The 2nd Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories

Robert Aickman
Fontana Books

Robert Aickman "Introduction"
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle "Playing With Fire"
Edith Nesbit "Man-Size in Marble"
Robert Hichens "How Love Came to Professor Guildea"
Elizabeth Bowen "The Demon Lover"
Sir Max Beerbohm "A. V. Laider"
Edgar Allan Poe "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar"
Lord Dunsany "Our Distant Cousins"
Robert Aickman "The Inner Room"
Perceval Landon "Thurnley Abbey"
John Metcalfe "Nightmare Jack"
Ambrose Bierce "The Damned Thing"
Edith Wharton "Afterward"

It's been a while since I stuck my head into one of these Fontana anthologies but tonight I had the craving.

Aickman has put together an admirable collection with only 3 of the 12 stories being of the 'Oh, it's that one again' variety; E. Nesbit's 'Man Size in Marble', Elizabeth Bowen's 'The Demon Lover' and Edith Wharton's 'Afterward'. All great tales and all solid choices but one's I've become very accustomed to skipping past.

Lord Dunsany

A few of the stories here proved to be an absolute delight; Conan Doyle's 'Playing With Fire' with it's cautionary tale of reaching beyond ones abilities, Robert Hichens' superbly crafted 'How Love Came To Professor Guildea' and Aickman's own supremely creepy 'The Inner Room' are all deliciously bewitching,

A few others, such as Lord Dunsany's 'Our Distant Cousins', with it's odd little scfi-fi tale very much in the spirit of both Wells' 'Time Machine' and C.S. Lewis' 'Out of the Silent Planet', and Poe's 'The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar' provided an enjoyable distraction. Whilst others like Sir Max Beerbohm's 'A.V. Laider', Perceval Landon's ghostly 'Thurnley Abbey', John Metcalfe's almost Sherlockian 'Nightmare Jack' and Ambrose Bierce's 'The Damned Thing' filled both time and pages without too much complaint or distraction.

As with the other volume - I have them all here but am eking them out - Aickman proves himself the consummate anthologist. Each story, even the ones I didn't overly enjoy felt as though they belonged, as though they were at home in the collection and it proved for the most part to be a hugely enjoyable read.

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Passenger to Frankfurt

Agatha Christie
Fontana Books

It was an unusual predicament for Sir Stafford Nye-to awaken in a stupor after being drugged, only to find his passport stolen. There was also no trace of the fascinating woman he encountered in Frankfurt who begged him to help save her life. But Sir Stafford's troubles are only just beginning. The target of two murder attempts, he now seeks the help of the stranger who so urgently sought his. If he can locate her. What he finds is a woman of numerous identities and twice as many secrets, who ushers him into the shadows of an international conspiracy that could well prove to be the death of them.

Well, what a very odd book.

I love the Agatha Christie TV adaptations, the Geraldine McEwan Marples are a particular favourite but the only thing I've ever read by her is a short horror story.  This one is one of her, very, late books published in 1970 to mark the ladies 80th birthday.  The cover art alone, by Tom Adams, was enough to get me to drag it off the shelf but a quick web search for a synopsis meant it jumped to the head of the pile.

What we have is not, as you might have guessed, a detective novel but a spy novel.  Now, I've only ever read one other spy novel in my life, the utterly brilliant 'Death will Have Your Eyes' by James Sallis, but I thought it was perhaps time for another.

At the heart of this book we have a global conspiracy to encourage armed revolt amongst disaffected teenagers by a shadowy cartel of nazi sympathisers and the plucky Brit aristos lined up against them. There are a few flashes of wit and brilliance here, Lady Matilda being a favourite and especially so when she heads off on her little spying trip, but on the whole this is a fairly uncomfortable read that seems much more of a chance for Christie to complain about the various she thinks that are wrong with the 1960s.  What kept popping into my head was how much it reminded me, in particular, of the movie adaptation of Michael Moorcock's 'The Final Programme'  (the first Jerry Cornelius novel) just with a very different mind set and purpose.

