The Pan Book of Horror Stories

Selected by Herbert van Thal

Reviewing anthologies is always a tricky proposition. By their nature, an anthology is uneven and unpredictable. Every story has the potential to be the best thing you’ve ever read or the worst thing you’ve ever read. The strength of the format is that, when you do hit a dud, its over quickly and you can move on to the next selection. Without a strong thematic throughline provided by a single author, a collection of short stories may end up more miss than hit, depending on the editor’s tastes.

In 1959, the publisher Pan McMillan produced an anthology of horror stories that would grow year by year into a cottage industry of pulp paperbacks, with lurid covers and lurid contents. In 2017, Pan McMillan reissued the original anthology with a cool new modernist cover. Fellow Avocadoan Robert Maitland, Architect picked up a copy and eventually passed it on to me, knowing that we share general sentiments towards the horror genre.

There are 22 stories in this anthology, written by authors whose names are unfamiliar to me for the most part, although genre stalwarts like Bram Stoker, Seabury Quinn, an uncredited H. P. Lovecraft, and Nigel Kneale (better known for his work in television) appear in the alphabetically arranged table of contents. This probably says a lot about my own tastes, but the best story in the lot is Lovecraft’s, here credited to Hazel Heald as it was when originally published in Weird Tales, but with content that is almost entirely from Providence’s favorite son. “The Horror in the Museum” is a typical Lovecraft tale with oogie monsters, eldritch lore, and appropriate gruesomeness, and I must admit that oogie monsters is one of my favorite elements in horror.

Many of the other stories are simple crime tales, entirely lacking in anything I would call “horror.” For example the opening story, Joan Aiken’s “Jugged Hare,” concerns a love triangle involving a wealthy older man, a bored young woman, and a business partner, which plays out in a predictable fashion. Seabury Quinn, a contemporary of Lovecraft’s who succeeded him in popularity in life if not in legacy, provides “The House of Horror,” and includes some true gruesomeness, but no monsters, and so many lame contrivances that the story ultimately fails as horror or even basic entertainment.

But as I said, even when there’s a dud, there’s another story to read. Peter Fleming’s “The Kill” concerns a disputed inheritance and a possible werewolf who fully embraces the philosophy of “eat the rich.” I quite enjoyed that one. Hester Holland and Flavia Richardson both make use of the young woman hired as secretary trope, but Holland’s “The Library” does so with subtlety and suggestion that Richardson’s “Behind the Yellow Door” eschews for the aforesaid gruesomeness.

The undercurrent in too many of these tales is the racism of the period. I was warned to avoid George Fielding Eliot’s “The Copper Bowl” because of it, and while “The Copper Bowl” was extreme in that regard, its far from the only story marred by it. Bram Stoker’s “The Squaw” is just as bad, albeit about Native Americans instead of Asians. Oscar Cook’s “His Beautiful Hands” is a dreadful story where a foreign wife mutilates her musician husband’s hands, and her motive for doing so is essentially her foreign ancestry. Its more than a little off-putting, and casual racism rears its ugly head in most of the stories in the collection. Too often to make the collection all that much fun to read. I was constantly reminded that, while Lovecraft is justly notorious for his racism, he was not unique. But also, he died in 1937 and this collection was originally published in 1959.  

There’s some good writing in these stories, and definite highlights, but overall I struggled. Its good practice, I think, to know your history, whether that is actual, anthropological, artistic, or fictional. Every story in the Pan Book of Horror Stories adds to my education, and for that I don’t regret reading it. And I remain grateful for the opportunity to do so, but I’m looking forward to the other book Maitland sent me, Mysteries of the Worm: The Cthulhu Mythos Stories of Robert Bloch. That I believe I will have a lot more fun reading.