Best New Horror Volume 3 (1991): 2015 Revised PS Publishing Edition

Best New Horror Volume 3 (1991): 2015 Revised PS Publishing Edition: edited by Stephen Jones and Ramsey Campbell, containing the following stories:

• True Love  by K. W. Jeter: Really disturbing character study.
• The Same in Any Language  by Ramsey Campbell: A visit to the Greek islands turns out badly for a boy and worse for his annoying father.
• Impermanent Mercies  by Kathe Koja: Totally weird and strangely disturbing.
• Ma Qui  by Alan Brennert: Marvelous piece of posthumous narration set during the Viet Nam War.
• The Miracle Mile  by Robert R. McCammon: Pretty slight entry from a zombie anthology.
• Taking Down the Tree  by Steve Rasnic Tem: A weird, poetic piece from the prolific and valuable Mr. Tem.
• Where Flies Are Born  by Douglas Clegg: OK bit of body-horror.
• Love, Death and the Maiden  by Roger Johnson: Moody horror-quest sort of fizzles out in murkiness.
• Chui Chai  by S. P. Somtow: Another unimpressive piece of horror from someone who was a really impressive science-fiction writer in the 1970's and early 1980's.
• The Snow Sculptures of Xanadu  by Kim Newman: Fun metafictional oddity for Citizen Kane fans.
• Colder Than Hell  by Edward Bryant: Chilly psychological horror story recalls Sinclair Ross' classic "The Painted Door."
• Raymond  by Nancy A. Collins: Collins creates a sad werewolf.
• One Life, in an Hourglass  by Charles L. Grant: Riff on Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes is low-key but mostly satisfying.
• The Braille Encyclopedia  by Grant Morrison: Creepy horror piece suggests that mostly-comic-book-writing Morrison is riffing hard on Clive Barker.
• The Bacchae  by Elizabeth Hand: Brilliant piece of feminist, mythological horror set in a rapidly disintegrating near-future.
• Busted in Buttown  by David J. Schow: Interesting, but it really feels like Schow is riffing on Dennis Etchison here.
• Subway Story  by Russell Flinn: Flinn abandoned writing soon after this was published, which is a shame -- he was like a somewhat more surreal but quite horrifying version of Ramsey Campbell in terms of his subject matter and descriptive focus.
• The Medusa  by Thomas Ligotti: One of Ligotti's relatively early, much-anthologized, weird pieces.
• Power Cut  by Joel Lane: Sharp, satiric horror about homophobia.
• Moving Out  by Nicholas Royle: Excellent, unusual, disturbing ghost story.
• Guignoir  by Norman Partridge: Fun, pulpy piece of American ultraviolence, complete with carnival.
• Blood Sky  by William F. Nolan: Unusual, affecting character study of a serial killer.
• Ready  by David Starkey: Interesting.
• The Slug  by Karl Edward Wagner: Writer's block horror from the late, great writer and anthologist who faced these demons and others at the time of publication.
• The Dark Land  by Michael Marshall Smith: Excellent early bit of horrifying, somewhat surreal journey into... something.
• When They Gave Us Memory  by Dennis Etchison: A typical Etchison oddity, which is to say unusual in subject matter, elusive in meaning, keenly observed in physical detail.
• Taking Care of Michael  by J. L. Comeau: Sort of yuck.
• The Dreams of Dr. Ladybank  by Thomas Tessier: Tessier works some very modern, gender-bending, boundary-pushing changes on the basic set-up for such horror classics as Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Parasite."
• Zits  by Nina Kiriki Hoffman: Bleak, disturbing vignette.

Overall: Many of these stories have become repeatedly republished classics, and others merit rediscovery. There are very, very few misses. Fine editorial work from the team of Jones and Campbell. This new edition updates the biographies for the writers, so there is new material if one already owns the original edition. Highly recommended.

Unspeakable Cults

Shudder Again (1993): edited by Michele Slung, containing the following stories:

Aphra (1993) by Nancy A. Collins
Eye of the Lynx (1983) by Thomas Ligotti
Heavy-Set (1964) by Ray Bradbury
Mr. Wrong (1975) by Elizabeth Jane Howard
The Runaway Lovers (1967) by Ray Russell
The First Time (1993) by David Kuehls
The Ceremony (1897) by Arthur Machen
The Nature of the Evidence (1923) by May Sinclair
The Face of Helene Bournouw (1960) by Harlan Ellison
A Host of Furious Fancies (1980) by J. G. Ballard
When the Red Storm Comes: Or, The History of a Young Lady's Awakening to Her Nature (1993) by Sarah Smith
Ravissante (1968) by Robert Aickman
A Birthday (1987) by Lisa Tuttle
The Crooked Man (1955) by Charles Beaumont
On the Lake of Last Wishes (1993) by Claudia O'Keefe
Again (1981) by Ramsey Campbell
Kin to Love (1937) by T. H. White
Same Time, Same Place (1963) by Mervyn Peake
The Model (1975) by Robert Bloch
Silver Circus (1927) by A. E. Coppard
Honeymoon (1931) by Clement Wood
The Parasite (1894) by Arthur Conan Doyle.

Solid, enjoyable mix of original and reprinted short fiction in a sequel to Michele Slung's earlier anthology entitled I Shudder At Your Touch. The anthologies focus on horror stories with some element of sexual or romantic horror. The sexual elements tend to be subtle and understated in most of the stories, at least when it comes to graphic sex scenes. That doesn't mean that the stories can't be disturbing.

Among the reprints, we get both supernatural and non-supernatural horror, along with one mostly non-horrific ghost story, "The Nature of the Evidence" by May Sinclair. Slung does a really nice job finding suitable but under-reprinted stories for the anthology. She also supplies lengthy introductions that contextualize the stories without giving away plot points.

One of the highlights is Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Parasite," written by the creator of Sherlock Holmes before he'd become a public believer in the paranormal. It trades gratifyingly on the Holmesian -- its narrator is a solid rationalist forced to believe in psychic phenomena by being mentally attacked by the human 'parasite' of the title. Like much good horror, the story operates on parallel tracks of the figurative and the literal. Our narrator is under psychic attack, but he's also a stand-in for anyone who has in some way lost control of his own mind, through no fault of his own. 

The stories original to this volume are a bit more uneven. David Kuehls' "The First Time" is an interesting case. Its horrific yet jokey punchline requires an elaborate science-fictional set-up. And the content of that punchline is disturbing enough that the whole story seems too slight for the horror it ends with, an EC shock-short that turns something truly malign into a cause for hilarity. On the other hand, Nancy Collins' "Aphra," in which a man falls into a very physical relationship with a human skeleton he buys at a yard sale, manages to strike the right tone of obsession and Poe-esque necrophiliac lunacy.

In all, this is a pretty good anthology. Readers looking for a weird wankbook will be disappointed, though. I hope. Recommended.