The Best New Horror 2

by Ramsay Campbell

  The Pulphouse publishing empire was among the most prolific of the year, and Pulphouse: The Hardback Magazine Issue 7: Horror and 9: Dark Fantasy (both edited by Kristine Kathryn Rusch) featured an interesting mix of talents. An allegedly revised edition of Weird Tales, a facsimile volume edited by Peter Haining, differed little from the original 1976 edition. Worth noting were Short Sharp Shocks edited by Julian Lloyd Webber, Hotter Blood: More Tales of Erotic Horror edited by Jeff Gelb and Michael Garrett, and The Man in Black: Macabre Stories from Fear on Four, a tie-in with the (largely derivative and hack-ridden) BBC radio series.

  On the banks of the mainstream could be found When the Black Lotus Blooms edited by Elizabeth A. Saunders, featuring mostly new fiction and an introduction by Robert McCammon; Black Water 2: More Tales of the Fantastic edited by Alberto Manguel, which included sixty-four stories; and The Omnibus of 20th-Century Ghost Stories edited (and with a notably ill-informed introduction) by Robert Phillips, featuring a cover by Stanley Spencer and some out-of-the-way tales by such as Tennessee Williams, Denton Welch and Gertrude Atherton.

  Two of the best anthologies of the year were Digital Dreams edited by David V. Barrett, ostensibly collecting science fiction tales about computers but featuring some memorable dark fantasy from the likes of Terry Pratchett and Garry Kilworth, and Thomas F. Monteleone’s Borderlands, the first in a proposed series which showcased fine work by an impressive range of writers.

  Although the series was dropped by its British publisher, Ellen Datlow’s and Terri Windling’s The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: Third Annual Collection was a hefty selection of forty-seven stories and poems, along with knowledgeable end-of-the-year summaries, while Karl Edward Wagner’s eclectic selection for The Year’s Best Horror Stories XVIII produced the usual number of obscure gems. New “Best of the Year” collections were Quick Chills: The Year’s Best Horror Stories from the Small Press Volume One edited by Peter Enfantino, featuring thirteen tales selected from semi-professional sources, and our own modest volume Best New Horror, which according to Locus suffered from being “slightly British-skewed”.

  In America, Weird Tales proved a worthy continuation of “The Unique Magazine”, with some excellent stories presented in an attractive format. Although too much of the fiction in Fear was mediocre, the magazine continued to lead the market in the UK, despite the launch of such newsstand rivals as Skeleton Crew (which never really recovered from the sacking of its editor after the second issue) and The Dark Half (aimed principally at the horror video audience). Of the British magazines, Interzone published the most distinctive tales in the field.

  Small press magazines proliferated, and there was worthwhile material to be discovered in a host of fanzines and semi-professional titles such as After Hours, The Blood Review: The Journal of Horror Criticism, Cemetery Dance, Crypt of Cthulhu, Deathrealm, Eldritch Tales, Ghosts & Scholars, Grue, Haunts: Tales of Unexpected Horror and the Supernatural, Iniquities, Midnight Graffiti, Noctulpa, 2AM, and the British Fantasy Society’s Dark Horizons and Winter Chills.

  The first issue of Gauntlet: Exploring the Limits of Free Expression lived up to its subtitle with fiction by Ray Garton, Steve Rasnic Tem, Harlan Ellison, William F. Nolan and Douglas Winter, and articles by Ray Bradbury, Ramsey Campbell, Rex Miller and Dan Simmons, amongst others.

  Neil Barron’s Horror Literature: A Reader’s Guide was an expensive 600-page bibliographic reference book which included a lengthy section devoted to contemporary horror fiction. The Weird Tale by S. T. Joshi restricted itself to studying the work of Arthur Machen, Lord Dunsany, Algernon Blackwood, M. R. James, Ambrose Bierce and H. P. Lovecraft; a follow-up volume is planned. James Van Hise managed to exploit two authors in one book with Stephen King and Clive Barker: The Illustrated Guide to the Masters of the Macabre. King feels that too many books are being written about him, and Stephen Spignesi’s The Stephen King Quiz Book is certainly one of them. Stanley J. Wiater continued in the footsteps of Doug Winter with Dark Dreamers: Conversations with the Masters of Horror, featuring twenty-four interviews with well-known horror writers.

