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Graveyard Shift: More Tales From The Edge of the Chair
Contents
On The Killing Of Eratosthenes The Seducer by Kathleen Freeman
The Adventure of the Clapham Cook by Agatha Christie
The Last Night of the World by Ray Bardbury
"They" by Rudyard Kipling
The Chair by John Bartlow Martin
Old Fags by Stacy Aumonier
"Dead Men Working in the Cane Fields" by William Seabrook
How The Brigadier Lost His Ear by Arthur Conan Doyle
Dry September by William Faulkner
Rattenbury & Stoner by F. Tennyson Jesse
Sing A Song of Sixpence by John Buchan
The Murder In Le Mans by Janet Flanner
Sleeping Beauty by John Collier
The Shadow Of The Shark by G.K. Chesterton
A Small Buried Treasure by John Fischer
The Horla by Guy De Maupassant
Scrawns by Dorothy L. Sayers
On The Killing Of Eratosthenes The Seducer by Kathleen Freeman
The Adventure of the Clapham Cook by Agatha Christie
The Last Night of the World by Ray Bardbury
"They" by Rudyard Kipling
The Chair by John Bartlow Martin
Old Fags by Stacy Aumonier
"Dead Men Working in the Cane Fields" by William Seabrook
How The Brigadier Lost His Ear by Arthur Conan Doyle
Dry September by William Faulkner
Rattenbury & Stoner by F. Tennyson Jesse
Sing A Song of Sixpence by John Buchan
The Murder In Le Mans by Janet Flanner
Sleeping Beauty by John Collier
The Shadow Of The Shark by G.K. Chesterton
A Small Buried Treasure by John Fischer
The Horla by Guy De Maupassant
Scrawns by Dorothy L. Sayers
- GenresHorror
319 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1967
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September 5, 2020
As I just read the larger book from which this excerpted (The Edge of the Chair), I figured I'd go back and excerpt the pertinent reviews from my exhaustive review of that anthology.
This is a book of "suspenseful" stories, fiction and non-fiction. I was not a fan of much of the non-fic, and so didn't read "On the Killing of Eratosthenes the Seducer" by Kathleen Freeman (about ancient Greece). "Rattenbury & Stoner" by F. Tennyson Jesse (about a famed murder case in the 1920s in which a working-class driver, involved with his mistress, murders her aged husband) was interesting in that it was intended to "set the story straight" (or at least offer some food for thought) about the woman in the case, whose morality and character were much maligned in the press, which led to her suicide after being found innocent. Nice look at culture & class hypocrisy, but still, long winded for all that. "The Murder In Le Mans" is about the famed case of the incestuous Papin sisters, servants in Paris who murdered/mutilated their Mistress and her daughter. Though it seems obvious the girls were schizophrenics, Janet Flanner spends her time haughtily and smugly dismissing all the other opinions of their motivation at the time (oh, those silly demmed Marxists and Surrealists!) - one presumes her work will fade into history as well. More solid were: John Bartlow Martin's "The Chair" tells the details of a 50s era spree killing by two ne'er-do-wells (one of whom ends in the electric chair) while filling us in on the young man's semi-tragic background as a sufferer of brain trauma as a child that left the compulsion and control areas of his mind seemingly damaged, thus leaving us with the realization that everyone knew this kid was going to end up coming to a bad end, but that there was no (and really still is no) social program in place to help him. William Seabrook introduces the world to the idea of Haitian zombies in the excerpt "Dead Men Working in Cane Fields," which is interesting because even here is the suggestion that the victims are not really dead but merely drugged. Finally, "A Small Buried Treasure" by John Fischer relates an anecdote of tomb robbery, contraband, betrayal and revenge from rural Greece - a fun read. And now the fiction...
A note about the weakest stories here - my ascribing them as such may have something to do with the fact that I'm not really a fan of Mystery and Detection short fiction, so those pieces here indicated may be perfectly fine for fans of such, they were just not to my tastes. That fastidious Belgian detective Monsieur Poirot (written with a great "voice", granted) solves the mystery of a disappearing servant in Agatha Christie's "The Adventure of The Clapham Cook" - cute, but also a good example of why I don't read a lot of this kind of thing. "How the Brigadier Lost His Ear" by Arthur Conan Doyle relates how a Naploeonic-era officer, involved in the ransacking of Venetian art treasures, has a thrilling and romantic adventure. Eh. Similarly, John Buchan has one of his jolly English fighting toffs befriend a South American president being stalked by assassins in "Sing A Song of Sixpence" - and it's all a jolly good bore. Finally, I downgraded (from a previous reading) G.K. Chesterton's "The Shadow of the Shark" which is a (not uninvolving) "locked room" type mystery in which a man is found dead at the tide line on an isolated stretch of beach, with no footprints in evidence anywhere about him. And what does a single starfish have to to do with it all? There's lots of neat stuff here (talk of shark gods, and a fish-masked stranger at the window) but also a lot of dubious (and frankly, insulting) psychological and metaphysical posturing before we get the solution....ohh, hum!
