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I won't bother focussing on the so-so, mediocre stories, which are all passably entertaining in their own right, just on the stinkers and the good'uns. THE MAN WHO HATED FLIES, by Charles J. Benfleet: A man asks his friend to prove to him the existence of reincarnation, with unexpected results. A very slight and comic story, but written in a style that's designed to entertain. 3/5 MEN WITHOUT BONES, by Gerald Kersh: Explorers in the South American jungle come across a crashed spaceship. Horror and sci-fi are ably mixed in this exceptionally surprising and finely crafted pulp outing. 4/5 His ivy plant reacts well to this new ingredient in its diet but comes the day when he has to provide more. He experiments with household pets before turning his hand to grave-robbing. Soon the ivy is capable of catching and preparing its own food .... THE COMPUTER, by Rene Morris: A hitman is assigned a job by computer. A simple crime story with futuristic overtones. The problem here that the twist ending is way too familiar for modern readers. 2/5The Terrapin." A mixed bag--on the one hand, the characterization is excellent, and the scenario nightmarish. Too bad the author throws it away for a painfully predictable ending. Case, labeled a classicist by his colleague and friend Ramsey Campbell [ citation needed], uses graphic imagery to convey directly as possible what the character feels [ citation needed]. His work, as in "The Hunter", prefigures the early novels of David Morrell by several years. A resident in an insane asylum explains how he ended up there. Kind of amusing, but not believable. A body with a dismembered corpse in it is going to weigh a lot more than a suitcase with documents in it. THE ASSASSIN, by Raymond Williams: A Norman lord abuses his wife until she can take it no more. She employs an assassin to take revenge upon her husband. A straightforward story loaded with gristle and gore, but badly written too. 2/5

SUITABLE APPLICANT, by Charles Braunstone: A young woman applies for a job as a companion. Perverse sex, cannibalism and a surgical nightmare. All in a day's work for a Pan Horror author, I guess... 3/5

Series: Pan Books of Horror Stories

Tim Stout - The Boy Who Neglected His Grass Snake: The boy is Trevor Cater, an odious, spoilt little brat who wants what he sees, and sulks and whines 'til his parents relent and get it for him. Such is the case with the grass snake which he callously allows to starve to death then discards in the dustbin. The snake's ghost wreaks dreadful vengeance for this ill-treatment, I'm delighted to say. Edward Lucas White (1866-1934) was an American author and poet. Although he wrote a number of historical novels, he is better known for his horror stories, which he based on his own nightmares. This is a really disgusting piece of jungle-set body horror. If you're a fan of David Cronenberg's early movies, you'll love it.

So, to sum up: Best Story - 'Mrs Manifold' by Stephen Grendon; Worst Story - 'Fried Man' by Martin Waddell. The highlight of the collection would have to be the opening story 'The Hunter' by David Cass. As I read it, I could really picture this being made as an Amicus production in the 1960s with Cushing and Lee in the roles of Wetherby and Byron respectively. THE LADY WHO DIDN’T WASTE WORDS is by Hamilton Macallister. It’s short and ambiguous, about a weird train passenger. Plenty of unusual stuff going on here. Chris Massie’s A FRAGMENT OF FACT is the usual spooky-house-on-the-moor stuff which has a few moments of excellence amid the typical ingredients. Flavia Richardson’s BEHIND THE YELLOW DOOR has a predictable plot but some gruelling surgical horror behind it that makes for extremely macabre reading. Angus Wilson’s RASPBERRY JAM is about a couple of grotesque old ladies and has a moment of inconsequential violence that turned my stomach more than anything in the rest of the book. Miss Fletcher's Plum Tree." Almost threw the book across the room at this point. The author is a decent writer, but the story can't decide if it wants to be shota spanking porno or a torture porn movie, and so it goes for both.Like Stephen King's Misery (well the movie anyway, I've never read the book), this is a writer's nightmare, and when that writer writes as beautifully as Hartley it is a joy to read. This one really had me intrigued from the first paragraph. A young girl writes a desperate series of letters to her adult brother in which she pleads for help as she becomes aware of threats against she and her middle brother from her new stepmother. The voice of the young protagonist is engaging, even if the story, as a whole, may not be entirely satisfying. I thought this was going to be a vampire story. I was wrong. The twist is that the lover of the title is a necrophile. It’s a very short story, and adds just the right touch of tasteful depravity to the mix. On its original issue it was seen as something garish and unpleasant, its horrific tales too gruesome and unsettling for many. When you ask many of the present day genre writers – Stephen Jones, Clive Barker, Mark Morris, Phillip Pullman – it is this series they remember that affected them when younger.

Whether the man was a short-fused psycho all along and that the girl’s demise was in the post, or whether she precipitated it by her refusal of his proposal we shall never really know. I personally lean towards the former. Ocr tesseract 5.0.0-1-g862e Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_detected_script_conf 0.9892 Ocr_module_version 0.0.15 Ocr_parameters -l eng Old_pallet IA-WL-2000085 Openlibrary_edition But once the dancer invites the twins into her bed, the already dark tale becomes more Tod Browning’s Freaks, with the twins wreaking a vicious revenge upon the philandering “normals”. Rene Morris - The Baby Machine: Spoiled rotten Malinda has been cheating on her doting husband Peter but now he's had enough. She's to leave immediately - and their baby son is staying with him as it's not as if she's ever behaved like a mother. That duty has been admirably performed by 'Matilda', the robotic baby-machine of Peter's invention. Malinda determines to defy her husband one last time but Matila is pathologically possessive - and rubber tits her to death! This collection was published in 1970 so you know there's not gonna be much political correctness to be found! Prepare to be slightly offended...This is an old-fashioned ghost story about a landlady who receives a visit from the husband she killed years before. Not a classic, but well told.