NINE HORRORS AND A DREAM BY JOSEPH PAYNE BRENNAN [1958]

 OCTOBER IS THE PERFECT TIME FOR HORROR SHORT STORIES. 

And short stories are my favourite way to imbibe horror in its written form.  One of the masters of the form was Joseph Payne Brennan (1918 - 1990) and NINE HORRORS AND A DREAM is one of his horror story collections from 1958.  I've been reading a nice paperback edition from Dover Books which was reprinted last year and contains one of my favourite horror stories of all-time.  "SLIME" has been a favourite horror story of mine since I first read it in Les Daniels' classic book on horror entitled "LIVING IN FEAR" back in the early 1980s.  "SLIME" is the best example of a "blob" story in fiction, I think.  

"It was a great gray-black hood of horror moving over the floor of the sea.  It slid through the soft ooze like like a monstrous mantle of slime obscenely animated with questing life."

Probably the closest cinematic approximation of this story is "The Raft" sequence in CREEPSHOW 2.  "SLIME" opens this short story collection in the classic manner.  Following "SLIME" is a rather slight but enjoyable tale called "LEVITATION" which is about a hypnotist who . . . well . . . levitates people from his audience.  If you've seen OFFICE SPACE, you know the twist to this story.  "THE CALAMANDER CHEST" is a wonderfully eerie story that I've never read before.  Ernest Maax buys an antique chest made of dark brown, black-striped wood from a dealer who seems a little too happy to get rid of it cheaply.  Maax brings the chest home and inspects it for defects but it's a very well-made, undamaged empty wooden chest.  

"Then one evening his attention was returned to it in a very startling manner.  He was sitting up, reading, late in the evening, when for some reason his eyes lifted from his book and he looked across the room toward the corner where he had placed the chest.  A long white finger protruded from under its lid.   He sat motionless, overwhelmed with sudden horror, his eyes riveted on this appalling object.  It just hung there, unmoving, a long pale finger with a heavy knuckle bone and a black nail."

Ooo, creepy!  Another excellent tale in the collection is "ON THE ELEVATOR" which opens with an example of Brennan's evocative prose:

"The storm had been building up far out at sea since early morning; by evening the full fury of it broke against the beach fronts.  Mountainous gray waves rushed up the slopes of sand, washed across the boardwalks and churned into streets which paralleled the shore.  With the thundering waves came an icy rain and winds of gale velocity.  As the evening wore on, the storm raged unabated."

Glorious prose which places you right into the feeling of the tale.  Of course, once the scene had been established, Brennan turns up the creep-o-meter:

"Somewhere at sea the violence of the storm had wrenched the rotted remains of a ship from its resting place in the ocean muck and now bits of the wreckage hurtled shoreward with the waves. . . . Whatever was cast up, however, remained totally unseen, for there was no one foolhardy enough to prowl the shore while such a storm still raged."

The night clerk on duty in the lobby of the Atlas Hotel on Ocean Street is totally absorbed in reading his novel when he hears the front door open and feels the cold, damp air hit him.  When the air doesn't stop, he looks up from his book to see the door is still wide open and there are muddy wet footprints leading across the lobby floor.  What shambling thing has the ocean thrown up that now walks about in the night?!?!  Another great story which has a bit of a Lovecraftian air is "CANAVAN'S BACK YARD".  Canavan is an antiquarian (shades of M.R. James too) who buys an "isolated old house on the outskirts of town" . . . is there any other kind??? . . . from which he sets up a combined second-hand bookshop and combined living quarters.  "Behind the ramshackle old house in which he lived and ran his shop stretched a long and desolate yard overgrown with brambles and high brindle-colored grass.  Several decayed apple trees, jagged and black with rot, added to the scene's dismal aspect."  The narrator came up Canavan several times staring out his back window at the overgrown yard as if mesmerized and finally he is drawn into the high grass which seems to stretch dimensions into seeming miles and in which he almost becomes lost.  The grisly past history of the property is later discovered to be the source of the land's curse.  

NINE HORRORS AND A DREAM is a slim volume; only 106 pages fro tip to tail.  However, it's got some terrific stuff in it; several of the stories classics of horror fiction.  A nice volume of chills you can devour in one sitting.