The 17th Fontana Book of Great Horror Stories

WHERE NO WIND BLOWS

By Alan Temperley

Alan Newman is a decidedly rich and successful farmer.  He can trace the uplift in his fortunes to the day and hour he chose to abandon traditional animal husbandry and embrace factory farming methods.

But there is (inevitably) a price to pay.

I would probably be happy to wager a fair few bob that many of the author's own views on the horrors of factory farming are laid out in within this text; Temperley here pulling no punches describing the appalling practices carried out on pigs, chickens, and cows in many such institutions.  With the afterlife punishment meted out to Newman probably some fervent wishful thinking by the author.  

I did wonder, as I moved towards the closing couple of pages, if perhaps the farmer's wife and four young children were going to be somehow dragged in to share his fate.

But the author decided to swerve away from that particular scene.  This was the genteel Fontana collection, after all.

THE LAOCOON COMPLEX

By J. C. Furnas

Poor Howard Simms keeps finding snakes in his bathwater.  Initially, he is content to let them wriggle away down the drain - even though the hole looks way too small to facilitate their escape this way.  But, eventually, his patience wears thin so he blows the head off one with a revolver.

He then, somewhat improbably, takes the decapitated snake to the local hospital to see what the doctors there make of it.  He is initially regarded as a drunken fantasist, but after presenting his gruesome evidence he is referred to world renowned psychiatrist Dr Eisenmark.

Who gets to the bottom of things.  Sort of.

I suppose one's approach to understanding this entry would to a large extent depend upon whether or not one was familiar with the story of Loacoon from Greek mythology.  Which I was not.  

So where the snakes were coming from baffled me as much as it did Howard.  Consequently I found myself keen to find out where the author was going with this one.  And I really enjoyed the journey, even if the How was totally ignored, and the psychiatrist's Why came across across as so much amateur guesswork.

The neat twist at the very end, I did like though.

FIRSTBORN

By David Campton

Harbouring great expectations, Harry and his wife Elaine are happy to accept an invite from Harry's rich uncle to abandon their debt-ridden life in Dorset, and come and stay in a "croft north of Inverness"

Uncle was once a successful Something in the City, but has now retired and taken up horticulture to fill his hours.  Initially breeding orchids, he had moved onto growing those carnivorous plants (Venus fly traps, Sundews and the like), before rearing in his basement some whopping sex-starved multi-tentacled Da-Doo whose flowering parts "might have exposed a florist to prosecution under the obscene publications act."

Uncle has also been working on a pet theory of his that the dividing line between animal and vegetable could be crossed with regard to breeding.

Enter Elaine (quite literally).

The Pan Horror collection housed quite a number of rampant plant stories but, the faint scent of incest encountered in John Collier's Green Thoughts aside, nothing nearly so overtly sexual as this yarn.

For not only do we find the plant exudes a perfume which allows the couple to instantly overcome both Harry's impotence and Elaine's frigidity, but we are left in no doubt what is going on when Elaine is later found spreadeagled over the tendrils in a St Andrew's cross pose.  (Quite apt given the yarn is set in Scotland).

And then there is that unambiguous empty bean-pod like structure later discovered in Elaine's bed, as she is recovering from her ordeal.

All of which leaves poor Harry wondering whether his firstborn will be Animal, Vegetable or Mineral.

WAKING OR SLEEPING

By Willis Hall

Reggie keeps having the same recurring nightmare in which he is imprisoned in a small cage in what appears to be some sort of medieval dungeon.

Wife Emily suggests he visit his GP for "a tonic".  Which he eventually does.  But....

An eminently readable tale where, I think, the reader is led to believe that whatever the doctor had casually prescribed somehow put the unfortunate Reggie into a coma, and hence tilted him into permanent dungeon dreamland.

BACK FROM THE GRAVE

By Robert Silverberg

Middle-aged James Ronald Massie has just awoken to find himself in a box; a satin-lined box.  Indeed a satin-lined box which almost perfectly matches his dimensions.  Yep, there really was no getting away from the fact he was in a coffin.

