The Best New Horror 5

by Ramsay Campbell

  ABC-TV’s mini-series of Stephen King’s The Tommyknockers may have been overlong but at least it was fun. Showtime’s anthology movie Body Bags was not even up to the standard of HBO’s variable Tales from the Crypt series, despite being directed by John Carpenter and Tobe Hooper. Home Box Office’s remake of Attack of the 50 ft Woman starred Darryl Hannah and was just as cheesy as the 1958 original. The Spielberg-produced SeaQuest DSV was thankfully pulled from British screens after only a few weeks, and most people either loved or hated Oliver Stone’s virtual reality (and virtually incomprehensible) Wild Palms.

  In March, the third annual World Horror Convention moved to the snowbound climes of Stamford, Connecticut, where the guests of honour included authors Peter Straub and Les Daniels, artist Stephen Gervais, actor Paul Clemens, and Master of Ceremonies Stanley Wiater. The winner of the 1993 Grand Master Award was Richard Matheson.

  The Horror Writers of America held their annual meeting and Bram Stoker Awards banquet in June in New York City. After speeches by HWA President Dennis Etchison, Whitley Strieber and movie director John Carpenter, the award for Novel went to Thomas F. Monteleone’s Blood of the Lamb, Elizabeth Massie’s Sineater picked up the First Novel award, and Novelette was a tie between Stephen Bissette’s Aliens: Tribes from Dark Horse Comics, and “The Events Concerning a Nude Fold-Out Found in a Harlequin Romance” by Joe R. Lansdale (from Dark at Heart). Dan Simmons’ “This Year’s Class Picture” (from Still Dead) won in the Short Story category, Norman Partridge’s Mr Fox and Other Feral Tales picked up Collection, and the Non-Fiction award was presented to Cut!: Horror Writers on Horror Film edited by Christopher Golden. The Life Achievement award went to Ray Russell. Because of complaints from international members, the HWA officially changed its name to The Horror Writers Association during the weekend’s business meeting.

  The eighteenth British Fantasy Convention was held in Birmingham in early October. Guests included Peter James, Tad Williams, artist Les Edwards, and master of ceremonies Dennis Etchison. The British Fantasy Award for Best Novel was presented to Graham Joyce’s Dark Sister, while Peeping Tom was named Best Small Press for the second year running. Nicholas Royle collected both the Best Short Story award for “Night Shift Sister” and the Best Anthology Award for Darklands 2. Jim Pitts received the Best Artist award for the second consecutive year, Conrad Williams was voted Best Newcomer, and the Special Award went to Michael Moorcock.

  Horror got a chilly reception at the 1993 World Fantasy Convention held in Minneapolis later the same month. Despite all-but-ignoring the field for their guests and programming, the organisers couldn’t help but notice that the award winners continued to reflect the overall popularity of the genre: Tim Powers’ occult fantasy Last Call won Best Novel, Best Novella went to “The Ghost Village” by Peter Straub (from MetaHorror), and Best Short Story was a tie between Joe Haldeman’s “Graves” (from The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction) and “This Year’s Class Picture” by Dan Simmons. Jack Cady’s The Sons of Noah was awarded Best Collection, while Best Anthology went to Dennis Etchison’s MetaHorror. James Gurney was voted Best Artist, Dell/Abyss editor Jeanne Cavellos picked up the Professional Special Award, and the Non-Professional Special Award went to Doug and Tomi Lewis of Roadkill Press. Harlan Ellison received the Life Achievment Award.

  When California dealer Barry R. Levin announced his 6th Annual Collectors Awards, Michael Crichton was voted Most Collectable Author of 1993, Mark V. Ziesing Books won the Most Collectable Book of the Year Award for the lettered state of Mefisto in Onyx by Harlan Ellison, and the Lifetime Collectors Award went to Arthur C. Clarke for “the creation of a body of classic works that ennoble the genre of science fiction”. Unfortunately, the presentation ceremony had to be cancelled because of the Los Angeles earthquake.

