Tom Owen – Circus Of Horrors

Tom Owen – Circus Of Horrors (Panther, 1960)

Obsessed by a burning desire to create beauty from ugliness he probed deeper and deeper into the mysteries of surgery using the living as guinea pigs for his sinister experiments.

Kingsley Amis – The Green Man

Kingsley Amis – The Green Man (Panther, 1971)

Brian Frowde

The Green Man’s Maurice Allington is a worldly publican, but haunted. His pub is inhabited by the spirit of Dr. Thomas Underhill, the seventeenth century scholar rumoured to have killed his wife. The local sexton had refused to dig Underhill’s grave. And the rector had declined to officiate at his funeral.

And there are skeletons in the cupboard of Allington’s own domestic affairs – just rattling to get out.

“The main one was somebody called Dr Thomas Underhill who lived here in the later seventeenth century. He was in holy orders, but he wasn’t the parson of the parish; he was a scholar who for some reason gave up his Cambridge fellowship and bought this place. He’s buried in that little churchyard just up road, but he nearly didn’t get buried at all. He was so wicked that when he died the sexton wouldn’t dig a grave for him, and the local rector refused to officiate at his funeral. They had to get a sexton from Royston, and a clergyman all the way from Peterhouse in Cambridge. Some of the people round about said that Underhill had killed his wife, whom he used to quarrel with a lot, apparently, and he was also supposed to have brought about the death of a farmer he’d had trouble with over some land deal ….. both these people were murdered all right, half torn to pieces, in fact, in the most brutal way …..”

“Tale of supernatural terror meets sex-farce” …… It’s all going so well for Maurice Allington, genial, alcoholic landlord of charming country gastro-Pub The Green Man, Fareham, Hertfordshire. As a distraction from his day to day duties, Maurice is on the verge of cracking it as far as persuading understanding wife Joyce to join he and bit-on-the-side Diana in a three-in-a bed romp. But just lately, Maurice has been seeing ghosts, relatively benign ones to begin with, but these are merely the warm-up acts for powerful seventeenth century Black Sorcery wizard Dr. Thomas Underhill who is soon making a nuisance of himself in Maurice’s affairs. Maurice realises that Underhill has grim designs on the life of his young daughter Amy – perhaps the only person on earth he truly cares for – but what chance has he against a dead man who can – and does – raise that most destructive of nature’s forces, the Green Man itself?

Despite his unashamedly Jamesian approach to his ghost story, Amis crams it with incident and introduces so many spectres that the reader’s attention has little chance of wavering. At one point, time literally stands still for all but Maurice and his latest guest, a nondescript young man who, it transpires, is God, and, to put it bluntly, not somebody you’d wish to invest any faith in.

As to the feted “domestic affairs”: There was much feverish anticipation when the BBC2 ran it’s three-part adaptation as the sub-plot involving Allington’s (Albert Finney) attempts to get wife Linda Marlowe to agree to sharing a bed with he and Sarah Berger came to a head. Maurice eventually gets his wicked wish, but should have realised that, with luck like his, it was always going to go * ahem* tits up …

See Vault Of Evil’s Green Man thread for more

Stephen Gilbert – Willard

Stephen Gilbert – Willard (Panther, 1971, originally Michael Joseph, 1968 as “Ratman’s Notebooks“)

The narrator (unidentified) is a clerk in the company founded by his late father which now belongs to former employee Mr. Jones. Nagged by his ailing mother and shunned by girls, the lonely outcast begins to train a colony of rats his mother has ordered him to destroy before they infest the property. Fortunately, the old girl hasn’t got long to go and, shortly before her death, Ratman sends eight of his fast expanding army on a mission to bite through the tyres of Jones’ car after the skinflint “usurper” refuses him a wage rise.

Once his mother is consigned to the soil, the raids become more ambitious. Led by Socrates – the most devoted and responsive rodent – they rob the Malcolmson’s place and the lady of the house informs the press of her encounter with “a rat the size of a man”. This prompts our hero to dig out a theatrical mask to wear on future missions. All goes well until Socrates is killed and a new leader emerges. Ben – as eulogised by Michael Jackson in one of his creepiest love songs – has dominion over all the rats and can apparently read. He bugs the narrator out something terrible and, once they’ve murdered his worst enemy, he abandons them at the scene of the crime. He’s going to start a new life, enjoy his recent inheritance, marry the girl and … Oh. Maybe Ben doesn’t like the idea of that too much.

There’s something about this novel that strikes me as very “Best of Pan Horror Stories” circa ‘67-70, and it certainly screams “Film me!”. Offsetting the murders and mayhem are episodes of macabre humour and heartbreaking sadness as, having found happiness for the first time in a wretched, downtrodden, lonely existence, the clerk watches helpless as his best friend is killed and then finds himself usurped all over again.

