Whispers, edited by Stuart David Schiff (1977): A Craft of Love

My tale had been called "The Attic Window," and appeared in the January, 1922, issue of Whispers. In a good many places, especially the South and the Pacific coast, they took the magazines off the stands at the complaints of silly milksops, but New England didn't get the thrill and merely shrugged its shoulders at my extravagance.

- Lovecraft, "The Unnamable" (1925)

In the early 1970s, a young military dentist named Stuart David Schiff began a seeming inexhaustible labor of love by putting together a little magazine of original horror and dark fantasy stories, which he titled, in a nod to HPL, Whispers. Finding the horror genre lacking in outlets for good writers, Schiff simply created one himself, was able to offer money, and attracted the attention of an impressive roster of scribes, both the classic - Robert Bloch, Fritz Leiber, Manly Wade Wellman - and the (then) newly minted - Dennis Etchison, Karl Edward Wagner, Ramsey Campbell, as well as folks never heard from again. Illustrators too, were welcomed, some hearkening back to the original Arkham House days, like Frank Utpatel and Lee Brown Coye - Schiff's editorial senses were impeccable.

Whispers #1, July 1973 - great cover art by Tim Kirk

Later in the decade anthologies of the best stories were published in hardcovers, and then, of course, came the paperbacks. In February 1977 the first Whispers paperback was released, from Jove/HB. You can see the cover art below, by Rowena Morrill, and how it features not a single real image of horror; it seems more fantasy-oriented, I mean, what is that, a dragon, and a princess? (Actually it's inspired by Wellman's adventure tale of Native American mythology, "The Dakwa").

At the top you see the June 1987 Jove reprint and its startling cover art by Marshall Arisman, intimating distorted psychological states in the sleek metallic sheen of a modern world, terror for the end of the century. But that's not what Whispers is; the terrors of Whispers are of the comforting old-fashioned sort, evil fantasies vividly told, well-oiled engines of weirdness and frightful fun that invoke demons and devils, Lovecraftian entities, vengeful madmen, landscapes of legend and myth, and other staples of the much-loved pulps era... with a few new twists.

Editor Schiff today

Almost to a one, the stories Schiff has compiled are solidly entertaining. Whispers starts off strongly with "Sticks." Originally written as a kind of horror writer's in-joke, Karl Edward Wagner's (pic below) story mixes Weird Tales art, anthropology, and vague cosmic malice to terrific effect, and it has become a classic in that Mythos; it won the 1975 British Fantasy Award for best short story and has been reprinted plenty (you'll also note its striking similarity to a popular indie horror movie that came along two decades later). Amazingly enough it was inspired by real-life events! A pulp horror artist comes across a strange collection of bundled lattices of sticks in the lonely woods of upstate New York.

It should have been ridiculous. It wasn't. Instead it seemed somehow sinister - these utterly inexplicable, meticulously constructed stick lattices spread through a wilderness where only a tree-grown embankment or a forgotten stone wall gave evidence that man had ever passed through.

And things just get worse from there. Really worse. Pretty great, unique, disquieting, although I could have done without the little explanatory afterword included, just a paragraph down from the story's final doom-laden lines.

Whispers #9, July 1976- eerie art by Steve Fabian

I've noted before that with the explosion of paperback horror in the 1980s the quality of the writing itself suffered much, but that in the '70s the genre was still populated by professional authors who could actually and truly write. How refreshing! There is the delicate style of Robert Aickman's (pic below) tale "Le Miroir," in which the most complex of ordeals sometimes finds its own resolution, and now Celia sat before the beautiful mirror or looking glass, now in one new dress, now in another, and intermittently without troubling to put on a dress at all.
 

