65 Great Tales of Horror

by Mary Danby (Editor, Contributor), Auguste de Villiers de l'Isle-Adam (Contributor), Thomas Burke (Contributor)

CONTENTS

Villiers de L’isle Adam – The Salvationists (The Torture Of hope)
Honore de Balzac – The Mysterious Mansion
E. F. Benson – Negotium Perambulans
Charles Birkin – Text For Today
Robert Bloch – Return To The Sabbath
Sydney J. Bounds – Hothouse
Ray Bradbury – The October Game
Joseph Payne Brennan – The Horror At Chilton Castle
Anthony Burgess – An American Organ
Thomas Burke – The Bird
Hortense Calisher – Heartburn
Truman Capote – Miriam
R. Chetwynd-Hayes – The Monster
Agatha Christie – The Last Seance
John Collier – De Mortuis
William Wilkie Collins – A Terribly Strange Bed
R. C. Cook – Green Fingers
Roald Dahl – The Landlady
Mary Danby – Nursery Tea
Monica Dickens – Activity Time
Arthur Conan Doyle – The Brazilian Cat
Stanley Ellin – The Speciality Of The House
A. E. Ellis – If Thy Right Hand Offends Thee
H. H. Ewers – The Spider
Elizabeth Fancett – Someone In The Room
William Faulkner – A Rose For Emily
C. S. Forester – The Man Who Didn’t Ask Why
Jane Gaskell – Jane
Terry Gisbourne – The Quiet Man
John B. L. Goodwin – The Cocoon
Patricia Highsmith – The Snail-Watcher
Fanny Hurst – Guilty
Henry James – The Romance Of Certain Old Clothes
Gerald Kersh – Comrade Death
Henry Kuttner – The Salem Horror
David Langford – Cold Spell
L. A. Lewis – The Meerschaum Pipe
H. P. Lovecraft – The Hound
Philip MacDonald – Our Feathered Friends
Roger Malisson – The Thirteenth Kestrel
Frederick Marryat – The Werewolf
Richard Matheson – No Such Thing As A Vampire
Guy de Maupassant – The Hand
Clive Pemberton – The Will Of Luke Carlowe
Hal Pink – The Screaming Plant
Edgar Allan Poe – The Black Cat
Seabury Quinn – The House Of Horror
Jane Rice – The Refugee
Robert Silverberg – Back From The Grave
Frances Stephens – Claws
Bram Stoker – Dracula [extract]
Theodore Sturgeon – It
Terry Tapp – See How They Run
Bernard Taylor – Pat-a-Cake, Pat-a-Cake
William F. Temple – The Whispering Gallery
Harry E. Turner – Now Showing At The Roxy
R. E. Vernede – The Finless Death
Evelyn Waugh – The Man Who Liked Dickens
Philip Welby – Buffy
H. G. Wells – Pollock And The Porroh Man
Edward Lucas White – Lukundoo
T. H. White – The Troll
Henry S. Whitehead – The Lips
Angus Wilson – Mummy To The Rescue
Alexander Woollcott – Moonlight Sonata

Genres: Horror, Short Stories, Anthologies, Fiction, Fantasy

688 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1981

Reviews

[Shawn · Rating 3 out of 5]

FIRST TIER: So, having a few of these Octopus omnibus anthologies on my shelf (and previously having read Ghost Stories) I think I get the general gist of them now - essentially it's about 2/5th public domain classics, 2/5th modern "classics" and a little of the budget left over for 1/5th of the space being previous holdings by the publisher or stories by friends or associates of the editor. Which is not bad, really - because the time period covered by that last part is the 1970s (and most specifically British authors) so while the quality is sometimes lacking, there's a good chance you haven't read them yet (and, thus, always hope for some unexperienced gem). And, of course, you get a bumper supply of "classic" stuff as well. Thus - a good book for a kid!

SECOND TIER: With big anthologies like these, it always turns out to be enormously helpful that I am an obsessive note keeper, and so can check my records as to what I've already read. And in this case, I'd already read THREE QUARTERS of the offerings here - although, to be fair, I actually ended up reading that unknown quarter and re-reading another quarter (so that I could generate Goodreads reviews for those stories) - so I ended up reading half the book!

