The Best new Horror 4

by Stephen Jones

  Tim Burton’s darker and much improved Batman Returns topped the American box office at the end of 1992 with receipts of more than $162 million, although it was soon overtaken by Walt Disney’s animated Aladdin (well past the $200 million mark by now) and the dire Home Alone 2: Lost in New York ($173 million). In Britain, the Batman sequel could only manage fourth place behind Basic Instinct, Hook and Lethal Weapon 3.

  In fact, 1992 was the third best year on record for movie admissions, with genre films making up almost a quarter of the year’s total. One of the surprise hits of the year was The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, a slick psychothriller that cost $12 million to make and grossed $88 million. Far less successful was Francis Ford Coppola’s visually striking but incoherent version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula which, although it grossed around $82 million, had a reputed negative cost of nearly $70 million.

  Despite ILM’s incredible special effects, the decidedly unfunny horror comedy Death Becomes Her grossed nearly $60 million and still managed to finish ahead of the underrated Alien3. Two dumb Stephen King adaptations, The Lawnmower Man and Sleepwalkers, both came in around the $30 million mark, and the disappointing adaptation of Clive Barker’s Candyman was not far behind.

  Wes Craven returned to form with The People Under the Stairs, but the Stephen King sequel Pet Semetary Two proved a disappointment. The failure of either Buffy the Vampire Slayer or John Landis’ Innocent Blood to set the box office alight killed off the predicted vampire boom before it even got started.

  Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth was the most successful entry yet in Clive Barker’s Cenobite series, and it managed to make more money than Dr. Giggles, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me and Brian DePalma’s demented Raising Cain.

  The Resurrected, Dan O’Bannon’s version of H. P. Lovecraft’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, and Peter Jackson’s tasteless zombie gorefest Braindead (aka Dead Alive) deserved wider exposure, however it was probably just as well that Amityville 1992: It’s About Time, Children of the Night, Critters 4, Cthulhu Mansion, The Devil’s Daughter (aka The Sect), Evil Toons, House IV, Killer Tomatoes Strike Back, Maniac Cop III: Badge of Silence, Prom Night IV: Deliver Us from Evil, Puppet Master III: Toulon’s Revenge, Scanners III: The Takeover, Seedpeople, Xtro II and others of their ilk were relegated to the video wastelands.

  Genre films did surprisingly well at the 1992 Academy Awards with The Silence of The Lambs (Best Film, Director, Adaptation, Actor and Actress!), Beauty and the Beast and Terminator 2: Judgment Day each earning multiple Oscars. George Lucas was presented with the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award and the Gordon E. Sawyer Award went to Ray Harryhausen.

  Television had little of interest to offer in 1992. Wes Craven’s Nightmare Cafe quickly disappeared and The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles failed to recapture the excitement of the original films. The small screen’s high points were all animated shows—The Simpsons, The Ren and Stimpy Show (despite the firing of creator John Kricfalusi) and the impressive animated Batman series.

  At the second World Horror Convention, which returned over March 5–8 to Nashville, Tennessee, Stephen King won the 1992 Grand Master Award. Predictably, he was not on hand to receive it.

  The Horror Writers of America’s Bram Stoker Awards were presented on 19 June in New York. Robert R. McCammon’s Boy’s Life won in the Novel category, while the result for First Novel was a tie between The Cipher by Kathe Koja and Prodigal by Melanie Tem. “The Beautiful Uncut Hair of Graves” by David Morrell beat out the other nominations for Novella/Novelette and “Lady Madonna” by Nancy Holder did the same in the Short Story category. Prayers to Broken Stones by Dan Simmons won for Collection, and Clive Barker’s Shadows in Eden edited by Stephen Jones picked up the Non-Fiction award. The Lifetime Achievement award was accepted by cartoonist/writer Gahan Wilson.