Dark fantasy elder statesman Fritz Leiber's penchant for horror set in the current day appears in "The Glove." A tale of rape and guilt written in a smartly casual manner, Leiber's narrator wonders, Gloves are ghostly to start with, envelopes for hands - and if there isn't a medieval superstition about wearing the flayed skin of another's hand to work magic, there ought to be. Although I'm not a fan of sword-and-sorcery, and Brian Lumley's "House of Cthulhu" is firmly in that field with its medieval vocabulary and dialogue (speaking in "ayes" and "Os" and names with lots of Zs, Hs, and Ys), the story began to charm me, especially because of its skin-crawl climax and Cthulhu references.

Weirdbook Press, 1984

Some comic relief too: Bob Bloch contributes a mordantly self-referential piece, "The Closer of the Way" (his first book was entitled The Opener of the Way; get it?). "Mirror, Mirror" has a classic deal with the devil gone wrong, Ray Russell's satiric swipe at vain Hollywood types. You'll dig the Cockney cannibal of "The Inglorious Rise of the Catsmeat Man" by Robyn Smith. And Richard Christian Matheson's "Graduation" is an epistolary tale of a college student's clever, insightful, but not-quite-self-aware letters home; he keeps mentioning you-know-who but, sadly, I'm not quite sure who that was... but I don't think I'd want to be there when he comes home for spring break.

Matheson - Man I gotta find & reread his Scars

And Whispers ends with a bang: "The Chimney," one of the best Ramsey Campbell stories I've read. A child learns of Santa in the worst way, much too young, a fiend on television:

I'd seen two children asleep in bed, an enormous crimson man emerging from the fireplace, creeping toward. They weren't going to wake up! "Burglar!" I'd screamed. "No, dear, it's Father Christmas," my mother said. "He always comes out of the chimney."

Perhaps if she'd said "down" rather than "out of"...

This is one of Campbell's straightforward tales of quiet creeping dread, and the payoff lingers, finding that our deepest childhood fears resonate throughout our - and perhaps others' - entire lives. Stellar stuff. And winner of the 1978 World Fantasy Award for best short fiction.

Doubleday hardcover, 1977

And so many other satisfying tales of vintage weirdness, perfect for reading while curled up before the proverbial fireplace: "The Pawnshop" by Charles Fritch; "Goat" by David Campion; another with a good Lovecraft vibe, "The Willow Platform" by Joseph Payne Brennan. There are darker, more realistic stories here too, especially Etchison's murder-on-coed-campus "White Moon Rising," which hints at the fragmented types of stories he'd produce for the next several decades. But mostly Whispers presents carefully-crafted works that evoke the 19th and early 20th century masters, just the kind of horror that Lovecraft himself always loved.

Night Cry magazine, Fall 1985

This is issue #3 of Night Cry, with black-and-white illustrations by Paula Goodman. I like them lots better than J.K. Potter's from the previous post. The only story in this ish that I've read is David J. Schow's "The Woman's Version," which was in his fine collection Seeing Red. Pretty cool; you can see its illustration on the cover there, by Manuel Morales. I found that editor Alan Rodgers wrote a handful of Bantam horror novels in the early '90s that I recall seeing around, but never read. Anybody...?

Update: Right now I'm halfway through a wonderful horror novel, one I'd almost choose to keep reading on and on, but that can't be, so I hope to have the review up by week's end. If you're jonesing for more than just magazine scans right now, do yourself a favor and hie on over to The Mighty Blowhole, and feast upon these nasty creature-feature delights!

Night Cry magazine, Winter 1985

Few months back I found a handful of old Night Cry magazine issues, but I haven't read any of them. Night Cry was the digest-sized offshoot of Twilight Zone mag and didn't last too long; only 11 issues between '84 and '87 and this is issue #4. Lots of no-name authors mixed in there with bigger SF&F and horror folk. J.K. Potter, whose surreal collages adorned many a limited-edition horror work during that era, did all the artwork seen here. A nice snapshot of mid-'80s horror. You can pick up copies online for so-so prices; I scored mine for a buck apiece.

Seeing Red by David J. Schow (1990): Fright Film Blurred

The first of two collections of David J. Schow's horror stories published in 1990, Seeing Red was one of my favorites back then. While Lost Angels included his longer, more ambitious, less genre-specific works, Seeing Red is just a bit more traditional. Many of the 14 tales here were originally published in magazines such as the '80s return of Weird Tales, or in Night Cry, Twilight Zone, or Whispers. What made them so appealing to me was their breadth of style: some are almost EC comic-like, others are glimpses into writers' lives, still others are energetically violent, and a couple even show some real sentimentality.

Unused 1990 cover art by Tom Canty

After the friendly, if slightly critical, intro by T.E.D. Klein - he relates how impressed by Schow's work he was as editor of Twilight Zone magazine in the early '80s and wonders if Schow is "too smart for horror" - the opener "Red Light" is one of Schow's best but was also in Lost Angels. "Bunny Didn't Tell Us" is a gleefully gross revenger about hapless graverobbers. "Incident on a Rainy Night in Beverly Hills" might be too much of a Hollywood in-joke; L.A. is Schow's bread and butter and the movie industry figures largely in many tales here, but I found "Incident" distractingly talky. "Coming Soon to a Theater Near You" is one of two stories set in movie theaters, and is straight-up repulsive, flesh-crawling horror.

Original Twilight Zone mag art

The willfully obnoxiously-titled "Blood Rape of the Lust Ghouls" is a true entertainment of a creepy gore-movie reviewer whose critical savaging of the titular film puts him in a delicate and unexpected place. This is the kind of insider-style horror story I truly dig. Another fave is "One for the Horrors," which has warmly occupied my heart of horror these many years. How could I not love a story about a movie theater that shows the movies that never were, shows the scenes the censors demanded cut, and is a love story about movie-lovers to boot? Cinephiles rejoice, it's wonderful.

Original Twilight Zone mag art

Same for "Pulpmeister," an autobiographical account of a hack men's adventure scribe who inexplicably meets the macho hero of his stories. Like Karl Edward Wagner, Schow uses his own experiences as a pulp writer and its attendant miseries for his fiction, dining on Kraft mac-and-cheese and dealing with harried, careless agents and editors, not to mention the horror of cranking out 200-page action novels in under a week. I can't even imagine!

A graffiti sigil stands in for the title of another, a tag from the beyond; a seriously authentic tale of street-punk lowlifes hustling on Hollywood Boulevard: Where was Sid Vicious's star? Jello's? Wendy O's? Nothing on the Walk of Stars related to Eye Man's reality. Fuck it. Schow's detailing of a horrific car crash that kills one of the punks hits dead-on. It also provides the collection with its title. "The Embracing" did nothing for me and was a drag to finish; it seemed like a pale imitation of one of Harlan Ellison's dystopic moral screeds of dark fantasy; it's also the earliest story here so maybe that explains its derivative quality.

2002 reprint from Babbage Press

The star of Seeing Red is easily "Not from Around Here," the last in the collection, and one not published previously. Herein Schow's prose is more thoughtful and measured but not to fear: when the gore comes it's graphic and upsetting. Set in the rural areas outside San Francisco, it's sort of a story about a city slicker in the big bad woods who gets more than he bargained for. There are shades of Klein and King and Wagner, yes, but the sexual nature of the violence is presented in an unexpectedly new manner. "Not from Around Here" is actually scary, monster scary, which isn't something you find in horror fiction as much as you'd think. But it's about something too: there is bravery, loss, realization, and a new life to be had when fear is conquered.

While Schow's hyper-literate, arch, sometimes obnoxiously insider-y prose and endless now-dated cultural references might seem off to readers today, there are still some real gems in Seeing Red, some that I didn't even get around to discussing ("Lonesome Coyote Blues," "The Woman's Version," "Night Bloomer"). I find that dated quality kind of charming in a way. He liked to play with the genre and wasn't out solely for shocks; this probably lost him as many readers as it gained him. Schow may have moved on to a life of crime-writing these days, but I'll always remember him for Seeing Red.

