276°
Posted 20 hours ago

The Pan Book of Horror Stories

£9.9£99Clearance
ZTS2023's avatar
Shared by
ZTS2023
Joined in 2023
82
63

About this deal

THE SPIDER, by Basil Copper: A man stays in a hotel infested with weird spiders. Absolutely terrifying if you're an arachnophobe, and short and atmospheric if you're not. 4/5

THE MAN WITH THE MOON IN HIM, by William Sansom: A down-and-out stalks the London Underground, looking for meaning in his life. A study of social alienation in this non-mainstream effort. 3/5

Series: Pan Books of Horror Stories

This is an old-fashioned ghost story about a landlady who receives a visit from the husband she killed years before. Not a classic, but well told. Nigel Kneale (1922-2006) was a British screenwriter, famous for creating the character of Professor Bernard Quatermass.

For the record, my 6 bottom of the barrels are – ‘My Dear How Dead You Look And Yet You Sweetly Sing’ by Priscilla Marron; ‘The Janissaries of Emilion’ by Basil Copper; ‘The Computer’ by Rene Morris; ‘Sugar And Spice’ by A. G. J. Rough; ‘The Most Precious’ by John D. Keefauver; and ‘Playtime’ also by A. G. J. Rough. Jules de Gradin and his friend Trowbridge were the Holmes and Watson of the supernatural realm. Creations of pulp magazine author Seabury Grandin Quinn (1889-1969), they made a previous appearance in the story The House of Horror in the first volume in this series. Here they have a memorable encounter with a women who is as beautiful as she is deadly.

Another enjoyable volume in this series. Of the nineteen stories, I’d rate nine of them good to very good, and five as fine. How many PB stories feature spouses who hate each other, or one hates the other? Answer : loads and loads. And how many feature downtrodden husbands? Answer : loads and loads. A physicist starts having remarkably realistic dreams in which he is transported to an Asian beach in the distant past. This longer story creates a powerful sense of encroaching terror. While the ending is not unexpected, it is very powerful. THE ILLUSTRATED MAN, by Ray Bradbury: A carnival worker decides to reinvent himself as a Tattooed Man, but the witch who carries out the work has some sinister ideas. Another highly evocative and lyrical story from Bradbury, who had a thing for 'dark carnivals'. 4/5

Whether the man was a short-fused psycho all along and that the girl’s demise was in the post, or whether she precipitated it by her refusal of his proposal we shall never really know. I personally lean towards the former. I know I am being more than a touch pedantic here, but the biological details of the story did annoy me a bit. Spiders breathe atmospheric air of which there is none to found inside the human body, so that first one which crawled up inside the General would have drowned had it attempted to burrow into the membranes.John Burke - A Comedy Of Terrors: Robbie Searidge, a designer for a movie company, practices torture and mutilation on his visitors then reproduces the finer details of their tormented deaths on film for mass consumption. When he catches his girlfriend Dolores prying in his secret room he flays her alive then disposes of her body (and those of her predecessors: burnt alive, hung, drawn and quartered, etc.) at the junkyard. But Dolores brother is convinced that Robbie is a murderer and before she went "missing" Dolores confided to him that lover-boy talks in his sleep: about his greatest fear .... THE RETURN, by G. M. Glaskin: A 17-year-old girl, dozing in the grass, is assailed by a horrible sight. Verbose, purple prose thought = a chore to read. 1/5 It's beyond me to do the sheer grimness of this one justice, but the overall effect is like some literary equivalent of Witchfinder General. The highlight of the collection would have to be the opening story 'The Hunter' by David Cass. As I read it, I could really picture this being made as an Amicus production in the 1960s with Cushing and Lee in the roles of Wetherby and Byron respectively. Fengriffen and Other Stories (1971) – Contains the novel Fengriffen and the stories "Among the Wolves" and "Strange Roots"

Asda Great Deal

Free UK shipping. 15 day free returns.
Community Updates
*So you can easily identify outgoing links on our site, we've marked them with an "*" symbol. Links on our site are monetised, but this never affects which deals get posted. Find more info in our FAQs and About Us page.
New Comment