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Title: Bar the Doors
Series: ———-
Editor: Alfred Hitchcock
Rating: 3 of 5 Stars
Genre: Crime Fiction
Pages: 198
Words: 59K
The subtitle for this book is “13 Great Tales of Terror by Masters of the Macabre”. This collection uses a lot of short stories that didn’t appear in Hitchcock’s own mystery magazine and it shows. Not that they are in any way bad, but they don’t have that “curated by Hitchcock” feel that I get from other collections.
Also, while I have kept this in the “crime fiction” fiction, the tales of terror subtitle is much more accurate. Not all are supernatural. Some are blatantly physical, such as The Storm, in which a woman comes home a week early only to find her husband is out. And she finds a woman’s body in a moving trunk with a distinctive ring on it’s finger. The story ends with her being gaslit by her husband and seeing that same ring on his finger. It was just plain creepy but nothing supernatural. Then you have Pollock and the Porroh Man which is ALL about the supernatural. A man takes a voodoo man’s woman and then tries to kill the voodoo man and in the process gets cursed. He then kills the voodoo man, so there is no way to lift the curse. The head of the voodoo man follows him back to England and haunts him until he goes insane and he kills himself. Lovely, eh?
I was particularly interested in this collection because of the inclusion of two authors, Ambrose Bierce and Augustus Derleth. Both were small time contributors to the King in Yellow and Cthulhu mythologies and I was hoping that these stories would give me a taste of what they were like. I was not impressed. Derleth’s story, The Metronome, was a simple ghost story about a murdered boy murdering the step-mother who had killed him. I actually had to go and read the story again before writing this because I had completely forgotten what it was about a mere week after reading it. It wasn’t bad but there wasn’t a single memorable thing about it. Bierce’s The Damned Thing, was about an invisible monster that killed a man in front of his friend the story is the friend relating it all at the inquest. The inquest ends with the jury deciding the man who was killed was killed by a mountain lion. While nothing spectacular, it did have that fatalistic feel of “nothing I say or does matters” which I’ve come to associate very strongly with Cosmic Horror.
I did have a bad scan of this, as it was quite apparent that someone had simply scanned the pages from the original paperback and sent it out into the wild without cleaning it up at all. So there would be random “Authors Name Page X” or “Story Name Page X” scattered throughout the text. That detracted from the flow of reading through this smoothly. Kind of like hitting a nail in tree while chopping it down using a chainsaw. If you’ve ever had that experience, you’ll know exactly what I mean.
Finally, the cover. The version I had originally came with some lame picture of Hitchcock in a rain coat in the rain at a doorway about to enter. It was blasé. I chose this cover because it’s very creepy looking and is actually semi-related to the story “The Kill”.
★★★☆☆
Table of Contents:
- SPEAKING OF TERROR Alfred Hitchcock
- POLLOCK AND THE PORROH MAN H. G. Wells
- THE STORM McKnight Malmar
- MOONLIGHT SONATA Alexander Woollcott
- THE HALF-PINT FLASK DuBose Heyward
- THE KILL Peter Fleming
- THE UPPER BERTH F. Marion Crawford
- MIDNIGHT EXPRESS Alfred Noyes
- THE DAMNED THING Ambrose Bierce
- THE METRONOME August Derleth
- THE PIPE-SMOKER Martin Armstrong
- THE CORPSE AT THE TABLE Samuel Hopkins Adams
- THE WOMAN AT SEVEN BROTHERS Wilbur Daniel Steele
- THE BOOK Margaret Irwin
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