What do you think?
Rate this book
Weird Shadows From Beyond: An Anthology of Strange Stories
Ten Nightmares: A freshly turned grave with one mourner filled with hate; a telephone kiosk at night with something outside trying to get in; a ghoul playing knucklebones on a tombstone; a bodiless evening dress suit dancing in a moonlight glade; and iron shark tooth; a witch and a were-leopard...These are but a few of the ingredients of this nightmarish collection of weird stories. (back cover copy)
Contents
"Danse Macabre" by Mervyn Peake
"Blood Offering" by John Kippax
"Same Time, Same Place" by Mervyn Peake
"Master of Chaos" by Michael Moorcock
"Wednesday's Child" by William Tenn
"Dial 'O' For Operator" by Robert Presslie
"The Flowers Of The Forest" by Brian W. Aldiss
"Fresh Guy" by E.C. Tubb
"The Garden Of Paris" by Eric Williams
"The Graveyard Reader" by Theodore Sturgeon
Contents
"Danse Macabre" by Mervyn Peake
"Blood Offering" by John Kippax
"Same Time, Same Place" by Mervyn Peake
"Master of Chaos" by Michael Moorcock
"Wednesday's Child" by William Tenn
"Dial 'O' For Operator" by Robert Presslie
"The Flowers Of The Forest" by Brian W. Aldiss
"Fresh Guy" by E.C. Tubb
"The Garden Of Paris" by Eric Williams
"The Graveyard Reader" by Theodore Sturgeon
- GenresHorrorShort Stories
157 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1965
1 person is currently reading
40 people want to read
About the author
John Carnell
124 books4 followersLibrarian note:
There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name
There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
May 4, 2022
This is a very good anthology of fantasies edited by Carnell, one of the premiere early English genre editors. Most of them first appeared in Science Fantasy magazine in the U.K. and were new to American readers, including good stories from E.C. Tubb, Mervyn Peake, Brian W. Aldiss, John Kippax, and Robert Presslie. I also enjoyed fine works from William Tenn and a nice Eternal Champion S&S story by Michael Moorcock, but my favorite was Theodore Sturgeon's The Graveyard Reader. It has a creepy Josh Kirby cover with a strange feature who has a face that looks suspiciously like Alfred E. Neuman.
January 2, 2021
A collection drawn from the British Nova Publications science fiction and fantasy magazine holdings, most originally published in the late 50s/early 60s - so, an interesting sampling of a slightly different taste, I'd previously read about half the offerings here but they were all due for a reread, so...
John Kippax's "Blood Offering" is one of those "violation of tribal taboo" stories, familiar from Kipling and Wells. Here, though, it's purely a matter among the South Sea Islanders with the lone white man acting mostly as observer until the Shark God makes the scene in the climax. There's some nice dialogue between island class strata, sketching of folkloric magic practices, and an authentic feeling for detail-as-life-lived in this revenge tale. A solid if familiar read. "The Flowers Of The Forest" by Brian W. Aldiss is, on the one hand, a well-written and imaginative tale of man who has fled his native lad (after committing an act of jealous murder) and seeks out a native witch in the jungles of Sumatra. The psychology of the main character is sharply drawn. One the other hand, it is also a story about astral traveling and body-hopping (for a similar, if stronger, example, see "The Horsehair Trunk" by Davis Grubb) and seemed altogether too gimmicky to me.
E.C. Tubb's "Fresh Guy" is one of those cute filler stories used to pad out so many genre magazines during the heydays of publishing, built around a clever idea, competent writing and not much else. Here, two vampires, a ghoul and a werewolf await mankind's return from the deep underground bunkers that shielded them during an apocalyptic nuclear war. An enjoyable time-waster (although I always flinch at attempts to "de-supernaturalize" classic monsters, as happens here). "The Garden Of Paris" features the exploits of Monsieur Delacroix as the civil servant functionary of UNO whose job it is to filter all the crazy mail into "cranks" and "useful" and investigate the latter (thus, a variant of the occult detective/monster hunter figure). Following up on a man who reports blood curdling screams from the Paris Gardens on the night of every full moon (the helpful citizen is sure a secret Communist torture cell is behind it all), Delacroix discovers the truth (without giving anything away, I assure you it is not werewolves either). A perfectly entertaining (if run-of-the-mill) monster story by Eric Williams, perhaps most notable for the frame of series character Delacroix and its extended denouement (the character is a civil servant, not a police officer, and not a particularly courageous man, which is a nicely realistic touch).
