Peter Haining (1940–2007)

This is one of my favorite collections of stories of this kind. In it is Montague Summers' "The Grimoire", his only piece of fiction, offering delights of bibliomania and demonology; also Ambrose Bierce's piece on dreams, "Visions of the Night", in which he recounts a dream which prefigures Arthur Machen's capture of evil as that which goes against Nature ("evil is when flowers sing"), but also inspires a cynic's amusement. The Crowley story is among the most effective horror tales I have show more ever read - reminding me of aspects of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. "The Shifting Growth", written by John Gawsworth (Juan I) and Edgar Jepson, shares affinity with Crowley's tale, and is, well, uncommonly disturbing (as well as uncommonly anthologized). Acquire, enjoy, and wind through the labyrinth where you're led (to be lost). show less

A review I read nearly forty years ago of Peter Dickinson's The Flight of Dragons mentioned how the author used scholasticism, biology and chemistry "to prove how dragons could have physically existed, breathed fire, and flown." This put me in mind of a discussion of dragon legends in the Quantock Hills of Somerset where, of at least nine dragons mentioned, only one breathed fire: the dragon of Kingston St Mary. Peter Haining's The Man Who Was Frankenstein suggested to me why this might be show more so.

A couple of miles north of Kingston, near the highest point on the Quantocks, once stood Fyne Court in the village of Broomfield. The best known of the owners of Fyne Court was Andrew Crosse (1784-1855) whose epitaph in St Mary's church reads The Electrician ... He was Humble Towards God and Kind to His Fellow Creatures.

Other names were more colourful: the Wizard of the Quantocks, the Thunder & Lightning Man. What Crosse did was to convey atmospheric electricity along one-and-a-quarter miles of insulated copper wires strung from trees and poles to his laboratory. When the electricity was discharged from his batteries the reports could be "as loud as those of a cannon" and "the stream of fire ... too vivid to look on for any length of time". Might not the memory of this early experimenter in electricity have added the description "fire-breathing" to the dragon legend closest to Broomfield?¹

Hesiod's Theogony told various legends of the Titan Prometheus who created man from clay, stole fire from Hephaestus' forge and stored it in a rod (a fire-drill perhaps), and was bound to a rock and tortured for his pains. Millennia later Percy Bysshe Shelley, author of Prometheus Unbound, and Mary Godwin (later Mary Shelley) were present in 1814 at Andrew Crosse's only London lecture. Haining believes that Mary's impressions of the lecturer contributed significantly to her chief claim to literary fame, Frankenstein, which was subtitled The Modern Prometheus: hence the title of Haining's book.

And then, in an almost incredible episode of nature imitating art, Andrew Cross appeared, like Victor Frankenstein, to create life itself, in 1837, twenty years after Mary Shelley's book first appeared. Crosse was trying to form artificial minerals by the action of electricity on fluids but during the course of repeated experiments produced six- and eight-legged 'insects' of the genus acarus, reputedly confirmed in independent parallel experiments by no less a person than Faraday (though there is no evidence to support this).

Like a real-life Frankenstein, Crosse was vilified as a blasphemer and atheist, which distressed him greatly, but the mystery has not really been satisfactorily explained.²
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¹ It's probable, however, that the fire-breathing dragon legend predated Andrew Crosse's lifetime, as a dragon is carved on one of the medieval bench ends of nearby Crowcombe church. However, all the accounts of the Kingston St Mary dragon appear to date from the 20th century: Vince Russett, 'The Dragons of Quantock' in Picwinnard, the magazine of Wessex leys and folklore 8, February 1979

² It's argued that cheese-mites or dust-mites had contaminated Crosse's experiments

This review, now slightly revised, first appeared in The Journal of the Pendragon Society Vol XIII No 3, Summer 1980. It forms part of a short series celebrating the bicentenary of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, first published 1818.

https://wp.me/s2oNj1-crosse show less

Thank God I only read one of Peter Haining's anthologies. The mediocre stories here put me off seeking out any more of his editorial efforts.

If this wasn't already enough reason to avoid him, it has come to light in later years that Haining was an unrepentant plagiarizer, fabricator, and just plain liar. He would scavenge obscure pulp fare, rewrite it, and try to pass it off as the product another obscure but more desirable author. He would provide bogus references for the stories that were show more harder to investigate in the good ol' days. He edited texts without any acknowledgement, "borrowed" stories without attribution (or deliberately incorrect attribution), and generally did what he wanted while compiling his little anthologies.

Wonder why his anthologies are so mediocre? Besides cramming them with second rate real stories, He wasn't a particularly gifted writer even when trying to dress up third class fare. A pig with lipstick still looks like a pig!

Check out Douglas A. Anderson's entries in the "Wormwoodiana" blog for more interesting research about Mr. Haining. show less

Terrific collection of stories on which various classic horror films were based. Well-known fare such as Bram Stoker's "Dracula's Guest" and Robert Louis Stevenson's "The Body Snatcher" is nicely balanced with more obscure items like Francis Mann's "The Devil in a Convent" (an early twentieth century retelling of a medieval legend) and Nikolai Gogol's "The Viy" (from which Mario Bava freely adapted his film Black Sunday). There's also a skillful abridgement of Gaston Leroux's The Phantom of show more the Opera, which packs considerably greater punch as a sixty-odd-page novella than in its original novel-length form. My only quibble is with editor Peter Haining's decision to identify the stories by the titles of the films on which they were based: e.g., Stoker's story is listed in the table of contents as "Dracula's Daughter," not "Dracula's Guest." In some cases the story and movie titles were the same, but H.P. Lovecraft's "The Colour Out of Space" appears here as "Monster of Terror"...which is doubly confusing for American readers, since the film based on the Lovecraft tale was entitled Die, Monster, Die! in the United States. (Monster of Terror was the film's British title.)

The introduction by Vincent Price and afterword by Christopher Lee add to the fun, as do photographs from all but three of the films. There's one particularly rare still from the lost 1909 film Lunatics in Power, which was based on Edgar Allan Poe's story "The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether." (Usually credited to Thomas Edison, the film was a production of the Edison Manufacturing Company, but actually was directed by J. Searle Dawley.) show less