The Pan Book of Horror Stories

Product Information

Dulce Gray - The Fly: Arthur and Maria Pontney, middle-aged suburbanites, their marriage a sham, united in mutual loathing. Your typical Pan couple in other words. He's having an affair with secretary Mabel, a girl half his age. Maria despises sex ,so the silly bitch is welcome to him as far as she's concerned. But she still wants to kill him. If only she could hypnotise him like that stage magician she saw, make him jump out of the window. And flies. He hates flies so she'll have to find a little duty for them ...

Just to mix things up a bit, this one is a poem. A morbidly humorous tale of uxoricide. Very enjoyable. I feel that I’m cheating a little with this first review because I actually read the book some years ago and this is taken from my basic notes, but I will be reading from volume two onwards - now. His collection Brotherly Love and Other Tales of Faith and Knowledge was published by Pumpkin Books in the late 1990s.

The Books

The Physiology of Fear’ by C.S. Forester – Experiments involving fear are carried out by a Nazi. Fascinating characters and situation. The eleventh volume in this series is another varied selection, this time perhaps with a little less of the squirm-inducing sadism that was such a stark element in the previous few volumes. Not that tasteless grizzly violence is absent. After all, you do get a brutally extended act of infanticide courtesy of regular contributor Dulcie Gray. I'LL LOVE YOU - ALWAYS, by Adobe James: A man buys an old Civil War mansion meaning to renovate it but soon falls foul of a succubus. James seemed to have a thing for sexy horror stories and this tale of a nymphomaniac ghost is no different. Contains a spectacularly politically incorrect ending. 3/5

THE RETURN, by G. M. Glaskin: A 17-year-old girl, dozing in the grass, is assailed by a horrible sight. Verbose, purple prose thought = a chore to read. 1/5 My first foray into the cult world of PBHS, and it's a mixed bag. The novella that opened the book is really very good stuff-pulpy and predictable, but very well written. So far the rest of the work is just...meh. It's not violent or extreme enough to be novel or transgressive; it's more of a general vibe of pornographic and shoddy bloodletting. It's kind of like watching a video nasty: The real crime is less in the content (I've read worse in Richard Laymon and Ed Lee), and more in the utter ineptness of the, ahem, execution. A cat gets its revenge on a loudmouthed American tourist who inadvertently killed its kitten, in a tourist torture chamber.Stewart seems to have a fondness for the name Mason as here's a whole family of them. Although the mother won't be seeing the outside of a mental hospital any time soon ... Dulcie Gray was a major British stage actress who switched to writing and was pretty good at that too. She came up with a couple of classics for the Pan Books and this is one. The fat 15 year old babysitter ends up taking her anger out on the baby, naturally, and it's a really horrific scene. Don't think anyone would publish this now. The Pan Books stories features a number of evil fat people. Like I say, don't look for any PC here.