Sea-Cursed: Thirty Terrifying Tales Of The Deep

by T. Liam McDonald (Editor, Introduction), Stefan Dziemianowicz (Editor), Martin H. Greenberg (Editor)

Includes tales of the mysterious briny deep and the chaos and tragedy it can cause in people's lives.

CONTENTS
Introduction by Stefan Dziemianowicz and T. Liam McDonald
A Descent Into the Maelström by Edgar Allan Poe
The Captain of the Pole-Star by Arthur Conan Doyle
The Upper Berth by F. Marion Crawford
The Brute by Joseph Conrad
The Boats of the Glen Carrig by William Hope Hodgson
The Song of the Sirens by Edward Lucas White
The Ship of Silent Men by Philip M. Fisher
The Temple by H. P. Lovecraft
Bells of Oceana by Arthur J. Burks
Second Night Out (aka The Black, Dead Thing) by Frank Belknap Long
The Black Kiss by Robert Bloch & Henry Kuttner
The Sea Thing by A. E. van Vogt
Sea Curse by Robert E. Howard
A Vintage from Atlantis by Clark Ashton Smith
Derelict by Hugh B. Cave
Sea-Tiger by Henry S. Whitehead
The Women by Ray Bradbury
The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth by Roger Zelazny
The Wine-Dark Sea by Robert Aickman
The Ferries by Ramsey Campbell
The Night Sea-Maid Went Down by Brian Lumley
Down by the Sea Near the Great Big Rock by Joe R. Lansdale
Message Found in a Bottle II, or: An Invitation from Your Captain by Nancy Holder
A Sailor's Pay by Jack Cady
Deep Sleep by Matthew J. Costello
Scape-Goats by Clive Barker
Between the Windows of the Sea by Jack Dann
Dip in the Pool by Roald Dahl
The Night Ocean by R. H. Barlow & H. P. Lovecraft
Spawn of the Sea by Donald Wandrei

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

545 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1994

Reviews

[Shawn]

FIRST TIER: A genre short fiction collection based on nautical themes (ships, oceans, seas, beaches, shores, etc.) with the usual expectations (ghost-ships, pirates, adventures, sea monsters, drownings, etc.). Very solid, only a few clunkers, and as such, worth your time.

SECOND TIER: I had previously read about 1/3 of the pieces here, but only had reviews on Goodreads for about 1/6, so I read/re-read 5/6 of the whole thing. A good quarter of the book is taken up by the Hodgson novel (already read). This is a solid "theme" collection, with a nice assortment of classics and recent genre stories. Two caveats - the decision to include the entirety of the Hodgson short novel (while certainly "on theme") seems like a bit of lazy and deliberate padding. And, while it's not often commented on, one job of an anthology editor is to arrange stories in an aesthetically pleasing order - granted, this often can't be done because of various factors, but it really did seem a shame here to end on the Wandrei monster story and not the extremely evocative"The Night Ocean."

THIRD TIER: And now the stories, qualitatively from least to best.

I had very little use for "The Sea Thing" by A.E. van Vogt. A Shark God assumes human form and attempts to take revenge on a group of men residing on an isolated island - but his plans are thwarted by his strange new body and poor planning. I've said before that (besides "New Wave" writers like Ballard) I'm not really an SF fan - especially pulp SF. And Van Vogt is known for his pulp-era SF writing (and the occasional dark fantasy/horror piece like "The Witch"), so although I know him by name, I don't have a lot of experience reading him. I found this story poor and almost punishing to read. Partly this is because Van Vogt is trapped in the "why use one word when eight will do the job?" pulp-era "maximize the writer's fee" thing - but even the way he deploys it is maddening - no action is ever just enacted, but must be drawn out in detail (there were any number of times when something happened and then, as I started the next paragraph, I realized he was STILL DESCRIBING that simple action, like a man being thrown to the ground and getting up, for example) and extraneous detail is often overly noted (those lamps in that room? they're hanging. from the ceiling. from cords. in between beams. not that it is important at all...) The pacing of this story is awful as well, always moving on to something else just when it seems like things are going to happen. Van Vogt, for all I know, could have been a solid SF writer - maybe he was one of those "big idea" guys? All I can say was that reading this story (which culminates with the antagonist being undone by his poor planning, and not through ANY direct action of the protagonists) was something akin to wading through treacle...

