Too Much Horror Fiction Updates...

Hola amigos, long time since I rapped at ya! Got some horror (all good) news you can use...

I've written two introductions for two new horror anthologies: one was published at the end of 2024, The Rack: Stories Inspired by Vintage Horror Paperbacks, edited by Stoker Award-winning author Tom Deady, from Greymore Publishing; order here. Also, the brand-new Claw Machine, compiled by an old East Coast pal of mine who now also resides in Portland. You can order it from Little Key Press here. Both feature horror/science fiction/speculative lit stories that I think will appeal to TMHF and Paperbacks from Hell fans. It was definitely an honor to have been asked to write for these books!

And yet another intro I wrote is for a vintage paperback novel that will be reprinted by Fathom Press later this summer. Like Valancourt, they are putting back into print paperback horror under their Savage Harvest line. This one is Bad Ronald, the 1973 book by giant SF scribe Jack Vance, the basis for the infamous TV movie of yore (which I still have not seen!). The fresh new cover art, by Steve Andrade, is pretty spectacular (he's done all of the Savage Harvest reprints, I believe, and they are nothing short of wonderful). You can preorder it here. 

Last but certainly not least: Grady Hendrix and I, along with Valancourt Books, have decided to wrap up the Paperbacks from Hell reprint series with three more titles, thus ending the line with an even two dozen works. But the titles have not been finalized yet! We're discussing a few books, but as you know, tracking down publication rights, and then convincing people to have their books republished, is tricky business; the stars have to align just so. 

The moving parts are: books we all three like; the book is entirely out of print (no ebook/audiobook either); the original paperback is somewhat rare/expensive in the secondhand market; the author/estate is willing to have the book reprinted; and the promise of potential sales. As the years have gone on, checking off all those boxes is incredibly difficult. We've reached complete dead ends on several titles we've wanted. So we've all agreed, unfortunately, the end is here. I'll say we are looking at some "classicks" that a lot of people want to get their grubby mitts on, but that's all I will say for now. 

Alas, we cannot reprint several notorious works that people have been asking about over the years: Eat Them Alive, The Voice of the Clown, and The Little People. For various and sundry reasons, the rights to these three remain completely unavailable to us. Frustrating and disappointing, I know, but I think the other titles were hoping to reprint will be quite well received! I will announce as soon as we've decided and gotten the rights signed off on.

Okay, back to reading, and hopefully getting some reviews back up on here...

The Snake by John Godey (1978): My, My, My Serpentine

The gritty, grimy New York City of the 1970s looms large in our pop cultural imagination. Movies like Taxi Driver, Saturday Night Fever, The French Connection, to name a quick few, are today all virtually everyday notions, while progressive music from Blondie, Talking Heads, the Ramones, and early hip-hop continue to symbolize the absolute essence of "cool." The politics of the day were hardball and hard-won, like President Ford telling the town to (apocryphally as a headline in the local news) "Drop dead," and later, Mayor Ed Koch practically became a celebrity and known to folks who wouldn't dare step foot on those profane mean streets. 

Enter The Snake: a 1978 thriller from a writer named John Godey. This was the crime fiction pseudonym of Brooklyn-born author Morton Freedgood, who had worked in NYC's film industry for all the giant movie companies, like Paramount and 20th Century Fox. As noted on the cover of the 1979 Berkley paperback, Godey previously wrote The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3, which was made into a 1974 movie that also captured NYC at its most lawless. Letting loose a giant slithering atavistic reptile into the gleaming greenery of Central Park must have seemed like a no-brainer to the author, especially in the wake of Jaws. The cover of the original hardcover captures it nicely:

Godey seems to know every inch of the city, doling out places names and addresses like any reader will know exactly what he's talking about (ah, New Yorkers!), and I often plugged in such into Google Maps to get a clear view of the specific environs the action was happening in. His depiction of the titular creature is both scientifically sound and aesthetically unsettling. The reasoning for its arrival and escape is believable in its randomness, a backstory both intriguing but also blackly comical in a way, and very NYC-coded. "Two dead in less than twenty-four hours, that's one thing... People die all the time. But the other thing, the politics, that's serious."

