A Whisper of Blood
Page 32
A veteran book industry journalist and fiction author, Hall’s critical work appears in Publishers Weekly, various newspapers and online venues, in non-fiction books such as Icons of Horror and the Supernatural, edited by S.T.Joshi, and Supernatural Literature of the World, edited by S.T.Joshi and Stefan Dziemianowicz, and most recently in The Book of Lists—Horror: An All-New Collection of Spine-Tingling, Hair-Raising Blood-Curdling Fun and Facts compiled by Amy Wallace, Scott Bradley, and Del Howison.
ROBERT HOLDSTOCK
Robert Holdstock is the author of several novels and collections, including his “Mythago’ Cycle: The Bone Forest, Lavondyss, The Hollowing, Gate of Ivory, and Mythago Wood, which received the World Fantasy Award in 1985 and was aptly hailed by Alan Garner as “a new expression of the British genius for true fantasy.” His more recent work is “The Merlin Codex’: Celtika, The Iron Grail, and The Broken Kings. Holdstock was born in rural Kent but has made London his home for a quarter of a century.
K.W. JETER
K. W. Jeter was born in Los Angeles in 1950. He has written some very edgy novels, including Dr. Adder, The Glass Hammer, and Infernal Devices. He has also had a number of short stories published. His work defies classification.
GARRY KILWORTH
Garry Kilworth has been writing short stories for thirty-five years now and is still fired with enthusiasm for the medium. In 2006 PS Publishing brought out his collection Moby Jack and Other Tall Tales which covers ten years of stories. The same publisher will be bringing out Tales From The Fragrant Harbour, a collection of original general fiction stories written while the author lived in Hong Kong, paired with a collection of fantastical tales also penned in the same location. The first half will be subtitled “Once-Told Tales” and the second section “Twice-Told Tales” (thanks to Nathaniel Hawthorne, much admired). Garry Kilworth lives in England some of the time and in various other countries the rest of the year.
KATHE KOJA
Kathe Koja writes novels for adults and for young people (sometimes the same books). She lives in the Detroit area with her husband, artist Rick Lieder, and their cats.
THOMAS LIGOTTI
Thomas Ligotti is recognized as a contemporary master in the genre of horror fiction and his work has been compared to that of classic horror writers Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft.
He has received several awards, including the Horror Writers Association Bram Stoker award for his collection The Nightmare Factory and short novel My Work Is Not Yet Done.
Ligotti’s latest collection of stories is Teatro Grottesco, published by Durtro Press. A short film of his story “The Frolic” is available on a DVD. In addition, a graphic novel based on works from Ligotti’s 1996 collection The Nightmare Factory was released in 2007, with a second volume scheduled to appear in 2008.
BARRY N. MALZBERG
Barry N. Malzberg’s collected essays on science fiction, Breakfast in the Ruins, was published in the Spring of 2007; the book conflates his 1982 classic Engines of the Night and all of the essays published since. His collection In the Stone House was published in 2000; several of his 1970s science fiction novels have been reissued within the past half-decade.
Malzberg’s body of work includes a fair amount of novels (The Cross of Fire) and short stories concerned with religion but “The Passion of Azazel” is only the third work which has dealt with the Judaic. (Two 1970s short stories appear in Jack Dann’s anthology More Wandering Stars.) He has been publishing science fiction and fantasy for over forty years; his first story, “We’re Coming Through the Windows” (Galaxy 8/67) was sold on February 11,1967. With a fetching smile and an indescribable moue, Malzberg further notes that these last years of his seventh decade are becoming, unsurprisingly, a tortuous slog.
ELIZABETH MASSIE
Elizabeth Massie is a two-time Bram Stoker Award-winning author whose books include Sineater, Wire Mesh Mothers, Welcome Back to the Night, Shadow Dreams, Twisted Branch (as “Chris Blaine”), Homeplace, King Takes Queen (a novelization of the second season of Showtime’s The Tudors), and many others. Her short fiction has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies such as The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: Fourth Annual Collection, Best New Horror 2 and 17, The Mammoth Book of Vampire Stories by Women, Kolchak: The Night Stalker Casebook, The Spider Chronicles, and more. In addition to writing, she is the creator of the Skeeryvilletown cartoon universe, featuring 3-Eyed Devil Cat, Fire Breathing Dog O’Death, Boo Boy, Wolfie, and the rest of the bizarre gang.
She lives in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia with illustrator Cortney Skinner.
DAVID J. SCHOW
David J. Schow has a pyramid of chromed skulls on his TV set. His wardrobe is predominantly black, his sunglasses are quite dark, and he only comes out at night. He is known primarily in the horror field for his powerful, award-winning short fiction, and for editing Silver Scream, arguably the first splatterpunk anthology. His novel debut was The Kill Riff, his “rock’n’roll horror novel,” and his second was The Shaft, his “sex and drugs horror novel.” In 1989 he branched out into films and television, scripting the unsavory activities of such social lions as Leatherface and Freddy Krueger. His short fiction has been collected in Seeing Red, Lost Angels, Black Leather Required, Crypt Orchids, Eye, Zombie Jam, and Havoc Swims Jaded.
