Blog-o-ween 2023: Charles Beaumont

My childhood nightmares were in black-and-white.

I am a child of the 1970s and 80s, so that means that I was raised with countless hours of syndicated reruns playing in the background. And those reruns were mainly in black-and-white. The Andy Griffith Show, I Love Lucy, The Munsters, The Addams Family...all these shows (and more!) played cheek by jowl with their more modern (and in color) brethren on every station up and down the dial. I didn’t differentiate between a show from 1960 and one from 1980. It was all the same to me. It was all entertaining.

But there was one show that hit a little differently. One show that wormed its way into my little kid’s brain in the bright light of the afternoon and hibernated there until the sun went down and it was time to go to bed...

Close, but I’m actually talking about...

The Twilight Zone, that bizarre brainchild of writer Rod Serling, was a touchstone of terror and wonder for many generations thanks to syndication. If you sang the four notes that make up the intro to its theme song in public right now, chances are very high a majority of the folks standing around you would know what it was from. They would also have to assume that something weird just went down, because why else would you be singing the theme to The Twilight Zone on a public sidewalk? Then, of course, they would have to give you a wide berth, because weird stuff is catching. After all...

Chances are also pretty high that, if people start thinking about The Twilight Zone, then today’s featured writer here on Blog-o-ween 2023 wrote whatever it is they are thinking of. I’m not talking about Rod Serling, however. I’m not even talking about Richard Matheson. Today, we are going to look at a couple of stories that came from the typewriter of the lost man of American fantasy, Charles Beaumont.

First up is the story that Twilight Zone fans know Beaumont for best. Before it hit American televisions in 1960, however, “The Howling Man” was published in the November 1959 issue of Rogue.

“The Germany of that time was a land of valleys and mountains and swift dark rivers, a green and fertile land where everything grew tall and straight out of the earth...In that time, before I had heard of St. Wulfran’s, of the wretch who clawed the stones of a locked cell, wailing in the midnight hours, or of the daft brothers and their mad Abbott, I had strong legs and a mind on its last search, and I preferred to be alone...”

“The Howling Man” is the story of a man who nearly succumbs to illness during a walking trip of Europe in the decade before the outbreak of the Second World War. Waking up in a monastery in Germany, the narrator finds himself under the care of a group of monks in the Abbey of St. Wulfran’s. While convalescing, the narrator hears screams emanating from somewhere deep in the abbey. When he asks his hosts about these screams, the monks claim that they hear nothing. With his strength returned, the narrator investigates and finds that the monks are keeping a man locked in a cell. The man begs our narrator to free him. The monks, the prisoner explains, are insane. Five years ago, they burst into his home, took him away from his family, flogged him, and then locked him away in that filthy room. The narrator feels pity, but the abbot, Father Jerome, insists that they have good reason for keeping the man locked away. What is the reason? Who is the howling man? And what could be the worst that would happen if the narrator did set him free? I mean...it wouldn’t be the end of the world, would it?

Next up is “The Hunger,” which was never an episode of The Twilight Zone. As dark and strange as those televised stories got, I don’t think this tale of madness, serial killers, and desire would ever have made it past CBS’s Standards and Practices Department. Instead, “The Hunger” was published in Playboy in 1955 and later included in Beaumont’s short story collection The Hunger and Other Stories in 1958.

“Now, with the sun almost gone, the sky looked wounded—as if a gigantic razor had been drawn across it, slicing deep. It bled richly. And the wind, which came down from High Mountain, cool as rain, sounded a little like children crying softly: a soft, unhappy kind of sound, rising and falling.

“Afraid, somehow, it seemed to Julia. Terribly afraid.”

There’s a madman on the loose in the town of Burlington, leaving behind a trail of murdered women. Julia lives at home with her two windowed sisters, Maud and Louise. The killer and his victims are all that Julia’s sisters can talk about. One would think they were obsessed by the crimes. Julia, too, thinks of the killer, of his reasons for doing what he does, and of the life he’s had, and how the loneliness they each feel can’t make them so different from one another. Instead of going to bed that night, Julia gets dressed and goes out for a walk. Just to feel the air, she tells herself, but deep down inside she knows the real reason she’s gone out in the middle of the night. What is Julia’s reason? And who is following her every step? And what will happen to Julia when the footsteps she hears come closer and closer and closer...

Charles Beaumont was born Charles Leroy Nutt in Chicago, Illinois, in 1929. He sold his first story to Amazing Stories in 1950. Having been made fun of as a child because of his last name, he legally changed it to “Beaumont” for personal and professional reasons. In 1954, Playboy magazine published his short story “Black Country.” It was the first work of fiction to ever appear in the magazine, and soon thereafter men began to assure their wives that they only read Playboy for the stories. Around this time, Beaumont began to write for television and film.

