More Whispers in the Dark

Whispers IV: edited by Stuart David Schiff (1983) containing the following stories:

A Night on the Docks by Freff: One of the oddest vampire stories I can think of, with echoes of the classic tale "Call Him Demon" by Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore

Into Whose Hands by Karl Edward Wagner: Terrific, moody piece that draws on Wagner's experiences as a psychiatrist working in public mental health facilities. Maybe Wagner's most subtle piece.

Out of Copyright by Ramsey Campbell: Droll bit of supernatural revenge by Campbell, working in a very literary version of his EC Comics revenge mode.

Elle Est Trois, (La Mort) by Tanith Lee: I think this is the prolific, multi-talented Lee's crowning achievement in short works. It's really an essential piece of dark fantasy/horror.

Come to the Party by Frances Garfield: Fun short from the writer also known as Mrs. Manly Wade Wellman.

The Warrior Who Did Not Know Fear by Gerald W. Page: Odd choice, as it's really a piece of a longer work of heroic dark fantasy, a piece without an ending. Still enjoyable.

Fair Trade by William F. Nolan: Another short exercise in the EC vengeance mode, with Nolan doing spot-on dialect for the first-person narrator.

I Never Could Say Goodbye by Charles L. Grant: Mysterious.

The Devil You Say! by Lawrence Treat: More humour than horror.

Diploma Time by Frank Belknap Long: Interesting ghost story from long-time writer Long, with one of his typically jarring moments in which he eschews transitions, though here it's intentional.

Tell Us About the Rats, Grandpa by Stephen Kleinhen: Minor bit of gross-out horror.

What Say the Frogs Now, Jenny? by Hugh B. Cave: Unpleasant insofar as the female victim of sexual harassment is somehow made out to be the antagonist of the piece. I don't think that was Cave's intent, but it's a really ugly, somewhat cliched story.

The Beholder by Richard Christian Matheson: Unusually supernatural story for the master of shocking short-short stories.

Creative Coverage, Inc. by Michael Shea: Bleak comedy about corporate malfeasance. Really, really, really bleak.

The Dancer in the Flames by David Drake: Evocative piece draws on Drake's time in Viet Nam, but uses a somewhat clumsy 'footnote' ending to fully explain what has happened.

The Reflex-Man in Whinnymuir Close by Russell Kirk : Lovely period piece/pastiche by the always elegant Kirk.

In all: recommended.

Most Peculiar Mummy

Whispers (1977) edited by Stuart David Schiff, containing the following stories:

"Sticks" by Karl Edward Wagner: One of Wagner's four greatest stories, "Sticks" is a terrific piece of Cthulhu Mythology, with an absolutely riveting first half.

"The Barrow Troll" by David Drake: Typically tough-minded piece of revisionist historical fantasy from Drake.

"The Glove" by Fritz Leiber: Blackly humourous San Francisco-era piece from Leiber, set in a familiar apartment building for Leiber fans.

"The Closer of the Way" by Robert Bloch: Droll bit of meta-fiction from the creator of Psycho.

"Dark Winner" by William F. Nolan: Fascinating bit of Bradbury-tinged horror-nostalgia that would have been right at home on The Twilight Zone.

"Ladies in Waiting" by Hugh B. Cave: Solid haunted-house riff.

"White Moon Rising" by Dennis Etchison: A non-supernatural psychological thriller from Etchison. Stylistically precise, thematically mysterious.

"Graduation" by Richard Christian Matheson: Epistolary creep-out.

"Mirror, Mirror" by Ray Russell: Fun, minor piece.

The House of Cthulhu by Brian Lumley: Lovecraftian sword-and-sorcery.

"Antiquities" by John Crowley: Mummies wreak havoc in England in a most peculiar way.

"A Weather Report from the Top of the Stairs" by James Sallis and David Lunde: Adaptation of a famous Gahan Wilson cartoon ("And then we'll get him!") with two different endings.

"The Scallion Stone" by Basil A. Smith: A very M.R. Jamesian horror story from a writer who avoided publication until after his death.

"The Inglorious Rise of the Catsmeat Man" by Robin Smyth: Very much an Ambrose Bierce/Roald Dahl-like exercise in gross-out horror-comedy.

"The Pawnshop" by Charles E. Fritch: Entertaining deal-with-the-devil story.

"Le Miroir"by Robert Aickman: An even-more-ambiguous-than-usual story from the eternally ambiguous Aickman.

"The Willow Platform" by Joseph Payne Brennan: Nice bit of regional Maine Lovecraft-tinged cosmic horror in the backwoods.

"The Dakwa" by Manly Wade Wellman: The Southeast backwoods play host to a particularly gruesome Native-American monster.

"Goat" by David Campton: Really solid, evocative piece of particularly British small-town horror.

"The Chimney" by Ramsey Campbell: Award-winning story of childhood horrors that may or may not be real.

