posted on 01 Sep 2019

Best Black Magic Stories edited by John Keir Cross

Sometimes you’re drawn to a delicious looking bauble or plaything and you must have it even though the better angel of your nature is telling you that it’s probably all surface and no substance. Well, I have a distressing tendency to go down this track with books and the latest one I’ve found myself lumbered with is Best Black Magic Stories published in 1960 by the usually excellent Faber & Faber and with a jacket design to die for from Edwin La Dell, war artist and lithography buff.

In truth, I'm much too weak not to fall for the promise of a wet August day with a selection of spooky stories all packaged in this unrefusable wrapping. But, sadly, that rich promise is just about as good as it gets because what’s inside the covers is a decidedly motley selection.

John Keir Cross (1914 – 1967) must have seemed a perfectly good choice to be the guiding light behind this anthology – he was a sci-fi author, primarily for what we’d now call the young adult market, and a television and radio script writer for various popular science fiction, adventure and horror programming. Cross has included a story of his own but I can’t help but feel that he’s played fast and loose with his brief – to say that the short stories included here are the best of ‘black magic’ is stretching definitions well beyond breaking point. The truth is that the majority of stories here are generically supernatural or ambiguously spooky rather than having their roots in black magic.

There’s some high quality names included here – M.R. James, John Wyndham, Ray Bradbury and even the Decadent pen of Joris-Karl Huysmans. But roping James’ Casting The Runes into the black magic camp seems to me to be taking liberties. But I sympathise with decision -  it is after all a welcome addition to any collection because it’s such a high class piece of hokum.

John Wyndham’s More Spinned Against… is a tongue-in-cheek bit of fluff about a woman who swaps places with the legendary Ariadne in spider form and Ray Bradbury keeps the light-hearted mood going with his classic The Homecoming, which is the story of an ordinary, mortal boy in an enormous family of ghouls attending a special reunion on All Hallow's Eve.

Cross has included a couple of Victorian standards – Richard Barham’s A Room In Leyden culled from The Ingoldsby Legends and Lord Lytton’s The Haunted and the Haunters, which I found a bit turgid to be honest.

These collections always carry their fair share of duds and fillers but for me the sparkling little bit of paste-jewelry in this lot was Dennis Wheatley’s The Snake. Wheatley’s tale is tripe of the purest kind but entirely in keeping with the ethos of the collection – a schlock little spooky, mystery/horror thriller that is as close to the black magic motif as most of these stories get. Wheatley is a pulp writer but he does what he does with brio. You won't read this for its literary value but if you surrender yourself to a sort of Hammer Horror kitsch you'll have a ball.

Out of print for ages, the book can be found on the second hand market in hardback or paper cover for under £10.

 

Terry Potter

August 2019