Mammoth Book of Monsters edited by Stephen Jones

Mammoth Book of Monsters
Edited by Stephen Jones
Copyright 2007

Introduction by Stephen Jones
Jones introduces his anthology of monster stories by describing the ground rules for inclusion in the book and tells us we’ll see some of the old archetypes like the vampire, the werewolf, and the zombie. Godzilla gets a new look and we’ll meet some new creatures like Clive Barker’s Rawhead Rex.

Visitation by David J. Schow
Supernatural debunker extraordinaire, Agnus Bond, has determined a means through which he can predict supernatural occurrences and their location. Only he believes them to be natural phenomena – not spiritual. The grandfather of his deceased partner joins him at a strange Kentucky hotel to observe the latest occurrence. Agnus says he can deflect the attack because he does not believe it to be supernatural. But the old man proves him wrong.

Mix Stephen King’s 1408 and Shirley Jackson’s Haunting of Hill House and this is what you get. It’s not a bad story, but been done many times before. There’s no new or compelling twist to the scientific researcher applying science to the supernatural.

Down There by Ramsey Campbell
A woman and a male coworker are working late in a high rise building with only one working elevator. The building has a colorful past and an oddly cavernous sub-basement. She and her coworker try to make the elevator work correctly to leave the building, but end up in that strange sub-basement which was stocked with unholy terrors by its builder.

This is my second reading of this story, having first encountered it in Campbell’s collection, Alone with the Horrors. Three years ago, I said this about it: Campbell has a great concept here, but really misses the mark in character development. I love a plot-driven story, but Campbell doesn’t put any effort into making either of the characters sympathetic or unsympathetic. They’re just “there” for the action to revolve around. I stand by that statement. The reader is left with no idea what motivates these characters. Campbell feints at it. He gives us hints, but never fleshes them out. Better characters would have made this heavily plot driven story better.

The Man He Had Been Before by Scott Edelman
A 14 year old boy lives in a remote cabin with his constantly arguing parents. The world is gone, now dominated by zombies that hunt by night. By day, the family hunts sleeping zombies. This has gone of four eight years and the boy longs for a normal life and a family that isn’t always fighting with each other. One night, he slips out of the cabin and into his old home in the suburbs. He goes to the basement where memories of his youth and his abusive father come back to him.

This an exceptional short story that takes the zombie motif back to its origins in Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend. While the zombie world is a backdrop, the story is about loneliness and longing for normalcy, much as Richard Morgan wanted it in Matheson’s story. The central character is developed wonderfully and the story is poignant. It’s one of the best zombie stories I’ve ever read.

Calling All Monsters by Dennis Etchison
A comatose and apparently braindead man listens as a doctor argues with his wife. He is all but dead, the doctor tells her. The tests confirm it. He is an organ donor and he has been in a car accident. His wife pleads in vain for the doctor to run additional tests, but the doctor says no, the harvesting must begin now. The man, apparently not feeling anything because of his damaged brain and spinal cord, is left to think his last thoughts as the “monsters” begin harvesting his organs.

This was a short and unsatisfying story. The horrors of surgery and organ harvests being performed on accident victims still able to feel and sense is a medical fact. Etchison was going for the art of being exceptionally “short” with this short story, but I didn’t feel the horror that was supposed to be there. Stephen King does a much better job building character and tension in his story about premature carving of bodies in Autopsy Room Four.

The Shadmock by R. Chetwynd Hayes
Over the years, the ancient monsters of Europe – the vampire, the werewolf, the ghoul, etc, have been breeding to create new breeds of monsters. The newest, and most fierce is the Shadmock. An English millionaire and his wife learn this when they purchase a remote cabin in the woods and decide to spend a week there in the summer. They are greeted by the house’s staff which is a gruesome looking, but polite couple and their son. A local minister visits for dinner and tells them that their house staff are monsters. The man disbelieves at first. But when the monsters relieve him of his soul to make them one of their own, he becomes a believer. Meanwhile, the wife has made an ally of the fiercest of the bunch, the handsome Shadmock who is the son of the caretakers and the gardener. She promises to help tend the garden in exchange for his protection. When his parents want to drain her blood to fertilize the garden, the young Shadmock shows them who is in charge.

This story is told in traditional European style with a voice reminiscent of Bram Stoker – lots of words! Despite its wordiness, it is a new twist on the traditional European haunt that is engaging reading. The story was made into a segment of an anthology film in 1980 entitled, The Monster Club, starring Vincent Price.

The Spider Kiss by Christopher Fowler
Good, upstanding citizens of Miami are going crazy. They are attacking, hacking, biting, and slicing their fellow Floridians for no conceivable reasons. Then, they are killing themselves in even more bizarre manners. Two Miami detectives investigate. One is older and set in his ways. The other is younger and more open to new ideas. The younger one finds the answer with a new age guru who tells him that the cosmos are leveling man’s karma by stripping him of his soul and replacing it with the souls of lesser creatures.