A bit on the weaker side: "The Ship Of Silent Men" by Philip M. Fisher - A ship pursues a distress signal from another craft, but on boarding her find the unresponsive crew going through their repetitive tasks as if asleep, and dressed for deep cold. This is a better set-up than a pay-off, and has all the padding of pulp fiction of the time. A nice atmosphere of eeriness is generated but can't really be maintained with a story so dedicated to not giving us definitive answers. In Arthur J. Burks' "The Bells Of Oceana" a ship's watchman begins to encounter strange sights and sounds at night - including the odd, titular bells and mats of seaweed around the ship, before facing off against a strange creature. This is an oddity - on the plus side, you don't get many malevolent mermaid/siren stories, but on the minus side is the repetitious pulp writing and a climax that cheats at the moment of tension just for brevity's sake. "Second Night Out" by Frank Belknap Long features a seasick traveler who sits in a deck chair late at night and finds himself overcome with a presentiment of evil, which, after recovering, he is told led to tragic circumstances for the ship's doctor on the previously trip. Returning to his cabin, he finds a weird creature waiting for him. This is also an oddity. On the one hand, while overwritten in spots, it's not SO overwritten as many pulp yarns of the time. And the threat is both weird and unexplained (the fact that it chooses to dress in its previous victim's clothes, and eventually dissolves into a pool of blood, are also singularly weird details). Not necessarily a good story, but an entertaining diversion! Robert Bloch & Henry Kuttner teamed-up on "The Black Kiss", where a painter moves into his inherited house on the sea shore, only to find himself plagued by repellent and morbid dreams of sea-creatures. Hmmmm, this is kind of the authors doing Lovecraft lite (ancestor who was sorceress/monster, race of beings living under the sea, personality transference) although here we get sirens/mermaids instead of "Deep Ones" and the like. Honestly, it felt very "by the numbers".

Sport fishing for giant monsters on the seas of Venus puts in a showing in "The Doors Of His Face, The Lamps Of His Mouth" by Roger Zelazny, told through the character of a burnt-out "baitman" (a diver that engages the trap that lures the creature) who once nearly landed the creature himself, but balked out of fear. Well, as I've often said, I'm not an SF reader - this is well-written and perfectly fine for what it is, but is not for me - I guess I don't possess the suspension of disbelief for SF like this, that commits to a psychological portrait of a Hemingway-esque/Old Man And The Sea type character (The story takes a bit of time explaining how a giant crane on a floating platform - the future version of a swivel chair on the back of a boat used for marlin/swordfish fishing - works) but sets it in a far-flung future, so I can't convince myself that the guy would be at all relatable. In "The Night Sea-Maid Went Down" by Brian Lumley, the manager of an oil rig writes a letter explaining why he's getting as far away as possible from the sea following the disaster that wrecked the rig. This was a re-read for me, and I still find it just an okay story. Partly, that's because of the epistolary format, which allows Lumley to sketch out the skeleton of a story's plot without having to write the details. And that plot is pretty basic Lovecraft pastiche - the rig is built over a sleeping Old One, you see, and so drills right into the thing, awakening it. Fine for what it is but.... Meanwhile, in Jack Dann's "Between The Windows Of the Sea", a depressed woman tries to commit suicide by throwing herself into the sea, but survives to meet her soulmate. One one hand, a moving and emotional (and well written) character study- on the other hand, you have a pretty good idea where it's gonna go as the end nears. Eh.

Good but flawed include: "The Captain Of The 'Pole Star'" by Arthur Conan Doyle - A doctor's journal reveals the ultimate fate of a whaling ship's seemingly unbalanced Captain, as the ship chances being ice-locked by dallying near Greenland, all while strange sights and sounds are experienced. I actually dropped this a notch on the reread - mostly because, while the psychological portrayal of the Captain and the details of life aboard a polar whaling ship are engaging, the actual supernatural stuff is given a highly perfunctory pay-off (quite literally, the last few words of the last line!). Meanwhile, herein is contained the short novel The Boats of the 'Glen Carrig'. The book itself is written as an account/record by one of the survivors of the accidental sinking of the Glen Carrig, those lucky few who fled to two large lifeboats when the ship hit a rock, and then, the adventures they experience. Those of modern sensibilities, unable to place writings into their historical stylistic contexts, need not apply. There are no "characters", per se, just a recitation of the vicissitudes the survivors must undergo as, adrift at sea, they encounter a flat island of mud and evil vegetation (trees that bleed, complete with wailing human faces, and nightly assaults by monstrous plants), escape into a storm at sea and then find themselves stranded on a larger, higher island smack dab in the middle of a "weed continent" in the Sargasso sea. Survival is the key, as our plucky narrator and the crew/passengers fight off giant crabs (brought to mind the Harryhausen MYSTERIOUS ISLAND film adaptation of Verne), "Devil Fish" (essentially, giant squids), and the hideous "Weed Devils", pale white squid-men with tentacled arms and snapping beaks who live in the sargassum and come ashore for nightly attacks. And all this must be done while engineering a way of making contact with a huge old ship, stranded just off-shore in a tangle of weed, whose survivors have been in this hellish place for seven years! It's quite a lot of fun, although Hodgson's choice to tell the story in deliberately archaic language may turn off quite a few - the writing is dry and flat, although not without exciting incident. Some details that seem like wastes of time (the construction of a giant bow - the manufacturing of which is described in full detail - that later proves incapable of fulfilling its purpose) do end up having a point, while it also may be said that you might read more in-depth nautical details and lists of equipment than you would care for. The scenes in the initial mud-island and the first wrecked ship that the survivors retreat to at night are very effective - suffused with a feeling of both sterility and corruption (nothing will grow there but fecund, yet degenerate, vegetation) and a later attack by a devil-fish on the beach of the higher island, again, reads as something out of a Sinbad movie. Parts of this book must have been lifted for the obscure Hammer film THE LOST CONTINENT, I think.

"The Temple" by H.P. Lovecraft -has the commander of a German submarine during WWI send a message in a bottle transcribing his last days where (the sub crippled and most of the crew dead, seemingly due to a curse), he sinks to the bottom of the South Atlantic and encounters a drowned city. Actually, not a bad little yarn - the set-up assures us that we will not have a full payoff due to circumstances, and Lovecraft does a very good job sketching the egotistical and racist sub commander. In "Sea-Curse" by Robert E. Howard a sailor (and his mate) take advantage of a girl, leaving her in the family way and, after she commits suicide, her witch-like Aunt swears a curse against the two - which eventually comes true. This is not really a "story" so much as a short piece that has the feeling of a fable or legend. So, it doesn't surprise you - but there are some atmospheric moments (including a rotting, dead ghost ship) and the seaport setting to enjoy. Meanwhile, in Clark Ashton Smith's "A Vintage From Atlantis," pirates find an enormous (and barnacle-encrusted) wine jar washed up on a desert island and hold a celebration. But the wine inside causes visions of a lost place and time...This not bad - solid dark fantasy and just as long as it needs to be for the point to get across. Evocative.

A radio operator on a fogbound ship gets a message that another ship (which his sister is onboard) has rammed a derelict ship and is now sinking, in "Derelict" by Hugh B. Cave. He relays the directional messages from the sinking ship as they race to the rescue... While it could be considered a "sentimental ghost story", this does a nice job on two fronts - capturing the (forgive the pun) atmospheric setting of a fog-bound, rain-drenched ship and, also, the workaday realities of being a radio operator on a ship. It's not a great story or anything, but effective. In "The Ferries" by Ramsey Campbell a man visits his nautical Uncle who has retired, and now seems wary of the sea. After his Uncle disappears, he has a strange vision of a decaying boat, finds a similar ship-in-a-bottle, and then begins to find himself experiencing increasingly hallucinatory invasions of "marine" imagery into his life. Well, this is kind of a mixed bag. It sort of goes where you expect it to, by a certain point, and I felt the transition from the Uncle's discussion to the Nephew's dream was kind of unclear - writing wise - but there's some great imagery here and I could see it being done as a short film (like the acclaimed 70s M.R. James adaptations). Meanwhile in "A Sailor's Pay" by Jack Cady, a man narrates the awful events that occurred when he was a Coast Guard member in Portland, Maine and he and the rest of his crew had to venture out on a foggy night to try and find a wife-killer who has fled in a boat. But one of the members of the crew was suffering from some extreme PTSD from WWII, and things went very badly. On the one hand, this is a fairly serious and well-written examination of trauma and stress and how it haunts a life, with a minor (perhaps just psychological) "ghost story" ending. Cady is a solid writer, but I felt the story meandered a bit.

A cosmopolitan man on a cruise ship seems very sketchy in his relations with a woman in "Deep Sleep" by Matthew J. Costello, but this is no ordinary man (and no ordinary trip on a cruise ship, either, as it turns out). This is a cute little thing, whose pleasures are small and "qualified" (so I resist the urge for spoilers). Sure, it uses "horror" figures (and "events" for that matter) in a generally "non horror" way - but the story isn't really trying to be scary - just inventive and "cute" (in a horror adjacent way). In Roald Dahl's "Dip In The Pool," a passenger on a cruise ship thinks he's got the perfect way to make sure he wins the large lottery pool that the ship runs every day. But, despite thinking ahead, he's wrong. Enjoyable, if standard, Dahl in snappy, time-filler, cute idea mode. Which is fine!

REVIEW CONTINUED IN THE FIRST COMMENT!

[Graham · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm a sucker for sea-themed horror stories and SEA-CURSED is a fine mammoth collection of stories generally amassed from the early 20th century. Given that my favourite era of the short story is the pulp era I certainly wasn't complaining, and the editors have done a great job finding some rarer titles that provide creepy thrills to this day. The only oddball inclusion is the entire Hodgson novel THE BOATS OF THE GLEN CARRIG; he's one of my favourite authors, but surely one of his many sea-themed horror short stories would have sufficed?

The very best stories found here are as follows: F. Marion Crawford's THE UPPER BIRTH, a wonderfully eerie ghost story set within a ship's passenger cabin; Philip M. Fisher's THE SHIP OF SILENT MEN, which takes a science fiction premise and turns it into a hair-raising and ghoulish outing; A.E. van Vogt's THE SEA THING, which crucially adds psychology and character to a monster story; Clark Ashton Smith's A VINTAGE FROM ATLANTIS, which is up to his usual quality; Roald Dahl's DIP IN THE POOL, a delicious black comedy with a twist ending; and Donald Wandrei's SPAWN OF THE SEA, which is a blob story on a ship and quite wonderful to read.

Next up are the 'very goods', and there are many of them: Poe's natural disaster story A DESCENT INTO THE MAELSTROM; Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's THE CAPTAIN OF THE POLE-STAR, an ethereal ghost story with an Arctic backdrop; Joseph Conrad's THE BRUTE, in which the very structure of a ship itself seems possessed by evil; Edward Lucas White's THE SONG OF THE SIRENS, which takes Greek myth and gives it an effective modern-day spin; Arthur J. Burks' BELLS OF OCEANA, which boasts sentient seaweed and fine pulp chills throughout; Frank Belknap Long's SECOND NIGHT OUT, in which a repellent creature wreaks havoc accompanied by dashings of Lovecraftian-style cosmic horror; and Robert E. Howard's SEA-CURSED, in which revenge plays out in a small island community.

There are still more above average stories collected here, among them Robert Aickman's THE WINE-DARK SEA, another which utilises Greek mythology to profound, dream-like effect; Ramsey Campbell's chilly outing THE FERRIES, a ghost story with his usual backdrop of social decay; Brian Lumley's THE NIGHT SEA-MAID WENT DOWN, a fun Lovecraft pastiche I haven't seen collected anywhere else; DOWN BY THE SEA NEAR THE GREAT BIG ROCK, a unique and gory Joe Lansdale; and Clive Barker's SCAPE-GOATS, an eerie zombie story unlike any other I've read.

The rest is a mixed bag. Both Henry Whitehead and Ray Bradbury contribute interesting work which is a bit too short to really get going, while Hugh B. Cave's DERELICT is worth a look as a more psychological piece. The modern stories are less appealing, particular Zelazny's over-long outer space tale and a silly one about Dracula aboard the Titanic. Such lesser works don't affect the overall quality, however.

[Malcolm Torres · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is exactly the kind of book I love: Fantastic and creepy tales set aboard ships at sea. If you like this sort of thing, this volume will not disappoint because it has tales by Joseph Conrad, Edgar Allen Poe, Clive Barker, H. P. Lovecraft, Ray Bradbury, Roger Zelazny and many other less-well-known creepsters of the sea. These yarns include sailing ships, whirlpools, undersea misadventures, psycho shipmates, monsters of the deep, lost at sea, zombie sailors and many other plots and themes that expand this obscure niche genre. If you like this, please friend me and make recommendations for similar tales.

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

Down by the Sea by the Great Big Rock is the gem of the collection. So good. The others have their highs and lows.

[Judy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great authors write great horror/terror sea-related stories -- some scarier than others, all well written, and interesting to read -- I know why I'm afraid of the ocean, but not because of the monsters of the deep -- the power of the ocean is dreadfully scary to me!