the 26th pan book of horror stories selected by clarence paget - release date (?) 1985

ARTIST: STEVE CRISP

B SESHRADI: THE RIVER BED

ROSEMARY TIMPERLEY: MANDRAGORA

HARRY E. TURNER: SPECIAL RESERVE '75

ROSEMARY TIMPERLEY: FIRE TRAP

JOHN H. SNELLINGS: FLIES

J. J. CROMBY: MASKS

TRUSTIN FORUNE: THE BATH

NICHOLAS ROYLE: TIME TO GET UP

B SESHRADI: AN IMMACULATE CONCEPTION

IAN C. STRACHAN: DEATH OF A COUNCIL WORKER

RALPH NORTON NOYES: MICRO-PROCESS

JOHN H. SNELLINGS: THE LOFT

OSCAR HOLMES: NO MARK OF RESPECT

St JOHN BIRD: FIREWORK NIGHT

JESSICA AMANDA SALMONSON: SILENT WAR

ALAN TEMPERLEY: HENRY AND THE BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE

When I started writing in the early 1980s, I sent my stories out to literary magazines – London Magazine, Stand, Ambit – and to the Pan Book of Horror Stories. I found an address, somewhere, for Herbert van Thal, the superbly named editor of the long-running series in which a number of excellent writers had appeared over the years, and I sent off a bunch of stories. I received a very kind letter back from Phyllis van Thal, Herbert’s widow, in which she told me that she had forwarded my submission to Clarence Paget, who had taken over the role of editor. In due course I heard from Clarence Paget. ‘I regret to say,’ he wrote, ‘that I am returning to you “Alice”, “Home Sweet Home”, “Dora and Arthur Brown” and “An Unreliable Report” which cannot be used. I will be writing to you shortly,’ he went on, ‘with an offer for “Time to Get Up” which I enjoyed very much.’ I think I probably danced up and down on the spot and then rushed out into the corridor of my student hall of residence to see if I could find any of my friends with whom to share the good news. This was in May 1984. I was 21.

The Pan Horror series had published numerous stories by some of my favourite short story writers, notably William Sansom, Alex Hamilton, John Burke, Giles Gordon and Robert Aickman. I also had a soft spot for Eddy C Bertin (largely because he was Belgian) and Philip Sidney Jennings (co-founder and editor of Jennings Magazine). My favourite volume was the sixth, combining Sansom’s wonderfully shocking ‘A Real Need’, Burke’s creepy ‘Party Games’ and a reprint of John Lennon’s ‘No Flies on Frank’. It’s impossible to overstate how excited I was to sell a story to the series. ‘Time to Get Up’ was the eighteenth short story I had written. It wasn’t the first to be published – that was ‘The Man Who Picked His Nose and Loved Fat Women’, which appeared in a non-profit magazine called Rebound – but it was my first to be accepted and my first professional sale and I thought it would lead to my being unable to walk down the street without being recognised and perhaps even politely acknowledged. Mel Smith’s character in Colin’s Sandwich would later suffer from the same delusion, prompted by his appearance in the Langley Book of Horror.

The reality, of course, was a little different. I was paid £50 for the story. It came out in October 1985, but for weeks, possibly months, before it was due out, I would obsessively check the horror section whenever I was in a bookshop. When I finally did slide a copy of volume 26 off the shelf, and saw Steve Crisp’s hyper-real illustration of bluebottles in a gaping mouth for the first time, I felt an intense buzzing in my temples, as if the flies had lifted off the surface of the book and entered my own head. I still get a buzz from seeing a new story in an anthology, but that first time was special.

I started sending more stories to Clarence Paget after ‘Time to Get Up’ was accepted, and they all came back, one in August 1984, three the following month, by which time I was living in a very damp studio flat in Paris, four in January 1986, and so on. In all I sent 20 stories after ‘Time to Get Up’ and they were all rejected. The later ones, which in my opinion were much better stories than ‘Time to Get Up’, would eventually see print elsewhere, but they were judged to be not right for the Pan Book of Horror. Of one story, Clarence Paget wrote, ‘I must return your story “Ours Now” which not remotely can be considered for the Pan collections. I’m sorry but there it is.’