The Brains of Rats by Michael Blumlein (1990): Just Agony. Not Death.

"The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown," H.P. Lovecraft famously wrote in the introduction to his own Supernatural Horror in Literature (1927). To that, might I be so bold as to add that the emotion of fear is also one of the most subjective? While it's true that most humans are afraid of most of the same things - spiders, snakes, disfigurement, public speaking, etc., etc., - when presented with fictional/artistic accounts renderings of things which are meant to scare us, our reactions will often be vastly different, based on the tenor of our private imaginations. Horror fans still argue over, say, whether The Blair Witch Project or The Shining were scary; naive readers want to know "the scariest books to read" for Halloween; fans of Lovecraft games and films find his stories "corny"; lists are compiled of the scariest this, that, or the other in horror entertainment and arguments rage in the comments section. 

I don't participate in that discussion anymore: I don't read horror (or watch horror) to be scared. It's purely aesthetics for me; I simply love horror's palette, its recurrent images and themes and motifs, or new twists on said images and themes and motifs. Darkness and doom and death and despair, I love that shit. But it doesn't have to affect me directly, I don't have to be made to feel like someone or something is standing behind me or outside the window, that there is immediate and unavoidable danger lurking out there. If you're like me, if you get what I'm saying... read on.

This brings me to The Brains of Rats. With its intrinsic intelligence, its peerless caliber of prose, and over all, the stinging whiff of antiseptic which masks the stink of deceit and decay, the collection by Michael Blumlein (a practicing physician) is one of the landmarks of '80s/'90s horror fiction, a challenging yet rewarding work that offers the grimmest of delights for the reader looking not for another gorefest or spook story but for tales that disturb, bewilder, perplex, amaze, that unseat everyday perceptions so that the familiar seems strange and horrific but also... fresh, ready for new appraisal even.

Blumlein's visions emerge whole and complete, his mind's eye surgically sharpened to shock us from our stupor, to provoke us to question, to answer perhaps as well. His calm, unemotional prose reveals a desire to be absolutely clear and precise about difficult, uncomfortable subjects and ideas that often resist resolution - yet beneath that calm surface rages an emotional tumult. Although you won't see it in demonic contortions or blood-spattered climaxes; you will instead feel a quiet subtle whispering that touches your subconscious but leaves your brain tingling and your butt clenching. I just wouldn't describe the stories in Brains of Rats as scary - but they are still unsettling in a very great way.

I first read this collection in early 1991, spending about $30 on the original Scream/Press hardcover (below). It blew me away. So for ages now, having sold off my copy more than 10 years ago, I've wanted a revisit. While vacationing throughout Colorado, I found this Dell 1997 paperback reprint. These are stories Blumlein wrote throughout the 1980s, under the radar, for publications like Twilight Zone, Omni, Fantasy & Science Fiction, as well as more experimental, even postmodern mags like Interzone and Semiotext(e). Once you've read these stories you'll see why. If you're into J.G. Ballard, David Cronenberg, classic cyberpunk, that kinda thing, you'll appreciate Blumlein's icy new world.

I even reread a couple during my vacation, lounging around when not sightseeing, but eventually gave it up: the stories probed deep into pain, terror, confusion, grief, in a very immediate, intimate manner. There was no comfort, no ease, no escape - obviously not vacay reading. To begin, let's take the utterly stunning "Tissue Ablation and Variant Regeneration: A Case Report" for example: written in 1984, it concerns a then-current real world political figure and... well, some spoilers ahead.

Were it not so detached "Tissue Ablation" would be the blackest of satiric comedy; imagine Burroughs's Dr. Benway becoming one of America's most lauded surgeons. The story however is written in the exact style as it sounds: academic medical (you might get your Gray's Anatomy handy). This distances the reader only a tad; soon one realizes the enormity of the procedure being performed and - it can't be. Not that. It is nearly unimaginable, but with the good doctor detailing every slice, every incision, every removal in the most exacting words, we can see all too well the madness before us.

I would be lying if I claimed that [the patient] was not in constant and excruciating pain... In retrospect, I should've carried out a high transection of the spinal cord, thus interrupting most of the nerve fibers to his brain, but I did not think of it beforehand and during the operation was too occupied with other concerns.

