Tag: Ramsey Campbell

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10 scary pictures for Halloween 2024

 

From pixabay.com / © Benjamin Balazs

 

It’s that time of year again – October 31st, Samhain, All Hallow’s Eve, Halloween.

 

As is customary on this blog, I’ll mark the occasion by displaying ten items of creepy, frightening or unsettling artwork that, during the past year, I’ve stumbled across in my Internet wanderings and taken a shine to.  And this time, I’ll feature a few pictures that aren’t just dark in tone but actually relate to Halloween.

 

So, to set the mood, here’s a picture called Halloween by the Ohio artist Maggie Vandewalle who, her website explains, “has used watercolour or graphite to convey her love of the organic world and that of a really good story.”  This has led to her producing many images of animals linked to the occult: cats, bats, crows, hares.  She also does a good job of drawing trees, and I find this landscape particularly gorgeous.  Few things are more evocative than looking at the colours of an evening sky through a mesh of darkening tree-branches.

 

© Maggie Vandewalle

 

Earlier this month – October 7th – was the 175th anniversary of the death of America’s premier writer of macabre fiction, Edgar Allan Poe.  Here’s something Poe-esque, an illustration for his story The Fall of the House of Usher (1839) by the New York-born, New Jersy-raised and Connecticut-dwelling writer and illustrator Robert Lawson.  Lawson’s speciality was children’s books – his work adorns such classics as Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper (1881) and T.H. White’s The Sword in the Stone (1938) – and as this gallery page for the Goldstein Lawson Collection shows, he had a flair for drawing fairy tale and mythological creatures.  However, in 1931, he won an award for creating an etching for Poe’s famous tale of familial decline, madness and destruction.  As my digital copy of the etching is murky and wouldn’t look good in the cramped confines of this blog, here’s the clearer, preliminary pencil-drawing Lawson made for it.  As the late Roger Corman, director of the famous 1960 film version House of Usher, once commented, “The house is the monster.”  It certainly looks it in this.

 

From feuilleton / © Estate of Robert Lawson

 

From Edgar Allan Poe to Bram Stoker.  With yet another Dracula film adaptation, Roger Eggers’ Nosferatu, scheduled for release at the end of this year, I thought it timely to include this illustration featuring Stoker’s legendary vampire count by Spanish painter and illustrator Fernando Vicente.  It depicts the scene where Dracula crawls down his castle wall, “face down with his cloak spreading out around him like great wings”, fingers and toes grasping “the corners of the stones”, descending “with considerable speed, just as a lizard moves along a wall.”  In keeping with Stoker’s 1897 novel, Dracula is still an old man at this point – but Vicente’s version is an old man who looks like he can take care of himself and whom you wouldn’t want to mess with.  Indeed, he makes me think of the late silver-haired American character-actor Dennis Farina, who specialised in playing tough mobsters and cops (and who’d been a Chicago police detective before taking up acting).  Though it’s Dennis Farina with red eyes and fangs.

 

From bookpatrol.net / © Fernando Vicente

 

And from Bram Stoker to H.P. Lovecraft.  Just over a year ago, the Scottish actor David McCallum – best known for his TV roles in The Man from UNCLE (1964-68), The Invisible Man (1975), Sapphire and Steel (1979-82) and NCIS (2003-23) – passed away.  In the tributes that followed, there wasn’t much mention of the fact that McCallum was also a musician and writer.  And nothing was said about his prolific career as an audiobook narrator, a career that extended to the weird, baroque and morbid world of legendary horror writer H.P. Lovecraft.  Among the Lovecraft stories he narrated was The Rats in the Walls (which can be heard here on YouTube).  I like this cover illustration from the original LP of the recording, designed by Brooklyn artists Leo and Diane Dillon, with its giant skull (composed of normal-sized skulls and other bones) and an insane green face, seemingly spewing yellow bile, emerging from the bottom of the wall behind.  More on the Dillons can be found here and here – the latter site featuring some cracking cover art they did for the 1972 Ray Bradbury novel The Halloween Tree.

 

From pinterest.com / © Leo and Diane Dillon

 

Old bones are also on view in this image, which I’ve seen called The Boy in the Skeleton on social media.  It’s by the Dutch engraver and woodcutter Christoffel van Sichem the Younger, who lived from the late 16th to the mid-17th century.  I presume the panic-stricken lad, inside the larger and rather insouciant-looking skeleton, serves as a metaphor for how the human soul is imprisoned within a cage of flesh and bone, despite that cage being a fragile and ultimately perishable one.