To say this story was horrible would be an understatement. New Age, politically correct tripe wrapped up in splatterpunk prose. Skip it!

Café Endless: Spring Rain by Nancy Holder
A Japanese businessman is entertaining his company’s American agent in downtown Tokyo. They are bar hopping when she sees the Café Spring Rain and is enchanted by its outward appearance. The Japanese businessman reluctantly agrees to accompany her. He is reluctant because there is a certain Kabuki dancer with whom he had a fling – a fling that still haunts and scars him today – who danced in that bar. He soon finds himself drawn back into the dark embrace of that undead dancer.

This story was exceptionally light on plot and heavy on imagery and erotica. It was well written in achieving what the author wanted it to. However, I like my fiction plot driven. Not much of a story here.

The Medusa by Thomas Ligotti
A college professor has a grim obsession with Medusa and collects all sorts of lore on the mythical woman with hair of snakes. A friend tells him to go to an antique book store. Deep in the musty stacks, he meets a strange woman wearing a turbin who drops him a note that directs him to a brownstone in the city. He goes and is lead to a storage room where he sits and ponders Medusa. Upon leaving, he friend tells him the whole thing was a ruse set up by his friend’s wife. Our college professor then learns the true nature of his friend’s wife.

This story was heavy on doses of dreary philosophy. The prose reminds one of Lovecraft – heavy on passive narration and light on dialogue and action. Not an exciting story. Certainly not a scary story. But some of Ligotti’s ruminations are thought provoking.

In The Poor Girl Taken by Surprise by Gemma Files
An old woman comes to a remote Canadian inn called The Poor Girl Taken by Surprise and tells the legend of the werewolf. She tells of its roots, its nature, and its habits. This old woman knows because she is the oldest of the werewolves of Canada. These men have slain and eaten her two young daughters, also werewolves. The men, she tells them, are now her children.

This is quite the atmospheric tale. The atmosphere is bleak, lonely, and desolate in the Canadian wilderness where darkness and cold hold sway. Not a lot of story to be found here, but a chillingly told lecture on werewolves and their need to kill for the sheer joy of the kill.

Downmarket by Sydney J. Bounds
An orphaned teenager escapes an English orphanage and makes his way south to a small London town where he gets a job as a barrow boy at a local market. The tenants of the market take a liking to him and treat him well – until they decide it’s time to sacrifice him to the spirit of the market.

This is an oft-told tale of human sacrifice by otherwise good people. Bounds’ story is good in that it is short – sparing nary a word to drive his plot. He also develops his main character sufficiently for the reader to know and care about him. One of the shortest – and best – stories in the book thus far.

The Horror from the Mound by Robert E. Howard
A vampire is afoot after an unwitting, down on his luck farmer releases him from his tomb in an errant treasure hunt.

A succinct short story summed up in one sentence. Howard is known for driving his story through fast moving plots. This story never slows. Great stuff from a legend!

Fat Man by Jay Lake
Two down on their luck farmers chance across Bigfoot while hunting game in the Oregon forest. Believing they are going to get rich, they talk a local restaurant owner into letting them store the eight foot tall missing link’s body. However, as children in the area start to come up missing as Bigfoot lie dead in that freezer, the whole town learns the true nature of Bigfoot.

The Sasquatch legend is not one I’ve explored a great deal – in either fiction or non fiction. Jay Lake delivers a fast pace narrative where sometimes, points of view become confusing. Good tale nonetheless.

The Thin People by Brian Lumley
A Londoner walks back to his flat with a half drunk drinking buddy to have a nightcap. As they walk, his buddy is dismayed to find out what neighborhood he lives in. This area, he tells our Londoner, is inhabited by the Thin People. The Thin People are so tall and narrow they are nearly impossible to detect and their abodes exist in little narrow crannies. They have a talent for folding and unfolding themselves – and folding other people and things. They don’t like people very much and don’t mind folding them.

This is an original concept and give Lumley an A for creativity. Unfortunately, the story just wasn’t that interesting. His monsters weren’t that terrifying and his characters not that interesting.

The Hill by Tanith Lee
A professional librarian takes a job at a mansion outside a small village in Kent. The mansion’s grounds are inhabited by exotic species of mammals, reptiles, and insects collected by its owner and housed in woods nearby. With the landlord gone on some adventure somewhere, the librarian settles in to sort books with the butler and maid. When the alarm sounds in the village, they all respond. They find that the dead have dug themselves out of the graves of the village’s lone cemetery and are about the countryside, slithering on their bellies to get about. The mansion staff returns to the mansion to hunker down and see what happens next.

This great story is where Henry James(whose stories of the supernatural always had a rational ending) meets Hammer horror. The first person narrative is atmospheric and its main character well grounded – not given to fits of over the top fear. The resolution as to why the dead are returning is clever.

Godzilla’s Twelve Step Program by Joe Lansdale
Godzilla, once a destroyer of cities and subway cars is in recovery for his addiction to mayhem. He has a job in a steel mill providing fire and a small apartment. He shares time with other former monsters such as King Kong and Gamera who are in varying states of recovery. He tries to stay on the wagon and his sponsor desperately tries to help him. But, his love of destroying man’s creations proves too much.

