The 8th Fontana Book of Great Horror Stories (1973)

THE GODSEND

By Bernard Taylor

Little Carolyn and Rick's mother is too busy writing to dedicate too much time to her children.  So she employs local girl Janie help out.  The children love Janie, with her exotic tales of Africa, her magician's tricks, and her fascinating nature walks.

But everything changes the day Rick is bitten by some kind of insect on one such ramble.

Yes, this one works.  With a marvelous body-horror final scene bonus.

An odd thing about this story though, is that the author reused the title for his 1976 debut novel - that one featured no vampyre grasshoppers though.

THE TROLL

By T.H. White

Mr. Marx tells the tale of a fishing trip his father made to the northerly Swedish village of Abisco.  Peering through a keyhole (as you do) into his adjoining hotel room, Dad witnesses an eight-foot tall troll, eating a woman.

Or did he?

I am not quite sure what to make of this one.  Did the whole business actually happen as related, or did Marx's dad's make the whole thing up?  Or, even, has Dad's subconscious merely added in a few gory details to the tragic deaths of the professor and his good wife.  

For two of the occasions Dad sees the troll came just after he has (or at least, believes he has) just awoken from a bad dream.  The other encounter took place in the hotel dining room, where Dad is the only person who can see it.  He tells the manageress the troll had burned his hand, but those blisters could actually have come from the spirit lamp.

HAVELOCK'S FARM

By Charles Birkin

Faith Harrison has just been appointed assistant to the old schoolmaster of the infant school in the remote hamlet of Leasley.  

But an administrational blunder means she is required to find alternative lodgings upon arrival.  Which she does with the eccentric, and generally locally shunned, Havelock family.

But the Havelocks, although taciturn and gruff, treat the young woman well enough.  Well, all except one.

I first encountered Charles Birkin (or Sir Charles Lloyd Birkin, 5th Baronet 1907 – 1985) in Pan3.  His A Poem and a Bunch of Roses, I really enjoyed, with its genteel language and sedate pacing, before the shocking arrival of Pierre in the protagonist's bedroom.

This one ploughs a similar furrow, although I do not feel the characterisation here is quite so strong.  Many of the players, even Faith to an extent, drift through the narrative leaving barely a ripple.  Such as poor Grannie.

But once we learn of brother Simon Havelock who "doesn't live in the house ...any longer", any reader familiar with Birkin's work will have guessed Faith and Simon were going to enjoy a first (and final) date, before the end of proceedings.

THE PECULIAR CASE OF MRS. GRIMMOND

By Dorothy K. Haynes

Elderly Mrs. Grimmond is quite used to her cat bringing in mice, but cannot quite work out what he has brought in this time.  Some black-coloured, sharp-toothed, curly-haired thing which yaps like a puppy - but most certainly is not.

The thing feeds by biting then sucking the blood from Mrs' G's wrists and, although she grows to hate having to feed it in such a manner, she decides to keep it for the company.

One day a neighbour asks Mrs Grimmond to look after her baby for an afternoon.

The original Look-at-what-the-cat's-brought-in story perhaps.  Except, given the tale takes the form of an internal monologue, we have to beware the unreliable narrator.  And also consider the possibility that Mrs Grimmond is simply a murderous fantasist.

For a few things really do not ring true in the story: would a neighbour Mrs. Grimmond had "never spoken to" really have asked her to look after a baby?  

And just who were these "pretty girls from the youth club", who would visit, because they "enjoyed the idea of slumming"?

As an aside, I am sure that few folks would have missed it, but the cat's name Deil is, of course a derivation of devil.  Witness Robert Burns' line in Tam o' Shanter:

"Fair play, he car'd na deils a boddle."

(Fair play, he didn’t care a farthing for devils.)

THE PIT

By Gwyn Jones

Akerman is boarding with Mr. and Mrs. Bendle in South Wales, as he indulges his passion for poking about old mine workings.

However, his passions also stretch to Mrs. Bendle herself, although the pair have not consummated their mutual attraction quite yet.

Akerman is fairly confident his host is unaware of what is developing beneath his roof.  But then the couple let their guard down for a momentary kiss.

I had to read this one two or three times, in order to ensure I had not missed any subtleties in the narrative.  And, also, to attempt to get the geography of Akerman's subterranean meanderings clear in my head.

