It's beyond me to do the sheer grimness of this one justice, but the overall effect is like some literary equivalent of Witchfinder General. On its original issue it was seen as something garish and unpleasant, its horrific tales too gruesome and unsettling for many. When you ask many of the present day genre writers – Stephen Jones, Clive Barker, Mark Morris, Phillip Pullman – it is this series they remember that affected them when younger. THE FUR BROOCH, by Dulcie Gray: A young woman is desperate to get rid of her slimeball suitor, but he has other ideas. Written in a very genteel and decidedly old-fashioned style, but this somehow

After reading all 37 Fontana Books of Horror and Ghost stories, I now embark on the 30 volume Pan Books of Horror (published between 1959 and 1989). A thirteen-year-old orphan girl is very fond of the obese bachelor who visits her regularly. His intentions are anything but wholesome. A disturbing tale of sexual menace. Dream House’ (Dulcie Gray). Two good one’s in a row from this writer whose style is a pleasure to read. A large overbearing woman and her skinny quiet husband take out a long term lease on a large country house. This is another character horror. I wasn’t expecting the denouement. Almost unheard of - A Pan Horror Collection in which there are absolutely no duffers! Except one rather inconsequential poem, all of the stories here are, at the very least, great macabre fun. A pair of deformed twins touring their travelling fair around Europe both enjoy the sexual charms of one of their acts; a dancing gypsy girl. They are equally delighted when she gives birth to a healthy baby boy, but all is not as it appears.

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The Fur Brooch’ (Dulcie Gray). A woman who is the fiancé of a good-looking man is constantly irritated by her mother pushing her towards an odd and creepy man. The creepy man is none too pleased at her choice! This is a beautifully written character horror story with a good central idea and a heavy foreboding atmosphere.

In the night someone (Edward is too drunk to ascertain the gender) visits his room and treats him to an hour’s fun'n'games. Was this Edward’s wife, their handsome servant boy Ahmed, or someone else altogether? The rather flannelly, waffley closing paragraph where the man recalls the swans they had had encountered earlier in the day perhaps holds some deeper Wild Swans at Coole type meaning, but if so it was lost on my simple mind. Stewart seems to have a fondness for the name Mason as here's a whole family of them. Although the mother won't be seeing the outside of a mental hospital any time soon ... Jennifer’s plans do appear to go just a little too smoothly to be credible, but it is a diverting enough read.Another enjoyable volume in this series. Of the nineteen stories, I’d rate nine of them good to very good, and five as fine. Whether the man was a short-fused psycho all along and that the girl’s demise was in the post, or whether she precipitated it by her refusal of his proposal we shall never really know. I personally lean towards the former.