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Ghostly, Grim and Gruesome: An Anthology
Table of Contents:
The basket chair - Graham, W.
The face in the mirror - Baker, D. V.
The flowering of the strange orchid - Wells, H. G.
The forgiving ghost - Gilford, C. B.
Gone to the dogs - DeFord, M. A.
The horse of the invisible - Hodgson, W. H.
Mason's life - Amis, K.
The peg-doll - Timperley, R.
The sale of midsummer - Aiken, J.
The troll - White, T. H.
The porcelain doll - Tolstoy, L.
Three miles up - Howard, E. J.
The basket chair - Graham, W.
The face in the mirror - Baker, D. V.
The flowering of the strange orchid - Wells, H. G.
The forgiving ghost - Gilford, C. B.
Gone to the dogs - DeFord, M. A.
The horse of the invisible - Hodgson, W. H.
Mason's life - Amis, K.
The peg-doll - Timperley, R.
The sale of midsummer - Aiken, J.
The troll - White, T. H.
The porcelain doll - Tolstoy, L.
Three miles up - Howard, E. J.
- GenresHorrorShort Stories
146 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1976
About the author
Helen Hoke
114 books11 followersHelen Jeanne Lamb Hoke (20 July 1903 - 26 March 1990) was an American author of children's books.
She wrote nearly 100 children's books and set up and ran children's book divisions in five publishing companies. Helen Hoke was well known for her anthologies on children’s humour, but she was also fascinated by the esoteric, the supernatural, and the weird.
In 1945, Hoke married Franklin M. Watts, who owned Franklin M. Watts, Inc., publishers, and became the vice-president and director of international projects.
Franklin Hoke is her grandson.
She wrote nearly 100 children's books and set up and ran children's book divisions in five publishing companies. Helen Hoke was well known for her anthologies on children’s humour, but she was also fascinated by the esoteric, the supernatural, and the weird.
In 1945, Hoke married Franklin M. Watts, who owned Franklin M. Watts, Inc., publishers, and became the vice-president and director of international projects.
Franklin Hoke is her grandson.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
September 15, 2014
I grew up on anthologies for young people like these. Granted, at that time (the mid-70s), they were a dying form but luckily the bookmobile and dusty school libraries were a safe place for the format to curl up and mutate, and luckily for me I haunted those places as well.
What always impresses me, looking at these things as an adult, is that the choices of stories were made from, generally, the works of adult writers. Nothing against the Young Adult publishing model, but I still contend that what made me such a widely-read child, and engendered my love of literature, was the fact that I wasn't expected to only read things written for my demographic and age range, work that only pandered to me. I was expected to dig a little, work a little. You learn about the adult world, as a child, by picking up little pieces scattered all around your media - or at least I did. Included in that was having to struggle with odd references to the inscrutable adult world - I don't mean references planted by the author, I mean prosaic things like mortgages and drinking problems and jobs. Puzzling over and collating these details help you to construct a concept of what adulthood meant, while also providing you with some inner fortitude through the implication that "you can handle writing like this".
The contents of these youth anthologies tend to be a mixed bag of classic ghost or weird stories, mystery & crime stories, and crazy little puzzlers (some of the latter two from ELLERY QUEEN MYSTERY MAGAZINE and ALFRED HITCHCOCK MYSTERY MAGAZINE). This particular, quite solid, anthology is no different and if I'd read it as a kid it would have made an impression. I've read a number of the stories here before, but there were a few nice new surprises for me.
Mixed bags always have a few clunkers, of course, and GHOSTLY, GRIM AND GRUESOME is no exception. I didn't re-read "The Forgiving Ghost" by C.B. Gilford as my notes indicated I hadn't like it back in Alfred Hitchcock's A Hangman's Dozen. Miriam Allen deFord has a cute little thing called "Gone To The Dogs", in which a writer wakes up one morning to discover he has turned into a Great Dane (he can still talk and think, though). It's a nice fantasy story for a kid's book (Charles Fort even gets name checked, and lycanthropy gets a call out) but a bit thin for an adult.