Characters are familiar: the beleaguered cop, the cocky young herpetologist, the lovely journalist, the sweaty mayor, the religious nuts who make it their mission to find and kill the demonic reptile, plus various hapless victims introduced and dispatched with maximum suspense. Godey may be writing a slick bestseller, and he's a bit above the pulp pay-grade; still, lots of vulgar '70s slang and profanities and ethnic slurs you'll remember from the movies of the day, with less enlightened folks going about their daily grind in a city that can swallow you whole—and now even has the ability to inject fast-acting fatal venom right into your veins. New York City really has it all, don't it? "Any other city, if somebody got bitten by a snake, the public would blame the snake. Here they blame the mayor." 

I read The Snake quickly, enjoying a little imaginative time-travel to a place and time I do dearly love. As a horror novel of snaky scares it's not on a par with The Accursed, but Godey is quite adept at his descriptions of the 11-foot black mamba and its shenanigans, how it hides in the wilds of Central Park and is pretty much an innocent creature going about its own primal business. This is a thriller through and through. The set-up is solid, the sense of locale impeccable, the climax breathless, and the very ending you might guess—but ultimately The Snake is a satisfying bit of '70s suspense.

The snake in the park became a jewel in the crown of the city's obsession with its own eccentricity. The public reasserted its prideful conviction that it inhabited the most put-upon city in the whole world. When bigger and better and more unendurable disasters were contrived, they were visited justly upon the city that matched them in stature, which was to say, the city that was superlatively dirty, declining, expensive, crime-ridden, unmanageable, and glamorously unlivable beyond any other city in the world.

Under the Fang, edited by Robert McCammon (1991): The World is a Vampire

Vampires, vampires, vampires! Loathsome creatures of the night stalking and snacking on humans across the globe! There's no escape! Whatever can we do?!

Nothing, it seems, or very little, to save ourselves. Thus is the setup for the stories in Under the Fang (Pocket Books, Aug 1991, cover by Mitzura), under the auspices of the Horror Writers of America coalition, with editing duties by iconic bestselling paperback author Robert R. McCammon. Akin to the zombie apocalypse anthos based on George Romero's movies, Book of the Dead (1989) and Still Dead (1992), (which of course hearken back to 1957's I Am Legend) all the stories exist in this new world, with each author bringing their own special methods of madness to the proceedings.

McCammon in 1991

Virtually all the vampire anthologies published prior to the early Nineties were collections of classic stories, moldy golden oldies by the likes of Bram Stoker, Polidori, EF Benson, Crawford, Derleth, et al. Esteemed editor Ellen Datlow gave us Blood is Not Enough in 1989 and A Whisper of Blood in 1991, which featured all-new vampiric works by the cream of the genre's crop. I'll confess: I've read neither, even though I've owned them since Kurt Cobain was still alive. But those two volumes seem to be the first that showed that the old symbols and themes of vampire fictions could be given fresh new life at the end of the century. 

The vampires within Under the Fang exist on a spectrum of generic types: the typical night creeper; the almost-zombified monster driven mad by thirst; the brilliant military leader; the scientific sort looking for a way to walk in daylight; the Anne Rice decadent aesthete. Vampires have been dubbed cutesy nicknames, like "suckheads" and "fangers" and whatnot. That out of the way, let's get to the contents: McCammon gets a twofer, first with a metafictional introduction, in the guise of a doomed note from an unnamed narrator:

They've won. They come in the night, to the towns and cities. Like a slow, insidious virus they spread from house to house, building to building, from graveyard to bedroom and cellar to boardroom. They won, while the world struggled with governments and terrorists and the siren song of business. They won, while we weren't looking...

He handily sketches out the scope of the situation in a couple pages, setting us up for the tales to come. Second is his story "The Miracle Mile," of a family's drive to an abandoned season vacation spot and amusement park. Vampires have of course overrun it, and Dad is pissed. With his signature mix of corny sap and derivative horror, McCammon delivers perfectly cromulent reading material. It's just that I always find him square and dull and earnest, and not my jam whatsoever.

