The 6th Fontana Book of Great Horror Stories (1971)

The Quest For Blank Claveringi

By Patricia Highsmith

Professor Avery Clavering would very much like to leave his mark upon his chosen field of zoology.  Ideally by discovering a previous unknown species, and having it named after him.

When he reads about the legend of twenty-foot tall, man-eating snails reputed to exist on the remote Pacific island of Kuwa, off he sets.

I tried hard to read some sort of fable into this one - perhaps Clavering wishing to own a part of nature, but ending up being "owned" by it.  But the yarn just came across as a pulpy piece of Rider Haggard meets Dr. Doolittle schlock.  But no less entertaining for all that.

The physiology of the business is of course silly, something I thought a learned lad like Prof. Clavering may have mentioned at least once during the business.  For any creature to grow to the size these chaps did, they would have required a pretty substantial internal skeleton to attach their insides to.

Not to mention the fact, the two brutes would fairly swiftly have stripped the three square miles of Kuwa Island of all foliage.  Unless, of course, these were fishing snails! - for they did appear impervious to salt water.

For all that, the narrative rattles along in fine style, pitching man against nature - a sort of Robinson Crusoe vs. The Killer Snails - with the reader entertained in a will he/won't he kind of way.

Even if the cover of the anthology does rather give the game away.

Back For Christmas

By John Collier

Dr. Carpenter is off to start a three-month contract in America, and his control freak of a wife Hermione (who is coming with him), has made all the arrangements.

But Dr. C has plans of his own, so murders then buries his wife in the cellar of their house.  Then sets off for the good ole US of A, to (hopefully) live happily ever after there with Marion.

These jolly tales of murderers not-quite-getting-away-with-it, popped up on a number of occasions in the Pan collection.  And this I think, is the first such Fontana instance, and the denouement, I have to own up made me smile.

Which, I rather think, was the author's intention.

The Cocoon

By John B.L. Goodwin

With an absent mother and a disinterested father, young Denny is pretty much left to his own devices.  Which, in his case, means a free reign to indulge his passion for collecting moths and butterflies.  He also enjoys bringing home caterpillars, allowing them to pupate, and relishing the surprise of what finally emerges.

Out searching one afternoon he comes across a huge caterpillar new to him, so he settles it in a container in his room, to allow it do its magic.

When the moth finally emerges it has a whopping ten-inch wingspan.  Denny, unable to find a container large enough to prevent the insect damaging its wings, decides to kill it straight away.  So, after a quick visit to the killing jar, the creature ends up pinned to the wall at the foot of Denny's bed.

All well and good, until Denny starts hearing the beating of large wings against the outside of both his bedroom door and window.

Disrespect nature at your peril, seems to be the message here - a common enough one in horror short stories.  I seem to recall an entry in the Pan Collection by Dulcie Gray, which tread pretty much the same ground as this one.

Although The Cocoon, I feel, has little to commend it above the plethora of similar.  The reader never really connects with Denny or his plight, particularly after his cabbage white killing spree.

The story's redeeming feature is the author's Bradbury-esque few paragraphs describing Denny's caterpillar hunt:

"The autumn sun, already low, ogled the brittle landscape like some improbable jack-o'-lantern hanging in the west.....although the leaves on the trees displayed the incautious yellows of senility and ochres of decay." 

Unfortunately, as pretty much all of the rest of the drama takes place in Denny's bedroom, the author's pen never really gets the opportunity to take flight again.

There are, after all, only so many ways you can describe the pattern on a moth's wings. 

The End Of The Party

By Graham Greene

Nine-year old Francis Morton is terrified of the dark.  Which is a bit unfortunate as he has been invited, along with his twin Peter, to a birthday party where he knows the children will play Hide-and-Seek with all the lights out.

His attempts to articulate his fears to the adults around - his nurse, his own mother and also the mother of the birthday boy - are casually dismissed.  He being told "Don't be silly" and "There's nothing to fear in the dark".

Perhaps Peter will protect him.

Written in 1929, I cannot help but feel there is an element here of the author equating Peter's anxieties with the disorders seen in those men who returned from WWI with shell shock and other nervous conditions.

Like Francis, many of these unfortunate individuals would have been faced with an uncaring society, suggesting they simply Man Up.

I am probably over-stretching my allegory though, if I tentatively postulate that Francis's demise, quite literally, at the hand of his brother, paralleled the fate of those few hundred shell-shocked Tommies executed during WWI by their own comrades for "cowardice".

