Tales of Dungeons and Dragons

by Peter Haining (Editor), Ray Bradbury (Introduction ), Bram Stoker

Genres: Fantasy, Short Stories, Anthologies, Horror, Dungeons and Dragons

416 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1986

About the author

Peter Alexander Haining was an English journalist, author and anthologist who lived and worked in Suffolk. Born in Enfield, Middlesex, he began his career as a reporter in Essex and then moved to London where he worked on a trade magazine before joining the publishing house of New English Library.

Haining achieved the position of Editorial Director before becoming a full time writer in the early Seventies. He edited a large number of anthologies, predominantly of horror and fantasy short stories, wrote non-fiction books on a variety of topics from the Channel Tunnel to Sweeney Todd and also used the pen names "Ric Alexander" and "Richard Peyton" on a number of crime story anthologies. In the Seventies he wrote three novels, including The Hero (1973), which was optioned for filming.

In two controversial books, Haining argued that Sweeney Todd was a real historical figure who committed his crimes around 1800, was tried in December 1801, and was hanged in January 1802. However, other researchers who have tried to verify his citations find nothing in these sources to back Haining's claims. A check of the website Old Bailey at for "Associated Records 1674-1834" for an alleged trial in December 1801 and hanging of Sweeney Todd for January 1802 show no reference; in fact the only murder trial for this period is that of a Governor/Lt Col. Joseph Wall who was hanged 28 January 1802 for killing a Benjamin Armstrong 10 July 1782 in "Goree" Africa and the discharge of a Humphrey White in January 1802. Strong reservations have also been expressed regarding the reliability of another of Haining's influential non-fiction works, The Legend and Bizarre Crimes of Spring Heeled Jack.
He wrote several reference books on Doctor Who, including the 20th anniversary special Doctor Who: A Celebration Two Decades Through Time and Space (1983), and also wrote the definitive study of Sherlock Holmes on the screen, The Television Sherlock Holmes (1991) and several other television tie-ins featuring famous literary characters, including Maigret, Poirot and James Bond. Peter Haining's most recent project was a series of World War Two stories based on extensive research and personal interviews: The Jail That Went To Sea (2003), The Mystery of Rommel's Gold (2004), Where The Eagle Landed (2004), The Chianti Raiders (2005) and The Banzai Hunters (2007).

He won the British Fantasy Awards Karl Edward Wagner Award in 2001.

Reviews

[Glenn Fraser · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a fantastic cohort of authors and some of their hard-to-find early stories. I picked it up from a $1 store in Blayney, NSW from a pair of sci-fi obsessed women who couldn't wait to share its inner gold. What a lovely, holiday reading treat and a wonderful snapshot of so many different writing styles across a few hundred pages.

[Matthew Atkinson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some cracking stories, a few poor ones, and the odd one or two that will HAUNT you for the rest of your life, mwhahah

[Alex · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is not an anthology that has any relation to the product that was distributed by TSR. When this book was published, D&D had not yet reached its second edition, and there’s nothing in the jacket copy or forewords to indicate a purpose for the title. Instead this is an anthology like a deep-cut mix-tape. It has all the usual suspects, but instead of their usual selections, the choice was made to share something obscure or painfully out of print. A number of stories have returned to circulation after the release of this book. A story that helped birth Fahrenheit 451 -- “Bright Phoenix” by Ray Bradbury -- is an appropriate closer to this anthology of forgotten and lost texts.

There were a number of gems included here. “The Dualitists” by Bram Stoker was a nasty little story that could be read as a black satire of the privileged class and what that allows them to get away with. “The Lighthouse” by Robert Bloch and Edgar Allan Poe was a rather effective story about crushing loneliness and monsters that try to fill that void; I could certainly tell some of the parts where Bloch finished up this fragment, but I couldn’t point to the transition with certainty. “The Kid Learns” by William Faulkner has incredible dialogue and voice with a snappy sting. “The Grip of Death” by Robert Bloch and Henry Kuttner is delightfully ghoulish.

