Kurt Singer (editor)
Target Books

I have two books that are emblazoned with a toad on the cover.  The first was 'The Fontana Book of Great Horror Stories' which at least had a Nigel Kneale story in it that featured the creatures, this one just wanted the 'Urgh' factor.

It's a bit of a hodgepodge this one.  It opens well with one of Wilkie Collins' non-supernatural stories of duplicitous French gamblers in 'A Terribly Strange Bed' before things take a distinctly downward turn with 'Psychic Alert Saved Film Star' by Frank Stevens.  This 'factual' piece tells of the actress Elke Sommer and how a psychic premonition and a ghostly visitor saved her life on two separate occasions.

The book is right back on track with the muscular macabrery of G.G. Pendarves, 'The Dark Star', which pits an alienist with a penchant for the supernatural and muscularist (I think I might just possibly have made that term up) in a spiritual battle for the soul of the latter's beloved against an ancient ancestor inside a haunted painting.

Richard Middleton

Carl Jacobi's 'Portrait in Moonlight' is a colonialist voodoo tale complete with distasteful language that delivers a well earned comeuppance to it's unpleasant lead.

I rather enjoyed Richard Middleton's whimsical 'The Ghost Ship' with it's courteous and occasionally inebriated ghosts but it's impact is lessened by the subsequent descent into more spiritualism / ghost hunting (apologies if this sort of thing is your bag but it really isn't mine) with various ghost busting memoirs from Horace Leaf in 'I am a Psychic Detective' before the book ends well with Seabury Quinn's, 'The Cloth of Madness', that finds an interior decorator extract revenge via wallpaper.

Like I said at the top, a mixed bag but one that errs on quality and is a quick and, mostly, enjoyable read.

Wilkie Collins
Wordsworth Editions

This is a unique collection of strange stories from the cunning pen of Wilkie Collins, author of The Woman in White and The Moonstone. The star attraction is the novella The Haunted Hotel, a clever combination of detective and ghost story set in Venice, a city of grim waterways, dark shadows and death. The action takes place in an ancient palazzo converted into a modern hotel that houses a grisly secret. The supernatural horror relentless pace, tight narrative, and a doomed countess characterise and distinguish this powerful tale.
The other stories present equally disturbing scenarios, which include ghosts, corpses that move, family corpses and perhaps the most unusual of all, the Devil's spectacles, which bring a clarity of vision that can lead to madness.
Collins is one of the great storytellers. He excels in presenting narratives that both disturb and engross the reader, as this fine collection demonstrates. 

I've read a fair few of Collins' stories over the last couple of years and enjoyed them all.  They are lively, imaginative and written with a real readability, an easy way of phrasing that many of his contemporaries and successors lacked.  That said though, I've little interest in reading any of his longer works - or those of the other writers of the era - as I've, for the most part, come to think of these writers as providing my short story kick.  So, the novella that makes up a large - 149 page - chunk of this book was my longest excursion by far into the realms of the Victorian ghost story.

The story itself tells of a jilted woman, her usurper in her ex's affections and his extended family.  The tale moves between London, Ireland and Venice as a seemingly inevitable and perhaps fated meeting between various parties at the hotel of the title.  For most of the novella it feels like a fairly slight story extended beyond its bounds and supported in it's telling by Collins' readability but when the uncanny and the odd begin to appear it is all the more effective for it and the novella culminates in a most satisfying manner.

Making up the rest of the page count are several shorts of varying quality of which I was only previous acquainted with the first, 'The Dream Woman' which tells of a grooms (the horse variety) unrelenting fear of his ex wife.

A marriage is at the heart of the third tale also, 'Mrs Zant and the Ghost', in which a chance encounter with a lady in a park brings a widower and his young daughter  into her life in time to save her from an unpleasant fate.  I've admitted in these pages before that I am a real sucker for a happy story so this proved to be a real favourite.

'A Terribly Strange Bed' is, along with 'The Dead Hand' & 'Blow Up With The Brig!', one of several stories here with no supernatural content.  All are enjoyable, the latter being the least so, but aren't what I read these books for and so my enjoyment is limited but, as I say, the first two are certainly enjoyable in what they are.

Of the three remaining stories, two deal with apparitions, in one 'Miss Jeromette and the Clergyman' this is in the context of a story told about a murder committed whilst the other 'Nine O'Clock' tells of a premonition of death.  Both stories have a sense of inevitability about them as their denouements are telegraphed from the off but the journeys to the ends is enjoyable enough.