I was eventually forced to draw a map (of sorts), which helped considerably.  But, even then, I still could not figure out how one particular right turn took Akerman back to the level from which he had entered.  Perhaps I was taking the author's description too literally.

I also could not quite ascertain exactly what Akerman's motivation for descending into the unused pit was.  He talked about "Curiosity.  And habit", then a touch later admits to himself, he had entered to ensure "No one could say he was afraid".

Most puzzling, and I am sure the author intended it to be so, was the off-kilter final scene, where Bendle bodily picks up the exhausted and bedraggled Akerman, and wanders off into the woods, with cowed wife in tow.

Had Bendle enjoyed had a change of heart, and had decided to take Akerman back to the cottage to tend him back to health.  Calling Akerman "machgen'i" (translates as "my boy"), may suggest so.

But given he had already tipped all of Akerman's belongings down the pit, perhaps the owner was about the follow them?

The ambiguity of the ending just added, to what was had felt at times like a bite-size Jules Verne.

ROYAL JELLY

By Roald Dahl

Albert and Mabel Taylor's long-awaited baby is failing to thrive.  Now 6 weeks old, she weighs 2lbs less than her birth weight.

Committed bee-keeper Albert wonders, perhaps, if adding some of that funny royal jelly stuff to the baby's milk preparations may help.  After all, it is what bees feed a larva to turn it in to a queen.

Royal Jelly is one of Roald Dahl's most famous adult short stories.  Due in no small way, I am sure, to the well-remembered episode of the UK TV series Tales of the Unexpected.  Although, if memory serves, the most unexpected aspect of that filming, was the fact elderly wood-and-plaster Timothy West had somehow hooked the delectable Susan George.

But whereas TotU went for the inevitable visually shocking ending, Dahl's narrative has the realisation of what has gone on dawn gradually upon the reader, using descriptions of the gradual changes to the appearances of both Albert and the baby.  And the story, rather effectively, leaves the reader to continue the narrative in their head.

The relationship between the parents is an odd one, and some of the dialogue between the pair resembles that between children.  Apart of, course, for the lengthy chunk of exposition where Albert expounds on the wonderful properties of royal jelly - both to Mabel, and the reader.

As befitting the anonymous worker-turned-queen motif, the baby is never named.  For the parents, when discussing the child, use phrases such as "this baby" and "our little baby".  Even the narrator refers to the unfortunate nipper as "it".

A PAIR OF MUDDY SHOES

By Lennox Robinson

A sickly Dublin schoolteacher accepts an invitation from her aunt to spend Christmas in West Cork.

Whilst there, she experiences a series of increasingly bizarre dreams.  The last of which feels particularly real.

I never like dream sequences in short stories, for they generally strike me a just laziness on the part of the author, who often gets to introduce a chunk of weirdness into the narrative without the need to fully explain it.

Dream sequences are usually used as, often clumsy, foreshadowing or utilised as a representation of a particularly productive bout of sleepwalking.  In the case of this story, both.

And, should the reader not have the gumption to work out just what has gone on, the author spells things out in a condescendingly detailed manner on the final page.

THE PORCELAIN DOLL

By Leo Tolstoy

Each time a man is alone with his wife, she turns into a small porcelain doll.

Given this short four-and-a-bit pager was penned by one of the towering literary figures of the past two centuries, one has to assume there to be far more to the narrative than initially meets the reader's eye.

Is the the fact the wife turns to porcelain only when she and the writer are alone, a metaphor for an emotionally sterile sexually barren marriage?

I note Tolstoy tells us the wife has an "expected child".  Has pregnancy changed the wife, to the extent the husband no longer feels she is the same woman?

And what to make of that easily missed point made early in the tale, that the wife is now "made of that very porcelain about which (her) parents had a dispute"?  Were the writer's in-laws doll-makers?

All very unsatisfactory.  Must try better next time, Leo.

THE TIBETAN BOX

By Elizabeth Walter

Alice Norrington is visiting her sister Mary, who has been left a "semi-invalid" by a heart attack, when she notices an unusually fine carved wooden box.

Ellen, a friend and colleague, whom Alica had invited along, examines the box, and proclaims it a Tibetan Magican's box.  And that, rather more disconcertingly, inscribed into the underside of the box is a curse, threatening death to anyone who either steals the box, or attempts to destroy it.

Let's attempt to destroy it, the ladies decide.

