Blog-o-ween 2023: "Minuke" by Nigel Kneale

Look, I gotta come clean with you good people who show up everyday to Blog-o-ween looking for guidance. I owe it to you to tell the truth, to lay it all on the line. So, here goes: Yes, monsters are scary — what with the waving tentacles and the dripping goo and the gnashing teeth in the multiple mouths that are set vertically instead of horizontally all over its body and I don’t know what else — but, and this is just between you and me, monsters aren’t real.

I know, I know...but someone had to tell you. Monsters aren’t real. There are people who act monstrously, sure, but monsters? What with the waving tentacles and the dripping goo and the gnashing teeth in the multiple mouths that are set vertically instead of horizontally all over its body and what not? Monsters? They don’t exist except in the pages of horror stories and on the big- and small-screens. And once the author or the filmmaker shows you the monster? It’s not as scary anymore. You can deal with it.

The best horror, I think, is grounded in the more mundane, universally felt, everyday fears and anxieties: the fear of death, the anxiety of not being able to make ends meet, the fear of the dark, the anxiety of walking back to your car late at night in an unfamiliar neighborhood, the fear of waving tentacles and dripping goo and gnashing teeth...the usual stuff that everyone has experienced in their lives.

Let’s take for an example the anxieties that come with homeownership. Part of the American Dream is to own your own home. Me, I’m a renter. Always been a renter. Always will be a renter. The thought of owning a home and having electrical problems or plumbing issues or a leaky roof and having to pay for those repairs sets my flesh crawling. Not to mention dealing with the infestation in the basement of things with waving tentacles and dripping goo and gnashing teeth...but that’s a whole other thing.

Owning a home and being only one poorly soldered pipe away from disaster and financial ruin is probably what drove people to the cinemas in 1979 to see The Amityville Horror. Sure, living in a house where a guy once killed his entire family is pretty scary — and those two red eyes of “Jodie” floating outside the daughter’s second-story bedroom window certainly are — but as Stephen King points out in his 1981 history of the horror genre, Danse Macabre, the real horror in Amityville has less to do with the events of the past and more to do with the house that the Lutzes now own lock, stock, and barrel. Upon reevaluating the film after leaving a screening where he noticed the average age of the attendees was closer to middle age than the usual teenager, King writes:

“Here is a movie for every woman who ever wept over a plugged-up toilet or a spreading water stain on the ceiling from the upstairs shower; for every man who ever did a slow burn when the weight of the snow caused his gutters to give way...

“‘Think of the bills,’ a woman sitting behind me in the theater moaned at one point...but I suspect it was her own bills she was thinking about...[T]he main reason that people went to see it, I think, is that The Amityville Horror, beneath its ghost-story exterior, is really a financial demolition derby.”

Today’s short story is also steeped in the fears and anxieties of home ownership. Let’s take a trip to post-war Britain with writer Nigel Kneale and hear the story of a house that is on the market for a song. It has a strange past and an even stranger name. Let’s take a open-house tour through "Minuke."

“The estate agent kept an uncomfortable silence until we reached his car. ‘Frankly, I wish you hadn’t got wind of that,’ he said. ‘Don’t know how you did: I thought I had the whole thing carefully disposed of...’”

It is after the Second World War in England, and an estate agent is driving the unnamed narrator to see a house. At first glance, the narrator seems to be someone who is in the market for a home, but as the estate agent’s story of the house unfolds, the reader quickly gets the sense that the narrator is simply a curiosity-seeker. No one could possibly want the home that the estate agent is describing. What’s wrong with the house? Well, for starters, the name.

“It was taken by a man named Pritchard. Cinema projectionist, I think he was. Wife, a boy of ten or so, and a rather younger daughter. Oh — and dog, one of those black, lop-eared animals. They christened the place ‘Minuke’, M-I-N-U-K-E. My nook. Yes, that’s what I said too. And not even the miserable excuse of its being phonetically correct.”