  To paraphrase an old saying, books and films don’t kill people – people kill people. However, given the current moral climate on both sides of the Atlantic, it would appear that all society’s ills can be neatly blamed on horror fiction, television violence or Britain’s so-called Video Nasties (which have not legally existed since the Video Recordings Act of 1984). Obviously, this just ain’t so.

  More than two decades after its original release, Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange still remains banned in Britain, ever since the director withdrew the film from distribution in 1974 after a media outcry blaming it for outbreaks of senseless violence. In early 1993 the British courts upheld the ban in a lawsuit filed by Warner Bros., the movie’s distributors, against a London cinema that screened the film – despite prints being freely accessible in almost every other country in the world.

  At a TV Programme Executives meeting in January, Motion Pictures Association of America (MPAA) president Jack Valenti said he didn’t “give a damn” about research which showed no correlation between television violence and the rising crime rate. He insisted that the entertainment industry should act as if television is a factor in anti-social behaviour and not leave to the government the role of “surrogate guardian of family value standards”.

  On April 2nd, author and bookseller David Britton was convicted under Britain’s Obscene Publications Act, and ordered to serve a four-month jail sentence because of comics found in a 1991 raid on his bookstore. Manchester police had made numerous raids on the premises and in 1992 failed in their attempts to get Britton’s satirical novel Lord Horror destroyed.

  ELSPA, the UK trade association for computer and video game publishers, teamed up with the Video Standards Council to draft a self-regulating rating system for video games which are exempt from classification by the British Board of Film Classification. In 1992 the BBFC began to classify video games depicting human sexual activity or mutilation.

  In February, two boys aged ten years old were charged with the abduction and horrific murder of James Bulger in the Merseyside area. At their trial in November, finding both boys guilty, the judge made spurious reference to a video – Universal’s Child’s Play 3 – which one of the boy’s fathers had rented prior to the killing. He inferred (without any proof) that the boy might have been exposed to the video and consequently influenced by it (a totally unsubstantiated conclusion).

  This was quickly picked up by the UK tabloid press, which began a sensationalist witch-hunt, spurred on by Liberal Democrat MP David Alton (whose previous attempt at profile-raising was trying to repeal Britain’s abortion law) and a moral minority who called for a ban on all films deemed “unsuitable for home viewing”. All this despite the police stating that the video had absolutely no bearing on the case, James Ferman of The British Board of Film Classification denying any connection between screen violence and young offenders, and the British government describing the country’s censorship laws as “Draconian” enough.

  But in the end, it wasn’t enough. The Newsom Report, a document claiming that a group of child psychologists had changed their minds about the effects of screen violence on children, was conveniently produced for Alton to cite, even though several of the signatories had not changed their minds at all. In April 1994 Home Secretary Michael Howard caved in to cross-party pressure and introduced new classification and censorship laws on films and video games. Films would be refused a release, or forced to carry a restricted classification, if the BBFC decided that a viewer could become a threat to society. Twentieth Century Fox succumbed to pressure to drop its UK theatrical release of The Good Son, in which Macaulay Culkin plays a child murderer. Vadim Jean’s Beyond Bedlam, based on the horror novel by Harry Adam Knight, was initially denied a video certificate by the BBFC and condemned, like the acclaimed Reservoir Dogs and Bad Lieutenant, to languish in the UK video wasteland.

  David Alton has said that he plans to target television and books next. British booksellers are already resisting horror titles and several films have been “voluntarily” withdrawn from video distribution or denied television screenings. So long as such controversy can be fanned by the cynical media, hypocritical politicians and misinformed pub
lic opinion, we should all be on our guard. It is all too easy to use horror fiction and films as a scapegoat for economic and social deprivation. As most intelligent people realise, fiction is only a reflection of life. The real problems exist elsewhere . . .

  The Editors,

  May, 1994

  MICHAEL MARSHALL SMITH

  Later

  MICHAEL MARSHALL SMITH’S first novel, Only Forward, was published to critical acclaim by HarperCollins in 1994. A freelance graphic designer and radio scriptwriter, over the past few years his short fiction has appeared in various anthologies, including several volumes of Dark Voices, The Mammoth Books of Frankenstein, Werewolves and Zombies, Shadows Over Innsmouth, The Anthology of Fantasy & the Supernatural, Darklands and Darklands 2, Touch Wood, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror and two previous editions of The Best New Horror.