The story is sketchy and lacking in flow and the ending arrives unheralded and unexpected dragging itself out of the muddy morass of the rest of the book.  There's an interesting story in there somewhere but one that I think would have needed a few rewrites to tease into shape.

Welsh Tales of Terror

R. Chetwynd-Hayes
Fontana Books

Inside what is probably the single most stereotypical portrayal of Welsh cliches ever to adorn a book cover this anthology of stories set in Wales, written by Welsh writers or regarding Welsh folklore turned out to be utterly fantastic.

Let's start by getting the various folktales out of the way.  These, here, take the form of teeny little half page stories relating things like 'The Brown Hobgoblin of Bedd Gelert', 'Dead Man's Candles', 'The Devil's Tree', 'Corpse Candles' and more.  They're fun little hints at the depth of Welsh folklore but little more than that.  For those wishing for a more in depth examination that's catered for with a chapter taken from Marie Trevelyan's early 20th century study 'Folk-Lore and Folk-Stories of Wales' that explores the phenomena of the 'Ceffyl-dwr' in 'Water Horses and the Spirits of the Mist'.

Arthur Machen

So, onto the stories.  There are a number of very enjoyable stories here but the book is helped no end by an exemplary opening trio of tales.  First up is Glyn Jones' 'Jordan', a story of an attempted swindle and the grim and unpleasant fate that befalls the perpetrators.  The second story is by one of my favourite authors, John Christopher, and is the first thing of his I've read that was neither science-fiction nor post-apocalyptic.  'A Cry of Children' is a subtle and deeply moving story with a brutal and breathtaking finale.  The golden trio culminates with Arthur Machen's 'The Shining Pyramid' with its folk horror and proto-Lovecraftian rural horrors from beyond.

There's a bit of a dip next with Angus Wilson's 'Animals or Human Beings' which despite being written in a very agreeable and jaunty style has a story that really does nothing interesting which is also the case with the ghost story 'The Man on a Bike' by Hazel F. Looker that follows it.

Regular readers of my write-us will know that I'm a bit of a sucker for a happy story and so in many ways 'The Morgan Trust' by Richard Bridgeman (a pseudonym of sci-fi writer L.P. Davies) ticked lots of my boxes with its story of a man on an obsessive quest finding what he's looking for in two remote Welsh towns.

Caradoc Evans

Obsession is also at the heart of two more tales of Caradoc Evans' 'Be This Her Memorial' takes religious fervour in a small town to its extreme and 'The Lost Gold Mine' by Hazel F. Looker has a more obvious object of fascination.

Dorothy K. Haynes' contribution 'Mrs Jones' is a repurposed folktale of a woman kidnapped and forced to cook for the little folk of Gower.  It's lifted from the doldrums by the matching belligerence of both its victim and her erstwhile rescuer whose dislike of the woman and her domineering ways could be her downfall.

Ronald Seth's 'The Reverend John James and the Ghostly Horseman' is another story that feels like a repurposed folktale but unlike its predecessor has little charm or wit in its telling.

The books second story by Glyn Jones, 'Cadi Hughes', is a bit of a disappointment after the opener.  It has a great opening and a couple of fun moments but is ultimately a bit cruel and vindictive.

Richard Hughes

The final three tales pretty much capture the Wales I grew up in the 1970s dealing as they do with coal mining, religion and folk horror.  Jack Griffith deals with the first of these as he traps a group of men underground in 'Black Goddess' and we're left to decide for ourselves whether the supernatural aspect is more real than the insanity.  'The Stranger' by Richard Hughes drops a small demon into the household of a preacher and his peg-legged wife.  It tries for laughs amidst the temptations and the piety but I thought it all got more than a little jumbled at the end.

R. Chetwynd-Hayes

The book closes with editor R. Chetwynd-Hayes' own contribution, 'Lord Dunwilliam and the Cwn Annwn'.  It's the most 1970s thing here by far as it's Regency period setting and wild snowy moorland setting filled with obnoxious aristocrats, cackling peasants, beautiful maidens and ancient powers put me in mind of so many of my favourite Hammer movies.

