Fine Frights: Stories That Scared Me, ed. by Ramsey Campbell (1988): A Feast of Fiends

Despite it coming out at the height of the Eighties horror boom and published by genre giant Tor Books, I have no recollection at all of Fine Frights: Stories That Scare Me. An anthology of short stories compiled by the great and prolific Ramsey Campbell, the subtitle is the seller here: a story that can frighten one of horror's premier authors will surely reduce regular readers to a slab of shivering Jello. I've owned my minty-fresh copy of the book—never reprinted—for well over a decade, after finding it a library book sale and paying a whopping single dollar for it. The Jill Bauman cover, while perhaps not one of her most accomplished, references one of the stories therein; and if you look closely at the bottom brick on the right corner, you can see her sig: "Jill."

Campbell in 1988, photo by J.K. Potter

Campbell has assembled a dozen stories that he has deemed his favorites, and are actually only "a sampling" of the short works that have scared him over the years. Some of the names readers of science fiction will recognize more than horror fans, some stories are decades old and virtually forgotten, while others are—were—contemporary of the time but had not yet made their bones. I can assure you that, whenever a particular story was written is of no matter; these are top-flight tales of terror, with (almost) each one containing masterful soul-freezing moments of fear, unease, or shock.

Not a moment is wasted as we begin: "Child's Play," by respected Danish literary author Villy Sorensen (pic above), worms right under the skin. Written in the early Fifties, its unassuming title belies the story's utter remorseless cruelties; it's underwritten in a sly, chilling manner, almost like child-speak. This is fitting, as we meet the two little brothers, never named, who happen upon a smaller boy named Peter. A highlight of the entire anthology. "Shut up! We must clear this up before mother gets home."

Two of the best authors of the day are represented: Karl Edward Wagner's classic "More Sinned Against" has been one of my personal favorite horror tales since I first read it back when I was in high school, when it appeared in David J. Schow's essential 1988 antho Silver Scream. Two people trying to make it in the sleazy show-biz environs of Eighties El Lay, with all the ups and downs that requires. This bit of comeuppance is rife with Hollywood grit 'n' glamour, and what happens after the glitter fades. The ending is a total banger, unforgettable lo these many decades later. Candace couldn't have endured it all if it weren't for her selfless love for Rick, and for the coke and smack and pills and booze.

Thomas Ligotti's "The Greater Festival of Masks" is from his Songs of a Dead Dreamer, just after its small press pub in 1985, but prior to the mass market release; only then would his name would gain more and more recognition. All the Ligottian trademarks are here: nameless city, crooked streets, eerie moonlight, shops of bizarre accoutrements, and reflections upon identity and reality. This is not my favorite Ligotti story, but its essence of the esoteric is so strong, so pervasive, its climax so uncanny, I can see why Campbell chose to include it. For these are the declining days of the festival when the beginning and the end, and the old and the new, the existent and the nonexistent all join in the masquerades.

One of the dozens of anthologies in which "Thurnley Abbey" appeared, 1984

Dating from the early years of the 1900s, both "Thurnley Abbey" by Perceval Landon and "The Necromancer" by Arthur Gray work wonders with the musty trappings of classic ghost stories. While the former has to be one of the most anthologized around, Campbell notes in his little intro that he found many of his readers didn't know Landon's story at all; Gray's work is a brief, erudite, M.R. James-style spooker. While these old-fashioned tales-within-tales can, to some modern readers, seem a little dusty and remote, I can assure you they retain their ice-cold powers. "I know that my heart stopped dead, and my throat closed automatically."

"The Fifth Mask" by British author Shamus Frazer (pic above) is certainly a precursor to the output of both Campbell and Ligotti. A nervous man reminisces over double whiskies about a frightful occurrence from his boyhood, when he and a pal, on the Fifth of November, were out and about pranking while wearing masks, which was the style at the time (published originally in 1957, there are several uses of the n-word to describe said masks here). But someone has beat them at their own game of disguise... The entire dank and anxious mood is one that must have affected Campbell greatly, because many of his works have precisely the same vibe. She was as thin as her voice, dressed all in black... there was a stucco wall behind her, patched and discoloured as a gravestone, and the ghosts of winter trees rising above and losing themselves in the twilight.

"The War is Over" by David Case is original to this anthology, so maybe Campbell commissioned it. It is grim. Case wrote two cult horror/Gothic novels, Fengriffen and Wolf Tracks (1971 and 1980 respectively, both back in print from, who else, Valancourt Books), but was not overly prolific. This tale is set just after WWII, but the main story is one of enemy soldiers. This one has teeth and no mercy. "The brave soldier was not then so brave. He pleaded, he begged. He called upon God. Soon he could no longer plead with words, for he had no tongue."