In 1963, Beaumont was thirty-four years old and at the height of his powers as a writer. However, he soon began to complain of headaches and lapses of concentration. His speech became slurred, and his thinking erratic. His writing suffered, and the jobs dried up. His friends, including William F. Nolan and Jerry Sohl, did what they could, ghostwriting several scripts based on Beaumont’s ideas.

In the summer of 1964, after being subjected to numerous tests by the UCLA medical staff, it was determined that Beaumont was suffering from the effects of either Alzheimer's disease or Pick's disease, or both simultaneously. Whichever was the case, it was, in essence, a death sentence. Beaumont’s health declined rapidly until his death in 1967 at the age of thirty-eight. His son, Christopher, said Beaumont "looked ninety-five and was, in fact, ninety-five by every calendar except the one on your watch".

Both of our stories today are available in audiobook format. Just check your local library’s shelves or on-line catalog for the e-book. You can also find the episode of The Twilight Zone based on “The Howling Man” on Amazon’s free streaming service Freevee.

If you want to flex the muscles of your imagination, however, then listen to the episode of The Twilight Zone Radio Drama below. Actor Stacey Keach admirably takes over the master-of-ceremony reins from Rod Serling. The 176 episodes of the series were produced by BBC Radio 4 between 2002 and 2012. Many of the stories are ingeniously updated to reflect contemporary technology and trends.

Well, that’s all for today’s Blog-o-ween entry. I hope we haven’t frightened you too much. What’s that? You hear a man screaming? Do I hear it, too? Why, of course not. Don’t be silly. Just crawl into bed, close your eyes and...pleasant dreams? Hmmmm? Heh-heh-heh!

Blog-o-ween 2023: Ambrose Bierce

Saturday night may be alright for fighting for some folks, but I’ve always been more of a “stay at home, lie on the couch, and read” type of person. If I’m fighting anything at all it’s to stay awake so I can finish the short story or the chapter I happen to be working on.

For those homebodies like me, I have a triple-header of stories in store for you. They all come from the pen of a man who is considered to be the greatest satirist America ever produced. His tales of the American Civil War influenced writers like Stephen Crane and Erenest Hemingway. His short works, especially his tales of terror, are so well-regarded that critics place him alongside other American fantasists such as Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft. He is also a man whose final words could not have been more prescient. Writing to a friend in the United States in 1913 from Chihuahua, Mexico, while accompanying Pancho Villa’s revolutionary army, he closed his letter by saying,

“As to me, I leave here tomorrow for an unknown destination.”

And he did, too. No one ever set eyes on American short story writer, journalist, poet, and Civil War veteran Ambrose Bierce again. Thankfully, his stories didn’t disappear with him.

Our first story is “The Damned Thing.” In it, a group of men are gathered around the corpse of Hugh Morgan. Serving on an inquest jury into his death, the men hear testimony from a witness who was with Morgan when he died, and Morgan’s diary is read. Both sources present evidence that just could not possibly be true. How could the man have been mauled to death, having been shaken back and forth violently in the air, as the witness proclaims, when there was nothing near him as he died? And what of Morgan’s diary entries that describe a creature whose color is no color that the human eye can see?

You can find the written text of “The Damned Thing” here, or, if you prefer, listen to a reading of the story from the good folks at HorrorBabble below.

Next up, we have “The Middle Toe of the Right Foot.” Inspired by a story Bierce read of a knife duel in a dark room, this short story concerns a man named Manton who, ten years before, had killed his wife and two children. After being recognized when he returns to town, Manton gets into an argument and is challenged to a knife fight. The fight takes place at the scene of his old crime, the house in which he murdered his family. His challenger plays a trick on the man and locks him alone in the dark in a room in the house. The next day, the men return to find Manton crouched in the corner of the room, dead from sheer fright. What happened there in the dark of that room? And who left behind three sets of footprints in the dust on the floor, two of which were small, as if made by the feet of children, the third set missing the middle toe of the right foot?

The story is available here thanks to Project Gutenberg. You can also listen to an audio rendition of “The Middle Toe of the Right Foot” below.

Our final tale for this sinister Saturday night is the melancholy “Beyond the Wall.” While in San Francisco, the narrator agrees to have dinner with an old friend at the man’s house. During the meal, a knocking on the wall is heard. Upon inspection, the narrator determines that it could only have come from beyond an outward facing wall of the tower in which the room they are in is situated. The narrator’s friend seems relieved that someone else heard the sound, and he weaves a tale of forbidden love, of playful raps on the wall between himself and a young woman not of his class. What happened to the burgeoning love affair between the man and this woman, and why, after so many years, does he still hear a knock on the wall?

You can find out by reading “Beyond the Wall” here or by listening to a reading of the story via this link.

Ambrose Bierce was born in 1842 in Ohio. His family was poor, but they instilled in the young Bierce a love of books and of writing. At the age of fifteen, Bierce left home to become a printer’s devil (another name for an apprentice in a print shop...and also a great name for a band) at an abolitionist newspaper in Indiana. At the start of the American Civil War, he enlisted in the Union Army and saw action in countless battles, including at Shiloh and Chickamauga.

