Showing posts sorted by relevance for query betty owen. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query betty owen. Sort by date Show all posts

Saturday, October 31, 2015

Combo: FFB: The anthologies of Betty M. Owen; October's Underappreciated Music; Tuesday's Overlooked Films and/or Other A/V: the links and more

25th anniversary issue; source of "Ghost Hunt"
Illustration by Lee Brown Coye
Please see below for the "Tuesday's" A/V, October Underappreciated Music, and Friday's "Forgotten" Books posts in that order...thanks to all contributors and all you readers (and viewers/auditors!) and happy Hallowe'en...


 TUESDAY'S OVERLOOKED A/V ON FRIDAY:
Dedicated to the memory of Ed Walker...and Maureen O'Hara.

Ali Karim: Bouchercon

 Anne Billson: The Heat and its cat

 Anonymous: Maureen O'Hara;  Short Term 13; The Dark Corner; The Professionals

 Anonymous 4 (my early-music-loving friend) recommends:


 Bhob Stewart: Jack Kerouac reads Dr. Sax; One Fast Move or I'm Gone

 Bill Crider: Never Too Late [trailer]

 Brian Arnold: And Now the Screaming Starts!

 B. V. Lawson: Media Murder

Short Horror Films #1:
"The Empty Space In Between" (some nudity)

The Empty Space In Between from Maria Tornberg on Vimeo.

 Colin: Shotgun

 Comedy Film Nerds: Tyler Smith and David Bax

 Cullen Gallagher: Blood and Lace

 Cynthia Fuchs: Life Itself

 Dan Stumpf: Malpertuis (aka The Legend of Doom House)
Dellamore Dellamorte

 David Vineyard: Dellamorte Dellamore (aka Cemetery Man)

 Diana B: Early AMC, and TCM now/#LetsMovie

 Dorian Bartilucci: North by Northwest

 Ed Walker: his last The Big Broadcast

 Elizabeth Foxwell: The Chalk Garden

 Short Horror Films #2:
"Monster" (the seeds of The Babadook)

Monster - Jennifer Kent from Jennifer Kent on Vimeo.

 Evan Lewis: Nosferatu (1922) restored

 Gary Deane: Hell Bound

 George Kelley: Burn, Witch, Burn!

 Gilligan Newton-John: There's Nothing Out There

 Short Horror Films #3:
"There Are Monsters"


How Did This Get Made?: Death Spa 

 Iba Dawson: NY ComicCon

 Ivan G. Shreve, Jr.: The Great American Dream Machine

 J. Kingston Pierce: origins of The Streets of San Francisco

 Jack Seabrook: Alfred Hitchcock Presents: "The Orderly World of Mr. Appleby"

 Jackie Kashian: Crazy Stupid Love; Breanna Conley on photobooths

Jacqueline T. Lynch: Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein; Maureen O'Hara

 James Clark: The Red Circle 

 James Reasoner: The Cat and the Canary (1939 film) 

 Janet Varney: All Jane Comedy Festival; Rhea Butcher 

Jerry House: Drop Dead! (Arch Oboler's 1962 album): "The Dark" 

 Vincent Price reads Joseph Payne Brennan's "The Calamander Chest" (Caedmon Records)--a favorite story of Jerry Houses's.

Part 2
To hear an earlier Price/Caedmon Hallowe'en/horror-themed album (sleeve below; illustration by Leo and Diane Dillon), please click on this sentence.
John Grant: Blues in the Night; Woman Unafraid 

Jonathan Lewis: Billy the Kid vs. Dracula: The Walking Dead (1936 film); Terror Train

 Karen Hannsberry: Guest in the House 

 Kelly Robinson: Destiny (1921 film); The Phantom of the Opera (1925 film); Melinmontant; Die Pest in Florenz (aka The Plague in Florence); Warning Shadows (1923 film); Der Golem (1920 film); Au Secours!