  He has twice won the British Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction and he was voted Best Newcomer in 1991.

  I REMEMBER STANDING in the bedroom before we went out, fiddling with my tie and fretting mildly about the time. As yet we had plenty, but that was nothing to be complacent about. The minutes had a way of disappearing when Rachel was getting ready, early starts culminating in a breathless search for a taxi. It was a party we were going to, so it didn’t really matter what time we left, but I tend to be a little dull about time. I used to, anyway.

  When I had the tie as close to a tidy knot as I was going to be able to get it, I turned away from the mirror, and opened my mouth to call out to Rachel. But then I caught sight of what was on the bed, and closed it again. For a moment I just stood and looked, and then walked over towards the bed.

  It wasn’t anything very spectacular, just a dress made of sheeny white material. A few years ago, when we started going out together, Rachel used to make a lot of her clothes. She didn’t do it because she had to, but because she enjoyed it. She used to trail me endlessly round dress-making shops, browsing patterns and asking my opinion on a million different fabrics, while I half-heartedly protested and moaned.

  On impulse I leant down and felt the material, and found I could remember touching it for the first time in the shop on Mill Road, could remember surfacing up through contented boredom to say that yes, I liked this one. On that recommendation she’d bought it, and made this dress, and as a reward for traipsing around after her she’d bought me dinner too. We were poorer then, so the meal was cheap, but there was lots and it was good.

  The strange thing was, I didn’t even really mind the dress shops. You know how sometimes, when you’re just walking around, living your life, you’ll see someone on the street and fall hopelessly in love with them? How something in the way they look, the way they are, makes you stop dead in your tracks and stare? How for that instant you’re convinced that if you could just meet them, you’d be able to love them for ever?

  Wild schemes and unlikely meetings pass through your head, and yet as they stand on the other side of the street or the room, talking to someone else, they haven’t the faintest idea of what’s going through your mind. Something has clicked, but only inside your head. You know you’ll never speak to them, that they’ll never know what you’re feeling, and that they’ll never want to. But something about them forces you to keep looking, until you wish they’d leave so you could be free.

  The first time I saw Rachel was like that, and now she was in my bath. I didn’t call out to hurry her along. I decided it didn’t really matter.

  A few minutes later a protracted squawking noise announced the letting out of the bath water, and Rachel wafted into the bedroom swaddled in thick towels and glowing high spirits. Suddenly I lost all interest in going to the party, punctually or otherwise. She marched up to me, set her head at a silly angle to kiss me on the lips and jerked my tie vigorously in about three different directions. When I looked in the mirror I saw that somehow, as always, she’d turned it into a perfect knot.

  Half an hour later we left the flat, still in plenty of time. If anything, I’d held her up.

  “Later,” she said, smiling in the way that showed she meant it, “Later, and for a long time, my man.”

  I remember turning from locking the door to see her standing on the pavement outside the house, looking perfect in her white dress, looking happy and looking at me. As I walked smiling down the steps towards her she skipped backwards into the road, laughing for no reason, laughing because she was with me.

  “Come on,” she said, holding out her hand like a dancer, and a yellow van came round the corner and smashed into her. She spun backwards as if tugged on a rope, rebounded off a parked car and toppled into the road. As I stood cold on the bottom step she half sat up and looked at me, an expression of wordless surprise on her face, and then she fell back again.

  When I reached her blood was already pulsing up into the white of her dress and welling out of her mouth. It ran out over her makeup and I saw she’d been right: she hadn’t quite blended the colours above her eyes. I’d told her it didn’t matter, that she still looked beautiful. She had.

  She tried to move her head again and there was a sticky sound as it almost left the tarmac and then slumped back. Her hair fell back from around her face, but not as it usually did. There was a faint flicker in her eyelids, and then she died.

  I knelt there in the road beside her, holding her hand as the blood dried a little. It was as if everything had come to a halt, and hadn’t started up again. I heard every word the small crowd muttered, but I didn’t know what they were muttering about. All I could think was that there wasn’t going to be a later, not to kiss her some more, not for anything. Later was gone.