THIRD TIER: roughly weakest to strongest, and with 65 stories that's a lot of ground to cover (so as usual I apologize for the length) and let's go:

Well, I didn't read "Dracula, an extract" because I generally don't read extracts from larger works. "Text For Today" by Charles Birkin has Anglican missionaries dealing with a revenge murder on the isolated pacific island where they are stationed, until a misinterpretation of a biblical passage leads to a horrific outcome. Weak, and in the style of a British-flavored TALES FROM THE CRYPT type story. Angus Wilson's "Mummy To The Rescue" is about the nanny of a extremely naughty girl getting burnt-out by her abusive behavior, with events about to take a turn for the...better? Eh, I didn't like this confusingly told (so as to keep the final reveal "twist" a secret) and rather lurid little thing the first time I read it and still found it lacking again. Wilson handles the character of the Nanny, and her and her friend's dialogue well, I'll give him that, but still... Finally, "Now Showing At The Roxy" by Harry E. Turner is set in a dystopian future (eight and a half years from now!) of urban squalor, where two theater owners vie for a dwindling audience by programming more and more lurid films in an attempt draw an overstimulated, desensitized audience. One finally pulls ahead by factoring in the ghoulish draw of a chance for the random audience member's death, which then escalates to an inevitable conclusion. A broadly drawn attempt at social satire that is neither as funny or as deep as it seems to think.

In the "okay but flawed" category, we have: the droll murder story of "An American Organ" by Anthony Burgess. Not much to say about it - just, eh. Meanwhile, Thomas Burke's "The Bird" is a cruel, racist variant on Poe, notable for being one of those stories in which "vengeance" is inexplicably visited on someone who understandably commits murder against a horrific abuser. "The Salem Horror" by Henry Kuttner has an author moves into a notorious house in Salem once owned by a witch and discover a secret tunnel in the basement to a chamber room containing murals, where he chooses to set up his writing desk (inexplicably). An occultist warns him against it, even as locals begin dying, and the witch's grave is found opened and her body gone. This is pulp horror of the weak variety, with Kuttner doing a vague variation of Lovecraft's "Dreams In The Witch House" in broad strokes.

In the just "OK" category: "Moonlight Sonata" by Alexander Woolcott is a droll little macabre piece in which a man, visiting a friend's estate and finding him absent, spends the night - only to spy a ghost near his door, quietly embroidering. But as it turns out, it isn't a ghost and that isn't what it is doing. I upgraded this a bit on the reread but not by much. I appreciated its drollness a bit more now, and its attempt to sell the story as true, but still it seems a bit of macabre slumming. Sydney J. Bounds' "Hothouse" has a fertilizer operative strike a deal with an eccentric wealthy man to supply blood-rich material for his hothouse plants. But such food stimulates strange growth. More of a quick idea than a story. "The Monster" by R. Chetwynd Hayes is a variant of the "Eye of The Beholder" episode from TWILIGHT ZONE, here with added post-apocalyptic and religious zealotry motifs. Not bad but nothing amazing, I moved it down a notch in assessment. A man returns to his hometown in "Buffy" by Philip Welby, and discovers that the local bully - who once delighted in making sport of the town's crackpot (who fancied himself an alchemist) - has become strangely reclusive recently. This is a bit of a variation of Machen's "The White Powder" simplified into a nasty "revenge by magic" story. "Someone In The Room" by Elizabeth Fancett is a bit of short suspense writing. A wife, having just broken up with her husband (who angrily stormed out) spends her first night alone with their toddler son. And now she has awoken in the middle of the night, convinced there is someone in her room... is it her husband? an intruder? Fine for what it is, and pretty effective in that, but the ending (and its need to provide a "twist" to the resolution) ends up seeming merely mean-spirited.