 Short Horror Films #4:
"The Underpass"


 Ken Levine: Friday questions 

 Kristina Dijan: The Uninvited (1944 film); Cloverfield; Tremors; The Devil Rides Out; Rodan; Underrated 1955 films; The Abominable Dr. Phibes; horror films 

 Laura G.: She Wore a Yellow Ribbon; Appaloosa; Palm Springs Classic Science Fiction Film Festival; Public Hero #1; Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956 film); Flaxy Martin

 Lucy Brown: Mrs. Biggs

 Marty McKee: Nightmare in Chicago (longer variation on Kraft Suspense Theater: "Once Upon a Savage Night"); The Zebra Force; The Bubble; Invasion of the Blood Farmers  (my take on "Once Upon a Savage Night" among other work)

 Michael Shonk: US commercial broadcast primetime

 More short surrealist than horror film:
"Thanatopsis" by Ed Emshwiller


 Mystery Dave: Focus 

 Patricia Nolan-Hall: 3 Bad Men; Werewolf of London

 Patti Abbott: sitcoms; The Dick Van Dyke Show: "It May Look Like  a Walnut"

Pop My Culture: Scott Aukerman 

 Prashant Trikannad: Million Dollar Arm

 Rick: The Norliss Tapes; Universal's 1940s Mummy films; Hammer's Dracula films from best to worst 

 Rod Lott: Trick or Treat (1986 film); Tales of Hallowe'en; Dark Places; The Lodger (2009 film); Hidden (2015 film); Trapped Ashes; Colour-Correct My Cock; The Vatican Tapes; I Spit on Your Grave III: Vengeance is Mine

More short whimsical than horror film, but still kinda: 
"When Tickling Goes Wrong"
(as far as I know, there're no further parts)


 "Rupert Pupkin": Twice Upon a Time

 Ruth: The Italian Straw Hat 

 Salome: The Leopard Man; Asphalt; I Wake Up Screaming

Sam Juliano: City of the Dead (aka Horror Hotel)

 Scott A. Cupp: Count Yorga, Vampire

 Sergio Angelini: Sheila Levine is Dead and Living in New York  (Yvette Banek on this one.)
Murder, My Sweet

 Stacia Jones: Murder, My Sweet

 Stephen Bowie: Serge Krizman

 Steve Bailey: The Creature with the Atom Brain

 Steve Lewis: Mimic; B.A.D. Cats: "Pilot" 

 Television Obscurities: favorite '80s obscure series

 Todd Mason recommends: "Ghost Hunt", a 1949 episode of Suspense...based on H. Russell Wakefield's story in the 25th anniversary issue of Weird Tales, and a radio predecessor of sorts to all the "found footage" films of the last thirty-forty years.


 Victoria Loomes: Twin Peaks: "Zen, or the Skill to Catch a Killer"

 Vienna: Maureen O'Hara; The Unknown Man  

 Yvette Banek: favorite Hallowe'en films

 OCTOBER'S UNDERAPPRECIATED MUSIC:

 Harry Partch: The Outsider


Patti Abbott: Music and Songs

Brian Arnold: The Glass Prism: "The Raven"

Jayme Lynn Blaschke: Friday Night Videos

 Paul Brazill: A Song for Saturday

Jim C.: The Philly Joe Jones Sextet: "Blues for Dracula"; Dave Pike

 Moondog: "Fog on the Hudson"


 Steve Coleman: The Small Faces: Ogden's Nut Gone Flake; Cory Wells

 Bill Crider: Song of the Day; Forgotten Hits, Local Charts; The Bobby Fuller Four

 Jeff Gemmill: Melody Gardot in concert; Greta Isaac; Neil Young in Concert,1989; Top 5s

 Jerry House: John McCutcheon on the hammered dulcimer; Daily Music+; Hymn Time

 George Kelley: David Bowie: Five Years (1969-73)

 Fanny: "Ain't That Peculiar"


 Kate Laity: "I Put a Spell on You"; The Classics IV: "Spooky"