The first anthology of stories from Schiff's semi-prozine Whispers really almost bursts with heady goodness. In all: Highly recommended.

I've Come To Talk With You Again

The Year's Best Horror XXII-1993 edited by Karl Edward Wagner (1994) containing "The Ripper's Tune" by Gregory Nicoll; "One Size Eats All" by T.E.D. Klein; "Resurrection" by Adam Meyer; "I Live to Wash Her" by Joey Froehlich; "A Little-Known Side of Elvis" by Dennis Etchison; "Perfect Days" by Chet Williamson; "See How They Run" by Ramsey Campbell (aka "For You to Judge"); "Shots Downed, Officer Fired" by Wayne Allen Sallee; "David" by Sean Doolittle; "Portrait of a Pulp Writer" by F. A. Pollard [as by F. A. McMahan]; "Fish Harbor" by Paul Pinn; "Ridi Bobo" by Robert Devereaux; "Adroitly Wrapped" by Mark McLaughlin; "Thicker Than Water" by Joel Lane; "Memento Mori" by Scott Thomas; "The Blitz Spirit" by Kim Newman; "Companions" by Del Stone, Jr.; "Masquerade" by Lillian Csernica; "Price of the Flames" by Deidra Cox (aka "The Price of the Flames"); "The Bone Garden" by Conrad Williams; "Ice Cream And Tombstones" by Nina Kiriki Hoffman; "Salt Snake" by Simon Clark; "Lady's Portrait, Executed In Archaic Colors" by Charles M. Saplak; "Lost Alleys" by Jeffrey Thomas; "Salustrade" by D. F. Lewis; "The Power of One" by Nancy Kilpatrick; "The Lions in the Desert" by David Langford; "Turning Thirty" by Lisa Tuttle; "Bloodletting" by Kim Antieau; "Flying Into Naples" by Nicholas Royle; "Under the Crust" by Terry Lamsley.

This was editor Karl Edward Wagner's last Year's Best horror-short-stories volume for DAW Books before his death at the age of 49 due to complications caused by chronic alcohol abuse. His was a tragic end long foretold, based on most accounts I've read, a slide that went on for more than a decade. Through that slide, he edited more than a dozen volumes of this annual collection (the only such annual collection for horror at the time), and while his writing petered out over that awful span, his editing remained sharp and idiosyncratic right up until the end.

Wagner's editorship tended to focus on short stories rather than novellas and novelettes, which meant that his volumes -- especially the later ones, with much-increased page counts -- sometimes have a ridiculously large table of contents. I think sometimes there must have been one novella out there that year that was better than three of the included short stories, but Wagner's committment to a certain level of volume introduced readers to a lot of writers who might otherwise have remained mostly unknown.

This isn't Wagner's best Year's Best volume. There are a few too many gimmicky punch-line stories for my taste, and a few too many generic stories with generic titles. But there's also excellence here from Dennis Etchison -- maybe the least well-known great horror writer of his generation due to his concentration on the short story.

And there's a concluding double-punch of fine novellas by little-known writers, "Flying into Naples" by Nicholas Royle and "Under the Crust" by Terry Lamsley, that highlights Wagner's career-long strength as a finder and provider of excellence from unexplored corners of the publishing world. When Wagner died, the DAW series was buried with him. Poor Wagner, but what a legacy he left, singing out of darkness. Recommended.

Doomsday Books

The Year's Best Horror Stories: XX-1991 (1992) containing Ma Qui by Alan Brennert; The Same in Any Language by Ramsey Campbell; Call Home by Dennis Etchison; A Scent of Roses by Jeffrey Goddin; Root Cellar by Nancy Kilpatrick; An Eye for an Eye by Michael A. Arnzen; The Picnickers by Brian Lumley; With the Wound Still Wet by Wayne Allen Sallee; My Giddy Aunt by D. F. Lewis; The Lodestone by Sheila Hodgson; Baseball Memories by Edo van Belkom; The Bacchae by Elizabeth Hand; Common Land by Joel Lane; An Invasion of Angels by Nina Kiriki Hoffman; The Sharps and Flats Guarantee by C. S. Fuqua; Medusa's Child by Kim Antieau; Wall of Masks by T. Winter-Damon; Moving Out by Nicholas Royle; Better Ways in a Wet Alley by Barb Hendee; Close to the Earth by Gregory Nicoll; Churches of Desire by Philip Nutman; Carven of Onyx by Ron Weighell.

Horror was in a boom period in 1991, with splatterpunk rising to the fore. Wagner's selections here in the tenth volume he'd edited of DAW's annual Year's Best Horror is solid and occasionally eclectic and broad of range, with M.R. James-influenced 'traditional' ghost stories rubbing shoulders with splatterpunk, existential horror, sexual horror, and surreal, unease-making entries by Nina Kiriki Hoffman and D.F. Lewis. Alan Brennert's story is a fine bit of Viet Nam horror, while Ramsey Campbell's story suggests that some Greek islands should not be visited by tourists. Recommended.


