Legend of the Werewolf

One of the very few films made by Tyburn Film Productions,`The Legend of the Werewolf ' is a fun and occasionally funny romp very much in the tradition of the classic Hammer films but made at a time (1975) when such films were already seeming pretty old hat alongside US contemporaries such as 'The Exorcist' and 'The Texas Chain Saw Massacre' as well as UK movies like 'Death Line'.

Found running wild in the French woods as a child Etoile had been raised by wolves before being adopted by a circus family and displayed as the 'Wolf Boy'.  As an adult Etoile (David Rintoul - who I think many parents among you will recognise as the voice of 3 Peppa Pig characters including 'Dr Brown Bear') runs away to the city and finds work in a zoo alongside the keeper (Ron Moody).  There he falls in love with a prostitute (Lynn Dalby) but develops an irritating habit of growning hair, fangs and claws and snacking on her clientelle.

Directed by Hammer (and Amicus) veteran Freddie Francis from a script by Anthony Hinds (son of Hammer's founder William Hinds) who also wrote 'The Curse if the Werewolf' for, well, I'm sure you can see the pattern for yourself by now, starring Peter Cushing and with a cameo from Michael Ripper the links to the venerable studio were numerous and overt and the end result is an enjoyable last gasp of the classic British horror.

 

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Supernatural Tales 37

David Longhorn (editor)
Supernatural Tales

I've been thoroughly enjoying these quarterly magazines from the Supernatural Tales blog.  They give me a semi regular fix of a Mark Valentine story and have introduced me to a couple of other interesting writers.

I have to say though I was less enamoured of this issue than I usually am.  Mark is here and his 'The Forwarding Agent' is another delicately twisted exploration of odd hobbies and fractured reality but the other stories just didn't really do all that much for me.

C.M. Muller's 'Slattergreen' was an initially intriguing tale of loss and transformation that came to a far too sudden and jarring end that left me wondering what the point was. A feeling magnified tenfold in Jeremy Schlieve's 'Children's Castles'.

'Silver' by Helen Grant was a nicely written werewolf tale that seemed to have been inspired by the author's discovery of an interesting piece of trivia regarding glass-making rather than by the story itself and so I came out of it thinking more about the factoid and the construction of the story than the story itself.

With the exception of a couple of reviews by the editor the book closes with Chloe N Clark's 'Leopard Seals' a really intriguing story wrapped in some padding about a dream. The central idea I thought really promising but the dream stuff just seemed like filler.

A slightly frustrating read this time out but not entirely a bad one although I really could have done without the one about the castle.

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The Best Ghost Stories

Various
Hamlyn

With a title as seemingly clear and straightforward as that one up there you'd imagine that this here 750 page house brick of a book would be chock full of ghostly mayhem but you'd be fairly wrong in your assumption.  There's a little note at the beginning to the effect that they've played fast and loose with the term 'ghost story' and they're not lying. 

Spectral types do figure but they are mostly conspicuous by their absence.  In their stead we have a veritable smorgasbord of the grim, gruesome and ghastly; black magicians (Edward Bulwer-Lytton's 'The House and the Brain' and M.R. James' 'Casting the Runes'), werewolves (Saki's 'Gabriel-Ernest'), other dimensions (Algernon Blackwood's 'The Willows'), ancient evil (H.P. Lovecraft's 'Rats in the Wall'), death itself (Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Masque of the Red Death'), Pan (Arthur Machen's 'The Great God Pan' and E.M. Forster's 'The Story of a Panic'), vampires (J. Sheridan le Fanu's 'Carmilla') and even a spirit or two (Oliver Onion's 'Are You Too Late Or Was I Too Early').

Amongst these are a host of other tales with certain authors featuring multiple times - there are 3 Machen's and 4 Lovecraft's for instance.  There are a few stories that keen anthology readers like myself will know well like W.W. Jacobs' 'The Monkey's Paw' but in general this is an intriguing selection that isn't afraid to sit a longer tale such as the Machen or le Fanu I mentioned earlier alongside a more fleeting tale such as Guy de Maupassant's 'Was It A Dream'.

It's all the better for it too.  The size of the book kept me subsumed in it's various world's for the best part of a fortnight, I even read some of it whilst holidaying at Baskerville Hall which seemed appropriate.  It is a delightfully atmospheric and absorbing read and I applaud the decision for multiple tales as it allowed for a deeper immersion in both an particular writer and in the book itself.

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The Werewolf Pack

Mark Valentine (editor)
Wordsworth Editions

The wolf has always been a creature of legend and romance, while kings, sorcerers and outlaws have been proud to be called by the name of the wolf. It's no wonder, then, that tales of transformation between man and wolf are so powerful and persistent.

On a recent visit to Hay on Wye I scored a big stack of these Wordsworth Tales of Mystery and the Supernatural books (and then three more in Cardiff three days later) so expect a few of them to crop up here over the coming months.  One of the first books in this series that I read was Mark's other Wordsworth Editions anthology, 'The Black Veil & Other Tales of Supernatural Sleuths', which was about as much fun as a book is capable of being so I jumped at this new discovery even though a fan of monster stories I am not.

Count Stenbock

I've not read many werewolf stories before - there was a short in one of 'The Sandman' volumes and I've vague memories of flipping through an adaptation of one of the 'Howling' movies as a kid and there's a Wyrd Britain regular that I'll come to later - but I've seen a whole host of movies, it is a most filmable creature, but the books have never really interested me.  There are some really interesting moments but I didn't really find this volume as satisfying as the other.  Much of that must be put down to my love of of the occult detective angle and my ambivalence to monsters but also far too many of the stories here had the feel of a folktale which, as regular perusers of my scribblings will know, aren't my favourite things.

There are though several interesting stories lurking here, Saki's 'Gabriel-Ernest' (which I alluded to earlier) is a perennial anthology entrant but I'd not come across his tale of bluster and comeuppance, 'The She-Wolf', before and won't be sorry if I never do again.  'The White Wolf of the Hartz Mountains' by Captain Frederick Marryat is a worthy opener with elements of folk tale providing a backbone for a much more interesting story than I assumed from it's first few pages.

R.B. Russell

Count Stenbock's 'The Other Side' is a delicately hallucinatory tale of forbidden flowers and beguiling women and an ambiguously supernatural Sherlock Holmes pastiche called 'The Shadow of the Wolf' by Ron Weighell sticks out dynamic duo on the roof of an old house in the country tracking a savage murderer.  The book closes with R.B. Russell's wonderfully strange 'Loup-Garou' which I'm not even going to try and describe to you as it's something you need to experience yourself.

Around these stories are a host of other tales that are all worthy of your time as they display interesting takes on the mythos but the above were, for me, the standouts. As I said at the beginning, creature stories aren't my favourites but as a toe dipping exercise into the genre this book has much to recommend it.

Buy it here -  The Werewolf Pack (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural)