This series lasted from 1959 to 1989, 30 small volumes of highly unpleasant stories. It started with some literary pretensions – the first one includeThis series lasted from 1959 to 1989, 30 small volumes of highly unpleasant stories. It started with some literary pretensions – the first one included CS Forester, LP Hartley, Muriel Spark and Angus Wilson. By volume 6 that had been ditched and the brilliantly named editor Herbert van Thal (a real person!) had discovered a group of young writers who thought all the old spooky stuff was lame and just wanted to write stuff about ever more horrible people doing ever more repulsive things to each other. More hacking, more experiments, more body parts in the fridge! This was a pretty successful formula until around volume 16 when the public got sick all this gruesomeness and sales plummeted. So now, thirty years later, you can pick up volumes 1 to 15 for £5 to £10 but then the prices rapidly escalate because there were fewer of them printed and all the rest of them are priced at £50 to £100 plus now.
My copy of the 21st Pan Book has zoomed up in price but as I read it it rapidly zoomed down again because the glue holding the pages together turned to dust and the whole thing fell apart. As did some of these stories.
Fans of this series like to debate which story is the all time most disgusting and it’s generally agreed that at number one is Kowlonga Plaything in No 23, followed by Love on the Farm, in volume 24. Both stories were written by Alan Temperley and I wouldn’t summarise the plots for you for love nor money. Mr Temperley later became a children’s book writer.
The original Pan Books ran from 1958 to 1988. The first 12 or so were either great or pretty good – after that they were frankly appalling. Superfan JThe original Pan Books ran from 1958 to 1988. The first 12 or so were either great or pretty good – after that they were frankly appalling. Superfan Johnny Mains had the idea of reviving the Pan Books and this one-off is the result. It features 7 stories from the original anthologies and 13 new ones.
All the new ones, sorry to say, are really quite awful. You might have thought that in 2016 authors could have been even more tasteless, vile and disgusting than they were in the 60s, 70s and 80s but strangely, all these new stories are so very very tame, and seem to be trying not to upset anyone.
Horror is no place for political correctness, you know.
But this book is not a write-off, because Mr Mains has done fans a great service. He’s written a 40 page history of the Pan Books combined with a mini-biography of the previously mysterious Herbert van Thal, the original editor, and this is stuffed with delightful info about all the totally obscure authors who wrote the original good stuff, those weirdohs who were so obsessed with leprosy, insane asylums, homicidally jealous husbands, homicidally jealous wives, feral children who would eat you as soon as look at you, insane retired surgeons who graft your legs onto their deformed daughter, single gentleman sex criminals who are allowed to adopt young orphan girls (this would not be allowed any more, I think), flesh eating plants, and so on and so forth.
Ramsey Campbell, one of the authors appearing in earlier volumes, is quoted on the series' fansite (oh yes, there is one) as saying ;
"I thought the seRamsey Campbell, one of the authors appearing in earlier volumes, is quoted on the series' fansite (oh yes, there is one) as saying ;
"I thought the series became increasingly illiterate and disgusting and meritless."
He's right, and No 12 is a good example. Hardly any story has discernable merit in any way, a farrago of unlikely demonic children, crazed surgeons, murderous spouses and sex killers and haunted dolls. Standard PBHS stuff. In some ways, of course, that's what appeals to me. How unpleasantly obedient to be always reading Proust, Dostoyevsky and Joyce. Live a little with a badly-written story about a guy whose mother develops a growth on her shoulder which gets bigger and bigger until it's actually physically larger than she is! Ha ha! Yes!
The cover is a graphic representation of me waiting for a No 17 bus on Mansfield Road one winter morning in 1993....more
This collection was published in 1970 so you know there's not gonna be much political correctness to be found! Prepare to be slightly offended...
ActuaThis collection was published in 1970 so you know there's not gonna be much political correctness to be found! Prepare to be slightly offended...
Actually there are only a few stories worth commenting on. By 1970 this series had run out of good horror. The real horror is that it carried on for another 19 years!
David Case, ‘The Cell’
Diary of a werewolf. This one, when human, is an uptight prudish rightwing male chauvinist (as they were called in 1970) which is quite an amusing idea - a prudish werewolf. (In the brilliant mockumentary What we Do in the Shadows(New Zealand, 2014) a group of vampires run into a group of werewolves and start verbally abusing each other until one of the latter group shouts out "Come on, let's go, we're werewolves not swearwolves...") . David Case plays with the idea that serial killers are werewolves. In one sense or another.
