Edited by Herbert van Thal
236 pages, Pan Books
Review by Pat Black
(Crypt door creaks open)
Like any movie nasty, we’re back when you least expect
it, with more Pan Horror…
Scary dots, I love these. The sinister ellipses… And then
the italics!
Your yucky cover: After the previous effort’s bizarre Halloween disco/
goofy mummy/ “Grandad’s had an accident!” number, we’re back to something
slightly more serious.
It looks like a clay sculpture of a bald bloke,
perhaps a study of a Roman emperor, minus laurels. He has been decorated with a
variety of invertebrates – a few earthworms, a centipede, a wasp and what could
be a locust. The figure doesn’t look too bothered about his forest friends. As
far as it goes, this one isn’t very disturbing.
This book first appeared in 1969, the year future
historians will probably refer to as the
high watermark of American scientific, cultural, economic and military power. The
year of the first moon landing, of Tricky Dicky being in the Oval Office with
no apparent signs of trouble, and the zenith of flower power. This latter phenomenon
might have been linked to the counterculture and a revolt against power that
crossed international boundaries, but it was unmistakably American. Soft power crystallizes into hard power, over time.
This was before Woodstock turned into Altamont. When
we still had Jim, Jimi, Janis and all the rest, and as far anyone knew, The
Beatles were still together and making records.
It couldn’t last, though. The peak came and went. The
counterculture was about to experience a comedown, and it would be brutal. This
was the point, according to Hunter S Thompson, when the surging wave broke and
rolled back. Welcome to the 1970s.
Free love might have been in the air in 1969, but
openness, permissiveness and tolerance isn’t much in evidence in this
collection. Most of the stories concern infidelity, jealousy, and bitter, nasty
revenges taken as a result. If sexual liberation is one side of the coin, then
this is the other: teeth clenched, eyes bulging, quivering with impotent,
psychotic rage.
It’s a step away from more outlandish and dated gothic
concerns, and there is something to be applauded in that. Grim and grubby as it
is, much of this book concerns earthly horrors, and on occasion, it strays into
the territory of Things That Might Really Happen. But I can get a belly full of
that. Sometimes I’m OK with good old ghosties and monsters.
The opener is “The Acid Test”, by Chris Murray. It
features a dastardly plot after a young woman makes a successful play for a
rival’s date on a night out. The spurned party, Paula - who we are told has
“Sicilian blood” - enlists the services of some goons to capture Marie and make
her suffer for her impertinence.
The punishment is a quick dip in a bath of acid. Paula
is stripped, dangled from the ceiling and leered over by the heavies who kidnap
her. The story has a sleazy atmosphere without explicitly detailing Marie’s body
– the kind of eroticism a teenager might dream up.
How the story works out is a little cheesy, even down
to the unexpectedly positive ending. But it’s a pacy opener, and it sets the
tone for the rest of the book: some cheating, some flesh, and some torture.
AGJ Rough, a series regular, returns with “Something
In The Cellar”. That something is a cheating wife, who is chained up down there
by her husband after he catches her in bed with another man. She is walled up
for good measure, left with an oxygen supply and just enough food and water to
survive his long business trip abroad. That’ll teach her, he thinks.
However, the husband has a serious car accident, and
ends up in a coma. One year later, he returns to his house to see what’s
happening down in the cellar…
No cheating spouses in John Christopher’s “Ringing
Tone”, but there is a sleazy bloke. To the outside world, he’s a retired
military man, unmarried and referred to as a “bachelor” without any
connotations attached. Someone well-liked in his community, a familiar face often
to be seen with a half-pint at the pub near his house.
However, he has a secret hobby - looking up the names
of women in phone books, and then making obscene calls.
“Phone books? Huh?”
He gets all kinds of responses. Some of the women hang
up, some are stunned, some are furious, some are fascinated, and some are totally
into it. There’s one victim, however, who gives him pause – a
desperate-sounding young woman who implores him not to hang up.
