Night of the Demon

Based on the classic M.R. James story 'Casting the Runes', 'Night of the Demon' tells the story of an American psychologist, the somewhat overbearing Dr. John Holden (Dana Andrews), arriving in the UK to debunk a notorious satanic cult led by Julian Karswell (Niall MacGinnis) only to find himself wrapped up in both the murder of a colleague and his own predicted and imminent demise.

Made by the French director Jacques Tourneur (who had previously made the fabulous 'Cat People') ''Night of the Demon' is an early entrant into what has become known, perhaps slightly clumsily, as folk horror and certainly set the scene for many a Hammer and Amicus film to come in the next decade and a bit.  Standing stones, (references to) witchcraft, black magic, rural landscapes and runes all feature prominently but the film is made with a master's eye for atmosphere conjuring malevolence even in broad daylight as in the garden party scene - later perhaps to find an unlikely homage in the video for UK prog rock band Marillion's video for their song 'Garden Party'.

Beyond the technical skills of the director 'Night of the Demon' features fantastic performances by all involved.  MacGinnis is superbly understated as Karswell equally at home delivering his blase threats (and curse) against Holden as he is gently dealing with his 'wayward' mother's (Athene Seyler) attempts to help the same.  Andrews is almost smotheringly pompous in the lead role as his brash and rational new world confidence comes crashing into old world irrationality helped only by the presence of his murdered colleague's niece (Peggy Cummins) whose scientific education matched with her British heritage allows her to straddle both worlds.. 

There's some dispute over the demon itself, was it's appearance always planned or was it inserted at the insistence of producer Hal E. Chester and should it even be seen at all. Personally I come down on the side of those who would rather not have seen the beast but I do wonder if that's partly because this was a film that eluded me as a youngster and so I first saw it when the teenaged metalhead version of me in his Slayer T-shirt was already becoming a distant memory but he would have bloody loved seeing the demon.

Buy it here - Night of the Demon (1957) [DVD] - or watch it below.



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A Touch of Chill

Joan Aiken
Fontana Lions

The homely and the exotic mix in fifteen unique tales. The macabre and witty stories are a melange of horror guaranteed to send chills up the spine of any sleepless reader.

I'm always happy to go for a trip into the estimable Ms. Aiken's imagination but I've been deliberately holding back on this one for when I had a real craving.  It was well worth the wait.

Obviously she's most widely known for her various books for children especially the 'Wolves of Willoughby Chase' novels and the 'Arabel & Mortimer' series but she also accumulated an impressive array of more adult fiction including many shorts of the weird, macabre or ghostly variety.  'A Touch of Chill' is the second anthology of those I've encountered.  The other probably has the edge in my affections but there is much to like here.

The opening story 'Lodgers' is perhaps one of the weakest but strangely is also one of the stories here that is perhaps most characteristically Aiken.  It concerns a creepy husband and wife who take up the empty rooms in the house of an overworked single mother with two poorly children. It's not a bad story, it just feels a little unfinished especially in it's ending.

The book is right back on track with the second story, 'Mrs Considine', a lightning fast tale of witchcraft  and premonitions and with the third, the wonderfully vindictive, 'The Swanee Glide'.

Next up is probably my favourite piece in the book, 'Listening'.  As a fan of experimental music and the tenets of 'deep listening' the story had me from it's second paragraph and whilst this aspect was only one part of what turned out to be a sublimely rolling narrative that begins with a dead cat and ends with a memory of a painting.

'The Companion' is a slight twist on the classic haunted house tale, 'The Rented Swan', in a bizarre love story whilst 'Jugged Hare' feels like an Agatha Christie pastiche.  'A Game of Black and White' sends the book back into the realm of the weird as a young boy celebrating his birthday during an eclipse finds himself trapped in a very unpleasant predicament of a far more surreal kind than the unpleasantness that seems likely to be about inflicted on the hapless teen burglar in 'Time to Laugh'.

'He' is probably the books best contender for 'most likely to appear in an anthology of the macabre' with it's wonderfully archaic tale of magical revenge although its successor 'The Story About Caruso' runs it a close second.  Conversely the more deliberately modern 'the Helper' with its heroin addiction, anorexia and robots is easily the least satisfying thing here although again it's successor, 'Power Cut', runs it a close second.

