Before we get to the main event, investigating these allegedly scary stories that are said to induce screams, I'll point out that I've already read and blogged about two stories from Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Scream Along With Me by major SF writers, Theodore Sturgeon's "It" and Thomas Disch's "Casablanca." Also, note that I am reading today's three stories in a scan of Stories That Scared Even Me, not original printings or later reprints. Plus, if you enjoy gazing upon Alfred Hitchcock's beautiful face, check out our last blog post, in which we read four stories from late 1970s issues of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine.
And, finally, note that the estimable tarbandu at The PorPor Books Blog is a fan of these Alfred Hitchcock anthologies and has read and blogged about all 25 stories in Stories That Scared Even Me, and talks about collecting Alfred Hitchcock anthologies and reading Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine in the comments to the recent blog post of mine I linked to above. Make sure to check out what tarbandu has to say!
"Camera Obscura" by Basil Copper (1966)
The individual sentences of "Camera Obscura" are all well written and there are plenty of interesting images, but the narrative moves very slowly and is repetitive, and the story is thuddingly manipulative--we know from the get go that we are not supposed to like the protagonist, so there is little suspense, as we expect all along that something bad is going to happen to this guy and that we are not supposed to sympathize with him when it does.
Mordecai Sharsted is a moneylender. He has a client, Gingold, an apparently wealthy man who has not been paying his debts on time, so Sharsted walks to Gingold's place in order to give the man a final warning before seizing some of his assets. Instead of letting us make up our own minds about Sharsted, Copper just comes out and tells us that Sharsted has a "sinister, decayed look" and a "mean soul" and so forth, laying it on thick, making sure we know he is no good. Much is also made of his poor eyesight, I guess a metaphor for how he can't see right from wrong or refuses to open his eyes to the light of Jesus or whatever, and his green lensed spectacles, a sort of cliched way of telling us he is careful with money. Talk of eyes and eye glasses that limit light and restrict vision also constitute foreshadowing of what Sharsted is going to encounter in Gingold's house.
Gingold lives high up on a hill in a crummy section of town with twisty labyrinthine streets; he wears white and I guess is supposed to remind us of God. More than once the view from this house is compared to the view God must have of the Earth. In Gingold's presence, Sharsted get a little tongue-tied and has trouble bringing the conversation to the point of his visit. Way upstairs in his house full of valuable paintings and other artifacts, Gingold has an elaborate camera obscura that projects upon a table a bird's eye view of the town. He shows this to Sharsted, and points out the home of a woman who owes Sharsted money; this woman can't pay her debts and will soon be evicted. Gingold asks repeatedly if Sharsted will forgive this woman her debts; Sharsted will not.
Gingold has a second camera obscura that projects a weird altered vision of the town, all red and showing buildings still standing which have long since been destroyed and replaced. Gingold directs Sharsted into this world. Sharsted desperately tries to find his way home in this maze-like hell version of the town, running into animated corpses wriggling with worms who turn out to be thieves and confidence men of Sharsted's acquaintance, men and women long dead, his steps always bringing him back to a Christian chapel. Sharsted then tries to make his way back to Gingold's to tell the man he will forgive the woman her debts, but it is too late, Sharsted has been consigned to hell forever.
Too long, too slow, too repetitive, too obvious; seeing as the actual writing style is accomplished, if you are the type of person who figures he shouldn't have to pay his debts and that the people who loaned you money should be tortured everlastingly, maybe you'll enjoy "Camera Obscura," but I am giving it a thumbs down.
"Camera Obscura" seems to have first seen print in The Sixth Pan Book of Horror Stories and people seem to love it. Everybody resents his creditors! Besides in Copper collections, "Camera Obscura" has appeared in multiple anthologies that compile favorite contributions to the long-running series of Pan Books of Horror Stories and Copper's story was even made into a short for the TV show Night Gallery. According to imdb, the TV version of Mordecai Sharsted is played by the guy who portrayed the villainous WASP on Benson, and the moneylender has been rechristened "William Sharsted." Hmm.
There are a bunch of old Liberty ships rusting away in the harbor. Pickard sneaks aboard them at night and steals components from them to sell--his faithless and acquisitive wife uses the money to buy a fur coat. Pickard hires other petty thieves to aid him in his illegal scavenging of this government property. These other men tell him that, while working in the decaying vessels, that they sometimes hear strange noises. One of the assistant thieves vanishes, then another quits because he is so spooked by the sounds. Pickard also has a weird dream one day. Anyway, it turns out that people who die on these Liberty ships become zombies, and one night one of them, the accomplice who disappeared, kills Pickard and Pickard becomes one of the zombies. Don't worry about Pickard's wife--she has to return the fur coat, but she gets another man pretty quick.
A competent trifle composed of commonplace genre fiction elements. St. Clair does the bare minimum in the relationship and personality departments, and chooses to make her story more jokey than scary and apparently feels no need to come up with an explanation of why the Liberty ships are turning those who die in them into the living dead. Not actually bad, but unambitious and not scary.
After the wholly unremarkable "The Last Three Ships" was included in Stories That Scared Even Me and the abridged paperback version of that volume it went dormant for some four decades, inexplicably rising from the dead in a 2013 anthology titled Horror Gems.
