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megapolisomancy's review against another edition
2.0
Anthology #2, covering stories published from 1972-1973. Still mostly stinkers; odd choice to pick two each by Ramsey Campbell (one of which merited inclusion) and Brian Lumley (neither of which merited inclusion) and none by any women. That said, worth picking up for "The Events at Poroth Farm" alone, if by some chance you read horror anthologies and don't have multiple copies of it already, and the Brown was a pleasant surprise by an author I didn't know .
Introduced by the one and only Christopher Lee, who dwells briefly on the difference between terror (my thing) and horror (not my thing), unfortunately prevalent in the literature at the time. Good on him.
I read the American version ("Series II") which omits some of the stories in the British version ("No. 2").
David's Worm • Brian Lumley
The 7-year-old son of a nuclear researcher gets his hands on one of his dad's test subjects, a mutant planarian flatworm (a species famously regenerative, and infamously and inaccurately understood to chemically absorb the memories of other flatworms via cannibalism). The mutant flatworm gets loose - surprise - and starts feeding on bigger and bigger prey - surprise, surprise - moving from a minnow to a pike to a dog to, wouldn't you know it, David himself. The prose reads like it was written by someone who has never read another story in his life, not just painfully old-fashioned (I think I made this point in the first year's entry too but this reads like something from the 1930s or '40s) but downright clunky and bizarre:
David's worm had eyes too, two of them, and they were fixed equally firmly on the pike.
David gawked at the way it happened. The fish circled once, making a tight turn around his revolving "prey," then flashed in to the attack at a speed that left David breathless. The boy knew all about this vicious species of fish, especially about the powerful jaws and great teeth; but the pike in question might never have had any teeth at all - might well have been a caviar sandwich - for all Planny worried!
Yes, the worm is named Planny, and yes, "for all Planny worried!" is an inexplicable turn of phrase about a killer mutant flatworm, but I think it's "David gawked at the way it happened" that's really sticking with me - not only is it a filler sentence that adds nothing, but what an inexplicable way to phrase it.
The Price of a Demon • Gary Brandner
There's something to be said for a short short that knows exactly what it wants to be and what generic markers it wants to hit and gets in, does it, and gets out in a modicum of pages. In Encino, a white collar drone's kind of batty wife has gotten into witchcraft and, wouldn't you know it, finds herself chanting spells from the wrong book ("Daemonic Spelles") by the wrong "ancient druid" and starts being bitten by an invisible demon. Brandner conveys her terror well (and the terroir of Southern CA too), and it's nice to find a husband in a horror story who immediately believes his wife and tries to help solve the problem. Sometimes the solution is worse than the problem, though, and the ending conveys that pent-up terror nicely as well - the whole story, indeed, could have devolved into horror and gore quite easily but (thankfully) avoids it.
The Knocker at the Portico • Basil Copper
Opens with a very brief aside about the narrator having found the following manuscript in some old documents: a middle-aged scholar in London describes the course of his life up until the time he marries his beautiful young assistant, has a brief period of happiness, and then falls into turmoil and distress as his magnum opus takes over all of his time and attention. A handsome young doctor falls into the void between the couple, and the stressed-out and suspicious protagonist begins to hear a thunderous knocking at the portico, silent to everyone else, driving him increasingly mad and paranoid. Eventually the wife leaves and the thoroughly-insane scholar kills their housemaid and tracks her down to the doctor's home, crashing thunderously against his door and, wouldn't you know it, catches a glimpse of his decrepit form in a mirror: "THE KNOCKER AT THE PORTICO WAS MYSELF." We then return to the frame "story" (which is all of nine sentences in total) and learn that the knocker died in the doctor's asylum but the narrator is his great-grandson and "just heard the knocking for the first time tonight." This has nothing to do with anything.
Self-conscious pastiche of "The Outsider" with some Poe thrown in for good measure, endless tensionless setup for not a lot of payoff, and the less said about the frame the better.
The Animal Fair • Robert Bloch
Dave, a hitchhiker in Oklahoma, lands in a deserted town before realizing everyone is at a low-rent carnival (not to be confused with the low-rent carnival from Bloch's story in Vol. 1). He's nonplussed by the star attraction, a sickly, pathetic gorilla, and hitchhikes out of town before being picked up by - wouldn't you know it - the head carnie himself, a reactionary ex-stuntman, full of anti-Hollywood and anti-hippie rants, who had made his name portraying animals in the films by wearing authentic skin costumes he butchered and brought back from the bush. That all came to an end when his adopted daughter was assaulted and murdered by a cultish group of hippies she had fallen in with, led by a man named "Dude" (a thinly-fictionalized Charles Manson). The captain took out all of Dude's flunkies, but implies the man himself has escaped. He then relates some nonsense stories about the bush and witch doctors tricking people into thinking they're animals by sewing them into skins and drugging them, all while the gorilla is caged in the back of the truck.