 

From x.com

 

Right, back to the theme of Halloween.  I love this picture by the Paris-based illustrator Nico Delort.  Entitled It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, it’s obviously inspired by the much-loved, animated TV Halloween special of the same name, which was based on the cartoon-strip creations of Charles M. Schultz and first broadcast in 1966.  It shows the thumb-sucking, security-blanket-clutching Linus Van Pelt venturing into his local pumpkin patch to await the coming of the alternative Santa Claus, the Great Pumpkin.  Linus can be discerned in the middle distance of Delort’s composition, while the Great Pumpkin – possibly – can be glimpsed on the end of a faraway cloud.  But it’s the satanically-grinning pumpkins in the foreground that command your attention.

 

© Nico Delort

 

Also satanic is this picture by British artist Dave Kendall, who’s worked in collaboration with talents as diverse as Pat Mills (founder of the world’s greatest sci-fi comic, 2000AD), heavy metal titans Metallica and the late Lovecraftian author Brian Lumley.  Among Kendall’s dark, brooding and frequently twisted creations, I find this one of the most disturbing.  Its image of a bloody-faced nun, with grotesquely elongated fingers, is inspired by a short story called The Hands.  This was penned in 1986 by the esteemed Liverpudlian horror writer Ramsey Campbell and can be read here.

 

© Dave Kendall

 

More female monstrosities are displayed in this picture.  All I can determine about these bat-ladies is that they’re the work of an Austrian artist called Robert Loewe and appeared in the February 11th, 1913 edition of the weekly satirical magazine Die Muskete.

 

From thefugitivesaint.tumblir.com

 

Meanwhile, it’s a female doing the screaming – in impeccable, wide-mouthed and wide-eyed Japanese manga style – on this cover illustration for the appropriately named Halloween Comics.  The artist is Kazuo Umezo, known in Japan as ‘the god of horror manga’.  For inspiration, Umezo has often drawn on traditional Japanese folklore and legends and he’s made this argument against the many people – parents, editors, educators – who’ve urged him to ‘think of the children’ and tone down the horror content of his work: “Old Japanese folk stories and fairy tales could be unflinchingly brutal.  They come from a time when tragedy and carnage was an everyday part of life.  Now we have people calling to water them down, which essentially whitewashes history.  It’s insulting to the memory of those who suffered to bring us these stories.”  More of Umezo’s work, definitely not toned down, can be viewed on this entry dedicated to him on the website Monster Brains.

 

From monsterbrains.blogspot.com / © Kazuo Umezu

 

Finally, to end things on a gentler note, here’s a picture I appreciate both as a cat-lover and as someone who finds graveyards fascinating – one of a cat (black, of course) exploring a graveyard at night.  It’s from the cover of a ‘cozy mystery’ novel entitled Witch Way to Murder (2005) by Shirley Damsgaard and it’s by the New York artist Tristan Elwell.  A more recent and better-known cover illustration by Elwell, which also involves a cat, is the one adorning John Scalzi’s bestselling and award-winning satirical novel Starter Villain (2023).

 

From unquietthings.com / © Tristan Elwell

 

Enjoy Halloween!

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My 2022 writing round-up

 

© The Horror Zine

 

If years were cars, then the one that’s just concluded, 2022, would definitely not be a sleek, shiny Aston Martin DB6 driven by Sean Connery in Goldfinger (1964).  No, 2022 would more likely be an ugly, black-smoke-spewing, rolling-coal diesel pick-up truck driven by some Trump-loving, climate-change-denying, QAnon-believing, anti-vaxxer moron in Texas.

 

Thanks to wars, economic crises, environmental disasters and ongoing pestilence, I can’t imagine anyone claiming that 2022 was a vintage year.  Well, maybe except for the Right Honourable Baroness Michelle Mone OBE, who at this moment is possibly raising a glass of bubbly and toasting the sight of Britain receding in the rear-view mirror of her luxury yacht, cruising at full speed towards some far-off, sun-kissed tax haven where she can enjoy the 29 million pounds that’s allegedly turned up in her and her children’s bank accounts.  This windfall may have something to do with Michelle cannily using her position and influence to lobby the British government a while back, during the pandemic, and persuade them to hand over 200 million pounds of taxpayers’ money to the mysterious company PPE Medpro in return for it supplying the NHS with personal, protective equipment – equipment that, it transpired, “’did not comply with the specification in the contract’ and could not be used”.