"The Porcelain Doll" is an oddity in which Leo Tolstoy writes his new sister-in-law a short letter to regretfully tell her that his new wife has turned into a porcelain statue (complete with crux of arm joined to body and a broad base with painted grass and a tree-stump!). I've read this before and assumed that it's some kind of commentary on realizing his wife's emotional fragility now that he lives with her, spun out to satirical/symbolic lengths. Would have puzzled me as a child.
I've written before (in my review of Irish Tales of Terror) about my conflicted relationship with William Hope Hodgson's occult detective Carnacki (and about my conflicted relationship with the figure of the occult detective in general, for the Jules De Grandin story in American Fantastic Tales:Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps - more on this in a later review, I'm sure). 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", Carnacki tells us (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) 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 Carnacki 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 are a number of solid stories here. The book opens with "The Basket Chair" by Winston Graham which is a fine, quiet little ghost story in which an aging psychic investigator recuperates from a heart attack at a family member's home, and slowly become convinced there is a ghost haunting the large wicker chair that sits in his room. The story behind the history of the chair, when it comes, is sufficiently gruesome and shocking (a disfigured man, death by forced starvation and suicide by cut throat) and the details build (the pacing of this story is excellent) until a moment of true ghostly horror... which is ironic A good spooky story for a child, who might not even get the ending at first.
Denys Val Baker's "The Face In The Mirror" is very TWILIGHT ZONE and another story type that could broaden a child's horizons by not giving them a pat answer (in other words, the introduction of the expectation of ambiguity, or at least the possibility of it, would be a good thing for a young reader to encounter). The narrator is getting a shave and in the mirror spies the reflection of a malignant little man waiting his turn, all the while peering at him with utmost hatred. The narrator flees and this triggers a nightmarish chase through the maze of city and darkening suburbs in an effort to escape. Well done, aside from some occasional clumsy prose.
I'd read "The Flowering of a Strange Orchid" by H.G. Wells a few times before. It's often forgotten that Wells produced some weird tales along with his science fiction and fantasy. This is another well chosen story for children about a rare and unexpectedly dangerous plant. There's some interesting detail to be gleaned in the rather feminine description of the plant and the main character being a rather bland English chap who's so milquetoast that he bemoans the lack of adventure in his life, that he never fell in love or married, and that adventures seem always to happen to other people. Until the orchid. Which, I guess, also allows the story to fall into the classic "careful what you wish for" tropes.
Joan Aiken's "The Sale of Midsummer", while quite good, is I fear perhaps a little *too* abstract for a young reader (but then, challenges are important). It's a strange, recursive story about stories - about the reoccurring, if contradictory, legends surrounding a quaint, forgotten little English village that may, or may not, be trapped in an eternal moment of the perfect 3 days of summer, much like Brigadoon. It reminded me a bit of Angela Carter crossed with Jorge Luis Borges and does a very good job of generating a misty, unfocused feeling, as if reality is slipping away from you as you read. Nice.
"Mason's Life" by Kingsley Amis, about a short conversation in a bar, is centered on the kind of idea now overly familiar in popular culture but new at the time (and probably new to a young reader at any time) and excellently executed here.
I was very impressed by "The Peg Doll", a short little ghost story here by Rosemary Timperley. The story, when stripped back to its central ideas is, like many ghost stories, simple and familiar. But the details are what bring on the spooky - and this tale of a man who gives his daughter a Victorian-era doll he discovered in the wall of an orphanage he was demolishing creates a powerful hook in one seeming throwaway sentence. This one minor line that occurs early on becomes clear at the end, exposing the real world horrors that underlay the haunting. Very well done.
Finally , there are two absolutely outstanding stories here, both of which I had read before but one of which I'd since forgotten and was extremely happy to rediscover. I'd always remembered "The Troll" by T.H. White because who can forget such a simple set-up as a man, awakening in his hotel room after a nightmare, driven to peek through a keyhole into the adjoining room and thus seeing a hideous mythological creature consume a poor woman whole? The real frisson in this tale comes in the narrator's assurance that what he saw was utterly fantastic and yet completely real to him. It's an interesting examination of beliefs, dreams and reality marked by some amazing writing.