Good but a little flawed: Stacy Aumonier's "Old Fags" is a conté cruel about characters living in poverty (the titular hobo makes money by retrieving cigarette and cigar ends from the gutter) and a churlish young dog-walker who seduces and abandons a girl. Not bad, I upgraded it on this reread (the milieu is well-developed, and the class conflict sketched well).
Good stories: Previously, I was not a fan of Rudyard Kipling's "They" but, on the re-read, I found some things to appreciate in this tale of a traveler (in a newfangled motor coach) who stumbles onto the sprawling property of a blind landholder, said grounds seemingly populated by dozens of half-glimpsed children. Not so much a good read for the story, per se, as for the details: some wonderful landscape descriptions (the forested area lies near the sea), the woman's flashes of telepathic empathy, a desperate dash by motor car to save a dying child. A very sedate, melancholy story that's not scary but interesting. "Dry September" by William Faulkner tells of the events leading up to a lynching in a small town, giving use sparse, colloquial and lyrical sketches of some of those involved (including inadvertently). Nice us of prosaic (repetitive and uninformative) dialogue. Powerful. "Scrawns" by Dorothy L. Sayers has a young housemaid girl, newly arrived at the remote titular estate, finding herself in a Gothic nightmare of disfigured servants and a lunatic Master. Are they really digging a grave for her out in the garden? Suspenseful black comedy.
Three excellent stories here: In Ray Bradbury's deliberately non-hysterical and gentle "The Last Night of the World", all adults everywhere have the same dream - that the world will end that night, and thoughtfully accept it. Nice, Bradbury and his most concise and human. John Collier spins a version of the old "careful what you wish for" trope in "Sleeping Beauty", in which a rather Romantic Englishman becomes besotted with a radiant young woman he finds in an sideshow exhibit in an American backwater town, who is supposedly resting in an unbreakable trance. He must possess her, but this proves more difficult than he anticipated, not to mention what awaits him when, having installed her in his manor in England, he finally succeeds in using modern medicine to break her trance. A wry, cynical piece, well told. Finally, it is always a pleasure to re-read "The Horla" by Guy de Maupassant, one of my top-ten favorite stories ever. If you've never read it, the plot is simplicity itself. A happy man, prone to occasional bouts of melancholia, finds these bouts increasing in frequency and now paired with lassitude, depression and general anxiety. As these feeling increase, and he seeks to dispel them through travel and camaraderie, he experiences night terrors (and a classic "nightmare/old hag" event) which cause him to begin to believe that there is an invisible, intelligent being plaguing him and sapping his energy. On the other hand, we could also just be reading a step-by-step description of a mental breakdown from an articulate man succumbing to madness as the relentless new complexities of modernity (including news media, and breakthroughs in psychology and the natural sciences) overwhelm him, eventually transforming the new world into an "other" to resist, and then become subjugated to. In the end, his distress leads to a rash action with terrible results and abject despair. I really can't give this story enough accolades - Maupassant's subtle handling of the material is astonishing its balance and the narrator's vacillation between transports of paranoid despair (in which he sees the natural world as crude and ugly) and cosmic transcendence are masterful.
This is a book of "suspenseful" stories, fiction and non-fiction. I was not a fan of much of the non-fic, and so didn't read "On the Killing of Eratosthenes the Seducer" by Kathleen Freeman (about ancient Greece). "Rattenbury & Stoner" by F. Tennyson Jesse (about a famed murder case in the 1920s in which a working-class driver, involved with his mistress, murders her aged husband) was interesting in that it was intended to "set the story straight" (or at least offer some food for thought) about the woman in the case, whose morality and character were much maligned in the press, which led to her suicide after being found innocent. Nice look at culture & class hypocrisy, but still, long winded for all that. "The Murder In Le Mans" is about the famed case of the incestuous Papin sisters, servants in Paris who murdered/mutilated their Mistress and her daughter. Though it seems obvious the girls were schizophrenics, Janet Flanner spends her time haughtily and smugly dismissing all the other opinions of their motivation at the time (oh, those silly demmed Marxists and Surrealists!) - one presumes her work will fade into history as well. More solid were: John Bartlow Martin's "The Chair" tells the details of a 50s era spree killing by two ne'er-do-wells (one of whom ends in the electric chair) while filling us in on the young man's semi-tragic background as a sufferer of brain trauma as a child that left the compulsion and control areas of his mind seemingly damaged, thus leaving us with the realization that everyone knew this kid was going to end up coming to a bad end, but that there was no (and really still is no) social program in place to help him. William Seabrook introduces the world to the idea of Haitian zombies in the excerpt "Dead Men Working in Cane Fields," which is interesting because even here is the suggestion that the victims are not really dead but merely drugged. Finally, "A Small Buried Treasure" by John Fischer relates an anecdote of tomb robbery, contraband, betrayal and revenge from rural Greece - a fun read. And now the fiction...
