The Horror Horn, the Best Horror Stories of E. F Benson (Panther, 1974)
The Bruce Pennington cover sold it to me immediately. I had seen his art on plenty of other Panther horror paperbacks - including this selection from Clark Ashton Smith (see the top three) - and I was expecting stories in a similar vein; lurid tales of necromancy and other-worldly terror.
Alas, a picture of small hairy humanoids cavorting in the snow might have illustrated the title story a little more appropriately. I swallowed my disappointment and read the rest... and became a convert.
E. F. Benson may not have been a proponent of highly imaginative cosmic horror as practiced by Lovecraft, Smith, or Hodgson, but he was certainly versatile. While this 'best of 'collection does include ghost stories and other traditional fare (including two excellent stories of vampirism, 'The Room in the Tower' and 'Mrs. Amsworth'), it does have more original tales. Notable examples include 'Caterpillars', where ghostly swarms of the titular larvae serve as a supernatural vector for cancer, and 'Negotium Perambulans' (a favourite of Lovecraft), which features a slug-like elemental that reduces its victim to "no more than a rind of skin in loose folds over projecting bones".
He wasn't as staid as some of his more traditional contemporaries either, slipping in a bit of grue on occasion. Here is what one of the subhuman horrors does to an animal it catches:
"..with a grunt of anger she seized the leg in her other hand, and, as a man may pull from its sheath a stem of meadow-grass, she plucked it off the body, leaving the torn skin hanging round the gaping wound. Then putting the red, bleeding member to her mouth she sucked at it as a child sucks a stick of sweetmeat. Through flesh and gristle her short, brown teeth penetrated, and she licked her lips with a sound of purring. Then dropping the leg by her side, she looked again at the body of the prey now quivering in its death-convulsion, and with finger and thumb gouged out one of its eyes. She snapped her teeth on it, and it cracked like a soft-shelled nut."
Mmmm... yummy.
It saddens me that a complete collection of E. F. Benson's horror is not currently available in an affordable, widely available manner. His two brothers' (inferior) ghost stories were collected and published by Wordsworth a few years ago, and if they can afford to publish the huge collection of Oliver Onion's ghost stories in one volume as they did last year, one would hope they'll eventually get around to publishing a catch-all collection for the better known of the Benson brothers.
Until then, I have my treasured, tatty, Panther paperback.
Note: A subset of all three of the Benson brothers' supernatural and horror stories are available online here for the curious.
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