Customer Reviews

The Year's Best Horror Stories: Series II

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Like many of the earlier volumes of this series, copies of `The Year's Best Horror Stories: Series II' (1974) in good condition can go for a premium price. Should you find a copy at a more affordable price point, it may be worth picking up, although there are at most 4- 5 good stories in this volume.

My rundown of the contents:

Brian Lumley provides two entries. `David's Worm' is a tongue-in-cheek tale of a monster on the loose in the English countryside. `Haggopian' is more grim in tenor; a reporter interviews a well-known deep-sea explorer who has developed a disturbing affinity for grotesque forms of aquatic life.

There are also two entries by J. Ramsey Campbell (he later dropped the `J'). Both are underwhelming exercises in `psychological' horror. `Napier Court' deals with a sickly young woman who decides to have a nervous breakdown in a haunted house, while `The Old Horns' sees a man on holiday at the English shore drawn to a strange patch of local forest.

Gary Brandner's `The Price of A Demon' is a decent enough tale of modern witchcraft, while Basil Coppersmith's `The Knocker at the Portico' adheres to the themes of classic ghost stories. `The Animal Fair' by Robert Bloch is a surprisingly good tale about a carnival sideshow traveling around the bleak landscape of the Midwest.

T. K. Brown the Third provides `Haunts of the Very Rich', a satirical look at rich folks who discover their Fantasy Island vacation experience is not the one they signed up for. `The Long-Term Residents', by Kit Pedler, sees an overworked scientist vacationing at an unusual B & B; it was too low-key and oblique for my tastes. `Like Two White Spiders' by Eddy C. Bertin, is one of the better reworkings of the traditional `Hands of Horror' theme.

The anthology closes with a novelette from T. E. D. Klein titled `The Events at Poroth Farm'. The story centers on a neurotic English professor who decides to spend his Summer on a farm owned by an eccentric young couple; the animals on the farm develop Bad Attitudes. As is so often the case with Klein's short fiction, so much effort goes into slowly developing an atmosphere of unease and tension that the denouement, when it finally comes into view, is unimpressive.... and more than a little contrived.

All in all, 'Series II' shares a middling rating along with most of the other volumes from the early years of this series.