Richard Matheson: Shock! The Paperback Covers

X-- This day when it had light mother called me a retch. You retch she said. I saw in her eyes the anger. I wonder what it is a retch.

With those opening lines to his first published short story "Born of Man and Woman" in 1950, Richard Matheson was let loose upon the world. Many of his short stories became famous "Twilight Zone" episodes or appeared in Playboy, the Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy, and various mystery/crime magazines. Just the other night I read for the first time "Prey," his 1969 short that became the legendary episode "Amelia" in Dan Curtis's Trilogy of Terror TV movie (1975). The story was splendid: perfectly conceived and then executed with stark believability and conviction. I can't imagine there's a horror fan out there without at least some passing knowledge of that horrific Zuni fetish doll!

These four different Shock collections gather those tales, and though long out-of-print they seem to be fairly widely available online in various editions: the original Dell publications from the early and mid-1960s, as well as the Berkley reprints from the late 1970s (cover art by Murray Tinkelman).

Wormwood by Poppy Z. Brite (1993): Being Nothingness

Horror's purview is one of good versus evil, obviously, but that's one battle which doesn't interest me much in fiction; I do not think art has to be didactic or proselytize to be effective. In Poppy Z. Brite's first stories, collected in Wormwood, there is no real sense of good or evil, just the aesthete's pose of worldliness and boredom. She was concerned not with morality but with sensuality and brought a sort of fin de siecle decadence to the genre just as its paperback popularity seemed to be fizzling out. This approach was something horror mostly lacked in the era, concerned as it was with middle American families, or children and teenagers.

A teenager herself when her stories were being published in The Horror Show magazine in the mid 1980s, Brite's characters were the misfit kids, part of subcultural movements that I was familiar with and sympathetic to—punk and goth and whatever the mixture of the two beget. They hung out in filthy, ill-lit clubs, wore black rags and had messy hair and crashed in abandoned houses and churches, sleeping on stained mattresses and consorting intimately with a variety of partners, usually all in a New Orleans of perfume and rot. Certainly to an audience used to the familiar comforts of Koontz, King, or Saul this wasn't going to go over well at all, but it didn't need to; Brite's first novel, the highly anticipated Lost Souls (1992), was part of Dell's line of innovative and edgy horror novels not geared towards a mainstream audience. Published in hardcover, Lost Souls made Brite the hot horror commodity of the early 1990s. And it didn't hurt that her two earliest champions were Dan Simmons (who wrote the introduction for this collection) and the mighty Harlan Ellison.

When I first read most of these stories it was late 1993 and the collection was entitled Swamp Foetus, a limited-edition hardcover from Borderlands Press. This paperback edition from Dell did not come out until 1996, and then retitled Wormwood probably because someone took offense at the original. Still, it's a good title, evoking the poison and delirium of absinthe, then still a more or less obscure liqueur beloved of true arty decadent types. But it's also relevant since it refers to "His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood," which was the first story I ever read by Brite, in 1990's Borderlands. I was hooked immediately. This story always reminded me of Lovecraft's minor tale "The Hound," yet it is undeniably Brite's own. Two young men, jaded and bored beyond belief by their excesses in art, sensuality, drink, and drugs, turn to grave-robbing for ghoulish kicks. Then, in a dank punk rock nightclub, they meet another boy who may offer them their greatest and most final thrill.

Dying: the final shock of pain or nothingness that is the price we pay for everything. Could it not be the sweetest thrill, the only salvation we can attain... the only true moment of self-knowledge? The dark pools of his eyes will open, still and deep enough to drown in. He will hold out his arms to me, inviting me to lie down with him in his rich wormy bed.

