rbadac (June 26, 1999)[Pearls in Darkness I: 'The Departure'--Selma Robinson]Recommended readings from AND THE DARKNESS FALLS (World; Cleveland, 1946), "edited" by Boris Karloff.
The headpiece to this story notes that it was first published in Harper's Magazine, then reappeared in an O. Henry Memorial Award Collection of Short Stories, and was dramatized for radio and performed by Tallulah Bankhead, Julie Haydon, and Gertrude Lawrence. Impressive credentials indeed, and when you read this you will see why it is a classic.
Norah has seen her betrothed Kenneth on the railway platform. It was to have been their wedding day. Dr. Waldron tries to persuade her that this is impossible, that she must have imagined it.
'If she went to enough of the old places and did all the same things, one time she was bound to be lucky; one time he would be there. It didn't take reason to believe that, so, of course, Dr. Waldron couldn't see. It took intuition...'
The story is quite short, and won't take you five minutes to read. But give yourself ten, five to read and five more to sit there thinking about it.
rbadac
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Robert Suggs (June 29, 1999)
Selma Robinson, ay? Looks like I'm going to have to finally break down and find me a ragged copy of the Boris. I always imagined it must have a 95% chestnut composition.Rob
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rbadac (July 18, 1999)
[Pearls in Darkness II: ' "John Gladwin Says..." ' -Oliver Onions]Ach. Are we getting old? Does the rough-backed beast of a nameless terror retreat before the silvery peal of Eternity's bell? the frozen smiles of corpses melt into mists of shining vistas of memory's meaning? the clutch of dead hands fall away from a rising into tremulous vaults of star-picked wonder, the radiant prophecies in limitless breadth and reel throughout unsounded creation, the whisper of the Absolute?
Relax, that was just a rhetorical question. But there was a golden car that just went by, John Gladwin says, and it's run him off into a hedge, and through it, into a confrontation with his past.
Hedges. Hedges. How is it that such profound inroads insist on being discovered through shrubbery? E.M. Forster's 'The Other Side Of The Hedge.' The shadowy recesses of Robin's Rath. The mazes of country houses. The Hound of the Hedges, a mythological creature that evolved among the hedgerows and grassplots of Northern China, one of the attractions of Charles G. Finney's THE CIRCUS OF DOCTOR LAO (Viking; NY, 1935, illustrated there by Boris Artzybasheff, and by Gordon Noel Fish in the Grey Walls Press edition of 1948). They are usually such civilized borders.
And so it is that civilized people blunder through them. John Gladwin says he saw a ruined church. But once inside, these and other ruins magically reassemble, and a pageant of recollection enfolds him.
rbadac
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Robert Suggs (July 19, 1999)
I'm sorry, could you run that by me one more time?Rob
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rbadac (July 20, 1999)
Hold on, lemme check my notes...okay, July, July, July...hmmm. Schedule One, sub-section b. Yep, that's my next article.No, wait.
Er... (what the--??) ...uhh...
No, actually that was my next FOUR articles, umm...
It's compressed. Yeah, that's it. Do a thingie on the file and expand it.
(Whew !) All right...
(whistle)
Wonder what's on TV?
rbadac
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Julie Long (October 31, 1999)
["As the Darkness Falls" - Karloff ed.]Happy Hallowe'en!
Can anyone tell me what stories are in the 1946 anthology edited by Boris Karloff called "As the Darkness Falls"? Thanks.
Julie
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Dave Kurzman (November 2, 1999)
AND THE DARKNESS FALLS ed. by Karloff (most likely not edited bu someone else). World 1946. Whoops....I was going to list the contents but it's a whopper. 69 stories and poems. If you really need the info, email me and I'll try and scan and email you the contents as jpgs.oOo
paghat (November 2, 1999)
This is one of the half-dozen best American horror anthologies & captures many important magazine pieces that have never been collected elsewhere, not to mention the longish & exceedingly knowledgeable headnotes for each tale. I once asked 4E Ackerman if Boris really could've done such a bang-up anthology personally, & Forrey said he was under the impression that Boris could indeed have done so if he'd had the time or inclination, as he was very well-read in this area. But it was edited by Dr. Edmund Speare.-paghat the ratgirl
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Dave Kurzman (November 2, 1999)
I must need to update my references. Where did you get the Speare info? The info I have indicates Speare as the probable editor of TALES OF TERROR (World, 1943) but unknown for ATDF.oOo
paghat (November 3, 1999)
Actually it was Marv Kaye who told me who edited it; 4E couldn't quite remember. But if you read Boris's introduction (& it's possible that that's the only part of the book he had a hand in) the last sentence credits Speare.-paghat
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rbadac (November 3, 1999)
> I once asked 4E Ackerman if Boris really could've done such a
> bang-up anthology personally, & Forrey said he was under the impression
> that Boris could indeed have done so if he'd had the time or inclination,
> as he was very well-read in this area. But it was edited by Dr. Edmund
> Speare.
