Third Black Book of Horror ed. by Charles Black

[Calenture]

The Third Black Book of Horror edited by Charles Black

Mortbury Press, Crowswing, 2008

The most recently published of Charles Black's testaments of love to the old Pan Books of Horror - a love clearly shared by the writers who have contributed to this series.

As said before, I can hardly post these as reviews, having stories in the books myself; but here's the first in a series of synopses. Charles definitely deserves a medal for putting so much time and effort into publishing this series. I'm sure Herbert van Thal would have approved.

Takashi’s Last Symphony by Gary McMahon: Jake has had an argument with Sandra, who hasn’t come home, and he’s coming down with the flu; so this is possibly not the best time to visit his composer friend Takashi. Takashi is a man ‘living on the edge’; an abused child tortured by his mother, forced to practise endlessly at the piano; although she's dead, he still nurses a hatred for her and now, half-deaf, lives alone at the top of an apartment building, writing music and assembling grotesque pieces of sculpture with ‘found objects’.

At first Jake thinks his friend is in a good mood; he’s just completed another sculpture.

Then Jake looks more closely at the sculpture.

This one is dedicated to horror writer John Llewellyn Probert, and is a very apt choice of story as it probably appeals to Probert’s (professional?) fascination with the surgical possibilities inherent in much horror fiction - possibilities explored in his own stories.

A Sense of Movement by David A Riley: This was the first story in the book that I turned to – not for the first time, as Riley has been delivering well-told and interesting stories since the Seventies. This one tells the story of Malcolm, who’s just had a punch-up with Bill Sutcliffe in one of the local pubs. Malcolm had won the fight, but then lost his girlfriend Linda. Making his way home, he notices the vague movement in one of the upper floor windows of a derelict house.

Later Malcolm learns from a workman that the house had belonged to local loony, Osbert Cunningham, who’d practised black magic, believed he could achieve immortality, and been shut up in an asylum for his pains...

Visit Charles Black's website: Mortbury Press

Or Buy the book at Amazon

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Last Night by Joel Lane: Loving Connor isn’t easy, and this vignette takes the form of a sort of unwritten letter from his companion. This form of narrative makes the story very personal and intense, like looking over someone’s shoulder as they make an entry in a diary. It lends the story a sleazy and convincing feel; when the pubs are described, you can almost feel the damp rings and crumbs on the tables.

As the narrative progresses, there are suggestions that something is going on which is more sinister and disturbing than a usual lover's resentment over selfishness and drunkenness. Who are the two strangers who stop Connor in the pub? What do they want, and what’s wrong with their hands? Intense and disturbing as good poetry in a grubby notebook, this one will stay with you.

Widow’s Weeds by Paul Newman: Nicholas de Vries behaves strangely when his friend Tarling visits him one evening, creeping about in stockinged feet to surprise someone he thinks is at the door or peering through the window at shapes moving outside in the bushes.

Set in the days of British Colonial rule we learn how De Vries had wanted to escape from a dry-as-dust office job and secured a position in Bali. At first wondering if he’s sacrificed his home comforts for ‘dried meat, rice and pigs,’ his expectations are confounded by the beauty of his new home. But soon the island’s peace is disrupted when a small incident blows out of proportion and he finds himself involved in the stamping out of a native uprising. It’s after one of the bloodiest battles that he sees the old woman with the dead baby in her arms, who spits one incomprehensible word at him like a curse.

And later he learns of the leyal, a monstrous demon hag that in Balinese myth haunts the jungle.

As his friend returns to the house one evening, he sees something which might have been a trick of the light, “a slightly paler patch of whiteness in the deepening gloom of the east wall…”

Visit Charles Black's website: Mortbury Press

Or Buy the book at Amazon