　

The Year's Best Horror: XVII-1988: edited by Karl Edward Wagner (1989) containing Fruiting Bodies by Brian Lumley; Works of Art by Nina Kiriki Hoffman; She's a Young Thing and Cannot Leave Her Mother by Harlan Ellison; The Resurrection Man by Ian Watson; Now and Again in Summer by Charles L. Grant; Call 666 by Dennis Etchison; The Great God Pan by M. John Harrison; What Dreams May Come by Brad Strickland; Regression by R. Chetwynd-Hayes; Souvenirs from a Damnation by Don Webb; Bleeding Between the Lines by Wayne Allen Sallee; Playing the Game by Ramsey Campbell; Lost Bodies by Ian Watson; Ours Now by Nicholas Royle; Prince of Flowers by Elizabeth Hand; The Daily Chernobyl by Robert Frazier; Snowman by Charles L. Grant; Nobody's Perfect by Thomas F. Monteleone; Dead Air by Gregory Nicoll; Recrudescence by Leonard Carpenter

　

1988 was a transitional year for horror in general. Slasher movies were on the wane, while the ultra-violence of splatterpunk was on the wax in written horror. Wagner's selection here is mostly solid, though two pieces by the usually solid Ian Watson are startlingly ineffective as horror. Three novellas -- "Fruiting Bodies", "The Great God Pan", and "Recrudescence" -- are the high points here, along with one of the better NuCthulhu stories I've read in awhile, "Souvenirs from a Damnation", and one of Elizabeth Hand's first published stories, "Prince of Flowers." Dennis Etchison is solid and disturbing as always. Recommended.

Horrotica

Walk on the Wild Side: The Best Horror Stories of Karl Edward Wagner Volume 2 edited by Stephen Jones (2012): Centipede Press has done readers of horror and dark fantasy a tremendous service with the release of its two-volume collection of the late Karl Edward Wagner's best horror fiction. This is the weaker of the two volumes, collecting Wagner's shorter works with an emphasis on his late-life burst of often pornographic short stories.

Wagner started his writing life as a dynamo, both in horror and in heroic fantasy, much of the latter featuring his time-jaunting anti-hero Kane. He also worked on his own short-lived specialty press (Carcosa), wrote a licensed Conan novel (The Road of Kings), and took over editorship of DAW Books' excellent Year's Best Horror series in the early 1980's, a job he'd hold until his death in 1994.

Along the way, something happened. It involved the consumption of astounding amounts of alcohol and the growth of an intermittent writer's block that would persist from the late 1970's until his death. Trained as a psychiatrist, Wagner must have known something was going on. But what? We'll never entirely know, and the prose pieces in these two volumes by Wagner's friends suggest that he was ultimately a mystery to them as well.

We know that Wagner wrote at least one pornographic novel, and an awful lot of his late output collected here ranges into the territory of erotic horror (or 'horrotica!!!). I really wish he hadn't.

Gone for the most part is Wagner's marvelous sense of place and psychological depth, replaced with spurting penises in foaming hot tubs and more girl-on-girl action than normally found in a frat boy's hashish dream. There are a few gems here -- the creepy asylum story "Into Whose Hands" and the sad homage to The King in Yellow, "I've Come to Talk to You Again, are excellent, as is the punk-rock nightmare "Did They Get You To Trade?"

There are several stories across both volumes that deal with writers, writer's block, and writers either grown old or old before their time. How autobiographical these stories are is ultimately unknowable, but the cumulative effect certainly feels autobiographical. As an editor and a writer, here lies a fallen giant, an indispensable part of 1970's and 1980's horror, dark fantasy, and heroic fantasy. And if Karl Edward Wagner never became as great as he could have been -- well, the tragedy of his personal fall outweighs literary concerns. Recommended.

Where the Summer Ends: The Best Horror Stories of Karl Edward Wagner Volume 1

Where the Summer Ends: The Best Horror Stories of Karl Edward Wagner Volume 1 edited by Stephen Jones (2012): Centipede Press has done readers of horror and dark fantasy a tremendous service with the release of the two-volume collection of the late Karl Edward Wagner's best horror fiction. This is by far the strongest of the two volumes, collecting Wagner's longer short works, including his finest stories -- "Sticks", "In the Pines", "Where the Summer Ends", and "Beyond All Measure."

Wagner started his writing life as a dynamo, both in horror and in heroic fantasy, much of the latter featuring his time-jaunting anti-hero Kane. He also worked on his own short-lived specialty press (Carcosa), wrote a licensed Conan novel (The Road of Kings), and took over editorship of DAW Books' excellent Year's Best Horror series in the early 1980's, a job he'd hold until his death in 1994.