I had really enjoyed Elizabeth's Walters' previous contributions to the Pan and Fontana series:  The Island of Regrets (Pan7) and The Spider (Font2), but this one didn't do it for me.

I think it was the fact that all three women in the narrative were such unsympathetic characters, I found I didn't really care which were left horizontal and which remained vertical by the end of proceedings.

There were some neatly-written passages, I will admit.  Such as, "Mary's heart attack had in no way softened that organ", and the fact we learned that the African Mission field where Alice worked was "pock-marked by her vigorous descents upon it".

But, just as much of the narrative irked.  For example, would anyone really phone a doctor (rather than 999), upon witnessing someone sever three fingers?  And is hair oil truly so volatile as to be be easily ignitable?

Perhaps if a dragon is involved, it is.

MR. PRIAPOS

By Pamela Vincent

The wheelchair bound Mr. Priapos is the entertaining and stimulating life-and-soul of Madge Sinclair's dinner party.  But he has his eye on his hostess's seventeen-year old daughter Diana.

I rather liked this intriguing little mystery with its clues scattered throughout the text, until it turned silly at the end.

Diana, believing that that Mr. Priapos has murdered a village girl recklessly decides, after dark, to hunt for clues throughout the maze in his garden.  Apparently "her conviction, that Mr Priapos was the unknown murderer stifled any uneasiness she may have felt, alone in the night".  How does that work?

Then later, in the maze itself, just as Mr. P is about to do the dirty deed, Diane's boyfriend Rex miraculously bounds through the bushes (ostensibly) to her rescue.  "I was on the hill when I saw your torchlight in the maze".  What?  So Diana has her own recognisable-from-a-distance torchlight, does she ?

Before finally, for no discernible reason, Diana disappears in a clap of thunder!

I am afraid the best I can say about this one, is that it is better than the author's entry in Font6.

SO YOU WON'T TALK

By Manuel Komroff

Having been sentenced to death for the killing of "the sergeant of detectives", Handsome Dan is still refusing to name his accomplice.  But Captain Quill is determined to get the prisoner to talk - either before death.....or after.

The old re-vivified head prop had already been visited by the Fontana series, with William and Mary in Font1.  And far more successfully, in my opinion, with Roald Dahl bringing a subtlety of touch to his tale sorely lacking in this one.

For, although Handsome Dan does eventually spill the beans, he spends most of his post-death time onstage whining to be allowed to die, like a latter day Ernest Valdemar.

But he had good cause, I suppose.

 

THE TELL-TALE HEART

By Edgar Allan Poe

A man murders his father/grandfather/landlord/flatmate because he doesn't like the old man's eyeball.  And is brought to justice by his own conscience.

This story is perhaps Poe's best known, and has been analysed to death over the 180 years since it was written, so I do not intend to add much to the pile.

Other than; one thing which struck me when re-reading it recently, is the fact I had always assumed the murderer to have been making a confession either to the police, or to a doctor or priest during the monologue.

But this time around had me wondering if he was not in fact chattering away to his inner self.  To a voice inside his head, which kept insisting: "You are completely mad.  You do know that?"

HARVEST HOME
By Mary Danby

The narrator is going to be parted from his new bride Tessa for a whole week, whilst she finishes university and he travels to the tiny island of Marna, to rent accommodation for their intended summer-long honeymoon.

Upon arrival, he notes how contended and serene the islanders all appear.  Something, he later learns, they attribute to the locally fermented wine Risos, which everyone drinks - even the children.

The narrator is introduced to Risos at a local inn, and is soon up and dancing like a good 'un, before jumping into bed with a local "dream-maiden". 

On the day before Tessa's arrival, the narrator learns that Risos is fermented from the Risos plant, which requires extremely fertile soil to flower each year.  Soil fertilised with "blood of love", in fact.

As I was reading this one, I found there was an insistent voice in my head whispering "The Wicker Man!"  But, although Font8 was first published in 1973, the same year Robin Hardy's film was released, the actual dates are such, I cannot convince myself Mary Danby could have seen the film before she penned this tale.

She may, of course, have known the story through David Pinner's novel Ritual, upon which the film was based.  That being said there are sufficient differences with Danby's tale, for it to be a long way from a re-write of either the film or book.  

But, even so, it does not take too much foresight on the part of the reader to divine what the unfortunate Tessa's role in the soil regeneration process is going to be.