Peter Von Greenaway – The Medusa Touch

Peter Von Greenaway – The Medusa Touch (Panther, 1975: Gollancz 1973)

John Morlar, a novelist, is brutally battered almost to death in his London flat. Inspector Cherry seeks clues interviewing Morlar’s psychiatrist and reading Morlar’s books and journals. But instead of pointers to the would-be killer’s identity, Cherry begins to discover the terrifying truth behind a series of hitherto unexplained disasters. The apocalyptic crash of a Jumbo jet into a London skyscraper … the tragic failure of an American moon shop … the mysterious loss of a submarine with all hands – these and many other apparently unconnected catastrophes turn out to have Morlar as their common focus. But how can one man create such destruction?

And Where Will He Strike Next?

“I’m the man who has learned to invoke disaster”

Basis for the gloomy film of same name starring Richard Burton as the bandaged tragedy controller.

Inspector Cherry is investigating what appears to be the attempted murder of novelist John Morlar. He’s been battered so violently with a bust of Napoleon that he no longer has a face and the doctor even pronounced him dead. While Morlar is fighting for his life – or is it his death? – in an oxygen tent, Cherry follows his leads. His first port of call is Morlar’s psychiatrist, Zonfeld, whose name recurs in the author’s splenetic journal. Meanwhile, the TV gives obsessive round the clock coverage to a lunar disaster and an air-crash. Cherry gets the bizarre feeling that these have some bearing on his case and can’t help thinking that his sergeant’s throwaway remark – “The World’s falling apart” – has great significance.

Cherry progresses to Covent Garden to Mr. Townley, publisher of Morlar’s novels as well as such literary gems as Virginia Ruislip’s I Was Tutankhamen’s Mistress. Morlar sold well until his fourth novel, an all-too realistic depiction of a Fascist Britain. Townley tells Cherry “His last four novels weren’t just thrillers – they were terrifying.” His journals – Von Greenaway quotes from them extensively – suggest that the guy is a one-man Sex Pistols, railing against the aspirations of the middle classes, pop stars, Liberals, Nazi’s, Priests … all self-deluded, no difference between the lot of them.“The whole bloody country is under sedation, The Archers, Librium, Coronation Street, funny men with big heads and little shorts looking for goals, opinion polls, Top Twenty, methahexadryne …. G. B. is drugged to the eyeballs and doesn’t know it.”

…. his parents, the Church of England, the army, chorus girls, Hackney (especially Mare Street), “contemptible satirists”, the import-export industry, John Buchan, “experts”, Broadstairs, cars (”excrescences from the very anus of technology”), the left, the right, Sesame Street, The Imperial War Museum (”Arse-holes”), the judicial system …

God, but you can’t help but admire Morlar his all-consuming, phenomenal rage – from afar, at least. Those who come into his orbit have to watch their step as they have a nasty habit of dying in mysterious circumstances. From his controlled rants at Zonfeld we learn that he truly believes his unasked for telekinetic talent destroyed his nanny, his parents, a sadistic bully of a teacher and a number of pupils at his school,. No suspicion ever fell on him, but he was always in the vicinity when the tragedies occurred. In the case of his parents, they were forced over a cliff when their parked car rolled toward them under its own volition, after which his aunt adopted him – “she was the only creature I ever came near to loving” – and he had a relatively quiet time of it until Mr. Copley the history teacher dared to pick on him for staring out of the window during one of his ghastly lessons (the ‘leaves’ incident in the film). “Thinking of him now I can’t imagine a more dashing colonel commanding a frilly regiment of the gay liberation front” sneers Morlar. And so it goes on. The list of Morlar’s victims grow with his frustration and disillusion: his army regiment, a pompous Tory-ite judge (prior to his novelist incarnation, he’s a lawyer until he commits career suicide), his wife and her lover – and that’s just him warming up. As he approaches his fiftieth birthday, he pays his first visit to Zonfeld and it acts as a catalyst. In the face of the psychiatrist’s initial disbelief in his master of disaster demeanor, Morlar decides some spectacular demonstrations are called for. Which is how a jumbo jet comes to crash into Centre Point.

Once Morlar has developed a taste for staging spectacular proof of his power, the disasters pile up and, as he lies all but dead in hospital, he prepares to take the battle to God. The Dean of St. Pauls, an abhorrent publicity junkie, has launched a crusade against the very evil he doesn’t believe in and a forthcoming Rally is to be launched from the Cathedral. Cherry, Duff and their boss try to persuade the old fool of Morlar’s intentions, so the Dean gets onto his buddies in the media and tips them off that he’s going to perform an exorcism on this strange novelist chappie. That doesn’t cheer Morlar up one bit.

The novel ends in a riot of falling masonry and takes it’s leave on a very unpleasant final note.