Silly story without purpose. Enough said.

220 Swift by Karl Edward Wagner
A professor explores an area along the Pigeon River for the ancient mines of the conquistadors. He rooms with a graduate student who is student who is studying regional folklore. One evening, the pair are having dinner with their landlord when the professor discovers they’ve been using a Conquistador helmet as a flower pot. He demands to be taken to the cave where it was found. The professor and the graduate student enter the cavern. We find out the miners of these ancient mines weren’t conquistadors and we find out the graduate student isn’t who he said he was.

This was a fantastic tale that would have made an excellent vintage 1950s B-horror flick. Wagner keeps his reader guessing all through the story. Great stuff that would make great reading material for pre-adolescents.

Our Lady of the Sauropods by Robert Silverberg
A lady research scientist is trapped on an island that is inhabited by artificially created dinosaurs. It will be thirty days before a shuttle will arrive to pick her up. Basic challenges like gathering food and water have to be met. She is able to survive until she falls from a tree and breaks her leg. But she finds an unusual ally and benefactor. She finds she has the power to repay the favor.

This was a creative concept and a well told story by one of the masters of sci-fi/fantasy! The main character is well developed without too much backstory. This story was published about eight years before Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, so credit Silverberg with a brilliant dinosaur story – of which there are few.

The Flabby Men by Basil Copper
At some point in the earth’s future, when the planet is sickened with radiation and pollution, a research scientist is dispatched to an island research station that is studying the native inhabitants of that island. One day while exploring, he meets a woman (in this day and age, women are called “breeders”) who shows him a slimy growth on her chest. In her own language, she pleads for help. A team of researchers is dispatched to a satellite location near the village to research the nature of the problem. They find out that there are other inhabitants of the island – sea creatures who devour souls.

Cooper gets caught up a bit in describing the minute details of logistics, making his story unnecessarily long. But the main theme of malevolent sea creatures is straight out of the Lovecraft canon. Cooper’s writing made the story resemble something of where H.P. Lovecraft met Roger Corman. If one can get past the excessive verbiage, there’s a great story there.

The Silvering by Robert Holdstock
A man living on a remote island has formed an intimate relationship with a sea creature known as a Selkie who shed their sea creature skin when they come ashore and become human. When another selkie who is not his beloved shows up one evening, he is distraught to learn that she has “gone deep.” He wants her skin so he can bring her back to life. The selkie are not eager to comply.

I have mixed views on this story. I liked the twists contained in the otherwise disjointed prose. But the writing is just atrocious! Events unfold that have no bearing on anything and the narrative’s timeline is confusing and hard to follow.

Someone Else’s Problem by Michael Marshall Smith
A man boards a commuter train to take him home after a hectic day at his London office. As he sits pondering the problems at the office, he sees a monkey standing in the aisle of the car, looking at him with blue eyes. He is stunned. At first, he believes it must be somebody’s pet. Later, when he goes to the bar car for a drink, he finds the monkey and his friends. Nobody else is present. He returns to his seat. When his seat mate heads for the bar car for a snack, he doesn’t discourage her. He just wants to get home.

This story had so much potential, but fell flat. It took forever to get going. The first third of the story is the main character pondering his office problems. I don’t care to read them anymore than I care to hear them from someone. The man’s dismissal of what he sees and his lack of concern for his seat mate who is going as a lamb into a slaughter when she heads to the bar car is chilling, but it took too long to get there.

Rawhead Rex by Clive Barker
An ancient evil is awakened when a farmer removes a sunken stone from his field. A gigantic humanoid creature with large claws, large teeth, and a taste for human flesh is unleased on a British village to kill and pillage at will. The police can’t help. The church can’t help. But perhaps a new immigrant can.

Written with Barker’s usual lack of restraint, Rawhead Rex is a lot of fun and perhaps the best story in this book. The monster, Rawhead, is as menacing as they come. Parts of the story are written from his point of view and he is truly evil and depraved. Barker knows no sacred cows and adheres not to conventional mores, making the first reading of any of his stories and adventure.

The Chill Clutch of the Unseen by Kim Newman
The retired police chief of a small Connecticut town considers his responsibility to be at the train station daily to watch the train arrivals for his town is where old ghosts come to die and new monsters are born. He’s battled them like his father before him. One day an ancient ghost arrives and Chief Stockton is there to greet him. They go to Stockton’s house to discuss the pains of old age and the nature of their rivalry.

This story was too ponderous to be fun and too long for its subject matter. I like the idea of a New England town where ghosts and monsters go to die and new ones are born. I didn’t want a lesson on geriatrics.

Stephen Jones has edited some fine anthologies and has usually been able to garner submissions from great authors like Stephen King, Robert McCammon, and Neil Gaiman. This book contains many stories by authors who are strictly second and third tier writers. The biggest name in the book is Clive Barker. While Rawhead Rex is a fun, sometimes disturbing story, it’s far from his best. Robert Silverberg, Ramsey Campbell, and Brian Lumley are represented and are definite first tier writers. But like Barker, they are not represented with their best work.