The house was built in a hurry along a coast-road overlooking the sea during the interwar period, and that’s when the estate agent says he sold the house to the Pritchards. Everything started out fine until little things began to go wrong. First, the plumbing seemed to go haywire. Then, the plaster on the walls in the bedroom crack from floor to ceiling. Next, Mrs. Pritchard is injured when a hatch door between the kitchen and dining room comes down on her wrists. The funny thing about that, said Mr. Pritchard to the estate agent, is when he tried to lift it off of his wife’s arms

“...it wouldn’t come! I got my finger under it and heaved, but it might have weighed two hundredweight. Once it gave an inch or so, and then pressed harder. That was it — it was pressing down!”

And that’s just the start of the Pritchards’ troubles with Minuke.

What is the cause behind these problems? What does one of the men who helped build the house have to say about the enormous flat stones that were found on the site and used as the foundation of Minuke? And what of the old Norse — or older! — burial mound?

Nigel Kneale was born in Barrow-in-Furness, England in 1922. In 1928, his family returned to the Isle of Man, and it was there that Kneale was raised. In the 1940s, unable to enlist in the army due to photophobia (a sensitivity to light), Kneale moved to London and worked for BBC Radio. He acted in radio plays and wrote stories for magazines such as Argosy and The Strand. In 1949, he published a collection of his tales, Tomato Cain and Other Stories. In 1950, it won the Somerset Maugham Award.

After this success, Kneale began to write scripts for radio and television. It was in the early 1950s that he created his most enduring character: Professor Bernard Quatermass, head of the British Experimental Rocket Group. Quatermass would be the main character of four television serials over the next twenty years. Beginning in 1953 with The Quatermass Experiment, the professor’s adventures would continue in Quatermass II (1956), Quatermass and the Pit (1958), and the final, melancholy chapter of the professor’s life, 1979’s Quatermass.

Outside of the Quatermass adventures, Kneale was busy with other serials of the weird and supernatural. Beasts (1976) was a six-episode character-based anthology series. The Stone Tape (1972) was a scientific ghost story about a group of engineers in an old mansion trying to find a new recording medium. Instead, they find something in the old stone walls of the house. He also wrote an episode of the ITV series Against the Crowd called “Murrain.” (I’ve, uh, written about it before...you can find my blog entry on it here.)

Kneale’s list of projects that came to fruition or died on the vine is too lengthy to go into here. To learn more about these projects, I urge you to look for a copy of Andy Murray’s biography Into the Unknown: The Fantastic Life of Nigel Kneale. Tomato Cain and Other Stories (of which “Minuke” is but one) has been brought out in a new edition recently by Comma Press. If you are just interested in today’s story, then look for anthologies such as Classics of the Supernatural (edited by Peter Haining) and A Classic Collection of Haunting Ghost Stories (edited by Marvin and Saralee Kaye).

If you need to know what happened to the Pritchards and Minuke right this very instant, well you are in luck. Here is a reading of the story from Tony Walker’s excellent Classic Ghost Stories Podcast:

So, that’s it for today, Gentle Reader. Come back tomorrow for more tales of the macabre. That knocking sound in the walls? Probably just the pipes. That’s nothing. It’s the fact that it’s knocking in Morse code that is disconcerting. Anyway...pleasant dreams? Hmmmm? Heh-heh-heh!

Blog-o-ween 2023: "The Dog Park" by Dennis Etchison

As I’ve mentioned before, I live in Los Angeles, and if you’ve ever been to La La Land, then you know that it’s a dog town. (And as a cat person, it pains me to say that, but there you have it.) Dogs accompany their owners everywhere (or is it the other way around?) — to restaurants, to the grocery store, to the beach. There are dogs of all shapes, all sizes, all breeds. I’ve probably seen more dogs riding in strollers than I’ve seen children — and I’ve probably seen more children on the ends of a leash than I’ve seen dogs. Go figure.