I know there are lots of other books in this series covering different areas of the country (and indeed parts of the world) compiled by different editors all of which are now on my wants list but truthfully they are all going to have to be something special to live up to this one.

The 4th Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories

Robert Aickman (ed)
Fontana Books

After finally getting to read some stories by Aickman, who over the last year had climbed to the top of my list of authors I wanted to track down, I noticed on my shelf this anthology of stories chosen by him.  It's the only one of the Fontana series I've managed to track down so far and it's a real delight.

For Aickman 'The essential quality of the ghost story is that it gives form to the unanswerable' and that key aspect of the unknown and mysterious is what guides the choice of stories.  There are few answers here and resolutions are often ephemeral.

Opening the book is 'The Accident' by Ann Bridge.  The pseudonymous Bridge was an avid mountain climber and her story reflects this as a psychiatrist attempts to help a young brother and sister menaced by sinister letters and footprints in the snow.  It's an attractive premise but one which is hampered by Bridge's
love of climbing and so much of the suspense becomes lost in the descriptions of the activity.

Barry Pain's 'Not On The Passenger List' is one in a long line of ocean traversing ghost stories. Here a widow on her way to England is haunted by a ghost that, unusually, is also seen by other passengers.  the story is told by another traveller and whilst not played for laughs has a lightness to it that indicates, to me at least, an author more at home with a more frivolous story style.

Oscar Wilde

The great Oscar Wilde is represented by a story called 'The Sphinx Without a Secret' wherein two men discuss a recent doomed romance and the enigmatic lady at the centre of it.  It is the most sparse of tales with the entire story revolving around the ladies behaviour and the endless connotations implied by the ambiguity of the ending.

The American writer (and friend of Wilde) Vincent O'Sullivan offers a fairly inconsequential but amusingly macabre little story of a belligerent ghost in denial of his own death in 'When I Was Dead' before we are provided with a translation of Alexander Pushkin's 'The Queen of Spades' that reveals itself at the last to be an amusing tale of spectral revenge rather than a fairly typical tale of avaricious behaviour within the Russian nobility.

Whilst more renowned as a critic Desmond MacCarthy's 'Pargiton and Harby' shows him to have had a keen predilection for the weird as his tale of a man haunted by an event in his past reveals itself to be far more interesting than it's premise.

Hugh Walpole

Whilst we're on the subject of the weird Hugh Walpole's 'The Snow' is a brief, fiery examination of a marriage in tumultuous decline as the husband's placidity and the young wife's irascibility clash irrevocably in the shadow of his dead wife's memory.

I can find very little information regarding the author of the next story, Eric Ambrose, other than that he was English and his from and to dates.  His story, 'Carlton's Father', written in 1936 is a fabulous piece of proto-steampunk that any attempt to explain would spoil so onto the next which is by the peerless M.R. James.

'A School Story' is one of the fastest moving of James' tales with a rapidity of telling that takes it's tempo from the narrators bewildered retelling of the events surrounding the disappearance of a teacher.  It isn't one of James' most involved tales and the ending goes a bit too far but it's always fun to dip into any of James' works.

I've read a few of Saki's stories over the last couple of years and they're usually enjoyable but they've never grabbed me as much as some of his contemporaries.  His story here, 'The Wolves of Cernogratz'  is a rather gentle and poignant tale of the return to the ancestral home by the last of the von Cernogratz family.

Wilkie Collins

The book ends with the William Wilkie Collins novella, 'Mad Monkton'.  This wonderful tale by friend and contemporary of Charles Dickens tells of one man's attempt to avoid both the family curse and the family prophecy as he searches for the body of his dead uncle.  I've read a couple of Collins' stories before this and have been hugely impressed each time and this was the best of them all.  I find his way with words to be eminently readable and his imagination beguiling.

I picked up this book expecting to be entertained for a weekend and instead was treated to a number of old favourites alongside a number of intriguing authors whose work I was unaware of and who were of such a level of obscurity that it would have been no effort for me to have remained ignorant of them.

An excellent and extraordinary collection that explores the fantastical and the macabre in the most imaginative and enjoyable way.