Along the way, something happened. It involved the consumption of astounding amounts of alcohol and the growth of an intermittent writer's block that would persist from the late 1970's until his death. Trained as a psychiatrist, Wagner must have known something was going on. But what? We'll never entirely know, and the prose pieces in these two volumes by Wagner's friends suggest that he was ultimately a mystery to them as well.

But we do have the stories, and more than ten years of the DAW anthologies. At his best, Wagner conjured up an extremely specific and detailed sense of place populated with psychologically complex characters and character interactions. While I tend to associate his best work with the American Southeast, "Sticks" actually takes place in and around the Hudson River Valley. The first half of that award-winning novelette represents Wagner's high point, a pitch-perfect evocation of horror centered around a hiker's discovery of odd-looking arrangements of sticks. If the second half moves into too-literal Lovecraftiana -- well, it's still a competent finish to a brilliant beginning.

"Beyond All Measure" gives the reader one of the more fascinating spins on vampires I can recall, while ".220 Swift" plunges into the backwoods of the American Southeast in search of creatures and situations that recall some of the tales of Arthur Machen. "In the Pines" is a harrowing tale of ghostly obsession, maybe Wagner's most sustained work, and one fit to stand beside similarly themed stories that include "The Beckoning Fair One" and "How Love Came to Professor Guildea."

I'm not as stuck on the two dream-odyssey stories included here -- Wagner's greatest strengths didn't lie in the surreal or the purposefully vague -- and one later novelette suggests a massive deterioration in skill. But the riches here, handsomely assembled and with generous accompanying prose pieces and illustrations, are worth your time. Highly recommended.

Edge of Night

Cutting Edge: edited by Dennis Etchison (1986) containing the following stories:

Blue Rose by Peter Straub; The Monster by Joe Haldeman; Lacunae by Karl Edward Wagner; "Pale, Trembling Youth" by W. H. Pugmire and Jessica Amanda Salmonson; Muzak for Torso Murders by Marc Laidlaw; Goodbye, Dark Love by Roberta Lannes; Out There by Charles L. Grant; Little Cruelties by Steve Rasnic Tem; The Man With the Hoe by George Clayton Johnson; They're Coming for You by Les Daniels; Vampire by Richard Christian Matheson; Lapses by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro; The Final Stone by William F. Nolan; Irrelativity by Nicholas Royle; The Hands by Ramsey Campbell; The Bell by Ray Russell; Lost Souls by Clive Barker; Reaper by Robert Bloch; The Transfer by Edward Bryant; and Pain by Whitley Strieber.

Solid original horror anthology from Etchison, a fine and unjustly neglected horror writer in his own right. There's violence, and sexual violence, here, but most of it seems justified by the context of the stories (though "Goodbye, Dark Love" seems a wee bit problematic). The writers basically comprise a who's who list of 1980's horror writers, along with some genre long-timers (Nolan, Johnson, and Bloch). Etchison's revealing introduction grants an insight into his career, and into his thoughts on the state of horror and other genres as of 1986. Recommended.

Unnerved

New Terrors I, edited by Ramsey Campbell (1980; 1982), containing the following stories:

The Stains by Robert Aickman; City Fishing by Steve Rasnic Tem; Yare by Manly Wade Wellman; A Room With a Vie by Tanith Lee; Tissue by Marc Laidlaw; Without Rhyme or Reason by Peter Valentine Timlett; Love Me Tender by Bob Shaw; Kevin Malone by Gene Wolfe; Chicken Soup by Kit Reed; The Pursuer by James Wade; The Spot by Dennis Etchison and Mark Johnson; The Gingerbread House by Cherry Wilder; .220 Swift by Karl Edward Wagner; The Fit by Ramsey Campbell; and Big Wheels: A Tale of the Laundry Game by Stephen King.

　

American paperback cutdown of Campbell's massive British anthology of new horror stories. Pocket Books seemed to be keeping one eye on the bottom line, so the limited page count in this and the subsequent volume caused several novelettes from the British anthology to be left out of the two American volumes. So it goes.

The stories are mostly excellent. The late, great Robert Aickman's novelette dominates the anthology -- it's weird and unnerving and inexplicable in that peculiar Aickman way that seems to be some odd combination of Franz Kafka and M.R. James. Gene Wolfe, Campbell himself and Karl Edward Wagner all contribute solid, disparate stories. Wolfe's echoes Shirley Jackson and Edith Wharton. Wagner's novelette feels like a novel that's collapsed into itself -- it needs more length to avoid the sudden narrative shifts and jumps that threaten to completely undo suspension of disbelief, but it ultimately holds together.

Dennis Etchison supplies a story that could be held up as an exemplar of Etchison's dry, allusive work about the assorted weirdnesses of Los Angeles life. Tanith Lee supplies a less dire, funnier story than I'm used to from her, about a very oddly haunted hotel room.