One place that you are sure to encounter a dog off its lead is on the countless hiking paths that wind their ways through the canyons of the Santa Monica, Santa Susana, and San Gabriel Mountains. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve been reassured by a fellow hiker that their dog is friendly and they just wanted to get off their leash and have the same freedom as everyone else. Why not just let them run wild in one of the many dog parks in the city, I wonder. Then, I remember this story by Dennis Etchison, and I figure ol’ Fido is safer here with us on the path. God only knows what goes on in the canyon when the sun goes down there in...“The Dog Park.”

“Madding heard the dogs before he saw them.

“They were snarling at each other through the hurricane fence, gums wet and incisors bared, as if about to snap the chain links that held them apart. A barrel-chested boxer reared and slobbered, driving a much smaller Australian kelpie away from the outside of the gate. Spittle flew and links vibrated and rang.

“A few seconds later their owners came running, barking commands and waving leashes like whips.

“‘Easy, boy,’ Madding said, reaching one hand out to the seat next to him. Then he remembered that he no longer had a dog of his own. There was nothing to worry about.”

Madding, a writer in Los Angeles, takes a trip to one of the many dog parks that the city offers. This one happens to be off Mulholland Drive, at a place where the homes of the rich, attached precariously to the canyon walls, overlook everything. It is one that he used to take his own dog to. Only now, he no longer has it. At the park, he meets Stacey and her dog Greta. Stacey is also a writer. She asks Madding where his dog is, and he hints at the canyon beyond the park. “Down there,” he tells her, “I hope.”

Uh-oh.

As they talk, Madding reveals that his dog (who never had a name — Madding hadn’t gotten around to it yet) went missing the month before at this very park. He took off running and never returned. Madding tells Stacey that he is leaving the city for good, but that he thought he would give it one more chance.

Soon, Stacey’s dog Greta goes missing, as well. And as she panics, and Madding tries to calm her, the people in their balconies above seem to go quiet, watchful. It is as if they are waiting for something to happen. But what? Where did Greta go? What awaits Madding as he slips into the dark and verdant canyon?

“The Dog Park” is not a story of out-and-out horror. There is no monster (well, maybe) and no outward violence. There is only the setting sun, the dark of the canyon, and the tinkling of ice in the glasses of those watching the scene below them. Etchison’s story would probably be best described as “quiet horror” (though not, thank god as “elevated horror,” whatever is meant by that backhanded compliment), though its horror may be so quiet that many miss it the first time through. I know I did. After going back to the story again and again and experiencing Madding’s sad desperation, his disgust with life in Hollywood, his decision to go into the canyon and look for Greta, and his hope (however lost) of finding his dog again, the horror of all this happening under the watchful eyes of the people in their canyon homes grew. I’ve been in those canyons, seen those houses, and you just wonder if they are like the boxes at the opera. Merely there to watch the play of life being performed below.

Dennis Etchison was a California native, born in Stockton in 1943. While still in high school. Etchison wrote the short story “Odd Boy Out.” She submitted it to many science-fiction magazines without any luck. Finally, taking a page from the book of his hero Ray Bradbury, who said that a writer should submit their stories to the least likely market, Etchison sent the story to Escapade, one of many “gentlemen’s magazines” that were being published at the time. It was accepted, and Etchison earned himself a $125.00 check.

Etchison has written in many fields, including novels, short stories, screenplays, and movie tie-in novels. Under the pseudonym “Jack Martin,” he wrote the novelization for Halloween II, Halloween III: Season of the Witch (which includes an explanation of just what it is that is happening beneath the mask of the young boy exposed to Conal Cochran’s Halloween commercial — chilling stuff!), and Videodrome.

He’s written screenplays, teleplays, and radio scripts for numerous outlets, including HBO’s series The Hitchhiker, the CBS radio series The Twilight Zone, and Fangoria’s Dreadtime Stories. He teamed up with John Carpenter to produce a script for Halloween IV: The Return of Michael Myers. Said script was rejected by movie producer Moustaoha Akkad as being “too cerebral.” As Etchison himself described the story:

“Halloween was banned in Haddonfield and I think that the basic idea was that if you tried to suppress something, it would only rear its head more strongly. By the very [attempt] of trying to erase the memory of Michael Myers, [the teenagers] were going to ironically bring him back into existence.”