  On the film front, John McCarty’s The Modern Horror Film covered much the same post-Night of the Living Dead ground as Kim Newman’s Nightmare Movies. Karloff and Lugosi: The Story of a Haunting Collaboration was an in-depth comparison of the two actors by Gregory William Mank, and a worthy follow-up to the same author’s The Hollywood Hissables. David J. Skal’s Hollywood Gothic: The Tangled Web of “Dracula” from Novel to Stage to Screen provided fascinating insights into the making of both the US and Spanish versions of the 1931 Dracula. Stephen Rebello did an equally fine job on Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho, while Mike Budd’s The Cabinet of Dr Caligari: Text, Contexts, Histories was exactly what its title described. Invasion of the Body Snatchers edited by Al LaValley featured the original script along with associational material, and Plan 9 From Outer Space was similarly enshrined, together with cast biographies and an Edward D. Wood filmography, by Tom Mason.

  A real labour-of-love project was Philip J. Riley’s series of facsimiles of the original shooting scripts for such Universal classics as Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein, Son of Frankenstein, The Mummy and This Island Earth (not to mention Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein), with introductions by Forrest J Ackerman, Vincent Price, John Landis, Valerie Hobson, Zita Johann, Jeff Morrow and others.

  You either love him or hate him, but Joe Bob Goes Back to the Drive-In included the usual idiosyncratic movie reviews and satire which can be found every week in his We Are The Weird newsletter.

  Two of the best art books of the year were Blood and Iron, showcasing the work of Les Edwards, and H. R. Giger’s Biomechanics, introduced by Harlan Ellison.

  The comics industry manifested the three persons of Clive Barker: Tapping the Vein Book Three adapted his stories “The Midnight Meat Train” and “Scape-Goats”, Book Four “Hell’s Event” and “The Madonna”. Even more popular were Clive Barker’s Hellraiser and Clive Barker’s Night Breed, both offering spin-off storylines from the author’s two movie projects.

  Neil Gaiman continued to develop The Sandman through such memorable mini-series as “The Dolls House” and “Dream Country”, the former eight-part sequence ending up as a handsome graphic novel with an introduction by the ubiquitous Barker. Gaiman also did odd things with Miracleman, Hellblazer (in which he teamed up with artist Dave McKean) and a superb four-part series The Books of Magic. McKean was also responsible for the artwork in the hugely successful Arkham Asylum, and wrote and illustrated the first issue of the ten-part graphic magazine Cages.

  Batman remained popular in graphic novel format. The inventive Gotham by Gaslight included an introduction by Robert Bloch, while Batman 3-D came complete with red and blue glasses and a headache. Gahan Wilson did a wonderful job illustrating the first of the new Classics Illustrated, The Raven and Other Poems by Edgar Allan Poe, and there were movie-inspired comics based on Planet of the Apes, RoboCop, Total Recall, Darkman and even Aliens vs. Predator! There was a welcome reissue of the best of the ’50s EC Comics, including Tales from the Crypt and Vault of Horror.

  The most commercially successful film of the year on both sides of the Atlantic was Ghost, which grossed more than $200 million. Other films that took more than $100 million at the box-office included Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Total Recall and Dick Tracy – although, given their huge production costs, the latter two still have a long way to go before they make a profit.

  The most popular horror film of the year was Flatliners ($60 million), closely followed by Arachnophobia and Gremlins II: The New Batch. Much further down the charts came Darkman, Predator 2, Child’s Play 2, Jacob’s Ladder, The Exorcist III, Ghost Dad, Edward Scissorhands, Tales from the Darkside, The Guardian, Tremors, Graveyard Shift and The Witches. Vampire’s Kiss was an appealingly unrestrained comedy of psychosis, but the title was by far the best thing about I Bought a Vampire Motorcycle.

  The big losers of the year inc
luded Nightbreed, Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III, the colour remake of Night of the Living Dead, Richard Stanley’s first feature Hardware, Brain Dead (based on an unfilmed script by the late Charles Beaumont) and Frankenhooker. However, each of them took more than Roger Corman’s comeback film as a director, Frankenstein Unbound. A surprise entry in the British chart was a reissue of The Exorcist, proving that it can still draw an audience nearly twenty years after it was made, perhaps because it is now banned in the UK on videocassette. The most powerful chills of the year were to be had from Joe Pesci’s psychopath in Goodfellas and from George Sluizer’s film The Vanishing, a sunlit tale of terror not unlike a bleaker Chabrol film than Chabrol has yet made.