The book ends with two stories that I can only describe as Aiken-esque and are all the better for it.  'Who Goes Down This dark Road' is a frankly bizarre and funny tale of a young girl's hair and the teacher tasked with uncovering it's secret whilst 'A Train Full of Warlords' tells of a family in the aftermath of a tragedy and the ways in which each is dealing with it.

As I said earlier I didn't find this collection to be as wholly satisfying as 'A Bundle of Nerves' but it still offers a very satisfying selection of stories.  her stories transcend genre boundaries mixing the fantastical withe the macabre and the fun with the supernatural.  There are elements in her stories of the classic authors of the weird and the supernatural but also you can see echoes of her contemporaries such as Roald Dahl and I for one think it's about time she was regarded with the same level of esteem.

Tales of the Mysterious and Macabre

Algernon Blackwood
Spring Books

I've been slowly working my way through this sizeable hardback for a few months now reading a couple of stories and then shelving it for a week or two. I've mentioned here before about my long held dislike for reading anthologies of short stories which is a prejudice I've had to overcome over the last few years since starting to read more and more of these period strange stories.  Out of these anthologies the name Algernon Blackwood was one that held a particular appeal.  He has a name that seems expressly designed to be that of an author of weird fiction and his photos make him look like a magician.  He's a regular in anthologies so stories by him weren't hard to track down and the more I read the more I wanted to read and finding a copy of the 'Ancient Sorceries and Other Stories' Penguin paperback in a charity shop only helped stimulate this interest.  So, stumbling across this 400 page anthology was a happy day indeed.

Published in 1967 by Spring Books it contains 23 tales of the odd, the uncanny and the unnatural.  The stories in this volume are decidedly less spooky than the ones I've read previously although there is a strong undercurrent of the strange and the inexplicable but these are far more of the weird fiction genre than the ghostly.

Within its pages lie various pieces of treasure; a delightfully odd encounter for Blackwood's occult detective Dr. John Silence with a man who is 'A Victim of Higher Space', the strangely enchanting tale of a brother and sisters experience of a house filled with 'The Damned', a sacrificial tale involving the old gods of the sea in 'The Sea Fit', a tale about the transcendent powers of nature in 'The Golden Fly' and a rather lovely tale of cross generational help in 'The Other Wing'.

The collection is crammed full of enticing oddities all written with Blackwood's characteristic charm and readability.  Personally I have a marked fondness for the more ghostly side of his work but on the whole this collection turned out to be one of beauty and intriguing profundity.

Aylmer Vance: Ghost Seer

Alice & Claude Askew
Wordsworth Editions

A collection of classic supernatural tales from the Edwardian period. Originally published in 1914 between 4 July and 22 August in The Weekly Tale-Teller, the stories were belatedly collected into the current volume in the late 1990s by Jack Adrian.
This is a collection of eight ghost stories, written by the remarkably prolific husband and wife team of Claude and Alice Askew, centering on Aylmer Vance, an investigator of the supernatural. Dexter, the narrator, meets Vance during a fishing holiday and Vance tells him three ghost stories on successive nights, each story involving Vance more closely in the action. The fourth story brings Dexter himself into the action, and reveals him to have unsuspected clairvoyant powers. The remaining stories feature Vance and Dexter as a sort of Holmes-and-Watson team investigating incidents not all of which prove to have supernatural causes.

Another in the fabulous Wordsworth Editions series of 'Tales of Mystery and the Supernatural', Aylmer Vance: Ghost Seer is a short collection of Edwardian ghost stories featuring the titular psychical investigator and his 'Watson' the clairvoyant barrister Dexter.

Over the 8 tales that make up the book Vance initially tells Dexter of a number of his encounters with the supernatural; a possession from the ancient past in 'The Invader', an encounter with an old god in 'The Stranger', a love story featuring a beautiful ghost exeriencing one last soiree in 'Lady Green-Sleeves' and a tale of heartbreak, love, poetry and fire that transcends death in 'The Fire Unquenchable'.  It's following this fouth story that Dexter becomes Vance's apprentice and takes a more active role in the proceedings.  Like the aforementioned Watson he is very much the junior partner and serves mostly as narrator but also as pupil as result of his psychic abuilities.

The second four stories explore hauntings and possession in the 'The Vampire', haunted houses in 'The Boy of Blackstock' and 'The Fear', and the enduring influence of past lives in 'The Indissoluble Band'.