I get that it’s a “Mammoth” book of monsters, but some of the stories were too mammoth. They came close to departing the definition or short story and approached the land of novella. That’s not necessarily bad except the time invested in one of these long short stories should be worth the reader’s while. Too often in this anthology, it was not worth the while.

Alone with the Horrors by Ramsey Campbell

Alone with the Horrors
By Ramsey Campbell
Copyright 1991

This anthology of Ramsey Campbell short stories spans his career from the early 1960s through 1991.

The Tower of Yuggoth
Campbell delves directly into the Cthulu mythos in this tale about a young man’s tireless quest to find the origins of strange aquatic life inhabiting the woods in New England. As a teenager, he finds strange books in his parents’ home library that lead him first to Miskatonic University to read from the unholy book, The Necronomicon. He then heads off into the Maine woods to find the strange tower and it secrets it reveals about an unholy species coexisting with man.

Still imitating Lovecraft here, but getting better at it . . .

Cold Print
A man with a passion for “odd” books is guided to an out-of-the-way bookstore where he finds a treasure trove of his kind of literature. He soon finds himself prisoner of this literature – and its purveyor.

Campbell is taking his first tentative steps away from Lovecraft, establishing his own voice. The story is not particularly strong or frightening, but he’s improving.

The Scar
A family man’s brother in law tells him that he’s seen his double on a train near Liverpool, meaning the man is about to die. The only dissimilarity, according to the brother in law, is a long scar from the man’s temple to the base of his neck. A few days later, the man is attacked in an alley and disfigured – leaving him with a scar on his face. He undergoes a rapid personality change, so the brother-in-law takes him back to the scene of the crime to try to help him – with disastrous results.

I read this story three times and I still did not get the climax. This tale is not well told at all. The characters are uninspired and the story simply doesn’t make sense.

The Interloper
Four English boarding school students enter the catacombs that run beneath their school and find a familiar presence in their lives is actually a subterranean dweller.

The story shifts points of view about 800 words in and is quite confusing. It is not engaging, scary, or even interesting.

The Guy
The narrator is a teenage boy who decides to hang out with a troubled and shy youth who has an incredibly guilty conscience about a horrifying accident many years ago. As they prepare to celebrate “Guy Fawkes Day”, that guilt comes to a head.

At least this story was coherent. It was not, however, particularly interesting.

The End of a Summer’s Day
A woman and her husband go on a tour of a cave. She becomes terrified and inexplicably discovers her husband is blind. She endures the taunts of the tour group and guide as she tries to figure out how to get them out.

If this story had a point, I didn’t get it. Kafka authored an inexplicable transition in Metamorphosis, but at least that story of alienation was engaging and the allegory apparent. Campbell’s prose is anything but engaging and his character development is horrible, even for a short story.

The Man in the Underpass
A school girl becomes fascinated with a graffito man painted on a Liverpool underpass near her school. Soon, small pets begin to disappear and the girl’s friends become increasingly terrified.

Finally, we have a coherent story with a couple developed characters. The plot is original and its climax worthwhile.

The Companion
A writer spends his spare time exploring the various carnivals and amusement parks of England. He finds one that harbors a dark secret.

Ray Bradbury already told this story in Something Wicked This Way Comes and did a much better job at it. I want back the ten minutes it took me to read this incomprehensible tripe.


Call First
A librarian is fascinated by a patron’s daily ritual of calling home before he leaves the library – intoning without emotion “I’m coming home.” The librarian decides to see what the old man is going home to and finds a most unusual security system.

Campbell delivers a fantastic story with an unexpected conclusion. The story is taut and well paced.

In the Bag
A school administrator lays down a harsh punishment when students place a plastic bag over his son’s head, causing him to almost suffocate. When he gets home, he finds out how little the students appreciated the punishment.

This is a dull and predictable story. However, it managed to win a British literature award which might be telling of the quality of British fantasy and horror of the 1970s. . .

Baby
A Liverpool drunk becomes fascinated with an old woman and her pets. He follows her around the neighborhood as she pushes her shopping cart, believing that she might actually be rich and eccentric. He finds out the creatures with which she lives are not actually pets.

The Chimney
A paranoid youth develops a strong loathing of the fireplace in his room. Night after night, his fear slowly and inexplicably builds. He begins to fear Father Christmas himself because he comes down the chimney to deliver his presents. His fear of Santa is prescient as he finds out in the end.

This is one of Campbell’s more sympathetic characters. As a youth who was sometimes inexplicably terrified of household fixtures (my first home had a fallout shelter that terrified me) I could definitely sympathize. Campbell delivers his first real plot twist hear and it’s pretty good. This story would have worked as a “Night Gallery” script.

The Brood
A Liverpool apartment dweller develops a fascination for an ancient crone who hangs out under a streetlight at night outside his apartment. He follows her to her home and explores her apartment building where he finds her horrific secret.