I never knew that the author of Anne of Green Gables wrote ghost stories, and “The House Party at Smoky Island” was a competently pleasant one. This was definitely more the Victorian “chilling event” style of ghost story, rather than a malicious haunting. I rarely love that style, but this example was perfectly cromulent. “The Mystery of the Ultimate Hills” is a sardonic future tale by Ambrose Bierce whose protagonist is and anthropologist looking back at the fall of our civilization due to a global climate event. While there are many things this anthropologist reads incorrectly about America, there are a number of things they get right. Some readers may struggle to look past a couple racial slurs, but from the lens of an anthropologist millennia in the future, our divided culture and its animosity is not unfairly portrayed. It also shows how little progress has been made in the 100+ years since this story was written.

There are some odd attribution choices in this book. For example, neither of the two pieces that Bloch worked on included both participating authors. “The Challenge from Beyond” was only attributed to Howie, not by the full round robin of participants. That said, this anthology appears to only have Howie’s section from the middle of the story. I can only imagine the confusion of someone who has only experienced 20% of the middle of this story. So while there’s some scholarly work, there also some unusual blind spots.

There were also a number of clunkers which imply that several of these “lost” and “forgotten” stories never were collected or anthologized because they never inspired enthusiasm. “The Mysterious Mummy” by Sax Rohmer is more a mystery that involves museum mummies, but no overt or implied supernatural or horror themes. “The Eighty-Third” by Katharine Fullerton Gerould appears to be a call to arms against isolationism and miscegenation. While railing against isolationism is laudable, the horrific portion was exceptionally vague after a very long buildup. I’m not entirely sure this deserves to be “one of the best short stories of 1916.” According to the bio, Olaf Stapledon is the second most influential science fiction writer after H.G. Wells, but I can’t say that I’ve ever heard of the books mentioned or this author. The story included here, “A Modern Magician,” was an odd bit of toxic masculinity power fantasy. If this is indicative of Olaf’s work, it’s not surprising that the years have eroded his memory until he is just a ruined statue of Ozymandias. “The Bat King” by James Hilton has some great claustrophobic moments of being trapped in a cave with not light and...something else. But the ending was an oddly muddled Robinson Crusoe returning to civilization, finding that life has passed him by, and failing to come to grips with it. “People of the Black Coast” by Robert E. Howard is an odd remnant of a likely trunked story about punching giant crabs in the face.

[Graham · Rating 4 out of 5]

Peter Haining's large anthology of short fantasy stories begins with an introduction by Ray Bradbury and goes from there. The anthology is broken into three sections, horror, supernatural and then fantasy, so it's two-thirds horror really, although genre boundaries are hazy here. By far the best thing about this is that Haining has excelled in finding only the rarest of stories, often taken from obscure and forgotten publications, even when the author is famous. The vast majority were totally unfamiliar to me.

Stoker's THE DUALITISTS begins the horror section in a unexpected way with a story of sheer sadism and brutality, far ahead of its time. It's also by far the strongest thing the author has ever written, as he does away with the supernatural for an exploration of human evil. The stories that follow feel tame by comparison: Rohmer's THE MYSTERIOUS MUMMY is a crime story set in a museum, and Poe's THE LIGHTHOUSE, completed by Bloch, offers the familiar concept of a solitary figure going out of his mind, although the climax is memorably grisly. Gerould's THE EIGHTY-THIRD is more engaging, a story of a monstrous regiment in the dark days of WW2, spookily written. Faulkner's THE KID LEARNS is a short-short with a touch of magic realism about it, while Collier's THE MONSTER OF THE DEEP is based on (and references) the Loch Ness monster story that was popular in the 1930s. Bloch's THE GRIP OF DEATH (written in collaboration with Henry Kuttner) is a barnstorming story of wizardry in which a nephew tries to bump off his sorcerer uncle, with disastrous consequences. MacDonald's THE GREAT STONE DEATH is a straightforward giant monster tale much like a 1950s B-movie, while Wyndham's VENGEANCE BY PROXY is a very early exploration of the body-swap concept now commonplace in film. King's THE MANGLER is probably the best-known story of the collection these days.