And there's Stephen King's surreal little gem "Big Wheels: A Tale of the Laundry Game," which Campbell cites as King's strangest story circa 1980 and which remains so circa 2011. All in all, a fine anthology (or at least part of one), and a testament to Campbell's underrated excellence as an anthologist. Highly recommended.

Strange Choices

DAW Year's Best Horror Stories Series V (1976), edited by Gerald W. Page (1977), containing:
The Service by Jerry Sohl; Long Hollow Swamp by Joseph Payne Brennan; Sing a Last Song of Valdese by Karl Edward Wagner; Harold's Blues by Glen Singer; The Well by H. Warner Munn; A Most Unusual Murder by Robert Bloch; Huzdra by Tanith Lee; Shatterday by Harlan Ellison; Children of the Forest by David Drake; The Day It Rained Lizards by Arthur Byron Cover; Followers of the Dark Star by Robert Edmond Alter; When All the Children Call My Name by Charles L. Grant; Belsen Express by Fritz Leiber and Where the Woodbine Twineth by Manly Wade Wellman.

An odd entry in DAW's long-running horror annual with a lot of previously unpublished stories and several stories that aren't really horror at all, the latter most notably those by Munn, Bloch, and Cover. The best stories here are by Wagner, Drake, Lee, and Leiber, the last of which is one of the oddest and most affecting Holocaust stories I can think of. Manly Wade Wellman contributes a fairly representative tale of backwoods supernatural goings-on, more tall tale told around the cracker barrel than actual horror.

The Cover story is something of an unpleasant mess, while Brennan's story starts strong with weird occurences in shunned places before veering into what almost seems like self-parody with the revelation of the hidden menace. Munn's novella -- the longest piece in the anthology -- is a somewhat overripe bit of Westernized Orientalism. Lee and Wagner offer us intriguingly offbeat riffs on fairy tales and legend. Not a great volume in the series, but fairly solid. Recommended.

The Horror of 1986

DAW Year's Best Horror Stories Series XV (1986) edited by Karl Edward Wagner (1987):

Contents:

Introduction: What's in a Name? • essay by Karl Edward Wagner
The Yougoslaves by Robert Bloch
Tight Little Stitches in a Dead Man's Back by Joe R. Lansdale
Apples by Ramsey Campbell
Dead White Women by William F. Wu
Crystal by Charles L. Grant
Retirement by Ron Leming
The Man Who Did Tricks With Glass by Ron Wolfe
Bird in a Wrought Iron Cage by John Alfred Taylor
The Olympic Runner by Dennis Etchison
Take the "A" Train by Wayne Allen Sallee
The Foggy, Foggy Dew by Joel Lane
The Godmother by Tina Rath
"Pale Trembling Youth" by W. H. Pugmire and Jessica Amanda Salmonson
Red Light by David J. Schow
In the Hour Before Dawn by Brad Strickland
Necros by Brian Lumley
Tattoos by Jack Dann
Acquiring a Family by R. Chetwynd-Hayes

Another year (1986, that is), another great Year's Best Horror anthology edited by Karl Edward Wagner. Horrible things happen in biker bars, country estates, tourist towns, travelling carnivals, Hallowe'en parties and haunted houses. There's a lot more indeterminate, atmospheric horror here than in other Wagner Year's Best anthologies, epitomized in an emblematically Etchisonesque Dennis Etchison story ("The Olympic Runner") which disturbs even as it leaves one unsure of what, exactly, has happened (it also contains a terrifically handled shift in third-person narrative POV, for those who enjoy that sort of thing).

Horror grandmaster Robert Bloch contributes one of his last, great stories; Ramsey Campbell contributes one in a long line of odd, ruthless stories about childhood horrors. Joe R. Lansdale wrings some gruesomeness from the end of the world and what happens after, with some of the most unlikely predators ever arising from the irradiated remains of North America to finish off the survivors of WWIII.

For an anthology in the heart of the rise of splatterpunk, there's a surprisingly lack of graphic violence (fine by me, BTW), though what there is seems justified by the narratives in which it's contained. The R. Chetwynd-Hayes story pretty much embodies a sort of British drollness in horror, a blackly comic vision of a pitiful person undone by a ruthless evil from an unexpected source. Highly recommended.