This story is better than most in this collection, which isn’t saying much. It was incredibly average. The character development was not bad.

The Gap
A writer with a fascination with jigsaw puzzles has some friends as overnight guests. They bring along another writer who is an expert at witchcraft. After an unpleasant exchange over dinner, the writer receives a gift from his adversary – a puzzle with one piece missing. . .

Here, Campbell builds to a degree the strong dread that Lovecraft evokes with his writing without directly imitating Lovecraft’s prose. This was a satisfying story.

The Voice of the Beach
A man invites a friend to spend some time with him at his beachfront cottage. While walking along the beach, they discover what appears to be the remains of a small town made entirely of stone. Inside the ruins they discover a diary of a former inhabitant of the town. The hero’s companion becomes obsessed with the diary and the ruins. The hero falls ill and is left to ponder the constantly shifting sands of the beach. Both go insane for their own reasons.

The stone ruins evoke the same mood Lovecraft establishes in several of his stories – most notably “The Call of Cthulu.” His distortion of space is purely Lovecraftian. Of his attempts to imitate Lovecraft, Campbell does his best work here. He creates the fear and dread without showing you the evil, but he’s now writing in his own voice instead of copying Lovecraft’s style – which is best left to Lovecraft.

Out of Copyright
A publisher of anthologies is prone to stealing and rewriting the works of published authors without paying royalties. He finally steals from the wrong author and pays the consequences.

Campbell is living out an author’s fantasy here. Slaying publishers and editors is something that lies in the darkest wells of the souls of writers. Campbell says he had no particular anthologist in mind when he wrote it, but Ray Bradbury apparently recognized the target, according to Campbell.

Above the World
A writer returns to the hotel where he and his former wife honeymooned. She and her new husband have just died in an accident. He strays from the beaten path into the wooded mountains. There, he finds the unpleasant answers to many questions.

This story is written in the style that made me want to read Campbell in the first place. The man can create a vivid scene like no one I’ve ever read. His descriptions of the woods and the mountains rival Tolkien in their grandeur.

Mackintosh Willy
A homeless drunk torments kids in a park who dare to venture near the underpass where he lives. One day, he ends up dead. The kid everyone suspects killed Willy becomes the object of desire for an adolescent girl. There final date ends in tragedy when Willy gets his revenge.

There’s nothing original here. The characters are not engaging and the story is an oft-told tale of ghostly revenge.

The Show Goes On
A shopkeeper is convinced that burglars are entering his store through the abandoned theater next door. He decides to enter the theater at night and preempt their thievery. As he moves about the creepy movie palace, he finds that, while the theater may be abandoned by the living, some performers and audiences do go on after death.

This is a well written haunted house story. The concept of a haunted theater is not particularly original. However, Campbell makes the best of a recycled idea. The theater becomes a maze in which the hero becomes lost. Campbell builds the terror nicely.

The Ferries
An urbane Londoner travels to a seaside town to bring his dying uncle to his home in London. His uncle, at death’s door, recounts a voyage where he and his shipmates encounter a ghost ship. His uncle dies and the man takes home with him a bottle he finds on the beach near his uncle’s house.

A ship in a bottle serves as a talisman of evil. That’s pretty original and Campbell develops his story and his character well.

Midnight Hobo
A late night radio host becomes obsessed with what he is sure is an evil creature that lurks under an overpass near his home. He avoids the overpass when he walks to work and has nightmares after finding the remains of a cat that has been torn to pieces. Like the teenagers in the prototypical slasher film, he just has to see what it is down there.

Like “Three Billy Goats’ Gruff,” the terror living under the bridge figures into a lot of Campbell’s horror. It’s interesting to read Campbell’s work develop from his earlier stories that seemed to have no point when they ended to one where he wraps up a horror story masterfully. In this story, Campbell shows that the hero need not die at the end for the story to be scary.

The Depths
An author tortured by writer’s block rents a house that was the scene of grisly murders. Upon leaving, he finds that he is able to predict ghastly crimes before they happen. What’s worse, the murder rate in his neighborhood is soaring!

I love this tale because it keeps you guessing. I developed two hypotheses about the character that were shot down as I read and was surprised by the ending.

Down There
A woman and a male coworker are working late in a high rise building with only one working elevator. The building has a colorful past and an oddly cavernous sub-basement. She and her coworker try to make the elevator work correctly to leave the building, but end up in that strange sub-basement which was stocked with unholy terrors by its builder.

Campbell has a great concept here, but really misses the mark in character development. I love a plot-driven story, but Campbell doesn’t put any effort into making either of the characters sympathetic or unsympathetic. They’re just “there” for the action to revolve around.

The Fit
A pubescent boy spends the summer with his aunt who works as a seamstress in rural England. Delivered to his aunt are two dresses to be altered. The dresses are made by a strange hag who lives in a one room cottage in the woods. The strange fabric has human hair woven into it. After reluctantly working on the dresses, his aunt is haunted by her work and it is up to her nephew to save her.

