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Terror by Night
paperback book
- GenresHorror
Paperback
First published June 1, 1974
64 people want to read
About the author
R. Chetwynd-Hayes
139 books58 followersRonald Henry Glynn Chetwynd-Hayes aka Angus Campbell.
Ronald Chetwynd-Hayes was an author, best known for his ghost stories. His first published work was the science fiction novel The Man From The Bomb in 1959. He went on to publish many collections and ten other novels including The Grange, The Haunted Grange, And Love Survived and The Curse of the Snake God. He also edited over 20 anthologies. Several of his short works were adapted into anthology style movies in the United Kingdom, including The Monster Club and From Beyond the Grave. Chetwynd-Hayes' book The Monster Club contains references to a film-maker called Vinke Rocnnor, an anagram of Kevin Connor, the director of From Beyond the Grave.
He won the Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement for 1988, and the British Fantasy Society Special Award in 1989.
Ronald Chetwynd-Hayes was an author, best known for his ghost stories. His first published work was the science fiction novel The Man From The Bomb in 1959. He went on to publish many collections and ten other novels including The Grange, The Haunted Grange, And Love Survived and The Curse of the Snake God. He also edited over 20 anthologies. Several of his short works were adapted into anthology style movies in the United Kingdom, including The Monster Club and From Beyond the Grave. Chetwynd-Hayes' book The Monster Club contains references to a film-maker called Vinke Rocnnor, an anagram of Kevin Connor, the director of From Beyond the Grave.
He won the Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement for 1988, and the British Fantasy Society Special Award in 1989.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
March 18, 2018
While I enjoyed this third collection more than his previous, Cold Terror (1973), I still haven't fully warmed to Chetwynd-Hayes' work. His later The Monster Club (1976) was campy fun, but something about the tales in these earlier books just rubs me the wrong way, as if he's just writing ghost stories as a lark, not to be taken seriously. I've seen some refer to him as the heir to M.R. James and an equal peer to Aickman, but in my opinion he lacks the quiet elegance of the former as well as the otherworldly eerieness of the latter.
Each of the three collections I've read have had two or three stories that somewhat merited the praise he gets, but mostly they're standard ghost and monster tales, tongue firmly planted in cheek at all times. Or at least it comes across that way to me. Robert Bloch does this as well -- his stories are filled with cheesy puns -- but I never felt that horror was little more than a trifle in his mind, as opposed to Chetwynd-Hayes. Bloch usually at least had a unique concept or neat twist, even if the twist involved a silly play on words. I just don't like when it feels as if the writer's making fun of the genre I love.
Still, the prose here is very good (and VERY British), always keeping me at least partially entertained, and his style is best represented here by the two stories that bookend this collection: "The Throwback," about a stranded traveler's dealings with a strange older couple nearby and their even stranger young boy, who our traveler suspects may be a werewolf; and "Housebound," in which Celia decides to murder her husband with the help of a bank-robber ghost that haunts their house. Neither of these stories are groundbreaking (all the stories are variants of tried and true tropes), but they're well-told, and made this book worth reading in the end. Barely. "The Echo" --about Anne and Oliver, old friends who reunite after 6 years only to have Oliver accuse Anne of being a doppelganger -- is another above-average, creepy entry worth mentioning.
Overall, this would make a decent intro for novice horror and ghost story fans -- and indeed a few of the stories here seemed written for a younger audience -- but longtime fans will more likely be thinking "Been there, done that."
3.0 Stars.
Each of the three collections I've read have had two or three stories that somewhat merited the praise he gets, but mostly they're standard ghost and monster tales, tongue firmly planted in cheek at all times. Or at least it comes across that way to me. Robert Bloch does this as well -- his stories are filled with cheesy puns -- but I never felt that horror was little more than a trifle in his mind, as opposed to Chetwynd-Hayes. Bloch usually at least had a unique concept or neat twist, even if the twist involved a silly play on words. I just don't like when it feels as if the writer's making fun of the genre I love.
Still, the prose here is very good (and VERY British), always keeping me at least partially entertained, and his style is best represented here by the two stories that bookend this collection: "The Throwback," about a stranded traveler's dealings with a strange older couple nearby and their even stranger young boy, who our traveler suspects may be a werewolf; and "Housebound," in which Celia decides to murder her husband with the help of a bank-robber ghost that haunts their house. Neither of these stories are groundbreaking (all the stories are variants of tried and true tropes), but they're well-told, and made this book worth reading in the end. Barely. "The Echo" --about Anne and Oliver, old friends who reunite after 6 years only to have Oliver accuse Anne of being a doppelganger -- is another above-average, creepy entry worth mentioning.
Overall, this would make a decent intro for novice horror and ghost story fans -- and indeed a few of the stories here seemed written for a younger audience -- but longtime fans will more likely be thinking "Been there, done that."
3.0 Stars.
Displaying 1 of 1 review