"The Master of the Hounds" by Algis Budrys (1966)
Budrys' work is usually about what it means to be a man, and "The Master of the Hounds" is devoted to comparing before us two different men who have gone through, or are going through, some kind of life-changing trial. Which of them is a real man who gets shit done and appeals to women? Is a real man a guy who dominates others and his environment by any means that comes to hand? Is your manhood inherent in your physique, or in your will? Do you have to be good to be a real man?
Our first contender in the who-is-a-man battle royale is Malcolm Lawrence, the New York artist. He has an attractive wife whom we are told was a little plump ten years ago when they married, but now is lean with a long face and high cheek bones. I guess the implication is that Malcolm is not bringing in enough groceries, even though this kind of sounds like he has upgraded his wife into a fashion model.
Malcolm has been working at an ad agency, but aspires to be a fine artist, and has quit the agency to spend a summer in a rented house on a quiet stretch of the Jersey shore, to get away from it all and see if he can come up with some real meritorious paintings. We witness the Lawrences interacting and the wife seems to always kind of be nudging Malcolm, not-so-subtly pushing him around, trying to manipulate him because she is disappointed in him.
To save money, the Lawrences took a house in what we'd have to call a failed development. The developers only finished two of the seaside houses, and only one of them is well-maintained--the two completed houses are surrounded by half finished houses that are falling apart in the seaside air. The Lawrences take the poorly maintained house, across the street from the well-maintained one, which they learn is occupied by a famous British Army officer, Colonel Richey, a veteran of the Second World War who was the senior British officer in a POW camp where he and other British officers were held year after year. Richey's exploits were the subject of a fictionalized film which the Lawrences have seen. (Budrys' story here was perhaps inspired by the 1963 film The Great Escape and the books which inspired it.)
Budrys does a good job making the first part of the story sort of creepy--the sad, abortive, rundown development, the Lawrences' first intimations about Richey's Dobermans, dogs Budrys tries to make seem scary which they see long before they actually meet Richey and learn they are living next to a celebrity. In the second part of the story the Lawrences and Richey sit down and get cozy, drinking tea, and Mrs. Lawrence and Colonel Richey seem to be flirting right in front of Malcolm!
Richey talks about his experiences in the German camp. The British prisoners were digging an escape tunnel, a tunnel Richey didn't really want to see used, as it would be risky to do so and perhaps pointless besides--by the time the British soldiers would be usable to leave the camp via the camp the war would be over or nearly so. The point of the tunnel in Richey's eyes was to serve as something for the prisoners to do, a goal to inspire teamwork and promote discipline. A cave in that occurred while Richey was working in the tunnel crippled him--among other things, his genitals were rendered inoperative. After the war, a journalist wrote about Richey's adventures, leading to the film and a trip to Hollywood for Richey top work on the film as a technical advisor. British taxes being so onerous, Richey decided to stay in the US and got this house and acquired and trained the two Dobermans, a breed of dog he knew something about because the Germans used them as guards in the camp.
Richey makes it clear that he will use his Dobermans to make the Lawrences his prisoners, even his slaves, all summer. Also clear is that Malcolm's wife thinks Malcolm is a loser and Colonel Richey some kind of evil genius whom Malcolm can never outwit--even though Richey the ruthless leader of men literally has no balls, he is more of a man than Malcolm the failed artist! Wifey even discourages Malcolm from resisting the colonel's attempt to confine and control them, and when things come to a dangerous climax she blames her husband more than the psycho who is tormenting them (she may even be appreciating the torment!)
(The Alfred Hitchcock-related stories we've been reading today and last time seem to paint women in a pretty poor light, don't they?)
Who will live and who will die? Will Malcolm come out on top and prove to himself and to his doubting wife that he is a man, or will the crippled Richey prove his superiority even though he cannot achieve an erection and is some kind of sadistic maniac?
A good thriller that is full of surprises but not cheap surprises--everything is foreshadowed and set up skillfully by Budrys. Budrys is almost as good at details and images and sentence construction as Copper, but while Copper overdoes it and his fine sentences become burdensome and many only provide information that is extraneous or superfluous, Budrys' sentences all contribute to the story's effect. Budrys' story also has believable and nuanced characters we can identify with, not just lame manipulative archetypes, and real suspense--we are not sure what will happen to the characters or how we are expected to feel about them. Thumbs up for "Master of the Hounds," easily the best story we are reading today and the only one that is legitimately scary.
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| We've blogged about the L. Sprague de Camp story in Masters of Darkness III and the Harlan Ellison and Fritz Leiber stories in Dogtales! |
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So there they are, three stories selected by Robert Arthur to be reprinted under the prestigious aegis of the director of Psycho. Algis Budrys' story is very good and absolutely deserves to be widely disseminated, Copper's is pretentious and ambitious and tells people what they want to hear and so it makes sense to reprint it, but the inclusion of St. Clair's banal piece constitutes a mystery. Well, life is one mystery after another, I suppose.
I love dipping into these anthologies, but next time we'll be reading a novel. See you then!
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