Hard Luck Story

By Pamela Vincent

The "Little Man" enjoys supplementing his income by hitch-hiking, then spinning his drivers a tall tale of poverty and an ill child or wife in hospital.  A small donation is usually forthcoming.

Until his final ride, where his lift coolly strangles him with a lemon coloured scarf.

Not quite sure what the point of this one is, other than a caution against telling fibs, perhaps.

The one unusual aspect of the tale, is the fact it is a male hitch-hiker who cops it.  Over in Pan-land, it would most certainly have been an attractive young woman. 

Srendi Vashtar

By Saki

Conradin is a rather sickly child being looked after by his adult cousin Mrs. De Ropp.  In a tool-shed in the garden he keeps a polecat-ferret, which he has named Sredni Vashtar.  The boy, although slightly afraid of the fierce creature, has begun to worship it as a deity, presenting it with offerings of stolen nutmeg.

When the overbearing Mrs. De Ropp threatens to have the animal removed, Conradin prays to the animal to "Do one thing for me".

Another literary heavyweight pitches up in Font6, with a rather anodyne tale which touches on such concepts as the power of the imagination, and the potential children house for casual evil. 

It is story clearly written for the brain rather than the heart, and whilst I am sure hundreds of academics have will have written thousands of words analysing the text, I rather doubt if anyone has ever been horrified reading it. 

   

Miss Gentilbelle

By Charles Beaumont

Young Robert's mother cannot bear the thought of him growing up to be a man; all of whom she believes, are "animals in every sense, not humans".

So she compels Robert to wear dresses, to curtsy, and to put on scent.  Worse than this, whenever he displeases her, she punishes him by sadistically killing one of his pets.

Robert's alcoholic father has long been banished to the spare room and given the status of gardener.  But Robert's plaintive question of him, "Am I really a little girl?" finally shames the man into leaving the house to seek legal custody of his child.

But, in his absence, Robert snaps when another of his pets is gutted by his clearly insane mother as a punishment.

Wowsa! - where to begin with this one?  Think Iain Banks' The Wasp Factory crossed with Patricia Highsmith's The Terrapin, then add in a psychotic sex-starved harridan straight out of one of Tennessee Williams' bad dreams, and you are about half way there.

Those opening few pages truly are a disorientating ride for the first time reader, as Robert is initially referred to as "he" by the narrator then, mere lines later, as "Roberta" and "a wicked, wicked girl" by his mother.

The text abounds with names, even though there are only three characters in the story.  In addition to the Robert/Roberta business, the boy is called Bobbie by his father, whom Robert himself addresses as Drake.  His mother, dismissively refers to Drake as Mr. Franklin. 

The mother's first name, we learn from Drake, is Minnie, and it is only the narrator who refers to her as Miss Gentilbelle.

Add into this muddy mix a puppy called Edna and Margaret the parakeet, and the less than totally alert reader can easily get lost.

What led to the bizarre state of affairs in the mad house is only really hinted at.  But I would suggest the mother became pregnant by Drake, but turned against him (indeed, against all males in general) when he either refused to marry her, or decided he preferred whisky.

That she and Drake, nevertheless, still occasionally get it on is made clear by Drake's first response when suddenly woken in the night by Thomas: "That you, Minnie?" 

But ultimately, one really could complete a fairly extensive PhD discussing this one.

The Pioneers Of Pike's Peak

By Basil Tozer

An old codger in a Colorado bar, spins a tale of an attempt some years back to scale nearby Pike's Peak.  An attempt foiled by angry spiders.

A moderately entertaining adventure yarn this one, although at a few points during the narrative the reader is brought up short, thinking "Whaaaat?"

To whit: Upon meeting the story-teller for the first time, the narrator asserts he "could not have been over fifty years of age, though he looked quite sixty".  How does that work?

Later, when the old man is telling of his preparations to attempt to scale the peak with three companions, he spouts: "In the success of our enterprise lay the welfare of thousands", yet fails to elaborate upon this bold assertion at all.  We, later in the narrative, are presented with the rather silly vision of four men surrounded by spiders attempting to blast their way out with shotguns.

And, whilst I am at it, what the heck are we expected to believe these "trillions of spiders" ate, when mountaineers were not on the menu? 

But the biggest cop out in the yarn, is the fact we are never told how the old man escaped the sea of arachnids, who devoured his friends.  Maybe he swam to safety.

Miriam

By Truman Capote

Mrs Miriam Miller is a 61-year old widow, who lives quietly on her own in an apartment block.  She has no friends, keeps herself to herself, with the high point of her week generally being a trip to the grocery store.