It's a great shame that the eight stories here are all that the husband and wife authors completed as both Vance and Dexter are enjoyable company and the stories are entertainingly creepy.

Pagan Triptych

Ron Weighell, John Howard & Mark Valentine
Sarob Press

In a recent email conversation with Mark Valentine I mentioned that when I broke my tibia last year I did so with an Algernon Blackwood paperback in my back pocket.  This led him to tell of a Blackwood inspired short story he was writing for a new anthology to be published soon by Sarob Press and that he would arrange for a review copy to be sent my way for Wyrd Britain.  Yes dear readers he is a lovely fella and I am a lucky sod.

Well, if it appeases your jealousy in any way my copy arrived the day after I got home from hospital after breaking my hip this time;  same leg, almost exactly 11 months on from the last time so maybe not so lucky after all.

'Pagan Triptych' is a set of 3 stories using some of Blackwood's characteristic themes - the occult detective, ritual magic, nature worship & reincarnation - each followed by an afterword from each author regarding their connection with the man and his work.

The book begins with an author I am otherwise unfamiliar with, Ron Weighell, whose story of magical sleuthing featuring his very intriguing occult detective, academic and magician, Doctor Andrew Northwoode, 'The Letter Killeth' is a fiery and intriguing sort of read.  With it's academic setting within the campus, libraries and lodgings of Belden College, Oxford it has a flavour of M.R. James' 'The Tractate Middoth' but is very much it's own thing as Northwoode, with the aide of a number of other magicians from diverse magical traditions, investigates and combats the magical affliction that has overcome his librarian friend.

The story is fast paced and wonderfully inventive with Weighell throwing around magical traditions and rites with seeming abandon as his crew of investigators hunt for their cure.  I'm an absolute sucker for a good occult investigator especially of the professorial type and I took Northwoode to my heart immediately.  Apparently he has featured in several other stories but a cursory eBay search reveals Weighell's other books to be price in eye-watering amounts amounts but he is going on my list of writers to watch out for.

Holding the middle ground in the anthology is John Howard who I'd previously encountered via his and Mark Valentine's collaboration on 'The Collected Connossieur'.  It would take better eyes than mine to separate the two in the previous volume so it was a nice opportunity to get to experience his solo work.

'In the Clearing' is a delicately subtle tale of a man cast adrift from his life and finding not just himself but also finding another person and another place.

It's a story of a man being expelled from the life he has created, of his meeting another who is entirely in his and of his desire to join him in his serenity and to find his own acceptance amongst the tangled pathways of the woods.

It's a lovely little piece that feels both supernatural and utterly real at the same time.  Daniel's relationship with the woods is so intrinsic that he wears it (or it him) yet for Nick it's a fearsome entity, the antithesis of all he knows and something that he, in his fear and in his loss, tries to claim.

It's a rather lovely piece that has sat with me for the week between reading it and writing this and I think perhaps for a lot longer yet.

Closing the book is Mark Valentine's tale of alternative worlds, reincarnation, destiny and fig trees.  The story follows a young man from ritualised childhood games in a figgery (such a lovely word) to the comradeship of like-minded people who have, like him, experienced unusual connections with certain places , a feeling of otherness and an echo of elsewhere.  It's a rumination on other lives, other places, other times, other existences and is every bit as intriguing as it is beguiling.

Along with three short ruminations on Blackwood by the authors this book proved to be the most wonderful fun.  The three have produced stories that whilst distinct and individual feel very much at home together which I think speaks volumes for both their skills and the rampant creativity of Mr. Blackwood himself.

In Ghostly Company

Amyas Northcote
Wordsworth Editions

A grey cloud formed on the summit of the altar, diminishing, thickening and turning into a Shape, a shape of evil and fear. The silent group by the fire once more broke forth into wild gesticulations and cries, Stella prostrated herself, the Form on the altar grew clearer and with a cry of horror Mr Fowke turned away and rushed madly across the moor'. Amyas Northcote's In Ghostly Company is a rare and splendid collection of strange and disturbing tales from the golden age of ghost stories. His style is akin to that of the master of the genre M.R. James: it is measured and insidiously suggestive, producing unnerving chills rather than shocks and gasps. Northcote's tales make the reader unsettled and uneasy. This is partly due to the fact that the hauntings or strange occurrences take place in natural or mundane surroundings - surroundings familiar to the reader but never before thought of as unusual or threatening. Long out of print, this book remains an enthralling and chilling read.