Similarly, "The Man Who Didn't Ask Why" by C.S. Forester - in which a man who has found a way to reliably see the future (and made himself wealthy from it) finally asks himself the inevitable question of his own mortality, which turns out to be the wrong question... is an okay shortie (which now would be considered "flash") that exists simply for the twist. Following a family's slaughter in the 1930s, we are told the story of the pleasant, mild-mannered killer and what led him to commit the deed in "The Quiet Man" by Terry Gisbourne. Again, okay for what it is, but not much at that - the crude, noisy, thoughtless family next door drives him to killing after he begins to perceive them as animals. The only interesting idea - that perhaps the family WASN'T causing all the noise - seems to get dropped. Patricia Highsmith's "The Snail Watcher" proves to be a disappointment. A businessman's newly found love of observing the mating and breeding habits of snails eventually becomes an obsession that destroys him... I like Highsmith quite a bit (was there ever a more misanthropic writer?) but this story didn't gain any points on a re-read. Not that it's bad, as an effectively "squicky" cautionary tale - but it feels as if there should be a deeper reading to it, yet it really doesn't contain enough pertinent "other details," or even gestures, towards that reading (there's no suggestion, for example, that the husband and wife's sex life is constrained, nor seemingly any problem in the child department).

Continuing with the Okays: "Guilty" by Fannie Hurst has an average British couple, childless, taken by surprise when the wife (at 40) discovers she is pregnant, but then begins to suffer various physical and mental problems (involving visions of fish - the husband is a fish monger), which the daughter, when grown, seems to inherit - leading to a tragic result. Nicely drawn, in terms of the characters and their closeness, but the central idea (inherited madness) seems a bit much. While totally solid, "No Such Thing As A Vampire" by Richard Matheson, betrays the problems with twist stories - once you know the twist, the joy of rereading is diminished. Still, a kid could easily be taken by surprise on first perusal of this tale of a European family seemingly plagued by bloodsuckers. A man finds out that his eccentric Uncle has left his vast fortune to an Occult society after his death, in Clive Pemberton's "The Will Of Luke Carlowe", unless the nephew agrees to a strange request that the Uncle hopes will prove that communication with the dead is possible. This has a really nice, compact little set-up, but the ending is a trifle too predictable (and predictably executed). In "The Screaming Plant" by Hal Pink, a wealthy man acquires the supposed seed of an actual Mandrake plant, as discoursed on in medieval literature (man-shaped, feeds on blood, deadly scream) - and proceeds to grow it in his manor home basement, with dire results. A disposable yarn which hurts a promising idea by just rushing through it with weak writing.

Two doctors get lost in a storm and stumble upon the house of a man who claims that his daughter is ill, but he proves to be a madman who has been abducting women and performing surgical mutilations and deformations on them in Seabury Quinn's "The House Of Horror." Yes, it's another yarn about impish little Frenchman and occult detective Jules De Grandin (along with Dr. Trowbridge, his stolid and endlessly thick "Watson" companion), a series character from WEIRD TALES magazine. His adventures tend to be formulaic and (in the usual pulp style) both too truncated and too verbose. The scenario in this one is straight out of some Monogram/Poverty Row horror film (A dark and stormy night! A door that opens by itself!) but the revelation is straight-up, early body horror. Sadly, Quinn leans too heavily on coincidence/nature, both to eliminate the threat and (sadder still) to negate the ethical problem posed by the climax, for it to be very satisfying - so, pure horror melodrama, really. In "Back From The Grave" by Robert Silverberg, a man awakens to find he's been buried alive by his scheming wife and the young man with whom she's having an affair. But he's determined to escape. Nothing is more engaging than a "buried alive" scenario - but there are limited potential outcomes for the ending. Here's one that, while not surprising, may be the first time it's been committed to text. Okay, really (although the tension is good).

