Nasty Lastly

Nasty Endings 1, compiled by Dennis Pepper (Oxford University Press 2001)

I picked up this book for ten pence at a car-boot sale. If it turned out to be no good, well, I hadn’t broken the bank. And I didn’t expect much, because I thought at first that it was a collection of original stings-in-the-tale by Dennis Pepper, a writer I’d never heard of before. He’s probably a bad writer, I thought, but it’s often interesting and instructive to see where writers go wrong.

In fact, Pepper is the compiler, not the composer, as I saw when I looked at the contents page and saw names like Edith Nesbit, T.H. White and Ambrose Bierce. My expectations of the book immediately went up. And yes, there were some good stings-in-the-tale here. Ramsey Campbell provides one of them in the opening story, “Call First”. Or kinda provides one of them, because Campbell’s stories are a bit like blurred photographs. You can see that they could have been good, but they aren’t actually good because he doesn’t write very well. If he did write well, he’d be up there with M.R. James as a giant of the horror genre. James is his most obvious influence, but he’s slyer and suburbaner and less scholarly than James. And I did like “Call First”, the story of a nosy porter at a library who gets more than he bargained for when he spies on an old man.

And I’m sure I’d’ve liked the story even more if I’d been one of the early readers at whom this book was obviously aimed. Back in 2001 it was trying to compete with computer-games, TV and music, to show kids that reading can be exciting too. And I hope it succeeded and maybe even convinced kids that printed words could be more powerful than images and sounds. I also hope that a lot of kids hunted down more by the author who provides the best story in this collection. The author is Saki and the story is “Interlopers”. I can still remember my own first reading. It leads you on very subtly and seductively, then catches you with a horrific final word of dialog. The last story in the collection, Robert Scott’s “The Helpful Undertaker”, also hinges on the final word of dialog. But it’s not subtly gruesome like Saki’s story: it’s gross-out.

But gross-out is good, when it’s done well. Funnily enough, the stories by the names that raised my expectations – Edith Nesbit, T.H. White and Ambrose Bierce – weren’t very good. “The Loony” by Alison Prince and “Cop for a Day” by Henry Slesar, authors I’d never heard of before, were both much better. This isn’t a world-shaking collection, but I’ve bought much more expensive books that I’ve enjoyed much less.

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Elsewhere Other-Accessible…

• “The Interlopers” by Saki