 Steve Lewis, Jonathan Lewis, Mike Doran and Michael Shonk: Music I'lm Listening To

 Todd Mason: A Quick World Tour; Some Television Theme Music (and songs thus employed)

 Lawrence Person: Shoegazer Sunday

 Charlie Ricci: Paul Desmond: The Complete RCA Victor Recordings featuring Jim Hall; Cory Wells

 Blue Rose: "River of Change"


 FFB: THE ANTHOLOGIES OF BETTY M. OWEN

 Betty M. Owen was an editor most visibly for Scholastic Book Services in the 1960s and '70s...and her most prolific contributions were of the horror and associated weird fiction anthologies she produced for Scholastic, along with some other compilations (her 1966 Christmas carol anthology, with fellow SBS anthologist Mary MacEwan, featured transcriptions/arrangements by none other than a relatively young Carla Bley) of more than passing interest, including a selection of Jack London's short work and two anthologies of fiction from the Scholastic Magazines young writers' contests. A lover of sf, as well, she produced one anthology of more or less purely science fiction content, albeit that was one I've never actually held or seen, as it appeared after I was out of the Scholastic Book Services' reach, for the most part (I was in highs school by then, and occasionally seeing their magazines in class, but for whatever reason we weren't getting the book offers). Perhaps notably, the most prominent book of hers not published by SBS is the critical survey Smorgasbord of Books: Titles Junior High Readers Relish. (Indices courtesy ISFDB.)

 Her first horror antho for SBS was:
A fine start, and indicative of her lack of any sort of "purism" among selections that were sfnal, more criminous, and otherwise not necessarily horror per se, though, for example, the Blackwood qualifies by any measure. As someone already having cut his teeth on the eclecticism of the Robert Arthur "Alfred Hitchcock" anthologies, this was not unwelcome. 

This was the first I bought among her books, and it's one of the more dear to me, as it introduced me to Finney with what I still think of as one of his best stories, and generally hewed closely to its stated remit, featuring mostly, at least, true horror as I think of it (supernatural suspense fiction, essentially)...the Poe being one of the relatively few exceptions...also notable that while Owen had mixed mostly classic and relatively "slick" writers in her first book of the outre, she reached just a bit into the more "insider" work of the likes of Evans, Hughes and, still to some extent in 1969, Lovecraft. Though whether she read the Evans in William Sloane's Stories for Tomorrow or Zacherley's Midnight Stew would be a good question to ask if we had the opportunity.

Well, this is probably the best of her anthologies for Scholastic, and probably why I chose it (in 2009, how time escapes) as the only of her books I've covered so far previously among FFB selections. I believe this book, also the first of hers I read in a borrowed copy, introduced me to Lawrence, Calisher and Borges...don't know if also St. Clair and Highsmith, but quite possibly--I suspect I'd read both of them perhaps a bit earlier in Arthur's "Hitchcock" anthologies.

This was the last of Owen's books I purchased as a youth, and by the time I found it, I'd already read the Bierce stories, and a couple of the Hearn and Le Fanu stories, but decided what the hell, let's see what the balance are like. It's an oddly budget-conscious and rather lazy-seeming antho, given it's devoted to three writers whose work was all firmly in the public domain, but perhaps the selections were very dear to Owen. This would also be the last anthology of macabre fiction she placed with SBS.

As noted, I've never owned a copy of this one, published by the time I was reading essentially only books published for adults, anyway, but it, too, is a rather neat collection of chestnuts and at least one obscure selection (the Hood, previously only in a William F. Nolan anthology) and one or two arguably so (though the Felsen had been anthologized by Groff Conklin after appearing in F&SF, and Felsen was reasonably well-known for his YA writing...the Abernathy being one of those stories that people who know the author's name at all tend to think of first). Clearly, SBS was hoping to cash in on some Star Wars/Close Encounters gravy...I wonder why Owen stopped at this point (SBS's notoriously low rates of pay?). 

Below, some of Owen's other work for SBS:
1980s or later reprint.

























selections from the Fitzgerald translation
edited by Owen




































For more of today's books, please (as almost always) see Patti Abbott's blog.



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Friday, January 16, 2009

Friday "Forgotten" Books: NINE STRANGE STORIES edited by Betty M. Owen (Scholastic, 1974)

Includes:
The rocking-horse winner, D. H. Lawrence;
Heartburn, Hortense Calisher;
The snail-watcher, Patricia Highsmith;
Manuscript found in a police state, Brian Aldiss;
The man who sold rope to the Gnoles, Idris Seabright (Margaret St. Clair);
The mark of the beast, Rudyard Kipling;
The summer people, Shirley Jackson;
The leopard man's story, Jack London;
The garden of forking paths, Jorge Luis Borges

Another in the series of books that sustained my love of horror, even though this, like most Owen and other Scholastic anthologies, was about as eclectic as an ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS anthology. A timely citation, since unfortunately Calisher, whose "Heartburn" is included, just died (somewhat less timely, but stil synchronicitous, is the citation by Andy Duncan on the IAFA-L list of an insane blurb on a 1963 book by the late St. Clair, not killed by apoplexy upon reading the blurb, but she might well've been:

From the back cover of Sign of the Labrys by Margaret St. Clair, a 1963 original paperback novel from Bantam:

"Women are writing science-fiction! ... Women are closer to the primitive than men. They are conscious of the moon-pulls, the earth-tides. They possess a buried memory of humankind's obscure and ancient past which can emerge to uniquely color and flavor a novel. Such a woman is Margaret St. Clair, author of this novel. Such a novel is this, Sign of the Labrys, the story of a doomed world of the future, saved by recourse to ageless, immemorial rites ..."

Duncan's scan of that cover:
http://beluthahatchie.blogspot.com/2009/01/women-are-writing-science-fiction.html

Meanwhile, I think you can see why these books might appeal to any literate youth; this was, I'm pretty sure, my introduction to Borges (I wouldn't catch up to his new work till The Book of Sand a few years later; also to Lawrence and probably to Aldiss, Highsmith, and "Seabright" (slightly ironic that what is almost certainly St. Clair's best know story was published by her under her Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction pseudonym).

The Aldiss is a slightly silly but ingenious account of a prison made up cells on a sort of wheel within a mountain, told in the great gray tones appropriate to such a narrative. The Highsmith is "The Snail Watcher," and I hope you've come across it somewhere in your reading life by now...easily the most famous short story published by the shortlived US fantasy and sf magazine Gamma, despite not being sf nor fantasy, but a potentially realistic animal suspense story involving the kind of obsessive Highsmith loved to describe (and one wonders why it ended up in Gamma rather than a higher-paying market...was it widely rejected? A favor to editor Charles Fritch, who later would edit the last years of Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine? The others are nearly as common chestnuts of such anthologies, and other sorts, except perhaps for the Calisher, which might well've been first anthologized, and spotted by Owen, in Ray Bradbury's Timeless Tales for Today and Tomorrow.

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Sunday, October 29, 2017

My Hallowe'en and beyond: Early Key Horror Anthologies (for me)

One of the books I learned to read with (along with Dr. Seuss and Gyo Fujikawa and Little Golden Books): compiled by Oscar Weigle



 edited by Wilhelmina Harper, borrowed from the elementary school library in first grade:
  • Publication: Ghosts and Goblins: Stories for Hallowe'en and Other Times
  • Editor: Wilhelmina Harper
  • Date: 1936-08-20
  • Publisher: E. P. Dutton
  • Price: $2.00
  • Pages: 271



