11 Great Horror Stories [1969]; Anthology Review...

11 Great Horror Stories

1969, Edited by Betty M. Owen

This thin unassuming paperback was among my first introductions into horror – in the realm of short stories, at least. My copy still has a pencilled ‘30p’ in the inside cover, and it has scaffolding of sellotape down its spine where my wife has bandaged the book back together for me several times. The cover is freaky, out of focus, weird – two swirling faces that on closer study seem to resemble Edgar Allan Poe and perhaps H.P.Lovecraft in nebulous hall-of-mirror caricature. It is an American book, and I’m guessing that I found it on one of my regular trawls through a jumble sale or a charity shop or a market stall, sometime in the early 1990’s.  I read it not long after.

I am very fond of this little book anyway; I love old anthologies like this. This particular one though had the distinctive pleasure of introducing me to that master of the weird, Howard Phillips Lovecraft, for the first time, or more or less the first time. I think I had read the odd story by Lovecraft before this, but they were more his minor, shorter, stories, and apart from perhaps The Festival, didn’t really have that much of an impact on the teenage me. All that changed with 11 Great Horror Stories, and it’s opening tale, Lovecraft’s "The Dunwich Horror". I had already seen the slow-going film with Dean Stockwell and I imagine I wasn’t expecting much of the story. What a surprise I was in for. I read it in one long sitting [as one should always try to do with Lovecraft] and just got lost in the story, in the atmosphere, an .d the great build-up of growing horror. It tells the story of Lavinia Whately, who gives birth to Wilbur, who grows up prematurely and precociously, having early interests in strange occult matters and interests. And something else – something that is growing in his attic. Wilbur is trying to summon things on the nearby hills, things he has read about in old, forgotten books, and when these attempts go wrong, the thing in his attic – without Wilbur to care for and maintain it – grows and grows until it bursts out of the attic room, escapes its confines, and begins to ravage around the nearby countryside. The thing is invisible, or almost so, and causes chaos shambling around the country lanes and hills, while the simple local folk go half mad with horror.

This is a great story, a cornerstone of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos, and a great place to start with Lovecraft, but equally is perfectly readable on its own. Lovecraft’s style is at its easiest-to-read here, and the power of the atmosphere builds to a fine ending, with very visual descriptions throughout the piece as well as a sense of looming menace. The Dunwich Horror is among my very favourite Lovecraft stories; on the strength of this story I immediately made more investigations into Lovecraft’s world, and within a week or two had read most of his more important stories and had become a lifelong Lovecraftian. Certainly a Great Horror Story!!!

Read it here: The Dunwich Horror

Listen to it here: The Dunwich Horror Audio  

[or you could always buy one of the many great books it's available in!]

  My next favourite story in this little book is not the Poe [which we’ll come back to later], but "The Judge’s House", a terror tale by Bram Stoker. I have since discovered that Stoker had a bit of a one-hit-wonder with Dracula; his other novels, such as The Lady Of The Shroud and The Lair Of The White Worm are nowhere near as good [White Worm is a bit of a mess!], but Stoker did write a handful of quality short horror stories, and The Judge’s House is among the best. Very readable and fast-moving, it tells of a young student who isolates himself in a decrepit legend-haunted old house where a strict judge once lived. Every night, when the student sets to his books, a huge rat comes to sit beside him and stare – a rat that could be ‘the old devil’ himself. Towards the end, the story segues from weird into a more pedestrian ghost story, but it maintains some surprises by having an ambiguous ending and two possible interpretations. The second half is slightly less than the brilliant first half, but this still qualifies as another Great Horror Story.

My next choice of the 11 [and I’m doing these roughly in the order of which I enjoyed most] is called "W.S." by the English novelist L.P. Hartley. The story has a hint of the Stephen King’s about it, but was written well before King ever got published. A writer receives strange postcards through the mail, culminating in a visit from the sender themselves. But is the visitor an unconscious part of the writers mind, a harmless but fruitcake fan, or perhaps a character somehow made flesh, seeking answers about his life.  This builds well into a compelling mystery, and put me in mind of such King tales as "The Dark Half" and "Secret Window, Secret Garden". Another enjoyable read.

Jack Finney’s story "The Love Letter" comes next, and while I enjoyed this, it is more a lightly sentimental science fiction tale, rather than horror, and tells about a series of impossible letters sent and recieved through time and space.

"The Return Of The Griffins" by A.E.Sandeling is a fun but odd story about a European politician who suddenly begins to see griffins all over the place, and yet no one else can see them. Is something weird going on, or is he just crazy? And in "Thus I Refute Beelzy" by John Collier, a child’s imaginary friend may be not that imaginary after all. I personally found this story to be just ok, but it is well-regarded; you can listen to Vincent Price reading the story here

Poe next, and his appearance here is with one of his less-famous stories, "The Oblong Box", which isn’t so much a horror story as a light mystery yarn. On a long sea voyage the nmarrator ponders over the problem of why a family have booked an unrequired cabin, and wonders what is inside their precious oblong box. The story is ok,. Memorable in its own way, but lacking the atmospheric claustrophobic horror of some of Poe’s best tales. Despite Poe being reprinted in a myriad of publications, I still think The Oblong Box a bit of an odd choice for 11 Great Horror Stories. For the record, I think my favourite Poe tale is "The Facts In The Case Of M. Valdemar" or "The Tell-Tale Heart".

