Twelve Tales of Suspense and the Supernatural by Davis Grubb (1964)

Known for penning the novel The Night of the Hunter upon which the classic 1955 movie was based, Davis Grubb (1919-1980) was a West Virginia native well-versed in the pride, poverty, tribulations and superstitions that were endemic to that region. This collection of short stories ranging over 20 years, Twelve Tales of Suspense and the Supernatural (paperback edition from Fawcett Crest, June 1965) includes some Weird Tales works as well as tales first published in popular magazines like Ellery Queen, Nero Wolfe, Woman's Home Companion, and Collier's: you know, all the middlebrow publications of the mid-century that your great-grandparents might have read of a TV-less evening (Cavalier too, but that was probably Grandad's privy reading).

Grubb's style has a slightly melancholy, forlorn (the variant "lorn," which I have never come across before, appears in places) note to it and his scenarios are decent time-passers, characters familiar: drawling ne'er-do-wells, laconic sheriffs, expansive judges, tempting women, shrewish wives, innocent children, cool killers. The aptly-titled "Moonshine" got me thinking of those Gold Medal paperbacks from the 1950s of Southern sleaze and backwoods ribaldry. That sensibility is everywhere, but not overwhelming; I wouldn't really call it Southern Gothic, but there is just a hint of it at the edges.

 From hardcover edition, 1964

While reading these stories I couldn't help but think of Grubb's contemporaries in short genre fiction. While his stories aren't quite as sensitively-wrought as Charles Beaumont's or as matter-of-fact believable as Richard Matheson's, as cold and cruel as Shirley Jackson's, Twelve Tales still has appeal. Readers fond of Fredric Brown and Gerald Kersh, two other unclassifiable writers whose fiction has strong echoes of crime, science fiction, suspense, and horror, should take note as well.

Most stories end with a ingenious image of violence, perhaps that's even the tale's raison d'étre, but we all know this is the pulp template. Nothing cuts too deep or too sharp, but you can see the bone in "One Foot in the Grave" and "The Horsehair Trunk," two good and grim revengers that echo Robert Bloch's punning but without that author's black humor. "Busby's Rat" and "Radio" could have served as minor entries in Ray Bradbury's October Country, and "The Rabbit Prince" is at once sad and sweet as a spinster schoolteacher is given a glimpse of wild abandon that could have come from his pen when he was feeling kinder. "Nobody's Watching!" is set in the high-tech world of TV production, and it's the kind of thing I could imagine Harlan Ellison writing about his early days, the dangers of the mediated image on the human mind... and body.

Hangin' with Bob Mitchum in the '50s. Lucky!

Orphaned children populate several of the short stories; of course endangered siblings form the crux of Night of the Hunter (which, goddammit, I must read!). Grubb has a particular sympathy for them--as who wouldn't?--but he doesn't present them mawkishly as a lesser writer would. "The Blue Glass Bottle" highlights how children misunderstand the grownup world about them. "Murder. It was a word. You heard the men say it at Passy Reeder's Store. Murder. It was black marks on the colored poster at the picture show house where the man clutched the red-haired girl by the throat." Grubb's writing shines here, with a slight To Kill a Mockingbird vibe, and the final lines quite affecting.

One of the oddest stories is "Wynken, Blynken, and Nod," which evokes the famous child's rhyme to a macabre end. You may find the reveal a tad ridiculous but it's handled nicely: "There is a moment--perhaps two--in the lifetime of each of us when the eye sees, the mind recoils, and all conscious thinking rejects what the eyes have seen." You might even think of Daphne du Maurier.

Grubb can imbue a phrase  like "not so much as a single scratch" with the most unsettling of implications. That's from "Return of Verge Likens," one of my faves, two brothers who react quite differently to the murder of their father. It was self-defense! claims the killer, and the cops agree. Too bad the man who did the deed was Ridley McGrath, "the biggest man in the whole state of West Virginia! Why, don't Senator Marcheson hisself sit and drink seven-dollar whiskey with Mister McGrath in the Stonewall Jackson lobby very time he comes to town? Don't every policeman in town tip his cap when Mister McGrath walks by?"

"That don't matter a bit," said Verge.