Amyas Northcote was an English writer of the Edwardian era with just this single volume of ghost stories published in 1921 to his name.

The intro by David Stuart Davies makes note of how Northcote's short tales were described as being written in an 'unemotional style' and indeed this is well noted as throughout the author feels very distant from his subject matter.  Emotions, other than fear, are kept at a respectable distance and he offers up his stories with a very British reserve.  Happily, this isn't something that bothers me to any particular extent and I like a fairly hands off author.

The stories themselves hail from what must be described as the halcyon days of the ghost story.  Northcote was a student at Eton during M.R. James' tenure at the school and it is to that venerable author, along with others such as E.F. Benson that Northcote's work draws parallels.

In the classic tradition of the genre and the era Northcote's characters are, for the most part innocents caught up in events over which they have little understanding and even less control.  For some their lack of comprehension proves to be their saving grace.  In other situations it's their innate goodness or the self destructive nature of evil or even their pet but equally often the innocent are sent to their grave through nefarious actions.

An aspect of the works here that particularly appealed is that in Northcote's hands the landscape becomes a character in itself.  His stories, unlike those of his eminent peer, are more definitely attached to their British landscape.  There are a few obvious exceptions but they could easily have been relocated to the wilds of Wales, Scotland, Cornwall or Devon.  In the story of the same name the nature of The Downs being as much a character as the spectral figures that haunt it and the horror of the actions of 'The Late Mrs Fowke' are intensified through both the unsavoury establishment she visits and the befouled rural setting within which she conducts her evil conjuring.

His writing seems embedded in a changing age;  the almost fully mechanised industrial society of the early twentieth century that remembers the wild places of the countryside but as a place of superstitious fear and dangerous magics.  Equally there's a sentimentality within his work that serves to make the prospect of the afterlife one here wrongs, both great and small and both slight and slights can be addressed and redressed.

I've become very much a fan of these Wordsworth Editions over the last few years and it's always a good day when I stumble across a new one especially one that I become as besotted with as I have with this one.  Northcote, I suspect, will always remain a peripheral figure in the pantheon of authors of the macabre but to those that seek him out and to those who fall upon him unexpectedly he will prove to be a fortuitous treat.

Crooked House

'Crooked House' was a three episode mini series written and co-produced by Mark Gatiss in 2008.  The series is an obvious homage to Gatiss' love affair with the Gothic supernatural horrors of writers such as M.R. James and the films of the Hammer and Amicus studios and it could easily have been presented in that most Amicus of formats, the portmanteau, but instead here we have three separate episodes featuring interlinked tales narrated by Gatiss' museum curator.

The tale telling is triggered when new homeowner Ben (Lee Ingleby) unearths a door knocker that he takes to museum curator Gatiss who believes it to be a remnant of the locally infamous, but now demolished, Geap Manor.

The curator tells two tales of the Manor, one from the 18th century and another from the early 20th before the third episode transpires in 'real time' so to speak.

There's a nice period feel to the whole thing and it does come across as a labour of love but it also comes across as a bit, well, cheap looking.  The stories though are suitably creepy, particularly the third, and there's a perfectly predicable but also perfectly correct ending to the whole thing.

Buy it here - Crooked House [DVD] - or watch it below.

The Collected Connoisseur

Mark Valentine & John Howard
Tartarus Press

Following in the footsteps of M.P. Shiel's exotic savant Prince Zaleski and Arthur Machen's Mr Dyson, Mark Valentine and John Howard's The Connoisseur - aesthetical detective extraordinaire - unravels a cornucopia of arcane mysteries in these twenty-three tantalising tales. Collecting together all the adventures in previous Tartarus volumes In Violet Veils and Masques and Citadels, along with four further tales published elsewhere, this volume provides the lover of esoteric mystery and adventure fiction with the complete Connoisseur casebook.
Venturing from his fire-lit study in an English cathedral city, The Connoisseur encounters, among other phenomena, strange masquerades in country houses; a Scottish island whose Prince may not be named; a poignant relic from the Black Sea region, sought after by a ruthless order; a secret account of the first crossing of an Arctic land and an Art Deco cinema which may retain resonances of its mysterious former occupants. From your own fireside, follow The Connoisseur into the delicate shading between this world and other realms of wonder, tragedy and trepidation.

I've been intending to tackle this book for a while now and the enforced immobility of this summer seemed like the perfect opportunity.