His hopes that he had somehow been placed inside it in error, and was presently still lying in the undertakers' rooms gradually give way to the realisation he has already been buried.  Things begin to look grim for Massie as his oxygen supply begins to run out, but he is a determined chap, and avows to get out one way or another.

A perfectly acceptable read this one in a Will He or Won't He kind of way, but overall it still feels slightly insubstantial.

Glossed over by the author is the How of the business.  Such as all the machinations and (one assumes) bribery which would have been required by Massie's young wife and her lover to succeed is getting their still-living victim where they ultimately wanted him. 

Alternatively of course, perhaps Massie's first heart attack had genuinely rendered him, like Poe's Berenice, in a catatonic state indistinguishable from death.  In which case, I would have thought the business of post-mortem examination and/or embalming (so popular in USA) would have raised their pesky heads.

I know I am being overly picky with what is overall a well-written yarn.......but I get to be.

HARRY: A FERRET

By Patricia Highsmith

15-year old Roland lives with his affluent mother in Paris.  But when he starts running with the local enfants terrible of an evening, she whisks him off to her house in the country near Orleans.

Whilst there, Roland impulsively purchases a ferret and cage from a plant nursery which pleases his mother not a bit.  Despite promising to keep the animal outside, Roland soon sneaks the thing into his bedroom - where it bites old Antoine, one of the house servants.  

The ferret must go, decides mother.

Patricia Highsmith enjoyed a lengthy history of writing about animals in both the Pan and Fontana series; a terrapin, rats and snails all spring to mind.  And here she was adding a ferret to her literary menagerie.

But there is not really much to say about this one, other than (as in most of the tales outlined above) a critter manages to off a human with apparent ease. 

THE LEATHER FUNNEL

By Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle

Here we have an English gentleman in Paris, visiting his good friend and collector of occult literature and associated paraphernalia Lionel Dacre.  Amongst the host's collection is a black leather funnel, which the narrator is asked to attempt to identify what it's function may have been.

The guest ventures the opinion it may be have been "used for filling wine casks", upon which Dacre jarringly diverts the conversation to discussing what he calls "the psychology of dreams".  The Frenchman asserting that certain objects, if slept close to, can influence the dreams of a sensitive mind.

A very sceptical narrator agrees to go to bed that night with the funnel on his pillow.

By morning, he is no longer a sceptic.

It is oft forgotten, for all the logic, science and reasoning abilities Conan Doyle imbued Sherlock Holmes with, the writer himself could be a bit of a ninny when it came to the paranormal.  He was a believer in seances, spirit materialisations and clairvoyance.  There was also that occasion when Conan Doyle wholeheartedly embraced and helped publicise the laughingly fake fairy photographs created by a pair of young girls in their Cottingley garden. 

So, looking through this lens, The Leather Funnel could be seen to be an attempt by Conan Doyle to normalise the psychology of dreams theory outlined above.

There is, certainly, a brief Holmes and Watson element to the dialogue when Dacre and the narrator are attempting to divine the exact nature of the funnel.  But Conan Doyle soon has Dacre verbally bulldoze his guest, once the conversation moves towards the paranormal.  I detect many of the author's own views in Dacre's monologue at this point.

I will not go much into the plot, as it is actually a bit of a page-turner once we reach the dream sequence.

Although, with Conan Doyle modestly skipping around the nuts and bolts of the torture description, it is well towards the end of the story before he finally confirms which end of the unfortunate victim the funnel had been inserted into.

Finally - I am not quite sure what the great Sherlock Holmes would have made of Conan Doyle having the narrator tell us:

"Finally I undressed, and turning out the lamp, I lay down.

After long tossing I fell asleep."

REPLY GUARANTEED

By Ramsey Campbell

Viv is in hospital recuperating from an appendix op.  She is also bored, but perks up when her boyfriend Jack shows her a decidedly oddly-worded personal ad which recently arrived at the local newspaper for publication.