A note about the weakest stories here - my ascribing them as such may have something to do with the fact that I'm not really a fan of Mystery and Detection short fiction, so those pieces here indicated may be perfectly fine for fans of such, they were just not to my tastes. That fastidious Belgian detective Monsieur Poirot (written with a great "voice", granted) solves the mystery of a disappearing servant in Agatha Christie's "The Adventure of The Clapham Cook" - cute, but also a good example of why I don't read a lot of this kind of thing. "How the Brigadier Lost His Ear" by Arthur Conan Doyle relates how a Naploeonic-era officer, involved in the ransacking of Venetian art treasures, has a thrilling and romantic adventure. Eh. Similarly, John Buchan has one of his jolly English fighting toffs befriend a South American president being stalked by assassins in "Sing A Song of Sixpence" - and it's all a jolly good bore. Finally, I downgraded (from a previous reading) G.K. Chesterton's "The Shadow of the Shark" which is a (not uninvolving) "locked room" type mystery in which a man is found dead at the tide line on an isolated stretch of beach, with no footprints in evidence anywhere about him. And what does a single starfish have to to do with it all? There's lots of neat stuff here (talk of shark gods, and a fish-masked stranger at the window) but also a lot of dubious (and frankly, insulting) psychological and metaphysical posturing before we get the solution....ohh, hum!
Good but a little flawed: Stacy Aumonier's "Old Fags" is a conté cruel about characters living in poverty (the titular hobo makes money by retrieving cigarette and cigar ends from the gutter) and a churlish young dog-walker who seduces and abandons a girl. Not bad, I upgraded it on this reread (the milieu is well-developed, and the class conflict sketched well).
Good stories: Previously, I was not a fan of Rudyard Kipling's "They" but, on the re-read, I found some things to appreciate in this tale of a traveler (in a newfangled motor coach) who stumbles onto the sprawling property of a blind landholder, said grounds seemingly populated by dozens of half-glimpsed children. Not so much a good read for the story, per se, as for the details: some wonderful landscape descriptions (the forested area lies near the sea), the woman's flashes of telepathic empathy, a desperate dash by motor car to save a dying child. A very sedate, melancholy story that's not scary but interesting. "Dry September" by William Faulkner tells of the events leading up to a lynching in a small town, giving use sparse, colloquial and lyrical sketches of some of those involved (including inadvertently). Nice us of prosaic (repetitive and uninformative) dialogue. Powerful. "Scrawns" by Dorothy L. Sayers has a young housemaid girl, newly arrived at the remote titular estate, finding herself in a Gothic nightmare of disfigured servants and a lunatic Master. Are they really digging a grave for her out in the garden? Suspenseful black comedy.
Three excellent stories here: In Ray Bradbury's deliberately non-hysterical and gentle "The Last Night of the World", all adults everywhere have the same dream - that the world will end that night, and thoughtfully accept it. Nice, Bradbury and his most concise and human. John Collier spins a version of the old "careful what you wish for" trope in "Sleeping Beauty", in which a rather Romantic Englishman becomes besotted with a radiant young woman he finds in an sideshow exhibit in an American backwater town, who is supposedly resting in an unbreakable trance. He must possess her, but this proves more difficult than he anticipated, not to mention what awaits him when, having installed her in his manor in England, he finally succeeds in using modern medicine to break her trance. A wry, cynical piece, well told. Finally, it is always a pleasure to re-read "The Horla" by Guy de Maupassant, one of my top-ten favorite stories ever. If you've never read it, the plot is simplicity itself. A happy man, prone to occasional bouts of melancholia, finds these bouts increasing in frequency and now paired with lassitude, depression and general anxiety. As these feeling increase, and he seeks to dispel them through travel and camaraderie, he experiences night terrors (and a classic "nightmare/old hag" event) which cause him to begin to believe that there is an invisible, intelligent being plaguing him and sapping his energy. On the other hand, we could also just be reading a step-by-step description of a mental breakdown from an articulate man succumbing to madness as the relentless new complexities of modernity (including news media, and breakthroughs in psychology and the natural sciences) overwhelm him, eventually transforming the new world into an "other" to resist, and then become subjugated to. In the end, his distress leads to a rash action with terrible results and abject despair. I really can't give this story enough accolades - Maupassant's subtle handling of the material is astonishing its balance and the narrator's vacillation between transports of paranoid despair (in which he sees the natural world as crude and ugly) and cosmic transcendence are masterful.
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