Welsh Tales of Terror

R. Chetwynd-Hayes
Fontana Books

Inside what is probably the single most stereotypical portrayal of Welsh cliches ever to adorn a book cover this anthology of stories set in Wales, written by Welsh writers or regarding Welsh folklore turned out to be utterly fantastic.

Let's start by getting the various folktales out of the way.  These, here, take the form of teeny little half page stories relating things like 'The Brown Hobgoblin of Bedd Gelert', 'Dead Man's Candles', 'The Devil's Tree', 'Corpse Candles' and more.  They're fun little hints at the depth of Welsh folklore but little more than that.  For those wishing for a more in depth examination that's catered for with a chapter taken from Marie Trevelyan's early 20th century study 'Folk-Lore and Folk-Stories of Wales' that explores the phenomena of the 'Ceffyl-dwr' in 'Water Horses and the Spirits of the Mist'.

Arthur Machen

So, onto the stories.  There are a number of very enjoyable stories here but the book is helped no end by an exemplary opening trio of tales.  First up is Glyn Jones' 'Jordan', a story of an attempted swindle and the grim and unpleasant fate that befalls the perpetrators.  The second story is by one of my favourite authors, John Christopher, and is the first thing of his I've read that was neither science-fiction nor post-apocalyptic.  'A Cry of Children' is a subtle and deeply moving story with a brutal and breathtaking finale.  The golden trio culminates with Arthur Machen's 'The Shining Pyramid' with its folk horror and proto-Lovecraftian rural horrors from beyond.

There's a bit of a dip next with Angus Wilson's 'Animals or Human Beings' which despite being written in a very agreeable and jaunty style has a story that really does nothing interesting which is also the case with the ghost story 'The Man on a Bike' by Hazel F. Looker that follows it.

Regular readers of my write-us will know that I'm a bit of a sucker for a happy story and so in many ways 'The Morgan Trust' by Richard Bridgeman (a pseudonym of sci-fi writer L.P. Davies) ticked lots of my boxes with its story of a man on an obsessive quest finding what he's looking for in two remote Welsh towns.

Caradoc Evans

Obsession is also at the heart of two more tales of Caradoc Evans' 'Be This Her Memorial' takes religious fervour in a small town to its extreme and 'The Lost Gold Mine' by Hazel F. Looker has a more obvious object of fascination.

Dorothy K. Haynes' contribution 'Mrs Jones' is a repurposed folktale of a woman kidnapped and forced to cook for the little folk of Gower.  It's lifted from the doldrums by the matching belligerence of both its victim and her erstwhile rescuer whose dislike of the woman and her domineering ways could be her downfall.

Ronald Seth's 'The Reverend John James and the Ghostly Horseman' is another story that feels like a repurposed folktale but unlike its predecessor has little charm or wit in its telling.

The books second story by Glyn Jones, 'Cadi Hughes', is a bit of a disappointment after the opener.  It has a great opening and a couple of fun moments but is ultimately a bit cruel and vindictive.

Richard Hughes

The final three tales pretty much capture the Wales I grew up in the 1970s dealing as they do with coal mining, religion and folk horror.  Jack Griffith deals with the first of these as he traps a group of men underground in 'Black Goddess' and we're left to decide for ourselves whether the supernatural aspect is more real than the insanity.  'The Stranger' by Richard Hughes drops a small demon into the household of a preacher and his peg-legged wife.  It tries for laughs amidst the temptations and the piety but I thought it all got more than a little jumbled at the end.

R. Chetwynd-Hayes

The book closes with editor R. Chetwynd-Hayes' own contribution, 'Lord Dunwilliam and the Cwn Annwn'.  It's the most 1970s thing here by far as it's Regency period setting and wild snowy moorland setting filled with obnoxious aristocrats, cackling peasants, beautiful maidens and ancient powers put me in mind of so many of my favourite Hammer movies.

I know there are lots of other books in this series covering different areas of the country (and indeed parts of the world) compiled by different editors all of which are now on my wants list but truthfully they are all going to have to be something special to live up to this one.

