I’d also give worthy mentions to ‘The Treat’ (M. S. Waddell), ‘The Sins Of The Fathers’ (Christianna Brand), ‘Message For Margie’ (Christine Campbell Thomson), ‘The Spider’ (Basil Copper), and ‘The Living Shadow’ (Rene Morris). I am really unsure as to what the point of this one is, beyond titillating the Pan reading hordes who were by now expecting to encounter the graphic slaughter of at least a couple of women per volume.

With another half dozen stories that are fine ( ‘The Return,’ ‘The Snail Watcher,’ ‘The Last Experiment,’ ‘Street of the Blind Donkey,’ ‘Never Talk To Strangers,’ and the much anthologised ‘The Monkey’s Paw’) this is an enjoyable enough collection, if not quite up to the standards of volumes 2, 3, 4 and 5. You're afraid of your own son" she cried, struggling. "Let me go. I'm coming, Herbert, I'm coming!" But once the dancer invites the twins into her bed, the already dark tale becomes more Tod Browning’s Freaks, with the twins wreaking a vicious revenge upon the philandering “normals”. I'm hugely indebted to Mr Duncan Ball, who very kindly provided me with scans and contents listings for the volumes I had missing - many thanks to him. Due to his contribution, this is now a complete listing of all thirty volumes. Like their Fontana counterparts, these volumes would attention grab from the shelves with their garish and ghoulish covers (my edition of volume one has a severed head lying amongst roots on an earthy floor). Again, like Fontana, they mix old with new stories, with later volumes concentrating more on the new. The Pan books don’t have the fine lengthy introductions of the Fontana books, but in the first ten books more than make up for it in quantity.Submerged’ by A.L. Barker – A boy swimming in what he has always nostalgically considered to be ‘his’ river witnesses an argument and event between a man and a woman. The more I think about this story the better it gets. The Copper Bowl’ by George Fielding Eliot – As punishment, a woman is tortured because a man she knows will steadfastly not give out military information. A fine and gripping little story. It's beyond me to do the sheer grimness of this one justice, but the overall effect is like some literary equivalent of Witchfinder General.

In the meantime, here’s a brief overview of each of the 22 stories in this first, groundbreaking volume. My first foray into the cult world of PBHS, and it's a mixed bag. The novella that opened the book is really very good stuff-pulpy and predictable, but very well written. So far the rest of the work is just...meh. It's not violent or extreme enough to be novel or transgressive; it's more of a general vibe of pornographic and shoddy bloodletting. It's kind of like watching a video nasty: The real crime is less in the content (I've read worse in Richard Laymon and Ed Lee), and more in the utter ineptness of the, ahem, execution.Waddell provided a couple of the most memorable contributions to the previous volume. Here he lets us walk in the shoes of an especially cold-blooded killer. This is a subtly creepy tale of menace, something to whet the appetite for the more explicit horrors that come in later stories. A thirteen-year-old orphan girl is very fond of the obese bachelor who visits her regularly. His intentions are anything but wholesome. A disturbing tale of sexual menace. You bloody ponce! That’s what you are! If you can’t do right by me, why don’t you go out and get yourself some pretty, sweet little queer to have your sex with?” MESSAGE FOR MARGIE, by Christine Campbell Thomson: A medium becomes involved with a young girl waiting for a message from beyond. Spicy supernatural shenanigans from the respected editor with some gore thrown in. 4/5

THE LADY WHO DIDN’T WASTE WORDS is by Hamilton Macallister. It’s short and ambiguous, about a weird train passenger. Plenty of unusual stuff going on here. Chris Massie’s A FRAGMENT OF FACT is the usual spooky-house-on-the-moor stuff which has a few moments of excellence amid the typical ingredients. Flavia Richardson’s BEHIND THE YELLOW DOOR has a predictable plot but some gruelling surgical horror behind it that makes for extremely macabre reading. Angus Wilson’s RASPBERRY JAM is about a couple of grotesque old ladies and has a moment of inconsequential violence that turned my stomach more than anything in the rest of the book. THE JANISSERIES OF EMILION, by Basil Copper: A man is plagued by dreams in which he's washed up on an ancient beach. Literally the stuff of nightmares, this one, and the level of dread and foreboding is second to none thanks to the story's relentless inevitability. 5/5 Fengriffen and Other Stories (1971) – Contains the novel Fengriffen and the stories "Among the Wolves" and "Strange Roots" I don't know anything about C. A. Cooper, but he has two stories in this anthology. This one is a particularly creepy and suspenseful ghost story. I guess these horror anthologies are like a time capsule of the fears and obsessions of the age. If so people in 1958 were scared of hulking retired surgeons with a Nazi past and a big library.

Series: Pan Books of Horror Stories

Gerald Kersh (1911-1968) was a British-born American writer of novels and short stories. His most famous novel is Night and the City (1938) which was the basis for the 1950 film directed by Jules Dassin. This is another story of something unspeakable lurking in the jungle, but with a difference. THE 'BEAN-NIGHE', by Dorothy K. Haynes: A young girl is haunted by the spirit of a washer-woman. A well-written and chilling ghost story that's a perfect exercise in foreboding. 4/5 The eleventh volume in this series is another varied selection, this time perhaps with a little less of the squirm-inducing sadism that was such a stark element in the previous few volumes. Not that tasteless grizzly violence is absent. After all, you do get a brutally extended act of infanticide courtesy of regular contributor Dulcie Gray.

On its original issue it was seen as something garish and unpleasant, its horrific tales too gruesome and unsettling for many. When you ask many of the present day genre writers – Stephen Jones, Clive Barker, Mark Morris, Phillip Pullman – it is this series they remember that affected them when younger. But the real flaw with this one is the gargantuan geographic coincidence which has to be swallowed, whereby two Englishmen who last met over a quarter of a century ago bump into one another, not only in foreign country, but in a sparsely populated region where they are probably the only living souls within a fifteen kilometer radius. For the record, my 6 bottom of the barrels are – ‘My Dear How Dead You Look And Yet You Sweetly Sing’ by Priscilla Marron; ‘The Janissaries of Emilion’ by Basil Copper; ‘The Computer’ by Rene Morris; ‘Sugar And Spice’ by A. G. J. Rough; ‘The Most Precious’ by John D. Keefauver; and ‘Playtime’ also by A. G. J. Rough. Almost unheard of - A Pan Horror Collection in which there are absolutely no duffers! Except one rather inconsequential poem, all of the stories here are, at the very least, great macabre fun.

The gloriously tasteless, lowbrow, prurient and sadistic Pan Books of Horror Stories were a formative influence in my youth, kind of balancing out the intellectual version of the same thing I got from Ingmar Bergman and Pasolini. The Physiology of Fear’ by C.S. Forester – Experiments involving fear are carried out by a Nazi. Fascinating characters and situation. When you have a short story beginning with the line “I like to burn children”, it is a fairly safe bet we are not looking at an O. Henry Prize contender. No, this one has the feel of Kaufman deliberately dumbing down in response to the New Brutalism seen in Pan12.