Great character development here with the adolescent boy (one must believe that Ramsey Campbell was once an adolescent boy). The story is an original concept as well and builds to a nice climax.

Hearing is Believing
A man is tormented by the sound of rain that comes from his expensive stereo. At first he is merely annoyed at not being able to enjoy his music. But the sound of rain in his small house dominates his waking and sleeping hours.

This is the first fiction haunted stereo story I’ve ever read. Keep in mind the true story of Ron DeFeo who is notorious for having murdered his family in Amityville, NY after he heard a voice in his stereo telling him to do it. A few more pages of story and character development might have made this fair story good.

The Hands
A man is talked into entering a church to take a survey. After being led to a room to fill out the survey, he finds himself trapped in a shifting maze and strange pursuers.

Think “Hotel California” set in an old English church. “Hotel California” is a better short story than this mess. This is the worst story in the second half of the book.

Again
A man hiking along a park trail happens upon a cabin and an old crone who has apparently locked herself out of her home. The man obliges her and crawls through a window to unlock the door. Inside, he finds the cottage to be a small house of horrors and discovers the crone’s dark secret.

This is the first I’ve seen Campbell delve deeply into tales of the undead. He sets the scene masterfully with his descriptive prose and drives the story forward in a well paced narrative.

Just Waiting
A quarreling couple take their young son into the woods on a picnic. During the hike, his parents argue constantly and make the boy miserable. When they arrive at the glade where they plan to hold their picnic, they find a very formal wait staff catering to them. . . and to the boy’s escape fantasies.

There’s more than a touch of absurdity to the story. The main character is a sympathetic tyke and his parents bores. You can’t help but feel good for him in the end.

Seeing the World
Richard and Angela’s annoying neighbors insist that they come over and see their slides of their latest Greek vacation. Some neighbors are annoying, and some have evil inhabitants lurking in the basement of their homes!

Not a strong story. The characters were well developed – especially the annoying neighbor that just insists on showing slides. But the terror is almost tacked on and really tangential to the tale.

Old Clothes
A mover “acquires” an old coat while emptying the home of a dead spiritualist. Soon, treasures start appearing in the coat’s pockets. Like most treasures in horror stories, these bring consequences. The mover finds he can’t lose the coat.

A rather unsatisfying story with a good character. Maybe Campbell undertook one too many haunted garment stories in as much as Stephen King undertook one too many haunted car stories.

Apples
A childish prank of stealing apples from the neighborhood crank ends badly for children on Halloween night

For Campbell, this was a rather light tale like one might encounter in a comic book It was thoroughly enjoyable.

The Other Side
A schoomaster is taunted by prank phone calls from his students and a capering clown that he can see from his apartment window that affords a view of the “other side of the tracks.” When he observes one of his female tormentors in danger, he ventures to the other side of the tracks and confronts the monster.

Again, as Campbell is wont to do, he lost me in the climax. I reread it several times and ended up saying, “so what?” I just didn’t care to ponder it anymore.

Where the Heart Is
A recent widower whose wife and child died in childbirth sells the home they shared and falls into a deep depression after closing. Keeping a key for himself, he visits and observes their various renovations before ending his despair.

There’s not much of a supernatural element to this story; just tremendous sadness. Campbell establishes this mood nicely. It’s a well told, sad tale of loss.

Boiled Alive
A dull payroll manager in a British factory starts receiving strange phone calls inquiring if he is Dr. Doncaster. He soon finds out that he is living out the plot of a bad movie. After having seen the movie and its ending, he must decide whether to maintain his tenuous grip on reality or to become the film’s hero.

This story had a nice element of unpredictability, a well written climax, and just the right amount of uncertainty as to the outcome.

Another World
A man lives a life of total seclusion, hidden away from the real world by his ultra religious father. When his father dies, he has to venture out to see that his father’s remains are taken care of. He finds the world a much more unwholesome place than he ever dreamed.

This is a variation on Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” where the man, pure of heart, ventures into the dark foreboding forest (or in this case, city) to confront and be tempted by evil. Campbell gives us far less resolution to his story than did Hawthorne.

End of the Line
A telemarketer selling videophones always opens his sales pitch with, “I bet you wish you could see my face.” Apparently, he is unable to see the faces of his friends and associates.

For some reason, Campbell thought there was some humor in here somewhere. I found no humor – just a series of random sentences marching across the landscape in search of a plot. What a useless story with which to end an anthology that chronicles his life’s work up until 1991.

My Favorite Horror Story edited by Mike Baker and Martin H. Greenburg

My Favorite Horror Story
Edited by Mike Baker and Martin H. Greenberg

The concept of this anthology is simple. The editors asked several prominent horror and science fiction writers to submit their favorite horror stories. The sum is a collection of stories that inspired today’s best writers to write.

