Wagnerian

The Year's Best Horror VIII, edited by Karl Edward Wagner (1980, for the year 1979): Wagner's first year as editor for DAW's seminal, annual horror anthology gives us more than a dozen stories ranging from very good to classic, carefully selected (as was Wagner's M.O.) from a wide array of genre magazines, mainstream magazines, low-print-run chapbooks and assorted other venues. Wagner, who died in 1994, was one the horror genre's five or six greatest editors, and a fine writer as well.

Wagner's first effort for DAW is wide-ranging, combining first or second efforts from a couple of writers, stories from established writers, and at least one return to the genre by one of the Golden Age's more skilful writers ("From the Lower Deep" by Hugh B. Cave, a dandy of atmosphere and misdirection). Splatterpunk was still a few years away in 1980, and few of the stories are particularly graphic. A fine balance is struck between realistic horror (the best of these being old hand Davis Grubb's "The Babysitter") and the supernatural, with all the shadings between those two poles. The Ramsey Campbell story included here is a bit of a curiosity, though a very effective one -- "To Wake the Dead" is really the prologue to Campbell's excellent novel The Parasite.

Harlan Ellison gets two selections; 1979 really marks the end of Ellison's most fruitful years as a short-story writer, and while "In the Fourth Year of the War" is a dandy, "All the Birds Come Home to Roost" seems awfully dated now, and a tad like a misogynist's fantasy of horror (a guy who's had a lot of sex with women suddenly starts having those women show up in his life for a one-night stand, in reverse chronological order, leading him backwards to his first wife, who's been in a mental asylum for decades and, I guess, is going to drive him crazy or something when she returns, given that she mumbled a lot and made him feel bad, but then he punched her, and then she got committed. In any event, the poor guy just keeps getting jumped by his previous conquests as some sort of cosmic punishment. Maybe this only qualified as horror in the Swinging 70's).

But enough of my yakking. Wagner would ultimately edit these annual books until his death, when DAW discontinued the line. This one and the others are all well worth picking up used for both their literary and historical value. Highly recommended.

Falls the Shadow

The Shadow: Blood & Judgment, written and illustrated by Howard Chaykin (1986): 1986 was the year that three comic-book-industry-changing books came out from DC Comics -- The Dark Knight Returns, Watchmen and this violent, sexy and irreverent reimagining of the old Shadow radio-and-pulp character. The other two are still in constant print; alas, because this is a treatment of a character licensed from another company, The Shadow: Blood & Judgment has, so far as I know, only been available in used bookstores and on EBay since about 1989.

That's a shame because it's fucking awesome, though I can understand why oldy timey Shadow fans like Harlan Ellison squeaked and gibbered with outrage when Chaykin's miniseries first appeared. It's revisionist on almost every level, making the Shadow both an even more bloodthirsty avenger of crime and an even bigger bastard in his personal life than was ever imagined in the old pulps and radio shows of the 1930's and 1940's. Somewhat confusingly, the confusing opening of the Alec Baldwin Shadow movie of the early 1990's sort of lifted some of its concepts from this miniseries and not from the original pulps. So it goes.

As a back-issue-bin bonus, this miniseries spawned an even more irreverent and hilarious ongoing series that ran for 19 issues, an annual, and a Prestige Format two-issue Avenger miniseries spinoff. In that later magnum opus, writer Andrew Helfer and artists Bill Sienkiewicz, Marshall Rogers and Kyle Baker took about as much piss out of the Shadow (and really out of weird avengers of crime in general) as one could without completely deflating the concept.

I like reverence as much as the next guy, but Chaykin's take is giddy fun involving characters who are generally really, really well-dressed (no one draws natty clothing like Chaykin) and often really, really perverse. Unfortunately, the grim-and-gritty late 1980's comic marketplace took its cues from the violence of this and other books but pretty much left out the humour (mostly black) and the stylishness. Still, this is thrilling stuff, even moreso in the context of today's moribund Doc Savage and Avenger DC reboot universe, First Wave. Someone should have hired Chaykin et al. to steward that one. It might have got cancelled just as quickly, but at least it would have been awesome sauce while it was being published. Highly recommended.