ROBERT SILVERBERG
Robert Silverberg was born in New York City, and has lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for many years. His first book, Revolt on Alpha C, was published in 1955. He is the winner of four Hugo awards and five Nebula awards as well as most of the other significant science fiction honors. He is the author of over one hundred books and an uncounted number of short stories, which have appeared in such magazines as Omni, Playboy, and Penthouse, and have been widely anthologized. Among his best-known book titles are Dying Inside, The Book of Skulls, Gilgamesh the King, Lord Valentine’s Castle, Born with the Dead, and Nightfall (with Isaac Asimov). He has edited the Alpha and New Dimensions anthology series and, with his wife Karen Haber, the Universe anthologies of original science fiction.
MELINDA M. SNODGRASS
Melinda Snodgrass was born in Los Angeles, but her family moved to New Mexico when she was five months old so she considers herself a native New Mexican.
After practicing law for three years, she realized that while she loved the study of law she didn’t particularly love lawyers so she quit to pursue a career in writing. She wrote numerous science fiction novels, and helped edit and wrote for the Wild Cards anthologies. In 1988 she accepted a job on Star Trek: The Next Generation, and began her Hollywood career.
Her most recent Hollywood position was as Consulting Producer on the N.B.C. show Profiler. She has written television pilots and feature films for Disney. In addition she has written a number of freelance episodes for various television shows.
She is working on an occult thriller series for Tor books, and she is hard at work on her story for the new Wild Cards Anthology. She is also putting the final polish on a spec pilot which she is writing with Ian Tregillis. Her passion (aside from writing) is riding Grand Prix dressage on her Lusitano stallion Vento da Broga.
THOMAS TESSIER
Thomas Tessier is the author of several novels of horror and suspense, including Nightwalker, Finishing Touches, Rapture, and Wicked Things. His novel Fog Heart won the International Horror Guild Award, as did his first collection of short stories, Ghost Music and Other Tales. He lives in Connecticut and is working on a new novel.
KARL EDWARD WAGNER
Karl Edward Wagner’s first novel, Darkness Weaves, was published in 1970. He wrote or edited more than forty books over the course of his career, including his collections In a Lonely Place, Why Not You and I?, Exorcisms and Ecstasies, and Midnight Sun: The Collected Stories of Kane; and (as editor), fifteen volumes of the annual Year’s Best Horror Stories series from 1980 to 1994. He won four British Fantasy Awards and two World Fantasy Awards.
RICK WILBER
Rick Wilber’s most
recent book is My Father’s Game: Life, Death, Baseball. His thriller, The Cold Road, was published in 2003, and his short-story collection, Where Garagiola Waits, was short-listed in 1999 for the Dave Moore Award for most important baseball book of the year. Wilber’s short stories and poetry has appeared in magazines and newspapers such as Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Analog, The Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, Elysian Fields Quarterly, The Tampa Tribune, and The St. Louis Post Dispatch. He was editor for a dozen years of Fiction Quarterly, the short-story supplement of The Tampa Tribune, and later was fiction editor at GalaxyOnline.com. He has had more than fifty short stories and a similar number of poems in print as well as several hundred feature stories, reviews and essays.
He is a journalism professor at the University of South Florida and also writes college textbooks on writing, editing, and mass-media studies. His website is www.rickwilber.com.
JACK WOMACK
Jack Womack is the author of Ambient, Terraplane, Heathern, Elvissey, Random Acts of Senseless Violence, Let’s Put the Future Behind Us, and Going, Going, Gone.
He was in 1994 a co-winner of the Philip K. Dick Award and currently works as Publicity Manager for all science fiction and fantasy titles at HarperCollins Publishers.
CHELSEA QUINN YARBRO
A professional writer for forty years, Yarbro has sold eighty-five books and more than ninety works of short fiction, essays, and reviews. She also composes serious music. She lives in her hometown—Berkeley, California—with three autocratic cats. In 2003, the World Horror Association presented her with a Grand Master award; the International Horror Guild honored her as a Living Legend in 2006.
Acknowledgments
I’d like to thank the following people for helping to make this anthology possible: Merrilee Heifetz, David Hartwell, Rob Killheffer, Ginjer Buchanan, Don Keller, and, as always, all the contributors.
PERMISSIONS
Introduction to A Whisper of Blood, © 1991 by Ellen Datlow.
“Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep,” © 1991 by Suzy McKee Charnas.
“The Slug,” © 1991 by Karl Edward Wagner.
“Warm Man,” © 1957, 1985 by Agberg, Ltd. First published in Fantasy & Science Fiction, May 1957. Reprinted by permission of the author and Agberg, Ltd.
“Teratisms,” © 1991 by Kathe Koja.
“M Is for the Many Things,” © 1991 by Elizabeth Massie.
“Folly for Three,” © 1991 by Barry N. Malzberg.
“The Impaler in Love,” © 1991 by Rick Wilber.
“The Moose Church,” © 1991 by Jonathan Carroll.
“Mrs. Rinaldi’s Angel,” © 1991 by Thomas Ligotti.
“The Pool People,” © 1991 by Melissa Mia Hall.
“A Week in the Unlife,” © 1991 by David J. Schow.
“Lifeblood,” © 1991 by Jack Womack.
“Infidel,” © 1991 by Thomas Tessier.
“True Love,” © 1991 by K. W. Jeter.
“Home by the Sea,” © 1991 by Pat Cadigan.
“The Ragthorn,” © 1991 by Robert Holdstock and Garry Kilworth.
“Requiem,” © 1987 by Melinda M. Snodgrass. First published in A Very Large Array, University of New Mexico Press. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Do I Dare to Eat a Peach?” © 1985 by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro. First published in Shadows 8, Doubleday & Company, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the author.
A Biography of Ellen Datlow
Ellen Datlow is an acclaimed, award-winning science fiction, fantasy, and horror editor.
Born and raised in New York, Datlow aspired to be a veterinarian when she was a child, but changed her plans when she realized how much she preferred reading and writing to math and science. Her first publishing job was in the New York office of Little, Brown & Co. in 1973. During the next eight years she worked at a handful of other publishing companies before finally finding her calling in 1981 as an editor of short fiction at OMNI magazine, where she worked until 1998. She has also worked at the online magazine Event Horizon and at scifi.com.
Datlow has edited more than fifty anthologies, including the bestselling collections Naked City: Tales of Urban Fantasy, Supernatural Noir, and Darkness: Two Decades of Modern Horror. She has published important science fiction and fantasy writers such as Stephen King, Joyce Carol Oates, Ursula K. Le Guin, Clive Barker, William S. Burroughs, and many more.
She has also edited or co-edited numerous critically acclaimed anthologies of speculative fiction, including the Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror series. She often collaborates with renowned co-editor Terri Windling, with whom she worked on Snow White, Blood Red, a work of adult fairy tales that has been one of their most successful projects together.
Datlow is the recipient of several awards, including multiple Shirley Jackson awards and Bram Stoker awards, Hugo Awards for Best Professional Editor, Hugo Awards for Best Short Form Editor, and Locus Awards for Best Editor, to name just a few. She also received the Karl Edward Wagner Award for “outstanding contribution to the genre.” In 2011, she was the recipient of a Life Achievement Award by from the Horror Writers Association, and i. In 2014, she was awarded the Life Achievement Award from the World Fantasy Association. Datlow also co-hosts a popular reading series, Fantastic Fiction, at the KGB Bar in New York City, where she resides.
Baby Datlow in 1950. The so-called “Gerber baby” portrait was common at the time.
Datlow’s high school graduation photo, taken in 1967.
Datlow at home, wearing a vintage dress for a science fiction function in 1981. She says that she favors 1940s-era clothing.
Datlow sitting at her desk in the OMNI offices in 1981, roughly a year after she began working there. On her desk is a Kaypro computer and the Selectric typewriter she kept for addressing envelopes. On her bulletin board she pinned, among other things, a photo of King Kong climbing the Empire State Building.
Datlow in 1989, on the roof of the building where John Clute, renowned science fiction and fantasy critic, and his artist wife, Judith, live. The Clutes are based in Camden Town, London, and have graciously hosted many writers and editors over the past few decades. (Datlow usually stays with them on her annual visit to London.) Datlow is on the left, John Clute is in the center, and Datlow’s good friend Pat Cadigan, an award-winning science fiction writer, is on the right.
A manipulated photo of Datlow taken in 1990 by art photographer and illustrator J. K. Potter, giving her cat eyes. It first appeared on the original back flap of Alien Sex.
Datlow in front of an advertisement for OMNI magazine in New York City in 1991. That winter day, Datlow wandered Manhattan with her camera and her friends, the married writers Steven Gould and Laura J. Mixon. They happened upon the advertisement just north of Datlow’s West Village home.
Datlow with fellow editor Terri Windling in 1994. Datlow and Windling have collaborated on anthologies for more than twenty years, yet rarely see each other. This photo is from one of those rare yet cherished meetings.
Datlow modeled for J. K. Potter’s cover of the illustrated edition of The Island of Dr. Moreau by H. G. Wells, published in 1990. Potter gave Datlow a print of the image, which hangs on her living room wall.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
These are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1991 by Ellen Datlow
Cover design by Amanda Shaffer
ISBN: 978-1-5040-5826-1
This edition published in 2019 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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