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
THE LODGER IN ROOM 16
THE LODGER IN ROOM 16
By David Dixon
Mr Feith is living on the top floor of a less than salubrious lodging house. He has never met is co-lodger in room 16, but every few nights, the elusive neighbour seems to begin operating some noisy hand-cranked piece of machinery.
Complaints to the landlord go nowhere, so Feith takes things into his own hands to investigate.
Good fun, this one in a pulpy, silly sort of way. We get next to no back story on the Lodger of the title, other than he "works in a local cemetery" and, rather more intriguingly, he "came with the house". The few descriptions were get on his appearance talk about being "horribly fat and grey" and "soft and rotten like an overripe plum".
I think we are led to believe he/it is disinterring bodies from the disused cemetery opposite the boarding house, and grinding down the bones - to what purpose we can only guess.
Feith is painted as a fussy, prim martinet character. Hardly likeable. Quite why he insisted on a room on the upper floor in the first place, when the landlord had told him "rooms up there wasn't for letting", is never expanded upon. But we can, I think, understand his insistence upon getting to the bottom of the nonsense which was going on next door.
Even if, in the end, he did not.
R. Chetwynd-Hayes - Growth
Anonymous - In The Slaughteryard
Monica Dickens - Activity Time
THEY BITE
By Anthony Boucher
Hugh Tallent is in the California desert spying on some new-fangled glider being tested by the US military. When leaving he encounters Morgan an old acquaintance; someone very familiar with Tallent and his "Secrets for Sale" past.
There is clearly bad blood between the pair, for Morgan immediately threatens to blackmail Tallent, so a meeting is arranged the following day.
That evening Tallent visits a local bar, where he is regaled with a couple of yarns of supernatural events, and a shunned "old Carker Place". Carkers being apparently the locals' name for cannibalistic semi-humans who exist out in the desert.
Tallent wonders if he can use these rumours to help rid himself of the troublesome Morgan for good, but in the process stirs himself up a hornets' nest of trouble.
I blew hot and cold throughout when reading this one. Loads of great writing: Tallent frantically scrambling up the mountainside to his spy position, the evocative bar-room scene, the brutal line where Tallent "swung the machete once and clove Morgan's full, red, sweating face in two". And that final terrifying image of the female Carker in the doorway.
But, two scenes really spoiled the story for me;
There is the whopping geographic coincidence we are, as readers, asked to swallow when Tallent encounters Morgan in the desert. For not only has Tallent bumped into another bod on a deserted mountain, but someone who not only knows him but, is apparently, well acquainted with, and prepared to exploit, Tallent's shady past.
Later, there is the rather silly business of the decapitated head of a Carker maintaining it's bite on Tallent's hand. With a machete at his disposal, I should have thought his first option would be to whack the bone-dry skull, including the jaw, into a million fragments. Rather than deciding self-amputation to be the better course of action.
These two gripes asides, I really enjoyed my first introduction to the rather unique writing style of this author.
Rosemary Timperley - House Of Mirrors
Mor Jokai - The Drop Of Blood
Harry E. Turner - The Wager
Bryn Fortey - Shrewhampton North-East
Garry Kilworth - Love Child
THE BLACK DRUID
By Frank Belknap Long
Archaeologist and academic Stephen Benefield is just leaving a New York library after carrying out a bit of research, when he is irked to note someone has moved his overcoat to the opposite end of the coat rack. Harrumphing, he puts on the coat and catches an underground train to make his way home.
But, whilst on the train, he finds himself the object of many curious and distasteful stares, with one terrified young boy yelling out "Black Boogeyman".
Upon reaching his lodgings Benefield receives a further shock when he glances in the mirror in the hall, for facing him is indeed a black something.
What I think we may have here is that rarest of things in the Pan and Fontana collections: a Happy Ending. Or at least, not a grim one. For our hero appears to have succeeded in dodging a bullet by the simple expedient of taking off the black overcoat, which we later discover, was clearly not his. But belonged to, we have to assume, The Black Druid of the title.
Actually, when I think about it, the narrator in Frank Belknap Long's only entry to the PBoHS, The Ocean Leech, also enjoyed a happy(ish) ending.
A sentimental horror writer - whatever next?
Mary Danby - Robbie
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