  The British Fantasy Awards were presented at Fantasycon XVII in Birmingham, England, on 4 October. The August Derleth Award for Best Novel went to Outside the Dog Museum by Jonathan Carroll. Michael Marshall Smith won the Best Short Fiction award for the second consecutive year, for “The Dark Land”, and the anthology it came from, Darklands, edited by Nicholas Royle, won in the Best Collection/Anthology category. The Best Small Press award went to Peeping Tom, edited by Stuart Hughes, and Jim Pitts was voted Best Artist. Melanie Tem was announced as the winner of The Icarus Award for Best Newcomer, and the Special Committee Award went to Andrew I. Porter, editor and publisher of Science Fiction Chronicle.

  The World Fantasy Awards were presented on 1 November at Pine Mountain, Georgia. Boy’s Life by Robert R. McCammon picked up another award for Best Novel. The Best Novella award went to “The Ragthorn” by Robert Holdstock and Garry Kilworth, and “The Somewhere Doors” by Fred Chappell won Best Short Story. Lucius Shepard’s The Ends of the Earth was voted Best Collection and Tim Hildebrandt named Best Artist. The Best Anthology award went to The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: Fourth Annual Collection, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, and George Scithers and Darrell Schweitzer won the Special Award Professional for Weird Tales. The Special Award Non-Professional went to W. Paul Ganley for Weirdbook/Weirdbook Press, and artist Edd Cartier won the Life Achievement Award.

  Californian book dealer Barry Levin announced Stephen King was the Most Collectable Author of the Year. Charnel House’s lettered state of Last Call by Tim Powers was Most Collectable Book of the Year, and Robert Reginald received the special Lifetime Collectors’ Award for His Invaluable Contribution to Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Bibliography.

  In an editorial provocatively entitled “Daring to Care” in the spring 1992 issue of the British small press SF magazine Nexus, Paul Brazier claimed that “the abbatoir aspect of horror fiction has come to dominate the genre, until it seems we can expect blood to drip from every page . . . Certainly, writers of [Mark] Morris’ calibre mar their books with the blood-letting which seems to be de rigueur nowadays, and it would be nice to see more real psychological value creeping back into horror fiction.”

  It would appear from Mr Brazier’s comments that he hasn’t read very much good horror fiction lately. Otherwise, he might not have dismissed the entire genre in quite so cavalier a manner. Over the past couple of decades a tolerance between the genres has been established, with many authors, editors and publishers now content to blur the demarcation lines between the categories.

  Then, in the grand tradition of fanzine writing, along comes Mr Brazier giving the impression that the horror field hasn’t developed since the bad old days of The Pan Book of Horror Stories. Even a brief perusal of any of the three Year’s Best horror anthologies currently available would reveal the breadth and scope of horror fiction being published today.

  Of course, the very nature of some horror fiction dictates “blood to drip from every page” (in the same way that some science fiction still uses the trappings of spaceships and ray-guns), however that alone does not necessarily mean that it is bad fiction.

  We would be the first to admit that there is a great deal of bad horror fiction being published (we are exposed to much of it every year when compiling this anthology!), but that argument also applies to every other publishing category.

  The undeniable strength of horror fiction is the very diversity the field has to offer. One of the most enjoyable aspects of editing Best New Horror is discovering how horror (or terror, or suspense, or dark fantasy, whatever you want to call it) can be incorporated into almost any other type of fiction, be it war stories, westerns, crime or, yes, even science fiction.

  If, as Mr Brazier claims, all he is asking horror writers to do is “to care about their characters,” perhaps he should read more fiction by those authors currently working in the field before he dismisses the entire genre out of hand. He might even be pleasantly surprised . . .

  The Editors

  May, 1993

  SCOTT EDELMAN

  The Suicide Artist

  SCOTT EDELMAN’S short fiction and poetry have been published in The Twilig
ht Zone Magazine, Fantasy Book, Amazing Stories, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction, Eldritch Tales, Weirdbook and the Necronomicon Press chapbook, Suicide Art.

  He has also written comic books for both Marvel and DC (House of Mystery, Weird War Tales, Welcome Back Kotter etc.) and various television scripts ranging from Saturday morning cartoons for Hanna-Barbera to Tales from the Darkside. His novel The Gift, published by Space & Time in 1990, was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award in the category Best Gay SF/Fantasy Novel, and he is currently the founding editor of the magazine Science Fiction Age, launched in 1992.