After the war, Bierce settled in San Francisco and became an editor and writer for many magazines and newspapers. Many of his short stories were written in a frenzy of activity between the years 1888 and 1891, and most were based on his experiences during the Civil War. His most famous short story, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” was one such tale of the horrors of war. Written in 1890, it tells the tale of a soldier who escapes hanging at the eponymous bridge — or does he? The story follows the man as he tries to get back home to his family.

At age seventy-one, Bierce went on a tour of the battlefields he’d fought on during the Civil War. Finding himself in Texas, he decided, seemingly out of the blue, to join Pancho Villa’s revolutionary army as an observer. While in Mexico, he wrote to a friend:

"Good-bye. If you hear of my being stood up against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags, please know that I think it is a pretty good way to depart this life. It beats old age, disease, or falling down the cellar stairs. To be a Gringo in Mexico—ah, that is euthanasia!"

His last known communication was dated December 26, 1913. After that, Beirce’s whereabouts became unknown. Some feel that Bierce made up the story of following Pancho Villa and had gone to the Grand Canyon to commit suicide. Others claim to have seen Bierce executed by firing squad in a cemetery in Sierra Mojada, Coahuila, Mexico. Whatever the truth is, Ambrose Bierce was ever seen again.

Ah, the desire to get away from it all...it’s something that we all want, is it not? But I think we can all agree that the best escape from life isn't by following an army around. The best escape is via...pleasant dreams? Hmmm? Heh-heh-heh!

Blog-o-ween 2023: Wylding Hall by Elizabeth Hand

Since we are heading into the weekend, I thought I would dead-icate (heh-heh-heh!) Fridays here at Blog-o-ween 2023 to longer form stories. We won’t be checking out anything that can’t be read (or listened to for you audiobook fans) in an evening or two. Don’t worry, I’m not going to make you read The Naked and the Dead or anything. I mean, that sounds like an erotic thriller starring Andrew Stevens and Shannon Tweed...

...wait a minute...is The Naked and the Dead the basis for an erotic thriller with supernatural overtones about a high-profile security firm employee (played by Andrew Stevens) who sets up cameras in a swanky mansion in the Hollywood Hills and captures the ghost of a starlet who dances in the nude every night at midnight (Shannon Tweed, natch) and he has to solve her murder so she can find peace and move on but he’s fallen in love with her and can’t let her go? And all this happens against a backdrop of chiaroscuro lighting, neon, and a musical soundtrack made up of saxophone and synthesizers? Is that what The Naked and the Dead is about? Why aren’t we reading that?!

Sorry...got off the main road for a second there.

Anywho, today’s Blog-o-ween entry is a short novel by American writer Elizabeth Hand. It isn’t an erotic thriller set in 1990s Hollywood concerning itself with the surveillance of naked starlets, but it is a folk-horror set in 1970s England and involves a documentary film, a psychedelic folk-rock band, and the supernatural. All these factors come together at an ancient, crumbling house in the Hampshire countryside called...Wylding Hall.

Windhollow Faire, a 1970s acid-folk band with one record to their name and a tragedy in their past, retreats to the country to lay the ghost of the suicide of their lead singer Arianna and to put together enough tracks for their second album. Their manager suggests they take off and isolate themselves from the world at a place called Wylding Hall. Things don’t go to plan, however, when Julian Blake, songwriter, guitarist, and former boyfriend of the dead Arianna, begins acting weird (or is that “wyrd”?) He seems strangely familiar with Wylding Hall and its environs, history, and architecture, even though he tells the group that he’s never been there before.

Then, one day, Julian disappears.

And it’s Julian’s mysterious disappearance that draws a documentary film crew together forty years later to interview everyone involved — the surviving band members, their manager, etc. What happened to Julian? Where did he go? Did the mysterious woman who showed up at the local pub the band was playing in have anything to do with it? Why does every person who stayed at Wylding Hall have a strange story to tell?

The genius of Wylding Hall, I think, is in its construction as an epistolary novel made-up of single person interviews. It reminded me of Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain’s book Please Kill Me: the Uncensored Oral History of Punk. That book is a fascinating collection of remembrances, anecdotes, and yarns culled from hundreds of hours of interviews with scores of people who were there when it happened. These interviews are then presented to the reader in a seemingly unstructured way. There is very little in the way of scene-setting or context. McNeil and McCain remove themselves from the playing field, so to speak, and let their subjects speak for themselves.

I imagine the documentary film crew doing the same in Hand’s novel. They collected all their interviews, then pulled out the parts that they wanted, the snippets that made the best, most coherent story, and set it down for the reader to take in and make up their own minds about what happened. Hand does a wonderful job of giving each of the interviewees their own voice and point-of-view, so that it really feels like we are hearing from different people from different backgrounds with different desires and who have come to different conclusions. It is masterfully done.