If you know Bloch you know where this is headed but it dodges at the last minute, Dave "not really wanting to stop, because then he'd have to ask the question." I appreciated that, even if I didn't appreciate much of what came before.
Napier Court • Ramsey Campbell
Alma Napier, a sickly young musician, is left home alone by her parents while they go on vacation. They've always infantilized her, and she's a bit of a recluse anyway and always preferred to stay home and focus only on music, which her left-leaning ex-boyfriend (her parents forced their separation because of his lower class station) accuses her of "abdicat[ing] from the human race and its suffering" and lectures her about her ideological shortcomings, as does her best friend, who seems destined to end up with the ex-boyfriend. Alma's also sexually repressed - her flute takes on phallic overtones, and she (and Campbell) draw attention to Michael Caine "sublimating his sex-drive through his saxophone" in Hurry Sundown. A lot going on there, huh? Also, the house is probably haunted, in a classic Campbellian manner of distant narrative asides and subtle wrongness and tricks of the eye, where the former tenant committed suicide and "fade[d] into the house" just as Alma is trying to do. A smart, dense, psychologically-driven haunted house story in the Jacksonian tradition.
Haunts of the Very Rich • T. K. Brown, III
Six rich assholes are on a business jet to a remote resort, so secret they (and the rest of the world) don't even know exactly where it is, which turns out to be a double-edged sword when a storm cuts off power shortly after they arrive and they're utterly isolated. Everything breaks, rots, fails, the staff quit, bandits attack, misery compounds misery, etc etc. Wait - none of them remember how they got on the plane in the first place! Again, you know where this is going, but it zigs and zags a bit, and nails that kind of surreal, existential terror that I love.
Brown just appears to have dabbled in writing short stories, which is a shame, because this one piqued my interest and he had a real knack for pithily summing things up to move the story along where lesser writers would have sunk into needless detail ("Nerves were lacerated; tempers rose and were lost; cruel words were exchanged. By morning, the Dugan marriage had suffered fatal injuries.") He got up to some interesting things outside of writing, though:
"Thomas K. Brown, 82, a retired Howard University German professor who was also a short story author, died of pneumonia July 3 at Mariner Health nursing home in Kensington, MD. Brown taught at Howard University from 1969 to 1985. His fiction appeared in Esquire and Playboy under the pen name T.K. Brown III... Mr. Brown, who was born in Philadelphia, studied German at the University of Munich after Haverford. He worked as a broadcaster for the Office of War Information during World War II and was interpreter at the Nuremberg war crimes trials after the war. In the 1950's and early 60's, he and his wife, Carolyn, owned and managed a resort motel in the Florida Keys."
The Long-Term Residents • Kit Pedler
A biochemist drives from London to a bed and breakfast in the countryside for a much-needed vacation. Everything's a bit odd, especially the proprieter and her "long-termers" who seem to spend all of their time sitting in the common area. The mystery is enjoyable and probes themes of aging and fulfillment and alienation nicely, even as the prose is wooden and the dialogue has a halting, unnatural rhythm to it, and then as always the explanation (mad scientists, old acquintances, "full body transfusions") sucks all the life out of the whole thing.
Like Two White Spiders • Eddy C. Bertin
A first-person confession by an accused murderer in an asylum. He's a lifelong outsider with beautiful hands, but, wouldn't you know it, the hands are evil, and the narrative builds to a hysterical Poe-esque off-screen act of brutality. Well-written and -constructed but utterly impossible to take seriously. Off-handedly placed within the Cthulhu Mythos when the relentless hand-monsters are compared to the Hounds of Tindalos.
The Old Horns • Ramsey Campbell
A very vague short piece about a debauched company picnic at the titular patch of quicksand (the title also referencing pan pipes, satyrs, etc). The protagonist, an erstwhile poet, lends a somewhat irritating voice to the proceedings. Dozing off during a game of hide and seek, he has a dream (?) of awful figures performing some sort of pagan ritual, distorted heads echoing a faced balloon (?) a child saw earlier. A caddish member of the group goes missing (who initially praised paganism, which the narrator counters dragged you down and "rotted you") and the poet tries to find him. There's a lot of the moon and flies and mud and paganism and rot and strangled singing/screaming/music and bloated heads or decapitated heads or rotted faces in the mud. I don't know.
