The Unbidden (1971)

[Gloomy Sundae]

R. Chetwynd-Hayes - The Unbidden (Tandem, 1971: Pyramid, 1975)

No One Lived There
Why Don't You Wash? Said The Girl With £100,000 And No Relatives
Don't Go Up Them Stairs
The Gatecrasher
A Family Welcome
Crowning Glory
The Devilet
Come To Me My Flower
The Playmate
Pussy Cat - Pussy Cat
A Penny For A Pound
The Head Of The Firm
The Treasure Hunt
The Death Of Me
Tomorrow Is Judgement Day
The House

Apologies for all the Chetwynd-Hayes overkill of late, but his work - his 'seventies stuff for Tandem and Fontana at least - holds an almost Wheatley-esque fascination for me.

RCH came to the horror game late. He was 52 when his first collection, The Unbidden was published in 1971 and made no bones about why he turned to horror: In those days all things supernatural and ghastly sold, and once he got going he was extraordinarily prolific.

His first professional sale was The Man From The Bomb to one of Badger Books' offshoots from the lovable Supernatural Stories,Science Fiction #21 (Oct. 1959). He followed this with a novel, The Dark Man (Sidgwick & Jackson, 1964) and his first contribution to Herbert Van Thal's Pan Book Of Horror Stories (The Thing, 1966). Van Thal became his agent and Chetwynd-Hayes went into overdrive. Prior to The Unbidden, he contributed the brilliant Looking For Something To Suck to Fontana Horror #4 (1969) and Housebound to Aiden & Nancy Chambers' Ghosts (Topliner, 1969. Another of those collections for the younger audience that do the job for adults). The following year it was The Monster (Fontana Horror #5) and The Bodmin Terror, again for Fontana, in Cornish Tales Of Terror which he also edited.


No One Lived There: A traveller explores a deserted house in Devon. From a half-chewed manuscript scattered about the place, he learns that It's occupants were German, occult dabblers, entirely out of sympathy with Hitler and that they seem to have abandoned the house in a hurry when the Nazi's came to power. On the wall hangs a swastika (the non-tilted original) and gracing the mantelpiece, a framed photograph of a man and his son with a naked beauty stood proudly between them. As the traveller tries to make sense of it all, the rats drift in. One of them, he notes, has miniature female breasts not unlike those in the photograph. Cornered in a room with the rodent army chewing down the door, he spends his final moments writing about what he's experienced.

Why Don't You Wash? Said The Girl With £100,000 And No Relatives: Having skillfully manipulated Judy's pools winnings into various stocks and bonds under his own control, Gilbert Makepiece suggests a nice holiday at Waddington. Evidently, she finds the prospect of seeing an old Water Mill enthralling, so off they go. After he's drowned her, Gilbert does a little travelling in Europe before settling into his plush Curzon Street apartment. Judy catches up with him while he's enjoying a soak in the bath.

Despite the grating title, this isn't one of his "I'm zany, me!" efforts, though you don't have long to wait for one to rear its hideous head ...

Don't Go Up Them Stairs: Lionel learns that his grandfather, mother and relatives are all members of a Satanic cult who make up seriously rubbish chants and keep a ghoul in the upstairs room. When one of them dies, they are fed to the creature in return for him confining himself upstairs. Lionel, being inquisitive, has to sneak up to see this fabulous, terrible creature. And now it has sniffed fresh young flesh, mouldering corpses have lost much of their appeal.

The Gatecrasher: Edward Charlton and his trendy friends hold an impromptu seance - and summon forth the spirit of Jack the Ripper. Saucy Jack soon has total dominion over Edward and together they prowl Soho, picking up working girls to butcher back at the flat off Edgware Road. When the downstairs neighbour grows suspicious that those stains on his ceiling are maybe not the result of spilt red wine after all, its time for the pair to part company.

One of the four RCH stories filmed for the Amicus anthology From Beyond The Grave

A Family Welcome: Rivals It Came To Dinner as his goriest creation. Madelaine poisons her husband, Sir Charles Walton, with arsenic, having married him for his money in the first place. His corpse is so terrifying that the undertaker is obliged to sew shut his eyes, pad the mouth with cotton and break his legs before he can be laid to rest in the family vault ("Here ye Walton's Sleepe - God Grant They all Lye down"). Fat chance of that ...