I enjoy short horror fiction. Stephen King, in describing the satisfaction of reading a good short story, made an apt comparison between the short story and a novel. He likened a novel to a long love affair while comparing the short story to a quick kiss from a stranger. While I’ve ever experienced the latter, I’ve got to believe the experience would be enjoyable.

Sweets to the Sweet
By Robert Bloch
Submitted by Stephen King

A nanny has quit the employ of a wealthy aristocrat because she can no longer care for the man’s daughter whom she describes as evil – so evil even her own father hates her. When the man’s brother goes to his house to see the girl and investigate, he finds the girl playing with her toys, which are really just “candy”.

Movie fans know of Bloch’s most prolific work, Psycho, a novella that Alfred Hitchcock made into one of the greatest horror movies of all time. Connoisseurs of horror fiction know Bloch as one of the masters and great contributors to contemporary genre fiction. Like most Bloch work, the prose is short and the story well paced.

The Father Thing
By Phillip K. Dick
Submitted by Ed Gorman

Aliens have eaten Charles Watsons’ father. He must flee from the awful thing that has taken its place and take revenge on its evil master.

This is the only Dick story I’ve ever read and, while I enjoyed it, I enjoyed the movie, “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” more which this story resembles closely. That novel was written by Jack Finney and they were written about the same time. Finney’s allegory about the Red Scare of the 1950s is deliberately thinly veiled. Dick’s story is not an allegory, but an attempt to convey the horror of a child. As we all know from being children, the imagined horrors of our youth are the most intense. Dick does an adequate, but not superb job in capturing that.

The Distributor
By Richard Matheson
Submitted by Ed Gorman

A new man moves into Joseph Alston’s neighborhood and promptly introduces himself to Alston as Theodore Gordon. At first, Gordon seems amicable enough. But soon, he starts to “redistribute” the belongings of his neighbors. When they complain, Gordon seizes control of the neighborhood through nefarious and prurient means.

I have a passion for Matheson’s work. I have read about half of it and am looking forward to taking more soon. He is rivaled only by Bradbury in his ability to tell great genre short stories. Matheson’s prose is a forerunner to that of writers such as Stephen King who tells great tales in a straightforward manner (usually). The Distributor is just another of Matheson’s wonderful stories. Certainly not his best, but I’ve never read or seen anything by Matheson I would call bad.

The thing about Matheson is, almost everybody is familiar with his work, but they don’t know it. He wrote 13 scripts for Rod Serling’s “Twilight Zone” including several of its most famous episodes like “Terror at 20,000 Feet”. He wrote I Am Legend that has been made into three different movies. He also is known for blending romance and fantasy in such books made into movies as Somewhere in Time and What Dreams May Come.

A Warning to the Curious
By M.R. James
Submitted by Ramsey Campbell

A young man spins a tale in an English country inn about great and powerful artifacts of a forgotten age buried in the countryside. He convinces two older gentlemen to help him unearth these artifacts. Someone lives to tell the tale. . .

This is the one story in the book I really did not enjoy. Campbell tells us he appreciates the “lightness” of James’ writing. I found it dull. I liked the story concept a great deal. The two older gentlemen remind me of members of “The Chowder Society” of Peter Straub’s Ghost Story. However, sometimes the failing of a story is in the poor telling of a good tale.

Opening the Door
By Arthur Machen
Submitted by Peter Atkins

A cynical journalist recounts his encounter with a man known as “The Canonbury Clergyman”. His interviews with the clergyman leave him with large gaps in his memory and disorients him in a way that is hard to reconcile with his journalist’s hardened sensibilities. When the clergyman vanishes, he recounts it as perhaps the only true case of a human being truly disappearing from existence.

I like the journalist character who, as a Fleet Street tabloid writer, is a bit of an anti-hero. Machen tells the tale as any journalist would – events chronologically told with insights from the author. It reads like a feature article from a newspaper. Machen was a journalist by trade, so he was in his element when he wrote it. This was my first experience with Machen and he’s an author more of whose works I hope to read.



The Colour Out of Space
By H.P. Lovecraft
Submitted by Richard Laymon

A meteor crashes into a New England farm. Soon, the family living on that farm devolve from human beings into subhuman beings. His neighbors and the local constabulary investigate to find the greatest horror man has ever known.

Lovecraft never tells a tale from the point of view of the victims of horror. Lovecraft’s narrative always comes from a third party observer. That is how Lovecraft terrifies the reader without ever quite showing the source of that terror. This story is a rare instance when the narrator is directly engaged in the action and sees the nature of the horror – a meteor whose description is of no color, yet of all colors. Stephen King retold this tale in a campy fashion for his anthology movie, “Creepshow”.

The Inner Room
By Robert Aickman
Submitted by Peter Straub

A young girl acquires a large dollhouse from a country antique store. The dollhouse is large enough that an entire room is required to accommodate it. Parts of it are strangely inaccessible, although its features can be observed through windows – except for room in the center of the house. The secrets of that room and that house will go on to dominate the girl and her brother into their adult years.

