I decided it was time for something new on this blog, and as usual, that means something I've already done but didn't give its own feature before. This will be a feature dedicated to anthologies, previously covered with my post on the amazingly inappropriate Hitchcock kids' anthology (itself part of a larger collection likely to reappear if this goes on much longer), especially the sci fi, horror and generally messed up ones I knew and sometimes loved from the school and public libraries. For this installment, I have two, part of a somewhat larger set I built up, and they are as interesting as they are not so much good.
For the backstory, the present selections are from a vast series of anthologies by one Helen Hoke, a prolific and apparently otherwise respected author and publisher of children's books. In the 1970s and the first half of the 1980s, Ms. Hoke took credit for somewhere in the neighborhood of 25 of these things (you can try to count them at ISFDB) under the general description of horror. I remember these things infesting the libraries into the 1990s and 2000s, usually clustered in the kids' section. Like the Crestwood House Monsters series, we never saw these on sale, and once they started disappearing from the library shelves, the difficulty and corresponding price of getting them went up very quickly, though not yet to anywhere near the level of those little orange volumes. It was in one of these that I read "The Ski Lift", a story suspiciously similar to the plot of Frozen (not the Disney movie). We won't be seeing that one this time, but that should tell you all you need to know about how appropriate these are for kids.
What's noteworthy in hindsight is that these are grab bags even by anthology standards, especially in overall quality. Any given one will predictably include some genuine classics of Victorian/ Gothic fiction, some underrated selections from the mid-century pulps, and a helping of "modern" selections that you would have to harrow Copyright Hell to find anywhere else. Like Weird Tales of old, there is no attempt at genre consistency. There is supernatural horror, science fiction, borderline dark fantasy, and the odd "straight" mystery/ thriller story. In the centerpiece of this post, tastefully titled Creepies, Creepies, Creepies, it happens that no less than six of the twelve selections are within the sci fi category.
The best piece of this anthology, and a good contender for best in my entire set, is "The Dancing Partner", a steampunk-flavored written by Jerome K. Jerome in 1893. The author was best known as a humorist, which puts him in the league of switch hitters like Guy DeMaupassant and W.W Jacobs. It's an intriguing bit of proto sci fi and a grisly early entry in the "killer robot" genre. It's all about a dancing automaton created by an eccentric toymaker as a companion for his daughter and her friends. It proves to be a formidable, very non-anthropomorphic bot with a retrospective steampunk flavor. Things go well at first as a girl named Annette joins the mechanical man on the ballroom floor, and there's enough subtlety that it's never clear how soon or how fast things go wrong. There's just a slow transition from cheerful admiration to unease to horror as the machine dances with the increasingly unresponsive young lady. I reread it for this post, and what most intrigued me was a passage that could sum up both genre conventions and real-time armchair analysis in more recent times: "Those who are not present think how stupid must have been those who were; those who are reflect afterwards how simple it would have been to do this, that or the other, if only they had thought of it at the time."
Other sci fi entries here include William Hope Hodgson's "The Voice In the Night", another Victorian-era tale, a Gernsback-vintage tale "Carlton's Father" by Eric Ambrose about immortality gone awry, and Clifford Simak's atypical invasion story "Skirmish". On the modern end, there's "The Meshes of Doom", scavenged like "The Ski Lift" from the Pan Book of Horror Stories series, a halfway decent killer plant story that cops out as psychological horror. The most curious is "The Animators" by the moderately prolific Sydney Bounds, a straight-up zombie story set on Mars from 1975 that became the basis of The Last Days On Mars. The strange thing is that the modern zombie mythos was notable for emerging straight from low-budget cinema and only much later finding a footing in printed fiction. Yet, this stands as an early outlier, after Night of the Living Dead but still before Dawn of the Dead really solidified the formula. It reads like a comic book short, with a bare minimum of character development and not even that much gore. The most interested element is the almost unlikable protagonist, explicitly the lone military man among scientists who bristle at his strict discipline, exactly the kind of dynamic that wouldn't and couldn't happen on an actual space expedition. By comparison, the undead are almost undescribed apart from the unintimidating Patient Zero, who climbs out of his dusty grave after being stripped of his space suit. For once, the undead prove at least as smart as the opposition, and get the upper hand in time for a predictable unhappy ending.
For the remainder of the stories, the most interesting is a crime piece "The Bitter Years" from Dana Lyon, a crime novelist who wrote mainly in French. It's a concise, polished piece with a little too much emphasis on the ironic ending. I personally would find it more interesting if a murderess left a man moldering with no sign of remorse, as the real kind do quite frequently. Also of interest is "The Natterjack" by Mary Danby, who apparently printed it under her own editing gig for the
Fontana horror series, as near as I can make out a perverse twist on the "frog to prince" fairy tale archetype. Then there are a few more "classics" from Bram Stoker and H.P. Lovecraft, plus a Cthulhu Mythos-adjacent entry from Robert Bloch.
For the other half of our selection, titled Spirits, Spooks and Other Sinister Creatures and graced with a cover that would make a kiddie-Halloween NES game blush, I'm going to have to be brief, and there's not nearly as much to talk about. The mix is shifted toward the "classics" end with Perceval Londons 1908 tale "Thurnley Abbey", and more from Saki, E.F. Benson and H. Rider Haggard. The last of whom contributes perhaps the worthiest entry, "Only A Dream", which adds the weightier themes of grief and guilt to already effective Gothic horror. On a similar classy vein is "Lodging For The Night" by Joan Aiken, who went from a Pan contributor to a respectable career, which I'm not sure I've read. On the science fiction side, there's "Mouse" by the criminally underrated Fredric Brown, a strange combination of invasion and possession, and perhaps "The Third Level" by Jack Finney. Also qualifying are "A Most unusual Murder", a time-travel tale with a side of true-crime toxic fandom by Bloch, and "Not Snow Nor Rain" by Miriam Allen Deford, another story I don't think I've gotten around to reading from a member of the original circle of Charles Fort. There's a few more on the actual kiddie vein, the most interesting of which is a short called "The Monster Of Poot Holler"; whose titular creature is described as "Thin as baling wire... (l)ong as a full grown tree". Because there's no way a killer alien that can disguise itself as an extension cord will traumatize the kids...
And while I'm at it, a few illustrations, starting with the one for the Jerome piece!
And the space zombie story; he somehow looks heroic.
And the Lyon murder tale!
With that meandering look, I'm ready to call it a day. All in all, these anthologies stand first and foremost as what it was like growing up before the internet, ebooks, and generally having anything that isn't nailed down in copyright law at your fingertips. It was a simpler time, perhaps a gentler time, but then so much worse. Just as I am doing this, I am forcefully reminded that I used to scour these and similar books to photocopy stories for my own files. Now, I have more than I could have dreamed of in my ebook libraries, including material from the same libraries, much of which I still haven't read. The old appeal definitely had a lot to do with the challenge. Still, I'd rather have the stories available both to me and everyone else a download away, and I hope to do my part to keep people aware of what actually good 1960s/ 1970s horror was like before the death of the public domain sends it to the grave. That's all for now, more to come!
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