Ince Robin - Dead Funny Horror Stories by Comedians

Dead Funny

What happens when mirth turns to murder? When the screams are not from joy, but flesh-ripping pain? Dead Funny is an audacious anthology, featuring tales of terror from some of the brightest lights in UK comedy.

Award winners Robin Ince and Johnny Mains team up for this unique exploration of the relationship between comedy and horror to see if they do, as believed, make the most comfortable of bedfellows.

Featuring the talents of

Mitch Benn, Katy Brand, Neil Edmond, Richard Herring, Charlie Higson, Matthew Holness, Rufus Hound, Robin Ince, Phill Jupitus, Tim Key, Stewart Lee, Michael Legge, Al Murray, Sara Pascoe, Reece Shearsmith and Danielle Ward

Youll die screaming.

Robin Ince is a multi-award-winning comedian and author. His book Robin Inces Bad Book Club was based on his tour Bad Book Club . More recently he has toured Happiness Through Science , The Importance of Being Interested and is currently touring Robin Ince Is In And Out Of His Mind and Blooming Buzzing Confusion.

Johnny Mains is an award-winning editor, author and horror historian. He is editor of Salts Best British Horror series and five other anthologies, and author of two short story collections.

Published by Salt Publishing Ltd

12 Norwich Road, Cromer, Norfolk NR27 0AX

All rights reserved

The concept of Dead Funny: Horror Stories By Comedians Johnny Mains & Clare-Louise Mains 2011, 2014

Introduction and Selection Robin Ince and Johnny Mains, 2014

Individual contributions the contributors, 2014

Possum previously published in The New Uncanny (Comma Press, 2008) ed. Sarah Eyre and Ra Page

A View From A Hill previously published in New Statesman (December, 2012)

The rights of Robin Ince and Johnny Mains to be identied as the editors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with Section of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 .

This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Salt Publishing.

Salt Publishing 2014

Created by Salt Publishing Ltd

This book is sold subject to the conditions that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

ISBN 978-1-84471-992-1 electronic

Dead Funny is dedicated to

Rik Mayall and Robin Williams

Robin Ince would also like to dedicate Dead Funny to Nicki and Archie

Johnny Mains would also like to dedicate Dead Funny to Kevin Demant from the Vault of Evil website and Bob Pugh

Introduction

I was lucky enough to find a sheeps skull in a field when I was ten, and soon it was on my bedside table, with a candle stuck on it to replica te some imagined cover of a horror anthology. I was that child who hung around cemeteries, collected LPs of death and horror sound effects and Edgar Allan Poe readings by Basil Rathbone, and was told by his older sisters that, if and when he grew up, hed become a serial killer. I became a stand-up comedian instead. On the advice of the Pope of Trash, John Waters, I have committed my hideous crimes as comedy routines rather than in actuality.

It all started with Alan Franks Horror Movies book. I still have it now, though stupid nine year old me cut out some of the colour plates to make into a wastepaper bin as a project at the Friday night Baptist church childrens group. It would be some time before I would see my first proper horror. At ten, I saw Vincent Price in The Pit and the Pendulum . At eleven, I was allowed to watch the black and white half of the BBC horror double bill season. I wrote to Boris Karloffs widow and she sent me a lovely letter back.

All things horror were embraced by the outsider kids of my generation. We spent our pocket money on House of Hammer magazine and trading cards with a stick of yellow gum and images of Christopher Lees Dracula impaled on a cartwheel. I bought the Mayflower Book of Black Magic Stories and picked up Herbert Van Thals Pan Book of Horror Stories . The first I remember reading was by Dulcie Gray, an actor who specialised in playing well-bred couples with her husband Michael Denison, but I discovered that behind this prim and proper exterior was a mind that reveled in the grotesque. The outlet for being trapped in stagey, sometimes stodgy fare, was to kill and kill again on the page.

The comedians and writers I usually hang out with were usually the slightly weird kids at school, while others collected football stickers, they hung around comic shops trying to get hold of Monster Mag and imagining whole films in their heads from single stills of decapitated Shakespearians or frozen Nazis. We had nightmares, but rather than destroying us, we fed on them, and one day theyd become our day job. I still read Poe now, and I even got around to a one off, late night improvised prog rock musical with Robyn Hitchcock and a bunch of jazz musicians, mimes and opera singers, based on Guy N Smiths killer crabs novels.

And while you are reading this book, remember that the goriest deaths will have been created while the writer was imagining their worst heckler. Interrupt at a comedy club at your peril, now you know what goes on in the minds of the stand-up.

As to the traumatic birth of this book, I met editor Johnny Mains in 2010 through Twitter. I was due to play in Norwich, where he was then living. He asked if we could chat about the Pan Horrors after my show, which we did.

Over several beers, Johnny made less sense as the evening went on and he forgot his coat.

We met again when I came to Plymouth in 2011 with Night of 400 Billion Stars. He came to me with the idea of co-editing Dead Funny and it was something I immediately said yes to. However, Johnny and I are both hectically busy people and we never got round to working on the book until this year. But here it is. A book that were both extremely proud of, weve not had to kill any comedians during the making of it and Id like to thank Johnny for all of his hard work.

Robin Ince

Foreword

I always think that a good story becomes a truly great one that it has a smattering of black humour to it. The stories of Conrad Hill and Harry E. Turner, both authors of the infamous Pan Book of Horror Stories series were able to, quite magically, mix disgusting horror and stomach ache laughter very easily.

It was during a chat about what anthology to do next with my wife when we hit upon the idea that an anthology by comedians would be a suitably quirky book. Its certainly never been done before. The more I thought on the concept, the more I was excited by it; comedians write their own material and it can stray into very dark places at times. Why couldnt they write short stories?

I had known Robin Ince for about a year by this time. I had commissioned a short story from both he and Charlie Higson, and what I was sent for The Screaming Book of Horror only confirmed the fact that a horror anthology, written by comedians, just might work.