The 5th Fontana Book of Great Horror Stories (1970)

The things you learn on the internet - for lurking behind the preposterous feathers and beak on the cover of Font5, is none other than our new editor Mary Danby, as the covers begin a period of depicting a scene from one of the yarns within.

This one, aptly, from Mary's own entry.

THE BLUE LENSES

By Daphne Du Maurier

Marda West has spent some weeks with her eyes bandaged, subsequent to an operation to save her sight.  

When the bandages are at last removed, she is required to temporarily have a set of blue contact lenses fitted.  Once the fog clears, she is delighted to realise she can see everything clearly.  But more than  a little puzzled to note that her nurse appears to be wearing what looks like a particularly realistic cow mask.

Indeed, all the ward staff appear in on the joke, each turning up sporting the head of a different animal.

The older I have got, the more I have learned to love Daphne Du Maurier's short stories.  Check out her long lost tale The Doll, if you can find it.  Written around 1929, it showcases a rather impressive sex-doll -  some decades before such a thing was even a thing.

The Blue Lenses is equally off-kilter, featuring the premise of a woman who is suddenly able to divine an individual's true personality, through whichever head she can see them wearing.  Stupid people are cows, sneaky ones snakes, whilst reliable folks are dogs etc.  

It is perhaps a rather clumsy tool, but it does the leave the reader anticipating which head her hubby will be wearing, when he arrives at the hospital.

Leaving aside the obvious fact no surgeon would ever operate on both eyes of a patient at once, the yarn is never less than eminently readable, with a sting in the tail which will probably irk or thrill first-time readers in equal numbers.

THE MAN UPSTAIRS

By Ray Bradbury

Douglas' grandma takes in boarders to make ends meet.  But the young lad isn't too keen on the latest one, Mr. Koberman, with his wooden cutlery and pockets full of pennies.

Grandma's house has a stained glass window in an upstairs alcove and, watching Koberman return from his regular night-shift through the red panel, Douglas is interested to note not only can he see right inside the boarder's body, but also that his internal organs look different from everyone else's.  

And Douglas knows about innards, having avidly watched his grandma gut many chickens.

Girls have been disappearing locally, and the talk around the dinner table is of vampires.  So Douglas decides to find out just what Mr. Koberman is made of.

I do not think I have ever encountered a Ray Bradbury story I did not enjoy, and this one is a chunk of particularly light-hearted fun.  Even if Koberman does appear to be a vampire (or whatever he is) with a decidedly cavalier approach to his personal safety during the hours of daylight.

For he is easily bested by an, admittedly astute, young boy, although I do wonder if whole whole tale was nothing but a vessel to house that groan-inducing final-line joke.

A WOMAN SELDOM FOUND

By William Sansom

A disillusioned young man on his first visit to Rome is seduced by a wealthy glamorous woman, who has a remarkable ability.

Man meets Woman in the The City, is a common theme in the few William Sansom short stories I have encountered.  Generally some mildly disturbing psycho-sexual interaction occurs at the climax of the narrative.

Not freaky stuff like this.

But that if fine.  Sansom's slightly dreamlike prose maintained my What-is-going-to-happen-next interest.  And at just under three pages, the length was just about correct.

As to whether there was some deep and meaningful allegory or metaphor at play, I have no idea.

  

 

THE GRAVEYARD RATS

By Henry Kuttner

Masson is the caretaker at a neglected rat-infested cemetery in Salem, Massachusetts.  He is not above exhuming recently buried corpses to sell them on to medical students.  But he generally confines himself to robbing the bodies of any valuables they have been buried with.  

The latest tenant of the graveyard was, Masson noted,  interred wearing expensive looking cufflinks.  But upon digging up and opening the coffin, he just catches sight of the deceased's feet disappearing through a hole gnawed in the coffin head.

Desperate not to lose his prize to the rats, the caretaker squeezes into the tunnel, after the swiftly disappearing corpse....

....which proves not to be one of his better lifestyle choices.

As Masson enters the subterranean maze of the rats' tunnels, we join him in a world of damp, dark, malodorous  claustrophobia.  

The fact things are not going to end well for him, is never really in doubt.  But the pickle he finally finds himself in had me smiling at the author's neat dexterity.  

For it was only then, the literary McGuffin of the rats' gnawing into the buried coffins from one of the ends became apparent.  

