Horror Hunters

„Horror Hunters“

„Nightmare tales of the dead and the undead“

Edited by Roger Elwood & Vic Ghidalia

Manor Books. 1975. $0.95

                                         The Front and Back cover to my 1975 edition.

                                        

                                                The 1971 edition that I can't find anywhere!!

This week’s book, Horror Hunters, is an early “themed anthology” originally published by Manor books back in 1971. The obvious theme of this anthology is seekers of horror or those who investigate it. I own the 1975 edition and can’t find a single copy of the 1971 edition anywhere. Once again Messrs. Elwood and Ghidalia deliver another enjoyable anthology of predominantly “Weird Tales” reprints.   I enjoyed it so much that I finished it in just one evening. The cover seems to be a very loosely based upon Theodore Sturgeons “One foot and the Grave”. The anthology is dedicated to “August Derleth”

Contents:

Ancient Sorceries - Algernon Blackwood

The Gateway of the Monster - William Hope Hodgson
The Unnamable - H. P. Lovecraft
The Thing on the Roof - Robert E. Howard
Mr Ames' Devil - August Derleth
In the X-Ray - Fritz Leiber Jr.
One Foot and the Grave - Theodore Sturgeon
I Kiss Your Shadow - Robert Bloch

Now let’s take a look at the stories!

Ancient Sorceries - Algernon Blackwood

 “Ancient Sorceries” is one of Algernon Blackwood’s most famous stories. It’s one of five “John Silence, Physician Extraordinary“ stories that he wrote. John silence is a British physician who handles supernatural cases. The structure of these tales usually has John telling his most interesting cases to his friends.  He’s basically passive in these stories and only at the end does he conduct a follow up investigation in an attempt to verify the facts of the case. I enjoyed this story a lot. It kept me guessing and on my toes up to the very end. It’s seems that a meek middle aged Englishman, while on vacation in the French Provence, decides to detrain at a small village in an attempt to escape all the noisy tourists who are sharing train with him. He doesn’t like crowds or noise. It seem that the ruin the atmosphere of his trip. As he leaves the train he is warned about the village by an elderly French traveller who had been sharing his compartment. As the Traveller only speaks broken French, all he understands is a warning about sleeping and cats. He is immediately enchanted with the medieval charm of the older part of the village and decides that getting off the train was a good choice. He notices how quiet the village is and how friendly the locals are. He books a room and immediately feels an amazing sense of peacefulness fall over him. He becomes so enchanted with the entire setting that he decides to stay for a few days. He ends up staying over 2 weeks since he just can’t bring himself to leave. This begins to frighten him a bit. He is also unnerved by realizing the villagers are keeping him under constant, if not extremely discreet, observation. He also begins to believe that the daily comings and goings of the villagers is purely for his sake and that they are all truly leading a completely separate existence that he knows nothing about.  Another interesting point is that the villagers always seem to remind him of cats and seem to be able to vanish after turning corners. He even goes out of his way to follow people just so he can discover how it is that they seem to disappear once they round a corner.  On the day that he finally pulls himself together and decides to leave he meets the innkeeper’s daughter and seems to fall under another spell of enchantment.  After spending a few more days in the company of this “enchanting” young woman he begins to think that villagers are waiting for him to make up his mind about something. He finally comes to the conclusion that once he makes of his mind, he has no idea about what though; they will reveal their secret to him and invite him to join their community.  I won’t give it all away though since I’ve all ready been run off at the keyboard. Let me just say we end up with a tale of black magic, executed witches, were cats, Satanism, the black mass and reincarnation!!  Lots of atmosphere makes this a top story in my eyes.

The story is available online is you want to read it. I recommend it very much!

John Silence Stories

The Gateway of the Monster - William Hope Hodgson

“Gateway of the Monster” is one of Hodgson’s “Carnackithe Ghost finder” adventures. And this tale truly is an adventure. Carnaki is a very competent and aggressive Edwardian Para-normal investigator who goes around the UK breaking ghosts. You could consider him to be the original “Ghost Buster”! In this adventure Mr. Carnacki is asked to investigate the goings on at an isolated country estate. Not that there’s any other kind of country estate in these kinds of stories. It seems that there is a haunted bed chamber terrifying the household. Carnacki ends up going up against a demon in the form of giant hand that is using a cursed ring as an inter-dimensional doorway. It has already strangled an entire family before Carnacki gets called in to send it packing.  Carnacki is a very modern sort of ghost breaker in that he not only uses magical spells, but also scientific equipment and a service revolver to battle the demon. So we get a monster hand, a strangled baby and a kitty cat that gets beaten to a shapeless pulp. Not bad for a horror story written 100 years ago. This story is grisly, gory and fun!

It’s available on-line if you want to read it.

Carncacki on-line

The complete Carnaki stories are also available from Wordsworth books at a very affordable price.

 Wordsworth Carnacki Collection

 

The Unnamable - H. P. Lovecraft

 “The Unanamable” is a transitional HPL story from when he was moving away from his “Dunsanyian” stories and had quite gotten started on the Cthulhu Cycle of stories. Personally, I like this story a lot. But sadly, I like it for all of the wrong reasons. This is exactly the kind of HPL stories that people love to make fun of and satirize. It has all of the qualities that a good “bad” Lovecraft story demands. The characters are stupid. The prose is so purple that the Caesar’s would have tried to wear it and it’s more hysterical than a Hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobiac at a spelling bee.