  •  Ghosts and Goblins • (1936) • interior artwork by Wilfred Jones
  • 13 • Foreword (Ghosts and Goblins) • (1936) • essay by Wilhelmina Harper
  • 23 • Hallowe'en • (1936) • poem by Molly Capes
  • 25 • The Ghost of the Great White Stag • (1925) • short story by Arthur C. Parker
  • 37 • The Hungry Old Witch • (1924) • short story by Charles J. Finger
  • 52 • The Conjure Wives • (1921) • short story by Frances G. Wickes
  • 57 • Someone • juvenile • (1913) • poem by Walter de la Mare
  • 58 • Ah Tcha the Sleeper • juvenile • (1925) • short story by Arthur Bowie Chrisman
  • 69 • The Woodman and the Goblins • juvenile • (1936) • short story by J. Berg Esenwein and Marietta Stockard [as by J. B. Esenwein and Marietta Stockard]
  • 77 • The King o' the Cats • (1894) • short story by Joseph Jacobs
  • 80 • The Enchanted Cow • (1931) • short story by Mary Gould Davis [as by Mary G. Davis]
  • 88 • Peter and the Witch of the Wood • (1936) • short story by Anna Wahlenberg
  • 105 • The Goblin of the Pitcher • (1931) • short story by Alida S. Malkus
  • 112 • Tamlane • (1894) • short story by Joseph Jacobs
  • 118 • The Ghosts of Forefathers' Hill • (1922) • short story by Raymond Macdonald Alden
  • 131 • The Shadow People • (1917) • poem by Francis Ledwidge
  • 133 • The Black Cat of the Witch-Dance-Place • (1936) • short fiction by Frances Jenkins Olcott [as by Frances J. Olcott]
  • 138 • Tomson's Hallowe'en • juvenile • (1936) • short story by Margaret Baker [as by Margaret Baker and Mary Baker]
  • 156 • So-Beé-Yit • (1936) • short story by Maynard Dixon
  • 165 • The Old Hag of the Forest • (1899) • short story by Seumas MacManus
  • 182 • The Ghost Wife • (1936) • short story by Charles A. Eastman
  • 187 • The Old Witch • (1894) • short story by Joseph Jacobs
  • 194 • Wait Till Martin Comes • (1921) • short story by Frances G. Wickes
  • The Wishing-Well • (1918) • short fiction by Maud Lindsay and Emilie Poulsson
  • The Witch's Shoes • (1929) • short fiction by Frances Jenkins Olcott [as by Frances J. Olcott]
  • 208 • Old Man Gully's Hant • (1936) • short story by Sarah Johnson Cocke [as by Sarah J. Cocke]
  • A Hallowe'en Story • (1936) • poem by Margaret Widdemer
  • The Witch of Lok Island • (1929) • short story by Elsie Masson
  • The Great White Bear • juvenile • non-genre • (1915) • short story by Maud Lindsay
  • The Ghosts of Kahlberg • (1936) • short fiction by Bernard Henderson
  • The Wonderful Lamb • (1930) • short fiction by Nándor Pogány
  • Teeny-Tiny • (1890) • short fiction by Joseph Jacobs

    •


















    Edited by Hal Cantor:
    Most common cover
    color variations
    edited by Nora Kramer:

    edited by Henry Mazzeo:
    • Publication: Hauntings: Tales of the Supernatural
    • Editors: Henry Mazzeo
    • Date: 1968-00-00
    • ISBN: 0-385-09373-X [978-0-385-09373-6]
    • Publisher: Doubleday
    • Price: $5.98
    • Pages: 318
    • Binding: hc
    • Type: ANTHOLOGY
    • Cover: Edward Gorey

    edited by Kathleen Lines:
    • Publication: The House of the Nightmare: and Other Eerie Tales
    • Editor: Kathleen Lines
    • Date: 1967-00-00
    • Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
    • Price: $3.95
    • Pages: xii + 250
    • Binding: hc
    • Type: ANTHOLOGY
    edited by Robert Arthur:
    edited by Betty M. Owen
    and then onto Helen Hoke and Son Manley and Gogo Lewis and certainly quite a few more Robert Arthur, Harold Q. Masur and other Hitchcock-branded books, and several more from Betty M. Owen...and Gerald Page's annual The Year's Best Horror Stories...
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