This being a folk-horror story, there are plenty of unsettling occurrences that may or may not involve strange rituals, old folk tales, poems that might be spells, and sacrifice. Hand blends all of these together in a heady brew that is powerful, but not overwhelming. She never hits the reader over the head with anything. Everything is subtle, strange, unsettling, as if it were taking place just out of the corner of the eye.

Elizabeth Hand was born in 1957 and grew up in Westchester County, New York. She sold her first story, “Prince of Flowers,” to Twilight Zone Magazine in 1988. Two years later, her first novel, Winterlong, was published by Bantam Spectra. She has written movie tie-in novelizations for The X-Files, 12 Monkeys, and Star Wars. She is a columnist for the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. She also created and wrote the 1990s DC Comics series Anima.

Both the novel and its multi-narrator audiobook should be available electronically at your local library. If you’d like a soundtrack to go along with your reading, may I suggest listening to Pentangle? They are a band who would have traveled the same circles as Windhollow Faire, and their music is a beautiful and haunting accompaniment to Wylding Hall.

So, cue up the music, pick up your copy of Wylding Hall, settle into a comfy chair in front of a roaring fire...preferably located in a crumbling, rural manse...and...well...pleasant dreams? Hmmmm? Heh-heh-heh!

Blog-o-ween 2023: "The Black Gondolier" by Fritz Leiber

I’ve lived in Los Angeles, CA, now for about six years. I still get a kick out of stumbling upon shooting locations from various television shows and movies in the city and the outlying towns. I’m the person who will turn to a traveling companion and ask, “Do you recognize this corner? Huh? Do ya? Huh?” When my friend admits that, no, in fact, they do not recognize where we are, I’ll painstakingly list all the shows that used that corner as second unit background material. You know, shows like The Rockford Files, Murder, She Wrote, Tucker’s Witch, Baywatch, and Stingray.

...well, that was until Stephen J. Cannell was talked into moving Stingray to Toronto, Canada, after the 8-episode first season because of the favorable exchange rate between the U.S. and Canadian dollars...but then, of course, so many productions were shooting in Toronto at that time, that they ended up moving west and shooting the 15-episode second season in Calgary and Vancouver, and...

Yeah, I’m a joy to be around.

Anyway, I’m a sucker for being able to walk the same streets as the characters in my favorite tv shows and films. The same goes for my favorite short stories and novels. Today’s short story by noted fantasy, horror, and science fiction writer Fritz Leiber takes place in Venice, CA, during the oil boom years of the mid-twentieth century. Leiber’s characters traverse the seaside town’s many canals.

...in fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if one of the canals Leiber describes was later used as the site of the home of Mitch Buchannon and his son Hobie in the first season of Baywatch, and later...

I digress...let’s instead talk about Fritz Leiber’s 1964 short story “The Black Gondolier.”

“Daloway lived alone in a broken-down trailer beside an oil well on the bank of a canal in Venice near the café La Gondola Negra on the Grand Canal not five blocks from St. Mark’s Plaza.

“I mean, he lived there until after the fashion of intellectual lone wolves he got the wander-urge and took himself off, abruptly and irresponsibly, to parts unknown. That is the theory of the police, who refuse to take seriously my story of Daloway’s strange dreads and my hints at the weird world-spanning power which was menacing him...”

So begins the tale of Daloway, spun by an unnamed narrator. As the story unfolds, the narrator recounts his time spent with Daloway in the weeks leading up to his disappearance. Daloway gives the narrator, as well as the reader, a lengthy history lesson of not only the city of Venice, CA, but of the dark, eldritch power residing beneath it:

“Daloway’s theory, based on his wide readings in world history, geology, and the occult, was that crude oil — petroleum — was more than figuratively the life-blood of industry and the modern world and modern lightning-war, that it truly had a dim life and will of its own, an inorganic consciousness or sub-consciousness, that we were all its puppets or creatures, and that its chemical mind had guided and even enforced the development of modern technological civilization...In brief, Daloways’s theory was that man hadn’t discovered oil, but that oil had found man. Venice hadn’t struck oil; oil had thrust up its vicious feelers like some vast blind monster, and finally made contact with Venice.”

Ridiculous, of course! Oil, a sentient creature, hellbent on using humanity for its own nefarious purposes? Pish-posh!

And yet...how to account for the strange occurrence that the narrator claims to have experienced on the night of Daloway’s disappearance? What to make of the sight of a gondola making its way up the Grand Canal piloted by a man in black with a passenger by his side? And what of the footprints leading away from Daloway’s trailer, “long narrow sharply pointed footprints, marked in blackest, thickest oil?”