From 1963, "The Horror at Chilton Castle" by Joseph Payne Brennan (above) is, I believe, fairly well-known among horror aficionados. I first read it some 10 or 12 years ago, and haven't forgotten it. Brennan was a respected mid-century horror/fantasy writer whose work stretches back to the Weird Tales era; his "Slime" is one of the great novellas of pulp horror ever. Here, Brennan evokes time-honored horror tropes with his narrator traveling through Europe looking for his ancestors. He hopes to visit the legendary Chilton Castle, to which his family has distant connection.

In a pub nearby the castle on a storm-lashed night, he ruminates on its spectral legends, and chances to meet someone who can give him a tour of the place—and, well, things go on from there. Strongly and vividly written, "Chilton Castle" is another fine example of Fine Frights... and the inspiration for the cover art. It would've made one helluva an episode of "Thriller"!

There were variations of the legend. Without doubt the original tale had been embroidered down the centuries, but the essential outline of the story concerned a secret room somewhere in the castle. It was said that this room contained a terrifying spectacle which the Chilton-Paynes were obliged to keep hidden from the world.

The four remaining stories are from science fiction authors; I'm sure that Campbell was reading them in magazines in his adolescence. This is to be expected: before the Paperbacks from Hell era, and even well into the Seventies, horror itself was cloaked in terms of SF, mystery, thriller, suspense, Gothic, speculative, fantasy, et al. Still, the authors know how to pluck a nerve ending.
 

"Cutting Down" by Bob Shaw (above) is by far the most graphic story included, a piece of Eighties grue originally published in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. I have absolutely no idea how he rates as a science fiction writer, but as a horror writer he does admirably. An Irish author who got his start in SF fandom, here Shaw gets right at one man's disgust, and the lengths he goes to to relieve himself of this ill. Another tale of comeuppance, oh so vaguely reminiscent of Stephen King's "Quitters, Inc." He drove a roughly estimated cubic centimeter of the fluid into his wife's bloodstream, withdrew the needle and stepped back, his breath coming in a series of low growls which he was unable to suppress.

Okay, I kind of guessed where Peter Phillips's (above) "Lost Memory" was going, but still found it fairly gruesome. A Fifties SF tale through and through, in which awkwardly made-up words, clunky characters names, and stilted "scientific" dialogue and description run amok while information is clearly withheld from the reader solely for an effective twist at the end. Not really my kind of thing at all, but I can imagine being a kid back then reading it for the first time, yikes. Chur-chur was muttering to himself about the extreme toughness and thickness of the stranger's skin. He had to make four complete cutting revolutions before the circular mass of white-hot metal could be pulled away by a magnetic grapple.

Not last, but least: John Brunner's "The Clerks of Domesday" is not completely terrible, I get the chilling implications of the narrator's paranoid delusions, but found the execution tedious. Brunner was connected to the New Wave of SF of the late Sixties and Seventies with prophetic novels such as Stand on Zanzibar, The Shockwave Rider, and The Sheep Look Up, and while this story seems to fit his dour predictions and predilections, it was the only one I struggled to finish. It had never been published prior to Fine Frights and has never been reprinted again.

Our final story is from the mighty Philip K. Dick (above), an early work, dated 1954, entitled "Upon the Dull Earth." If at first it is obscure, it will become haunting and forlorn; Dick's powers at evoking an emotional response was there from the beginning of his career. A young couple, angels, stars, an alternate plane of reality; a myth of the underworld, and lost in it. Dick's long interest in spiritual lives, esoteric religion, heretical beliefs, day-to-day reality versus cosmic illusion: all here. It was a terrified reflection that showed out of the mirror above the bowl, a face, tear-stained and frantic. The face was difficult to catch—it seemed to waver and slide. Grey eyes, bright with terror.

There you have it! And it should be no surprise that Ramsey Campbell has assembled such a high caliber anthology; the various styles of horror represented gives the book a wide appeal. It's a no-brainer: Fine Frights is a fine feast, a repast of morbid morsels that belongs on the shelves of any and all paperback horror collectors.

Sweet Halloween Swag!

