#BookReview ‘The 13th Pan Book Of Horror’ edited by Herbert Van Thal

About the book…

The ’13th Pan Book Of Horror’ was published by Pan in 1972. Edited by Herbert Van Thal, welcome to my occasional review feature where I look at how these anthologies reflect social mores of the time, how they interpret what was fearful when they were printed and whether the warm nostalgia that you get, looking backwards, is justified.

The books won’t be looked into in order, because I am picking them up as and when I can afford to-completely kicking myself as I once had the complete series yet a stupid decision had them given up to a second hand bookshop years back…

The unspeakable evil that lies dormant in the mind of man can erupt in diabolical ways…

‘There, completely embedded in the frontal lobe of his brain, was a moving, crawling, festering mass of tiny legs and bodies…’ – The Man Whose Nose Was Too Big, Alan Hillery.

‘Dear God, it was a skull, eyeless, teeth drawn back in a hideous rictus, and the so-piously clasped hands – claws rather – held something…’ – Spinalonga, John Ware.

‘I like to burn children. I like to burn them…’ – Flame, Norman Kaufman.

Ten more horrifying tales that will arouse hidden horror and leave you shuddering…

Book 13 contains the following stories-

‘The Man Whose Nose Was Too Big’ by Alan Hillery

‘Flame!’ by Norman Kaufman

‘The Twins’ by Carl Thomson

‘The Revenge’ by David Farrer

‘The Window Watcher’ by Dulcie Gray

‘Spinalonga’ by John Ware

‘Aggrophobia’ by L.Micallef

‘Awake,Sleeping Tigress’ by Norman Kaufman

‘The Dead End’ by David Case

This book is…..awkward and sexist and racist and very, very dated. It has tales of the ‘other’ where explorations into ‘outbacks’ and ‘jungles’ amongst ‘natives’ which made me cringe, descriptors of black individuals which are extremely problematic and violence on women which was stomach churning.

So, why did I read it to the end?

I asked myself the same question and it is a mix of sheer stubborness, a wanting the stories to improve and also trying to work out why I reacted against it in the way that I did.

I LOVE anthologies, and these days so many have mini biographies and links to other works, and these books come with many names I have never seen before, and no clue what the motivation behind any of the stories are.

So they stand alone, they are brief moments of time and these stories come without baggage.

But, that does not mean recognising that the majority of these stories contain physical and sexual violence against women, tales of revenge and messing with nature. One of the best stories is ‘The Man Whose Nose Was Too Big’, wherein a journalist smells a rat in the gap between a landed gent having a car accident and his death 8 months later and goes investigating the reason for the closed casket ceremony…and rather much wishes he hadn’t.

The stories are painfully English, there is very much a sense of social mores and what is right threaded through the tales, women ‘know their place’, men behave with gusto and tread in places they really, really shouldn’t. Including in, ‘Awake, Sleeping Tigress’ where a young fraudster takes refuge with a woman in her 90’s whose libido has not been awakened her entire life…until now.

The novella which rounds off the book, ‘Dead End’, is a take on ‘not meddling with things outside of our control’, a Dr Moreau-esque tale of ancestry, genetics and ‘savages’. It’s a moral tale with a bitter sting to it -that’s if you can ignore the casual racism and misogony.

Did I enjoy it?

Not really…it is an experiment in nastiness and vicious behaviour so maybe it succeeds as a horror anthology because it left me feeling uncomfortable and thinking how far we have come. It does not necessarily deal with fear rather the distaste for the darker reaches of the human mind and the depravities we perpetrate on each other.

About the editor…

Herbert Maurice van Thal (1904-1983), known as Bertie van Thal, was a British bookseller, publisher, agent, biographer, and anthologist.