Fritz Leiber, Jr., was born in 1910 to the actors Fritz Leiber, Sr. (natch), and Virginia Bronson Leiber. For a while, it seemed that Junior was destined to follow in his parents’ footsteps, but during the 1930s Leiber took up writing science fiction, fantasy, and horror stories in the vein (pun intended!) of H.P. Lovecraft. Indeed, thanks to the intervention of Leiber’s then wife, Jonquil Stephens, Leiber exchanged many letters with the New England fantasist the year before Lovecraft’s death in 1937. Lovecraft guided the young Leiber in his burgeoning writing career, helping him put together the material for his first professional sale, the story “Two Sought Adventure,” which introduced Leiber’s most famous creations to the world, the barbarian Fafhrd and the thief The Gray Mouser.

Leiber would later write novels such as Conjure Wife (about a college professor whose wife protects him from the dangers of office politics through the use of witchcraft) and Our Lady of Darkness (which introduced the occult science of “Megapolisomancy,” or the black magic of giant cities). Five years after his death in 1992, The Dealings of Daniel Kesserich, a lost Lovecraft-influenced short novel from the 1930s, would be discovered and published, causing Leiber friend and fan Harlan Ellison to exclaim, “For anyone who loves great literature, Fritz Leiber walked on water.”

“The Black Gondolier” was originally published in 1964 by Arkham House in an anthology edited by August Derleth called Over the Edge: New Stories of the Macabre. Later, the story would make it into Leiber’s own collections Night Monsters (1969) and The Black Gondolier and Other Stories (2000).

That’s all for today, kiddies. Be sure to come back tomorrow for another stop along the eldritch journey that is Blog-o-ween 2023. Meanwhile, don’t worry about those strange sounds you hear bubbling up from the ground or those eerie voices in your head telling you to go outside and dig a hole in the earth. It’s probably nothing. Just go to sleep and have...pleasant dreams...hmmm? Heh-heh-heh!

Blog-o-ween 2023: "Granny's Grinning" by Robert Shearman

For the first few days of this year’s Blog-o-ween, we’ve focused on stories featuring monstrous children. Today, it’s time to turn the tables on the adults in the room. Today, it’s time to see how truly monstrous the grown-ups of the family can be. Especially during the Christmas season, and especially when money’s tight. Hey, no one gets a free pass during Blog-o-ween!

Today’s story is by Robert Shearman, and it’s entitled “Granny’s Grinning.”

“Sarah didn’t want the zombie, and she didn’t know anyone else who did.”

“Granny’s Grinning” is set during the Christmas season, as all the best British horror stories seem to be. The toy that is on all the kids’ wish lists this year — Sarah and her four-year-old brother, Graham, included — is a costume. These just aren’t any old kind of costumes. These are costumes of monsters — vampires, werewolves, and, of course, zombies. The special thing about these costumes is that they actually turn you into the creature you are dressed as.

Sarah wants a vampire costume, because, as her friend Sharon Weekes tells her,

“it wasn’t just the obvious stuff like the teeth growing, but your lips swelled up, they got redder and richer and plump, and if you closed your eyes and rubbed them together it felt just the same as if a boy were kissing you.”

And that’s all Sarah really wants for Christmas — to know what it’s like to be kissed. If she’s not careful, kiddies, she just may find out…heh-heh-heh!

Sarah’s family is on the skids, financially speaking. Her father’s business is not doing as well as he’d hoped when he left a more stable position because he wanted to “go it alone.” Unfortunately, the credit crunch came along and put paid to those dreams. On top of the friction the lack of money is causing between her parents, Daddy’s recently widowed mother is spending Christmas with Sarah and her family. Mummy is not happy, but Daddy assures his wife that having Granny over may “work in our favor.” Sarah doesn’t hear the rest of that conversation, and more’s the pity.

Come Christmas, Granny has arrived and is unimpressed with all the work that Sarah’s family has done to make her visit special. That is, until Sarah opens her Christmas gift. Sarah didn’t get the vampire costume like she wanted. She received the zombie. But why does her costume resemble her dead grandfather so much? And why is her family insisting she sleep in Granny’s room that night?

Anything to help the family in times of trouble, amirite kiddies? Heh-heh-heh!

“Granny’s Grinning” is a gut punch of a story. Since we are seeing everything from Sarah’s perspective, the events unfold from a child’s limited understanding of what is really happening. There are clues throughout, however. When Graham wants to be allowed to wear his werewolf costume to the dinner table, Sarah’s mother says, “Fine...they can be monsters then, let’s all be monsters!” When Sarah, dressed as the zombie, sits next to Granny while they watch a James Bond film, Granny tells her the story of meeting Sarah’s grandfather. He was married to another woman, but Granny says, “I just looked at him, and said to myself, I’m having that.” Granny says that “[b]efore I met him, Arthur was a husband. And a father. For me, he became a nothing. A nothing.” As Granny holds Sarah’s hand on the couch, she tells her “You know what love is? It’s being prepared to let go of who you are. To change yourself entirely. Just for someone else’s pleasure.”

Uh-oh! That don’t sound good!

Robert Shearman has written for radio and the stage, as well as the page. He may best be known among fantasy-loving folks as the man who brought the Daleks back to the small screen on Doctor Who. “Granny’s Grinning” was first published in 2009 in an anthology from Ulysses Press entitled The Dead That Walk. Later in 2019, Shearman included it in his own collection of works called Remember Why You Fear Me.

I discovered this story in an anthology edited by Stephen Jones, Terrifying Tales to Tell at Night: 10 Scary Stories to Give You Nightmares! I assumed that this collection was in the vein (pun intended!) of R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps series or the Nickelodeon television series Are You Afraid of the Dark? You know — good, clean, spooky fun. The book is aimed, after all, at young readers 8-12 years in age.

How wrong can you get?!

This collection is pretty strong stuff for young kids. Heck, it was pretty strong stuff for me! And I loved it!

Another aspect of the book that may make the reader think that he/she/they is reader “kid’s stuff” is the illustrations on the cover and included throughout. One look at the cover, and you’d be forgiven for thinking that this book is just trying to be a clone of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark and its unsettling artwork by Stephen Gammell. The art of illustrator Randy Broecker sneaks up on you in the best way possible. What seems simple at first becomes intricate, beautiful, and creepy as all get out the more you look at it. When I was a kid, I used to HATE touching scary pictures in books for fear that they’d come to life and bite me. Broecker’s illustrations for Terrifying Tales to Tell at Night pushed me right back into that old childhood fear. And for that I say, “Thank you!”

There’s no audio version of “Granny’s Grinning” that I could find, but please, if you look for it at your local library, do try to get the version that is in Terrifying Tales to Tell at Night. You won’t be disappointed. Besides, I have more stories — and more illustrations! — from this collection on the docket for this month.

Meanwhile...happy reading and...pleasant dreams? Hmmmm? Heh-heh-heh!

Blog-o-ween 2023: "Raymond" by Nancy A. Collins

Yesterday’s Blog-o-ween entry was a terrific example of the “creepy kid” sub-genre in horror. In Robert Bloch’s hands, the story of Irma and her revenge against her father had an almost comic effect. That “snap ending” that Stephen King talked about certainly acted as a punchline, did it not? You might even say that the humor in “Sweets to the Sweet” was rather...biting...heh-heh-heh! Irma’s dad certainly laughed his head off. Heh-heh-heh!

Today’s story is a somewhat more sober and somber examination of the cruelties of childhood. All kidding aside, children can be vicious towards one another. The playground pecking order is a closely guarded and scrutinized hierarchy. Anyone who doesn’t fit into the established order quickly finds themselves banished to the end of the line to become the punching bag for everyone above them. Such is the fate of the title character of Nancy A. Collins’s short story “Raymond.”

“I remember the first time I saw Raymond Fleuris...”

Darryl Sweetman is your average seventh-grade kid in small-town Arkansas. He and his best friend, Rafe Mercer, are interested in the same girl, Kitty Killigrew. Both Darryl and Rafe wonder if this year’s county fair will feature a kootchie tent and, more importantly, if they’ll be able to sneak in and see the ladies in the undies.

Into this mundane world of normal desires and daydreams, Raymond Fleuris is dropped. Raymond’s dirt-poor social status along with his hillbilly bib overalls would be more than enough to seal any kid’s fate as the schoolyard’s scapegoat. Unfortunately for Raymond, he also comes to his first day at school with his head wound with gauze and gloves secured to his hands with string at the wrists. He doesn’t exactly blend in.

Raymond is also what Darryl refers to as “simple.” While he sits in the back of Darryl’s class, Raymond “never handed in homework and was excused from taking tests. All he did was sit and scribble in his notebook with one of those big kindergarten pencils.” Later, on the playground, the local bully, Chucky Donothan, decides to make sure that Raymond understands his place in schoolyard society. He pushes Raymond to the ground, but Raymond doesn’t fight back. He verbally abuses Raymond, accusing the new boy of wearing gloves to hide the hair that grows on his palms through masturbating too much, but Raymond says nothing. It isn’t until Chucky attempts to remove those gloves from Raymond’s hands that Raymond defends himself. And, boy, does he ever! Raymond becomes like a wild animal:

“One second Raymond was your basic slack-jawed moron, the next he was shrieking and clawing at Chucky like the Tasmanian Devil in those old Bugs Bunny cartoons. His face seemed to flex, like the muscles were being jerked every-which-way.”

During the scuffle, Raymond bites Chucky on the upper arm, drawing blood and screams from the bully. One of Raymond’s gloves comes off, giving Darryl a look at his bare hand. Raymond’s ring finger, Darryl notices, is longer than the other fingers. And that, Dear Reader, is our clue as to what sort of story this is. An elongated third finger is a sure sign of lycanthropy.

I said an elongated THIRD finger!

Poor Raymond, it seems, is a werewolf or shapeshifter. Collins doesn’t treat his affliction in the usual way, however. In her hands, Raymond’s condition is not monstrous. What is monstrous is what’s been done to him by his family and the doctors at the State Hospital in the name of normality and fitting in. Raymond’s fate at the end of the story is as much a snap ending as the end of Robert Bloch’s story, but instead of leaving the reader chuckling at the black humor, Collins’s last line is a sad reminder of what can happen to those misunderstood souls that “normal” society doesn’t know how to handle.

