...A Buffet of Short Horror...25OCT14...

Robert Louis Stevenson wrote horror.  I didn't know this until I was randomly looking up my favorite authors and relating them to horror.  Assuredly, I came across The Body Snatcher, first published in 1884, as part of a magazine extra.  The story follows a pair of questionable medical students that make sure they never run low on cadeavors for their employer.  It is based on the real-life case of the Burke and Hare murders.  Murder as a business came long before Izzy Azalea - this pair made sure that sixteen bodies made it to the nefarious Doctor Robert Knox.

No these are gone....GONE!!!  This is
the greatest horror story of modern times.
That had treacherous murder.  But raspberry
donuts.  Raspberry...donuts.

M.R. James wrote The Tractate Middoth and was published in 1911 in a second collection of ghost stories.  Middoth recounts the deathbed story of a dying man.  Some twenty years earlier the titular book is sought out by one John Eldred, but a ghost takes the book before it can be retrieved.  The ghost is a protector of sorts, as the pages hold within it the inheritance.  There is vengeance from beyond the grave for Eldred.  The story has been adapted several times on British television.

The Lottery by Shirley Jackson (1948), is one of the most famous horror stories of its time, with a theme very well known today.  Not to spoil the ending, but as the name suggests, a small town holds a yearly lottery.  From it, a name is chosen and the fun begins.  This theme has been copied several times since.  There was an episode of Sliders in fact that ran the lottery directly from an ATM.  There's also little known movies like The Hunger Games.

Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is well known, in fact being one of the earliest pieces of American literature to have survived in popularity since it was first published in 1820.  Irving also wrote Rip Van Winkle.  When Disney started to adapt Legend they found the running time not long enough for a feature, so it was packaged along with Wind in the Willows during WWII.

Mark Twain's A Ghost Story comes to us from his 1875 Sketches New and Old.  As Twain is a man of sincere wit, especially as it comes to the pitiable type, he delivers in spades here.

Starburst Flavored Candy Corn

Like Stevenson, Charles Dickens' Three Ghost Stories is an epic writer, and the supernatural is a natural fit for his style.  Dickens and Poe can be considered on the same playing field in many respects.  In Three, the most popular of them is The Signal Man, but The Haunted House and The Trial for Murder are just as effective.  In Signal, a railway signal-man tells the story of sighting a ghost, each time preceding a disaster upon the tracks.  It calls back a disaster five years before Dickens wrote the story, the Clayton Tunnel Disaster in 1861.

The Phial of Dread by Fitz Hugh Ludlow.

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Zots - never had them.

"Love is a Dream"...

...favored children's books on Halloween...05oct14...

The term 'vintage' for books falls woefully short, since good stories never go out of vogue.  Most of the time, they live up to their promise and are carried forward along with us.

As Halloween nears, there are few things as a child that we carry forward with the same emotional response than with horror.  Surely, we delight in it, we find exhilaration.  They give us a thrill like nothing else.  A good horror children's book will have a lasting impression upon our eager minds.  How many times did we hide a book, to hide from the sheer fear of its stories? Or, did you sneak them under the sheets, along with the all too critical flashlight, reading them in the unguarded shadow of night?

These are the stories I was lucky to fall into as a child, and have warped my senses since.

"In a Dark Dark Room" by Alvin Schwartz

"In a Dark Dark Room" is so evilly bent.  The horror I felt as a child (at what I thought was to be a benign book) today gives way to a twisted pleasure.  The stories are deceptively short.  There is an efficiency of words.  Yet, tied with the illustrations, where they outline the real terror, are tremendously effective.

"and Jenny's head..." Jenny's head! It fell off her body, only because Alfred was unwilling to let her be.  Oh, Alfred, could you just enjoy her loving attention otherwise?

With the Berenstain Bears' "Trick or Treat", "In the Dark" or "Berenstain Bear's and the Haunted House"there are some genuine scary moments, especially considering the amount of danger the kids were in.

Imagine escaping from one's room in the middle of the night and running through the country side and into the dark of the forest.  That's just cray.

Alfred Hitchcock's "Spellbinders of Suspense"

The Alfred Hitchcock series, which I've blogged a few times now, will always delight.  In "Spellbinders of Suspense", there are stories by heavyweights of suspense.  The illustrations were moody, though not heavily detailed.  Stories included:
"The Chinese Puzzle Box" by Agatha Christie
"The Most Dangerous Game" by Richard Connell
"The Birds" by Daphne du Maurier "Man From The South" by Roald Dahl "Yours Truly, Jack The Ripper" by Robert Bloch "The Man Who Knew How" by Dorothy L. Sayers


Then there's Hitchcock's "Haunted Houseful", with stories like:
"The Red-Headed League" by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
"The Treasure in the Cave" by Mark Twain
"The Forgotton Island" by Elizabeth Coatsworth
"The Water Ghost of Harrowby Hall"

There's the raw artisan nature of "Georgie".  It's just terribly cute.