This is a disturbing story, but it could have been
published anywhere – it’s a tragedy as much as an outright horror tale, and one
that leaves you wondering about the fate of the people on either end of the
line once the connection is cut. I will remember this one.
Dulcie Gray, now, a familiar name from the early Pans
alongside MS Waddell. “The Necklace” puts us in nasty, uncomfortable territory,
showing us a young man with learning difficulties who is sent away to a special
school, relieving a terrible, shameful pressure on his parents. When he comes
back from his residential term, he has a surprise for mummy and daddy. This one
was all wrong, and probably wouldn’t be written today. Turn the page at your
own risk…
Walter Winward’s “Self-Employed” places us back in the
realm of cheats given their come-uppance. It sees another middle-of-the-road
bloke who marries poorly. He’s in denial about his wife’s infidelity, until he
catches her in the act. There is a lot of this in the Pans, but this
volume seems particularly riddled with it.
She’s punished, but not in the way you imagine. You
won’t guess the twist, but it isn’t particularly clever, and the “revenge”
moment was less psychotic but somehow more distasteful than the guy who left his
wife in the cellar earlier on.
Rosemary Timperley is one of the Pans’ most respected
authors – a Rolls-Royce in a sea of Austin Princesses. But guess what? She
writes here about infidelity, and revenge.
“Supper With Martha” concerns a married man happily cheating
on his wife. His mistress is fun, exciting and dangerous, while Martha is dull,
dowdy and conventional. But - unfortunately for him, and especially for his
mistress - Martha isn’t daft.
You’ll see the twist coming – if you didn’t clock on
with regards to the title immediately - once Martha offers to cook supper for
her husband, but it’s still a cracking read. Great writers can do that, no
matter what kind of tale they want to tell, no matter what kind of anthology.
No infidelity in “Punishment By Proxy”, by James
Connelly, but there are some infidels, and lots of sexual propriety. This is a
kind of story which crops up in the genre now and again – Roald Dahl’s story
about the guy whose car breaks down on a desert road is one of them – in which
white men are invited into the house of a rich Arab, and are granted sexual
favours with women under his roof. Part of his harem, one supposes. Until relatively
recently, this wouldn’t have seemed that racist. But there is a streak of
unpleasantness in it, as the white adventurers find a sense of honour and
grandeur once the stakes are raised, with only an oblique reference to their
hypocrisy. This is dodgy territory.
Two oil executives are sent to tie up a deal with a sheikh
from a fictional country. On a tour of his opulent house, they are shown a
line-up of naked women, and asked to choose which one they would like to sleep
with. After they’ve made their choice, the sheikh asks them which part of the
woman’s body they liked best. After the reasons for this become clear, our two
trusty heroes become, eh, heroic. There’s a fight and a desperate flight for
freedom. But they have a big problem: the younger sister of one of the men, who
has come along for what she thinks is an exotic shopping trip, didn’t get the
flight home.
A perfectly readable story, but nasty in ways that it
probably didn’t intend. It trades on the fear of the other – painting him as a
savage, despite his riches; a man of barbarous customs, at odds with the de
facto decency of white western culture. Some regimes do qualify on this score
for barbarity, of course, but stereotypy helps no-one, and this sense of the
corrupt, decadent alien underpins just about every tuppence ha’penny piece of
anti-Arab racism you’ve ever heard. And if you think the western business
community are strangers to degeneracy, then I could tell you one or two horror
stories.
Frances Stephens’ “The End of the Line” was a welcome change
of gear. A troubled young woman is drawn towards a boarded-up old railway
tunnel. Something terrible happened there – something to do with a baby, maybe
hers, maybe someone else’s. It’s a disturbing look into a disordered mind and
toxic thought processes. The kind of story I would have thought was a throwaway
if I’d read it as a teenager, but I now know this is uncomfortably close to
true horror.