Both Campbell tales here end with offset single lines that seem to be intended to be pithy or snappy ("Only in dreams can houses scream for help." and "Poetry had won.") but neither works particularly well.
Haggopian • Brian Lumley
A cartoonishly fawning reporter gets to interview a famous ichthyologist - shades of Jacques Cousteau, intentionally, and, unintentionally and unfortunately for my ability to take the story seriously, Troy McClure. Not that the story needed much help in that regard, it's a drawn-out ode to Innsmouth and Lumley's puppyish enthusiasm for abandoning humanity for the freaks and the weird of HPL's lost aeons and Deep Ones and pockets of atavism. Haggopian, it turns out, was fed on by a supernatural hagfish for a while and is now a half-human half-fish vampire, complete with vampire brides and a hagfish, uh, organ jutting from his torso:
"You see, Mr. Belton, I had developed-yes, an organ! An appendage, a snout-like thing had grown out of my stomach, with a tiny hole at its end like a second navel!"
No comment.
There are a lot of exclamation points in this story.
The Events at Poroth Farm • T. E. D. Klein
Not much that hasn't already been said about this one, an utter classic of the field you've probably read - and if you haven't, what are you waiting for? Here's what I wrote one of the other times I read it:
In which an eldritch spirit possesses a cat and learns to be evil by reading horror fiction.
Inspired, in more ways than one, by Machen’s “The White People,” as our hapless grad student protagonist relocates to a farm in rural New Jersey for some summer reading for a course he’s putting together on the Gothic tradition. Everything is disconcerting, but what is really Wrong, and what is due to our narrator’s increasingly-unreliable state of mind? He seems to be kind of an addled sort anyway, and is on top of that an urban intellectual surrounded by nature and religious country folk, breathing in copious amount of industrial-strength insecticide, out of his element in every imaginable way, reading the most terrifying fiction that the world has produced, seeing and hearing things that shouldn’t be there…
An interesting counterpoint to Straub’s Ghost Story (1979), both Machen-inspired modern tales of horror and metafiction and monsters with a sense of humor.
As with the Campbell, I loved the blink-and-you'll-miss-it references to things awry and portentous.
Introduced by the one and only Christopher Lee, who dwells briefly on the difference between terror (my thing) and horror (not my thing), unfortunately prevalent in the literature at the time. Good on him.
I read the American version ("Series II") which omits some of the stories in the British version ("No. 2").
David's Worm • Brian Lumley
The 7-year-old son of a nuclear researcher gets his hands on one of his dad's test subjects, a mutant planarian flatworm (a species famously regenerative, and infamously and inaccurately understood to chemically absorb the memories of other flatworms via cannibalism). The mutant flatworm gets loose - surprise - and starts feeding on bigger and bigger prey - surprise, surprise - moving from a minnow to a pike to a dog to, wouldn't you know it, David himself. The prose reads like it was written by someone who has never read another story in his life, not just painfully old-fashioned (I think I made this point in the first year's entry too but this reads like something from the 1930s or '40s) but downright clunky and bizarre:
David's worm had eyes too, two of them, and they were fixed equally firmly on the pike.
David gawked at the way it happened. The fish circled once, making a tight turn around his revolving "prey," then flashed in to the attack at a speed that left David breathless. The boy knew all about this vicious species of fish, especially about the powerful jaws and great teeth; but the pike in question might never have had any teeth at all - might well have been a caviar sandwich - for all Planny worried!
Yes, the worm is named Planny, and yes, "for all Planny worried!" is an inexplicable turn of phrase about a killer mutant flatworm, but I think it's "David gawked at the way it happened" that's really sticking with me - not only is it a filler sentence that adds nothing, but what an inexplicable way to phrase it.
The Price of a Demon • Gary Brandner
There's something to be said for a short short that knows exactly what it wants to be and what generic markers it wants to hit and gets in, does it, and gets out in a modicum of pages. In Encino, a white collar drone's kind of batty wife has gotten into witchcraft and, wouldn't you know it, finds herself chanting spells from the wrong book ("Daemonic Spelles") by the wrong "ancient druid" and starts being bitten by an invisible demon. Brandner conveys her terror well (and the terroir of Southern CA too), and it's nice to find a husband in a horror story who immediately believes his wife and tries to help solve the problem. Sometimes the solution is worse than the problem, though, and the ending conveys that pent-up terror nicely as well - the whole story, indeed, could have devolved into horror and gore quite easily but (thankfully) avoids it.