One afternoon she makes a rare trip to the cinema, where she is approached by a 10/11 year old girl, who is also called Miriam, asking if she will buy her cinema ticket for her.   Mrs Miller does so, and the pair go their separate ways.

Late one evening, a week or so later, the girl pitches up at Mrs Miller's apartment as if invited, and inveigles her way in.  Miriam swiftly makes herself at home, disturbs a sleeping canary, helps herself to Mrs Miller's favourite piece of jewelry, before requesting something to eat.

Upon being asked to leave after finishing her sandwich, Miriam throws a wobbly, and smashes a glass vase before strolling out.

The incident leaves Mrs Miller shaken for a few days, but just as she feels she is getting over it Miriam returns, this time carrying a large box of clothes.

"I’ve come to live with you,” she says.

I initially took the girl Miriam to represent Death, or a harbinger thereof.  A fact I felt to be reinforced by Mrs Miller's interaction with the old man whilst out shopping.  For Miriam later stated: "The last place I lived was with an old man".

But then, on the internet, I came across a copy of a letter Truman Capote had written to a reader of the story back in 1945, where he stated "Miriam IS Mrs Miller".  Which sorta suggests the story is a description of a lonely woman's descent into schizophrenia.  

In either case, it is a marvelously sinister tale, and quite probably my favourite from the Fontana series so far. 

Cold Sleep

By Sydney J. Bounds

For the remarkably modest sum of £400, a company called Cold Sleep are offering terminally ill individuals the opportunity to be cryogenically frozen.  This to allow them to be revived in the future, once medical advances have made their particular disease treatable.

Hughie Clarkson, whose only ailment is hypochondria is delighted to shell out.

He is less delighted to discover upon waking, however, that Cold Sleep have re-thought their business model in the interim.

I was less than overwhelmed by Bounds' two entries in Font4, but this one is just great; a biting satire on private medicine, which I was sorry it ended when it did.

I loved the casual insouciance of the future "nurses", as they blithely filled in the blanks for poor Hughie.   

The Mysterious Mansion

By Honoré de Balzac

A visitor to the French town of Vendome comes across a neglected mansion with extensive overgrown gardens.  Chatting to his landlady, and later her servant girl Rosalie who once worked in the mansion, he pieces together a tale of infidelity, cruelty and murder.

I have been slightly surprised at the number of stories in the Fontana collections (so far) written by non-English writers.  Nothing wrong with that, of course.  But the problem with such tales is, no matter how nuanced or subtle the work of the original author, he/she is very much at the mercy of the translator.

I cannot help but feel such is the situation here, for the whole story is just so muddled.

Where to start?

After a lengthy (over-lengthy, one might suggest) description of the mansion of the title, the text suddenly states: 

"I inferred that I was not the only person to whom my good landlady had communicated the secret of which I was to be the sole recipient, and I prepared to listen."

Where did that leap come from?  And was Balzac's prose in the original French quite so verbose?  I rather doubt it.

Anyway, we next receive a chunk of back story from the narrator's landlady, covering the time when the old mansion was still in use.  Apparently a Spanish nobleman had been billeted with her as a prisoner-of war, and he had been having an affair with the lady of the mansion, one Madame de Merret.  This must have been some time ago, as the text states the mansion "door had been closed for the last ten years".

The landlady suggests her employee Rosalie (who is dropped into the plot like a stone) knows more, as she had worked in the mansion a decade earlier.  And yet, Rosalie is still described as being a girl!

Rosalie tells a tale of Monsieur de Merret finding the Spaniard hiding in an alcove of his wife's bedroom.

De Merret then offered Rosalie's fiancé Gorenflot, a local stone mason, twelve thousand francs to immure the Spaniard in bedroom recess, and then to disappear to a foreign country.  In addition to offering Rosalie "ten thousand francs on the day of your wedding", if she promised to leave with and marry Gorenflot. 

One has to assume the impoverished pair would have taken up this offer.  If so, then how the heck did Rosalie end up back in the town, working as a maid in the narrator's lodgings??

The narrator also describes the story of the mansion, as a "drama that had killed three persons".  I would suggest the other two were Monsieur and Madame de Merret, but no mention of their demise occurs anywhere in the yarn.

An extended version of this story did appear some fourteen years later, as La Grande Bretèche in Balzac's epic collection La Comédie Humaine, and perhaps many of the inconsistencies were ironed out in that version.

Not that that helps here.

Earth To Earth

By Robert Graves

Roland and Elsie Hedge are converts to Dr. Steinpilz's radical approach to composting.  