I read this story in a series of short installments and that may have made the experience less rewarding. I found the description of the house confusing and impossible to picture in my own mind. However, as the kids grow and the memories of the house instead of the house itself , come to the fore, the story really picks up and finishes nicely.

Young Goodman Brown
By Nathaniel Hawthorne
Submitted by Rick Hautula

A young man ventures into the woods on a quest to discover his own nature and test his own morals. While there, the true nature of his wife, friends, and associates is revealed in its most debased form. Brown’s own morality is tested and he is tempted with his basest desires by the devil himself.

I read this in college and enjoyed it a great deal. I did not enjoy it so much when rereading. Some stories can only by enjoyed once, I think. I’m not a fan of classical literature – preferring modern prose. However, it is impossible to not acknowledge the contributions of early writers like Hawthorne to the development of genre fiction.

The Rats in the Walls
By H.P. Lovecraft
Submitted by Michael Slade

A young man, traveling by bicycle through New England, tries to find shelter in what appears to be an empty house. But the house is not empty. It is inhabited by a absurdly weird man who has a number of guests “living” upstairs.

I’ve read almost all of Lovecraft’s fiction and this story still ranks as my favorite. The key component of Lovecraft’s fiction is dread. Seldom do we witness the horror – whether it precedes the story or is the climax. In this story, as in most others, our imagination finishes the tale for us much better than any written word. Lovecraft knew, perhaps better than any other writer, how to let the reader’s imagination finish the tale.

The Dog Park
By Dennis Etchison
Submitted by Richard Matheson

In the wealthiest of suburbs in Los Angeles, there is a dog park utilized by the rich and the famous – and their dogs. The hero of the story lost his dog in that park and isn’t quite sure why. He goes back to explore the park and meets a woman. As they talk, the woman’s dog meets its fate and the man learns the park’s secrets.

While this was an enjoyable tale, the social commentary was entirely too thinly veiled as to detract from the story. I have to believe Matheson has read better fiction than ths.

The Animal Fair
By Robert Bloch
Submitted by Joe R. Lansdale

A drifter comes across a traveling “jungle show” and is horrified with inhuman cruelty which the show’s host submits the show’s prime exhibit – a trained gorilla. After leaving the show, the drifter is hitchhiking when he is picked up by the show’s master. As they travel across the country – with the poor ape in tow – the circus master relates his own tale of inhuman cruelty done to him.

While the nature of the tale is much different than that of Psycho, the telling is the same. There’s no supernatural or fantastic element to the story. It’s just a horrific tale of the sometimes inhumane nature of man.

The Pattern
By Ramsey Campbell
Submitted by Poppy Z. Brite

A young couple – the man an artist and the woman a writer – rent a secluded cabin in the English country. Their first night there, the hear a horrific scream which could only be human. They search for its source and can find no evidence of anything amiss. When they make inquiries of the locals, they are told some secrets are better left undiscovered.

The story was decent, but what struck me was how vividly Campbell can describe a setting or scene. While good settings are an element of a story, they usually can’t carry a story. Here, Campbell’s brilliant descriptions elevate an average story to brilliant.

The Tell-Tale Heart
By Edgar Allan Poe
Submitted by Joyce Carol Oates

A young man slays a rival and conceals his body beneath the floor boards of his home. He tries to convince himself of both the infallibility of his concealment and the righteousness of his deed. When the inspectors arrive to search for the missing man, he smugly invites them in to examine his abode, quite confident they will not find the missing body. But the beating of the heart. . .if he can hear it, can the inspectors?

It is impossible to take a high school literature class and not be assigned this story. It is one of the most famous stories in history, spoofed, imitated and retold countless times. Poe’s legacy is the most enduring of any American horror writer.

An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge
By Ambrose Bierce
Submitted by Dennis Etchison

A confederate spy is about to hang for attempting to sabotage the Owl Creek Bridge. The hanging goes awry and he escapes into the river below. He eludes the Union troops pursuing him until he gets home when. . . .

I first read this story when I was in grade school and it was my first experience with a plot twist. It made an indelible impression on me. I forgot the author, but never the story, until I was in high school when it assigned in a literature class. Now, the name Ambrose Bierce, for me, will be forever linked to everything that is great in short fiction.

Bierce wrote more than one hundred short stories – mostly real life or supernatural horror from the Civil War. This particular story was adapted into a 22 minute film, without dialogue, for Rod Serling’s “Twilight Zone” with exceptional quality. It was also adapted for radio for the CBS Radio Mystery Theater in the 1970s.

The Human Chair
By Edogawa Rampo
Submitted by Harlan Ellison

A Japanese writer receives a strange letter from a furniture maker, telling her of how he designed a chair that allows him to hide inside it, undetected. He recounts how he used the chair to take up residence in an expensive hotel and make a living as a thief. Soon, his use of the chair becomes more prurient and horrifying.

This story had a delightful twist. It was originally written in Japanese and the translation is sometimes a bit stilted – lapsing into passive voice when active voice would have b been better. Nonetheless, Ellison promises a horror story to rival anything written by American or British authors and he does not disappoint.