McCammon and Sarrantonio, 1990

The recently-late Al Sarrantonio's "Red Eve" is an effective slice of dark, poetic fantasy in full Bradbury mode, which was common for him. I have no idea who Clint Collins is, but his brief "Stoker's Mistress" is a high-toned yet effective bit of metafiction about vampires "allowing" Bram Stoker to write his "ludicrous" novel Dracula... Shades of soon-to-be-unleashed Anno Dracula. Nancy A. Collins had already had her way with the vampires; "Dancing Nitely" is a perfect encapsulation of the modern image of the unholy creature: they all want to live in an MTV video scripted by Bret Easton Ellis. Contains scenes of NYC yuppies dancing under blood spray at an ultra-hip underground vamp bar, called Club Vlad, with a neon Lugosi lighting up its exterior. We may cringe looking back at it today, but back then this style was au courant du jour.

Late crime novelist Ed Gorman delivers an emotional wallop in "Duty," powerfully effective even though I was half-expecting how the turnaround was going to happen. I gotta try one of his full horror novels! Richard Laymon does his his usual schtick of adolescent ogling and rape fantasy scenarios rife with toxic masculinity in "Special," this story ends on an unexpected note of enlightenment. Better than other things I've read by him, but not enough to make me a fan. 

One of those writers whose byline makes me groan inwardly, J.N. Williamson (above), contributes a lengthy, pulp-prose-level Interview with the Vampire-esque work called "Herrenrasse" ("master race" in German, yuck) in which a hoity-toity vampire traps a potential Van Helsing in his apartment. They then engage in a lengthy dialogue of philosophical conceits of bloodsucking. Kinda cool, but Williamson's style can be pompous, overwritten in that pulpy, self-taught style that screams "show-off." Thomas F. Monteleone, he of the wonderful cutting edge Borderlands anthologies, contributes "Prodigal Sun," a brilliant vampire who had been an immunologist who now tries to cure their curse of bloodthirst. Well-written but so-so.

Together, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro and Suzy McKee Charnas pit their own fictional vamps—Count St. Germain and Dr. Edward Weyland, respectively—against one another in "Advocates," the most philosophically ambitious work here; no surprise, as both women approached the vampire as a concept in their other writings. Could've been better I felt, less than the sum of its parts.

Brian Hodge, 1991

On to the finest stories within: my favorite was Brian Hodge's "Midnight Sun," which is so well-conceived in scope and execution I daresay he could've written an entire novel using his scenario. Muscular and convincing, its setting of a military outpost in frozen wastes makes it a standout; the conflict, not only between humans and vampires but also between vampires themselves give the story a real moral heft. A close second was "Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage," by Chet Williamson, in which a loving husband and wife experience tragedy and woe after escaping into a cabin in the woods. Tough, moving, unsettling stuff. 

Surprisingly, Lisa Cantrell (above), she of The Manse "fame," pulls out a little winner in "Juice." It ain't moonshine this good ol' boy is making a living from. "Does the Blood Line Run on Time?" by Sidney Williams and Robert Pettit, is one of the real bangers here, an action-adventure-horror offering that is oh-so Eighties in just the right way. Williams wrote a few horror paperbacks around then, and now I'm considering adding them to my want-lists.

Other stories here, by authors both known and unknown, run up and down the scale from ok sure fine to oh well whatever nevermind. This might not be the best antho of the era I've ever read, but the quality of prose is very high—this was the HWA, after all—even if the story itself doesn't quite succeed. Me, I could've done with some more graphic bloodshed/drinking, or classic Lugosi/Lee-style vamp action in the good old Les Daniels' tradition. No matter; your mileage may vary as well (PorPor Books enjoyed it maybe a smidgen more than I did). Overall, I'd say Under the Fang is an easy recommendation for your horror anthology and/or vampire fiction shelves.