The remainder of the stories here were less well received by myself. The Mistake by Fielden Hughes [?}, concerning a medical miracle who needs no sleep, is reminiscent of Poe’s best tales, but not in the same league. “The Ape And The Mystery”, by Gerald Kersh,  is an ok story about the painting of the Mona Lisa, but hardly qualifies as horror. “Flies” by Anthony Vercoe is a very standard sort of ghost story, concerning a dying tramp and his strange hallucinations. And “The Shed”, by E. Everett Evans is the weakest story of all; poorly written and containing a weak plot about a shadowy presence in an old railway shed. These four stories I could happily have done without; there is a wealth of excellent horror stories pre-1969 which could have been included in their place.

Nevertheless, this is a charming little paperback, precious to me because it introduced me properly to Lovecraft, but also was a small window into the absolutely huge list of short classic horror stories. These old vintage paperbacks like this, I snap up whenever I see them, because you never know what little gems they will contain. “The Dunwich Horror” is a 10/10 story, absolutely classic Lovecraft, but this collection as a whole can only score... 7/10

[Michael Carter 1999/2015]

REVIEW - THE GREAT ZOO OF CHINA - HERE BE DRAGONS

The Great Zoo Of China

By Matthew Reilly

2015, Orion hb, 529pp

Some books are on my shelves for years before I get round to reading them, while some that I particularly want to read soon might still take six months or a year to actually get to. I saw a full page advert in a magazine for newly-released THE GREAT ZOO OF CHINA, did a little online poking around, and ordered it from my local library, along with Stephen King’s MR. MERCEDES, and after a couple of weeks, they both arrived on the same day. I read the King book first, but a day after finishing got note from the library that THE GREAT ZOO OF CHINA had to go back [as with most new books, there’s a waiting list; usually, you can keep books, with nine renewals, for twenty-seven weeks, enough for even the slowest reader]. So, I was faced with a pretty huge doorstop of a book, and the problem of could I get it read in little over a week. Well, clearly I could, because with big-ish print, lots of white space in chapter breakups and a handful of maps and diagrams, this huge book only runs to [I estimate] around 100,000 words. Also, it reads like gangbusters.

The plot; well, essentially, and in a movie-pitch sort of style, it’s Jurassic Park with dragons instead of dinosaurs, set in the jungles of China. Or, if you’d care for another handle, it’s a Jane MaClaine Die Hard With Dragons. Forty years ago the Chinese government discovered that dragons were real and were nested beneath the surface of the earth. Keeping this massive secret from the world, they have carried out a research program into the creatures, placing them in captivity and bringing in some of the worlds experts to oversee their project. Eventually, in a bid to own the most awesome visitor-attraction in the world, they have spent trillions of moolah to build a massive and ultra high-tech safari-type zoo environment in a jungled valley of Southern China. Herpetologist CJ Campbell, and her brother Hamish, are two of the experts helicoptered in to be given a pre-opening tour of the place, boat-rides, cable-cars, maglev trains, revolving mountaintop restaurants, the works. But captive dragons aren’t keen on remaining captive, so before long [about 20% in] everything goes belly-up, the dragons go nuts, and a long, long, 400 page action sequence begins.

This is a strange novel. It’s a pretty good concept, and author Reilly has a fair-enough kind of explanation for the dragons and their long history, and he adequately describes the enormous environment in which they are held. Also, his action sequences are truly massive, truly vast in scope, and, most of the latter 400 pages has truly enormous dragons going completely batshit, destroying everything around them, picking up petrol tankers and launching them from the air like bombs, or snatching helicopters from the skies, to smashing up buildings of reinforced concrete. There’s non-stop carnage and death and destruction here; head-biting, neck-snapping, gut-flying, car-boat-dragon chases, explosions, fire, machine guns, last-second escapes, completely awesome but all completely over-the-top  action; Peter Jackson would get tired, Michael Bay would have a migraine!! CJ Cameron, the female herpetologist somehow becomes Lara Croft or Jane Bond, surging from one reptilian assault to another, surviving by the skin of her teeth to the point of complete and total unbelievability. I think this book is the most action-heavy book I’ve ever read in my life. Sometimes it gets too much, too repetitive, and too samey-samey that, despite drawings of maps and detailed explanations, I still wasn’t always exactly sure where our heroes were running to or which part of the Dragon Zoo was exploding. You just sort of get the gist, the important action, while the pertinent details often happen as a fuzzy bang. There were times when I was bored of dragons throwing helicopters about the place, and times when I was considering leaving the rest of it unread and going for a lie down. But, to be fair, there were also action sequences that were engaging and reasonably exciting and kept the pages flying by; sometimes, when you get the point that it’s completely over-the-top and pretty paper-thin, you can’t help getting carried away with it, and I was laughing out loud at the ridiculousness of the next giant action extravaganza. Phew!

But, to be equally fair, the action, is pretty much all there is. The rest of the book is as empty as Jurassic Park’s gift-shop. There is very little depth to anything, the characters are largely stereotypes with cardboard-cutout development, and the writing style leaves little for contemplation; it’s a fast and lean, James Patterson kind of style, all fire and fists, but no space for much flair in the writing. The book screams Movie Deal! and the action is all very visual, but to be honest, if this was made into a Hollywood blockbuster it would cost as much to make as building an actual dragon zoo yourself, and more-to-the-point, any successful script would need extra work to muscle in a bit of character development, unless it were to become a                                                                           Transformers-like mess.

I kind of enjoyed THE GREAT ZOO OF CHINA to some extent. There were some visuals I’ll remember for a while, and I’ll recall the whole awesome ridiculousness of it, and it was very fast-paced and easy read. But if, as a reader, you enjoy a bit more originality, and a bit more depth or substance to your books, it’s probably not for you. Tonnes of dragons, though. 

                                           6.5/10