Ah, what if...what if...

Dennis Etchison died in May, 2019, after a bout with cancer.

“The Dog Park” was originally published in 1993 in the anthology Dark Voices 5: The Pan Book of Horror. Later, it was included in Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling’s The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: Seventh Annual Collection. Etchison included the story in his own collections The Death Artist, Talking in the Dark: Selected Stories, and Fine Cuts. “The Dog Park” is another story I’ve chosen from the excellent anthology My Favorite Horror Story, edited by Mike Baker and Martin H. Greenberg.

There you have it, folks. Another day, another Blog-o-ween 2023 entry. If you, like our friend Madding, find yourself alone in the canyons at night calling for your dog to come back, be sure to ask one of those nice people on the balcony of their home for their help. I’m sure they’ve seen exactly where your dog went and are more than willing to point you in the right direction. Well...in a direction, at any rate. What are neighbors for, after all?

In the meantime...pleasant dreams? Hmmmm? Heh-heh-heh!

Blog-o-ween 2023: "The Chimney" By Ramsey Campbell

Parents think they are, oh, so smart. They assume they know so much about the inner lives of their children, and how they think, and how they’ll react to a given situation that parents never stop to remember that a child’s mind is so open to all possibilities that the littlest things can be misconstrued and become a source of fear. In a vain attempt to protect their kids’ psyches, many parents shield them from the world’s obvious sources of terror and anxiety — upsetting world news, the death of older family members, scary television programs and movies, rap music and heavy metal...you know, the usual stuff.

Part of this assumed understanding (or arrogance depending on the parent) stems from misremembering their own childhoods. Parents never seem to recall the mundane moments that happened to their younger selves, the ordinary items that, when seen from the perspective of a child, sent shockwaves of terror through them and opened the door in their minds to a world of fear. Sometimes it was a jacket hung on a chair that looked like a ghoul crouching in the dark of a bedroom when the lights went out that sent shivers up a child’s spine. Or maybe it was when the child turned the crank on a jack-in-the-box, and the tune “Pop Goes the Weasel” played in that off-kilter way, and the anticipation of the lid springing open to reveal the clown within. But what if, the child’s mind proffers, what if it isn’t a clown at all under there? What if...it were something else...something with teeth and claws...and hunger...

Other times, children simply misunderstand the words that their parents say, and that opens vistas of horror to them. Stephen King, in his 1981 history of horror in print, TV, radio, film, and comics, Danse Macabre, talks about the child who couldn’t sleep without the light on because he’d heard his father, who was a baseball fan, talk often of the “twi-night double-header.” King also passes along the story of author John D. McDonald’s son’s fear of something he’d overheard adults talking about, “The Green Ripper.” I myself, growing up as a Planet of the Apes fan, was terrified when I heard Walter Cronkite talk about the “gorilla war” that was happening in Central America in the early 1980s.

I mean, c’mon, I think my fears were justified! It's only a matter of time before our ape overlords take over!

Today’s short story from Ramsey Campbell is also about a child’s misunderstanding of what should be one of the joys of childhood: Christmas. Let’s take a look at the terrors that live in “The Chimney.”

“Maybe most of it was only fear. But not the last thing, not that. To blame my fear for that would be worst of all.”

An unnamed narrator, now an adult, looks back at the time he was twelve years old and afraid of the chimney in his bedroom. He was a socially awkward child, someone who was picked on by those above and below him at school. Everything affected him and caused to feel anxiety and fear — the shout of a teacher, examinations, the size of his school, his mother’s own fears, and his father’s exasperated anger at the both of them.