And now we’re at the obligatory MS Waddell, with his
or her usual foray into grubby, ironic territory. “The Fat Thing” sees a strange
creature feasting on people who are overweight. It’s slimy, leaving a viscous,
filmy trail wherever it goes. Despite this it can mimic humans, getting close
enough to gain their trust before snaffling them. There’s a nursery rhyme theme
which has barely been thought through, and isn’t worth examining. The narrator
– who is, gasps, revealed to be The Fat Thing – stalks prey based on verse such
as Little Jack Horner and Old Mother Hubbard. The author all but admits he is
winging it, at one point. What a scream it all is. Imagine, me sitting here
writing this story with no idea how to go on! I think I’ll write that down. It’s
ironic, you see? You see?
Imagine getting paid for that.
I get that the editor might have wanted to shift the
tone and introduce some comic relief, but it seems forced. This story is tone
deaf, inexplicably pleased with itself, betrays a nasty sense of disgust about
overweight people, and is an acquired taste at best.
Two good ‘uns in a row, now. First, “The Flatmate”, by B Lynn Barber. I did wonder if the B was redundant, and whether this was the famous interviewer Lynn Barber. The story takes the form of a series of diary entries by a young girl after she moves into a flat, a couple of weeks after the previous occupant killed himself. It shows us the tragedy of a lonely, fanciful person as she makes what she thinks is a spiritual connection with the dead man – and then tries to right some wrongs on his behalf. It’s a nasty tale with a bloody conclusion, but skilfully done. You never lose sympathy for the dead man or the delusional girl.
After that, snowbound frolics with “The Ski-Lift”, by
Diana Buttenshaw. A European skiing setting gives it the crisp, clear sense of
a fairy tale. All that’s missing is the wolves.
It’s about two lifelong friends on a skiing holiday who
find themselves at odds over a girl. When they find out that the object of
their desires is actually staying at the same Alpine resort, with a man who
might be her cousin, but probably isn’t, Werner and Klaus both decide they will
catch up with her to check if the story is true. But it’s getting late, and the
ski lift is about to close for the night.
One of them decides to make a very large bet against
evolution by climbing a pylon and jumping on one of the last of the chairs before
they disappear over the mountain. The other follows, and they both make it. But
the ski-lift suddenly stops in mid-air for the night, the slopes are deserted, it’s
extremely cold, and, yes, you know where this one is going.
What fascinates me is that it’s quite a short story, told
economically. You get all the backstory and details over with quite quickly,
and the author is not afraid to tell, rather than show. It never goes off-piste.
No detail is spared in the grim conclusion, though. A nasty treat.
A sign of the times, now – CA Cooper’s “Magical
Mystery Trip” has the Beatles on its mind – it even quotes I Am The Walrus. The
band stomp as they play inside your cortex, distorting it with sound waves
which roll and break in red and purple crystal shards on an amethyst sea while
tiny green spiders with ruby eyes surf towards shore, giggling –
You get the idea. This sees a young man on an LSD
trip, plagued with waking dreams of nightmarish things. The acid hallucinations
are quite convincing. Toes become fire engines. People’s faces go on fire.
Giant crabs fill the sky. This would be bad enough if he’d chosen this
experience for himself, but he has no idea how it happened. It seems he has
been spiked by his friend.
The trip doesn’t end. Day after day after day, more
and more and more nightmares, while life goes on as usual outside his
perception bubble.
Much like the peculiar sexual morality we see
elsewhere in the book, this story sees the Pans saddling up a high horse. The
warning about psychedelic drugs – and this was 1969, remember – couldn’t be
clearer. Whatever you might think about this
finger being wagged in your face, the main character’s predicament is an
absolute nightmare.
Frances Stephens’ second entry with “Pussy Cat Pussy
Cat” next, a depressing but well-constructed tale of baby-meets-cat domestic horror.
The main character is alone in the house with a newborn baby and her older son.