Bryan Lewis, ‘A Question of Fear’
Hilarious - many of these Pan horror stories start off with two old buffers swapping stories over a large brandy and cigar in a gentlemen's club somewhere in Mayfair, just like the 1960s never happened. (Well, for many people, they didn't.) So here we have a "war hero" who doesn’t know the meaning of fear; in the club he meets a swarthy man named Smith who lays a wager of £500 (a lot in those days). He is to spend the night in a country mansion and if he survives he wins. In the mansion, first he is attached by toothless mastiffs. As he has brought his trusty service revolver he shoots them but then ... he's attacked by a gorilla! He shoots that too. But then sees it was behind a pane of bullet proof glass. He reclines on his bed and .... a guillotine has been rigged over it! He escapes death by inches! This Smith joker turns out to be the son of the pianist who our war hero had tortured during WW2 (for quite proper reasons). And Smith now works at Porton Down - yes, the government chemicals warfare secret laboratory! And has manufactured a way of disintegrating human bones inside living humans to turn them into human worms! Human worms! And our war hero has already ingested the evil potion! Squirm, war hero, squirm.
Barry Martin, ‘Case of Insanity'
How many PB stories feature spouses who hate each other, or one hates the other? Answer : loads and loads. And how many feature downtrodden husbands? Answer : loads and loads.
“You bloody ponce! That’s what you are! If you can’t do right by me, why don’t you go out and get yourself some pretty, sweet little queer to have your sex with?”
That's telling him. But you really shouldn't raise your voice in a Pan horror story because naturally he kills her and dismembers her gruesomely then takes the suitcase with her remains inside to be buried in the woods, along with another suitcase full of his clothes. On the way back he’s in a car crash and taken to hospital. They open his suitcase to find out who he is and alas they find the wife because he’d buried the wrong suitcase in the woods. That'll teach him.
Although come to think of it he must have noticed that the case he was burying weighed less than his wife's dismembered corpse? Could be men's suits and that extra pair of brogues were really heavy in those days. That must be it.
Robert Duncan, ‘The Market-Gardeners’
The Pan books were heterogeneous to a fault - just when you think it's all campy splatter stuff along comes a realistic genuinely chilling piece like this. A childless couple who sell vegetables at a market are visited by two men for an unspecified reason. They’re tied up and one rapes the woman. They take their time about it and then casually leave. No explanations, no conclusion. Nasty, brutal and effective.
Dulcie Gray, ‘The Babysitter’
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Dulcie Gray was a major British stage actress who switched to writing and was pretty good at that too. She came up with a couple of classics for the Pan Books and this is one. The fat 15 year old babysitter ends up taking her anger out on the baby, naturally, and it's a really horrific scene. Don't think anyone would publish this now. The Pan Books stories features a number of evil fat people. Like I say, don't look for any PC here.
Conclusion : it's probably not a bad thing that some books go out of print....more
Starts off with one of the best titles ever : "The Man Whose Nose Was Too Big". Starts off with one of the best titles ever : "The Man Whose Nose Was Too Big". ...more
The guy on the front is a ringer for my friend Jim after he's been working a few of those night shifts. Those night shifts can be bad.The guy on the front is a ringer for my friend Jim after he's been working a few of those night shifts. Those night shifts can be bad....more
The gloriously tasteless, lowbrow, prurient and sadistic Pan Books of Horror Stories were a formative influence in my youth, kind of balancing out theThe gloriously tasteless, lowbrow, prurient and sadistic Pan Books of Horror Stories were a formative influence in my youth, kind of balancing out the intellectual version of the same thing I got from Ingmar Bergman and Pasolini.
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.
The authors, most of whom were of obscure origin and who remained obscure, had several obsessions. Darkest Africa and the mysterious East was one (cue immeasurable fathomless cruelty); in case you think they were all racist blighters, they also seemed to think that behind the façade of every English country house was a retired surgeon just aching to graft your normal legs onto the body of his stunted daughter. Or chain you in the library and gradually eat bits of you.
As this was way before political correctness, story after story gives us psycho after psycho, chopping away at all and sundry. One thing sure to tip the most ordinary timid soul over into kitchen knife improvisation was sexual betrayal, and to their credit the authors give us hideous deaths of roving husbands just as much as faithless wives. And it's notable that in the world of the Pan Books there are no happy marriages. None at all.