And straight from the publisher! An editor from Penguin Books contacted me a couple weeks ago saying how much he enjoyed this blog and would I be interested in their new horror offerings for the Halloween season? Would I?! These three trade paperbacks—The Case Against Satan by Ray Russell, Perchance to Dream by Charles Beaumont, and Songs of a Dead Dreamer & Grimscribe by Thomas Ligotti— have each been given beautiful new covers that I believe accurately reflect the fictions therein. Thoughtful intros/afterwords are provided by folks like Ray Bradbury, Laird Barron, Jeff Vandermeer, and even William Shatner. These are welcome and affordable editions (the original Ligotti paperbacks from the 1990s are ridiculously expensive today) that will look terrific on your bookshelves. Get ready for some midnight reading...

Today in Horror Birthdays

Matthew Gregory Lewis (1775 - 1818), who wrote the lurid Gothic novel The Monk, published in 1796. Here you see the 1975 Avon paperback

Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823), author of the first true Gothic romance The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). Date unknown for this Penguin paperback.

Dean R. Koontz (1945), the man behind bestsellers too numerous to count. I liked Watchers (1987) and Lightning (1988) back in high school. These are the first-edition Berkley paperbacks.

The ever-enigmatic Thomas Ligotti (1953), whose exquisitely weird short fiction was first collected in Song of a Dead Dreamer back in 1985 by Silver Scarab Press.

And Philip Nutman (1963-2013), journalist and author. His "Full Throttle" was a terrific entry in 1990's Splatterpunks. 

Thomas Ligotti Born Today, 1953

And there is nothing in the sky, nothing I can see through the window. There is the moon, of course, high and round. But no shadow falls across the moon, no churning chaos of smoke that chokes the frail order of the earth, no shifting cloud of nightmares enveloping moons and suns and stars. It is not a squirming, creeping, smearing shape I see upon the moon, not the shape of a great deformed crab scuttling out of the black oceans of infinity and invading the island of the moon, crawling with its innumerable bodies upon all the spinning islands of inky space. That shape is not the cancerous totality of all creatures, not the oozing ichor that flows within all things...

from "Nethescurial," collected in Grimscribe: His Lives and Works (1991). Read my short review of Songs of a Dead Dreamer here.

Prime Evil, edited by Douglas E. Winter (1988): No Safe Place to Die

"Horror is not a genre," writes editor Douglas E. Winter in his introduction to the classy anthology Prime Evil, "it is an emotion." Winter was really onto something there, I thought upon first reading it, and it's been something of a philosophical beacon for me in my choices of entertainment in the two decades since. Fans don't have to limit themselves to movies or books labeled "horror" to find things that are violent, creepy, disturbing, terrifying. But I'm not telling you anything you don't already know, right?

I'd always held this anthology in high esteem but rereading it now I realize that's only because it contains one of my favorite horror stories ever, "Orange is Anguish, Blue for Insanity" (and going by reviews on Amazon and Goodreads, lots of other readers felt the same). Otherwise, these original stories in Prime Evil are so concerned with classiness that many don't quite deliver on the horror. Mood and psychology, yes, diffuse surreality and obliquity, mais oui, some good writing and imagery, true, but only a few stories are actually gruesome or horrifying or memorable. Even the moodier pieces seemed inert. So I'd say these mild, nondescript "horror" covers are rather apt.

I tried nine ways to Sunday to reread Stephen King's "The Night-Flier" but only found it dated; a sleaze journalist you'd think would actually be au courant but in King's relentless need to brand-identify everything is tiring because you keep thinking, "Oh, right, this story was written in the late 1980s," rather than, "Damn, is this story creepy." I just thought it was junky and its only reason for existence was to feature a vampire pissing blood into a urinal. I didn't reread Clive Barker's "Coming to Grief" and don't recall any of it, but Winter describes it as one of his "quiet, sentimental stories." Dennis Etchison's half-screenplay/half-short story "The Blood Kiss" is fun, nothing special; could've fit right into Schow's Silver Scream anthology that same year. "Alice's Last Adventure" I wrote a bit about here; Thomas Ligotti's story is fine, good stuff.

David Morrell, creator of Rambo himself, in "Orange is for Anguish, Blue for Insanity," delivers a terrific story of a poor art student, his friend, and an obsession: the paintings of Van Dorn, a 19th century painter driven mad by his perceptetion of the world and the colors he used to denote that madness. I love stories about crazy fictional artists of any kind, and the story also features the art students' academic research as well. Here's the narrator on one of Van Dorn's pieces:

All it took was a slight shift of perception, and there weren't any orchids or hayfields, only a terrifying gestalt of souls in hell. Van Dorn had indeed invented a new stage of impressionism. He'd impressed upon the splendor of God's creation the teeming images of his own disgust. His paintings didn't glorify. They abhorred.