The story starts out with two researchers of the unknown who are discussing if something can be truly “unnameable”. Researcher #one says no and researcher# two says yes.  They then go on to discuss a local legend about a 17th century family from the area who were dealing in black magic. Legend tells that the wife gave birth to a child so monstrous that they had to keep it locked up in the attic. I love this plot point. The only thing missing is the bucket of fish heads. This is terrible clichéd, but I honestly think that this is the origin of the cliché. So anyways the one researcher goes on to tell how this monstrous child broke loose from time to time and terrorized the vicinity. The researcher then goes on to tell his friend how after the parents died, the neighbours left the house abandoned and the attic locked. “Good riddance!” they must have thought.  Anyways baby mongo breaks out one last time and goes on a killing spree. The researcher tells of how when he went and investigated he found a pile of freaky deaky bones in the attic. The were so unnerving that  instead of sharing the discovery he goes and dumps them into the tomb of the things parents which is conveniently located in an old abandoned cemetery. It seems that the skeleton substantiates the old rumours of the thing having “ape like claws”, “hoofed feet”, “huge fanged jaws” and “horns”. AND it turns out they are discussing this the whole time while sitting on the aforementioned tomb as night closes in!  So they’re just sitting there “smokin’ and Jokin’ just as the moon gets covered by a passing cloud and something comes bursting up out of the tomb and goes all ninja turtle on them.

They wake up the next day in the hospitaly badly beaten and covered with hoof marks. Researcher #2 asks, “What was it that attacked us?” And researcher #1 replies “The “Unnamable”! 

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I have a name for it. Monster!

 I love this story just for its awfulness alone.

Here’s the on-line text…..

 "The Unnamable" on-line

The Thing on the Roof - Robert E. Howard

 This is a fairly ok Robert E. Howard penned “Cthulhu Mythos” story about grave robbing gone bad. It seems that an archaeologist (tomb plunderer) didn’t read far enough into REH’s version of the “Necronomicon”, “Unspeaksble Cults”, and brings home the wrong kind of treasure. The “Treasure” turns out to be one of those cranky, stinky shapeless, tentacled, hoofed and flying monstrosities that don’t play well with others. HPL would have called it typical “YogSothothery”. What I really like, is that in a typical HPL Mythos story the protagonist/victim usually ends up insane, with soiled drawers, devoured or a combination of the three. In a Robert E. Howard Mythos tale the protagonist charges death head on with both barrels blazing and ends up with his skull crushed to a pulp with a giant hoof print in the middle of it. This story is a good example of wha REH was nicknamed “Two Gun Bob”.

 

Mr Ames' Devil - August Derleth

This one is enjoyable but a typical example of what Mr. Derleth termed one of his “filler” stories. I hobby sorcery actually manages, much to his surprise and chagrin, his own personal demon. Said demon then goes about fulfilling his master’s wishes whether his master wants him to or not.  The hobby sorcerer then tries to use a contractual loop hole and, as always in these kinds of stories, it backfires. This one is short enough to be enjoyable before it wears out it welcome. I have to say though that Mr. Derleth was capable of much better stories.

 

In the X-Ray - Fritz Leiber Jr.

 I would consider “In the X-Ray” a fine story, if say, August Derleth had written it.

But since it was written by the great “Fritz Leiber” though, I have to say that it’s pretty dull and underdeveloped. I admit though, in Mr. Leiber’s defence, that this is one of his very early tales and all of his greatness still lay in the future.

A young woman goes to her Dr. complaining terrible pain and swelling in her ankle. It seems that this happened after having a nightmare about the rotting corpse of her recently deceased twin sister coming out from under the bed and grasping her ankle. The surving twin claims the pain feels just as if someone had her ankle in a painful grip from the inside. Uncle Doctor makes a few X-Rays and discovers that the girls were actually triplets, but the 3 girl didn’t develop and was absorbed by the surviving twin while still in the womb. This young woman also confesses to the Doctor that her twin sister hated her, and up until her death, made her twin’s life a living hell. The evil sister even cursed her twin whilst dying and swore to come back and get her. One thing the doctor has held back from his patient so far, it the fact that it seems that the absorbed twin has now started to finaly develop and grow!

Now let me stop here for a minute. This story has all the making of a great “body horror” story. I mean what can be nastier than having an absorbed foetus starting to grow and come to life inside of you! I don’t even want to consider how many wonderful ways he could have taken it. Sadly he doesn’t. The story ends with a suicide before anything awesomely awful could take place. From anyone else this would be a good story. Coming from Fritz Leiber though makes the story a huge let down.

One Foot and the Grave - Theodore Sturgeon

Ted Sturgeon never, to my knowledge, wrote a pedestrian story and this one is no exception. He manages to condense a novels worth of dialogue and plotting into just 45 pages! I’m sorry, but I’m not going to go all that deeply into the plot. It’s so crazy and complicated that I can only describe it as a “Screwball comedy, love story, Horror and fantasy mash up. You get murdered enchanted lovers, entombed arch angels, wizards, their familiars, werecats, Satyrs hidden valleys, unrequited love and a ton of dense plot. I get dizzy and tired just thinking about it. I can assure you that it’s a wonderful and satisfying story. Even though this appeared in "Weird Tales" I think that it would have been more at home in John W. Campbell's "Unknown".

 

I Kiss Your Shadow - Robert Bloch

“I Kiss your Shadow” is typical Bloch insanity from the beginning of his career. I’m running against time here so I’ll sum it up in one sentence. Guy kills his wife and her shadow comes back and screws until she comes down with a bad case of “coffin birth”!  The idea is so deliciously nasty that it’ll fester in your mind for days.

Like I said at the beginning, this collection is pretty strong story wise and extremely entertaining. The two fairly weak entries serve as palate cleansers between the heavier stories. Check it out if you can find a copy.

Take care and thanks for stopping by!

Doug