Crowning Glory: Gore, a gigolo who specialises in parting rich old ladies from their fortunes, tries it on with the Countess Helene Landi when, after weeks of plotting, he ambushes her in St. James' Park. She is already wise to him, but moves him into a suite at the Carlton Ritz regardless and pays him a whacking £50 a day for his services and the privilege of calling him "Chu-chu". He suffers this, even manages to grow fond of the old girl, but there's something ... strange about her. What's with the ridiculous wig about, for starters? Why does she go into a fury if he touches her head? And why is her maid Greselda ever ready with a cut throat razor and a medical dish?

Come To Me My Flower: Given that RCH wrote well over a hundred short stories to my limited knowledge, it was always a safe bet that he'd come up with at least one demon flower story. Bloody good one, too.

"They were really exceptional in a repulsive sort of way. Beryl counted twelve blooms altogether, but there might have been some smaller ones nestling down between the sickly green foliage. A large pink flower that towered up over its fellows had ear shaped petals, while a green one ... was a mass of green wormy spikes. Then there was a vivid mauve thing with coiled petals that looked unpleasantly like a technicoloured snake. And a brown one that might well have been taken for slices of raw liver skewered on chicken bones, and a pink-edged white petal horror, that was peeping over the vase edge, like some lost eye looking for a socket to occupy."

Beryl is ill in bed so Neil brings her a bunch of flowers to cheer her up. He didn't have to pay for them, the old hag with the basket gave him them for nothing. Via her nightmares, Beryl learns the names of these horrors: Gangarellas, Hellthimiums and Bad Intentions. As she weakens, the evil flowers get braver until finally they are ready to launch an attack ...

The Devilet: Ronald Adams, another of the author's middle-aged, middle-class, mollified bachelor types, buys a black egg from a second-hand trader along the Portobello Road. It hatches, out pops a miniature Devil complete with horns, beard and tail, which proceeds to eat all his groceries. As the Devilet can reproduce at will, the house is soon teeming with the little miscreants and Ronald is zipping back and forth from Sainsbury's like nobody's business. What will happen when the shop-bought food runs out?

The Head Of The Firm: Conrad Lewis, multi-millionaire, has only days to live, so when he learns that Prof. Borman has successfully performed a head transplant on a pig, he flies out to his Swiss clinic and makes him an offer he can't refuse. Conrad's head survives its removal, but there's no healthy body to attach it to. When he learns of a boardroom coup that will see him ousted from the company on the preposterous grounds that he is, in effect, dead, Lewis is desperate enough to agree to Borman's 'half-man, half-farmyard animal' proposal ...

A Penny For A Pound: A neat variation on the psychic vampire theme.
Narcissistic long hair Craig Bramford is stalked by a ghastly, withered crone. Try as he might, he can't avoid the old girl and, when he confides his problem to Diana, his big boobed, mini-skirted girlfriend, she vows to rid him of the "kinky old cow." But after confronting her rival it is Diana who comes off worse, "accidentally" falling under a train at Sloane Square station.

Bramford realises that his admirer is in some way responsible and, perversely proud that somebody would be prepared to kill for him, takes her in to live with him. It transpires that, far from being a bag lady, she is the incredibly wealthy Contessa Donna Mondago and she's been pursuing him because she wants to gift him her fortune as he's beautiful and riches are "wasted on the old". She neglects to tell Craig what she'll be taking in return.

RCH dispenses with the jokes for this one's duration and, as is so often the case when he plays it straight, comes up with a grimly effective shocker.

The Treasure Hunt: Psychiatrist Mr. Hunglebert Chiffinch assures George Hargraves that his son, Jason, to all outward appearances a moron, is actually a genius: all his brain needs is a little kick-start.

George hits on the idea of burying a wooden chest filled with sweets and 20p coins. It will be Jason's if he can follow some simple clues as to its whereabouts. Jason soon gives up the stupid game but finally displays a fiendish ingenuity and previously unsuspected tenacity in torturing the secret out of his hapless father.