Oh man. In retrospect. Oh holy shit. This is where science fiction meets horror, and the punchline, as it were, is devastating. We're never given a reason as to why the world now works as we see here; the conviction of the piece, and its resolution, are the sole reason why. Politically "Tissue Ablation" is a raging, maddened polemic; artistically it shares roots with Swift's "A Modest Proposal." As a work of horror, it is truly "horrible" yet not without its own kind of cold efficient beauty. It's one of the strangest - and best - stories of '80s horror.

Much of Brains of Rats concerns gender differences both at the biological and the social  strata, a theme which appears in nearly every story. These are ideas virtually never addressed in horror fiction of this era. Are we defined by our brains? Our genitalia? Some intermingling of each? Is what we think of as "natural" simply what our bodies are? Is mind not nature? The title story begins with the detached authority of a science textbook, even when it becomes about more than simple - or not so simple - scientific facts. The cadence is almost hypnotizing, and finally ominous:

The struggle between sexes, the battles for power are a reflection of the schism between thought and function, between the power of our minds and powerlessness in  the face of our design. Sexual equality, an idea present for hundreds of years, is subverted by instincts present for millions. The genes determining mental capacity have evolved rapidly; those determining sex have been stable for eons. Humankind suffers the consequences of this disparity, the ambiguities of identity, the violence between the sexes. This can be changed. It can be ended. I have the means to do it.

Blumlein lulls you with his matter-of-fact languor, but when the physician narrator turns on a dime to state his ability, you're left almost breathless. Characters represent at times perhaps not individual people but states of mind, philosophies, idealized members of the opposite sex. As he continues, offering snippets of evolutionary biology, autobiography, history, and philosophy, the amorality shocks but the conceit intrigues. More, we say, even as we recoil. More.

I felt almost in familiar territory with "Keeping House," a tale that wouldn't have seemed too unusual from Ramsey Campbell's pen. In first-person narration, a woman details how she and her husband purchase a house, one of a pair of identical structures built next to each other. The couple disagrees which to buy. Would it have mattered? Something seems wrong from the start; she blames the house next door. Her efforts to exorcize this "entity" through will power - I found a way in my mind to merge one wall of the house with another, eliminating perspective and the lessons of vision. Solid forms I deconstructed, melting their complex geometries into simpler dimensions - then reminded me of Ballard's Atrocity Exhibition. Then, our narrator notices filth and noxious odors everywhere, can't stop cleaning, disinfecting, comes to think her very own family, husband and infant daughter, are responsible; even her own sexuality is suspect. The final lines seem almost foreordained even as her behavior seems almost incomprehensible. Marvelous and accomplished stuff, definitely a high point of the collection.

Blumlein's first novel, 1987

Others: "The Wet Suit," with its quiet, uneventful denouement, could almost be a piece of realistic New Yorker-style fiction, except the wet suit of the title belongs to the deceased father of a middle-class family whose son learns of its vast fetishistic importance in the man's life. An importance, the son learns, everyone else in the family already knew... More Ballardian insanity in "Shed His Grace," all video mediation and clinical political pornography. Some classic cyberpunk stylings feature in "Drown Yourself" and "The Glitter and the Glamour." The former is (almost) straight out of Gibson's Burning Chrome, in which two androids "meet cute" in a wailing nightclub, while the latter reads like sentences were edited out, perhaps, to leave only an impressionistic jangle in the mind as we subconsciously put the story - future clone of some schmaltzy lounge singer? - back together again.

And most unexpectedly, Blumlein can break your heart: in "The Thing Itself," friends and lovers grapple with sickness and love and death. Myth, poetry, imagination: the real and the unreal at once, all intertwine to make peace with finality. The climax, perhaps a eulogy, perhaps a dream, perhaps only a journal entry or unmailed letter, is nearly the most touching I've ever read in horror fiction.

I remember the last morphine shot, the one that let you lie back, that let the knotted muscles in your chest and neck finally ease. The room was dark, your friends circled the bed like a hand. One by one they told the stories, they made a web of memories with you at the center.