  David Lynch’s Twin Peaks continued to delight and infuriate television viewers with its mysterious giants, singing dwarfs, possessed souls and the long-awaited revelation of just who did kill Laura Palmer. Malcolm Bradbury’s three-part adaptation of Kingsley Amis’ The Green Man for the BBC began well (if you discount the splattery preamble), but ultimately lacked the novel’s severity and sense of the supernatural. Two other BBC films worth mentioning were Frankenstein’s Baby because it was so terrible and the supernatural thriller The Lorelei because it was so good.

  Just what we didn’t need was yet another version of The Phantom of the Opera, but we got one anyway, filmed by Tony Richardson in France and Hungary. It starred Burt Lancaster and Charles Dance, who gave a ludicrously camp performance as the Phantom. To add insult to injury, we didn’t even get to see his disfigured face during this tedious three-hour adaptation.

  Among the worst of the new TV shows was the Canadian-made Dracula: The Series. Geordie Johnson played Alexander Lucard (get it?) as a contemporary Donald Trump of the vampire world (an idea which had already been used in Hammer’s The Satanic Rites of Dracula). He is pursued by three typical teens and their know-it-all uncle through each shoddy half-hour episode.

  Guest Speaker Robert Bloch received the Horror Writers of America’s Life Achievement Award, presented in Providence in June. Dan Simmons’ Carrion Comfort won the Superior Achievement in Novel; Nancy Collins picked up the First Novel award for Sunglasses After Dark; the Novelette award went to Joe R. Lansdale’s “On the Far Side of the Cadillac Desert with Dead Folks” from Book of the Dead, and Robert R. McCammon’s “Eat Me”, from the same anthology, was the chosen short story. Richard Matheson’s mammoth Collected Stories received the Collection award, while in the Non-Fiction category Harlan Ellison’s Watching tied with Horror: 100 Best Books edited by Stephen Jones and Kim Newman.

  Fantasycon XV, organised by the British Fantasy Society, returned to Birmingham in September, where Carrion Comfort also picked up the August Derleth Award for Best Novel. Co-Guest of Honour Joe Lansdale won the Best Short Fiction award for his Book of the Dead novelette, Carl Ford’s Dagon was voted Best Small Press for the second year in succession, and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade was Best Film, the last time an award in this category will be presented. Dave Carson again received one of his own statuettes as Best Artist, and Peter Coleborn was presented with the Special Award for his services to the Society.

  The World Fantasy Awards were presented in Chicago in November, and R. A. Lafferty was justly honoured with the Life Achievement Award. Best Novel was found to be Jack Vance’s Lyonesse: Madouc; “Great Work of Time” earned John Crowley the Best Novella award, while Best Short Story went to Steven Millhauser’s “The Illusionist”. Richard Matheson’s Collected Stories was again honoured as Best Collection, and for the second year running the Best Anthology was considered to be The Year’s Best Fantasy Second Annual Collection edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. Thomas Canty was voted Best Artist, the Special Award Professional went to publisher Mark Ziesing and the Non-Professional to Grue magazine.

  The Collectors Award for 1990, presented by bookseller Barry R. Levin, went – not unsurprisingly – to Stephen King as “Most Collectable Author of the Year” and to Doubleday for the limited edition of the uncut The Stand as “Most Collectable Book of the Year”.

  1990 was another boom year for horror, but it could be the last for some time. The danger is that the much-vaunted recession in the publishing industry, coupled with continued pronouncements of a bottoming-out of the horror genre, could soon become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

  1991 is the year when many publishers will begin cutting back on horror. Although the “name” authors will presumably survive, we could see a virtual disappearance of the mid-list (where most horror is published), resulting in fewer first novels appearing, contracts being cancelled, and the anthology experiencing yet another slump.

  The genre is likely to fare no better in movies. All the major studios now realise they must cut back on the immense budgets of the past few years, and as few horror films are top earners, such effects-laden projects will be the first to go, once again becoming the province of the low-budget independent.

  But it’s not all doom and gloom. Horror fiction continues to thrive in the short form, with a wealth of new talent (particularly women writers) attracted to the field. There are still numerous outlets for new work, from newsstand magazines to the burgeoning small press. Best New Horror will be here with a representative sampling of many of the best practitioners working today.