"Claws" by Frances Stephens is a conte cruel in which a man on the run from his debtors sets up a life for himself working a lobster boat in the remote Hebrides Islands. But a bully at work demands some attention, for which our main character ends up paying in spades. Nice opening and set-up, but the pay-off is routine. In "See How They Run" by Terry Tapp, a lone woman in an isolated farm house finds herself besieged by hordes of mice. Eh, I guess it was part of that whole British 70s "Super-rats are going to eat us" phase (see popular James Herbert novels, as well as episodes of DOOMWATCH and BEASTS). Some okay suspense writing up front, but it doesn't really have an ending so much as a media fade-out. Finally, "Pat-A-Cake, Pat-A-Cake" by Bernard Taylor has an infant explain (in adult language) how much he loves his new adoptive parents and how he managed to engineer the downfall of his negligent mother. It a weird variant of Bradbury's "The Small Assassin," with the (non-homicidal) baby getting rid of the bad mom in a somewhat unlikely way. The tone is fairly comic (the juxtaposition of the reasoned statements the baby makes and the baby-talk the adults hear is milked for some laughs) but its pretty much a trifle.

Next are the "Good but slightly flawed" stories: Henry Whitehead has an occasional thread of proto-"body horror" running through his oeuvre and "The Lips" makes use of the same threat featured in "Lukundoo" (see below, here rendered "l'kundu"). The skipper of a slave ship, bitten on the neck by one of his abused charges, finds the wound beginning to mutate in unexpected ways. The manifestation of the curse is disgusting (and, yes, racially charged), but perhaps dialed just a smidgen back in grotesqueness from the White). Joseph Payne Brennan's "The Horror At Chilton Castle" has a distant relative roped into being witness to a rare family ritual where the heir is presented with a hideous secret found in a sealed chamber. A full blown Gothic, this is a functional story with a fairly good build-up and "reveal" (although not much more to credit it with, and re-reads might find it lacking). "Miriam" by Truman Capote is, as might be expected, extremely well-written and observed. A tale of a perfectly happy shut-in widow who extends a kindness to a small girl and then is incessantly plagued by the child's increasingly wild (if benignly expressed) demands. Is it a ghost story, a doppelganger tale, an extended metaphor on childlessness? Hard to say... A folksy, friendly man in a small town is presumed to have killed his floozy wife and buried her under the concrete floor in his cellar, in "De Mortuiis" by John Collier. But he claims she's just left on a trip, and that he had no idea she was "loose" and sleeping around. I moved this droll little murder tale up a notch on the re-read.

In "A Terribly Strange Bed" by Wilkie Collins, a man wins big at a disreputable casino and then, overcome by drink (or something more?) agrees to spend the night in a room upstairs, with a very strange bed. Nice little bit of suspense writing which I am now old enough to re-appreciate (having dismissed it during my pretentious, middle-aged, "horror is important and deep and needs to have meaning" phase). I particularly liked the bit where some moonlight through a window triggers an unexpected and forgotten memory in our narrator. In A.E. Ellis' "If Thy Right Hand Offends Thee" there are repeated reports of a ghoulish figure being sighted on campus near a British University (and a student falling into a coma): a malevolent, nearly fleshless robed skeleton holding its own severed hand. This is an odd little piece, but effective for what it is. It seems to be modeled after M.R. James (the malignant creature is very "physical"), and yet its historical ties are only presented after the fact. Still, it struck me as a nice piece of spookery, and would make a good short film if a proper old British University would allow access for the filming. In "Jane" by Jane Gaskell, the titular character is prone to mental fits and has grown up in a strange household, with distant parents who keep her confined, and only a huge pet snake (which she considers a sister) as her companion. Eventually, she leaves for school, only to return to horror... A pithy little modern Gothic piece.

And now, into the comments for the rest!

[Mjhancock · Rating 4 out of 5]

Premise: It's an anthology collection of 65 stories, written by various writers from the 19th to mid 20th century, arranged alphabetically by author from Villiers de L'Isle Adam to Alexander Woollcott. And in the course of that, it goes over pretty every typical type of 19th and 20th century horror: mostly supernatural shenanigans, a mentally ill person does something terrible, colonists get punished for abominable behaviour in ways that are still somehow racist, monstrous plants and animals, and combinations of aforementioned four types.

Characters: likewise, we have a melange of typical horror types: the aforementioned mentally ill, rational men proven to be very wrong about how the world works; overprotective, nervous women; teens who are a little too brazen for their own good; precious children who wind up really needing the intervention of an adult; bad behaving sailors. And so forth.

