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Heavily influenced - admittedly so, by the author himself - by The Pan Book of Horror Stories series, these are enjoyably retro tales, some given a modern makeover, though others seem curiously dated. A couple of them are rather too sunk in such nostalgia, and the blatant rewrite of W.W. Jacob's The Monkey's Paw goes a bit far. Some of the tales, though, are excellent: The Tip Run and The Rookery are dark and delicious pieces of horror, and Cure is a very striking tale which could have been expa...
I admit it; I'm a product of the Pan Book of Horror Stories collections. I remember seeing Volume 7 on the window sill in our dining room when I was nine years old. No doubt my parents weren't banking on me reading it. However, once I had, I was hooked, and the tales have stayed with me ever since. 'Dulcie' by Hugh Reid really caught my imagination, and 'Never Talk to Strangers' by the mysterious Alex White gave me nightmares. I don't still have the book, in fact I haven't seen a copy for 35 yea...
Johnny Mains' Frightfully Cosy and Mild Stories for Nervous Types, is as varied a selection of horror writing as you could hope for from a single-author collection. From the dark humour of the fantasitically titled 'Mrs Claus & The Immaculate Conception', to the just plain dark 'Cure', there's a real range of styles here. Mains is obviously very clued up about the history of horror stories, but my only real criticisim is that in a couple of places his influences seemed too obvious and unfiltered...