The latter wants to keep a stray cat that keeps showing up. The mother’s every
instinct tells her to chase this creature – correctly.
Like the same author’s “The End Of The Line” above,
this story was plausible, and much more affecting when read as an adult than it
would have been had I discovered it as a teenager. I found the closing lines
difficult to stomach. “That’s why they call it ‘Horror Stories’, Pat.”
David Lewis’ “Long Silence, Old Man” sees a grown man
visiting his elderly father. The story would seem to be set in Mexico, going by
the characters’ names, but I could be guilty of an appalling assumption. Manolo
is bringing his new wife to visit his dad at his remote desert shack. It is
crudely implied that Manolo has some psychological problems which affect him in
the bedroom with his bride. This has its roots in some awful behaviour from the
old man, cruel punishments meted out to Manolo when he was just a boy. Manolo
decides to pay his father back, plus interest. It’s not quite therapy, but it
is therapeutic.
This was a grim, but also very sad story. A reminder
that an unkind family home is a nursery for monsters.
Now a curious one, William Sinclair’s “The Terror of Two Hundred Below”. The title suggests a monster mash, with some deadly creature haunting an ice cavern or the depths of the ocean. Instead, it’s a science-hates-you tale, with the title referring to temperature.
This is a bad story with a decent idea at its centre. It
starts with the main character fleeing down dark streets (this is in Glasgow –
it’s not the last story in the book to be set there). She meets a man, and begs
him for help. The baddies are chasing her. The good knight takes her home to
his flat, makes her a cup of tea, and then listens to her story.
She is a scientist, part of a group that won a huge
research grant prize, snatching it from under the nose of the man who was
widely expected to win. It’s fair to say he is upset about this.
After a series of totally implausible and deadly episodes,
she ends up working for the guy who took second prize. You’d think this lassie’s
every instinct would be telling her to keep this man as far away as possible,
but no. Perhaps she doesn’t realise she’s in a horror story.
At the naughty scientist’s Highland research
laboratory, she discovers the Awful Truth about his Unethical Experiments. Her
grim fate is laid out for her. But she escapes. And then, oh dear…
There’s a lot of things to pick at here. The dialogue
is terrible – the story is told by the main character as direct quoted speech,
but it doesn’t resemble anything that would come out of the mouth of a real
person, outside of an Ealing comedy. Some of the events are truly horrible –
she’s raped, and while there is no explicit detail, the way it’s described as
an afterthought is dreadful, whether this story is read in 1970 or 2020. The
central fate laid out for the main character is admittedly (yep, I went there) chilling.
It’s not a very good story, though.
Next up, an all-but-forgotten writer whose work
fascinates me. Dorothy K Haynes’ previous two stories for the Pans were brilliant
– historical tales set in Scotland, concerning witchcraft, the second sight, and
diabolical coincidence. “The Bean-nighe” and “Thou Shalt Not Suffer A Witch”
were so good they had me searching for other work by this forgotten writer. She’s
been out of print for a good while. “The Cure” reaffirms my belief that this is
a mistake.
We’re back in a Scottish village, not in the present
day, which sees a young man with unspecified issues and his mother being
offered up to the judgement of the town. The father was hanged, and his body is
still swaying in the wind, after a sentencing which many thought was harsh.
According to old superstitions, the touch of a hanged man can cure a person of
their ailments. The fact that the person requiring the cure is the dead man’s
son adds a bit more flavour to a pungent recipe.
Haynes is very, very good. She touches on many themes familiar
from Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” – the corrosive quality of back stoop
gossip, and its close relationship with irrationality.
Alex Hamilton’s “Image of the Damned” sees a genius
waxwork artist creating his masterpiece, in the form of a notorious rake,
shagger and gambler who is about to be executed. The condemned man hatches an
outrageous plot to escape the gallows, which no-one in their right minds would
fall for. This story is silly but it is very well told indeed, with a tone
befitting its chief character.