The Playmate: Initially, Richard and Pauline are delighted to acquire the old Victorian house, although she's slightly irked that they can't get any wallpaper to hang in the spare room which it seems, actively resists all attempts at refurbishment. And then there are the strange noises after dark.
Richard is away on business for three nights so Pauline, her nerves already frayed, takes his advice and buys a dog to keep her company. Comes the night when they witness a ghastly incident from the past and Pauline finally gets to meet the brutal, misshapen thing who is to take her as his latest playmate.

Pussycat - Pussycat: The severe Miss Chalfinch lives alone on the top floor in a room whose walls are plastered with photographs of cats, their facial expressions betraying varying degrees of hatred and fear. Her most recent feline, Erasmus, has just hit the afterlife after an altercation with a truck, but rather than displaying any sign of grief, she suddenly begins to act cordially toward young neighbour John Edwards, aspiring author, and systematically draws him into her world. The sheer conviction of the writing - he really does seem terrified of women - gives Pussycat - Pussycat a powerful bite.

The Death Of Me: "For I desire to be negative. To be blotted out, to rest in the deep, deep pit of never was - never will be - must never be again."

Stafford is dead, but he can't move on until he can remember how he died. His widow Anne - who didn't love him - and his burdensome aged mother, Mrs. Carruthers - who did - are currently helping Sergeant Johnson with his inquiries. Anne maintains his death was either suicide or an accident brought about by his own stupidity when he dropped the electric fire in the bath. She certainly didn't murder him as she couldn't muster the necessary effort to detest him that much. Well, she would say that, wouldn't she? Bloody women! They'll be the death of us all.

Actually, this time it's a little more complicated than that.

Tomorrow Is Judgement Day: Speakers Corner. Joseph Roosevelt Jones, 'Divinely appointed King of the World' is convinced that a foul mouthed Angel has appeared to him, informing him that the world will end tomorrow. Harry Wheatland asks him back to his Park Lane flat for a beer. He thinks he knows who the "Angel" was when he was alive - a work colleague - and has reason to suspect Mr. Jones' prophecy will come true.

The House: Anthony's life has been a lonely, loveless drift, forever haunted by a vision of the soul mate he's never met. When he moves into the house, he discovers the diary of Victoria Elizabeth Sinclair, and realises that this woman, born several decades before his birth, was his intended partner, just as she knew her lover had yet to be born. Gradually her presence reveals itself in one of RCH's gentlest ghost stories.

[David A Riley]

Strangely enough, The Unbidden was the very first collection of stories I ever read of RCH. At the time I was joint editor for the British Fantasy Society's Bulletin, and my review of The Unbidden then was completely negative. In fact, I think it was one of the most negative reviews I have ever written. I just did not like this collection or the stories in it at all.

My views have tended to warm to him, though, over the years, and having met him a few years later at The World Fantasy Convention in London, I must confess to having felt a little guilty at times over some of my far less than charitable comments about his work in that review.

The next collection he brought out, The Elemental, I actually liked - and I gave it a much more positive review!

I think one of my basic problems at the time with The Unbidden was that they were too light-hearted in tone for my tastes then, as if the writer, though writing about sometimes quite nasty things, just didn't himself take his stories seriously. Quite taboo to me then.

*****

I will have to dig out that old BFS review and copy it out here - though it was very unfairly bad. I wouldn't write anything quite so negative now, even if I didn't like a book. I would try to find something good in it. Hopefully! But I was in my mid-twenties then and a little bit arrogant about my opinions. And somehow or other RCH's collection just rubbed me up the wrong way.

I am still not a fan of his work, mind you. Although, having met him, I did like him as a man.

Curiously, I used a caricature of RCH in a story I wrote about an unscrupulous magazine editor, who comes out with some comments copied from quotes I had heard of RCH. Whether he really did say some of these things, I don't know, but they fit the character I was writing about quite well.

*****

Well, I have had time to check up on that review and was surprised to find that it wasn't in the BFS Bulletin at all but in Dave Sutton's fanzine Shadow, No 14, September 1971.

