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FFB: GHOSTS AND MORE GHOSTS by Robert Arthur (Random House, 1963); TALES OF TERROR by Ida Chittum (Rand McNally, 1975)

Medie Eylül 28, 2022

The Horrific Price of Nostalgia...


Tales of Terror by Ida Chittum; illustrated by Franz Altschuler (Rand McNally & Co. 1975)
11  By The Author (an introduction)
15  The House the Dovers Didn't Move Into
23  Vision of Roses
31  Uncle Ned Kunkle
36  The Twins
42  The Snipe Hunt
51  The Yellow Cat
54  Giant
58  The Feather Reader
67  The Woman Who Turned To Paper
71  Sod Miller's Money
77  Print On The Window
79  The Haunted Well
85  The Special Gift
95  Bring Back My Teeth
100  The Lovers
108  The Cruel Girl
111  The Twisting Wind
118  Courtland Wethers And The Pit
124  About the Author

A brief precis as I have to attend to other tasks before I set down my longer analysis of these two books, one I loved in my youth and one I missed altogether even though it was published when I was still young and it has a following which has driven prices of the scattered used copies through the roof. 

Robert Arthur published no actual collections of his own fiction aimed at adult readers during his lifetime, and no one has bothered to do so since, which verges on the ridiculous in both cases. All of the stories collected in his Ghosts and More Ghosts were originally published in adult-reading markets, as one can see above in the table of contents index, and there is no compelling reason for his work to be all but forgotten in YA literature as well...even given how much of his late efforts were largely devoted to one Alfred Hitchcock-branded franchise or another, including the original version of the Three Investigators book series, which he devised and oversaw before his early death in 1969. (A fair amount of his other fiction was collected in the Alfred Hitchcock Presents:  and YA "Hitchcock" volumes he ghost-edited for Random House (and the AHP: volumes for paperback reprint, in two volumes each, by Dell), among some other projects; he would include occasionally at least two of his own stories under his real name and one or more of his pseudonyms.) 

Ida Chittum's volume is keyed to her Ozark Mountains childhood, and while the copies of various editions of the Arthur can be expensive on the secondhand market, copies of Chittum's first book for the young readers' horror market are ridiculous (I picked up mine as a library discard for perhaps 50c in perhaps 1990; I'd guess by the current market I could sell it pretty easily for $75-100 in its goodish condition with library markings). Those who might've been hoping for a slightly westerly correspondent to Manly Wade Wellman's tales of the Appalachian supernatural are likely to be disappointed, as I was; these are raw, young folktales, often retold rather gracefully and with some wit, and very well illustrated by Franz Altschuler (I have to wonder if the illustrations are less available for this book to be reprinted at some level for its obviously passionate niche audience), but they lack in nearly every instance the complication that makes for compelling fiction (also despite some having lovely titles). In these tales, Something bad happens, and it continues, and there might be a twist, but not much of one. The End. Chittum's previous volumes of humorous anecdotes probably were at least as good...her sense of what's necessary for a story, versus a joke or anecdote, wasn't quite where it needed to be to make this more than mildly interesting reading. But one does get the same sense of isolated and "high lonesome" existence as one might in the Wellman and other better work in this bailiwick. 

A Friday's Forgotten Books and Friday Fright Night entry. 



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