But the narrator’s worst fears were in his own room. These fears were centered upon the large fireplace there and what the narrator imagined was waiting for him within the chimney. He recalls the time, when he was three years old, that he had seen a movie on television and how that movie had planted the seeds of his fears deep in his little mind:

“I’d seen two children asleep in bed, an enormous crimson man emerging from the fireplace, creeping toward them. They weren’t going to wake up! ‘Burglar! Burglar!’ I’d screamed, beginning to cry. ‘No, dear, it’s Father Christmas,’ my mother said, hastily switching off the television. ‘He always comes out of the chimney.’”

Always? Gulp!

And so a child’s terror is born. It is one that will follow the narrator throughout his young life. Though he tries to confront it and control it, that fear of someone — something — coming out of the chimney persists. But is it just an irrational fear? What of the noises the narrator hears in the chimney? What of the massive form that stands at the foot of his bed one night, its face “like a charred turnip carved with a rigid grin?”

“The Chimney” is one of those slow-burn horror stories that only British writers seem able to tell successfully. On top of that, Campbell uses the perspective of a child (even though the narrator is an adult when he tells his tale) to great effect. Everything for the boy is a source of anxiety. Every sentence seems to depict a world that can never be understood, and therefore, never be controlled. The adults around the narrator are just as confused, just as anxious, so there is no succor to be found there. Anxiety and fear seep from the page into the reader, and we become like children again, confused, powerless, and afraid. All in all, it’s a fantastic story of quiet horror and dread.

Ramsey Campbell was born in Liverpool, England, in 1946. He grew up in a broken home, his parents having become estranged shortly after his birth. His mother, also a writer, but one who went largely unpublished, encouraged Campbell from an early age to send his work off to publishers. Growing up a fan of H.P. Lovecraft, Ambrose Bierce, and Franz Kafka, Campbell wrote stories of the supernatural and the macabre from an early age.

Having published many short stories throughout the 1960s, it wasn’t until Arkham House came out with his collection of tales, Demons by Daylight, in 1973 that he quit his job working in a tax office to become a full-time writer. His first published novel was The Doll Who Ate His Mother in 1976. This was followed up with The Face That Must Die in 1979. Both were well received, and Campbell was on his way.

“The Chimney” won the World Fantasy Award in 1977. It was first published in Whispers: An Anthology of Fantasy and Horror. Later, it would be a part of Campbell’s own collection, Dark Companions.

For myself, this is another Blog-o-ween story that I found in the excellent Stephen Jones collection Terrifying Tales to Tell at Night (see also the entry on Robert Shearman’s “Granny’s Grinning”). Like the other tales in that book, “The Chimney” is accompanied by some fearsomely creepy illustrations from the pen of Randy Broecker.

That’s all for today, kiddies. Just remember that the world can indeed be a scary place, but our fears are often caused by our not fully understanding what we are seeing and hearing. So, when you hear something scraping its way down the chimney towards you, do not be alarmed! Know that it is only a soot-covered man waiting for the fire to die out so he can bring you...pleasant dreams? Hmmmm? Heh-heh-heh!

Blog-o-ween 2023: "The Lake" by Tananarive Due

When I was a kid, my family would go to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, every year for vacation. We drove down from Western Pennsylvania in a caravan of other families from our neighborhood. Some years, we would even sync up our annual summer trip with a couple of families from other states that we had met in previous years so that we could all be together. The beachside hotel we stayed at felt like an extended family. It was all very chummy and inclusive. I used to love hitting the beach every day to build sand castles, to bury my friends in the sand, and to look for seashells and sand dollars. My favorite activity, however, was swimming in the ocean. I loved the sound of the waves striking the shore, the feel of the cool water as it enveloped me, the strength of the tide as it lifted me and brought me gently back to the earth. Like being at the hotel, being in the ocean felt chummy and inclusive, like I belonged there.

And then I saw Jaws.

And I discovered that the ocean may not be the friendly, playful companion that I always assumed it to be. There were things underneath the surface of the water, things with teeth like butcher knives, things with lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll’s eyes, things that were hungry, things that liked to bite.

