Borderlands 2 wasn’t quite the cutting edge anthology claimed by editor Thomas F. Monteleone, but it did include some fine fiction, as did Tim Sullivan’s anthology Cold Shocks and Gary Raisor’s Obsessions. Final Shadows, the twelfth and last anthology of the series edited by Charles L. Grant, was as high-grade as ever. Mystery and horror climbed into bed together in Richard Chizmar’s first book as anthologist, Cold Blood, while Paul F. Olson and David B. Silva concentrated on urban horror in Dead End: City Limits. J. N. Williamson’s fourth Masques anthology appeared only in a limited edition. Night Visions 8 featured John Farris, Stephen Gallagher and Joe R. Lansdale, with an afterword by Robert R. McCammon, and F. Paul Wilson introduced Night Visions 9, which showcased work by Thomas Tessier, James Kisner and Rick Hautala.
Amy Myers’ long-delayed Fifth Book of After Midnight Stories appeared from a new publisher and turned out not to be worth the wait. The man who has done so much to promote water conservation in the bathroom, Robert Bloch, proved to be a wise choice to edit Psycho-Paths, which featured seventeen stories about psychotic killers. Chilled to the Bone contained fifteen stories on a gaming concept, edited by Robert T. Garcia.
Dark Voices 3, edited by David Sutton and Stephen Jones, continued the Pan Book of Horror series, and the same team was responsible for two more volumes of Fantasy Tales. Jones also collaborated with Neil Gaiman on an anthology of Nasty Verse, Now We Are Sick, and was sole editor of The Mammoth Book of Terror, which mixed new tales with classic reprints.
Other mixtures of new and reprint material included I Shudder At Your Touch, twenty-two stories of sexual horror collected by Michele Slung, and The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories 2, edited by Richard Dalby, which boasted more than 650 pages and an introduction by Christopher Lee. Dalby also compiled Tales of Witchcraft. Another veteran anthologist, Marvin Kaye, gave us forty-eight tales in Haunted America: Star Spangled Supernatural Stories. Gaslit Nightmares 2 featured stories from the Victorian and Edwardian period, expertly selected by Hugh Lamb.
The indefatigable Martin H. Greenberg and Charles G. Waugh included twenty-one zombie stories in Back from the Dead, and teamed up with Frank D. McSherry, Jr. for Civil War Ghosts. Greenberg and Jane Yolen introduced young adult readers to thirteen stories of Vampires, and Greenberg alone showcased all-new stories of the world’s most popular child molester in Nightmares on Elm Street: Freddy Krueger’s Seven Sweetest Dreams.
The reprint anthology offering the best value for money was probably Famous Fantastic Mysteries, an instant remainder collection of the best stories from the classic pulp magazines Famous Fantastic Mysteries and Fantastic Novels, edited by Stefan Dziemianowicz, Robert Weinberg and Martin H. Greenberg. The Complete Masters of Darkness edited by Dennis Etchison was a doorstep-size omnibus of three anthologies and (despite its renaming one of its contributors “Brain Lumley”) one of the most beautifully produced volumes of the year.
Ellen Datlow’s and Terri Windling’s The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: Fourth Annual Collection was another 500-plus pages of the finest material being published in those fields. Karl Edward Wagner’s always dependable The Year’s Best Horror Stories: XIX continued to mine some of the more obscure sources. The Best of Pulphouse: The Hardback Magazine edited by Kristine Kathryn Rusch contained a mixed bag of twenty-five stories. The Best of the Rest 1990 edited by Steve Pasechnick and Brian Youmans showcased stories from the small presses, and we hope that our own Best New Horror 2 filled in the rest of the gaps.
After less than a year, the much-troubled British newsstand magazine Skeleton Crew finally ceased publication, while Fear, and its short-lived fiction sister Frighteners, both disappeared following the collapse of their publisher and the banning by the bookshop chains of the first issue of the latter. Horror fans were left with The Dark Side, which was saved by an editorial buy-out when the original publisher decided to drop it, and a new but undistinguished title, Terror.
Despite the appearance (and in some cases non-appearance) of several alleged rivals, Interzone continued to publish some of the best fiction in the UK or indeed anywhere else, and it was joined by a companion journal, Million, devoted to popular fiction and featuring a regular horror review column by Mark Morris. Kristine Kathryn Rusch moved from Pulphouse to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and breathed new life into its contents.
