Don't be scared to read a good horror story - Ian McMillan

I didn’t mean to frighten you too much but it is Halloween after all, and Halloween is meant to be a bit scary, isn’t it?

Maybe, now that we have to do socially-distanced Halloweens and there won’t be too much trick-or-treating going on, maybe the best way to mark this unsettling day in the calendar is by reading a few gloom-laden stories by torchlight or moonlight or by the light of a fridge.

There are lots of frightening tales around these days but as a lad I was obsessed by the Pan Books of Horror Stories, edited by Herbert Van Thal, known to his friends as Bertie which, in my opinion, isn’t such a terrifying name.

By the time I started buying these Pan books the series was well established, the first one having been published in 1959. I must have jumped on the bandwagon by about volume eight or nine, and that meant that I would scour charity shops and market stalls for the ones I hadn’t got.

There’s a fabulous biography of Van Thal called Lest You Should Suffer Nightmares by Johnny Mains, published by Screaming Dreams Press, that not only plunges me straight back to the tales I was obsessed with in that odd time of my life between late childhood and early adolescence, but which also gives an insight into a vanished writing and publishing world of manuscripts typed and speckled with Tippex sent by post to men in suits who would send rejection slips back to you inside your stamped addressed envelope until, one day, you got a letter of acceptance and the offer of a few quid.

The books themselves were packed with the kinds of stories that I found genuinely horrifying and nightmare-inducing, and several have hung around in my mind to this day.

The Vertical Ladder by William Sansom was an odd piece about a youth who climbed a ladder at the side of a gasometer for a bet, and whose mates removed the bottom half of the ladder, leaving him suspended in mid air, unable to go up or down.

In It Came To Dinner by R Chetwynd Hayes, a man looks for a place to sleep and ends up, gruesomely, at the house of the Carruthers family in the misty East Anglian fens.

There’s one particular story that I can’t find a copy of but the central image of a vat of bright yellow liquid in a market somewhere in a hot unnamed country stays with me; some kind of mystical villain had collected all the decay from all the bad teeth in human history and poured it into this vat.

The Pan Books of Horror Stories stopped publishing in the mid 1980s and they’re now quite hard to find but if you do come across one in a box at a car boot sale, give it a go, next Halloween. Wooooo!

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