One odd fixation was about evil children, who are inclined to strip the flesh from your bones with their bare teeth as soon as look at you in the Pan Books. I guess these authors were working out their own difficult childhoods, and there must be a lot of wish fulfillment in here. The kids’ victims are always adults.
Also, they must have had some bad experiences with horticulture because there are quite a few killer plant stories.
Well, I can’t recommend the Pan Book of Horror Stories Number 8 or any of the other 29 either. I think you had to be there, or like me, find them in 2nd hand shops and read them with eyes abulge and palpitating heart later in your bedroom instead of homework.
A stunning portrait of a nasty drunk Victorian guy who works at travellingContains one of PB's All Time Greats :
"Crack o' Whips" by H A Manhood (1934)
A stunning portrait of a nasty drunk Victorian guy who works at travelling fairs running a dog act, and the bunch of kids he's cruel to and who are a lot crueller in return. Couldn't believe how beautifully this was written & I then found out H A Manhood was thought of as something of a short story genius in the 1930s but he couldn't make any money at it and he jacked it in. He wrote one novel - dig this title : "Gay Agony" . You couldn't make it up, "Gay Agony" by H A Manhood. He spent most of his life living in a railway carriage and growing his own vegetables. Only died in 1991 by which time he was completely forgotten. None of his books are listed on Goodreads which makes him Ultra-Obscure.
I love the slightly tipsy green mummy on the cover. He's saying "Er...yeah...ah...what was the question?"
I would like to write a whole thing on the PaI love the slightly tipsy green mummy on the cover. He's saying "Er...yeah...ah...what was the question?"
I would like to write a whole thing on the Pan Books of Horror Stories, all of them, which thrilled and gurgled my very brains and spinal fluids when I was the merest of boys. But certain people may find the material a little distasteful.
What a glorious gallimaufry of Grand Guignol it all was though.
From 1958 to 1988 The Pan Book of Horror Stories was the annual British gorefest. It started out here, the very first of the 30, with a most unscary bFrom 1958 to 1988 The Pan Book of Horror Stories was the annual British gorefest. It started out here, the very first of the 30, with a most unscary black cat on the cover, and with some kind of literary aspirations. Within a few years it fell, nay, it swandived, into the filthiest of sewers, it became caked with disgust and it revelled in relentless cruelty.
Yay!
There seem to be hardly any reviews of this nasty stuff, so here I boldly go. The favourites from this first rather feeble volume are :
AL Barker, ‘Submerged’.
Young lad had secret solo river swim sessions. Woman bursts on to the riverbank during one such, pursued by a man. She falls in the river and is drowned. The man is later arrested for murder. Beautifully written.
Oscar Cook, 'His Beautiful Hands'
A manicurist extracts deliberately protracted revenge on a man who wronged her mother. Incest, rotting fingers and a deformed baby also loom large. Never let it be said that Oscar Cook, whoever he was, did things by halves.
George Fielding Eliot, ‘The Copper Bowl’
Exquisite boy’s-own tale of torture - the hero tied up - his sweetheart tied down - the evil Chinese intend to extract the vital information from him - never! never I say! I laugh in the fact of death! oh but what's this? A rat! - placed on his sweetheart's naked stomach and quickly covered by the copper bowl... and a hot coal placed on the upturned bowl - what will the rat, driven mad by heat, then do? Nooo... anyway, the idea turned up later in American Psycho, so clearly it must be a good one.
Jack Finney, ‘Contents of the Dead Man’s Pocket’
Companion piece to Jack London’s “To Build a Fire” (one of the all time great short stories). This guy lives way up on the 16th floor in a NYC apartment, and is writing a crucial work-related document, a window is opened, wind blows document out of the window where it comes to rest on the small ledge which runs under the windows, but about 15 feet away. He steps outside to retrieve it and the nightmare begins. Great contrast between inside (normal) and outside (hell). Apparently Stephen King ripped off this idea for one of his stories.
Lunatic aunt keeps pretty blonde girl relative prisoner and convinces her she’s ugly. Great study of insanity.
Anthony Vercoe – 'Flies'
A starving tramp breaks into a vacant Elizabethan house in Holborn, and is transported back in time to the height of the Great Plague. He finds a rotting corpse, and big blowflies attack him. Oh well, you had to be there.
Angus Wilson - 'Raspberry Jam'
Two batty old lesbian alcoholics have an inappropriate friendship with a boy. This is a good one!