All the Darkness

DAW Year's Best Horror XIV (1985), edited by Karl Edward Wagner (1986):

Contents:

Introduction: Nurturing Nightmares by Karl Edward Wagner
Penny Daye by Charles L. Grant
Dwindling by David B. Silva
Dead Men's Fingers by Phillip C. Heath
Dead Week by Leonard Carpenter
The Sneering by Ramsey Campbell
Bunny Didn't Tell Us by David J. Schow
Pinewood by Tanith Lee
The Night People by Michael Reaves
Ceremony by William F. Nolan
The Woman in Black by Dennis Etchison
...Beside the Seaside, Beside the Sea... by Simon Clark
Mother's Day by Stephen F. Wilcox
Lava Tears by Vincent McHardy
Rapid Transit by Wayne Allen Sallee
The Weight of Zero by John Alfred Taylor
John's Return to Liverpool by Christopher Burns
In Late December, Before the Storm by Paul M. Sammon
Red Christmas by David Garnett
Too Far Behind Gradina by Steve Sneyd

By 1985, the horror boom that had begun in the late 1960's was starting to ebb, though it would be another ten years before horror fiction started to become really scarce on the bestseller lists. However, a rich list of small and large press horror magazines were still extant, giving editor Wagner a lot to choose from while assembling the newly expanded DAW anthology.

As usual, his selections are excellent and wide-ranging, both in terms of source and in terms of sub-generic classification. Psychological horror dominates in stories that include the university-set "Dead Week", the mournful "Pinewood" and the creepy "The Night People." Short, Hitchcockian shockers are nicely represented by "Red Christmas" and "Mother' Day." The supernatural is mystifying in "John's Return to Liverpool", in which a resurrected John Lennon shows up at the house of the first Beatles fan, and in the lengthy and unnerving "Too Far Behind Gradina," about a British housewife's bizarre vacation in Yugoslavia.

More conventional supernatural horrors await in "The Weight of Zero", a dandy bit of cosmic horror in the tradition (and time-period) of Arthur Machen, the neo-William Hope Hodgson sea-faring terrors of "Dead Men''s Fingers", and William F. Nolan's "Ceremony", about a hitman who takes the wrong bus.

Writers who'd effectively created their own genres by this time, Dennis Etchison and Ramsey Campbell, weigh in with fine entries in which the psychological and the supernatural collide mysteriously and horrifically. Campbell's piece is one of a subset of his fine horror stories in which the problems of getting old are explored in ways that blur the line between the supernatural and the natural, all within that signature Campbellian landscape of off-kilter description and terrible things moving just at the edge of vision. All in all, highly recommended.

Soft Monsters

DAW The Year's Best Horror Stories Series IX (1980), edited by Karl Edward Wagner (1981):

Introduction: The Year of the Anthology and Beyond by Karl Edward Wagner
The Monkey by Stephen King
The Gap by Ramsey Campbell
The Cats of Pere LaChaise by Neil Olonoff
The Propert Bequest by Basil A. Smith
On Call by Dennis Etchison
The Catacomb by Peter Shilston
Black Man with a Horn by T. E. D. Klein
The King by William Relling, Jr.
Footsteps by Harlan Ellison
Without Rhyme or Reason by Peter Valentine Timlett

As the introduction notes, 1980 was the year of the anthology in horror, with three 'one-off' original horror anthologies (Dark Forces, New Terrors and New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos) and the continuing Shadows series hitting the bookshelves. Wagner's selection here runs to some lengthy novelette-to-novella length entries (those by Klein, King and Smith) occupying about half the page length of this anthology.

King's "The Monkey" offers a King trope, childhood horror invading the world of the once-terrified child, in the titular toy, a cymbal-clashing mechanical monkey that causes people to die when those cymbals clash. It's a dandy. "The Propert Bequest," a posthumous appearance by Smith, manages a tricky feat -- expanding an M.R. Jamesian-style antiquarian ghost story to novella length -- and does so superbly (Peter Shilston's "The Catacomb" also walks in James's footsteps at less length but equal efficacy, as an English tourist makes an unfortunate unscheduled visit to a mysterious Italian church. France turns out to be even more unfortunate for an American in "The Cats of Pere Lachaise", while a visit to a medical clinic moves into undefined modern horrors in Dennis Ethison's piece.

The biggest gun here is T.E.D. Klein's "Black Man with a Horn", originally published in New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos. In 1979, a (fictional) former associate of American horror writer H.P. Lovecraft, returning from a disappointing horror convention in London, England, accidentally stumbles across a missionary who's returning to America from the Worst Missionary Posting Ever in Malaysia.

The narrator's realization that he's gradually being pulled into someone else's H.P. Lovecraft tale makes the story an occasionally sardonic delight, while Klein's careful delineation of the narrator's pervasive, systematic racism both makes cultural (the narrator was born in 1900) and narrative sense (Lovecraft was a notorious racist, and that racism informs certain aspects of his Cthulhu Mythos). And the black man with a horn -- not a man, and not actually carrying a horn -- is coming, stalking forth from a Lovecraft reference that the narrator had, until now, thought to be just another of Lovecraft's fictional creations. This story, and the anthology, highly recommended.