For years after, I did not like going into the ocean. Then, after seeing Friday the 13th, Piranha, and Alligator, I grew wary of lakes, rivers, and swimming pools, too. The water was a dangerous place to be! Therefore, in order to stay safe, one had to stay far away from it.

It never occurred to me that the monsters I feared beneath the waves could, like in today’s story from Tananarive Due, step out of the water and walk on land. And that their hunger would follow them, too.

Let’s take a trip down south to Florida and dip our toes in “The Lake.”

“The new English instructor at Graceland Prep was chosen with the greatest care, highly recommended by the Board of Directors at Blake Academy in Boston, where she had an exemplary career for twelve years. No history of irregular behavior presaged the summer’s unthinkable events.”

—Excerpt from an internal memo,

Gracetown Preparatory School

Gracetown, Florida

Abbie LaFleur, a native of Boston, MA, has just relocated to Gracetown, FL, to teach at a local prep school. She’s moved there in the heat and humidity of June to get a summer’s worth of teaching under her belt before the start of the school year proper. The colonial house that Abbie has moved into is isolated out in the woods and sits next to a very large lake. The house is too large for her, and will need a lot of work, but the lake becomes a source of comfort to Abbie. It calls to her, tells her to strip off her clothes and take a swim in it. Abbie does so at every given opportunity — during the day, during the night...during her dreams...

At work, Abbie makes friends quickly with the boys in her class, “strong and tireless boys, who could help her mend whatever needed fixing. In her experience, there were always willing boys.” (Gulp!) She chooses Derek, the school football team’s quarterback, to help with the house’s renovations. Soon, Derek and his younger cousin, Jack, are spending all their spare time at the house by the lake. The lake where Abbie swims...and hunts...and feeds.

What is the power the lake seems to exude? Why is Abbie drawn to it? And why can’t her feet fit into her shoes anymore? And what are those slits that have appeared in the ridges of her rib cage?

“The Lake” was originally published as part of a horror anthology edited by Christopher Golden called The Monster’s Corner: Stories Through Inhuman Eyes. All of the stories in the book are told from the point-of-view of the monster. It’s this perspective that makes reading Due’s short story so powerful and deeply uneasy. Abbie LaFleur is a sexual predator. Why did she leave her previous job? It’s never stated explicitly. Were there whispers of her illicit dalliances up north? The reader doesn’t know for sure. The lake, however, seems to recognize a predator when it sees one, and Abbie is drawn into its waters to be reformed and rebaptized. It’s a chilling metamorphosis.

Tananarive Due was born in 1966 in Tallahassee, Florida. She is the oldest of three daughters of civil rights activist Patricia Stephens Due and civil rights lawyer John D. Du, Jr. In 1995, while working as a journalist and columnist for the Miami Herald, Due wrote her first book, The Between, the story of a man diagnosed with schizophrenia whose break with reality may have a more cosmic and terrifying explanation. She has since gone on to write historical fiction, mysteries, and tales of the supernatural. Due is also part of the affiliate faculty in the creative writing MFA program at Antioch University Los Angeles, holds an endowed chair in the humanities at Spelman College in Atlanta, and developed a course at UCLA called “The Sunken Place: Racism, Survival And The Black Horror Aesthetic.” You probably have also seen her appearances in such documentaries as Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror and The 101 Scariest Movie Moments of All Time (both on Shudder).

“The Lake” later made its way into a collection of Due’s called Ghost Summer: Stories. There, it linked up with other tales about Gracetown. The small Northern Florida town doesn’t have a great history, and like all repressed pasts, it comes back to haunt the present in terrible ways.

Ghost Summer: Stories and The Monster’s Corner: Stories Through Inhuman Eyes should both be available at your local library. You can also listen to this reading courtesy of the Malden (MA) Public Library’s series “Campfire Ghost Stories.”

That’s all for today, campers. Remember to take only photos and leave only footprints...even if those footprints seem to have webbing between the toes. Be sure to extinguish all fires and clean up after yourselves, and...pleasant dreams? Hmmmm? Heh-heh-heh!

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!