Norman P Kaufman’s “A Sharp Loss of Weight” sees a man
imprisoned for a crime he didn’t commit released from jail, and on the lookout
for the man who framed him. There’s a bit of a twist involving revenge already
being taken on someone else’s behalf, but this story is an odd ‘un. I want to
say that “it goes to show that events usually end up paying horrible people
back”, but I know that this is wishful thinking.
Desmond Stewart’s “An Experiment In Choice” sees a man
waking up at the top of a huge chimney. He is informed that he has a choice to
make, as part of a psychological experiment: jump to the ground on the outside
of the chimney, or make the leap into the darkness inside. So, it’s certain
death, or uncertain, but probable death. In case he thinks he can just stay
where he is and pray for rescue, a steel blade begins to rise beneath him.
Think fast. What would you do?
Robert Duncan’s “The Evil One” takes us back to
Glasgow, and sees a woman at a party having sex with a man she is irresistibly
drawn to. She’s betrothed to someone else, but that hardly seems significant.
After the deed is done, she takes a look at the sleeping man under the sheets,
and complete and utter madness follows.
This story has the framing of horror, but it’s about something
else altogether. It’s got nothing to do with madness or diabolism, but is all
to do with a woman having good sex with someone she isn’t meant to. Freud noted
how closely horror stories are linked to sexuality – almost a continuum – and
with many of the stories here in mind, it’s difficult to disagree. It also fits
in with the distinctly Calvinist tone of this volume.
Joan Aiken’s “Marmalade Wine” sees a chap taking a walk
in the woods, and happening upon the arboreal bolthole of a famous surgeon.
They get talking, and the surgeon offers him a drop of the stuff in the title.
It’s awfully good, but wasn’t the surgeon in the news for something a little
while ago? Oh, mate.
Finally, it’s “Monkey Business” by John Arthur. A
British guide in Singapore takes an obnoxious American tourist out to see the
sights. There are two thick strands of racism here – we’re back to the type of
stuff we saw in the Arabian harem above, with strange, warped customs, set at
odds with the supposed decency of white people. Well… when I say “white people”,
I mean “English people”, because the second piece of racism is at the expense
of Americans - portrayed as brash, fat, greedy and uncultured. This is a lazy
stereotype alongside the mean Arab or the treacherous Oriental, and we
shouldn’t tolerate it either.
That said, the story is an utter shocker, truly
horrifying. It would have been very easy to hint at the loud American’s fate,
and leave him to it – but John Arthur goes there, and then some.
It reminds me of something George A Romero said about
Night Of The Living Dead, which also appeared in 1969. He was used to horror
films that showed you the shadow of the knife rising and falling, then a cut,
and then a body on the floor, and maybe a drop or two of blood. But George
wanted to show you the knife going in, and the blood pouring out. That’s
similar to the stunning final paragraphs of this story.
It was a fitting capper to one of the best of the
Pans. I have far too many books to read, and also one or two to write, so who
knows when the Pans will be back here? But never fear… they’ll be back!
(crypt door slams shut)
236 pages, Pan Books
Two good ‘uns in a row, now. First, “The Flatmate”, by B Lynn Barber. I did wonder if the B was redundant, and whether this was the famous interviewer Lynn Barber. The story takes the form of a series of diary entries by a young girl after she moves into a flat, a couple of weeks after the previous occupant killed himself. It shows us the tragedy of a lonely, fanciful person as she makes what she thinks is a spiritual connection with the dead man – and then tries to right some wrongs on his behalf. It’s a nasty tale with a bloody conclusion, but skilfully done. You never lose sympathy for the dead man or the delusional girl.
Now a curious one, William Sinclair’s “The Terror of Two Hundred Below”. The title suggests a monster mash, with some deadly creature haunting an ice cavern or the depths of the ocean. Instead, it’s a science-hates-you tale, with the title referring to temperature.