Arrow UK paperback, 1966

The collection concludes with the "Where the Woodbine Twineth," which was adapted for an episode of "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" and included in Peter Straub's excellent anthology for the Library of America, American Fantastic Tales (2010). A little girl whose parents have been killed now lives with her father's sister Nell, who will not tolerate any dreamy foolishness from her new charge (all probably the fault of her brother's "foolish wife"!). Young Eva natters on about the "very small people who live behind the davenport," you know, Mr. Peppercorn and Mingo and Popo! Aunt Nell will have none of this, but when Captain Grandpa or whatever his name is arrives on a steamer from New Orleans with a Creole doll for Eva, things get interesting. Despite the use of an unwelcome (but context-accurate) racial slur, "Woodbine Twineth" ends on a clear, classic, sparkling note of pure unadulterated horror.

Twelve Tales offers old-fashioned pleasures for genre readers; not a classic by any means, but I think a handful of stories--generally, the last half of the book--are  worth checking out. There's nothing as terrifying as Robert Mitchum lurking inside with love and hate tattooed on the knuckles of his hands, but then again... I'm kinda relieved there's not.

Robert M. Price Born Today, 1954

Lovecraft scholar and editor Robert M. Price has contributed much to the study and appreciation of weird fiction both vintage and modern. With his fanzine in 1981, Crypt of Cthulhu, Price featured fiction from all the familiar names associated with the Lovecraftian circle, as well as nonfiction and reviews by himself and fellow writers. His background was in theology, so his approach to the Mythos was thorough and perceptive. Price kept Crypt going for 20 years, and you can get later issues from Necronomicon Press.

Dig these hand-drawn covers for Crypt! Really love the aesthetic, I daresay ol' HPL, amateur journalist that he was, would've too. You can find a lot of the articles included in these online, which I highly recommend reading, especially his early Stephen King reviews.

 

 

In the early-mid 1990s Price began editing Mythos anthologies for the RPG publisher Chaosium, and below are a few of the trade paperback anthologies, each which expanded on a particular entity or town in the Mythos. These titles  seemed ubiquitous while I was working in a chain bookstore then, but I never read any though. What am I missing?

 

 

 

Like a Pigeon from Hell: The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard

This week saw the 108th anniversary of the birth of the pulp king of sword and sorcery  and the creator of Conan the Barbarian, Robert E. Howard. You probably already know this, but along with Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith, he was a titan of the pulp era and his books have long been available in countless and now collectible paperback editions. Time was kind to the art of a man who committed suicide when he was 30 years old, unable to face a future without his beloved mother, who lie comatose and near death when he put a pistol to his temple and pulled the trigger. 

When it comes to Howard's fiction, I have been mostly unfamiliar with it, preferring the horror/dark fantasy tales from HPL and CAS. But these two paperbacks - Cthulhu: The Mythos and Kindred Horrors (Baen Books, May 1987, cover by Steve Hickman) and Pigeons from Hell and Other Weird and Fantastic Adventures (Zebra Books, June 1976, cover by Jeff Jones) - feature mostly Howard's own brand of HPL-tinged horror/sword-and-sorcery/dark fantasy tales, all published in Weird Tales throughout the 1930s. You probably already knew this too, but there is some fantastic stuff here.

Sadly, both covers feature misleading - albeit spectacular! - imagery: neither Cthulhu nor dinosaurs truly appear in the stories. But they are threaded with the fictional forbidden tomes, esoteric knowledge, and dark gods that are familiar to readers of horror, but they are also purely Howard's own: the heroes here aren't pasty scholars and recluses, but men of muscle, bone, and sinew - which he won't often let you forget - while locales are often misty craggy lands from a deep and forgotten ancient age rather than the wilds of Arkham or the historic university environs of Providence. Howard even goes for the one-up on HPL when a character from "Pigeons from Hell" states, "Witchcraft always meant the old towns of New England, to me - but all this is more terrible." Zing!

I kinda skimmed through stories that contained vast passages about pure races, tribal honor, bravery, vengeance, that sort of thing (sword and sorcery - not my sort of thing), even when mixed with vague Lovecraftian darkness. Still, Howard's tales of grue work well and work often, and a few - "Pigeons from Hell," of course, "The Black Stone," "The Fires of Asshurbanipal" - I consider classics of their era. The famous and intriguingly titled "Pigeons from Hell" is a virtually perfect example of pulp horror. From its haunted house opening to its voodoo revenge turn all the way to its lurid, heart-palpitating climax, Howard never falters in his ability to propel a story forward (modern readers could probably do without the consistent use of the N-word, period-appropriate as it may be). I've read this tale a few times over the decades, read one comic book version, and recently saw its very well-done adaptation on the old "Thriller" show. Listen:

"A zuvembie is no longer human. It knows neither relatives nor friends. It is one with the people of the Black World. It commands the natural demons - owls, bats, snakes and werewolves, and can fetch darkness to blot out light... It dwells like a bat in a cave or a house... It can hypnotize the living by the sound of its voice, and when it slays a man, it can command his lifeless body until the flesh is cold. As long the blood flows, the corpse is its slave. Its pleasure lies in the slaughter of human beings."