Everything organic is grist to the mill of their steaming, fertiliser-producing heaps.  Everything.

The authors included in Font6 almost reads like a Who's Who of 20th Century literature: Highsmith, Greene, Saki, Capote, de Balzac.  And here was that titan of letters Robert Graves effortlessly pitching in with a surreal tale of horticulturalism gone awry.

The couple's obsession with composting actually reaching a stage where their whole garden is taken over by compost heaps, with no space for the fruit'n'veg the compost was actually intended to help grow.

I really liked the fact Graves' gave us no clue whatsoever to whom four of the "five beautifully clean human skeletons" once belonged to.  For there were no unaccounted for characters in the narrative.

The Man And The Snake

By Ambrose Bierce

Harker Brayton believes there is a live snake under his bed - there is not.

I suppose Bierce is attempting say something here about the power of superstition over logic.  If so, he certainly takes the long way round, for this yarn is stuffed full of verbose waffle.

Whole pages are filled with Brayton standing still in his room, wondering what to do, as he becomes fixated upon the pair of  eyes under his bed.  Eyes which gradually morph from being "small points of light" to "electric sparks", before becoming "two dazzling suns", as Brayton gradually goes bonkers.

He is such a skittish chap, we begin to wonder just how he has succeeded in living as long as he has.  And I rather felt, at the end of the story, had Francis Morton escaped his ordeal in The End of The Party earlier in this anthology, this is where he would have finally checked out.

Close Behind Him

By John Wyndham

Smudger and Spotty (no, really) are a pair of small- time burglars.  They are in the process of doing over a large house, when they are interrupted by the owner.  Spotty, terrified at the intimidating manner the owner approaches him, clubs him to death.

The pair are hurrying back to their getaway car, when they notice they are being followed.  Or, at least, something is leaving a trail of red footprints just behind them.

I devoured all those brilliant John Wyndham novels as a teenager; not just the weed tale, but lesser known ones like Chocky, The Chrysalids and The Kraken Wakes.  But his short stories somehow passed me by.  Indeed, I think this one may well be the first of Wyndham's I have ever encountered.

And, the author's easy style made Close Behind Him a most entertaining drama, even if poor old Smudger's fate was never really in any doubt

The nuts 'n' bolts of what had gone on is never quite made clear - is it the spirit of the murdered house owner seeking revenge  Or, perhaps a demon summoned up (Casting The Runes style) by the owner, to do his bidding?  

In either event, it is hard to work out quite what Smudger's doctor had done to deserve to inherit the phantom footprinter. 

As an aside - I first "read" Close Behind Him as an audiobook, and misinterpreted the phrase "bare-foot prints" as "bear footprints", which did lead to the narrative taking an apparently bizarre turn, until I realised my error.

Letter To A Young Lady In Paris

By Julio Cortazar

A chap is writing to tell his lady friend Andrea why he can no longer stay at her apartment.  For, apparently, he has begun vomiting up baby rabbits at an alarming rate.  

He informs her he has just about been able to cope with looking after ten of the critters, but an eleventh has proven to be one too many.

Few things scream Unreliable Narrator more than a posthumously read journal, diary or letter.  And this is one such of the latter.

We have only the letter-writer's word that any of the little bunnies existed, for he was apparently remarkably adept at keeping their presence hidden from the live-in maid.  Particularly the obvious issue of all those little tell-tale pellets (which is never addressed in the text).

So what was Cortazar up to here?  

Well, my stab in the dark is that the letter-writer suffered from severe anxiety, and each rabbit he coughed-up represented a particular worry or stress.  For, as he stated himself, he was generally able to hide and deal with the animals, when they appeared (as they had in the past) singly and some months apart.

The veritable warren of the blighters which arrived when staying in the apartment, represented the stresses he felt attempting to make himself at home in the "elaborate order" of Andrea's perfect apartment.

And one stress too many, sent him over the edge.  Literally.

Party Pieces

By Mary Danby

George and Maggie are hosting another of their "terrific" parties - this latest one to herald in the New Year.

George, a newspaper cartoonist, is well known for his famous after dinner "divertissments".  What will it be this year, everyone wonders.

Party Pieces is a pleasingly macabre, if hardly original, story.  

More interesting than the guts of the tale, I found, was Danby's description of the fancies and secret lusts of the various couples.  Which put me in mind of the acid pen of Leslie Thomas at times.  For there was more than a little of the Tropic of Ruislip about the party.

At least there was until the unfortunate Geoffrey went to pieces.