 

Anyway, on a personal level, 2022 was a hectic one for me.  It involved moving from Sri Lanka – not the result of the political and economic turmoil that erupted there earlier in the year, since I’d been planning to leave for some time before that – and coming to Singapore to start a new job.  The stress of the move may have affected me in a few ways.  For example, two things I normally love doing are reading books and watching films, yet in 2022 I’ve rarely had the concentration or been in the mood to do either.  However, one area of my life that seems to have survived unscathed is my writing.  I got a reasonable number of short stories published during the year, under the pseudonyms Jim Mountfield (used for my horror fiction) and Rab Foster (used for my fantasy fiction).

 

Here’s a round-up of those stories, who’s published them, and where you can find them.

 

© Schlock! Webzine

 

As Jim Mountfield:

  • In March 2022, my story Never Tell Tales out of School, which drew on unhappy memories of playground bullying during the rough-and-tumble 1970s, and was inspired by the work of the masterly Liverpudlian horror writer Ramsey Campbell, was published in Volume 16, Issue 26 of Schlock! Webzine. The issue can currently be purchased as a paperback or Kindle edition here.
  • Mermaid Fair – a story that involved both mermaids and, yes, a fair – was originally published in the now-defunct webzine Death Head Grin back in 2010. In March 2022, it was reprinted in the anthology Fearful Fun, from Thurston Howl Publications, which can be purchased here.
  • March was also when I had the first of several stories published in 2022 in the magazine The Sirens Call. Liver, set on a farm and featuring a dysfunctional father-son relationship, plus much eating of red meat, appeared in Issue 57 of The Sirens Call, which can be downloaded here.
  • And in July, it was the following issue of The Sirens Call that provided a home for my next story to appear in 2022. The magazine’s summer 2022 edition featured stories with a holiday theme. Thus, my story Selfless was about a holidaying couple in Thailand who come into possession of a strange smartphone that requires its owner to take lots of selfies.  Endless selfies… The issue can be downloaded here.

 

© Thurston Howl Publications

 

  • My haunted-house story Coming Home originally appeared in the webzine The Horror Zine back in 2014. In September 2022, I was delighted when it was selected for the commemorative anthology The Best of the Horror Zine: The Middle Years, which showcased the webzine’s strongest stories published between 2013 and 2020.  The collection can be purchased on Kindle or as a paperback here.
  • In October, I made it into the pages of another anthology. Published by Cloaked Press LLC, Nightmare Fuel 2022: Objects of Horror featured stories where “what lurks in plain sight… is the true horror” and where the scares emanate from “such seemingly mundane items as an antique desk, a television, or a cute little stuffed elephant…” My story was about a set of haunted wind chimes and, unsurprisingly, was called The Chimes.  Nightmare Fuel 2022: Objects of Horror can be obtained in Kindle or paperback versions here.
  • October was also the month of Halloween, and I managed to get a story into Issue 59, the Halloween edition, of The Sirens Call. This was entitled Guising and took a nostalgic look at the custom of guising – the Scottish version of trick-or-treating – as kids practised it in the 1970s.  Being a Jim Mountfield story, there was of course a gruesome ending.  A copy of the Halloween edition can be downloaded here.
  • Just before Christmas, my story Upstairs, inspired by the crumbling old French-Colonial-era apartment building that I lived in during my years in Tunisia, appeared in the December 2022 edition of ParABnormal Magazine, which can be purchased here.
  • And at the end of the year, my story The Faire Chlaidh – which translates from Scottish Gaelic as ‘the graveyard watch’ and is about the old belief that one of the souls of the folk buried in a graveyard has to remain there and guard the place – appeared in Issue 60 of The Sirens Call. It can be obtained here.