Among the the semi-professionals, Midnight Graffiti managed just one issue, two issues of Iniquities appeared, and the award-winning Cemetery Dance looks set to turn professional soon. Chris Reed’s Back Brain Recluse made the mistake of aiming for newsstand distribution too soon and quickly floundered.
One of the best new fanzines of the year was Tekeli-li! Journal of Terror. Its first two issues were devoted to Les Daniels and Douglas Clegg respectively. Another excellent newcomer was Necrofile: The Review of Horror Fiction, published quarterly by leading genre commentators Stefan Dziemianowicz, S. T. Joshi and Michael A. Morrison.
Robert Price’s Crypt of Cthulhu (still subtitled A Pulp Thriller and Theological Journal) and S. T. Joshi’s Lovecraft Studies continued to dissect Lovecraft minutiae. Of wider interest was Joshi’s Studies in Weird Fiction. Eldritch Tales continued in “the Weird Tales tradition”, while Weird Tales itself managed two more excellent issues.
There were new issues of After Hours, Deathrealm, Forbidden Lines, Grue, Haunts: Tales of Unexpected Horror and the Supernatural, The Scream Factory, 2AM and Weirdbook. The New York Review of Science Fiction presented the results of a survey on contemporary horror. Pulphouse: A Fiction Magazine was a new bi-weekly featuring an interesting mix of stories and non-fiction. Horror also turned up in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Mystery Scene, and specialist booklets produced by Roadkill Press, Necronomicon Press, Chris Drumm, Haunted Library, The British Fantasy Society and Pulphouse, the last in a bewildering variety of formats.
It was Clive Barker’s turn to get the non-fiction treatment, with no less than three volumes devoted to his career: Clive Barker Illustrator, edited by Fred Burke, contained plenty of Barker’s artwork—sixteen pages in full-colour—and an introduction by Stephen R. Bissette. Pandemonium, a collection of interviews, was less satisfactory, though it did contain the complete text of Barker’s play The History of the Devil. By far the most substantial was Clive Barker’s Shadows in Eden, edited by Stephen Jones, which ran to nearly 500 pages of articles and interviews by and about Barker, along with hundreds of illustrations and an extensive working bibliography.
Katherine Ramsland wrote Prism of the Night: A Biography of Anne Rice. George Beahm proved you could still get blood out of a stone with The Stephen King Story: A Literary Profile, and Stephen Spignesi managed to fill 800 pages of The Shape Under the Sheet: The Complete Stephen King Encyclopedia. How to Write Horror Fiction was the work of someone who should know, William F. Nolan, but the Horror Film Quiz Book was a sloppy piece of work by Shaun Hutson, someone who should know better.
Martin Tropp’s Images of Fear: How Horror Stories Helped Shaped Modern Culture did nothing to help the horror genre. Worse still was Walter Kendrick’s The Thrill of Fear, a superficial study of horror fiction (or rather, “horrid fiction”) which received a depressing amount of praise from mainstream book reviewers. The American publishers McFarland continued to specialise in books on horror films: Dennis Fischer’s Horror Film Directors 1931–1990 offered useful interviews among tedious synopses and opinions dully expressed. John McCarty’s Official Splatter Movie Guide Vol.II offered another superficial overview for movie fans, who were much better served by Shock Xpress 1, subtitled The Essential Guide to Exploitation Cinema, edited by Stefan Jaworzyn.
DC’s Mister E was a novel-length comic in four parts written by K. W. Jeter, and Faye Perozich recreated Anne Rice’s The Vampire Lestat for the graphic novel format. Michael H. Price and Todd Camp adapted the 1962 cult movie in Carnival of Souls, the full impact of David J. Schow’s script for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III was finally revealed in the Leatherface comic, and Steve
Niles adapted Richard Matheson’s classic vampire dystopia, I am Legend, in a four-part graphic format for Eclipse.
For the same company, Niles also adapted Clive Barker’s Son of Celluloid, ably illustrated by Les Edwards, followed by The Yattering and Jack, with art by John Bolton, and Revelations. Indeed—with a special Hellraiser companion, Clive Barker’s Book of the Damned; Jihad, a two-part cross-over between his regular Hellraiser and Nightbreed series; a three-part adaptation of his novel Weaveworld, and Clive Barker’s Hellraiser Poster Book, featuring perforated pin-ups for easy removal and a foldout poster by John Bolton—Barker rather dominated the comics field.
