Michel Parry – Beware Of The Cat

Michel Parry (ed) – Beware Of The Cat  (Gollancz, 1972: Arrow, 1974)

Introduction – Michel Parry

Gulielmus Baldwin – Beware The Cat
Barry Pain – The Grey Cat
Stephen Vincent Benet – The King Of The Cats
Traditional – The Vampire Cat
Byron Liggett – The Cat Man
J. S. Le Fanu – The White Cat
Algernon Blackwood – Ancient Sorceries
Saki – Tobermoray
Theodore Sturgeon – Fluffy
Ramsey Campbell – Cat And Mouse
H. P. lovecraft – The Cats Of Ulthar
Ambrose Bierce – Eyes Of The Panther
Walter Wintle – The Black Cat
Ernest Hamilton – The Child Watcher

Byron Liggett – The Cat Man:  Author Gerald Foster buys a tiny island in the Pacific, taking half a dozen cats with him for company. The narrator, Captain Rogers, agrees to deliver his supplies and over the next three years watches appalled as the cat population increases into the hundreds. It is all Foster can do to feed them and, now they’ve rid Tuo Atoll of its rats, birds and insects, the situation is desperate. Rogers makes him a present of two fierce dogs but they’re easily overcome and eaten, so next he suggests poison. Foster won’t hear of such cruelty, reasoning that this situation is down to him, not the ferocious felines. Rogers decides he’s going to kill them with or without the recluse’s consent, but his sloop is smashed in a hurricane and its four months until he can return to perform the operation.

It’s obvious from the first how this will end but the sheer inevitability of it all adds to the horror of the thing

Ernest Hamilton – The Child Watcher: Her owner drowned Esther’s kittens at birth. Guess what Esther has in store for her owners’ new born baby?

Theodore Sturgeon – Fluffy: The cat wants to be rid of its owner, the obscenely wealthy, pampering but insufferable Mrs. Benedetto. Ransome, professional house-guest and casual blackmailer, unwittingly provides the perfect opportunity. Before he reveals his dastardly frame-up to Ransome, Fluffy explains why cats have never been arsed to take over the world.