 

© The Sirens Call

 

As Rab Foster:

  • In January 2022, my fantasy story Crows of the Mynchmoor appeared in the ezine Swords and Sorcery Magazine. Not only about crows, but also about witches, sheep, scarecrows and, yes, turnips (beat that, George R.R. Martin), the story can now be read in the ezine’s archive section, here.
  • And it was in Swords and Sorcery Magazine that my second Rab Foster story of the year appeared, in August. The Library of Vadargarn was about forbidden books, religious zealots and demons covered in bronze scales and, again, is available for reading in the ezine’s archives, here.
  • Drayak Shathsprey, the hero of Crows of the Mynchmoor, made a second appearance in 2022. This was in the story The Tower and the Stars, published in the ezine Aphelion in October.  The Tower and the Stars also featured another Rab Foster character, the witch Gudroon, who’d originally appeared in the anthology Swords & Sorceries: Tales of Heroic Fantasy, Volume 3, published in November 2021.  The story is now available to read in Aphelion’s archive, here.

 

And that’s everything.  A very Happy New Year to you all.

 

Let’s hope that – if years were cars – 2023 is more like that Aston Martin DB5 and less like a brazenly-polluting, smoke-belching pick-up truck that Andrew Tate would approve of.  (Tate… Ha ha.)  Oh, and let’s hope too that Michelle Mone’s luxury yacht hits an iceberg.

 

© Aphelion

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Horror before it got panned

 

© Pan Books

 

One more horror-themed reposting just before Halloween…

 

Michael Gove, well-known cokehead, Aberdonian nightclub boogie-king and England’s Education Minister from 2010 to 2014, would be disappointed in me.  When I was a lad, my usual reading material was not the likes of George Eliot’s Middlemarch, which in 2013 Gove famously said he wanted to see the nation’s youth reading.

 

Rather, when I was 11, 12 or 13, I commonly had my nose stuck in works by such authors as Sven Hassel, James Herbert and Guy N. Smith, meaning that I didn’t become conversant in the effects of the Great Reform Act of 1832 or in the gradual diminution of the ideals of Dorothea Brooke, which Eliot wrote about in her 1871-1872 masterpiece.  I did, however, end up learning a lot about German Panzer divisions wreaking bloody havoc on the Russian front during World War II, about chemical weapons leaking out of military laboratories in the form of thick swirling fogs and driving all who come in contact with them murderously insane, and about giant mutant crabs going on the rampage and eating people.  Knowing such things prepared me a lot for adult life.

 

I also spent a lot of time reading, in the form of tatty paperbacks that in the school playground and on the school bus were constantly borrowed, read, returned, borrowed again and read again, a series called The Pan Book of Horror Stories.  The first of this series had been published in 1959, under the editorship of the strikingly named Herbert Van Thal, a literary agent, publisher and author whom the critic John Agate had once likened to ‘a sleek, well-groomed dormouse’.  The first few volumes of horror stories that Van Thal edited for Pan Books consisted largely of classical stories from well-known horror writers and more ‘mainstream’ (whatever that means) writers who’d dabbled in the genre; and their quality was generally held to be high.

 

By the late 1960s, however, Van Thal was filling each new compilation with more and more stories from new writers, many of whom were taking advantage of a more permissive era to see what they could get away with in terms of violence, gore and general unpleasantness.  Serious horror writers and fans became quite sniffy about the books.  Ramsey Campbell, Britain’s most acclaimed living horror writer, has said: “I did like the first one when I was 13 years old, but I thought the series became increasingly illiterate and disgusting and meritless.”

 

When my schoolmates and I started reading them in the 1970s, the latest editions of The Pan Book of Horror Stories were low in literary quality but high in disgusting-ness, which suited our jaded, beastly little minds fine.  I’m still psychologically scarred by Colin Graham’s The Best Teacher in the ninth collection, which was about a psychopath who decides to write a manual for aspiring horror writers, instructing them in what dismemberment, disembowelment and various acts of torture really look and sound like.  To this end, he kidnaps a horror writer and starts dismembering, disembowelling and torturing him whilst recording everything with a camera and tape recorder.  Anyone who thinks that the horror sub-genre of ‘torture-porn’ began with Eli Roth’s movie Hostel in 2005 ought to check out Graham’s grubby epic from a few decades earlier.

 

© Pan Books

 

To be fair, the later Pan collections did feature then-up-and-coming, now-well-regarded writers like Tanith Lee, Christopher Fowler and, ahem, Ian McEwan.  However, by the 1980s (and after Van Thal’s death), the series was clearly on its last legs.  It resorted to ransacking Stephen King’s famous anthology Nightshift (1978) and reprinting stories like The Graveyard Shift, The Mangler and The Lawnmower Man.  This was unwise, since anybody inclined to read the Pan horror series had probably read Nightshift already.  The final volume, the thirtieth, had a very limited print run and if you ever lay your hands on a copy, it’s probably worth a lot as a collector’s item.

 

A while ago in a second-hand bookshop I discovered a copy of The First Pan Book of Horror Stories.  This, alas, was unlikely to be sought by book collectors, since the copy looked like something had chewed, swallowed, partly-digested and regurgitated it.  At least it was still readable, so I got a chance to sample the original instalment in this famous, or infamous, series.  I was curious to know if it deserved the praise Ramsey Campbell had given it and also to see how different it was from the more disreputable stuff that came later.

 

My first impression was that the stories in this collection weren’t how I’d have organised them.  I’ve heard writers whose works were printed in the later Pan books grumble about Van Thal’s abilities as an editor, and it’s hard to see why stories as similar as Hester Holland’s The Library and Flavia Richardson’s Behind the Yellow Door (both about hapless young women who are hired as private secretaries by older, plainly-batty women and who meet gruesome fates), or Oscar Cook’s His Beautiful Hands and George Fielding Eliot’s The Copper Bowl (both about exotic, grotesque revenges and tortures inflicted by East Asian people – at least one of them struck me as racist) should end up in the same book.  In fact, Eliot’s story follows immediately after Cook’s, thanks to Van Thal’s strange policy of arranging the stories by the alphabetical order of their authors’ surnames.

 

I also noticed how stories I’d read elsewhere and greatly enjoyed in my youth now, sadly, seem a bit duff.  I loved Hazel Heald’s The Horror in the Museum when I read it as a 13-year-old.  Heald, incidentally, wrote it under the tutelage of H.P. Lovecraft, whose influence is obvious in the ornate prose-style.  However, a modern rereading suggests that Heald (and Lovecraft) could’ve cut the story’s length by about 20 pages without losing any of its plot points.

 

Meanwhile, Bram Stoker’s The Squaw, another tale I had fond memories of, seems much poorer now thanks to one of its characters being an American tourist called Elias P. Hutchinson.  If Hutchinson was what Stoker believed all Americans sounded like, spewing toe-curling things like ‘I du declare’ and ‘I say, ma’am’ and ‘this ole galloot’ and ‘durned critter’, I can only say that Stoker needed to go out and do some research.  Still, despite some glaringly obvious failings, both The Horror in the Museum and The Squaw benefit from having cracking denouements.

 

From wikipedia.org

 

The Horror in the Museum is one of the few stories in the collection that contains a monster.  (And what a monster it is: “globular torso… bubble-like suggestion of a head… three fishy eyes… foot-long proboscis… bulging gills… monstrous capillation of asp-like suckers… six sinuous limbs with their black paws and crab-like claws…”).  Apart from The Kill by Colonel Peter Fleming, a werewolf story penned by none other than Ian Fleming’s older brother, the rest of the stories are fairly monster-free, depending on psychological terrors for their impact.  Indeed, C.S. Forester’s The Physiology of Fear is a horror story in an unusually literal sense.  It deals with a particularly horrific episode in human history, the Nazi concentration camps.  It also features a German scientist engaged in research, with the Third Reich’s support and with prisoners from the camps as his guinea pigs, into the emotion of horror as it arises in the human psyche.  And the story’s ending isn’t conventionally horrific.  Instead, the scientist is ensnared in an ironic and satisfying twist worthy of Roald Dahl.

 

Also not a horror story in any conventional sense is Muriel Spark’s The Portobello Road.  It qualifies as a ghost story, but most of all it’s a mediation on the nature of friendship as it survives, or doesn’t survive, from childhood into adulthood.  This being Spark – whose most famous creation, Miss Jean Brodie, was simultaneously a prim middle-class Edinburgh schoolmistress and a fascist – the story has a bitter, vinegary flavour.  None of its characters are particularly pleasant and none seem to deserve long-term friendship.  In fact, the one character who tries to keep those friendships alive is the one who, ultimately, commits the story’s single, shocking act of violence.