Is it good? Well, it's a 685 page anthology collection. I mention that not to brag (well, mostly not to brag) but because once anything gets over 500 pages, the sheer scale of it becomes part of the factors in reading, and kind of starts overwhelming other impressions. And when it's a collection of stories by different authors, that scale means there's not a lot to be said about the whole—there's just too many different pieces. I think if it had been arranged by original publication date over author, I'd be able to say a lot more about history and theme, and how approaches to horror have changed over time. But not only are they not arranged that way, there is no date given at all in the main text. You'd have to go hunting for each one, and I'm not inclined to do that 65 times. Edgar Allan Poe's 1843 “The Black Cat” is sandwiched between Hal Pink's 1934 “The Screaming Plant” and Seabury Quinn's 1926 “The House of Horror” and besides all three giving a vague sense of happening “in the past,” I'd be hard pressed to distinguish any sort of evolution or particular change between them. Or to put it another way, yes, there is a ton of good stories in this. Does that make the collection good? Honestly, somewhere around page 400 that question lost its meaning.

Is it Spooky? I could copy-paste the last paragraph here and replace the word “good” with “spooky,” and do the same for the next category, but that seems like a waste of everyone's time. Instead, let me flag a few that stood out as particularly scary/spooky. E. F. Benson's “Negotium Perambulans” tells the story of a small village with a ruined church that requires certain special observations; it's a wonderful blend of very stoic people pretending that That House everyone avoids isn't scary at all and all you have to do is make sure the light stays on all the time always. “Return to the Sabbath” by Robert Bloch is about a film being made around a man famous for his previous performance rising from the dead, and the grotesque nature of his rising is described very fully. Ray Bradbury's “The October Game” is arguably the most Halloween as well, since it's one of the few literally taking place on Halloween, but it's kind of a modern update on “The Black Cat” while simultaneously doing a twist on a traditional Halloween game. You see the twist coming, and it's appropriately awful. Not coincidentally, it also has one of the best lines of the book, as we'll see later. R C. Cook's “Green Fingers” is one of the many story about bad things happening around elderly women, but it's actually sympathetic towards its older protagonist, while taking to illogical extremes the boast that she can “make anything grow.” Hanns Heinz Ewer's “The Spider” is about a rented room where the last three inhabitants all killed themselves, and the man who is certain he can make his fortune by solving their deaths; the way the story manages to make the turn convincing is impressive and chilling.

Is it Halloween? Again, sometimes, yes. Arthur Conan Doyle's “The Brazilian Cat” and William Wilkie Collins' “A Terribly Strange Bed” are more tales of daring escape than horror per se, and the adventure story nature of them lends to a sort of scary fun approach. Stanley Ellin's “The Speciality of the House” ends exactly the way you assume a horror story about a strange food dish would end, but it's executed with a lot of fun. The H. P. Lovecraft story of the collection is “The Hound,” and even in a collection of horror, the Lovecraft story stands out for his unique use of language. The ol' racist, sexist, xenophobic weirdo sure can tell them. And I really enjoyed the excerpt from Brahm Stoker's “Dracula”; I'd read the novel before, but the passage where the hapless Harker realizes he's going to have work very, very hard to avoid dying in the castle is a lot of fun. And finally, Theodore Sturgeon's “It” reminds me a little of the sci fi classic “The Thing,” in its depiction of a being that's totally inhuman. So yeah, a lot of Halloween-ness fun to be had.

Quotes: “Then... some idiot turned on the lights.” Ray Bradbury, “the October Game”

“Children, however, when left so much to themselves, acquire a thoughtfulness not common to their age.” Frederick Marrayat, “The Werewolf,” a sort of darker Hansel and Gretel kind of story

“Madness rides the star-wind ... claws and teeth sharpened on centuries of corpses . . . dripping death astride a bacchanale of bats from night-black ruins of buried temples of Belial . . . Now, as the baying of that dead fleshless monstrosity grows louder and louder, and the stealthy whirring and flapping of those accursed web-wings circles closer and closer, I shall seek with my revolver the oblivion which is my only refuge from the unnamed and unnamable.” Needless to say, Lovecraft's “The Hound.”