  As always, we lead off Best New Horror with one of the most powerful stories in the volume. As the author explains: “ ‘The Suicide Artist’ comes out of my desire to wrestle with the question not only of ‘What is a horror story?’ but also the equally important questions ‘Why is a horror story?’ and ‘What is a horror story for?’

  “I have always felt that a story must do more than merely pass the time. It must defend its very existence as well. It must justify itself, and the demands it makes on your time.

  “When I read ‘The Suicide Artist’ aloud at conventions, the audience response is unlike that I receive for anything else I’ve ever written. Other stories of mine insist on getting mixed emotions out of a group. But no such dichotomies occur with this story. ‘The Suicide Artist’ receives a singularity of response such as I’ve never seen before. I dive into the performance, and within a few paragraphs I realise that the room has grown hushed, as if people had become too fearful to breathe. I have considered the audience reaction, and I think I have finally figured out why that happens. It is because they know that the voice of ‘The Suicide Artist’ is more than a narrator just speaking to some faceless listener. They know that the narrator is speaking to them.

  “And to you.”

  I LONG AGO DECIDED THAT NOTHING, nothing should suit a person’s life so much as the leaving of it, and the universe has supported me in this notion.

  The use of the word “decided” is perhaps inaccurate here. I am very concerned with accuracy, for it is important to me that you understand my story, perceive the reason I am telling it to you, and absorb it with all its exacting nuances. So let me retract the word “decided” right now, and strive henceforth to be more precise in my prose. For can it ever be said that we “decide” to learn the lessons that life, in its hammerlock on our attention, endeavors to teach us?

  I was not as old as you might think I would have needed to be to have first learned that central precept. I was at an age when life was still vague, and death itself seemed apocryphal.

  Will you listen while I tell you of it? Of course you will. Forgive my disingenuousness in asking, when of your attention I have no doubts.

  I was never a social animal. Whether I took that path by personal choice or molded by cosmic design I do not know, and at this point in my life it is far too late to invest much concern in the issue. So entering kindergarten was in itself something of a shock to me. I had never even been inside a nursery school, as mother intended to keep me as far from churches and synagogues for as long as possible, and it seemed as if the only nursery schools she could find were affiliated in some way with a religious institution of one kind or another. Kindergarten, therefore, was my first exposure to peer humanity en masse.

  I did not like it. Did you honestly expect that I would?

  The short, stout woman who squinted at me through thick glasses was not the only teacher I encountered there. My brother and sister five and six year olds, who were better teachers of knowledge than she, taught me everything I need to know about cruelty and intolerance, about prejudice and insult, about hatred and pride. The lessons were not ones I wished to absorb, but obviously, at that age, I had little control over my attendance. So I went, and I learned.

  I did not like the other children very much. I do not understand those who, as children, did like other children. To me, they were the ones who with angelic demeanor would deliberately bump into me when I was eating my milk and cookies, who pinched me and punched me, who would share with me only under warning of some undisclosed parental threat, who would not let an accidental sin of mine, such as spilling fingerpaint or coming back from the bathroom with my fly open, go unobserved and unreported if passing it on to the teacher would create a greater entertainment, who turned faces of menace to me and faces of innocence to adults. So when some of the children began to disappear and the parents when gathered together started speaking only in muffled whispers, I did not mind. At the time, I did not understand what was happening. I only knew that to me, a world with one less bully in it was a relief.

  During this period, parents were not as lackadaisical as they had once been about being there in the playground waiting for us when school let out. Their faces as they stood by the open gate, puffing on their cigarettes, were no longer calm and happy ones; even I could read the tension. Momma was always early, but then, Momma was early for everything. My childhood had been populated with mad dashes, as if out of fear that if we ever took it slow, life would get away from us. One day, Momma was not there. I watched as all the other kids vanished with their parents. I was eventually left alone in a darkening schoolyard.

  You might have thought that there would have been at least one parent who, in his or her concern for the safety of his or her own child, might have spared one iota of that concern for me. I know, years afterward, that is what I thought. I have resigned myself to the fact that it was just another one of my life lessons.