I guess these horror anthologies are like a time capsule of the fears and obsessions of the age. If so people in 1958 were scared of hulking retired surgeons with a Nazi past and a big library.
Not my favourite of this series, but here's a summary of the best stories :
William Sansom, ‘The Vertical Ladder’
Brilliant - A bunch of teenagers are lNot my favourite of this series, but here's a summary of the best stories :
William Sansom, ‘The Vertical Ladder’
Brilliant - A bunch of teenagers are loafing around and come to some disused gasworks. They lark about and one of the boys, trying to impress one of the girls, says he could easily climb up the six-storey-high gasometer, which has a rusty ladder attached to the side. After some banter, bragging and teasing he can't back down, so up he goes. He gets to forty feet up and it hits him how crazy and dangerous this is. He panics. He tells himself there will be some kind of platform at the top of the ladder. When he gets nearly to the top he finds the last ten feet of ladder has rusted away. Down below his friends have got bored and are leaving. They think he can just climb back down.
Stanley Ellin - 'The Speciality Of The House'
A guy is introduced to the delights of Shirro's restaurant, the finest men-only(!!) restaurant one could ever wish to find, especially when "Lamb Amirstan" is on the menu.
he saw with a final glance that Laffler and Sbirro were already at the kitchen door, Sbirro holding the door invitingly wide with one hand, while the other rested, almost tenderly, on Laffler’s meaty shoulders.
Trouble is, you read one cannibal story, you kind of read them all.
Oscar Cook – 'Boomerang' This is actually terrible but it's a good idea of what you got as a horror story seventy years ago. It's a Darkest Asia tale told in gentleman’s club as usual. Another love-triangle, again set in Borneo, this one involving two planters, Clifford Macy and Leopold Thring, and the latter's new bride, Rhona. When he learns of their affair, Thring avenges himself by inserting an earwig into Macy's ear which burrows its way through his head and out the other side, eating his brain as it goes. If you ask me, I don't think the earwig would do that.
Philip Macdonald, ‘Our Feathered Friends’
Out on a date in the country, our young lovers are attacked and killed by birds and they didn't do nuffink to annoy them either. This is a short, sharp version of The Birds published 20 years before Daphne du Maurier's story, the one Hitchcock filmed. It's interesting when writers either think of the same idea or shamelessly rip off ideas from each other, and one version is a gigantic hit....more
Genre writing is interesting, like genre music is. Horror is like porn in many ways - the bang you hope for from a piece of writing can only be deliveGenre writing is interesting, like genre music is. Horror is like porn in many ways - the bang you hope for from a piece of writing can only be delivered craftily - you have to build up the setting, the atmosphere - indeed, the poetry - and inject just a figleaf of plausibility into it all; if you neglect this stuff you got pulp; but you can't get too arty because then the money shot get all blurry and dissipates into metaphor. I read these Pan Books of Horror Stories in my youth and thought I'd cycle through a few of them again, to remind myself how much they warped my brain, and how bad or good they really were. ...more
Four cracking tales along with some others that are as lame as a three legged cat with a bad limp.
No one could disagree with A Rose for Emily by thatFour cracking tales along with some others that are as lame as a three legged cat with a bad limp.
No one could disagree with A Rose for Emily by that maestro from Mississippi William Faulkner nor yet The Cone by your friend and mine H G Wells
Horrocks saw a cindery animal, and inhuman, monstrous creature that began a sobbing, intermittent shriek... he knew the thing below him, save that it still moved and felt, was already a dead man... "God have mercy upon me!" he cried. "O God! What have I done?"
yeah, pretty solid stuff. The oddest story here is The Execution of Damiens by H H Ewers, not a famous name. I guess it's a misogynistic tract about how some women are like praying mantises that eat their own husbands. I reread it today and I would dearly love to know what H H Ewers thought he was up to. But it's haunting, you know. Down the years it lingers, like a trace of poison in my mind.
And the fourth item is in my list of all time great short stories:
The Facts in the Case of M Valdemar by Edgar Allen Poe - these guys want to find out what happens to you after you die - you know, I have wondered about that myself, I believe there are a few different theories - so anyway they locate a guy with a terminal condition and they hypnotise him at the very point of death - now, the experimenter seems very skilled in hypnosis because it works but as an interviewer he is frankly lamentable - but still, such a freaky situation involving much memorable tongue waggling, which can compensate for a lot, especially at dull dinner parties....more
The ending is so poignant, not a quality often found in a horror story. ThContains one of PB's All Time Greats :
"The Monkey's Paw" by WW Jacobs (1902)
The ending is so poignant, not a quality often found in a horror story. The monkey's paw grants wishes. The old woman makes the old man use it and wish for their son back alive (after he was mangled in a gruesome industrial accident). And then...nothing. And then... a loud knock on the cottage door.
