The Pan Books Of Horror were a rite of passage for my generation, similar to the next generation and video nasties. We had to read and use our imaginations.
The Twelfth Pan Book Of Horror (with a cover featuring a skeleton emerging from ice) featured a long short story (sic) called The Hunter. In fact, it takes up about half the book. It's a wonderfully English tale set on Bodmin Moor so I was very surprised to find out that David Case was American.
You wouldn't know it from the story, apart from a God-Damn and an I guess.
A penny-pinching hiker is perambulating across Bodmin Moor when he discovers a body, brutally savaged - and headless.
Cut to Wetherby in The Venturers Club, both a little past their prime. Our man has retired from big-game hunting and the club is now open to long-haired youngsters who don’t share the same passion for the hunt or exploration as the original members.
His quiet evening is interrupted by the arrival of old member Justin Bell. Bell is a no-nonsense copper whose membership only just got though on the basis of (or despite) his job.
Bell clues Wetherby in on the savage killing in Bodmin. The police are baffled (?!) and Bell thinks his old friend’s skills will help. Coincidentally, there’s another Venturer, the enigmatic Byron, who lives nearby. He has declined to assist the Old Bill.
Wetherby, enthused by the chance to reignite his old way of life, and intrigued (though not surprised) by Byron’s refusal to help, agrees to assist – and they have to set off earlier than expected because there’s been another savage killing.
A commercial traveller had run out of petrol not far from the scene of the first killing, and upon leaving his car in the pouring rain, met with a bloody end and the loss of his head. I like what Case did with this character, a reversal of the usual commercial traveller arc.
Wetherby and Bell investigate. It seems that the creature walks bipedally towards its intended victim, charges on all fours to the kill, slashes away with savage claws…but how does it decapitate the target so cleanly….and what about tracks away from the corpse….?
A journalist shows up, fomenting disdain amongst the investigators (Case does a good job of humanising him) and, knowing the sort of hysterical headline his editor wants, begins to suggest lycanthropy. Anyone familiar some of Case’s other work (The Cell, Among The Wolves) will know that this may not be too far from expectations.
We have a pub called The King’s Torso with irascible landlord, a scene that really frightened me as a nipper – the discovery of the third victim, and Wetherby’s realisation that perhaps it’s been too long, and his idea of patrolling the moor alone at night to draw out the beast was not such a good idea.
It’s a cracking tale, full of nostalgic goodness for me. Probably unworkable these days due to mobile phones, although the remoteness of the moor might bugger up signals.
Byron, with his peculiar philosophy of what living means, meanders through the story, highlighting Wetherby’s decline and normality, and giving off an aura of Nietzschean superpower.
The ending is somewhat anticlimactic but it’s a great journey.
I’ve managed to track down a US TV movie based upon the story, called Scream Of The Wolf. It doesn’t seem to be highly thought of, despite the involvement of Dan Curtis and Richard Matheson. We shall see.
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