"The best by far is Don't Go Up Them Stairs where for about the only time the author's annoyingly contemptuous attitude towards his characters is to the point. Hardly terrifying, it has a charm all of its own, funny and at the same time grotesque, like an adult fairy tale. For the rest of them, the author's amused contempt destroys what sympathy might be formed between the reader and the characters involved, and destroys what power these tales might have. Chetwynd-Hayes strikes me as someone who has the ability to write, and a good imagination - Why Don't You Wash? Said The Girl With A Hundred Thousand Pounds And No Relatives - shows that, but he wastes his talents, trivialising his ideas, sugar coating them with a feeble substitute for wit, and in the end making one wonder why he ever wrote them to start with. We know why, but is Mammon enough? The Unbidden..? Believe me, there's more truth to the title than was intended."

Three years later in the BFS Bulletin (Vol 2, No 2, July/August 1974) I wrote a review of The Elemental:

"Some time ago I reviewed a previous collection of Chetwynd-Hayes entitled The Unbidden in Shadow No 14. I dismissed him then as a hack. Although even now I would not go so far as to place him very high amongst ghost story writers (he is certainly no M. R. James) he has risen in my estimation with this collection from the abysmal depths into which The Unbidden had temporarily condemned him to perhaps a level comparable to that of Robert Bloch, although his writing is at times stylistically better than Bloch's.

What is probably the most revealing statement in the book is the fact that the title story has been used for one of the episodes in Amicus' new film From Beyond The Grave. It epitomises so many of the peculiar virtues of that company at its best. The tongue in the cheek that seemed to bulge insultingly in The Unbidden is under more careful control in this collection and is at times all but hidden from sight.

The first story, The Elemental, is superb for its comic rendering of Madame Orloff, a medium, who excels even Margaret Rutherford in the film version of Blithe Spirit for her comic disrespect of the spiritualism she not only believes in but knows to be only too horribly real. The story also has a keen insight into the cosmic overtones of spiritualism and also, more aptly, the shear frightfulness of spiritual creatures, especially any that could feed off our souls without our being aware even of their presence, like some grotesque leach, upon ours backs.

The other stories in the collection, though not of the same standard as the opening one, are at the worst adequate if not brilliant. They are all, though, thankfully either ghost stories or stories of the supernatural and not tales of grue and sadism as all too many collections turn out to be these days. It is obvious, though (or at least to me it is), that either Chetwynd-Hayes himself or his publishers realised full well that the later stories were the weakest in the collection and placed them where they are purposely. There is certainly a strong imagination at work, though it is not always carefully controlled and Chetwynd-Hayes' writing can quite easily - and not too infrequently, either - tend to be lurid in the Grand Olde Tradition of the pulps. The only difference is that they were written for an American audience and these are all too blatantly British. However, they are readable and on an entertainment level alone are adequate, with The Elemental providing by far the most interest in this category, but if one is looking for any of the more subtle or finer details that one would get in a tale by Aikman then one would be looking in this collection in vain. As I stated earlier the collection shares some of the peculiar virtues of Amicus films at their best (I could have included, perhaps, though with some trepidation, EC Comics as well). The collection, though sharing certain of these virtues, is like Amicus Films' productions only a superficial rendering of the supernatural for the most part. However, one story in particular - and I will not give away its title - does have a beautifully horrific, though skilfully muted corpse - obese and ugly and sprouting all kinds of unmentionably repellent fungoid growths - that just will not stay still, a story which has a strangely statuesque climax, and one that is none the less grotesque for all that."

Looking back at this last, verbose review, you'd think I was being paid by the word!

And I must admit that some of the pomposity embarrasses me now.

Tempus thankfully fugit!