  When I got back from the hospital I phoned her mother. I did it as soon as I got back, though I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to tell anyone, didn’t want to make it official. It was a bad phone call, very, very bad. Then I sat in the flat, looking at the drawers she’d left open, at the towels on the floor, at the party invitation on the dressing table, feeling my stomach crawl. I was back at the flat, as if we’d come back home from the party. I should have been making coffee while Rachel had yet another bath, coffee we’d drink on the sofa in front of the fire. But the fire was off and the bath was empty. So what was I supposed to do?

  I sat for an hour, feeling as if somehow I’d slipped too far forward in time and left Rachel behind, as if I could turn and see her desperately running to try to catch me up. When it felt as if my throat was going to burst I called my parents and they came and took me home. My mother gently made me change my clothes, but she didn’t wash them. Not until I was asleep, anyway. When I came down and saw them clean I hated her, but I knew she was right and the hate went away. There wouldn’t have been much point in just keeping them in a drawer.

  The funeral was short. I guess they all are, really, but there’s no point in them being any longer. Nothing more would be said. I was a little better by then, and not crying so much, though I did before we went to the church because I couldn’t get my tie to sit right.

  Rachel was buried near her grandparents, which she would have liked. Her parents gave me her dress afterwards, because I’d asked for it. It had been thoroughly cleaned and large patches had lost their sheen and died, looking as much unlike Rachel’s dress as the cloth had on the roll. I’d almost have preferred the bloodstains still to have been there: at least that way I could have believed that the cloth still sparkled beneath them. But they were right in their way, as my mother was. Some people seem to have pragmatic, accepting souls, an ability to deal with death. I don’t, I’m afraid. I don’t understand it at all.

  Afterwards I stood at the graveside for a while, but not for long because I knew that my parents were waiting at the car. As I stood by the mound of earth that lay on top of her I tried to concentrate, to send some final thought to her, some final love, but the world kept pressing in on me through the sound of cars on the road and some bird that was cawing in a tree. I couldn’t shut it out. I couldn’t believe that I was noticing how cold it was,
that somewhere lives were being led and televisions being watched, that the inside of my parents’ car would smell the same as it always had. I wanted to feel something, wanted to sense her presence, but I couldn’t. All I could feel was the world round me, the same old world. But it wasn’t a world that had been there a week ago, and I couldn’t understand how it could look so much the same.

  It was the same because nothing had changed, and I turned and walked to the car. The wake was worse than the funeral, much worse, and I stood with a sandwich feeling something very cold building up inside. Rachel’s oldest friend Lisa held court with her old school friends, swiftly running the range of emotions from stoic resilience to trembling incoherence.

  “I’ve just realized,” she sobbed to me, “Rachel’s not going to be at my wedding.”

  “Yes, well she’s not going to be at mine either,” I said numbly, and immediately hated myself for it. I went and stood by the window, out of harm’s way. I couldn’t react properly. I knew why everyone was standing here, that in some ways it was like a wedding. Instead of gathering together to bear witness to a bond, they were here to prove she was dead. In the weeks to come they’d know they’d stood together in a room, and would be able to accept she was gone. I couldn’t.

  I said goodbye to Rachel’s parents before I left. We looked at each other oddly, and shook hands, as if we were just strangers again. Then I went back to the flat and changed into some old clothes. My “Someday” clothes, Rachel used to call them, as in “some day you must throw them away”. Then I made a cup of tea and stared out of the window for a while. I knew damn well what I was going to do, and it was a relief to give in to it.

  That night I went back to the cemetery and I dug her up. What can I say? It was hard work, and it took a lot longer than I expected, but in another way it was surprisingly easy. I mean yes, it was creepy, and yes, I felt like a lunatic, but after the shovel had gone in once the second time seemed less strange. It was like waking up in the mornings after the accident. The first time I clutched at myself and couldn’t understand, but after that I knew what to expect. There were no cracks of thunder, there was no web of lightning and I actually felt very calm. There was just me and, beneath the earth, my friend. I just wanted to find her.