The Connoisseur is an investigator into the arcane, or as the book blurb has it, 'aesthetical detective extraordinaire', who, from his home in an English cathedral city, relates his accounts of his investigations to his chronicler, Valentine; a format that immediately ties this modern work in with classics of the genre such as Hope-Hodgson's 'Carnacki' stories, Algernon Blackwood's 'Dr John Silence' and even the Sherlock Holmes tales.

Where The Connoisseur differs from these others is in the things he investigates and experiences.  The supernatural is often nearby but the weird and the inscrutable is aways closer to hand.  Folktales, psychometry, summonings and magic of all hues are explored by this most enigmatic of antiquarian sleuths via the mediums of art, literature, music, performance, architecture and more.  He relates tales of an other worldly Prince and the family beholden to him, of shattering aeromantic divinations, of art, of memory, of obsession and of love.

These aren't tales of adventure; for the most part they do not seek to excite. Instead they intrigue, they entice and they beguile; they are, simply, magical.

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65 Great Tales of the Supernatural

Mary Danby (editor)
Octopus Books

This powerful and comprehensive collection of 65 brilliant stories contains the best of all the well-known writers of the supernatural, both old and new, with some stories specifically commissioned for this volume.

I've grown to love these anthologies particularly the older stories which this mammoth tome has in spades.  It also features a fairly large smattering of (at the time of publication) modern writers.

Of the 65 here it's the famous that have been represented by their A-game pieces.  Robert Aickman opens the book with the sublime terror of his 'Ringing the Changes', E.F. Benson's 'The Bus Conductor' will be familiar to some from it's film version in the 1945 Ealing Films classic 'Dead of Night'.  M.R. James' 'Lost Hearts' makes it's customary appearance as does William Hope Hodgson's Carnacki classic 'The Whistling Room', Robert Louis Stevenson's 'The Body Snatcher' and Nigel Kneale's 'Minuke'.

Robert Aickman

Alongside these and other key authors such as Algernon Blackwood ('Keeping His Promise'), Ambrose Bierce ('The Middle Toe of the Right Foot'), Charles Dickens ('The Signal-Man'), Arthur Conan Doyle ('The Brown Hand'), Mark Twain ('A Ghost Story'), H.G. Wells ('The Red Room') and Dennis Wheatley ('The Case of the Long-Dead Lord'), editor Mary Danby has gathered an intriguing selection of lesser known authors such as Charles Birkin whose 'Little Boy Blue' is an affectingly grim tale of childhood friendship and Dorothy K. Haynes' intense and horrific hotel in 'Those Lights and Violins'.

Adrian Cole

Rounding out the collection is a selection of more modern storytellers such as Adrian Cole who does a Cornish Lovecraft (who's also here with his excellent 'Moon Bog') pastiche called 'The Horror under Penmire', Danby herself gives a nifty tale of well-deserved comeuppance with 'The Engelmayer Puppets', Roger Malisson brings the creepy, small town horror in 'A Fair Lady' and Tim Vicary's heart wrenching 'Guest Room'  is a real highlight.

Since it was published in 1979 (mine is a 1982 4th edition) this book has become a charity shop staple but please don't let that put you off as it really is a corking collection.  OK so maybe there isn't 65 'great'tales but there's certainly a large proportion of the freaky and the fabulous.  There's a couple of tales that are very much not 'great' but Danby has compiled a fairly solid collection and there's a great deal of macabre fun to be had here.

Horror Stories

Susan Price (ed)
Kingfisher Books

Chills, spills and empty coffins! This wide-ranging collection of twenty-four spine-tingling stories draws on the best traditions of classic horror, from powerful myths and folktales to contemporary stories of man-made terrors. With contributions by writers of the calibre of John Steinbeck, Edgar Allen Poe, Charles Dickens, T. H. White, Philip K. Dick and Stephen King, this is a truly chilling anthology.

On one weird day out at a local town a few months back I found 3 books in this series of anthologies in 3 separate charity shops (and then a few weeks later another in a different shop in a different town).  I bought 2; this one and a Vampire one.

What we have here is very much the modern equivalent of the old Pan, Fontana, Puffin anthologies.  The contents selected by the author Susan Price, is a mixed bag of the famous and the less so, the old and the new, the ghastly and the funny.

There's 24 separate tales here each of which I jotted a sentence about in my handy little notebook as I read and that seemed a good enough idea for this review so here goes the most spur of the moment review I've ever written.