The Knocker at the Portico • Basil Copper
Opens with a very brief aside about the narrator having found the following manuscript in some old documents: a middle-aged scholar in London describes the course of his life up until the time he marries his beautiful young assistant, has a brief period of happiness, and then falls into turmoil and distress as his magnum opus takes over all of his time and attention. A handsome young doctor falls into the void between the couple, and the stressed-out and suspicious protagonist begins to hear a thunderous knocking at the portico, silent to everyone else, driving him increasingly mad and paranoid. Eventually the wife leaves and the thoroughly-insane scholar kills their housemaid and tracks her down to the doctor's home, crashing thunderously against his door and, wouldn't you know it, catches a glimpse of his decrepit form in a mirror: "THE KNOCKER AT THE PORTICO WAS MYSELF." We then return to the frame "story" (which is all of nine sentences in total) and learn that the knocker died in the doctor's asylum but the narrator is his great-grandson and "just heard the knocking for the first time tonight." This has nothing to do with anything.
Self-conscious pastiche of "The Outsider" with some Poe thrown in for good measure, endless tensionless setup for not a lot of payoff, and the less said about the frame the better.
The Animal Fair • Robert Bloch
Dave, a hitchhiker in Oklahoma, lands in a deserted town before realizing everyone is at a low-rent carnival (not to be confused with the low-rent carnival from Bloch's story in Vol. 1). He's nonplussed by the star attraction, a sickly, pathetic gorilla, and hitchhikes out of town before being picked up by - wouldn't you know it - the head carnie himself, a reactionary ex-stuntman, full of anti-Hollywood and anti-hippie rants, who had made his name portraying animals in the films by wearing authentic skin costumes he butchered and brought back from the bush. That all came to an end when his adopted daughter was assaulted and murdered by a cultish group of hippies she had fallen in with, led by a man named "Dude" (a thinly-fictionalized Charles Manson). The captain took out all of Dude's flunkies, but implies the man himself has escaped. He then relates some nonsense stories about the bush and witch doctors tricking people into thinking they're animals by sewing them into skins and drugging them, all while the gorilla is caged in the back of the truck.
If you know Bloch you know where this is headed but it dodges at the last minute, Dave "not really wanting to stop, because then he'd have to ask the question." I appreciated that, even if I didn't appreciate much of what came before.
Napier Court • Ramsey Campbell
Alma Napier, a sickly young musician, is left home alone by her parents while they go on vacation. They've always infantilized her, and she's a bit of a recluse anyway and always preferred to stay home and focus only on music, which her left-leaning ex-boyfriend (her parents forced their separation because of his lower class station) accuses her of "abdicat[ing] from the human race and its suffering" and lectures her about her ideological shortcomings, as does her best friend, who seems destined to end up with the ex-boyfriend. Alma's also sexually repressed - her flute takes on phallic overtones, and she (and Campbell) draw attention to Michael Caine "sublimating his sex-drive through his saxophone" in Hurry Sundown. A lot going on there, huh? Also, the house is probably haunted, in a classic Campbellian manner of distant narrative asides and subtle wrongness and tricks of the eye, where the former tenant committed suicide and "fade[d] into the house" just as Alma is trying to do. A smart, dense, psychologically-driven haunted house story in the Jacksonian tradition.
Haunts of the Very Rich • T. K. Brown, III
Six rich assholes are on a business jet to a remote resort, so secret they (and the rest of the world) don't even know exactly where it is, which turns out to be a double-edged sword when a storm cuts off power shortly after they arrive and they're utterly isolated. Everything breaks, rots, fails, the staff quit, bandits attack, misery compounds misery, etc etc. Wait - none of them remember how they got on the plane in the first place! Again, you know where this is going, but it zigs and zags a bit, and nails that kind of surreal, existential terror that I love.
Brown just appears to have dabbled in writing short stories, which is a shame, because this one piqued my interest and he had a real knack for pithily summing things up to move the story along where lesser writers would have sunk into needless detail ("Nerves were lacerated; tempers rose and were lost; cruel words were exchanged. By morning, the Dugan marriage had suffered fatal injuries.") He got up to some interesting things outside of writing, though:
"Thomas K. Brown, 82, a retired Howard University German professor who was also a short story author, died of pneumonia July 3 at Mariner Health nursing home in Kensington, MD. Brown taught at Howard University from 1969 to 1985. His fiction appeared in Esquire and Playboy under the pen name T.K. Brown III... Mr. Brown, who was born in Philadelphia, studied German at the University of Munich after Haverford. He worked as a broadcaster for the Office of War Information during World War II and was interpreter at the Nuremberg war crimes trials after the war. In the 1950's and early 60's, he and his wife, Carolyn, owned and managed a resort motel in the Florida Keys."
The Long-Term Residents • Kit Pedler
A biochemist drives from London to a bed and breakfast in the countryside for a much-needed vacation. Everything's a bit odd, especially the proprieter and her "long-termers" who seem to spend all of their time sitting in the common area. The mystery is enjoyable and probes themes of aging and fulfillment and alienation nicely, even as the prose is wooden and the dialogue has a halting, unnatural rhythm to it, and then as always the explanation (mad scientists, old acquintances, "full body transfusions") sucks all the life out of the whole thing.
Like Two White Spiders • Eddy C. Bertin
A first-person confession by an accused murderer in an asylum. He's a lifelong outsider with beautiful hands, but, wouldn't you know it, the hands are evil, and the narrative builds to a hysterical Poe-esque off-screen act of brutality. Well-written and -constructed but utterly impossible to take seriously. Off-handedly placed within the Cthulhu Mythos when the relentless hand-monsters are compared to the Hounds of Tindalos.
The Old Horns • Ramsey Campbell
A very vague short piece about a debauched company picnic at the titular patch of quicksand (the title also referencing pan pipes, satyrs, etc). The protagonist, an erstwhile poet, lends a somewhat irritating voice to the proceedings. Dozing off during a game of hide and seek, he has a dream (?) of awful figures performing some sort of pagan ritual, distorted heads echoing a faced balloon (?) a child saw earlier. A caddish member of the group goes missing (who initially praised paganism, which the narrator counters dragged you down and "rotted you") and the poet tries to find him. There's a lot of the moon and flies and mud and paganism and rot and strangled singing/screaming/music and bloated heads or decapitated heads or rotted faces in the mud. I don't know.
Both Campbell tales here end with offset single lines that seem to be intended to be pithy or snappy ("Only in dreams can houses scream for help." and "Poetry had won.") but neither works particularly well.
Haggopian • Brian Lumley
A cartoonishly fawning reporter gets to interview a famous ichthyologist - shades of Jacques Cousteau, intentionally, and, unintentionally and unfortunately for my ability to take the story seriously, Troy McClure. Not that the story needed much help in that regard, it's a drawn-out ode to Innsmouth and Lumley's puppyish enthusiasm for abandoning humanity for the freaks and the weird of HPL's lost aeons and Deep Ones and pockets of atavism. Haggopian, it turns out, was fed on by a supernatural hagfish for a while and is now a half-human half-fish vampire, complete with vampire brides and a hagfish, uh, organ jutting from his torso:
"You see, Mr. Belton, I had developed-yes, an organ! An appendage, a snout-like thing had grown out of my stomach, with a tiny hole at its end like a second navel!"
No comment.
There are a lot of exclamation points in this story.
The Events at Poroth Farm • T. E. D. Klein
Not much that hasn't already been said about this one, an utter classic of the field you've probably read - and if you haven't, what are you waiting for? Here's what I wrote one of the other times I read it:
In which an eldritch spirit possesses a cat and learns to be evil by reading horror fiction.
Inspired, in more ways than one, by Machen’s “The White People,” as our hapless grad student protagonist relocates to a farm in rural New Jersey for some summer reading for a course he’s putting together on the Gothic tradition. Everything is disconcerting, but what is really Wrong, and what is due to our narrator’s increasingly-unreliable state of mind? He seems to be kind of an addled sort anyway, and is on top of that an urban intellectual surrounded by nature and religious country folk, breathing in copious amount of industrial-strength insecticide, out of his element in every imaginable way, reading the most terrifying fiction that the world has produced, seeing and hearing things that shouldn’t be there…
An interesting counterpoint to Straub’s Ghost Story (1979), both Machen-inspired modern tales of horror and metafiction and monsters with a sense of humor.
As with the Campbell, I loved the blink-and-you'll-miss-it references to things awry and portentous.
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