 

Meanwhile, I reacted to the sight of Jack Finney’s Contents of the Dead Man’s Pocket as if an old friend had suddenly hoven into view.  Not that I’d encountered this particular story before, but it conjured up fond memories of American writers like Richard Matheson, Robert Bloch, Ray Russell and Charles Beaumont, who in the 1950s seemed to keep their rents paid by pumping out short stories for the likes of Playboy magazine and TV scripts for the likes of The Twilight Zone (1959-64) and Boris Karloff’s Thriller (1960-62).  In admirably direct and diamond-hard prose, their tales would detail the world turning suddenly and inexplicably weird for citizens of conformist post-war America, for both dutiful suburban wives in nipped-in-at-the-waist housedresses and office-bound men in grey-flannel suits.

 

From fictionunbound.com

 

Finney, most famous as the author of the sci-fi horror novel The Body Snatchers (1955), which has been filmed four times and shows conformity taken to a nightmarish extreme, starts his story thus: “At the little living room table Tom Benecke rolled two sheets of flimsy and a heavier top sheet, carbon paper sandwiched between them, into his portable.”  A half-dozen pages later, events have lured Benecke away from his portable typewriter and embroiled him in a vertiginous life-or-death struggle just outside his apartment window.  It calls to mind the Stephen King short story The Ledge, another one that appeared in his collection Nightshift.  I doubt if the similarity between the two stories is a coincidence, King being a big admirer of work from this era of American story-telling.

 

Also deserving mention are Oh Mirror, Mirror, a claustrophobic item penned by the great Nigel Kneale; Raspberry Jam, Angus Wilson’s poisonous take on the snobbery of old people who no longer have anything to be snobbish about; and Serenade for Baboons, a colonial horror by Noel Langley.

 

Inevitably, a couple of clunkers find their way into the book too.  Anthony Vercoe’s Flies wouldn’t be such a bad story if the writer hadn’t swamped his prose with exclamation marks.  I can’t remember encountering so many of the damned things in ten pages of prose before and the result is almost unreadable.  Meanwhile, The House of Horror is one of a series of short stories that American pulp writer Seabury Quinn wrote about a psychic investigator called Jules de Grandin.  De Grandin is French and seemingly meant to be a supernatural version of Hercule Poirot (who, I know, was actually Belgian).  Unfortunately, Quinn gives him a patois that is as cringe-inducing as Elias P. Hutchinson’s Americanisms in The Squaw: “Sang du diable…!  Behold what is there, my friend…  Parbleu, he was caduo – mad as a hatter, this one, or I am much mistaken!”

 

On the whole, though, I found The First Pan Book of Horror Stories a rewarding read.  I now look forward to tracking down the other, earlier instalments in the series – those ones that came out before Herbert Van Thal decided to crank up the levels of nasty, schlocky stuff, in order to satisfy the blood-crazed savages amongst his reading public.

 

Blood-crazed savages such as my twelve-year-old self…

 

© Pan Books

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Short, sharp shocks

 

© New English Library

 

We’re into October now, a month that ends with the scary festival of Halloween. In keeping with the spirit of the season, I thought I would repost on this blog a few old entries that have a macabre, and hence Halloween-y, theme.  I’ll start with this item, which I originally wrote in 2017.  It’s about my favourite volumes of short horror stories: books that deliver a series of short, sharp shocks. 

 

These are the ten collections of short horror stories that have had the biggest impact on me.  To keep this exercise manageable, I’ve limited it to collections written by a single author.  And the authors included are ones who are still alive or were alive when I started reading their work.  Hence, no Edgar Allan Poe, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, M.R. James, H.P. Lovecraft or Arthur Machen.

 

Blood and Water and Other Tales (1988) by Patrick McGrath

Patrick McGrath has spent his career writing fiction that shows his love for the gothic and grotesque but, in a rare display of broad-mindedness, critics have avoided pigeonholing him as a ‘horror’ or ‘fantasy’ writer and treated him as a serious mainstream-literary figure instead.  What a lucky man he is.  Blood and Water… showcases McGrath’s short fiction and features, among other things, a diseased angel (The Angel), a hand that starts growing out of an unexpected place (The Black Hand of the Raj), a community of anaemic vampires (Blood Disease) and, most surreally, a girl who discovers a jungle explorer camped in the bushes at the bottom of her suburban garden (The Lost Explorer).  Particularly vivid is The E(rot)ic Potato, a meditation on decay told by a fly.  And an even less likely narrator relates the events of The Boot’s Tale, an account of a nuclear holocaust that manages to be both horrible and funny.