Rediscovering "Three Miles Up" by Elizabeth Jane Howard is fortuitous and rewarding. Much like the thoughtful Aiken story previous, it may be too abstract for a younger reader to grasp, but I'm not exaggerating when I say that this immensely evocative and unnerving story feels, in a way, like a lost work by Robert Aickman. Oh, it's not as dense as his best, of course, but the setting (backwaters in the English canal system - an Aickamn interest), plot (a meandering holiday by two friends where the dynamic gets upended by the introduction of a mysterious woman) and mood (brooding, eerie and then slowly more and more disconnected from reality as the lost travelers find themselves in remote and uninhabited countryside, docking late at night at seeming villages that are not there come the dawn) all resonate with the Aickman vibe. The ending, when it comes, is abrupt and ambiguous yet creates a powerful feeling of doom. Extremely good story!
So, there you go. If you see it in some dusty book store or on the shelf of some forgotten, soon to be closed library (sold to Pepsi-Cola, no doubt, as libraries are now "Socialist", because they give people books for free, undermining our proud Capitalist tradition - complain all you want about soapboxing, you know in your heart that libraries are doomed), snap it up for some good reading!
What always impresses me, looking at these things as an adult, is that the choices of stories were made from, generally, the works of adult writers. Nothing against the Young Adult publishing model, but I still contend that what made me such a widely-read child, and engendered my love of literature, was the fact that I wasn't expected to only read things written for my demographic and age range, work that only pandered to me. I was expected to dig a little, work a little. You learn about the adult world, as a child, by picking up little pieces scattered all around your media - or at least I did. Included in that was having to struggle with odd references to the inscrutable adult world - I don't mean references planted by the author, I mean prosaic things like mortgages and drinking problems and jobs. Puzzling over and collating these details help you to construct a concept of what adulthood meant, while also providing you with some inner fortitude through the implication that "you can handle writing like this".
The contents of these youth anthologies tend to be a mixed bag of classic ghost or weird stories, mystery & crime stories, and crazy little puzzlers (some of the latter two from ELLERY QUEEN MYSTERY MAGAZINE and ALFRED HITCHCOCK MYSTERY MAGAZINE). This particular, quite solid, anthology is no different and if I'd read it as a kid it would have made an impression. I've read a number of the stories here before, but there were a few nice new surprises for me.
Mixed bags always have a few clunkers, of course, and GHOSTLY, GRIM AND GRUESOME is no exception. I didn't re-read "The Forgiving Ghost" by C.B. Gilford as my notes indicated I hadn't like it back in Alfred Hitchcock's A Hangman's Dozen. Miriam Allen deFord has a cute little thing called "Gone To The Dogs", in which a writer wakes up one morning to discover he has turned into a Great Dane (he can still talk and think, though). It's a nice fantasy story for a kid's book (Charles Fort even gets name checked, and lycanthropy gets a call out) but a bit thin for an adult.
"The Porcelain Doll" is an oddity in which Leo Tolstoy writes his new sister-in-law a short letter to regretfully tell her that his new wife has turned into a porcelain statue (complete with crux of arm joined to body and a broad base with painted grass and a tree-stump!). I've read this before and assumed that it's some kind of commentary on realizing his wife's emotional fragility now that he lives with her, spun out to satirical/symbolic lengths. Would have puzzled me as a child.
I've written before (in my review of Irish Tales of Terror) about my conflicted relationship with William Hope Hodgson's occult detective Carnacki (and about my conflicted relationship with the figure of the occult detective in general, for the Jules De Grandin story in American Fantastic Tales:Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps - more on this in a later review, I'm sure). 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", Carnacki tells us (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) 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 Carnacki 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 are a number of solid stories here. The book opens with "The Basket Chair" by Winston Graham which is a fine, quiet little ghost story in which an aging psychic investigator recuperates from a heart attack at a family member's home, and slowly become convinced there is a ghost haunting the large wicker chair that sits in his room. The story behind the history of the chair, when it comes, is sufficiently gruesome and shocking (a disfigured man, death by forced starvation and suicide by cut throat) and the details build (the pacing of this story is excellent) until a moment of true ghostly horror... which is ironic A good spooky story for a child, who might not even get the ending at first.
