Surprising literary ventures | 16 September 2006

The Horror Horn (1974)
by E.F. Benson

‘Are you ready for the ultimate in sheer horror?’ asks the back cover of this 1970s paperback. ‘Here are stories from the darker reaches of the mind, stories which will cling like mould in your memory because there is something horribly real and convincing about them.’ Well, of course there is. They were written by the author of the Mapp and Lucia books, who always aimed to be horribly real and convincing. E.F. Benson was the son of the Archbishop of Canterbury, a prolific author who, in between writing his classic high-camp stories of life in Tilling, knocked out a few ghost tales which were repackaged for the 1970s. The title story concerns a female yeti who pursues the quivering hero down a mountainside with the specific intention of catching and ‘mating’ with him. ‘She was enveloped in a thick growth of hair grey and tufted, and from her head it streamed down over her shoulders and her bosom, from which hung withered and pendulous breasts… A fathomless bestiality modelled the slavering mouth and narrow eyes.’