Tundra’s From Hell, illustrated by Eddie Campbell, was an epic eight-volume examination of the Jack the Ripper murders by Alan Moore, aimed at conspiracy buffs. Also from Tundra, Stephen Bissette’s Taboo continued to stir up controversy; the fifth issue is unavailable in the UK, S. Clay Wilson’s “This is Dynamite . . .” and Michael Zulli’s adaptation of Ramsey Campbell’s “Again” having proved too strong for the British Customs and Excise.
When not creating shared-world anthologies, Neil Gaiman continued to shake-up the comics industry with his award-winning Sandman. DC Comics issued volumes 1–8 and 17–20, titled Preludes & Nocturnes and Dream Country respectively, as a handsome boxed set of graphic novels, and also reissued Gaiman’s collaboration with artist Dave McKean, Black Orchid, as a graphic novel. For lovers of macabre humour, The World of Charles Addams was a splendid collection of classic Addams cartoons in black and white.
The top film in our field on both sides of the Atlantic last year was Terminator 2: Judgment Day, earning over $200 million at the box office and with plenty more to come from ancillary markets (in Britain it was just beaten into the top slot by Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves). A close runner-up was the multiple-Oscar winner The Silence of the Lambs. Drawn from somewhat older material, both The Addams Family and Martin Scorsese’s most overt horror film so far, Cape Fear, did very well, as did Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey, and a surprise success was Kenneth Branagh’s derivative hotchpotch Dead Again.
Hugo Award winner Edward Scissorhands more than doubled its 1990 total. Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare proved more popular than recent entries in the series, and given its (in one sense of the word) healthy box office, it would come as no surprise if the exploits of Freddy Krueger were further prolonged. Wes Craven returned to form with The People Under the Stairs—Frank Capra with cannibalism—and demonstrating that sequels are still in favour, Child’s Play 3 raked in the dollars.
The alleged comedy Drop Dead Fred was another surprise hit, while the mega-successful Ghost added an extra $11 million to its 1990 total of $20 million-plus. Delayed for a few years in America, Warlock finally opened to respectable returns. Also making a reasonable showing were Body Parts and the art-house release Truly, Madly, Deeply.
Down among the losers were Predator 2, barely adding to its disappointing 1990 total; The Unborn, Poison, Meet the Applegates, Scanners II: The New Order, Firehead and The Borrower.
On video, The Pit and the Pendulum was a darkly comic reworking of Poe that marked a return to form for director Stuart Gordon, and Maniac Cop 2 turned out to be nearly as good as the original. However, Charles Band’s long-awaited Trancers II was a major disappointment, as was Whispers, based on the novel by Dean R. Koontz. We could also do without Ghoulies Go To College, the third in the rubber puppet series, and Shock’em Dead starring Traci Lords and Aldo Ray. Best titles of the year had to be Chopper Chicks in Zombietown and A Nymphoid Barbarian in Dinosaur Hell . . .
Undoubtedly one of the treats of the year for horror fans was the HBO television movie Cast a Deadly Spell, which starred Fred Ward as down-at-heel private eye H. Phillip Lovecraft, tracking down a stolen copy of the Necronomicon in a 1940s Los Angeles where magic works.
The overlong Stephen King mini-series Golden Years received mixed reviews, but perhaps more indicative of the network mentality were the redundant and inept sequel, Omen IV: The Awakening, and the equally unnecessary remakes of What Happened to Baby Jane? and Night of the Hunter; Not of This World, which had nothing to do with the 1956 Roger Corman movie with a similar title; Charlton Heston playing Sherlock Holmes in Crucifer of Blood; the comedy Frankenstein: The College Years, and Blood Ties, a family saga about vampires.
One of the year’s big disappointments was Joe Dante’s weekly show Eerie, Indiana, which suffered from low ratings and a lack of imagination. Nor did the much-hyped revival of Dark Shadows last long, despite the presence in the cast of Ben Cross and Barbara Steele.
Robert Bloch was presented with the first World Horror Award when the World Horror Convention made its debut in Nashville, Tennessee, at the end of February.