Eclipse Books, 1988

It works like gangbusters, and if you haven't read "Pigeons," step away from your computer or smartphone or whatever and get to it! "The Black Stone" showcases Howard's main contribution to the Cthulhu mythos, the Unaussprechlichen Kulten, or Nameless Cults, by Friedrich Wilhelm von Junzt, an adventurer-scholar who of course discovers something he shouldn't have and is murdered - only after he finishes his book. This is the most overtly Lovecraftian story, with its academic narrator finally learning the horrors hinted at in a forbidden book are - gasp! - all too real. Howard whips himself into a frenzy of outlandish pulp prose  when he sets out to describe those "nameless rites" our old pal HPL was too squeamish to depict forthrightly. In a brooding forest beneath the moonlight, the narrator has found the titular object, but watches from afar:

...the worshipers, howling and foaming at the mouths, turned on each other with tooth and nail, rendering one another's garments and flesh in a blind passion of bestiality. The priest swept up an infant with a long arm, and shouting again that Name, whirled the wailing babe high in the air and dashed its brains out against the monolith, leaving a ghastly stain on the black surface. Cold with horror I saw him rip the tiny body open...

Ballantine 1979, Paul Lehr cover art 

I mean what! So, so good, really. The Ballantine paperback cover above captures the mood perfectly. "The Fire of Asshurbanipal" was also excellent, successfully mixing men's adventure in the exotic land of Arabia with mind-blasting cosmic horror. The back-story from Howard, about a green jewel, an ancient desert land of black stone, and a vengeful sorcerer, reads a bit like "The Shadow out of Time," and the two protagonists' entrance to this lost, deserted city evokes At the Mountains of Madness.They're looking for that fabled jewel, but they've been followed across the burning desert sands:

The shrieks had faded into a more horrific silence. Holding their breath, they heard suddenly a sound that froze the blood in their veins - the soft sliding of metal or stone in a groove. At the same time the hidden door began to open, and Steve caught a glimmer in the blackness that might have been the glitter of monstrous eyes. He closed his own; he dared not look upon whatever horror slunk from the hideous black well. He knew that there are strains the human brain cannot stand, and every primitive instinct in his soul cried out to him this thing was nightmare and lunacy.

Well, duh. Howard had a long obsession with obscure history, languages, and peoples, and enriched his pulp writing with it; "The People of the Dark," "The Children of the Night," "The Garden Fear," and "The Valley of the Worm" are the best examples of this proclivity. While not necessarily to my taste, I can see how young Weird Tales readers found their minds stimulated and expanded on such fare - which made Howard the success he was, and why he's still read today. Other tales like "Old Garfield's Heart," "The Thing on the Roof," and "Dig Me No Grave," are pure enjoyable gruesomeness with twist endings but retain a charm and readability for all that. Robert E. Howard's muscular prose, vivid action scenes, moody horrors, and ability to conjure in writing precisely what he imagined, can hijack your mind to a place in a past in which men are made of iron, honor is king, pigeons are from hell and dark and hungry gods demand nothing less than our very blood.

I Think of Demons... For You

A book from Robert Bloch that doesn't bear the legend "By the author of Psycho"! Truly a rarity. Also: today I will finish an anthology of ghost stories and hope to have the review posted in the next day or two...

The Avon Paperbacks of A. Merritt: Going from This Land Here to That

One of the most prolific and well-known of the original pulp masters, A. Merritt had his fiction published for decades by Avon. These are the 1970s reprints, featuring some pretty stellar paperback cover art! As his Wikipedia entry states, "Merritt's stories typically revolve around conventional pulp magazine themes: lost civilizations, hideous monsters, etc." Oh, etc.: love it! Also: "His heroes are gallant Irishmen or Scandinavians, his villains treacherous Germans or Russians, and his heroines often virginal, mysterious and scantily clad." Oh, scantily clad: love it! Honestly I don't think I've read anything by him, but these would look pretty great on my shelves...