The book closes with the frankly absurd 'The Devil's Spectacles' that begins with a story of cannibalism and ends with madness via mistrust, greed, jealousy and a very ugly pair of glasses.

As ever with these Wordsworth Editions what you get is a collection of unusual tales that are often engrossing, sometimes intriguing and occasionally puzzling but every now and again though these stories are written by a master of the craft and manage to be all three at once.

Robert Aickman (ed)
Fontana Books

After finally getting to read some stories by Aickman, who over the last year had climbed to the top of my list of authors I wanted to track down, I noticed on my shelf this anthology of stories chosen by him.  It's the only one of the Fontana series I've managed to track down so far and it's a real delight.

For Aickman 'The essential quality of the ghost story is that it gives form to the unanswerable' and that key aspect of the unknown and mysterious is what guides the choice of stories.  There are few answers here and resolutions are often ephemeral.

Opening the book is 'The Accident' by Ann Bridge.  The pseudonymous Bridge was an avid mountain climber and her story reflects this as a psychiatrist attempts to help a young brother and sister menaced by sinister letters and footprints in the snow.  It's an attractive premise but one which is hampered by Bridge's
love of climbing and so much of the suspense becomes lost in the descriptions of the activity.

Barry Pain's 'Not On The Passenger List' is one in a long line of ocean traversing ghost stories. Here a widow on her way to England is haunted by a ghost that, unusually, is also seen by other passengers.  the story is told by another traveller and whilst not played for laughs has a lightness to it that indicates, to me at least, an author more at home with a more frivolous story style.

Oscar Wilde

The great Oscar Wilde is represented by a story called 'The Sphinx Without a Secret' wherein two men discuss a recent doomed romance and the enigmatic lady at the centre of it.  It is the most sparse of tales with the entire story revolving around the ladies behaviour and the endless connotations implied by the ambiguity of the ending.

The American writer (and friend of Wilde) Vincent O'Sullivan offers a fairly inconsequential but amusingly macabre little story of a belligerent ghost in denial of his own death in 'When I Was Dead' before we are provided with a translation of Alexander Pushkin's 'The Queen of Spades' that reveals itself at the last to be an amusing tale of spectral revenge rather than a fairly typical tale of avaricious behaviour within the Russian nobility.

Whilst more renowned as a critic Desmond MacCarthy's 'Pargiton and Harby' shows him to have had a keen predilection for the weird as his tale of a man haunted by an event in his past reveals itself to be far more interesting than it's premise.

Hugh Walpole

Whilst we're on the subject of the weird Hugh Walpole's 'The Snow' is a brief, fiery examination of a marriage in tumultuous decline as the husband's placidity and the young wife's irascibility clash irrevocably in the shadow of his dead wife's memory.

I can find very little information regarding the author of the next story, Eric Ambrose, other than that he was English and his from and to dates.  His story, 'Carlton's Father', written in 1936 is a fabulous piece of proto-steampunk that any attempt to explain would spoil so onto the next which is by the peerless M.R. James.

'A School Story' is one of the fastest moving of James' tales with a rapidity of telling that takes it's tempo from the narrators bewildered retelling of the events surrounding the disappearance of a teacher.  It isn't one of James' most involved tales and the ending goes a bit too far but it's always fun to dip into any of James' works.

I've read a few of Saki's stories over the last couple of years and they're usually enjoyable but they've never grabbed me as much as some of his contemporaries.  His story here, 'The Wolves of Cernogratz'  is a rather gentle and poignant tale of the return to the ancestral home by the last of the von Cernogratz family.

Wilkie Collins

The book ends with the William Wilkie Collins novella, 'Mad Monkton'.  This wonderful tale by friend and contemporary of Charles Dickens tells of one man's attempt to avoid both the family curse and the family prophecy as he searches for the body of his dead uncle.  I've read a couple of Collins' stories before this and have been hugely impressed each time and this was the best of them all.  I find his way with words to be eminently readable and his imagination beguiling.

I picked up this book expecting to be entertained for a weekend and instead was treated to a number of old favourites alongside a number of intriguing authors whose work I was unaware of and who were of such a level of obscurity that it would have been no effort for me to have remained ignorant of them.

An excellent and extraordinary collection that explores the fantastical and the macabre in the most imaginative and enjoyable way.