Random Thoughts: I spent some time thinking about what elements demonstrate the stories' ages. Obviously, no mention of pretty much any media besides film; general persistent misogyny; an absence of any non-white protagonists. The closest it gets to that latter point is that the very first story, Villers de L'Isle Adam's “The Salvationists” stars a rabbi who experiences absolute horror at the hands of the Spanish inquisition; it sets a bit of an odd tone to start the collection with a story so rooted in real world atrocities.

--One other element that dates it is the sheer number of stories that are recounted to a fictional audience, as a tale that happened to the speaker, or someone the speaker knew. Maybe this was more common in a world where those kinds of tall tales were more common, but I think it's an affection we don't see as often.

--They weren't quite at the level to make the “Halloween” cut, but I also greatly enjoyed David Langford's “Cold Spell,” which is about happens when you don't do the English Morris Dance; and H. G. White's “The Troll.” Both stories take traditional horror folk tales and turn them towards cosmic horror, and I always appreciate that approach.

--Looking at my list of favourites, I definitely tend towards preferring supernatural horror. I pretty much knew that already, but it's nice to see it confirmed.

Rating: 60 out of 65 Great Tales of Horror. Those 5 know which ones they are.

[Dirk Grobbelaar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quite a bit of fun. I guess these old collections are mostly out of print, or have been replaced or updated by new ones. So if you are reading this you may have seen a secondhand copy for sale online and are wondering whether you should purchase it.

Just do it. The range of tales collected here are very varied (although they all fit the bill of horror - wisely the publishers refrained from calling it 65 Tales of the Supernatural).

I love these old anthologies. I sharpened my weird fiction teeth on this kind of thing when I was a young 'un. There are actually 64 stories here and an extract from Dracula (which I didn't read because I am reading Dracula separately). As you can imagine, the quality fluctuates, but this is the beauty of something like this, since different people like different things. The stories you enjoy might not be the ones that I enjoy, and vice versa. If you enjoy dark fiction, you will absolutely find something you like in the 64 stories contained herein - it is just the law of averages.

There are some obscure gems too, and at least a few that are surprisingly grisly (for example: one of the stories deals with dismemberment).

In a nutshell then: a (somewhat surprisingly) edgy collection of horror short stories. There will be some old gothic and spook stories that you undoubtedly know, but there are also a host of "newer" ones that you may find a delight.

[Stuart Dean · Rating 4 out of 5]

65 horror stories, mostly of the late 1800s to early 1900s period. Some really big names like Edgar Allen Poe, H.G. Wells, Roald Dahl, Arthur Conan Doyle, H.P. Lovecraft, and even an excerpt from Dracula by Bram Stoker. We have vampires, werewolves, witch doctors, and snails. But most of the stories are of the more psychological ghost story style. If every story was to end with the same phrase it would go something like, "as the door was bolted from the inside we were forced to break it down. Inside we found Throckmorton alone, eyes wide, not a mark on him, dead as a stone. And on his face a look of absolute unholy terror!" Entertaining tales of gaslight and telegraphs with a good many mostly British gentlemen encountering every sort of horror, from outright demons to cannibalism to mass suicide. The mass suicide one is particularly funny. At 688 pages it took me a while but it was worth the time.

[Rissa (rissasreading) · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a very cool and interesting read. It held a lot of old, and unknown short stories. They're all older horror stories and it shows in the way the stories are told and how they come to conclude. It's a fun read because it shows where some of our horror began, and it definitely makes you see some ways that current / past works have been inspired by these stories that are told.

The book starts off with a bunch of stories I found not as good as the middle of the novel & the ending stories I found to leave me feeling the same as the beginning. Enjoyable still

[Shannon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lxxl

[Shawn · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very mixed bag here. A lot of (if not all) "classics", which means most of them haven't aged well, but there are still some good ones.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good horror collection. Review to follow.

[Lamprini · Rating 5 out of 5]

WOW!!!!!