Tow pieces here by GORMENGHAST architect Mervyn Peake. In "Danse Macabre" (a story that brings to mind both Guy de Maupassant's "Who Knows?" and Richard Matheson's "Clothes Make The Man") a man observes his formal suit sneaking out of his room at night for an assignation deep in the woods with an ice blue evening gown. But what seems whimsical quickly turns sinister in this terse little story where the full horror hinges on the last line. Meanwhile, I got a lot more out of my reread of Peake's "Same Time, Same Place" than I had gotten initially. An impetuous young man storms out of his bourgeois home and the presence of his boring parents and to seek love and adventure in Piccadilly Circus. He finds the former (and then, by extension, a form of the latter, but not how he was expecting) in a tavern where he starts a relationship with an odd young lady. This is a powerful little story and deeper, I feel, than a surface reading may conclude. There's a twist that can't be revealed here and should really be experienced cold for maximum effect - but on my more mature read I take the last few lines as intended to be as horrifying as the actual twist. A very British story, in a way, as well.
In a somewhat similar bent is "Wednesday's Child", a fun little piece (more sci-fi than horror, honestly) that spins off a classic trope by William Tenn as a controlling Boss discovers his submissive secretary is hiding a secret in her vacation-time requests. May be more interesting to modern eyes for the paternalistic attitude the Boss shows to his female employee (think MADMEN) than for the twist. On the complete flip-side is "Master Of Chaos" by Michael Moorcock - I'm not a big fan of the sword and sorcery subgenre but I respect Moorcock's achievements in the field and this is a solid example with some inventive ideas ("terra incognito" is quite literal in this fantasy world, as unknown space is raw chaos until formed into liveable geography by ordering rationality, retroactively gaining a history and chronology) salted into the usual quest/monster/castle/femme fatale formula.
The two standouts here were: "The Graveyard Reader" by Theodore Sturgeon which has a disgruntled husband at his wife's grave (she died in a car accident seemingly fleeing her life with him) who is approached by a man who "reads" graves and can unlock their occupant's secrets. Sturgeon has a real knack for thought processes and real human dialogue in all its uneven cadence and choppy, clipped rhythms, plus an honest understanding of the stress found in uncommunicative relationships. The central conceit here - that graves can be read as patterns of ecological, architectural and atmospheric details - much as we perceive blocks of text - is also well-handled. It's a powerful, emotionally satisfying story, a fine slice of morbid dark fantsy.
Equally as strong, but previously unknown to me and a full-blown horror/monster story to boot is Robert Presslie's "Dial 'O' For Operator". I'm fascinated by horror stories that revolve around communications technology and media (Lucille Fletcher's "Sorry Wrong Number", Matheson's "Through Channels" and "Long Distance Call", Mark Laidlaw's "Cell Call", H.F. Arnold's "The Night Wire", to name a few) and here's a prime example. An operator gets a call late at night from a woman down by the docks trapped in a phone-booth by some black slimy blob creature. He and his staff work frantically to locate and rescue the woman but will they succeed when they can't even seem to locate her? As in many of those previous examples, the technology in the story allows a kind of distancing effect to occur while still capturing the immediacy of human interaction. A fine story with an ambiguous ending that almost emphasizes the human connection. Now, who do I contact about rights?
And that's it for this nice little collection!
John Kippax's "Blood Offering" is one of those "violation of tribal taboo" stories, familiar from Kipling and Wells. Here, though, it's purely a matter among the South Sea Islanders with the lone white man acting mostly as observer until the Shark God makes the scene in the climax. There's some nice dialogue between island class strata, sketching of folkloric magic practices, and an authentic feeling for detail-as-life-lived in this revenge tale. A solid if familiar read. "The Flowers Of The Forest" by Brian W. Aldiss is, on the one hand, a well-written and imaginative tale of man who has fled his native lad (after committing an act of jealous murder) and seeks out a native witch in the jungles of Sumatra. The psychology of the main character is sharply drawn. One the other hand, it is also a story about astral traveling and body-hopping (for a similar, if stronger, example, see "The Horsehair Trunk" by Davis Grubb) and seemed altogether too gimmicky to me.