  I stood there solitary for about fifteen minutes, holding in my hands a lion mask we had made that day out of a paper plate. While I was staring into the lion’s eyes, a man approached and told me that my Momma had asked him to drive me home.

  Yes, I know. And it seemed strange even at the time, but then, grownups were grownups, and to be obeyed. I followed him a long way from the school to where he had parked, and then we drove through winding streets I had never seen. During our entire ride, he spoke only once, and then in a soft, breathy voice.

  “Your shirt,” he said. “It’s so . . . so white.”

  When we parked, it was in front of a house unfamiliar to me. He must have noticed a puzzled expression, for he quickly told me that my Momma would not be getting home until later, that she wished me to wait there with him. He took my hand with cold and sweaty fingers, and led me inside. When the door clicked shut behind me, I did not like the sound of it.

  You can guess what happened now, can you not? You have heard stories that have begun like this before, are familiar with the overtones, can intuit the direction in which this little incident is heading. Can I not simply leave you to imagine the rest, if details are what you require? Do I need to go on? I would rather not, but I know you, so I guess I must, I guess I must.

  When, in the center of the room, I turned around at the sound of the locking door, when I saw the man’s face in its home base light, stripped of what must have been its previous strained pretense of innocence, I realized that what I had up until then been interpreting in his eyes as levity was really insanity, that what I had been mistaking as nervousness was really desire.

  He moved towards me, and I began to fight. I had never been a fighter, though I had been given many opportunities to learn. In the schoolyard, in response to the boys who took great delight in tormenting me, I normally rolled into a ball and waited for them to tire. At that instance, in that house, I intuitively knew that would not suffice. I kicked and punched wildly, only occasionally connecting with flesh as he pulled at my clothing. Buttons popped and cloth tore as I protested, and he had me naked almost before I knew it. He let me go and backed away, the clothing bunched tightly in his hands. Gasping, my nose bloodied, I crawled slowly away from him into a far corner of the room.

  “You shouldn’t have done that,” he said, staring down at a bloodstain on my shirt. “You shouldn’t have put up such a fight. Why do they always put up such a fight? Look at it. You’ve . . . soiled it.”

>   “I didn’t mean to,” I whimpered, able from the tone in which he’d spoken to tell the seriousness of my supposed crime. I looked around the room for a way out, and could see none. I was amazed that I had not earlier noticed the room’s bizarre decor. Fear had been clouding my perception, I imagine. The room’s only piece of furniture was a small cot, its rumpled sheets stained and yellowed. The door through which we had come was not visible, for it and all four walls of that room were hung with a crazy quilt of shirts and pants and shorts and socks, all small and childlike and delicate. Some were ripped to shreds, some clean but used, some covered with blood, some neat and fresh with creases still showing as if hardly worn at all. At the time I did not understand enough of the world to know what this odd collection might mean. Now I know, but I try not to think about it.

  The man, who I fear I must keep referring to as simply that, “the man,” because his name I was never to learn, kept glancing from my clothing to me to my clothing again. His eyes would widen when they sought out the fabric, and I tried to imagine what it was he saw there in its folds. I could not even come close then to describing that look, but these days, I often wonder if it is the same gleam that others find in my eyes. He finally turned from me, muttering, as if I was not there. He sat down on the edge of his bed, and began to ramble in a slurred speech. I shivered and strained to hear each word he said.

  “There is so much . . . evil in the world. So much. Only innocence can ward it off, protect me. I can feel it, yes, oh yes, I can feel it. The innocence has been . . . absorbed. This one is a good one. He will help me mend my shield. I can be safe again. I can be. I can be safe.”

  Repeating himself, he slumped back, and then began to snore. I listened to the ticking of a clock, and made myself count along with it until I had measured out sixty ten times, wanting to be sure that he was really asleep. Once I felt confident about his lack of consciousness, I searched for the door beneath the makeshift curtain, and having found it gently turned the knob. It of course would not open. Did you expect that my travail would end so easily? You know better, don’t you? You would not have bothered coming along with me on my journey if that is what you’d calculated, would you? You desire, you need, you must have . . . more, mustn’t you?