THE LOTTERY

By Shirley Jackson

Each June a lottery is held in a small US town, in order to choose a member of the community to be stoned to death - sacrificed, to ensure the "corn be heavy soon".

Jackson's short story is generally viewed as a warning against blindly continuing with old traditions, and a concurrent refusal to challenge authority.  

I happen to feel it goes further than that, and Jackson was actually railing against the Christian church.  The three-legged stool which supports the black box, from which the lots are drawn, representing the holy trinity of the Christian faith.  Plus, we all know Christianity is the religion founded upon a human sacrifice.

The little slips of unmarked paper, which end up fluttering around the stones soon to be used to kill Mrs Hutchison, could be seen to represent the cleansed souls of the remaining townspeople, drifting away and remaining free, as if going to heaven.  Their souls cleansed by the ritualistic slaughter of a single individual chosen as the scapegoat.

Although, I acknowledge I may be may be pushing things a bit when I point out a man called Adams is the first to draw a lot.

THE SEA RAIDERS

By H.G. Wells

A walker on a south Devon beach comes across a small group of pig-sized squid-like creatures feasting upon the remains of a human corpse.

He only just manages to escape the creatures when they turn their attention to him.  But rather than contact the authorities, he enlists a couple of labourers and a local with a rowing boat to attempt to recover the body.

This does not go quite as planned.

This one, on the face of it reads like a hunk of gloopy, pulp nonsense, about weird things coming out of the sea to cause mayhem for a spell, before quietly returning from when they came.

But there are some rather more subtle undercurrents to the narrative, I feel.  The detached manner the narrator relates the death of the women and children (innocents rarely died in Victorian fiction), allied to Wells' description of the creatures' victims as their "catch", leads one to think the author perhaps harboured a sneaking admiration for the brutes.

For the whole story ties into the notion that Wells had expounded in his essay The Extinction of Man, that Homo Sapiens' place at the top of the food chain was both a decidedly tenuous, and inevitably temporary, one.

Such thoughts, of course, were expanded fully in his 1898 masterwork The War of The Worlds.  Although, as we all know, in this one the human race managed to sneak an injury-time winner (with a little help).

A TALE OF THE RAGGED MOUNTAINS

By Edgar Allan Poe

Augustus Bedloe likes nothing better, after having taking his daily morphine dose to subdue his "neuralgic attacks", than a long ramble in the Ragged Mountains, southwest of Charlottesville VA.

He returns very late from one such trip and relates to the narrator, and also to his doctor, all he encountered during his day.

Specifically: somehow finding his way to the Indian city of Benares, then joining with the British garrison there in attempting to quell a local insurrection.  Before being apparently killed with a poisoned arrow, then being returned to life, once his spirit has floated back to the Ragged Mountains.  (That, my friends, is a day trip!)

The narrator, not surprisingly, listens with increasing skepticism to the account.....whilst the doctor does so with the increasing horror of recognition.

Poe would frequently include in his short stories a lengthy, oft times impenetrable, discourse on some scientific (or psuedo-scientific) topic related to narrative.  Anyone who has attempted to wade through the first few pages of The Pit and The Pendulum will know what I mean.

Here Poe rambles on about mesmerism, or hypnotism, as I suppose it may be termed these days.

After getting the theory out of the way, what follows is rather confusing yarn - a jumble of impressions and scenes, described at times, as if in compensation, utilising some wonderfully evocative descriptive prose.

We are gradually eased down a path of believing that Bedloe and Dr. Templeton have, through the latter's persistent attempts at hypnosis, built up some form of low grade mutual telepathy.  Using which Bedloe has somehow sub-consciously imbibed the details of a journal the doctor has been writing recording his time in India, half-a-century before.

And that Bedloe had subsequently incorporated aspects of the doctor's memoirs into a morphia withdrawal induced hallucination, whilst lost in the mountains.

I can just about go for that.

But then Poe tosses in a couple more red herrings before the end: the Bedlo/Oldeb name business before, finally, the silly nonsense of the poisonous leach.

But the real mystery here is: why would Mary Danby, given the opportunity to compile her first ever anthology of horror stories, choose to include this mediocre yarn over so many other Poe masterpieces?