E. F. Benson

1. Algernon Blackwood - The Kit Bag.
- Dark and spooky story about a man terrified by a bag.

2. Stephen King - Here There Be Tygers
- Pointless tale of urine related shyness and a tiger.

3. E.F. Benson - The Room in the Tower
- Prophetic dreams of a horrid old woman and a creepy room lead to a poor ending.

4. Philip K. Dick - Beyond Lies the Wub
- Very odd sci-fi tale of the ethics of food.

5. Susan Price - Feeding the dog
- A short fun morality tale about the costs of evil.

Nicholas Fisk

6. Nicholas Fisk - Teddies Rule OK
- A thoroughly, and I do mean thoroughly, creepy girl with teddy bear story.

7. Eleanor Farjeon - Grendel the Monster
- A quick telling of the Beowolf story.

8. Leon Garfield - A Grave Misunderstanding
- A fun little ghostly tale of the differences between what a dog 'sees' and what a human does.

9. Charles Dickens - Captain Murderer
- An oddly written tale of cannibalism and revenge.

10. Joan Aiken - Something
- Enigmatic and terrifying hauntings & dreams affect the males of a family.

Guy de Maupassant

11. Guy de Maupassant - The Hand
- Spooky tale of a haunted murderous hand.

12. Ellen Emerson White - The Boy Next Door
- Psychopathy American teen style

13. Scottish folktale - The Murder Hole
- Murder on the moors

14. Terry Jones & Michael Palin - The Famous Five go Pillaging
- A deeply Pythonesque tale of the collapse of Roman Imperialism.

15. John Steinbeck - the Affair at 7 Rue de M-
- Pointless story of malevolent bubble gum.

Vivien Alcock

16. Vivien Alcock - A Change of Aunts
- A fun tale of swampy retribution.

17. Edgar Allen Poe - The Cask of Amontillado
- Poe really liked walling people up.  Someone should check his house.

18. English folktale - The Pear Drum
- Odd tale about the perils of misbehaviour.

19. Philippa Pearce - The Dog Got Them
- Dog versus the D.T.s

20. Saki - Gabriel-Ernest
- A story of lycanthropy that begins well and ends poorly.

Philippa Pearce

21. Jan Mark - Nule
- Creepy little tale of anthropomorphism .

22. Jerome K. Jerome - The Dancing Partner
- A robotic take on 'The Red Shoes'.

23. Margaret Bingley - The Ring
- Young girl buys jewellery with a hidden cost.

24. T. H. White - The Troll
- Odd little story of a man confronted by a hungry troll whilst holidaying in Norway.

I'm so pleased they still do anthologies of this type for kids especially ones with this much good stuff but do many young people read Victorian horror?  I hope so.

Classic Tales of Horror

Stephanie Dowrick (ed)
Constable

What we have here is a journey around the world in the hands of a number of very famous and some significantly less so authors of the weird, the macabre and the ghostly.

The book opens with an almost throw-away yet very famous Edgar Allen Poe story about a vengeful 'Black Cat' and then heads off to court and a ghosts attempt to influence proceedings to ensure his murderers conviction in Charles Dickens' 'To Be Taken with a Grain of Salt'.

Wilkie Collins

Irish writer Sheridan Le Fanu's contribution is an odd and slightly pointless tale of a drunks encounter with a ghostly army and a mysterious request.  W. Wilkie Collins was both a contemporary and friend of Charles Dickens and there's a real Dickensian quality to this story of class, poverty and madness.

The books fifth tale, 'The Open Door', by Mrs Margaret Oliphant explores loss and rejection at a Scottish house and our second lady Victorian Elizabeth Braddon provides one of favourites in  'A Cold Embrace' where unwanted love sends an artist to his grave.

Ambrose Bierce's 'Moonlit Road' is an series of overlapping tales telling of wrongful death, madness and ghosts and Henry James makes a very fine contribution with his story of jealousy and greed and finally revenge in 'The Romance of Certain Old Clothes'.

Bram Stoker

Maybe as should be expected the most macabre tale  in the book comes from Bram Stoker.  'The Judge's House' is a great little bloodthirsty tale that tells of a young man assaulted by the shade of the previous inhabitant of the house he's chosen to live in whilst completing his work.