 

© Penguin

 

The Bloody Chamber (1979) by Angela Carter

Horror stories are often likened to dark fairy tales and Angela Carter’s short fiction commonly explores the overlap between the two.  For me, The Bloody Chamber is her greatest collection.  It provides adult, gothic reworkings of such fairy tales and myths as Beauty and the Beast (The Courtship of Mr Lyon), Snow White (The Snow Child) and Bluebeard (the title story).  It also contains one of the most gorgeous vampire stories ever, The Lady of the House of Love.  And werewolves get a look-in too thanks to the stories The Company of Wolves, The Werewolf and Wolf-Alice, which were incorporated into the classy 1984 movie The Company of Wolves, directed by Neil Jordan and scripted by Jordan and Carter.

 

Books of Blood, Volume 1 (1984) by Clive Barker

In the mid-1980s Clive Barker caused a sensation with the publication of his six Books of Blood, which are basically six volumes of short horror stories linked by a clever framing device.  Such was their impact that Stephen King dubbed Barker the Beatles of horror writing – whilst likening himself to horror’s slightly old-fashioned Elvis Presley.  To be honest, I found many stories in the later Books of Blood a tad pretentious; but Volume 1 is just about perfect in its blend of the funny, the profound and the hideously, graphically bloody.  Humour comes courtesy of the demonic-haunting spoof The Yattering and Jack and the charming supernatural-theatre story Sex, Death and Starshine (no doubt drawing on Barker’s experiences running the Dog Company theatrical troupe in late 1970s and early 1980s).  Profundity is supplied by In the Hills, the Cities, which takes place in the then-Yugoslavia and spookily prefigures the Balkans conflicts of the 1990s.  And for sheer, gross horribleness you can’t beat The Midnight Meat Train or Pig Blood Blues, the latter being one of my candidates for the title of Scariest Story Ever.

 

© Sphere

 

Dark Companions (1982) by Ramsey Campbell

Ramsey Campbell has long been regarded as Britain’s greatest living horror writer and Dark Companions is an ideal starting-point for anyone new to the Campbell oeuvre.  Both grim and believable, his short stories take place in a recognisably frayed and decayed modern Britain, populated by lonely and frightened people whose everyday fears gradually and nightmarishly take on tangible form.  Highlights include the distinctly un-Christmassy Christmas story The Chimney; The Depths, a dismaying exploration of why someone would want to write a really nasty horror story; Mackintosh Willy, which combines childhood fears of the bogeyman with all-too-real themes of homelessness and child abuse; and The Companion, surely the best ‘haunted fairground’ story ever written.

 

Night Shift (1978) by Stephen King

I can’t not include Night Shift here.  In my boyhood I’d go to scout summer-camps in the countryside near the Scottish town of Hawick.  During one camp I spent three days stuck almost permanently inside a tent because the Scottish weather was doing its normal thing and pissing non-stop with rain.  Luckily, in a Hawick bookshop beforehand, I’d bought a copy of Night Shift, a 1978 volume of Stephen King’s short stories, and to keep boredom at bay, I read that during the three days.  It made a big impression.  King has produced slicker collections of short stories since, but the unpleasant things inhabiting the tales in Night Shift have stayed with me for 40 years.  A huge demonically-possessed laundry machine that rumbles into malevolent life (The Mangler)…  Giant mutant rats lurking in the basement of a factory (The Graveyard Shift)…  A man slowly transforming into a monstrous flesh-eating slug (Grey Matter)…  A Mafia-type organisation that helps you give up smoking by threatening to torture and kill your family every time you puff a new cigarette (Quitters Inc)…  No, Night Shift isn’t subtle, but it certainly scared the bejesus out of me when I was a thirteen-year-old boy scout.