David Morrell

Read Morrell's story! "Orange" won the Stoker Award for best long fiction (side note: I first read this story in high school, and was wryly delighted that my school's own colors were the very same). Jack Cady's contribution starts off very well - Cady was a professor of creative writing and it shows in his powerful detailing of the lives of three friends many years after they served together in Vietnam. It's tough and violent and poetic and impressive. The problem is that the gunfight climax lasts about, I dunno, 20 pages or something and I was completely uninterested as the tale went on and on and on; Cady broke the spell he'd woven so convincingly.

1989 Corgi UK edition

I found "The Great God Pan" (ugh, I hate stories named after better, more deservedly famous stories) by M. John Harrison far too detached and mild, thought Paul Hazel's (who are these writers?) "Having a Woman at Lunch" to be too old-fashioned, and was simply unimpressed with Charles L. Grant's "Spinning Tales with the Dead." Look, Charlie, we all know you love quiet horror but you can't just write the words "moonlight" and "cloud" and "whisper"; ya gotta do the work too.

A minor Ramsey Campbell story of a stalker who thinks writers are stealing his ideas, "Next Time You'll Know Me," is okay; nothing particularly Campbellian about it though. "Food" is sly, gross, and witty; I'd expect nothing less from the stellar Thomas Tessier. One of the solid stories with its tone of world-weary grief and loss, Whitley Strieber's "The Pool" is a dream-like tale of the death of a child who seems in touch with worlds beyond this one. Childhood trauma underlies Peter Straub's "The Juniper Tree"; specifically, some rather graphic sexual abuse and years later, its fallout. It's more mainstream lit than "horror."

And there you have it: although Winter's introduction was thoughtful and influential, Prime Evil is less a major horror anthology of the 1980s than mostly an attempt to get horror fiction read by people who wouldn't deign to read it in the first place. It's true that horror doesn't have to have "potboiler prose, lurid covers and corny titles," but why are we trying to impress people who already look down on the genre? I mean, fuck them, right? Right.

Songs of a Dead Dreamer by Thomas Ligotti (1985): Fascinating to Observe What the Mirror Does

But stories, even very nasty ones, are traditionally considered more satisfying than reality - which, as we all know, is a grossly overrated affair.

The reclusive Thomas Ligotti writes hermetic, maddeningly quiet and exotically bizarre short stories populated by professors, physicians, poets and painters who slowly but surely find that the universe is fractured, unknowable, and ravenous. His 1985 collection Songs of a Dead Dreamer contains rich, dense stories with titles like "Les Fleurs," "Drink to Me Only with Labyrinthine Eyes," "Dr. Locrian's Asylum," and "The Chymist," which reveal a baroque and decadent view of reality twisted and askew just so. Speculates the narrator of "The Sect of the Idiot":

To suffer a solitary madness seems the joy of paradise when compared to the extraordinary condition in which one's own madness merely echoes that of the world outside...

Many of Ligotti's protagonists go almost willingly into this madness, to the edge of the world where an endless ribbon of road continues into space by itself, as the drunken children's book author of "Alice's Last Adventure" puts it while she ponders the identity of her most famous storybook character. Ligotti also displays a charmingly creepy self-referential tendency in "Professor Nobody's Little Lectures on Supernatural Horror" and "Notes on the Writing of Horror." I've always been a sucker for the horror story that is also about horror fiction.

On the one hand, there's the writer who can't face his fate: that the telling of a story has nothing to do with him; on the other hand, there is the one who faces it all too well: that the telling of a story has nothing to do with him.

The cover blurb about shelving this work between Poe and Lovecraft certainly piqued my interest in Ligotti when I found a copy on its first paperback publication (top, Carroll & Graf June 1991). Fellow traveler Ramsey Campbell provides the laudatory introduction: "He belongs to the most honourable tradition in the field, that of subtlety and awesomeness rather than the relentlessly graphic." Ligotti has nothing like Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos but still hints at awesome powers and entities that flit and gibber just beyond the scope of one's perception. And is the "dead dreamer" of the title an oblique reference to the Great Cthulhu itself? According to the cover illustration... uh, well, no.

Ligotti's worldview is one of pessimism and despair, his philosophy born of the perception that what we see as reality is merely a false mask obscuring an unimaginable, even unfathomable truth. He reveals our own distorted reflection, in a foggy mirror, in a glass of Scotch, in the swirling waters of the bath drain, in the cracked lenses of antique spectacles, where we see our aging faces, our corrupt nature, our final doom (It had dozens of legs and looked all backwards and inside out). But then as Professor Nobody says, Horror is more real than we are; and who are we to disagree?