Guy de Maupassant's 'The Hand' is a fun but slight and slightly vague tale that sits in advance of Robert Louis Stevenson's fabulous 'The Body Snatcher' with it's story of murder and comeuppance.

Rocking the most Hammer Horror of titles Francis Marion Crawford's ' The Screaming Skull' takes a fairly cliched idea and with it's first person, one sided dialogue treatment and a it of flair makes it quite fun.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

At this point we hit an absolute revelation of a story, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's fabulous slice of weird as a young wife, perhaps, goes utterly insane in a room covered in 'The Yellow Wall-Paper'. Next we've a classic with M.R. James' glorious 'Lost Hearts' which I surely don't need to tell you about and then we're onto Algernon Blackwood's 'Keeping His Promise' wherein a student receives a visitation from an old friend.

The book ends on a real high with a quick story by H.H. (Saki) Munro that tells a brutal tale of rural horror at the hands or rather pipes of Pan and finally a great piece of shape-shifting horror in Hugh Walpole's 'Tarnhelm'.

I've never been a fan of short story anthologies but over the last year I've got really into these collections of Victorian & Edwardian weirdness and I've found a few absolute gems and this was one of them.

The Daylight Gate

Jeanette Winterson
Hammer

Good Friday, 1612. Pendle Hill, Lancashire.
A mysterious gathering of thirteen people is interrupted by local magistrate, Roger Nowell. Is this a witches' Sabbat?
Two notorious Lancashire witches are already in Lancaster Castle waiting trial. Why is the beautiful and wealthy Alice Nutter defending them? And why is she among the group of thirteen on Pendle Hill?
Elsewhere, a starved, abused child lurks. And a Jesuit priest and former Gunpowder plotter, recently returned from France, is widely rumoured to be heading for Lancashire. But who will offer him sanctuary? And how quickly can he be caught?
This is the reign of James I, a Protestant King with an obsession: to rid his realm of twin evils, witchcraft and Catholicism, at any price...

To my mind Winterson is one of the unsung heroes of current weird and supernatural fiction.  I've been a fairly devoted reader of her work since I was handed a copy of 'Sexing The Cherry' back in 93 / 94.

This latest excursion into the unusual side of life takes us back to Pendle, Lancashire at the time of the witch hunts where the wealthy newcomer Alice Nutter, proud and confident in her rightness and her self and unwilling to kowtow to local bigwigs and their toadies becomes embroiled in the lives of a local family accused of witchcraft.  The reign of James the First is an unhealthy time to have any association with witchcraft or popery and Alice has both.

For much of the narrative Winterson retains a degree of period normality, peopling the cast with uneducated, superstitious peasants, officious religious zealots and people just trying to get along in an uncertain time.  Behind this though there is an undercurrent of magic about which you are left, for much of the novel, uncertain about whether it is real or simply superstition and vain hope.

The book's devastating final act allows us to see beyond the mundane circumstances and as such we are granted an understanding of both Alice and her motivations.

Over the years there have been several of Winterson's novels that have earned a permanent place on my shelves and I'm pleased that this story of humanity at it's most vile, most compassionate and most incredible will be joining them.

Buy it here - The Daylight Gate (Hammer)

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Below is a short snippet from a talk by Winterson about the book.  The full version can be found by clicking here.

Ancient Sorceries and other stories

Algernon Blackwood
Penguin Books

I'm still fairly new to these books of Victorian & Edwardian ghostly / horror / weird fiction that I've been reading on and off over the last year so many of the writers that are considered key to the genres - let alone the more obscure - are still unknown quantities for me.

I've always had a soft spot for the film and TV versions but horror books never were a thing for me (except for a short lived teenage binge on Shaun Hutson books).  So now that I'm giving them a go there are a few names at the top of my hit lists that I've been slowly ticking off;  Blackwood is one of them.

I was pleased to unearth a copy of this in a local charity shop in time to take on holiday to Ireland with me.  I sat and read it in a park in Dublin, a derelict graveyard in Glendalough (see photo), the castle grounds in Kilkenny and it was in my back pocket when I fell down a flight of stairs in Mullingar and broke my leg, arm and rib which kinda put a hold on reading, as did the ensuing operation and couple of months of morphine and frustrating, fidgety recuperation.  But now, two months on from starting it, I've finished the final story.

The book contains 4 short stories, 2 longer ones and each offers up an individual slice of the odd and the creepy.

