65 Great Spine Chillers edited by Mary Danby (1985, Octopus)

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65 Great Spine Chillers edited by Mary Danby (1985, Octopus)

This is one of a series of large anthologies edited by Mary Danby and published by St Michael (Marks & Spencer). I’ve read a few stories from this recently, so I’ll add to this thread as I read more of them.

The Cat Jumps by Elizabeth Bowen: First published 1940.

"The girl Muriel Barker was found looking up at the house a shade doubtfully. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘I do rather wonder they don’t feel…sometimes…You know what I mean?’

‘No,’ replied her companion, a young scientist.

Muriel sighed. ‘No one would mind if it had been just a short, sharp shooting. But it was so …prolonged. It went on all over the house. Do you remember?’ she said timidly.

‘No,’ replied Mr Cartaret, ‘it didn’t interest me.’

‘Oh, nor me either!’ agreed Muriel quickly, but added: ‘How he must have hated her!...’

The scientist, sleepy, yawned frankly and referred her to Krafft Ebing. But Muriel went to bed with Alice in Wonderland; she went to sleep with the lights on. She was not, as Jocelyn realized later, the sort of girl to have asked at all."

Rose Hill has stood empty for two years after the Bentley murder; unsurprisingly few will even consider living at the scene of ‘The Rose Hill Horror.’ Until thoroughly modern couple Jocelyn and Harold Wright view the house and decide to move in. Jocelyn doesn’t even consider changing the bath, even if it were possible, which, as it’s fitted, it’s not. She’d always wanted a fitted bath anyway. Naturally some friends are invited when they move in.

Exactly what Harold Bentley did to his wife isn’t revealed at first, only hinted at in a long series of cautious but increasingly horrible hints, which grow bloodier, more sadistic and, frankly, more excruciatingly funny as the story unfolds.

Bowen’s writing is by turns lyrical, dry; wickedly, blackly comic. Sometimes, by using precisely the wrong words, she evokes a genuine sense of weirdness:

“Jocelyn’s bedroom curtains swelled a little over the noisy window. The room was stuffy and – insupportable, so that she did not know where to turn. The house, fingered outwardly by the wind that dragged unceasingly past the walls, was, within, a solid silence: silence heavy as flesh. Jocelyn dropped her wrap to the floor, then watched how its feathered edges crept a little – a draught came in under her bathroom door."

The form the haunting of Rose Hill takes is a series of possessions which appears to exaggerate the natures of the various subjects. And Muriel, a woman who never takes a chance, should really not have been asked down at all.

This is the first time I’ve read this story, and I loved it. It’s not at all like the other Elizabeth Bowen ghost stories I’ve read; I really didn’t expect to be choking with horrified laughter as I swallowed some tea at the wrong moment. Ghastly sophisticated fun.

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The Pioneers of Pike’s Peake by Basil Tozer. I’ve probably read this one a number of times over the years, but when I Googled its printing history I was surprised to learn that it far pre-dated Weird Tales magazine, having first appeared in 1897.

Basil Tozer (1872-1949) was an English hunter, sportsman and journalist, who penned a number of articles, leading up to The Pioneers of Pike’s Peake which appeared in The Strand Magazine as an ‘original article separated from the volume, not a reprint or a copy’. This is actually a 7 page booklet in soft covers illustrated by none other than the prolific and acclaimed illustrator of childrens books Gordon Browne.

Art by Gordon Browne

So is the story’s history more interesting than its content?

It’s actually a pretty good story, beginning with the arrival of an elderly newcomer to a village pub in the Canadian Rockies. The old man interrupts a conversation among the regulars when he hears mention of the ill-fated expedition that climbed nearby Pike’s Peak years before.

Who was really the first to climb Pike’s Peak? And were the members of the expedition really eaten by mountain rats?

The old man claims to know the truth, and proceeds to deliver a blood-chilling tale of an expedition pursued and surrounded by hordes of huge brown spiders as they flee down the mountainside.

1897 was a pretty good year for horror as it also saw the publication of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Fiend of the Cooperage and H G Wells’s Pollock and the Porroh Man. In 1899 the weird horror theme was still going strong in The Strand, when it published Fred M White’s classic of man- and woman-eating vegetation The Purple Horror.

Ah, those were the days!