Denys Val Baker's "The Face In The Mirror" is very TWILIGHT ZONE and another story type that could broaden a child's horizons by not giving them a pat answer (in other words, the introduction of the expectation of ambiguity, or at least the possibility of it, would be a good thing for a young reader to encounter). The narrator is getting a shave and in the mirror spies the reflection of a malignant little man waiting his turn, all the while peering at him with utmost hatred. The narrator flees and this triggers a nightmarish chase through the maze of city and darkening suburbs in an effort to escape. Well done, aside from some occasional clumsy prose.
I'd read "The Flowering of a Strange Orchid" by H.G. Wells a few times before. It's often forgotten that Wells produced some weird tales along with his science fiction and fantasy. This is another well chosen story for children about a rare and unexpectedly dangerous plant. There's some interesting detail to be gleaned in the rather feminine description of the plant and the main character being a rather bland English chap who's so milquetoast that he bemoans the lack of adventure in his life, that he never fell in love or married, and that adventures seem always to happen to other people. Until the orchid. Which, I guess, also allows the story to fall into the classic "careful what you wish for" tropes.
Joan Aiken's "The Sale of Midsummer", while quite good, is I fear perhaps a little *too* abstract for a young reader (but then, challenges are important). It's a strange, recursive story about stories - about the reoccurring, if contradictory, legends surrounding a quaint, forgotten little English village that may, or may not, be trapped in an eternal moment of the perfect 3 days of summer, much like Brigadoon. It reminded me a bit of Angela Carter crossed with Jorge Luis Borges and does a very good job of generating a misty, unfocused feeling, as if reality is slipping away from you as you read. Nice.
"Mason's Life" by Kingsley Amis, about a short conversation in a bar, is centered on the kind of idea now overly familiar in popular culture but new at the time (and probably new to a young reader at any time) and excellently executed here.
I was very impressed by "The Peg Doll", a short little ghost story here by Rosemary Timperley. The story, when stripped back to its central ideas is, like many ghost stories, simple and familiar. But the details are what bring on the spooky - and this tale of a man who gives his daughter a Victorian-era doll he discovered in the wall of an orphanage he was demolishing creates a powerful hook in one seeming throwaway sentence. This one minor line that occurs early on becomes clear at the end, exposing the real world horrors that underlay the haunting. Very well done.
Finally , there are two absolutely outstanding stories here, both of which I had read before but one of which I'd since forgotten and was extremely happy to rediscover. I'd always remembered "The Troll" by T.H. White because who can forget such a simple set-up as a man, awakening in his hotel room after a nightmare, driven to peek through a keyhole into the adjoining room and thus seeing a hideous mythological creature consume a poor woman whole? The real frisson in this tale comes in the narrator's assurance that what he saw was utterly fantastic and yet completely real to him. It's an interesting examination of beliefs, dreams and reality marked by some amazing writing.
Rediscovering "Three Miles Up" by Elizabeth Jane Howard is fortuitous and rewarding. Much like the thoughtful Aiken story previous, it may be too abstract for a younger reader to grasp, but I'm not exaggerating when I say that this immensely evocative and unnerving story feels, in a way, like a lost work by Robert Aickman. Oh, it's not as dense as his best, of course, but the setting (backwaters in the English canal system - an Aickamn interest), plot (a meandering holiday by two friends where the dynamic gets upended by the introduction of a mysterious woman) and mood (brooding, eerie and then slowly more and more disconnected from reality as the lost travelers find themselves in remote and uninhabited countryside, docking late at night at seeming villages that are not there come the dawn) all resonate with the Aickman vibe. The ending, when it comes, is abrupt and ambiguous yet creates a powerful feeling of doom. Extremely good story!
So, there you go. If you see it in some dusty book store or on the shelf of some forgotten, soon to be closed library (sold to Pepsi-Cola, no doubt, as libraries are now "Socialist", because they give people books for free, undermining our proud Capitalist tradition - complain all you want about soapboxing, you know in your heart that libraries are doomed), snap it up for some good reading!
January 12, 2012
The rating is for the only story I remember from this, "The Peg-Doll" by Rosemary Timperley, which scared the absolute SHIT out of me as a kid. I wonder if it holds up.
December 2, 2022
Lsdl
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
January 30, 2017
There were some good choices this time; the Face in the Mirror and the Sale of Midsummer were both alright, as was the Troll.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews