Pan Book of Horror Stories: Volume 1

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In the run-up to Halloween in October 2018, BBC Radio 4 broadcast Anita Sullivan's reinterpretations of five stories from the 1962 Second Pan Book Of Horror Stories as part of the station's 15 Minute Drama series. [5] Reception and influence [ edit ] John D. Keefauver had a story each in the fifth and sixth volumes in this series and two in the seventh. He is also known for the bisexual-themed pulp novel Tormented Virgin (1962).

Adobe James was the pseudonym of James Moss Cardwell, an American writer and educator. A number of his stories are featured in this series, including one of my personal favourites - The Ohio Love Sculpture (included in The Fourth Pan Book of Horror Stories). The series lasted from the late 50s to the 1980s, thirty years of dismemberments, vats of acid, shrunken heads, spiders in the bedroom, child vampires, mistaken revenge, eyeballs in the beef stew, homicidal ants, homicidal cats, homicidal babies, psychotic surgeons, straightforward sex-murders, not so straightforward sex-murders, florid torturers and uncannily accurate sculptures which turn out to be taxidermy - ha haaah. David F. Case (1937-2018) was an American novelist and short story writer who specialised in horror and westerns. His short story Fengriffen: A Chilling Tale (1970) was filmed as And Now the Screaming Starts! (1973) (dir. Roy Ward Baker) LOVE ME, LOVE ME, LOVE ME, by M. S. Waddell: In which a man falls in love with a spectre. A traditional love story mixed with the grotesque. Better than I expected. 3/5 The Bats’ (David Grant). A boy who is brought up by distant parents gets his love from rearing animals in the garden shed. A good, dark family story with only a rather predictable and flattish ending spoiling the effect.A SMELL OF FEAR, by William Sansom: A woman is followed through the streets of London by a limping stranger. A great study of psychological horror, with some great frights - the 'fleas in the bath' scene is my favourite. 4/5 Above-average mix of short horror tales. Worth a read, but don't expect anything Sheridan Le Fanu-worthy. It gets three stars because it's better than the last horror anthology I read. THE SNAIL WATCHER, by Patricia Highsmith: A man's obsession with collecting snails has a dark outcome. An early companion piece to Hutson's SLUGS, and as slimy, ghoulish and nasty as you'd expect. 5/5 A resident in an insane asylum explains how he ended up there. Kind of amusing, but not believable. A body with a dismembered corpse in it is going to weigh a lot more than a suitcase with documents in it.

Screaming Terror, published under the Arthur Baker imprint, is a collection from the first three Pan Book of Horror Stories and is also edited by Herbert Van Thal. William Wymark Jacobs (1863-1943) was an English author of short stories and novels. Although most of his writing was humorous, it is his horror stories, particularly The Monkey’s Paw, for which he is most famous today.

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THE LITTLE ROOM, by William Sansom: A nun is walled up alive in a room and begins to suffer the effects of suffocation. Unsurprisingly, this is an utterfly depressing effort, and the nastiest yet from this author. 3/5 As I'm working through a list of short fiction authors in the early W's (Karl Edward Wagner through Ian Watson, if you must know), I'm currently reading some Elizabeth Walter pieces, and pulled this off the shelf to read "The Isle of Regrets"