>
> -paghat the ratgirlHa ! That solves a longtime mystery for me, anyway !
In case anyone remembers, there is an ongoing series in this group I started called 'Pearls In Darkness,' dealing with choice cuts from ATDF, which anyone is welcome to contribute to. So far, I've done two...
rbadac
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paghat (November 3, 1999)
One of my faves is "The Black Pool" by Frederick Stuart Greene. As the tale's headnote states, Greene was active in magazine fiction from 1915-1917 -- but it doesn't say why he stopped writing. Frederick was one of Blanche Coulton Williams' "discoveries" -- she was the leading short story creative writing professor of the era & the list of her graduates is a Who's Who of the best short story specialists of the 'teens & twenties. "The Black Pool" is a terror tale of guilt-induced hallucinatory ghostly horror which ends with a spectacularly visual image of self-induced doom. It is relentlessly downbeat & Frederick discovered such tales were almost impossible to sell. He kept at it for three years & published a very few stories that read like Faulkner on an especially gloomy day. "The Cat in the Canebreak" if I recall was selected for Year's Best Short Stories whose deeply knowledgeable editor for three years running cited just about everything Greene wrote as significant. I can only guess his own mood was as dark as his fiction; if you're depressive, it is hard to not feel worse & worse each time some editor says something like "This is the best story I've ever rejected. If you write anything with puppies & happy children in it, please try me again." Greene's farewell & fuck-you to the field was the extraordinary horror anthology THE GRIM THIRTEEN made up specifically of stories that had been bounced from magazine to magazine as "too gruesome" for popular consumption. And a gutwrenching anthology it is. Greene lived many, many years & never wrote again.paghat
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Julie Long (November 3, 1999)
Hey there PAgster --Thanks for the info -- by all accounts that I've seen, it seems that Karloff was a lovely guy. Which is probably why his monsters were so good.
Several years ago I had the opportunity to by ATDF - signed by Karloff no less. Like a moron I didn't and have regretted it ever since. Whay could I have been thinking, it's not like they wanted an arm and a leg...
Julie
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rbadac (November 3, 1999)
AAAAAAAHHHHHHH !!!!JULIE !!! That would have been worth AT LEAST two toes !!
rbadac
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rbadac (November 18, 1999)
[Pearls in Darkness IV: 'Telling'--Elizabeth Bowen (Part III was apparently paghat's)]The trappings are dated, but the example is chillingly modern, particularly so as, the headnotes confirm: 'The very youth of the people involved adds immeasurably to the horror.' No one listens to Terry, not even his sister or his brothers, certainly not his father; Terry is 'no good,' in the sense that he is incapable of doing anything, and his family is resigned to this paragon of incompetence in their midst:
'...They all felt him there, for as long as possible didn't notice him...'
And later:
'...They none of them wanted Terry to *feel* how his movements were sneaking movements; when they met him creeping about by himself they would either ignore him or say: "Where are *you* off to?" jocosely and loudly, to hide the fact of their knowing he didn't know...'
How many of you, especially those of you still young, know people like this, begrudgingly 'accepted' in only the most shallow senses, never in the more meaningful ones? Beyond the bare minimum of social interaction, they are like ghosts, and no one knows or cares what they are thinking and feeling, or examines what they say long enough to determine the cast of their motive; or, determining, speaks up in defense of a better one, to them, to others, to anyone. That would mean getting involved, mean first surmounting an instinctive dislike which the 'living' have for such a ghost.
This is a ghost story. This is not a ghost story. This is a story about a human being who is not very good at it, and is getting worse all the time. And what is the price of our rejection? Too civilized to surround the weak and peck them to death, we forget that, in the strength of their madnesses, they will finally see *us* as the weak ones, and will not be as polite.
(AND THE DARKNESS FALLS--World; Cleveland, 1946)
rbadac, sunshine superman
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