At one of the Hagerstown, MD, antique malls I frequent I recently spotted a paperback copy of the first of The Year's Best Horror Stories anthologies published by DAW. Printed in 1972, this thing had a Karel Thole cover with a cool lizard and some enigmatic human figures on it. (This image actually appeared first on Urania 561 in 1971 and has nothing to do with the stories in the DAW book.) isfdb is telling me that The Year's Best Horror Stories numero uno is actually one of many reprints of a British horror anthology edited by Richard Davis and printed in 1971, and the stories in it debuted in three different years. Well, let's ignore all that confusion and read four of the stories from the book, those by Robert Bloch, Brian Lumley, E. C. Tubb and Ramsey Campbell. (Davis also selected for his book "Prey" by Richard Matheson, a great story I have already read that I recommend to you all.) The copy of The Year's Best Horror Stories I saw was too dear, fifteen bucks, so I will be reading the stories in scans from divers sources.
"Double Whammy" by Robert Bloch (1970)
I'm reading this one in a scan of the issue of Ted White's
Fantastic in which it first appeared. I took a quick look at the Jeff Jones illo on page 33 and at the letters column and Fritz Leiber's book reviews--there seemed to be a lot of typos and printing errors. Leiber talks about some works of criticism of Tolkien, and offers his own tentative theory as to why Tolkien is popular--"I’d guess it’s because he winningly presents high-minded, self-sacrificing heroes to a generation weaned on cynicism, protest, and sex." This isn't a bad theory, but it is funny to hear it from Leiber, whose own work seems to be full of cynicism, attacks on traditional values and outré sex--I feel like only last week we read a story by Fritz in which we learn that Jesus Christ was the product of Mary being raped by a snake-millipede from outer space, and of course the Grey Mouser is a serial rapist and burglar.
OK, let's get to Bloch and "Double Whammy." Genre fiction writers love the idea of the travelling carnival or circus and we genre fiction readers often find ourselves exploring such milieus; looking through the archives of my own blog I see I have read a stack of novels and stories that involve a circus or carnival--if you dare, check out some links to blog posts from just the last few years!
Today we add "Double Whammy" to the stack. And it is a fine addition, an entertaining black magic and psychological horror and disastrous sexual relationship story that uses the setting of the carnival as well as readers' discomforts and prejudices around race, ethnicity and class to great effect. Thumbs up!
Rod is the barker at the carnival, and he is good at it, and enjoys tricking the local rednecks into parting with their dough to see the freaks. Rod is also secretly having sex with teenager Cora, the hot and horny granddaughter of the gypsy lady who runs the fortune telling scam. Rod should be happy, but he has a psychological problem. The freakiest of the freaks is the geek, a 50-something white drunk who, in order to finance his booze habit, has taken the job of putting on a "wooly wig" and burnt cork to make himself look like a monstrous African wildman. The geek capers and gyrates in a pit while Rod talks him up, and then Rod throws a live chicken into the pit and as the audience watches the geek bites off the living bird's head! Rod has developed the irrational fear that he somehow might become a geek himself, maybe if he starts hitting the sauce himself.
Things become very difficult for Rod when Cora reveals she is pregnant and wants to get married. Rod has contempt for Cora--he considers her of low intelligence, and he has a racist attitude towards gypsies (whom he conflates with "spicks") besides--so he obviously is not going to marry her, even if he told her he would the first time he banged her. He hits her to snap her out of a crying fit, and tells her to have an abortion.
When Cora turns up dead after trying to remove with a knitting needle the clump of cells which is Rod's child, the Basket Case, a man with no arms or legs, warns Rod to run for the hills, as the grandmother has, according to the Basket Case, black magic powers that she has used to devastating effect before on those who have trespassed against the honor of that hot little dish that was her granddaughter. Because of other poor decisions Rod has made, Rod can't get away quite yet, and is thus ripe for grandma's effort to achieve vengeance on him. What horrible fate does she have in store for Rod, and does he have any chance to escape it?
Bloch sometimes ruins his stories by explicitly explaining the psychology of his characters and y tiresomely hammering away at his social commentary, but in "Double Whammy" he shows rather than tells and the story totally works. For example, because he doesn't get too preachy or over the top, in "Double Whammy" Bloch is able to exploit liberals' contempt for Southern hicks, white people's fear of exotic ethnic minorities, and squeamish people's unease with the deformed, making the story disturbing on multiple levels or from multiple vectors. A high spot in Bloch's long career.
(Oh yeah, and no jokes!)
I recently said that Robert Silverberg's "To the Dark Star" was like the model of a modal science fiction story, and I think maybe Bloch's "Double Whammy" is a similar exemplar for horror stories. Both "To the Dark Star" and "Double Whammy" put a big helping of SF content up front (astronomy in Silverberg's case, deformity, gore and black magic in Bloch's) alongside an equally large serving of human relationship drama, and include a noticeable but subtle social commentary element, while leaving out distracting unnecessary fripperies like jokes and psychedelia.
Besides the Bloch collections Cold Chills and Last Rites, you can find "Double Whammy" in multiple English and foreign language anthologies.
"The Sister City" by Brian Lumley (1969)
In 2008 or '09 I borrowed a bunch of Brian Lumley collections from the NYPL, including
Haggopian and Other Stories which reprinted "The Sister City," and so I may have read this one before. We'll see.
Well, I don't specifically recognize "The Sister City," but it is a pretty pedestrian, derivative, and imitative piece of work full of references to Lovecraft stories. We might even call it a shaggy dog story, as the narrator travels around a lot but doesn't actually get very far, ending up almost where he began, and he doesn't really face obstacles or deal with problems along the way, and there is not really much of a surprise ending or any suspense.
"The Sister City," like so many Lovecraftian stories, consists of a memoir or testimonial and a bunch of supporting documents, reports by and correspondence among the authorities. As a youth, the narrator was injured during the war, apparently by the explosion of a German bomb which hit his house and killed his parents. Our narrator has odd hairless skin and webbing between his digits, so we know from page one this guy is the product of miscegenation between man and beast or has aliens among his ancestors or is some kind of monster or something.
After two years in the hospital our guy, whose reading during his recovery has inspired in him a fascination with lost cities, travels the world, visiting such sites as the pyramids at Giza and ruined cities mentioned in Lovecraft stories. He discovers ancient artifacts and reads prehistoric inscriptions and so forth. These travels are, I guess, meant to build atmosphere, as they don't have any bearing on the plot, though they offer the narrator opportunity to exercise his special powers, like his ability to swim like a fish and understand, in spoken or written form, just about any language.
Back home in England he is presented with a sealed envelope, left him by his parents to be opened when he is 21; if he had just stayed home he would have gotten this envelope. The letter in the envelope explains that he is the member of an ancient race of aquatic reptile people who live in an underground city beneath the Yorkshire moors. These lizard men have a convoluted life cycle, and in early life look almost like boring old homo sapiens like you and me, and so their reptile parents leave them on English doorsteps or at English churches or wherever to be raised by humans--you see, the underground city's conditions are difficult and not healthy for lizard people until they transform from mammal-looking kids into full scaly adults. As if that isn't contrived and silly enough, the narrator's parents decided to break the laws of their race and live among humans themselves with sonny boy instead of just leaving the narrator to be raised as an orphan or by adoptive human parents or whatever, but then they started looking too squamous to pass as Englishmen and so faked their own deaths by blowing up their house during a Luftwaffe air raid and retreated to the underground city. In dreams they beckon the narrator join them in their subterranean colony now that he is an adult, and it is suggested the narrator isn't just a joe-six pack lizard man, but lizard man royalty or even some kind of lizard god.
The supporting documents provide clues about how the narrator got back to the underground city and also hint that the British economy's tireless need for fossil fuels is going to result in the accidental and likely genocidal uncovering of the subterranean city of the narrator's people.
Merely tolerable.
I read "The Sister City" in a scan of Haggopian and Other Stories which had more typos than I expected. The story debuted in the oft-reprinted (in varying forms) Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, edited by August Derleth.
"Lucifer!" by E. C. Tubb (1969)
This is a good
Twilight Zone-style story. Tubb employs a brisk non-nonsense style that is quite effective. It is noteworthy that Tubb doesn't explicitly explain the title of the story, but expects you to be familiar with the Bible or Milton or Doré.
A man with an extraordinarily attractive face but a clubbed foot is working at a morgue. This guy is totally unscrupulous, and a sadist besides. He steals a ring from a dead body--unknown to him, the body is that of a visiting space alien, a sort of incognito tourist.
The sadist soon figures out that by pressing the button on the ring he can turn back time 57 seconds. This is a terrific boon--he can easily get rich by cheating at gambling games, and makes enough money to have his foot repaired.
The ring opens up other means of piling up the moolah--like by being a gigolo! The sadist becomes the world's greatest lover because he can touch a woman a certain way and if she doesn't respond well, he can just go back 57 seconds and touch her a different way, and keep it up until he touches her in all the ways she most desires--from her perspective, he is caressing and kissing and otherwise pleasuring her in all the ways she wants, saying all the words and playing all the little games that most excite her, without her having to tell him what to do!
The former morgue attendant doesn't just use the ring to make money, but to satisfy his perverted, most diabolical desires. Obviously he can grope strange women and then go back in time when they scream or strike him or whatever. But this guy isn't just a horndog--he's a sadist! He can punch a woman's teeth out or poke her eyes out and enjoy her agony for 50 or so seconds and then go back in time to before he struck her.
This all sets the scene for the horror climax. The sadist is on a transatlantic flight. The plane suffers a catastrophic failure in a storm and he is sucked out a hole in the fuselage and falls towards the ocean as the stricken plane falls beside him. He can't figure out a way to prevent the accident only 57 seconds before it occurs, so he is doomed to experience his fall towards the ocean again and again and again.
I like it. "Lucifer!" debuted in a magazine I don't know I have ever thought much about before, Vision of Tomorrow. Vision of Tomorrow, published in Australia, lasted only a dozen issues across '69 and '70. "Lucifer!" has been reprinted in a Russian anthology, an anthology on the theme of scary airplane flights edited by Stephen King (yeah, sure) and Bev Vincent (some kind of Stephen King superfan), and in the 2024 issue of Cemetery Dance's annual Weird Fiction Review.
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Jeder Damon hat seinen Preis Horror Stories is a German anthology of stories
drawn from multiple books edited by Richard Davis |
"The Scar" by Ramsey Campbell (1969)
This is a somewhat complicated story largely about difficult family relationships and other ordinary life challenges, like running a business. As the story proceeds, Campbell gives the reader reason to consider several different possibilities as to what is going on and question the sanity of several of the characters, and he also devotes quite a lot of ink to describing street scenes, fog, garbage under foot, the state of rooms and their decor, and so on, I guess to set the mood and to give the reader clues about class issues.
We've got three main characters and two minor but important named characters. Harriet is married to Jack the jewelry store owner, and they have two kids. Harriet has always had a pretty good life, but she has a brother who has had bad luck and is kind of a loser, Rice. Rice has trouble communicating with people and making friends, and Harriet has sort of pressured Jack into acting like he is Rice's friend, hanging out with him regularly in a pub in the crummy part of town where Rice lives in a dilapidated apartment and having Rice weekly come over to their middle-class house. For his part, scatterbrained ineffectual Rice would like to do something to help Harriet and Jack, earn their friendship and affection, be more than the beneficiary of their pity.
Rice one evening tells Jack in his clumsy halting way that on the bus he saw a man who looked just like Jack save that he had a scar on his face, and mentions the doppelganger legend that suggests that if you see your double you will soon die. Jack is in no mood for such depressing talk because he is already stressed out over the recent rash of robberies of stores--will his store be next?
The next time Jack walks to the slum to hang out with Rice, which he doesn't even want to do but does out of duty, he is attacked in an alley and suffers a wound on his face. The mysterious attacker brags that he is going to rob Jack's store and abuse his children. As the story continues, Harriet and Rice find that Jack is acting kind of crazy, bitter and even cruel, presumably driven unstable by the attack and by the robbery of his store, which has occurred as predicted. Rice even comes to fear that the two kids are being abused by Jack, and begins considering ways to save the kids and his sister from Jack, inspired in part by a book he read in which a guy sacrifices himself to save his friends.
We readers get clues and red herrings suggesting a number of possible explanations for what is going on. Could Rice be lying about the doppelganger, or only believe in it because he is insane, and have attacked Jack himself because he is jealous over Harriet (Campbell hints that Rice is sexually attracted to his sister) and the kids and envious of Jack's success? Or maybe it is Jack who is insane and/or evil (Campbell hints that we are not supposed to like Jack by having Jack think callously about the poor and show contempt for The Lord of the Rings) and actually faked the robbery of his store to get sympathy or insurance money or something. Or maybe the doppelganger is real, and has killed Jack and taken his place, first giving Jack the scar that matches its own so it could better infiltrate Jack's home and abuse his family.
In the last violent and bloody sequence of the story, Rice tries to solve the problem that is Jack or the imposter and we get a better sense of whether either or both of the two male main characters is a hero, a villain, or simply a victim.
This is the most sophisticated and challenging of today's four stories, though it is less fun than Bloch's and Tubb's more easily digested tales. I have to admit I don't really understand the monsters' operations--why is the monster who imitates Jack walking around with Jack's face before killing or displacing Jack? And why does the monster include in its imitation of Jack a scar Jack doesn't have yet? I briefly thought that maybe the "monster" was just a criminal who happened to look like Jack, but in the end of the story it becomes clear that there is a whole race of these doppelgangers and one of them is planning to impersonate Rice. Some scenes seemed to be suggesting that the doppelgangers cut off people's skin and wear it as a disguise, but that doesn't jive with other scenes, like, again, Rice seeing Jack's double while Jack is alive. Maybe the monsters can achieve a look a bit like that of an individual human and then don their targets' skin to complete the disguise? There is also the possibility that the monsters are just the depraved inner desires of Jack the grasping businessman and Rice the incompetent pervert come to life and "The Scar" is more like an allegory or fable about the evils fathered by capitalist and classbound English society and not an actual science fiction story that is supposed to make logical sense.
I can moderately recommend "The Scar;" the family dynamics and the descriptions are all good, if a little long-winded and tricky--the mechanisms of how the monsters behave is the only real problem, and maybe I am just too dumb and lazy to figure out just what is going on. I read the story in its original typo-ridden form in a scan of issue #13 of Startling Mystery Stories. Besides in the various forms of Richard Davis anthologies out there and Campbell collections, you can find it in Lost Souls: A Collection of English Ghost Stories and Doubles, Dummies and Dolls: 21 Terror Tales of Replication.
The Lumley just sits there, but the stories we read today from Davis' first Year's Best Horror Stories volume are all emotionally and/or intellectually engaging, and are all full of gore and death and creepy sex.
More horror stories from anthologies in the next gruesome episode of MPorcius Fiction Log!
Fifteen bucks for the inaugural DAW 'Year's Best Horror Stories' volume ? Man, I'd be tempted, tempted. Maybe buy it, and then eat Ramen for a week, or see my friends at the Plasma Center in Charlottesville.....
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