The Penguin Book of Vampire Stories, ed. by Alan Ryan (1987): At Dawn They Sleep

My my, but is this a tasteful, refined anthology of vampire stories! It simply drips pedigree like so much blood from a fanged maw. The Penguin Book of Vampire Stories (Penguin, Oct 1988), for the most part, stars classy creatures of the night, so refined and polite you could practically invite them to the publisher's cocktail party (after all this is Penguin Books we're talking about; it simply wouldn't do to have the hosts drained before the petits fours are served - leave those kinds of déclassé shenanigans for the folks at Zebra). I really appreciated that late editor/author Alan Ryan (Cast a Cold Eye, Dead White) chose such stories, which convey weirdness, unholy hunger, and chills with understatement and insinuation. Although he notes in his short introduction that the writers included "explore the vampire myth in new ways... the variety of twentieth-century vampires is dazzling," there is very little re- or de-mythologizing of the monster here: reading these stories in the 21st century, I was pleasantly surprised to see that all the traditional tropes are present and accounted for - in fact, this is where they were created. Sometimes you just want old-school.

What's most satisfying is the sheer quality of the writing itself. Some writers go for subtle intimation; others for pulpy thrills; still others prefer thoughtful, genteel bloodletting. Ryan did a stupendous job of gathering all kinds of vampire fiction, dating back nearly 200 years, into one volume, and it's all very good to great. I've dipped in and out of this book since I was in high school, but only these past couple weeks did I really make an effort to read (almost) all of it; I'm happy to report this antho is a must-have, an absolute must-have, for horror and/or vampire fiction fans - as well as plenty other folks who like great short fiction. Plus you can't deny the pure black-winged awesomeness that is the Edward Gorey (below) cover.

Arranged chronologically, we begin with the usual suspects undead: Varney the Vampyre, Carmilla, Dracula. No surprises there. It's easy to see why "Dracula's Guest" was a deleted chapter from Stoker's original Dracula (1897); not bad in and of itself, it adds little to Harker's journey to Dracula. I didn't reread J. Sheridan Le Fanu's pre-Drac "Carmilla" (1872) but lordy how I love its first movie adaptation, Hammer's The Vampire Lovers (1970)! That counts, right? Sure it do. M.R. James presents a tale-within-a-tale-within-a-tale - I think - for "An Episode of Cathedral History." Other supernatural classicists like Algernon Blackwood, E.F. Benson, and F. Marion Crawford come around too, in good form all. Solid foundations for the horrors to come...

On, then, to the classic pulp writers, who knew a thing or two about vampires - and what they didn't know, of course, they'd make up. "The Drifting Snow" is one of the few non-HPL tales I've read from August Derleth; it's marvelous, a tale of delicate understated terror. Again, horror mingles well with a frozen landscape. What lurks out in that winter wonderland you see out the window of your cozy country home? Nobody you'd wanna meet after dark, that's for sure. Stephen King had to have been thinking of Derleth's story when he revisited 'Salem's Lot in "One for the Road."

Gerard de l'Automne was meditating the rimes of a new ballade in honor of Fleurette, as he followed the leaf-arrased pathway toward Vyones through the woodland, begins "A Rendezvous in Averoigne." Brimming with purply, pulpy poetic prose as only Clark Ashton Smith (above) can write, the story's exoticism and decadence herald late 20th century modern vampires à la Rice (who is absent from this antho as she never wrote a short story).

The foods were rich and of strange savor; and the wines were fabulously old, and seemed to retain in their topaz or violet depths the unextinguished fire of buried centuries. But Gerard and Fleurette could barely touch them; and they saw that the Sieur du Malinbois and his lady did not eat or drink at all... the stifling air was laden with unformulable menace, was constrained by the spell of a black and lethal necromancy.

Moore wrote many SF stories featuring her proto Han Solo; here, with Shambleau herself

"Shambleau," the first and most famous story by early female speculative fiction writer Catherine L. Moore, is an overheated tale of horror-fantasy-science fiction straight from Freudian depths. It's pretty awesome: a space pirate named Northwest Smith rescues a feral young woman from a Martian mob and discovers those ancient Earth myths just might be based in reality after all. It's rife with perverse sexual imagery, all writhing wetness and delicious revulsion:

In nightmares until he died he remembered that moment... a nauseous, smothering odor as the wetness shut around him - thick, pulsing worms clasping every inch of his body, sliding, writhing, their wetness and warmth striking through his garments as if he stood naked to heir embrace.

No surprise it became a big hit with the Weird Tales crowd. An erotic horror classic!