  THE EDITORS

  APRIL, 1991

  K. W. JETER

  The First Time

  K. W. JETER has been described by Ramsey Campbell as “one of the most versatile and uncompromising writers of imaginative fiction.”

  He considers himself “a Los Angeles kid” and lives and works in California. His controversial debut novel, Dr Adder, is generally considered to be the prototype for the “cyberpunk” movement in science fiction, and his mentor Philip K. Dick called it “. . . a stunning novel that destroys once and for all your conception of the limitations of science fiction.”

  His other genre-spanning books include Farewell Horizontal, Infernal Devices, In the Land of the Dead, Dark Seeker, Mantis, Soul Eater, The Night Man and Madlands. He has also scripted Mister E, a four-part graphic novel for DC Comics.

  “The First Time” is only Jeter’s second short story; it is a deeply disturbing view of coming of age, based on an article he read in The Wall Street Journal about US kids getting into trouble in Mexican border towns and some teenage memories of visits to Tijuana. It’s not for the squeamish.

  HIS FATHER AND HIS UNCLE DECIDED it was about time. Time for him to come along. They went down there on a regular basis, with their buddies, all of them laughing and drinking beer right in the car, having a good time even before they got there. When they left the house, laying a patch of rubber out by the curb, he’d lie on his bed upstairs and think about them—at least for a little while, till he fell asleep—think about the car heading out on the long straight road, where there was nothing on either side except the bare rock and dirt and the dried brown scrubby brush. With a cloud of dust rolling up behind them, his uncle Tommy could just floor it, one-handing the steering wheel, with nothing to do but keep it on the dotted line all the way down there. He lay with the side of his face pressed into the pillow, and thought of them driving, making good time, hour after hour, tossing the empties out the window, laughing and talking about mysterious things, things you only had to say the name of and everybody knew what you were talking about, without another word being said. Even with all the windows rolled down, the car would smell like beer and sweat, six guys together, one of them right off his shift at the place where they made the cinder blocks, the fine gray dust on his hands and matted in the dark black hair of his forearms. Driving and laughing all the way, until the bright lights came into view—he didn’t know what happened after that. He closed his eyes and didn’t see anything.

  And when they got back—they always got back late at night, so even though they’d been gone nearly the whole weekend, and he’d gotten up and watched television and listened to his mom talking to her friends on the phone, and had somethin
g to eat and stuff like that, when his father and his uncle and their buddies got back, the noise of the car pulling up, with them still talking and laughing, but different now, slower and lower-pitched and satisfied—it was like it woke him up from the same sleep he’d fallen into when they’d left. All the other stuff was just what he’d been dreaming.

  “You wanna come along?” his father had asked him, turning away from the TV. Just like that, no big deal, like asking him to fetch another beer from the fridge. “Me and Tommy and the guys—we’re gonna go down there and see what’s happening. Have a little fun.”

  He hadn’t said anything back for a little while, but had just stared at the TV, the colors fluttering against the walls of the darkened room. His father hadn’t had to say anything more than down there—he knew where that meant. A little knot, one he always had in his stomach, tightened and drew down something in his throat.

  “Sure,” he’d finally mumbled. The string with the knot in it looped down lower in his gut. His father just grunted and went on watching the TV.

  He figured they’d decided it was time because he’d finally started high school. More than that, he’d just about finished his first year and had managed to stay out of whatever trouble his older brother had gotten into back then, finally causing him to drop out and go into the army and then god knew what—nobody had heard from his brother in a long time. So maybe it was as some kind of reward, for doing good, that they were going to take him along with them.

  He didn’t see what was so hard about it, about school. What made it worth a reward. All you had to do was keep your head down and not draw attention to yourself. And there was stuff to do that got you through the day: he was in the band, and that was okay. He played the baritone sax—it was pretty easy because they never got any real melodies to play, you just had to fart around in the background with everybody else. Where he sat was right in front of the trombone section, which was all older guys; he could hear them talking, making bets about which of the freshman girls would be the next to start shaving her legs. Plus they had a lot of jokes about the funny way flute players made their mouths go when they were playing. Would they still look that funny way when they had something else in their mouths? It embarrassed him because the flute players were right across from the sax section, and he could see the one he’d already been dating a couple of times.