The Ghost's Companion

Peter Haining
Puffin Books

One of the most prolific of the anthologists of the 1970s this is one of many books wirth Peter Haining's name on that reside on my bookshelves.  This one is a fairly typical selection but one based around the conceit that each story is inspired by or reflects the authors personal experience of the supernatural.

The book features 15 authors most of whom are fairly common in these books such as M.R. James, H.Russell Wakefield and Algernon Blackwood but here they are joine dby others such as Arthur Machen, fantasy legend Fritz Leiber and sci-fi master Ray Bradbury.

It's James who opens the book with his tale of a haunted schoolmaster in 'A School Story'.  it's a regular in collections and it's easy to see why as it's exceedingly fast to read with an enigmatic conclusion although for me it's weakened by the silly and unnecessary coda.

H. Russell Wakefield

Wakefield's 'The Red Lodge' is a bit of a treat as he tells a haunted house story where each member of the house is being terrified by whatver is there but we only see the father's experience first hand with his wife and son's experienced only via his observations.  It's a solid, creepy tale with a sudden and tumutuous ending.

'The Furnished Room' by American author O Henry is one I came across quite reently in another anthology.  It's a short story teling of a young man's search for his lady love culnminating in a lonely lodging room.

Next is another of those regulars with Algernon Blackwood's, 'A Haunted Island' where a young student left alone on a remote North American island where he has a terrifying experience with some ghostly natives.

Rudyard Kipling's contribution to the anthology is 'My Own True Ghost Story' from his time in India.  It's tempting to believe the word 'true' as this wonderfully written but ultimately mundane story does have the ring of truth to it.

Rudyard Kipling

This is my first experience of the next author, the fantastically named Lafcadio Hearn, whose 'The Boy Who Drew Cats' is more of a Japanese folktale than a period ghost story.  It's quite convincing in it's disguise and with that in mind is successful, as a ghost story though it's less so.

I've not read a great sdeal by Welsh author Arthur Machen but what I have read I've loved .  For many he's most famous as the author of the 'Angel's of Mons' story that was so embraced by the public during the first world war.  This is another aset during that conflict as a German sergeants past comes back to haunt him.

Moving forward to the next war we have Daphne Du Maurier's 'Escort' that finds a British tramp steamer saved from certain doom at the hands, or rather the torpedos of a German U-Boat by the timely arrival of a ghostly frigate  and this nautical theme is continued by Hammond Innes' 'South Sea Bubble' which pits a retiree against the ghosts of his newly aquired ketch.

Richard Hughes

Richard Hughes is another writer that I've enjoyed in the past and here his story, 'The Ghost' is a keen but brief treat unlike Dennis Wheatley who was one of those authors whose presence was inescapable in the 1970s and 80s and I've tried to read some of his books as a kid having seen the Hammer versions but couldn't get into them.  As an adult I still find him a little dry and his contribution 'The Case of the Red-Headed Women' is a not entirely successful haunted house talem with a particularly poor ending.

Fantasy writer Fritz Leiber provides a story that is about as far away from a sword swinging escapade as you can get and relocates the ghost story away from it's comfort zone in the manor house and the countryside and into the grit and grime of the city in a very entertaining short tale.

Joan Aiken

One of my favourite authors provides the penultimate story. Joan Aiken's 'Aunt Jezebel's House', written when the author was just 17 is a delightful little tale of that feels more like the opening chapter of a longer story than a complete tale in itself before the book ends with a Ray Bradbury short that owes little to the ghost story genre and is far more a result of Bradbury's sci-fi roots and reads more as an alien invasion story than anything else.  It is, as you'd imagine, very well written and buiklds beautifully to a satisfying climax that is diminished somewhat by my puzzlement over it's inclusion in this particular collection.

In all a very satisfying collection assembled by a very able anthologist.  I like a mix of known and unkown (to me) authors in my anthologies and this is a little heavy on the former but with only four stories that I had already read it was a great opportunity to experience work that I was unfamiliar with by a number of top notch authors and that can never be a bad thing.