Sincere thanks to horror author David A. Riley for giving me permission to reproduce the following posts from Vault Of Evil

gloomy

[burlveneer]

Here's a mini-review of The Unbidden that I posted to the alt.books.ghost-fiction usenet group on May 4, 2006:

I've slogged through another Ronald Chetwynd-Hayes collection, this
time his first, THE UNBIDDEN (1971). Why do I do it? Because at his
best he cranked out some first-rate stories with unexpected plot twists
and brilliantly imaginative grotesque imagery, or novel perspectives on
ghost and horror story tropes: "The Labyrinth," "Manderville," "The
Jumpity-Jim," "Housebound," "Markland the Hunter," to name a few. And
writing in the 1970s, his characters and settings were full of
anachronism and hoary cliches, but authentically rendered: the
gentleman of leisure, the rich old countess, the rooming-house, the
crumbling manor house (or "pile" as seemed to be the popular term), all
are conjured up out of moldy tradition and somehow transplanted to the
present day, and I like that. But often the plots don't make any
sense; Chetwynd-Hayes went on record saying that he started a story
without any idea how it was going to turn out, and sometime's that's
all too obvious, as in his many "who's the (insert supernatural
being)?" stories. But sometimes all the pieces fit and the result is a
perfect, nasty little gem. Unfortunately I didn't find any in THE
UNBIDDEN, though it contains a couple honorable mentions: "Crowning
Glory" is drolly comic in its Countess's treatment of her gigolo ("What
is your assumed birth name?" "Gore," he said sulkily. "I do not like
it. It makes me think of blood. I will call you Chu-Chu. You look
Chu-Chu.") and its gross-out ending (which by today's gross-out
standards is rather mild); "Come to Me, My Flower" has some effective
"evil flora" passages which recall the rotting fecundity of some of
J.G. Ballard's apocalyptic fiction; and the non-supernatural "The
Treasure Hunt" reads like a cross between Roald Dahl and Charles
Birkin. Otherwise there are some good bits here and there, and some
clever turns of phrase, but nothing that adds up to a great work. But
I did hit upon a way to enjoy it all, and that is to imagine the
stories as episodes of "Dr. Terrible's House of Horrible." Picturing
Steve Coogan mugging through these yarns turned out wonderfully,
especially on the over-the-top "Head of the Company." What do you
think happens when an aging, wealthy industrialist demands that a
brilliant surgeon graft his head onto a new body, notwithstanding that
the surgeon has so far only managed to transplant a sheep's head onto a
pig's body? Yes, you can see this one coming a mile away, but probably
not the twist ending. Now *that* was truly diabolical.

Bill B.

[Calenture]

I saw David's post on World of Horror magazine at the Vault last night, and this morning took a look through my copies, where I found Crowning Glory - which isn't bad - and Head of the Firm - which is like a one-line joke.

Interested to see that the cover of the Tandem Unbidden uses the same picture as the story in World of Horror No. 3 - but you probably knew that.

[Gloomy Sundae]

Hugh Lamb on Chetwynd-Hayes (from Jack Sullivan ed., The Penguin Book Of Horror And The Supernatural Viking, 1986)

British writer of science fiction and horror, who has produced several volumes of spectral tales. He is rather a latecomer to the genre, for he did not turn to horror until 1971, with the publication of The Unbidden. This volume contains The Gatecrasher, concerning the spirit of Jack the Ripper, and No One Lived There, about an English house occupied by Nazi agents during World War II: the house is discovered by a man who is eventually haunted by the almost humanly intelligent rats in the place.

A second volume of stories, Cold Terror (1973), which features The Door, a story with a touch of humour, contains a series of related supernatural adventures. A few of the tales were adapted for the screen as From Beyond The Grave.

Chetwynd-Hayes' work is of variable quality; it lacks the clear and elegant prose of Robert Aickman, and his clumsy sense of humour can often mar a tale.

Other collections are The Elemental (1974) and Terror By Night (1974), which has some good pieces based on folklore. Lileas And The Water Horse (1974) concerns the ghostly Water Ghost, who can transform himself into a man. Under The Skin (1974) is reminiscent of Robert Bloch, relating the tale of an actor in horror films who lives out his role in supernatural fashion. The Night Ghouls (1975) is a ghoulish collection of stories about dead-alive flesh eaters, and Tales Of Fear And Fantasy (1977) utilizes folklore well. The Monster Club (1975) is a humorous collection; his most recent book, A Quiver Of Ghosts (1984), has received mixed reviews. He has also taken over the editorship of The Fontana Book Of Great Ghost Stories from Robert Aickman.