Nancy A. Collins was born in rural Arkansas. During her life, she has moved around the country, living in New Orleans, Atlanta, New York City, as well as coastal North Carolina and Virginia. She is best known for creating the character “Sonja Blue,” a woman with demonic powers who hunts and kills vampires. Sonja Blue appears in a number of books. Collins has also written for the comics, taking over the writing reins on Swamp thing, Vampirella, and Red Sonja.

“Raymond” was published in an anthology called The Ultimate Werewolf. Later, it was included in Collins’s own collection Knuckles and Tales. I first encountered the story in Stephen Jones and Ramsey Campbell’s Best New Horror 3, published in 1992. I’ll be featuring more from this collection in the coming weeks.

Sadly, there isn’t an audio version of the story that I could find, but I think “Raymond” would sound great dramatized, especially those scenes that take place at the carnival. The carnival is a great trope in horror, and one that isn’t taken advantage of as much as it should be.

So, track down this story at your local library, curl up with it late at night...and...pleasant dreams...hmmm? Heh-heh-heh!

Blog-o-ween 2023: "Sweets to the Sweet" by Robert Bloch

“As a matter of fact, I am really a very lovable person, as my friends tell me — or they would, if I had any friends. Deep down underneath it all, I have the heart of a small boy. I keep it in a jar, on my desk.”

— Robert Bloch

Kids are weird. There’s just no getting around the fact. They’re weird, and they are dangerous. I wouldn’t trust a one of them for all the money in Fort Knox. Not for a second. Sure, the more highfalutin members of the PMRC, the local PTA, and various other parents groups wan’cha to believe that little Johnny and Jenny are innocent angels who need to be protected from the big, bad world. BAH! Little Johnny would stick a knife in yer back before you could say “Jack Robinson.” And little Jenny? Well, I think today’s story by Robert Bloch perfectly illustrates what she’s capable of.

“Irma didn’t look like a witch. She had small, regular features, a peaches-and-cream complexion, blue eyes, and fair, almost ash-blonde hair. Besides, she was only eight years old.”

Thus begins Bloch’s 1947 short story “Sweets to the Sweet.” In it, little Irma Steever, eight years old and sweet as pie, is a motherless child whose father, John Steever, blames for the death of his wife during childbirth. He constantly refers to her as an “unnatural little witch” and tells her nanny that all the child really needs is a “good thrashing.” Irma is a preternaturally intelligent child who reads voraciously — things like the Encyclopedia Brittanica’s entry on “Witchcraft.” That’s not the only craft she’s interested in. She likes making little dolls out of modeling clay. Why, just recently, she made one that looks exactly like her father! She takes it with her wherever she goes. And speaking of father, the poor man, he doesn’t seem to be feeling very well at the moment. Seems as though he’s been having pains in his arm, in his back, and in his chest. Sharp, jabbing pain...like a needle being plunged into the flesh...

“Sweets to the Sweet” first appeared in the March 1947 issue of Weird Tales magazine. Over the next fifty years, the story would be included in many of the author’s “Best of” collections, as well as countless anthologies. I first encountered the story in the 2007 edition of Mike Baker and Martin H. Greenberg’s anthology My Favorite Horror Story, where it was chosen for inclusion by none other than Stephen King, who claimed it to have “one of the most chilling snap endings I had ever read.”

Born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1917 and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Robert Bloch had a long and storied (pun intended!) career. He wrote horror, science-fiction, thrillers, short stories, novels, screenplays, and an “unauthorized autobiography” called Once Around the Bloch. He exchanged letters with H. P. Lovecraft and his circle of friends, including August Derleth, Clark Ashton Smith, and Frank Belknap Long. He was presented with the Life Achievement Award from the World Fantasy Convention in 1975 and the Bram Stoker Award for Life Achievement from the Horror Writers Association in 1989. Robert Bloch died of cancer in 1994.

All that aside, what we remember Bloch for most is writing a story about another misunderstood child with (dead) mommy issues. A child who grew up to be a man who ran the cutest little motel just off the old highway. A man who went a little mad sometimes...but that’s okay...we all go a little mad sometimes...don’t we?

If you find it a little hard to track down a printed copy of “Sweets to the Sweet,” don’t worry, we gotcha covered. The good folks over at HorrorBabble, the internet’s premier source for audio horror in its many forms, recorded a rendition of Ian Gordon and Jennifer Gill reading Bloch’s tale a few years ago in August of 2021. You can find that recording here on YouTube.

Pleasant listening and...pleasant dreams...hmmmm? Heh-heh-heh!

Blog-o-ween 2023: "The Hook"

Willkommen! Bienvenue! Welcome to LARPing Real Life’s Blog-o-ween 2023! Glad you could make it, even after listening to yesterday’s prologue —— BBC Four’s adaptation of Stephen King’s ’Salem’s Lot. It was pretty good, right? Pretty scary, too, huh? Well for Blog-o-ween’s first official entry, you should probably double-knot the laces of your shoes, because this one is going to knock your socks off! Let’s begin this year’s Blog-o-ween by celebrating one of the simplest, most direct, most effective horror stories ever told: “The Tale of the Hook.”

“The Hook,” or “The Hookman” is an urban legend, one of those stories passed from person to person, usually beginning with the words “What I’m about to tell you really happened, and it happened not far from here...” You know, the kind of story whose details slightly shift depending on who is telling it. A story that is told around a campfire or in a darkened bedroom during a sleepover, preferably with a lit flashlight held below the chin. Stephen King, in his 1981 history of horror Danse Macabre, called this tale “the most basic horror story I know,” and my rendition of it goes something like this:

This guy and girl are out on a date. They drive out to Lover’s Lane and start to cuddle and kiss. The guy has the radio on so’s they can listen to romantic music while they make-out. Suddenly, the radio announcer breaks into the broadcast and says that an insane killer has escaped from the local sanitarium and was last seen heading south. Towards the Lover’s Lane area, natch. The announcer says to be on the look-out for a man who stands well over six feet, weighs over 250 pounds, and has a sharpened hook instead of a right hand.

The girl gets scared, but the guy says not to worry. They go back to necking, but the girl hears something outside. Something like the branches of the underbrush being moved around. She wants to leave. There’s nothing out there, the guy says, and they start smooching again. The girl breaks it off. This time she says she hears the sound of sticks snapping under foot. Can’t we go, she asks the guy. The guy says it was nothing, and besides, if it was anything, he’d protect her, wouldn’t he? So they start kissing again. And then the girl stops again, because this time she says she’s heard something scratching against her door. She demands to be taken home.

The guy is fed up by this point. He starts the car, slams it into reverse, and then peels out, driving off like a drag racer. They get to the girl’s house. The guy goes around the car to open her door. He turns white as a sheet and faints dead away. The girl gets out of the car to see if the guy is all right. When she closes her door, she hears something thud against the side of the car. When she looks back, she sees hanging there on the handle of the door a bloody hook!

That’s just sheer perfection, is it not? I told that story just off the top of my head. I think I hit all the necessary plot points. Maybe you’ve heard the story, too? Heard it in a different way, perhaps, with different details, but essentially the same in its shape. As King says,

“The story of The Hook is a simple, brutal classic of horror. It offers no characterization, no theme, no particular artifice; it does not aspire to symbolic beauty or try to summarize the times, the mind, or the human spirit...No, the story of The Hook exists for one reason and one reason alone: to scare the shit out of little kids after the sun goes down.”

What other reason do you need, really?

Jan Harold Brunvand collected “The Tale of the Hook” in his 1981 book The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and Their Meanings. One of the sources of the urban legend, Brunvand discovered, was a letter published on Tuesday, November 8, 1960, in a nationally syndicated newspaper column by Abigail Van Buren, better known as Dear Abby.

In said letter, a young woman tells an even more abbreviated version of the story. The young woman starts her tale by saying “I don’t know whether it’s true or not, but it doesn’t matter because it served its purpose for me.” and ends it with “I don’t think I will ever park to make out as long as I live. I hope this does the same for other kids.” Brunvand goes on to trace the story back further, into the 1950s, to the post-war years when the Baby Boomers were just hitting adolescence, as well as the road. With their newfound mobility and freedom, kids headed off to out of the way places like their local Lover’s Lane and the local drive-in movie theater in their cars. “The Tale of the Hook,” then, as the young woman points out in her letter to Dear Abby, served as a way to scare those kids straight. You want go off alone and make whoopee in the back seat of your car? Fine, go right ahead, but be warned there’s an escaped maniac out there just look for an easy kill!

Also in 1981 (What is it with that year? Why so many discussions about spooky stories?), folklorist Alvin Schwartz included the story in his groundbreaking collection of oral tales for kids, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. Accompanied by some of the most disturbing illustrations ever set down on paper by Stephen Gammell, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark helped take the “sleep” out of sleepovers for an entire generation of kids.

(We will be coming back to Schwartz and his collection of oral tales and legends later in the month. Be on the lookout for stories like “The White Satin Evening Gown” and that classic “The Babysitter.”)

One of my favorite renditions of “The Hook” is from the 1979 summer camp film Meatballs. In it, Bill Murray plays head counselor Tripper who has a gaggle of wet-behind-the-ears CITs (Counselors-In-Training) out on a weekend camping trip. Around the campfire, Tripper shares the story of “The Hook,” and you gotta admit...it's a doozy:

Tomorrow, we'll take a look at a short story by Robert Bloch. Until then...pleasant dreams...hmmm? Heh-heh-heh!