DAW The Year's Best Horror Series XI (1982), edited by Karl Edward Wagner

DAW The Year's Best Horror Series XI (1982), edited by Karl Edward Wagner (1983):

Contents:

Introduction: One from the Vault by Karl Edward Wagner
The Grab by Richard Laymon
The Show Goes On by Ramsey Campbell
The House at Evening by Frances Garfield
I Hae Dream'd a Dreary Dream by John Alfred Taylor
Deathtracks by Dennis Etchison
Come, Follow! by Sheila Hodgson
The Smell of Cherries by Jeffrey Goddin
A Posthumous Bequest by David Campton
Slippage by Michael P. Kube-McDowell
The Executor by David G. Rowlands
Mrs. Halfbooger's Basement by Lawrence C. Connolly
Rouse Him Not by Manly Wade Wellman
Spare the Child by Thomas F. Monteleone
The New Rays by M. John Harrison
Cruising by Donald Tyson
The Depths by Ramsey Campbell
Pumpkin Head by Al Sarrantonio


1982 gives us a nice selection of horror stories ranging from M.R. James homages ("The Executor" and "Come, Follow!", the latter based on James's brief notes for stories he never got around to writing) to creepy contemporary horror ("Spare the Child", which makes overseas-foster-children sponsoring almost as scary as gormless middle-class Americans). Ramsey Campbell shows up twice, in both cases at least a bit meta for stories of a haunted cinema and a really haunted horror writer, respectively.

We also get short and punchy stories from Manly Wade Wellman and Mrs. Manly Wade Wellman (Frances Garfield), another mindfuck from M. John Harrison about, um, a bizarre new cancer treatment? Sarrantonio's "Pumpkin Head" is a Bradburyesque Hallowe'en story unconnected to the Lance Henriksen movie of the same name; Michael Kube-McDowell's "Slippage" manages to suggest classic Twilight Zone in its story of a man gradually being erased from history; and John Alfred Taylor gives us my nomination as the scariest supernatural hiking story ever written. Yes, it's a small sub-genre, but this one is a dandy. All in all, highly recommended.

30 Past

The Year's Best Horror Series X (1981), edited by Karl Edward Wagner (1982):


Contents:


Introduction: A Decade of Fear by Karl Edward Wagner

Through the Walls by Ramsey Campbell

Touring by Michael Swanwick and Gardner Dozois and Jack Dann

Every Time You Say I Love You by Charles L. Grant

Wyntours by David G. Rowlands

The Dark Country by Dennis Etchison

Homecoming by Howard Goldsmith

Old Hobby Horse by A. F. Kidd

Firstborn by David Campton

Luna by G. W. Perriwils

Mind by Les Freeman

Competition by David Clayton Carrad

Egnaro by M. John Harrison

On 202 by Jeff Hecht

The Trick by Ramsey Campbell

Broken Glass by Harlan Ellison


Another year, another beautifully selected 'Year's Best' anthology edited by Karl Edward Wagner. Standouts among the standouts include "Through the Walls", Ramsey Campbell's tale of a nightmarish drug trip; "On 202", Jeff Hecht's story of a homecoming plagued by bad weather and worse memories; "Egnaro", another M. John Harrison story that reads like Borges as rewritten by Kafka and Robert Aickman; "The Dark Country", a rueful traveller's tale by the estimable, non pareil Dennis Etchison; and "Touring", in which a mysterious concert promoter stages a fairly unlikely triple bill of performers in a seemingly deserted Minnesota town. Other stories run the gamut from M.R. James homages to science fictional terror, and we get at least one humourous horror story, "Firstborn", that actually does manage to be both funny and horrifying. Highly recommended.

Dr. Thirteen

The Year's Best Horror XIII (1984), edited by Karl Edward Wagner (1985):

Contents:

Introduction: 13 Is A Lucky Number - Karl E. Wagner

Stephen King - Mrs. Todd's Shortcut
Charles L. Grant - Are You Afraid Of The Dark?
John Gordon - Catch Your Death
Gardner Dozois - Dinner Party
Daniel Wynn Barber - Tiger In The Snow
Ramsey Campbell - Watch The Birdie
David J. Schow - Coming Soon To A Theatre Near You
Leslie Halliwell - Hands With Long Fingers
Fred Chappell - Weird Tales
Jovan Panich - The Wardrobe
Vincent McHardy - Angst For The Memories
David Langford - The Thing In The Bedroom
John Brizzolara - Borderland
Roger Johnson - The Scarecrow
James B. Hemesath - The End Of The World
John Gordon - Never Grow Up
Charles Wagner - Deadlights
Dennis Etchison - Talking In The Dark

One of the strongest entries from Wagner's 15+ year run on DAW's Year's Best Horror series, with a gratifyingly broad and deep range of stories. Splatterpunk was still in its formative stages in 1984, so the violence levels in these stories generally never go above a Yellow Alert level. Comic horror (David Langford's "The Thing In The Bedroom"), science-fiction-horror (Gardner Dozois's "Dinner Party"), children's horror (the two entries from John Gordon) and even a prose adaptation of what was originally a story from a comic book (Charles Wagner's "Deadlights") represent some of the more off-beat offerings.