It basically stated (and I paraphrase here): Smart but ugly guy seeks sexpot.  Viv decides it would be a bit of a jolly jape to reply, giving the hospital ward as her address.  Jack, not surprisingly, will have nothing to do with things, so Viv later persuades Mavis, the lass in the bed next to her, to post the reply.

Which sets in place a whole load of I don't know what.

The author Ramsey Campbell is today regarded as one of the most important figures in the recent history of British horror writing.  Which makes it all the more strange he never found his way to any of the thirty PBoHS collections, and had to wait until Font17 (the final volume) to squeeze into the Fontana series.  

I appreciate that Campbell's star was still on the rise when the PBoHS collections were in their sixties pomp, but the Pans went on until 1989, and yet no space could found for a Campbell contribution?

Having said all that, I cannot claim that this particular yarn did it for me.  There is a veritable smorgasbord of two-dimensional characters crammed into the sixteen-and-a-bit pages: Jack, Mary, Tony, Roy, Brian, Les plus various unnamed supporting roles.  I had to draw up a wee "family-tree" to help me keep up with who was who.  Never a good sign in a short story.

My other main gripe is that scene where Viv believes she is being followed/stalked as she walks home from the ten-pin bowling.  I am all for jacking up the tension during a story, but this business went on way too long, and I found myself willing the author to Get on With it !

Where the yarn does score is in forcing the reader to attempt to come up with some logical (if not quite rational) explanation of events.  And here is mine:

In a small house in the cemetery next to the hospital Viv is in (always good to have a boneyard beside a hospital, I feel), there once lived a randy old goat who enjoyed the wares of many of the local prostitutes, and not a few of the local nice girls too.

He became ill and confined to a wheelchair.  There are oblique references in the narrative that he may have have contracted, and later died from, venereal disease.  But this is not made totally clear.

He was buried in the aforementioned cemetery, but apparently his ghost can still occasionally be seen propelling his pale body around between the memorials in his wheelchair.

Getting lonely, the ghost decides the best way to find a soulmate is to use the lonely hearts column in the local rag.  The newspaper declines to publish, but.....Viv has a copy which she received from Jack, so pens a reply getting Mavis in the bed next door to post it.

Now, Mavis, I feel is an important character here, for I think she unwittingly (or possibly wittingly, for she shares the ghost's sexual voracity) acts as a vector to facilitate the spirit's transfer into Viv's flat. I say this because it is once Mavis is unpacking in Viv's flat for the first time (she just having moved in), that the ghost's trademark ointment smell appears.

Consequently, when Viv finally gets home after her frantic chase scene, she finds to her dismay, the thing which she was fleeing from was already in the flat hiding amongst Mavis's dresses.

Or maybe one of the nurses just slipped some LSD into Viv's tea for fun.

FIFTH SENSE

By Tina Rath

The body of a missing teenaged girl has been found with the head "pulled off", and the corpse partly eaten.  An expert from the local zoo confirms the bite marks to be that of a large carnivore, probably a wolf.

This werewolf story sorta annoyed me upon first reading.  I could tell I was being led up the garden path, as it were, by the author into believing the character Jos was the perpetrator.  His super-sensitive olfactory system, and his own quote "there's a bit of the beast in me" were rather too obvious false lights from the land.

But that was OK, as long I scoured the text for alternative suspects, I felt I would get there.  But I did not - and when the Big Bad Wolf was finally unearthed, I felt cheated.  Almost as if a new character had been introduced on the last page.

But.....careful re-reading unearthed cleverly hidden in plain sight pointers:

"She was rather sweet actually", one character wistfully recalls of the murdered girl.  And, later Jos' son Mark suggests that it may be "the wrong time of the month" for the same character.

Hats off to Ms. Rath.