The Fontana Book of Great Horror Stories

Christine Bernard
Fontana Books

I jumped on this book when I saw it in a cluttered second hand bookshop in Cheltenham because of the Nigel Kneale story that I hadn't read before; I'd have bought it anyway but that was the clincher.  There were a few other firsts in there too so let's take it one story at a time.

Starting things off is 'The Squaw' by Bram Stoker and it's tale of feline revenge as a rather stupid American tourist is given a medieval comeuppance by a particularly angry she-cat.  I've only ever read one Stoker tale before - 'The Judge's House' - which I really enjoyed and this one was fun also.  I really must get around to reading that copy of Dracula that's sitting on my bookshelf.

Next is only me second experience of Robert Aickman.  I'd managed to entirely miss him and now I've read him in two books in a row - 'Ringing the Changes' in '65 Great Tales of the Supernatural'.  'No Stronger Than a Flower' is a quietly odd little tale of newly weds that sees the wife relenting to her new husbands comments regarding her appearance in a most odd and unpleasant way.

Hugh Walpole

Hugh Walpole's excellent 'Tarnhelm' was one of three familiar stories here as a young boy is sent to stay with his two uncles only to discover that there's something quite unlikeable about one of them and he finds himself in serious danger.

The fourth story gives me my first chance to read an Agatha Christie story, 'The Gypsy' is a light but gratifying tale of premonition, fate and love wrapped up in a breakneck read that still manages to feel complete and satisfying.

Another anthology regular, Algernon Blackwood's 'A Case of  Eavesdropping', takes a young man to a boarding house where bumps (and blood) in the night are commonplace.

And so we arrive at the Nigel Kneale tale.  Kneale only ever published one non Quatermass book, a short story collection called 'Tomato Cain and Other Stories',  and it's from that his haunted house story 'Minuke' is the most anthologised so to get a chance to read another was a real treat.  'The Pond' is a short but sweet tale of revenge on a strange old taxidermist.

L.P. Hartley

Roald Dahl provides a tale that is straight out of his 'Tales of the Unexpected' style with a story that mixes a dead husband, his newly liberated wife and some gruesome post-mortem science with the promise of some well savoured revenge.

L.P. Hartley's 'The Two Vaynes' is by far the poorest story here with large plot holes in a fairly pointless plot of revenge for a pretty slight leading to revenge for a larger crime.

The Hartley story is followed by longest piece as Ray Bradbury's 'The Next in Line' tells of a young woman's descent into madness in a small Mexican town.  It's beautifully written but I found it to be quite unsatisfying with a very poor finale.  My preference in a ghostly or weird story is for a British setting - or at the furthest European - so the Bradbury was a step outside my happy place but still an enjoyable excursion as what Bradbury I've read in the past was always very readable as it, mostly, was here.

Frank Baker

Frank Baker's 'In The Steam Room' is notable only for it's narrators long list of possible deaths which do raise a smile but the story itself which sees a middle aged neurotic foresee a violent death inside a sauna is fairly innocuous.

The same can be said of 'The Interlopers' by Saki as two feuding Carpathian lords are trapped together in a deep forest giving them time to sort out their quarrel.

Of the final three stories one proved itself to be stylish but ultimately empty, the second to be slightly pointless and the final one to be an old favourite whose title I didn't recognise.

Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen's 'The Cat Jumps' is a haunted house story without any actual ghosts as the new owners and their party guests at a house famous for the gory murder committed there become obsessed and bewitched by it's reputation .  Ambrose Bierce's 'The Boarded Window' continues this theme with a remembrance of the reasons behind a sealed window in a deserted log cabin.

The book ends with Joan Aiken's lovely little twisted tale, 'Marmalade Wine' that finds a walker chancing across the country home of a retired surgeon only for things to go horribly awry.

As I've mentioned in previous reviews I do have a love for these old (this one is 1966) anthologies and this proved to be a most enjoyable one.  The selection is admirably light on ghostly goings on and heavy on supernatural revenge and retribution and is very much worth hunting down for anyone with a love of the weird.