"What are you holding me for? Let go. I must open the door." "For God's sake, don't let it in" cried the old man, trembing. "You're afraid of your own son" she cried, struggling. "Let me go. I'm coming, Herbert, I'm coming!"
More knocks on the door - a fusillade of them. The old woman gets to the door and climbs on a chair to unbolt it. She draws the bolt and the old man frantically scrabbling around in the bedroom finally finds the monkey's paw again. "He breathed his third and last wish."
"The knocking ceased suddenly, although echoes of it were still in the house. He heard the chair drawn back and the loud wail of disappointment and misery from his wife gave him courage to run down to her side, and then to the gate beyond. The street lamp flickering opposite shone on a quiet and deserted road."
***
There, I spoiled it now, but you should have read it already! I bet Stephen King stole this idea and used it somewhere. ...more
This series populated my teenage nightmares with psycopaths, torturers, vampires, sadists and unnaturally pale young girls. It was wonderful stuff becThis series populated my teenage nightmares with psycopaths, torturers, vampires, sadists and unnaturally pale young girls. It was wonderful stuff because, mostly, the writers had already dispensed with the gothic trappings of the ghost story all that spookyookums nonsense and were concentrating on the poetry of severed limbs and eyeballs and gouts and screaming. Some of it was just pure torture porn. Those were the bits I liked best.
Some highlights:
William Sansom - Various Temptations
Ronald Raikes, 31, is wanted for questioning in connection with the murders of four London prostitutes who have been strangled in a week. On impulse, our Ron climbs a ladder and finds himself in the bedroom of Clara, a plain and lonely woman who's just been reading about the murders. Naturally, he gets into conversation with her, they agree to get married, and he strangles her. I've compressed events a little, but that's the gist of it. There's a moral in there. I think it's the same one that's in the Marvelettes "Needle in a Haystack".
Martin Waddell - The Pale Boy
The Burnells are set upon adopting a little boy and when they visit the orphanage and are introduced to Paul they're knocked out by his pale elfin features. But of course it doesn't really work out.
Ray Bradbury - The Emissary
Reworking of a very famous story called The Monkey’s Paw and gave me a real jolt aged 14. Later totally stolen by Stephen King and reworked into Pet Semetary. So I don't know who should be madder at who.
Robert Bloch - Lucy Comes To Stay
Vi is in rehab, drying out after a humiliating drunken episode at a party. Her friend Lucy convinces her that her husband George and special nurse Miss Higgins are having an affair and that they have no intention of seeing her released. So she chops them up. In the Pan Books women are able to chop up two people at once.
Richard Davis - Guy Fawkes Night
One of at least three Pan Book stories about burning up a real live person instead of a guy on Bonfire Night. In England this does happen from time to time, but not that often. The Pan Books give a wrong impression of English life.
Vivian Meik - The Two Old Women
"They are human ghouls - perverted, secret drinkers and probably given to morally corrupt practices." However, you have to make an effort to get on with your in-laws, I suppose.
Septimus Dale - The Little Girl Eater
The pier has collapsed leaving Mason, his bones broken, trapped beneath a steel girder with the tide coming in. His only hope is that 6 year old Miranda, who finds him sticking out of the rubble, will inform her mummy and mummy's "friend" Johnny of his plight. But Johnny has just filled her head with some scary tale about a little girl eater, he was trying to make sure she stayed away from strangers, and so she gets the wrong idea. One of my all time favourite stories.
Robert Aickman -Ringing the Changes
In an English seaside town, on All Souls Night all the local dead people get up and dance around. It might sound like a downer but them bones still got rhythm.
MS Waddell - The Importance of Remaining Ernest
The pulp horror version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest crammed into 20 pages. Hilarious and very poor taste.
Joseph Payne Brennan – Slime
"A thing of slimy blackness, a thing which had no essential shape, no discernible earthly features. It was a shape of utter darkness, one second a great flopping hood, the next a black viscid pool of living ooze which flowed upon itself, sliding forward with incredible speed." However, you have to make an effort to get on with your in-laws, I suppose....more
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