The foggy, moonlit courtyard of an abandoned dwelling, perfect setting for a vampire tale, features in Carl Jacobi's "Revelations in Black" (see a cool comic book adaptation of it here). Stuff I love also featured: a bookish guy obsessed with a mysterious tome and a lovely lady of the night. Not that kind of lady, however: That face - it was divinely beautiful, the hair black as sable, the cheeks a classic white. But the lips - ! I grew suddenly sick as I looked upon them. They were scarlet...

 My god how I hate this cover

Moving into modern day with Fritz Leiber's essential, oft-anthologized "The Girl with the Hungry Eyes," about an urban photog and a model fit for the new world of advertising and consumerism. Familiar names Robert Bloch, Charles Beaumont, Ramsey Campbell, and Charles L. Grant all have good solid work included, stories in their own inimitable voices and styles. Two excellent stories I've reviewed elsewhere on this blog: Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's "Cabin 33" and Suzy McKee Charnas's "Unicorn Tapestry." Expectedly, "Pages from a Young Girl's Diary" is Robert Aickman's stately, measured, interiorized account of said young English girl's introduction to a mysterious gentleman at a turn-of-the-century ball while her well-to-do family vacations in Italy.

In some ways the most romantic thing of all is that I do not even know his name. As people were beginning to the leave the party, he took my hand and this time held it, nor did I even affect to resist. "We shall meet again," he said, "many times;" looking so deeply and steadily into my eyes that I felt he had penetrated my inmost heart and soul... I could only murmur "Yes," in a voice so weak that he could hardly have heard me...

Aickman tiptoes in his own manner up to a finish of fate accepted, something I rather enjoy in my vampire tales. "Pages" won the 1975 World Fantasy Award for best short fiction, and is a shining example of that classiness I was talking about.

Horror and humor mix delightfully well in R. Chetwynd Hayes's "The Werewolf and the Vampire," the kind of story Gahan Wilson would probably love to illustrate. Written in a breezy, British vernacular, these travails of a young man who discovers he's a werewolf and can confide only in a Cockney family of vampires are witty and even charming. Loverly!

And editor Ryan's own story, "Following the Way," has to be one of the most sensitively written stories I've read for this blog. His easy way of relating the intellectual pursuits of a young student at a Jesuit school and the relationship he builds with an older, inquisitive priest who gently tries to convince him to join the order over quite a few years, is utterly authentic; the story carries you along with conviction and its payoff feels just right, even if expected. Especially when expected! I only wish there had been a paperback collection of Ryan's short horror fiction back in the late '80s or so; today it'd be a stone-cold classic.

Tanith Lee's "Bite-Me-Not" wraps up the 600-page anthology; Ryan has saved one of the best of the lot for last. Lee entrances the reader with this truly dark fantasy, rich with strange and medieval imagery - usually something I cannot tolerate (I mean I can't even do Game of Thrones, books or show) - although leavened by sympathetic characters and prose that recalls a half-forgotten fable from the mists of history:

For Feroluce and his people are winged beings. They are more like a nest of dark eagles than anything, mounted high among the rocky pilasters and pinnacles of the mountain. Cruel and magnificent, like eagles, the somber sentries motionless as statuary on the ledge-edges, their sable wings folded about them.

1952 If magazine illustration of "Drink My Blood" - more here

And of course no vampire anthology would be complete without the legend himself, Richard Matheson - someone who definitely knew a thing or two about vampires, and made up what he didn't. Here we have "Drink My Blood," which ends on a chilling note of horror and hope; it's a classic Matheson twist and a story that has stuck with me for a gajillion years since I read it as a young teenager, but under the title "Blood Son." Shy, odd little Jules reads an essay in class. Doesn't go over well.

"When I grow up I want to be a vampire."

The teacher's smiling lips jerked down and out. Her eyes popped wide. 

"I want to live forever and get even with everybody and make all the girls vampires."

Boy, I hear ya buddy. I hear ya.

Peter Haining Born Today, 1940

British author and editor Peter Haining, who died in 2007, put together dozens of anthologies that collected classic and obscure horror, occult, Gothic, and science fiction over several decades, as well as nonfiction works on our beloved genre. Virtually all of these books were published, for whatever reason, only in the UK. Some - if not most - of the US paperbacks:

 

One of Haining's nonfiction titles that made it 'cross the pond is Terror! A History of Horror Illustrations from the Pulp Magazines. Fortunately I found a copy when I was in high school. It really and truly fed my hungering heart of horror, and it's been an invaluable resource on my bookshelves for decades now! Which is just the way he would've wanted it, I'm sure.

Read more about Peter here, and see lots more of his UK covers here.