GEORGY PORGY

By Roald Dahl

Cleric George is, by his own admission, obsessed with and terrified by women.  The result, we learn, of an overbearing mother and the traumatic witnessing, as a boy, of a rabbit eating its own newly-born young.

But, through a rather cruel home experiment involving sex-starved male and female rats and an electric fence, he concluding that females are by nature more sexually aggressive than males.  Meaning, to his mind, the situation is none of his making.

Armed with this knowledge he approaches his next social gathering with the predatory spinsters of his parish, with rather more confidence.

However, he underestimates the power of Pimm's.

A particularly muddy psycho-sexual puddle this one, but an entertaining fable for all that.

To raise claims of misogyny against Dahl over this story, (pretty much all the women are portrayed as sexually voracious predators) is to forget the fact that it is fiction.  For the story is written from the point of view of a decidedly unreliable narrator.  

And I feel the true message here is how most males are intimidated by strong self-possessed females, often finding recourse in violence, both overt and covert.  A point which is obscured by Dahl's clumsy use of the Freudian mouth-as-vagina metaphor.

I did wonder, however, about the fact George felt particularly attracted to Ms. Roach, due in part to her almost masculine muscularity.  Was there some degree of repressed homosexuality also going on here?

TO REACH THE SEA

By Monica Dickens

Jane Barlow has shelled out the not inconsiderable sum of $250 for a luxurious black wig.  She loves wearing it, and the attention it brings her,  But she is less pleased with the fact the darned thing appears to keep growing.

Haunted hair is a new one on me, but this one works well enough, even though it verges on the silly at times.  I loved the camp perruquier Monsieur Marmaduke, and would rather have like to have had a bit more of him.  If you see what I mean.

His postscript to the yarn ties up all the loose strands rather too tidily, perhaps.  And I cannot help but feel, in the hands of the likes of William Sansom, the narrative would have ended with the wig's discovery in the river.  With the reader left to come up with their own fanciful interpretation of events.

THE MONSTER

By R. Chetwynd-Hayes

Uncle Carl and his wife have brought up their niece Caroline secretly, for she was born a "monster".  And would be burned as such, should she ever be found.

Anyone who had read Nigel Kneale's story Oh Mirror, Mirror in Pan1, would have fairly swiftly divined the lay of the land with this one.

Indeed, it feels almost as if RCH had decided to re-write Kneale's yarn, but provide it with both a back-story (some post atomic dystopia, where a bizarre religion has sprouted up over the fact the moon now fills the sky each night), and a bid-for-freedom adventure by the unfortunate Caroline. 

HIS BROTHER'S KEEPER

By W.W. Jacobs

We enter the action with Anthony Keller, for reasons which are never touched upon, having just violently murdered his visitor Martle.

He is now faced with the thorny problem of how to dispose of the body.  He decides upon short-term storage in his bicycle shed, before creating a rockery in his garden under which Martle will be buried.

Which he succeeds in doing - after fending off the innocent attentions of first a visiting friend, and then of his housekeeper.

But then something or someone begins disturbing the completed rockery each night.

If not quite as re-write of Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart (Font8), this story pushes the some line; that subconscious guilt can sometimes override an individual's conscious desire to escape detection.

Jacobs' does utilise a more detached third-person narrative, as opposed to Poe' slightly manic stream of consciousness approach, and our hero here is blessed with far more self-awareness than the perpetrator in TTTH.

But, ultimately, the end game is the same.

THE HAND

By Guy de Maupassant

A reclusive Englishman, Sir John Rowell, moves into a remote Corsican villa.  He is befriended by the local judge who, when being shown Rowell's gun collection, is startled to see a withered human hand chained to one of the walls of the house.

This belonged, Judge Bermutier learns, to Rowell's "best enemy".

Some months later, Rowell is found strangled in his house, with a severed finger bone in his mouth.  And the hand is missing.

This one takes the form of a yarn related sometime after the events, by the judge to a group of coquettishly ghoulish women at a social event.  And it has the feel of a story best read aloud to an audience of an evening.  And perhaps it may have been effective as just such entertainment, back when it was written in 1883.

But today, it all just comes across and incredibly dated, highly predictable and not a little quaint.

The only real shock in the story is the point where Rowell jarring drops into the conversation the revelation that "I have also frequently been man-hunting", during one of Judge Bermutier's visits.  

But this revelation is just left to hang there, and is, regretfully, never expanded upon.

MRS AMWORTH

By E.F. Benson

Recently widowed Mrs. Amworth has returned from India to the sleepy Sussex village of Maxley, from whence her ancestors came.  Her frothy personality is generally a hit with her new neighbours, but notably not with retired academic Francis Urcombe.

For his interest in, and knowledge of, "occult and curious phenomena" has led him to suspect the new arrival in the village to be not all that she appears.

When Mrs' Amworth's gardener's son subsequently falls seriously ill with an unexplained acute anaemia, Urcombe deduces vampirism is at the root of things, and has the boy moved to his house.

His suspicions are confirmed when Mrs. Amworth's ghostly form appears outside the window of the upper floor bedroom where the boy is sleeping.  When confronted by Urcombe, the following morning, she (slightly preposterously, it has to be said) shirks back onto the road, where she is killed by a passing car! 

The narrator believes the ghastly business is all over, but Urcombe knows the job is only half done.

When I was young, I used to think Bram Stoker had invented vampires, and all their paraphernalia and weaknesses.  But, of course, there were dozens of writers scribbling away on the topic back in the day.

This yarn, published by E.F. Benson in 1923, is one case in point, even if it not a particularly impressive example.

The two main protagonists - the narrator and Urcombe - never really appear to be in any danger from their adversary.  Whilst, the only individual who does flirt with death (the gardener's boy) is so tangential to the narrative, his illness and recovery barely registers with the reader.

Mrs. Amworth is (ironically enough) the only character of any real substance, but we get so little of her.  We are almost a third of the way into the story before she has anything to say.....and she is soon under the wheels of a car, before too much more has elapsed.

The second half of the story, wherein Urcombe, with the aid of the narrator, destroys the vampire once and for all, is even duller, with the whole business going totally to plan

Indeed, the exhumation and pick-axe procedure is related in such an offhand and matter-of-fact manner, the final couple of pages could almost be read as A Beginner's Guide to Vampire Slaying.

THE WAXWORK

By A.M. Burrage

Hard-up freelance journalist Raymond Hewsen has persuaded the owner of Marriner's Waxworks to let him stay overnight in the Murderers' Room of the exhibition.  The journalist is hoping to sell a story of his experience, whilst Marriner is hoping the concurrent publicity will increase his customer numbers.

All the usual suspects are on display: John Thurtell, Edith Thompson, Hawley Crippen and the like.  Plus one Hewson had not heard of - one Dr. Bourdette, whose effigy is particularly lifelike.  

And did Hewson just see it move?

An exploration of paranoia and swift descent into madness this one, I think, leading to the highly fanciful notion that the protagonist had somehow scared himself to death.

Although, it is not impossible I suppose, that the real Bourdette had, indeed, been hiding in plain sight all along, and it was his coming-to-life antics which had caused Hewson's heart attack, or whatever had killed him.

In either event, this is a rather uninspiring effort, by an author pretty much forgotten these days.

The problem really is the alarmingly swift manner in which Hewson morphs from down-to-earth hack to wobbly jellyfish, jumping at his own shadow.  Before conveniently keeling over.

QUID PRO QUO

By Mary Danby

The fussy and pernickety Potters are off on their yearly holiday, leaving their live-in housekeeper Sarah to guard the homestead.  And she is determined to enjoy the two weeks of freedom, beginning with inviting her lover Harry over for a session of bumps in amongst the cushions.

Harry extends an offer of a trip away, but Sarah is stuck with the Potter's friggin' budgie to feed.

But then she decides it would simple enough to kill the thing, and then replace it.  Which she does.

This was was first exposure to the work of Mary Danby, a lady with whom, were I to finish all the Fontana Horror volumes, I was going to get to know rather well.  For I noted she had negotiated with the publisher the presence of one of her tales in each of the volumes she edited.  

Nowt wrong with that, I would probably have done the same.

Quid Pro Quo, whilst quite a simple tale of supernatural revenge, is on nodding acquaintance, at least, with Kafka's The Metamorphosis.  With both authors deftly avoiding the tricky business of explaining the How? by simply ignoring it.

The tone of the tale does feel a touch lightweight after some of the "classic" horror tales which preceded it in the collection.  But it does not feel out of place.  

Rather like a light sorbet desert following a few calorie-heavy main courses, in fact.