Original limited-edition hardcover, 1993

As the above passage might attest, much of Brite's fiction was populated by gay or bisexual young men; homoerotic overtones were the norm for her and definitely gave her work a true "outsider" edge. Her darkly elegant conflation of sex and death, usually so clumsily done in paperback horror, owes more to Baudelaire or Gautier than Barker or Rice (with whom she was often, and erroneously, compared). This is best seen in the later stories, both from 1991, the marvelous "Calcutta, Lord of Nerves" (which I wrote about here) and "The Sixth Sentinel," which show Brite maturing as a stylist. They are poisonous confections, two of my favorites from the time, and ripe with the beauty of putrescence and the stink of sex. In "Sentinel" she lovingly describes a flooded, ancient graveyard:

Some of the things that have floated to the surface are little more than bone. Others are swollen to two or three times their size, gassy mounds of decomposed flesh... silk flower petals stuck to them like obscene decorations... Yawning eyeless faces thrust out of stagnant pools, seem to gasp for breath. Rotting hands unfold like blighted tiger lilies. Every drop of water, every inch of earth in the graveyard is foul with the effluvium of the dead.

1992 hardcover, Delacorte Press

Two friends from her first novel Lost Souls (1992), Ghost and Steve, appear in "How to Get Ahead in New York" and "Angels," adrift and wayward, on their own for the first time. The sleazy environs of 1980s New York comes right to life in the former tale while the latter evokes the circus-freak setting of Katherine Dunn's Geek Love (1989). Unkempt, doomed musicians play large roles in "A Georgia Story" and "Optional Music for Voice and Piano," depicted sympathetically and believably. "The Ash of Memory, the Dust of Desire" is set in the restaurant industry - many years later, all her novels would be - in a brutally modern world that has little need for love or flesh. Certainly the earlier stories, like "The Elder" and "Missing," may be a little slight, but it's obvious they were written with passion and care and intensity.

All in all, I feel Wormwood is a must-read; it's been good, rewarding fun revisiting it. Are the stories scary? Not really, no. This, as well as the brooding teenage characters and sensual depictions of death, might be a turnoff off for some readers. But with their strange and compelling visions of a world populated by the outcast, the marginalized—indeed, by the dead themselves—Poppy Z. Brite's short stories show that true horror, facing it and embracing all its woes, may be bravest, most beautiful, the most rewarding thing of all.

Devil in the Centerfold: Horror Fiction Magazines of the '70s and '80s

Horror fiction thrives in short story form. Starting in the 1970s this aspect of the genre was reinvigorated after lying fallow for decades after the demise of Weird Tales magazine and others of its kind of the 1930s. Dozens of new magazine titles, self-published and not, specialized in publishing stories from up-and-coming writers, as well as more famous names (which were placed prominently on the cover, of course). Most of the magazines didn't last more than a few years or a handful of issues. Virtually every horror writer of the 1980s had their start in one or more of these magazines so I find it entirely appropriate to explore them a bit here.

The Horror Show, debuting in 1986, is fondly remembered for its J.K. Potter covers and for first publishing Poppy Z. Brite.


You can see the names on the covers that would soon be famous in the field: Lansdale, Brite, Ligotti, Schow. And certainly many more folks just disappeared from the scene. Night Cry was the horror spin-off from Twilight Zone magazine. Great girly-mag style covers here!

Cemetery Dance came a little later but is still going strong today, 20 years later, and has also published hardcover books from all the best writers. Well, probably some crappy writers too, I'm sure.

These '70s magazine covers for Whispers have no authors listed but actually it's the first of its kind, edited by Stuart David Schiff, and intended as a throwback to the pulp fiction days of yore. In the late '70s he started editing paperback anthologies under the same title; I remember reading them probably in 7th or 8th grades and am trying to track down some for review here.

The glossier Midnight Graffiti has already been covered on this blog here. These following covers are from magazines I'd never heard of until now. I've seen some of them on eBay but they're going for more than I like to pay for vintage horror fiction stuff. If you want to see more stuff like this, Locus magazine's archives are indispensable.