FIDEL BASIN

By W. J. Stamper

We are in Haiti here, with this one set during one of the Caco Wars of the early decades of the 20th Century.  Captain Vilnord has had enough of the cruelty being inflicted by his own side, so throws a wobbly and storms off to join the Caco rebels.

His feckless but ambitious subordinate Fidel Basin assumes command, but things do not work out well for him once the rest of the garrison decide to throw their lot in with the rebels too.

A few words on the author here first, who was actually a Lieutenant W.J. Stamper, possibly in the US controlled Gendarmerie of Haiti.  For he published a modest number of short stories based in that country during the 1920s.  I am aware I getting into the realms of pure conjecture here, but I did wonder as I was reading this one, if perhaps Captain Vilnord's sympathetic view of the Haitian rebels in this story, may have secretly reflected the author's own.

As regards the tale itself, it is an enjoyable and, indeed, historically informative read, even if there are two whopping plot holes:

• I could just about swallow Vilnord's decision to switch sides, but not really for the rest of the garrison to do so too.  The self-preservation instincts of the grunts would have been way too strong.
• And, if these remaining soldiers truly cared so much for the fate of the townsfolks, why then would they wait until the day after Fidel Basin had sent the prisoners on their death march to Port-au-Prince before rising up?

Basin's punishment, as decreed by the town magistrate was certainly pretty horrific, but he seemed almost to get off lightly given some of the alternative suggestions earlier bellowed out by the mob.

For my part, I briefly thought Basin's head was going to be sewn up inside the stomach of the dysentery corpse.  Now, that certainly would have been fun.

THE YELLOW SIGN

By Robert W. Chambers

Here we are treated to the adventures of artist Mr Scott and his nude model Tessie somewhere in France - probably a garret in Paris.  (The third tale from Font17 set in France).

Ever since finding a small clasp of black onyx inlaid with an unusual gold symbol, Tessie has been having a recurring dream in which she is looking out of an upstairs window on a hearse going by.  Inside the coffin is a still living Mr Scott, with the hearse driver being the fat, dough-faced nightwatchman of the church opposite.

Tessie later gives the clasp to the Mr Scott as a gift, and things go rapidly downhill for the artist. 

The Yellow Sign was originally published in 1895 as part of Robert W. Chambers' collection of short stories The King in Yellow.  The first four stories in the collection enjoyed a link running through them, and frequently referenced each other.   

Which is fine generally, but the reader of The Yellow Sign really finds themselves hamstrung in their attempts to understand all that is going on, unless they have already read these first three stories.

Thus we have no idea what the gift Tessie gives Mr Scott, with it's symbol which did not "belong to any human script", is all about.  And quite how the clasp succeeded in bringing about the appearance of The King in Yellow book in the artist's library is never touched upon.

A character called Sylvia is mentioned twice briefly in the text and, although we get the impression she is/was important to the artist, we learn next to nothing of her.  And an actress named Edith Carmichael bafflingly shoulders her way into the narrative to no real purpose or effect.

Perhaps had I read the earlier stories I could have answered these queries, and understood better what the heck was going on.  But as I have not, I just felt The Yellow Sign, when taken as a standalone piece of work to be vague, unfocussed and downright messy.

TRUE LOVE

By Mary Danby

Jack and Vera are outwardly an ordinary retired couple, complete with mongrel doggie and garden gnome.  But their apparent ordinariness hides some rather unusual culinary preferences.

With this entry Mary Danby closed out the Fontana series.  Not her best work perhaps, but certainly a long way from her weakest.

The reader is left in little real doubt early on as to what exactly Jack and Vera's dietary tastes run to.  "Uncanny disappearance of.....two newsboys", and "She was an excellent cook, and he was something of a gourmet" both appear on the first page of the tale.  As does the delightful description of Vera's arms and legs each being like a "pink, string-of-sausages".

So it is no surprise at all when we are introduced (along with one of the couple's pudgy neighbours) to Jack's DIY abattoir in his garage.  

There is, admittedly, a further twist of sorts in the narrative, but in reality it only exists to set up the weak final word joke.