The King story isn't horror per se, though it is a charming piece that straddles the line between light and dark fantasy. Fred Chappell's story, from a literary journal, takes us through a nightmarish historical voyage that includes the weird-but-true meetings of Hart Crane and H.P. Lovecraft; Dennis Etchison heads into Misery territory, albeit with a decided twist; David Schow pits a Viet Nam vet against the bizarre proprietors of a repertory cinema in rundown L.A.; Roger Johnson presents an able M.R. James homage; Ramsey Campbell is at his drollest in a "true story" which I'm guessing (or hoping) isn't. Karl Edward Wagner was a world wonder; highly recommended.

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.

The Rural Ghostbuster

Planet Stories: Who Fears the Devil?: The Complete Silver John Stories by Manly Wade Wellman, introductions by Mike Resnick and Karl Edward Wagner (2010 this edition): God bless the relatively new Planet Stories imprint, which is trying to bring out-of-print fantasy and science-fiction classics back in affordable, over-sized and reasonably priced paperbacks. It's a worthy project, and I hope profitable enough for them to continue. At the very least, you should go buy this book, the two entries by C.L. Moore and Robert E. Howard's Almuric from their back catalogue. Oh, and the Kuttner and A. Merritt volumes too.

Manly Wade Wellman, born early in the first decade of the 20th century and dying in 1986, wrote to the end. He was a pulp writer in many genres, but it was the regional horror-fantasies of the short stories of this volume and the five Silver John novels that represent the pinnacle of his reputation, works of startlingly original regional American fantasy rooted in the legends and songs of the rural American Southeast.

Nothing like them had appeared before the Silver John stories found a home in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in the early 1950's (though two of the stories here, "Frogfather" and "Sin's Doorway", date from the 1940's and may, Wellman maintained conditionally, be formative stories of John the Balladeer before he took up his silver-stringed guitar). The last story chronologically was written only a few months before Wellman's death.

Silver John (or John the Balladeer), never given a last name, wanders throughout the wilds of the Southeast, centered roughly in North Carolina. He carries a silver-stringed guitar and an encyclopedic knowledge of both myth and traditional regional songs. And he battles the forces of evil with those tools, his faith, and his essential goodness and decency. Silver is a bane to most things supernatural, though John will also occasionally use white magic (derived from such real spell books as The Long-lost Friend -- you can order it online!) and natural counterforces (woods such as hazel and cedar) in his wanderings.

John is endlessly curious about the origins of songs and of stories he's heard, and that drives some of his wandering, though he also does so to bring aid to friends and strangers alike who've been confronted by such things as witches, warlocks, the mysterious and malign Shonokins, the lurking gardinels (living, carnivorous houses), the weird creatures that may or may not be malign, and a variety of other back-country legends both 'real' and invented by Wellman (the line blurs sometimes, not least of which because Wellman collected stories from the people of the areas he wrote about, stories that in some cases were extremely regional in focus -- the gardinel and the stories of the Ancients Ones who mined the hills before even the Indians came may have a basis in truth. Or maybe not.)

Throughout it all, Wellman pulls off one of the most difficult feats in all fiction -- he makes good both interesting and attractive. John's neither a prude nor a teetotaler, and he's humble about his abilities in the face of supernatural evil. The scene in which he summons the ghost of George Washington to defeat a malign 300-year-old warlock is both emblematic of the series as a whole and deeply strange. But this stuff happens all the time. And maybe it does. Highly recommended.

In a Lonely Place by Karl Edward Wagner

In a Lonely Place by Karl Edward Wagner (Collected 1983): This mid-1980's collection of short stories and novellas by Wagner includes probably his most famous story, the award-winning "Sticks" from the mid-1970's. Wagner, who died too young in 1995, was a major writer, publisher and anthologist in the horror, dark-fantasy, and sword-and-sorcery genres for more than 20 years, with his annual Year's Best Horror anthology from DAW pretty much setting the gold standard for genre 'Best of' collections from the early 1980's until Wagner's death and resultant cancellation of the series.

Here, we get many of his best horror stories, including the forementioned "Sticks", a whopper of a Lovecraft homage that also references the artwork and lifestory of pulp illustrator Lee Brown Coye. Did the makers of The Blair Witch Project read "Sticks" at some point? If not, it's an incredible coincidence.

Other stories bounce off Lovecraft, Manly Wade Wellman and Robert Chambers' seminal The King in Yellow in interesting and productive ways, all without requiring any actual knowledge of the references for readerly enjoyment. The novella "Beyond Any Measure" remains, nearly thirty years after its first appearance, one of the five or six cleverest vampire stories ever written. Highly recommended.