Moving on to the supernatural section, we have James' THE MALICE OF INANIMATE OBJECTS, very different to the norm for this author, a slice of black comedy. Le Fanu's BORRHOMEO THE ASTROLOGER is a familiar spin on the deal-with-the-devil tale, while Anstey's THREE WISHES is a great and humorous real-life version of the old fable. Then we have THE HAUNTED PAMPERO, by one of my favourite ever authors William Hope Hodgson, about the crew of a ship being attacked by a creature half-man, half-shark. Blackwood's THE MAGIC MIRROR explores a novel way of beating gambling odds, and Sinclair's THE OVERMAN is a little like Robinson Crusoe except with some added psychic alien correspondence. THE HOUSE PARTY AT SMOKY ISLAND sees Montgomery, the famed author of ANNE OF GREEN GABLES delivering a most satisfying ghost story, White's SHINING HAT AT TARRING NEVILLE effectively tells of warring brothers, and Stapledon's A MODERN MAGICIAN is another psychic story with disastrous consequences. Leiber's THE GLOVE reveals that the author lost none of his skill in the 1970s.

The fantasy section begins with Morris' THE HOLLOW LAND, a fantasy of heroic knights and evil queens, and follows it with Bierce's THE MYSTERY OF THE ULTIMATE HILLS, a humorous futuristic story that feels quite dated. Dunsany's THE FIELD WHERE THE SATYRS DANCED and Ransome's THE AGEING FAUN are both whimsical and poetic pieces about goat-people in the woods, while Robinson's BIDDULPH is a bizarre story of the North Pole I didn't get on with. Hilton's THE BAT KING is an engaging tale about a man found living in a cave system with only bats for company, while THE CHALLENGE FROM BEYOND is a round robin written between Lovecraft, Moore, Merritt, Howard and Long, although less than the sum of its parts. Lastly, Howard's PEOPLE OF THE BLACK COAST is a brief Burroughs-style weird adventure, Gardner's RAVAGES OF SPRING tells of a genetist in a tornado, and Bradbury's BRIGHT PHOENIX is a thoughtful short story about book burning that would be revisited in one of his most famous novels.

[Dávid Novotný · Rating 3 out of 5]

A journey down the lane of literary history, this collection presents stories that were never included in any anthology but originally appeared only in magazines.

It is fascinating to see what captured readers’ curiosity (in some cases) over a century ago .
In a sense, this book functions as a classic anthology — containing a few remarkable pieces,
some that are merely average, and a few rather peculiar ones that did not quite appeal to me.

Perhaps it is because they were written in different times for different audiences, or for some other reason altogether,
but many of the stories faded from my memory quickly or failed to resonate with me.

Amidst them, however, there are three truly memorable works that evoked an eerie atmosphere and lingered in my mind:

“The Dualitists” (1887) by Bram Stoker

“The Eighty-Third” (1916) by Katherine Fullerton Gerould

“Bright Phoenix” (1947) by Ray Bradbury

[R · Rating 2 out of 5]

I felt this book was misleadingly titled. The book is divided into three sections: Horror, Supernatural, and Fantasy, and H.P.Lovecraft was put under Fantasy. I'm inclined to think the author was putting together a collection of short horror stories, and was told at the last minute that the title was being changed to "Tales of Dungeons and Dragons" to take advantage of the growing popularity of the game.

TL;DR: Solid collection of horror and horror-tinged short stories. Bad collection of Dungeons and Dragons inspired short stories.

[Shawn]

PLACEHOLDER REVIEW:

"The Magic Mirror" by Algernon Blackwood - a young chappie relates his adventure in Monte Carlo when he befriended a Tibetan Englishman who had acquired a magic mirror and wanted to try it out by winning at roulette. Which they did, until the not unsurprising outcome. A light fantasy, really, and not top tier Blackwood but the slangy dialogue of the young gambler makes it a fun read.

In L.M. Montgomery's "The House Party On Smoky Island" - a house party (duh!) of bored well-offs and bright young things has a pall hung over it by the dismal weather, and some guests worries and suppositions about a recent death in their circle that may have been murder, with the possible murderer in attendance. And then, someone suggests that they tell ghost stories to pass the time.... You know, this is quite a good little story, not a "horror" story exactly, but a solid example of a spooky ghost story. I love how compact it is, the easy language that sketches the party of bored upper crust, and then the short ramp up to a nice moment of surprising tension (if not actual shock). I even laughed at two of the lines ("the coming young man who never arrives" and the inevitability of bright young thing "Tweezers" asking rude questions and making rude statements).

Entirely different is William Faulkner's pithy little "The Kid Learns", in which a young gangster-in-training finds circumstances have advanced before his plans for them, and then the story shifts into the abstract/symbolic with the last line. Nice.