The winners of the Bram Stoker Awards, presented at the Horror Writers of America’s annual gathering, held in June at Redondo Beach, California, were Dark Dreamers: Conversations with the Masters of Horror by Stanley Wiater in the Non-Fiction category; Four Past Midnight by Stephen King in the Collection; “The Calling” by David Silva in Short Story; “Stephen” by Elizabeth Massie in Novelette. The Revelation by Bentley Little was honoured as First Novel, Mine by Robert R. McCammon as Novel. The Life Achievement Award was presented to Hugh B. Cave and to Richard Matheson.
The 1991 World Fantasy Awards were presented in November at the World Fantasy Convention in Tucson, Arizona. The Special Award—Non-Professional went to Richard Chizmar’s Cemetery Dance, while book designer Arnie Fenner received the Special Award—Professional. Dave McKean was voted Best Artist, Carol Emshwiller’s The Start of the End of It All and Other Stories was awarded Best Collection, and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, from the DC Comics Sandman by Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess, was the surprise choice for Best Short Fiction. Pat Murphy collected the Best Novella Award for “Bones”, and Best Novel was a tie between Only Begotten Daughter by James Morrow and Thomas the Rhymer by Ellen Kushner. Ray Russell was given the Life Achievement Award, and we are proud to announce that the Best Anthology was found to be the first volume of Best New Horror.
Also in November, we made it a rare double by winning the same category in the British Fantasy Awards, presented at Fantasycon XVI in London. Michael Marshall Smith’s “The Man Who Drew Cats” was chosen as Best Short Fiction, and the author also received the Icarus Award for Best Newcomer. Les Edwards was Best Artist, and Dark Dreams, edited by David Cowperthwaite and Jeff Dempsey, was voted Best Small Press. Agent Dorothy Lumley was presented with the Special Award for her services to the genre. Ramsey Campbell was given the August Derleth Award for Best Novel (Midnight Sun) and also the Dracula Society’s Bram Stoker Award for Ancient Images.
Santa Monica bookseller Barry R. Levin announced that Dan Simmons won his Collectors Award for 1991 as the Most Collectable Author of the Year, and the Most Collectable Book of the Year was the Charnel House lettered state of The New Neighbor by Ray Garton.
In an overview of 1991, one of the reviewers for Locus magazine wrote: “For someone whose love of science fiction and its possibilities runs deep, the growth of the horror field is perplexing, to say the least. In the main, a body of literature that explores the farthest reaches of the outré, or wallows in gratuitous gore, would seem to be limited in its relevance to anything.” This, from someone who should know better.
Such attitudes kept science fiction restricted to a publishing ghetto for more than four decades, and anyone who seriously believes that the horror field is “limited in its relevance to anything” (a difficult feat to achieve, one might think) obviously has little knowledge of the way the genre has developed in recent years. Good horror, like any other branch of serious fiction, has the ability to reflect and comment on the basic issues of contemporary life. At its best it can make us think about our situation, perhaps even change it.
Best New Horror does not purport to be a collection of the year’s best horror stories. Instead, we hope to present a varied selection of fiction—loosely connected by various notio
ns of horror—that illustrates the range of themes and ideas currently being explored in the genre, by top names in the field and exciting newcomers. Only you, the reader, can decide if we have been successful . . .
The Editors
April, 1992
K. W. JETER
True Love
ONCE AGAIN K. W. Jeter leads off a volume of Best New Horror with a study of dark sexuality.
Described by Ramsey Campbell as “one of the most versatile and uncompromising writers of imaginative fiction”, Jeter began his career as a novelist writing such science fictional books as Morlock Night, Dr Adder, The Glass Hammer and Farewell Horizontal. However, more recently, he has gained a reputation as a writer of disturbing horror fiction, with such novels as Soul Eater, Dark Seeker, Mantis, In the Land of the Dead, The Night Man, Madlands and Wolf Flow, and short fiction appearances in the anthologies Alien Sex and A Whisper of Blood.
“I don’t know what this story means,” admits the author, “other than it’s a story about love and happiness. I don’t have much more to say about it, except . . .
1. The words victim and victimizer are not easily defined. People who do have easy definitions for those words are lying to you, for reasons of their own; and
2. Martyrdom is a seductive endeavour, but then, it should be.
After that, there’s only silence.”
THE BROWN LEAVES COVERED THE SIDEWALK, but hadn’t yet been trodden into thin leather. She held the boy’s hand to keep him from slipping and falling. He tugged at her grip, wanting to race ahead and kick the damp stacks drifting over the curbs. The leaves smelled of wet and dirt, and left skeleton prints on the cement.
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