Suffer the Little Children by Stephen King was first published by Cavalier in February 1972. Miss Sidley is the terror of her schoolrooms. Thin, greying haired, with a vicious tongue and a back obviously held rigid by a metal support under her thin dress, she has complete confidence that she can turn her back on her class and still maintain control. By careful angling of her thick-lensed spectacles, she can see the whole class behind her reflected in the lens.

Trouble makers beware!

Then one day she sees Robert, a persistent troublemaker, change.

In the reflected image he undergoes a bizarre change into something that is clearly not human.

At this early point of the story, I decided that King was working one more take on that old Twilight Zone episode where a man puts on a new pair of glasses and sees the people surrounding him horribly transformed, their true nature’s revealed through ghastly transformations.

But as this is Stephen King writing, he pulls more – much more – from the story before its end.

Shortly before reading this, I’d read a news item about a man slitting the throats of his wife and teenage daughter, an entirely horrible report even against our present background of pandemic, police brutality and race riots which has become the ‘new normal.’ King worked as a teacher, and this story makes interesting social comment about overworked teachers, crowded classrooms and the shocking violence that can erupt in the most prosaic situations.

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The Girl from Tomango by Rick Ferreira:

The Girl from Tomango is that rare thing, a contemporary horror story by a little-known author that instantly surprises with its freshness and invention, presenting the unusual setting of a South Seas island paradise and the mystery of a missing young woman.

After work forces him to break his holiday short and return to London, Sinclair rushes back to Tomango to rejoin his new love, Lily Carew. But the hotel receptionist tells him that Lily has gone, “’She left suddenly, sir. Just like that. Got a job with the film company, I expect… We all said she was better looking than that Carmen Jones girl. We all said – ‘”

Sinclair had left Lily on nearby Turk island when she had insisted that people would talk if they were seen returning to the mainland together; he could leave first, she had told him, and she would arrange to return with another boat.

Is it possible that she’s still there?

On the beach, Sinclair finds the old man who had taken him to Turk island to meet Lily, but the man is reluctant to take him back. Turk island is bad; you must take your own water supply. Besides, there is a bad spirit there. Then the man makes an astonishing confession, and while Sinclair is absorbing this, explains why he believes Sinclair will not find Lily there. He tells him about the carrion crabs:

“They big as turtles but they hide until there is something dead. They no eat the flesh of the living. Never, Mista! But the moment you dead, they know. Then they come marching out, all in rows and rows. They get to the body and then they arrange it. Like Christ on the cross. First they pin the hands and the legs down with big claws that break off easy – the special claws for pinning down de body to de place. Then they use the real ripping claws to tear at de flesh when they get down to de eating.”

Before they set sail for Turk island, the old man flings one morsel of comfort to Sinclair. “You may be right, Mista. Lily – she’s alive, perhaps. More than perhaps. She is a clever, clever girl….”

The Girl from Tomango is a horror story that remains bright in the reader’s memory as a sunny photo on a gruesome picture postcard.


The Pond by Nigel Kneale

Manx screenwriter Nigel Kneale (1922 – 2006) is probably best-known for creating the long-running series of Quatermass stories for TV and cinema. In 1972 his one-off BBC play The Stone Tape broke new ground with its combination of science fiction and the supernatural. Beasts was a series of stand-alone plays which scared the hell out of me when I saw them first, but undoubtedly suffers now from some unfortunately dated visuals. He’s also adapted works by George Orwell, Susan Hill, etc.

His short stories have always been popular among readers of horror fiction.

The Pond concerns a rural taxidermist whose obsession for creating fantastic tableaux in which hundreds of small stuffed animals, arranged in anthropomorphic poses, has led to his completely wiping out the small creatures inhabiting a nearby pond.

This grotesque pastime was particularly favoured by the Victorians. There was a fascinating TV series introduced by noted historian and architectural photographer Lady Lucinda Lambton, which explored many fascinating aspects of Britain’s creepier and downright barmy past, and it’s to my lasting regret that I didn’t videotape the series, as it was never released on DVD. A few episodes can still be found on YouTube, and I recommend them – if you have the stomach for stuffed card-playing rabbits or dead mice in tiny ball gowns.

This story is a very short one, and you don’t need to be an avid reader of horror fiction to guess where its going. Not Kneale’s best, maybe, but grotesque, gruesome and very vivid.