E.C. Tubb's "Fresh Guy" is one of those cute filler stories used to pad out so many genre magazines during the heydays of publishing, built around a clever idea, competent writing and not much else. Here, two vampires, a ghoul and a werewolf await mankind's return from the deep underground bunkers that shielded them during an apocalyptic nuclear war. An enjoyable time-waster (although I always flinch at attempts to "de-supernaturalize" classic monsters, as happens here). "The Garden Of Paris" features the exploits of Monsieur Delacroix as the civil servant functionary of UNO whose job it is to filter all the crazy mail into "cranks" and "useful" and investigate the latter (thus, a variant of the occult detective/monster hunter figure). Following up on a man who reports blood curdling screams from the Paris Gardens on the night of every full moon (the helpful citizen is sure a secret Communist torture cell is behind it all), Delacroix discovers the truth (without giving anything away, I assure you it is not werewolves either). A perfectly entertaining (if run-of-the-mill) monster story by Eric Williams, perhaps most notable for the frame of series character Delacroix and its extended denouement (the character is a civil servant, not a police officer, and not a particularly courageous man, which is a nicely realistic touch).
Tow pieces here by GORMENGHAST architect Mervyn Peake. In "Danse Macabre" (a story that brings to mind both Guy de Maupassant's "Who Knows?" and Richard Matheson's "Clothes Make The Man") a man observes his formal suit sneaking out of his room at night for an assignation deep in the woods with an ice blue evening gown. But what seems whimsical quickly turns sinister in this terse little story where the full horror hinges on the last line. Meanwhile, I got a lot more out of my reread of Peake's "Same Time, Same Place" than I had gotten initially. An impetuous young man storms out of his bourgeois home and the presence of his boring parents and to seek love and adventure in Piccadilly Circus. He finds the former (and then, by extension, a form of the latter, but not how he was expecting) in a tavern where he starts a relationship with an odd young lady. This is a powerful little story and deeper, I feel, than a surface reading may conclude. There's a twist that can't be revealed here and should really be experienced cold for maximum effect - but on my more mature read I take the last few lines as intended to be as horrifying as the actual twist. A very British story, in a way, as well.
In a somewhat similar bent is "Wednesday's Child", a fun little piece (more sci-fi than horror, honestly) that spins off a classic trope by William Tenn as a controlling Boss discovers his submissive secretary is hiding a secret in her vacation-time requests. May be more interesting to modern eyes for the paternalistic attitude the Boss shows to his female employee (think MADMEN) than for the twist. On the complete flip-side is "Master Of Chaos" by Michael Moorcock - I'm not a big fan of the sword and sorcery subgenre but I respect Moorcock's achievements in the field and this is a solid example with some inventive ideas ("terra incognito" is quite literal in this fantasy world, as unknown space is raw chaos until formed into liveable geography by ordering rationality, retroactively gaining a history and chronology) salted into the usual quest/monster/castle/femme fatale formula.
The two standouts here were: "The Graveyard Reader" by Theodore Sturgeon which has a disgruntled husband at his wife's grave (she died in a car accident seemingly fleeing her life with him) who is approached by a man who "reads" graves and can unlock their occupant's secrets. Sturgeon has a real knack for thought processes and real human dialogue in all its uneven cadence and choppy, clipped rhythms, plus an honest understanding of the stress found in uncommunicative relationships. The central conceit here - that graves can be read as patterns of ecological, architectural and atmospheric details - much as we perceive blocks of text - is also well-handled. It's a powerful, emotionally satisfying story, a fine slice of morbid dark fantsy.
Equally as strong, but previously unknown to me and a full-blown horror/monster story to boot is Robert Presslie's "Dial 'O' For Operator". I'm fascinated by horror stories that revolve around communications technology and media (Lucille Fletcher's "Sorry Wrong Number", Matheson's "Through Channels" and "Long Distance Call", Mark Laidlaw's "Cell Call", H.F. Arnold's "The Night Wire", to name a few) and here's a prime example. An operator gets a call late at night from a woman down by the docks trapped in a phone-booth by some black slimy blob creature. He and his staff work frantically to locate and rescue the woman but will they succeed when they can't even seem to locate her? As in many of those previous examples, the technology in the story allows a kind of distancing effect to occur while still capturing the immediacy of human interaction. A fine story with an ambiguous ending that almost emphasizes the human connection. Now, who do I contact about rights?
And that's it for this nice little collection!
July 8, 2021
Good old-fashioned horror and fantasy (and therefore largely "tame" by modern standards, but still good). A couple of the stories seem dated, but others, such as "Dial O for Operator" by Robert Presslie still pack the required punch.
April 12, 2024
Some very non PC elements in this book, so be prepared for that.
Mild sexism aside, the Brian Aldwiss story shines brightest in this otherwise readable but dated collection.
Mild sexism aside, the Brian Aldwiss story shines brightest in this otherwise readable but dated collection.
November 11, 2013
Theodore Sturgeon = ultimate badass. Mops the floor with Carver & his ilk.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews