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Spine-Chillers: Unforgettable Tales of Terror
A collection of horror stories by a variety of English and American authors.
CONTENTS
Teig O'Kane And The Corpse by traditional
The Fortunes Of Martin Waldeck by Walter Scott
The Soul Cages by Thomas Crofton Croker
A Musical Enigma by Christopher Pearse Cranch
The Demon Cat by Lady Wilde
What Was It? by Fitz-James O'Brien
The Phantom Coach by Amelia Blandford Edwards
The Vampire of Croglin Grange by Augustus Hare
Dracula's Guest by Bram Stoker
Pallinghurst Barrow by Grant Allen
The Boy Who Drew Cats by Lafcadio Hearn
The Upper Berth by F. Marion Crawford
The Witch Of The Marsh by Ethel Marriott-Watson
Black Magic by Jessie Adelaide Middleton
Running Wolf by Algernon Blackwood
The Horse Of The Invisible by William Hope Hodgson
The Weed Men by William Hope Hodgson
The Transition Trolley by Joseph Howell
Problem Child by Brian Lumley
Moonglow by Steve Barnes
Night Prowler by Roger Elwood
The Undead by Roger Elwood
Tarantula by Howard Goldsmith
CONTENTS
Teig O'Kane And The Corpse by traditional
The Fortunes Of Martin Waldeck by Walter Scott
The Soul Cages by Thomas Crofton Croker
A Musical Enigma by Christopher Pearse Cranch
The Demon Cat by Lady Wilde
What Was It? by Fitz-James O'Brien
The Phantom Coach by Amelia Blandford Edwards
The Vampire of Croglin Grange by Augustus Hare
Dracula's Guest by Bram Stoker
Pallinghurst Barrow by Grant Allen
The Boy Who Drew Cats by Lafcadio Hearn
The Upper Berth by F. Marion Crawford
The Witch Of The Marsh by Ethel Marriott-Watson
Black Magic by Jessie Adelaide Middleton
Running Wolf by Algernon Blackwood
The Horse Of The Invisible by William Hope Hodgson
The Weed Men by William Hope Hodgson
The Transition Trolley by Joseph Howell
Problem Child by Brian Lumley
Moonglow by Steve Barnes
Night Prowler by Roger Elwood
The Undead by Roger Elwood
Tarantula by Howard Goldsmith
397 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1978
About the author
Roger Elwood
182 books32 followersRoger Elwood was an American science fiction writer and editor, perhaps best known for having edited a large number of anthologies and collections for a variety of publishers in the early 1970s. Elwood was also the founding editor of Laser Books and, in more recent years, worked in the evangelical Christian market.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
September 20, 2021
FIRST TIER
As collections of classic stuff go, this is pretty par for the course, with a few modern oddities salted in near the end (for whatever reason). As it turns out, I considered roughly half the stories "good" or better, so I guess that makes it a solid "liked it" - because anthologies are always a grab bag.
SECOND TIER
Keeping an endless spreadsheet of what I've already read (and what I thought of it) comes in handy for books like this. Because, as I did my usual prep before starting, I discovered that I had already read fully half of this book already (13 of the 23 stories offered here). Granted, I needed to do a few re-reads (because I had no extant Goodreads review for a few stories), but knowing what I had already spent time on accelerated my way through this collection. And it's a typical assortment of "the usual suspects", with the editor throwing in a few pieces by himself and contemporaries near the end.
THIRD TIER
As usual, week to strong. There were only two actual duds here. Roger Elwood's "The Undead" is a simplistically told story of dead grandparents who practiced black magic and are trying to claim the rest of their family. Eh. Read like it was written for a juvenile audience. Meanwhile, "Tarantula" by Howard Goldsmith is a briskly (sloppily) written piece of modern pulp where a dashing young doctor must face off against an evil spider-guy. Eh
In the just "okay" arena were "A Musical Enigma" by C.P. Cranch - which I did not reread, "Lady Wilde's "The Demon Cat" (a stripped down Irish folktale about a demonic feline, no great shakes), "Black Magic" by Jessie Adelaide Middleton (a British woman in India gives a leering beggar a substitute when he requests a lock of her hair, which leads to the rug acting strangely when he uses it for magic). And Steve Barnes' "Moonglow" is about a werewolf who falls in love with a witch. Nicely written but...eh.
Of the "good but slightly flawed" stories, we've got "The Fortunes Of Martin Waldeck" by Walter Scott (a German folktale about a wood-giant whose bestowed gifts of fortune always seem to bring bad luck and ruin - and Waldeck is no exception. Nicely done, with lots of good folklore detail), "The Boy Who Drew Cats" by Lafcadio Hearn (one of Hearn's Japanese folk sketches, here involving an artistic boy who is thrown out as a priest's acolyte because he has a compulsion to sketch cats, and what happens when he shelters in an abandoned temple inhabited by a goblin. A light and easy sketch, like much Hearn work), Algernon Blackwood's "Running Wolf" (I upgraded this on the reread. A man visits a remote "medicine" lake in Canada to fish, and can't seem to shake the attentions of a lone wolf. While, in the end, a typical "unsettled ghost" story, this time around I was able to appreciate Blackwood's skill at scene setting - almost a British Jack London- and atmosphere), "The Weed Men" by William Hope Hodgson (actually an excerpt from The Boats of the Glen Carrig showcasing, in a bit of monster action, the evening battle with the nightmarish, tentacled "Weed Men" on the Sargasso Sea desert island), Joseph Howell's "The Transition Trolley" (a piece of droll magical realism in which Conservative businessman Mr. Purges finds himself overtaken by an inexplicable worldwide event in which people's heads are being replaced by those of animals).
I've written before (in my review of Irish Tales of Terror) about my conflicted relationship with William Hope Hodgson's occult detective Carnacki. Unfortunately, the same problem I had with the story in IRISH TALES OF TERROR reappears here. Carnacki is a Sherlock Holmes of the occult, investigating and defusing reports of hauntings using his vast knowledge of occult lore, inventions of his own (like the marvelous electric pentagram!) and a detective's eye for rational clues and details. In "The Horse of the Invisible" (these stories always follow a modified Holmesian formula where our narrator visits the famed occult detective - the better to inform us with effusive praise about how great he is - and then Carnacki narrates to him his current adventure) Carnacki tells us about a particularly nasty haunting at an ancestral home (he's pretty beat up when we meet him) involving a family curse on the first born female, who has always been killed/trampled by a gigantic ghostly horse before she can marry. Carnacki is an odd character to read. There's things I like about him - he's fallible (and thus not pompous) and he doesn't bloviate endlessly (or at least, not too often) on the author's pet theories of supernatural phenomena - in fact, Carnacki will, just as likely, refer to or institute some spell and not explain anything about it. He even occasionally has flashes of character (Hodgson has a nice stylistic touch of having his character ask rhetorical questions of the narrator/reader to underline a point) but, in truth, he's generally flat and colorless - his assured knowledge (even though he may be wrong about particulars) unfortunately never allows the threats to become too personal. There's a bigger problem, though, which I will explain in a spoiler: Which is a shame, because in specific, the scenes and descriptions of the titanic, barreling, invisible equine are powerful and upsetting, Hodgson really captures the sense of a malignant, physical threat that can't be seen, and how genuinely frightening that would be. So, a mixed tale.
There's a solid amount of "Good" stories to be found here: "Teig O'Kane and the Corpse" is another anonymous bit of folklore, is familiar to me - it was adapted on the CBC Radio horror anthology show NIGHTFALL in the 1980s and the basic set-up (a young wastrel is cursed by the fairies with transporting a corpse to any graveyard that will take it, said corpse riding on his back) also appears in some Sinbad tales and Russian folklore (although there it's usually a witch). "The Phantom Coach" (aka "The North Mail") by Amelia B. Edwards has a hunter get caught in a snowstorm, lodge for a short time with a a reclusive and grumpy gentleman (a philosopher who has hidden himself away from the modern world after being mocked for his belief in the supernatural) who expounds on the mysteries of life and death and the afterlife, and then reenter the night to catch transport home - but winds up catching the wrong coach. While very basic in structure (essentially, it's almost a classic bit of folklore, putting the professor aside) there's also some very nice creepy descriptions of the coach's inhabitants. Must have froze the blood, back in the day. I'm letting nostalgia color my reaction to "The Vampire of Croglin Grange" by Augustus Hare, just a little. This is not exactly a fictional vampire story but something more along the lines of a "this strange event really happened" type memoir, lifted from some larger book by Hare. In that form, it turned up verbatim in one of those TIME-LIFE MYSTERIES OF THE UNEXPLAINED type books I devoured as a child in the 70s. So it's not a composed piece of fiction as much as a short, straight recitation of supposed "facts". A family rents an ancestral hall in the titular location and on a very hot evening, the lady sleeps with her shudders undone. She spies something moving, creeping among the shadows of the great lawn, a ragged figure with two pinprick eyes of red light gradually getting closer. This wretched form (think NOSFERATU) reveals itself at her window where it scratches and scratches until it able to exact an entrance (she is, of course, paralyzed with fright), at which point it sinks its fangs into her throat. Her screams bring her brothers and the thing flees. Later, they track it back to its lair, force open a coffin, and find a brown, dried up husk of a corpse, which they burn. End of story. So, not much there, but I must say the description of thing, and the vivid, atmospheric details (the hot night, the slowly advancing figure, the sinister red glowing eyes) do make this little anecdote an enjoyable (if ultimately familiar) read (and I would imagine, in the end, that the entire thing was created out of whole cloth anyway). While I'd argue that it maybe "Dracula's Guest" (purportedly Bram Stoker's jettisoned opening chapter for Dracula) doesn't stand *completely* on its own as a story (what with the final pay-off tying it into the novel) it's still an atmospheric tale in which a traveler learns (nearly fatally) the dangers of scoffing at local superstitions and heedlessly heading out into the teeth of a storm on Walpurgisnacht. There's some nice weather and countryside descriptions here, but I'd really like to know what Harker's intended plan was - wander in the growing dusk until he stumbled across a farmhouse? An enjoyable footnote to a much more famous book. "The Witch Of The Marsh" (aka "The Devil Of The Marsh") by Ethel Marriott-Watson (sometimes attributed to her husband Henry) is a near-Decadent, atmospheric short sketch of a young man meeting his lady love in a trysting place, only to have second thought. "Problem Child" by Brian Lumley has a first-person narrator take stock of himself and his character, only to realize he is really a ghoul (so, like a modern version of "The Outsider" by Lovecraft). Roger Elwood's other piece here, "Night Prowler", is a story about a young boy (of the "Monster Kid" generation) who realizes he's the only one in his remote Pennsylvania town who has deduced that the recent homicides in town have been caused by a werewolf. But is it *just* because he's a "Monster Kid"?
Finally, there were four outstanding stories included here. "The Soul Cages" by T. Crofton Croker is a charming tale of folklore involving Irish mermaids (called merrows), and one man's meeting with a merrow named Coomera. There's some wonderful, fairy-tale imagery and detail in this story, including magical hats, the benefits of deference to unnatural beings, drinking under the sea and little cages containing the souls of drowned sailors. Fitz James O'Brien's “What Was It?” (a story I've always loved, and tend to see as of a piece with Bierce's notable “The Damned Thing”) is about a boarding house that is reputed to be haunted. Nothing evidences itself until the narrator retires one evening and is attacked by an invisible creature. The journalistic tone (the story is told as if it were recounted for a newspaper) and prosaic, reductive plot () clash nicely with the fantastic element. Grant Allen's "Pallinghurst Barrow" has a man become bewitched by the ghosts of stone-age Picts (who dwell in the titular long grave mound), nearly ending up sacrificed to their skeleton king! There's a nice use of faery lore, a realistic social setting (full of various scientific and psychic "experts") and a pulpy, action-packed finale (I feel like Robert E. Howard must have read this). And then there's F. Marion Crawford's perennial "The Upper Berth", about a voyager on a cruise-ship placed in a supposedly haunted cabin, plagued by suicides and a porthole that won't stay closed. It's a neat little yarn in which the narrator physically engages in a struggle with the spirit.
And that, as they say, is that!
As collections of classic stuff go, this is pretty par for the course, with a few modern oddities salted in near the end (for whatever reason). As it turns out, I considered roughly half the stories "good" or better, so I guess that makes it a solid "liked it" - because anthologies are always a grab bag.
SECOND TIER
Keeping an endless spreadsheet of what I've already read (and what I thought of it) comes in handy for books like this. Because, as I did my usual prep before starting, I discovered that I had already read fully half of this book already (13 of the 23 stories offered here). Granted, I needed to do a few re-reads (because I had no extant Goodreads review for a few stories), but knowing what I had already spent time on accelerated my way through this collection. And it's a typical assortment of "the usual suspects", with the editor throwing in a few pieces by himself and contemporaries near the end.
THIRD TIER
As usual, week to strong. There were only two actual duds here. Roger Elwood's "The Undead" is a simplistically told story of dead grandparents who practiced black magic and are trying to claim the rest of their family. Eh. Read like it was written for a juvenile audience. Meanwhile, "Tarantula" by Howard Goldsmith is a briskly (sloppily) written piece of modern pulp where a dashing young doctor must face off against an evil spider-guy. Eh
In the just "okay" arena were "A Musical Enigma" by C.P. Cranch - which I did not reread, "Lady Wilde's "The Demon Cat" (a stripped down Irish folktale about a demonic feline, no great shakes), "Black Magic" by Jessie Adelaide Middleton (a British woman in India gives a leering beggar a substitute when he requests a lock of her hair, which leads to the rug acting strangely when he uses it for magic). And Steve Barnes' "Moonglow" is about a werewolf who falls in love with a witch. Nicely written but...eh.
Of the "good but slightly flawed" stories, we've got "The Fortunes Of Martin Waldeck" by Walter Scott (a German folktale about a wood-giant whose bestowed gifts of fortune always seem to bring bad luck and ruin - and Waldeck is no exception. Nicely done, with lots of good folklore detail), "The Boy Who Drew Cats" by Lafcadio Hearn (one of Hearn's Japanese folk sketches, here involving an artistic boy who is thrown out as a priest's acolyte because he has a compulsion to sketch cats, and what happens when he shelters in an abandoned temple inhabited by a goblin. A light and easy sketch, like much Hearn work), Algernon Blackwood's "Running Wolf" (I upgraded this on the reread. A man visits a remote "medicine" lake in Canada to fish, and can't seem to shake the attentions of a lone wolf. While, in the end, a typical "unsettled ghost" story, this time around I was able to appreciate Blackwood's skill at scene setting - almost a British Jack London- and atmosphere), "The Weed Men" by William Hope Hodgson (actually an excerpt from The Boats of the Glen Carrig showcasing, in a bit of monster action, the evening battle with the nightmarish, tentacled "Weed Men" on the Sargasso Sea desert island), Joseph Howell's "The Transition Trolley" (a piece of droll magical realism in which Conservative businessman Mr. Purges finds himself overtaken by an inexplicable worldwide event in which people's heads are being replaced by those of animals).
I've written before (in my review of Irish Tales of Terror) about my conflicted relationship with William Hope Hodgson's occult detective Carnacki. Unfortunately, the same problem I had with the story in IRISH TALES OF TERROR reappears here. Carnacki is a Sherlock Holmes of the occult, investigating and defusing reports of hauntings using his vast knowledge of occult lore, inventions of his own (like the marvelous electric pentagram!) and a detective's eye for rational clues and details. In "The Horse of the Invisible" (these stories always follow a modified Holmesian formula where our narrator visits the famed occult detective - the better to inform us with effusive praise about how great he is - and then Carnacki narrates to him his current adventure) Carnacki tells us about a particularly nasty haunting at an ancestral home (he's pretty beat up when we meet him) involving a family curse on the first born female, who has always been killed/trampled by a gigantic ghostly horse before she can marry. Carnacki is an odd character to read. There's things I like about him - he's fallible (and thus not pompous) and he doesn't bloviate endlessly (or at least, not too often) on the author's pet theories of supernatural phenomena - in fact, Carnacki will, just as likely, refer to or institute some spell and not explain anything about it. He even occasionally has flashes of character (Hodgson has a nice stylistic touch of having his character ask rhetorical questions of the narrator/reader to underline a point) but, in truth, he's generally flat and colorless - his assured knowledge (even though he may be wrong about particulars) unfortunately never allows the threats to become too personal. There's a bigger problem, though, which I will explain in a spoiler: Which is a shame, because in specific, the scenes and descriptions of the titanic, barreling, invisible equine are powerful and upsetting, Hodgson really captures the sense of a malignant, physical threat that can't be seen, and how genuinely frightening that would be. So, a mixed tale.
There's a solid amount of "Good" stories to be found here: "Teig O'Kane and the Corpse" is another anonymous bit of folklore, is familiar to me - it was adapted on the CBC Radio horror anthology show NIGHTFALL in the 1980s and the basic set-up (a young wastrel is cursed by the fairies with transporting a corpse to any graveyard that will take it, said corpse riding on his back) also appears in some Sinbad tales and Russian folklore (although there it's usually a witch). "The Phantom Coach" (aka "The North Mail") by Amelia B. Edwards has a hunter get caught in a snowstorm, lodge for a short time with a a reclusive and grumpy gentleman (a philosopher who has hidden himself away from the modern world after being mocked for his belief in the supernatural) who expounds on the mysteries of life and death and the afterlife, and then reenter the night to catch transport home - but winds up catching the wrong coach. While very basic in structure (essentially, it's almost a classic bit of folklore, putting the professor aside) there's also some very nice creepy descriptions of the coach's inhabitants. Must have froze the blood, back in the day. I'm letting nostalgia color my reaction to "The Vampire of Croglin Grange" by Augustus Hare, just a little. This is not exactly a fictional vampire story but something more along the lines of a "this strange event really happened" type memoir, lifted from some larger book by Hare. In that form, it turned up verbatim in one of those TIME-LIFE MYSTERIES OF THE UNEXPLAINED type books I devoured as a child in the 70s. So it's not a composed piece of fiction as much as a short, straight recitation of supposed "facts". A family rents an ancestral hall in the titular location and on a very hot evening, the lady sleeps with her shudders undone. She spies something moving, creeping among the shadows of the great lawn, a ragged figure with two pinprick eyes of red light gradually getting closer. This wretched form (think NOSFERATU) reveals itself at her window where it scratches and scratches until it able to exact an entrance (she is, of course, paralyzed with fright), at which point it sinks its fangs into her throat. Her screams bring her brothers and the thing flees. Later, they track it back to its lair, force open a coffin, and find a brown, dried up husk of a corpse, which they burn. End of story. So, not much there, but I must say the description of thing, and the vivid, atmospheric details (the hot night, the slowly advancing figure, the sinister red glowing eyes) do make this little anecdote an enjoyable (if ultimately familiar) read (and I would imagine, in the end, that the entire thing was created out of whole cloth anyway). While I'd argue that it maybe "Dracula's Guest" (purportedly Bram Stoker's jettisoned opening chapter for Dracula) doesn't stand *completely* on its own as a story (what with the final pay-off tying it into the novel) it's still an atmospheric tale in which a traveler learns (nearly fatally) the dangers of scoffing at local superstitions and heedlessly heading out into the teeth of a storm on Walpurgisnacht. There's some nice weather and countryside descriptions here, but I'd really like to know what Harker's intended plan was - wander in the growing dusk until he stumbled across a farmhouse? An enjoyable footnote to a much more famous book. "The Witch Of The Marsh" (aka "The Devil Of The Marsh") by Ethel Marriott-Watson (sometimes attributed to her husband Henry) is a near-Decadent, atmospheric short sketch of a young man meeting his lady love in a trysting place, only to have second thought. "Problem Child" by Brian Lumley has a first-person narrator take stock of himself and his character, only to realize he is really a ghoul (so, like a modern version of "The Outsider" by Lovecraft). Roger Elwood's other piece here, "Night Prowler", is a story about a young boy (of the "Monster Kid" generation) who realizes he's the only one in his remote Pennsylvania town who has deduced that the recent homicides in town have been caused by a werewolf. But is it *just* because he's a "Monster Kid"?
Finally, there were four outstanding stories included here. "The Soul Cages" by T. Crofton Croker is a charming tale of folklore involving Irish mermaids (called merrows), and one man's meeting with a merrow named Coomera. There's some wonderful, fairy-tale imagery and detail in this story, including magical hats, the benefits of deference to unnatural beings, drinking under the sea and little cages containing the souls of drowned sailors. Fitz James O'Brien's “What Was It?” (a story I've always loved, and tend to see as of a piece with Bierce's notable “The Damned Thing”) is about a boarding house that is reputed to be haunted. Nothing evidences itself until the narrator retires one evening and is attacked by an invisible creature. The journalistic tone (the story is told as if it were recounted for a newspaper) and prosaic, reductive plot () clash nicely with the fantastic element. Grant Allen's "Pallinghurst Barrow" has a man become bewitched by the ghosts of stone-age Picts (who dwell in the titular long grave mound), nearly ending up sacrificed to their skeleton king! There's a nice use of faery lore, a realistic social setting (full of various scientific and psychic "experts") and a pulpy, action-packed finale (I feel like Robert E. Howard must have read this). And then there's F. Marion Crawford's perennial "The Upper Berth", about a voyager on a cruise-ship placed in a supposedly haunted cabin, plagued by suicides and a porthole that won't stay closed. It's a neat little yarn in which the narrator physically engages in a struggle with the spirit.
And that, as they say, is that!
October 19, 2013
Despite my initial excitement about this particular book, I have to say I am suitably knocked down and disappointed.
Given the amount of accredited authors and titles in this particular book, I expected it to be an exciting read and one that I would not be putting down. However, it failed to draw me in as I had hoped. The stories did not excite me as much as I hoped they would and the characters were nonsensical.
Despite this I found the writing to be sophisticated and easy to follow and it is because of this that I have given this book 2 stars as opposed to 1.
Given the amount of accredited authors and titles in this particular book, I expected it to be an exciting read and one that I would not be putting down. However, it failed to draw me in as I had hoped. The stories did not excite me as much as I hoped they would and the characters were nonsensical.
Despite this I found the writing to be sophisticated and easy to follow and it is because of this that I have given this book 2 stars as opposed to 1.
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