemn promise" that he would not.

But the real flaw to the plot, is the flacid denouement in which Abercrombie Smith simply strolls into Bellingham's rooms, cuts the mummy into bits and tosses it onto the fire, along with the parchment on which is written (we assume) the incantation used to animate it.

No drama, no peril, no suspense.  Just a neat matter-of-fact tidying-up job.

Not unlike the flabby ending to Dracula, when I think about it.


SO TYPICAL OF ELEANOR
By Roger Clarke

Little Octavius and his irritating and controlling elder sister Eleanor go for a walk to the nearby Yafford water mill.  But only Octavius returns.

Although Eleanor does come home a week later.

A run-of-the-mill (pun intended) ghost story this one, with little to distinguish it from probably dozens or so similar ones I have read over the years.

In fact, the most intriguing aspect to the story is the fact there actually exists a Yafford water mill, on the Isle of Wight.  It is now a private residence and, upon discovering this fact, I wondered if the current inhabitants knew their home was once the scene of a murder.  Albeit a fictional one.


Thomas Burke - The Bird


HEADLAMPS
By Tony Richards

On a remote mountain in north Colorado resides Old Harry.  He has lived there feral these past 35 years, ever since he was involved in a vehicle collision which left him hideously disfigured.

He takes out his rage on the world in general by forcing unsuspecting travellers off the mountain track with his truck, and into the wooded chasm below.

Fourteen drivers has he edged to their deaths in this manner.  And it looks as if number fifteen has just shown up, in the shape of an MG driver who has taken a wrong turning.

With pretty much all of the entries to these collections, the reader has to be prepared to indulge in at least a modicum of belief suspension.  But this one does ask a lot of the reader.

For here we have a chap, severely burned in an accident, who has lived for 35 years in the woods surviving off berries and nuts and little critters.  He has also succeeded in maintaining a large truck if not quite road-worthy, then usable, for the same length of time, with just a "tool kit, hand-crank generator, spare battery and three jerrycans of extra fuel."

Not to mention that fact he has murdered over a dozen individuals over the piece, without the local police becoming anything more than mildly interested.

But despite all this, the yarn holds the reader's attention throughout.

Much of this is a result of the split narrative approach taken by the author.  For we have the Old Harry Vs The MG Driver business going  - reminiscent of John Carpenter's Duel, interspersed with a couple of villagers providing us with all the expositional dialogue we need to fill in any blanks.

I was a touch puzzled by the last couple of of sentences, though.  Was Old Harry and his lorry somehow still on the go, and had he just driven off the mountain?  

Or was there some sort of automotive Ghost Riders in the Sky thing going on?


THE GHOUL
By Sir Hugh Clifford


THE BOOREES
Dorothy K. Haynes

The Boorees of the title are small imp-like creatures who live up chimneys, "squatting on sooty ledges, with their feet tucked in and their heads on their knees, half asleep".  They are a fairly benign bunch, who generally limit their actions to making a bit of a racket when the fire is lit during winter.

However, as the narrator is warned by her mother, they can be quite vindictive when annoyed.

When the narrator (now an adult, and working as a nanny) retells the Boorees story to her charge - a noisome little oik called Dennis - he is naturally sceptical.  But, nevertheless decides to see if he can burn the little chaps out.

Dorothy Haynes was a Scots writer, so I have to assume this yarn is set in Caledonia somewhere.  But as one who grew up in Scotland in a house with a coal fire, I have to say I had never heard of this particular piece of folklore.  

Perhaps Boorees didn't deign to inhabit council hooses?


Christianna Brand - Akin To Love


Robert Haining - The Vigil


THE WITNESS
By Mary Danby

Middle-aged Sylvia Harrison is visiting her elderly Uncle Arthur, at his large esplanade house.  Having recently been made redundant herself, she decides to nudge the old chap towards the grave, so she can inherit the big house and convert it into an hotel.

But getting rid of Uncle Arthur's cat proves to be rather more challenging than dispatching the old boy himself.

More than a touch of the Lady MacBeths about Sylvia's demise here.  With her guilt-induced Damned Spots stretching beyond blood to sooty paw-prints and burn-holes in the brand new stair-carpet.

Tossing herself from a height, similarly mirrors Lady Macbeth's death in Orson Welles' film of Shakespeare's play.