Algernon Blackwood

Opening proceedings is 'The Empty House' wherein a young man accompanies a curious elder aunt on her ill-conceived nocturnal exploration of the local creepy pile.  He then trumps the whole haunted house idea with an entire haunted island that finds a student terrified by two native Americans on a deserted island.

The third story is my only previous experience of Blackwood, a great little story where a student entertains a visitor from his past in 'Keeping His Promise'.

My favourite story here is up next, 'A Case of Eavedropping' tells of a guest house haunted by echoes of an old crime.

The two remaining stories that make up the back half of the book both feature Blackwood's paranormal investigator Dr. John Silence.  In the first of the pair, 'Ancient Sorceries', he really is little more than the narrator of a tale of love and cats whereas the second has him centre stage investigating strange fiery occurrences at the country residence of a retired soldier in 'The Nemesis of Fire'.

In all a thoroughly enjoyable read that has greatly endeared me to Blackwood.  His prose is significantly less dense than many of his contemporaries and so I found him more readily readable and minor detours into the joys of surgery aside this was a very enjoyable read.

Twins of Evil

This, the third instalment of Hammer's Karnstein Trilogy, is a film that I have adored since before I first saw it. I was already a fan having read the House of Hammer comic adaption by Chris Lowder and Blas Gallego in the early eighties in an 'annual' called 'Dracula's Spinechillers' - the Twins of  Evil strip can be downloaded as a PDF from Alison Nastasi's site here - and absolutely loving it.  When I finally saw the movie it was everything I had hoped for.  Peter Cushing in full vampire slaying mode, debonair and despicable vampires and typically for Hammer at the time beautiful young ladies ripe for defiling.

Predating the two earlier Karnstein movies, Twins of Evil tells of the arrival in the town of Karnstein of orphaned twin sisters Maria (Mary Collinson) and Frieda (Madeleine Collinson) sent to live with their Uncle Gustav (Peter Cushing).  Unfortunately for the twins the town is plagued by two evils, Gustav and his zealous, puritan, witch-hunting 'Brotherhood' and the lascivious then vampiric actions of Count Karnstein (Damien Thomas). There is though the distraction of dashing school teacher Anton Hoffer (David Warbeck).

Cushing is at his fire and brimstone best here playing somewhat against type as a deeply unpleasant man who has been consumed by his beliefs and who can no longer see goodness in the world and refuses to accept anything other than his own 'truths'.  Thomas plays his Count Karnstein as louche and arrogant; brash and overconfident in his taunting of Cushing's Brotherhood, contemptible in his search for vampiric immortality, his callous disregard for others and his corruption of Frieda.  Neither of the Collinson twins display great acting ability but (with a few notable exceptions) this was never a key requirement for Hammer's early 70s leading ladies.

There are, of course, far better made, far better written and far better acted Hammer films but I just really love this one.  It's fast, overblown and fun and is one of a few films I can rely on to entertain me when nothing else is doing the trick. 

Buy it here - Twins of Evil [Blu-ray] - or watch it below.



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Psychomania (1973)

"How do the dead come back mother?  What's the secret?"

If I tell you that the quote up there was my ringtone for a couple of years then you'll know that I am a bit of a fan of this fantastically odd little movie.  Zombies, bikers, Beryl Reid, (a cameo from) John (Sgt. Benton) Levene, black magic, a toad and George Sanders - who incidentally committed suicide not long after leaving a note that read, 'Dear World, I am leaving because I am bored. I feel I have lived long enough. I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool. Good luck.' - it's a veritable tick box of wonderful.

The film tells of Tom Latham (Nicky Henson) the leader of  'The Living Dead' a hell raising biker gang and the son of a satanic witch played admirably against type by the fabulous Beryl Reid (if you dispute the word fabulous then go watch her performance as Connie Sachs in the original 'Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy' TV series).  It is through her and her butler, Shadwell (Sanders) that Tom learns the secret he's asking about above and soon he and his gang are putting it into practice and returning to life to terrorise the locals by killing coppers, trashing supermarkets and driving through walls.

It's a gloriously, wonderfully, joyously, awful film full of hammy performances, cliched dialogue and clunky special effects all held together with silly humour (including characters with names like Hatchet, Gash and Chopped Meat) and a fabulous soundtrack by John Cameron and I absolutely love it!

Perfectly ridiculous horror.

Enjoy

Buy it here - UK / US - or watch it below