One of my go-to books,
Scholastic's "FunFact Book of Ghosts" or
here.

A few definitive books that carried terrible visions for me for years of my childhood: the Scholastic books being one of the first.  I had checked it out of the Euclid Library so many times they actually stopped me from doing it for several months to allow other kid's to get nightmares.  I just couldn't put it down.

Then the Usborne Guides - holy criminy these were the worst
offenders!  The illustrations were just bloody,
malignant merzky messel.  This was my 'little black book' at
the time and one brought to the Boys and Girls Club.  There
were the headless, the poltergeists, the phantom warnings.
Damn you, Usborne and your twisted ways!

The Haunted Mansion 45, just fun!

The truly blood-curdling illustrations
of the Usborne Guides, this blogger
has more.

Five Little Pumpkins by Dan Yaccarino - it's the funnest song for
Halloween and pumpkins by far.

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...they played Brahms and I played the coat check girl...

The theater was small, too small to his liking.  It stood with a squat facade and although you would expect the incongruity of a larger ceiling, it was laughably small.  The paint was shabby and he knew, by having recently trumped Savannah in growth, the city council were probably already itching to stamp this building out and build something that would overshadow anything in the State.  The orchestra would not rival New York's, and would have been hung had they played this 'well' in Austria.


It sat some two hundred persons.  Thaddeus rolled his eyes where some of the men had to stand.  The box office had oversold the tickets.  He amused himself during their loose rendition of Brahms'  Tragische Ouvertüre by almost talking himself into lifting the front register.  When he was younger, it was so simple as the outside staff was non-existent, either eating dinner or finding a way to listen to the concert themselves.  This piece was new, so there was great interest from the elite and all of Atlanta's finest were assembled tonight.  He calculated some $400 dollars in the register tonight, and almost $20 in the staff's pockets where they already skimmed - overselling tickets never seem to make their way into the books.  The owner would be furious, but would be hard-pressed to prove anything.

The bold glorious intermission occurred and he made all of his mental notations.  The ostentatious rabble of the riche bared their breasts that Thad would have thought himself on the beaches of some Pacific Island shore.  The brown-skinned heathen would scarce wear grass as a dress, by the stereograms he had seen recently at Lord & Taylor.  Here they wore dark silks and velvet taffeta.

Here, on pale bosoms, were the catalog of the jewelry that would be slowly relieved of these ladies in the next year.  There, hanging from button holes, were timepieces that were equally valuable.  The men, typically as young as Thad, were the ones pulling them out more often.  You see, they wanted for them to be admired.  "What's that you say?  Oh, this old thing, man!  Why it is my father's 14k gold Elgin.  Not much too speak of.  It had seen service during the Mexican War.  My father had it on his person as he fought alongside General Scott.  An amazing piece actually!"

I warmly greeted many of the men around the whiskey bar.  All were smiles and gentle nods.  None were prone to conversation.

As the intermission concluded, I hung back and offered my seat to an older gentlemen that wore a British Crimean War medal.  He, hunched with the ravages of time more than war, happily took to it, and I wandered over to the lobby.

I hung back and made eye contact with the coat check girl.  She was a little thing, not yet out of her teens.  It took time to show my interest, and she eventually (invitingly) smiled.  I finished up the cigarette used as a prop to have her look my way and sauntered over.  I lightly smiled.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gertrude_K%C3%A4sebier

"My what a pretty little thing you are."

"Thank you, sir."

"No sirs, miss...?"

"Minnie...Minnie Houlson."

"Nice to meet you Minnie," he kissed her hand gently.  It was soft, not sullied by time.  He gave her his name and continued his catalog of names and finer things.

"Now that jacket, that looks like a friend of mine from downtown.  Goes by the name of Johnson."

She giggled, "No, that's Hartlet.  January Hartlet."

And the game continued, punctuated by moments of genuine affection, useless trivia, familial names, Brahms, eggs, weather and nothing else.  However, at the end of the forty minutes, when Minnie would be called away by a sullen-in-the-extreme woman by the name of Gertie, Thaddeus had a dozen or more names to tie.  He took out a small notebook and made a furious rout of notes.  They lacked copiousness, but would be later made up for at home.

The concert finished with a flourish, as well as some poorly timed decisions of the brass, that led to the downfall of the strings.  The conductor had stormed off the stage to the delight of the patrons, who cheered anyway.  The symphony was new and its benefactors understood the luxury of time and its eventual riches.

Thaddeus watched the coat check girl from a distance, handing out the coats: Richmond, Parque, de Elyes, Brogue, Latchfield, and so on.  All he had to do was follow the jewelry out the door and into the night.

He also understood the luxury of time and seen tonight that patience was in order.