 

© Panther

 

The October Country (1955) by Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury is someone else I couldn’t not have on this list as, to me, the guy was basically God.  He could turn his hand to writing anything – horror, science fiction, fantasy, magical realism and yes, our old friend ‘mainstream literature’ – but The October Country is probably his purest collection of macabre stories.  It features such pieces as The Scythe, about a man who finds a mysterious scythe, starts using it and becomes the Grim Reaper, harvesting souls rather than wheat; The Jar, wherein a man buys the titular jar at a fair and becomes obsessed with the indescribable something that’s floating around inside it; and the splendidly-grisly Skeleton, about a paranoid man who becomes convinced that the bony figure embedded inside his own flesh is an imposter and takes action to evict it.

 

Shatterday (1980) by Harlan Ellison

Remarkably, the science fiction / fantasy writer Harlan Ellison managed to win fame by largely eschewing novels and writing masses of short stories instead.  Well, fame in the USA at least.  His name was little-known and his work hard to come by in Britain.  Among many collections, Shatterday is possibly his best.  Particularly memorable is the melancholy Jeffty is Five, about a little boy who refuses to grow up; The Man Who was Heavily into Revenge, about a schmuck who haplessly wrongs another person and then, inexplicably, finds the whole world venting its wrath upon him; Count the Clock That Tells the Time, a cautionary tale about the consequences of doing nothing meaningful with your life and frittering it away; and the unsettling title story, about a man who phones his own apartment one evening and finds himself talking to himself, or more precisely, to a sinister alter-ego who’s planning to usurp him from his own existence.

 

© Penguin

 

Swamp Foetus (1993) by Poppy Z. Brite

New Orleans writer Poppy Z. Brite’s collection Swamp Foetus was a revelation when I read it in the 1990s.  It’s populated both with the archetypes of traditional gothic fiction – ghosts, zombies, freaks – and with the characters of another type of Gothicism, the modern-day sub-culture that arose when kids, inspired by punk, new romanticism and Edgar Allan Poe, started dressing in black, applying kohl eyeliner and listening to bands like the Sisters of Mercy and the Cure.  Swamp Foetus thus has stories like His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood where decadent, black-clad, absinthe-swigging youths fall foul of ancient voodoo / vampire horrors.  That said, no Goths are to be found in the best story here, which is Calcutta, Lord of Nerves.  Calcutta takes a fresh angle on George A. Romero’s original trilogy of Living Dead movies.  In the films, Romero’s zombie apocalypse is a very American one, with barely a mention of events in the rest of the world.  As its title suggests, Brite imagines the same apocalypse happening in the capital city of West Bengal.  What happens?  Nobody seems to notice it that much.

 

Thou Shalt Not Suffer a Witch (1996) by Dorothy K. Haynes

Scottish writer Dorothy K. Haynes is much underrated.  Her stories, often set in the dour, oppressive society of 1930s, 1940s and 1950s Scotland, when the Presbyterian Church still had undue influence, are impressively disturbing in their quiet way.  Perhaps most disturbing is The Peculiar Case of Mrs Grimmond, about an old woman who takes pity on a strange, unidentified little animal that her cat drags into the house one day and, while she looks after and nurtures it, incurs the wrath of the community around her.  Haynes also tackles myth and legend.  Her very Scottish takes on such fabled creatures as banshees (The Bean-Nighe), fairies (Paying Guests) and changelings (The Changeling) are satisfyingly grim and creepy.

 

© Black and White Publishing

 

The Wine-Dark Sea (1988) by Robert Aickman

I’ve written about Robert Aickman before on this blog, so I will just say here that this, for me, is his finest collection of stories.  There’s one stinker among its contents, the supposedly satirical Growing Boys, which is an unwelcome reminder that, first-rate writer though he was, Aickman was also a grumpy, reactionary, modernity-hating conservative.  However, everything else is excellent, if frequently challenging and baffling.  The Inner Room is a phantasmagorical story about a weird doll’s house.  Never Visit Venice pokes fun at the modern phenomenon of mass tourism with its an account of an unwary visitor to the title city taking a ride on a gondola from hell.  And Your Tiny Hand is Frozen, about an unsociable man becoming addicted to a telephone, through which he communicates with a strange woman who may or may not exist, shows Aickman’s unease about the loss of face-to-face interaction that new communications technology was causing – the story was written in 1953.  Maybe it’s just as well Aickman passed away in 1982.  He’d have really hated our era of smartphones and social media.

 

© Faber & Faber