Not the usual "unputdownable" or King-style encomiums 

And finally, "Bestseller," one of the bitterest, saddest tales about the economics of earning a living by the written word as any by Karl Edward Wagner or David J. Schow or Lovecraft, even.

The monkey sits on our head, we sit on the monkey. I finish the book, and an hour later the doctor calls to say that my young son has cancer. Cancer. What is the heart to do? Between exhilaration at completing the book and this sudden grief, my heart chooses the later. It is my son. They want to cut off his leg.

It is also the most startling, making literal a metaphor about one "breathing life" into one's art. Simply spectacular.

And the intro: oh, look, it's by our old pal Michael McDowell, the late lamented author of seminal '80s horror works like Cold Moon over Babylon, The Amulet, and The Blackwater series. It is a perceptive and faintly envious piece: I urge you to read it before the stories - you'll find no spoilers. McDowell states that "Blumlein's is a dignity of narration delineating madness and aberration. Even the stories that are 'predictable' such as the Who's-the-Android narrative of 'Drown Yourself' become treatises on passion and obsession." Indeed.

I will state it plain: The Brains of Rats is excellent, a rarity in '80s horror fiction, an adult work of brave and bristling smarts, skill, and fearlessness, as true and honest and uncompromising as the genre gets (which it so often isn't very). These stories are not for those who think horror is only skeletons and slime and gore and ghosts, who long to identify with everyday-folks protagonists, who want tidy oh-so-that's-what-it-all-meant finales, who want to step vicariously into the driver's mind-seat of the insane. So the stories aren't "scary" - Michael Blumlein has given us something better, unparalleled in power: a freezing, eye-watering blast of fear and pain from the most desolate and despairing of mysterious countries, that one of meat cradled within our skulls.

Post Mortem: New Tales of Ghostly Horror, ed. by Olson & Silva (1992): Come and Die with Me Forever

I don't believe in ghosts. And yet... ghostly doings in horror fiction tend to work their chills on me. What I find particularly effective are the emotions and psychological states the ghosts often represent: guilt, unrequited love, vengeance, regret, loneliness, grief, rage, even sexual longing. Becoming the external manifestation of characters' repression is an essential part of any ghost's (albeit fictional) existence. Same goes for haunted houses, which function as geographic representations of the mind and all its tortures. I'm a sucker for that stuff, even if my readings in the classic ghost stories of antiquary is rudimentary; it's those ideas I find satisfyingly creepy. 1989's Post Mortem: New Tales of Ghostly Horror (Dell/Abyss Jan 1992) contains solid examples of these ideas, from generally skillful writers with names both recognized and not.

While its paperback cover resembles nothing so much as classic '80s Slayer album art, Post Mortem doesn't rely on graphic or demonic excesses to frighten readers; there's hardly a broken bone or bloody wound or occult word in these entire 350 pages. None was an outright bomb but there are some ho-hum entries. Not all the stories even attempt horror; they can mostly be divided up between "hopeful" ghosts and "scary" ghosts. Although both Paul F. Olson and David B. Silva were editors of well-regarded '80s horror mags, Horrorstruck and The Horror Show respectively, I wasn't impressed with their metafictional introduction. Ditto Dean Koontz's afterward, which highlights exactly why I find him useless as any kind of horror authority. Koontz prefers, it seems, those "hopeful" ghost stories, the ones that confirm his belief that his spirit "will never die."

The opener "Each Night, Each Year," by Kathryn Ptacek, works well enough, and has some of the creepiest imagery in the book, but she overplays her hand at times by underwriting. When the haunted narrator states "It is my guilt that brings him here," it's already obvious, I think, that that's exactly what's going on, and stating it so baldly snaps the spell. I don't need to have my head grabbed and pointed right at the issue; a gentle handhold can be just as unnerving, no? The recently-late Gary Brandner brings a gruesome little ghost story in the simplistic "Mark of the Loser," solidly in the old-fashioned EC Comics style.

Next, "Timeskip," Charles de Lint's entry, is a modern urban fantasy with 20something protagonists; I know he's considered a pioneer in that subgenre, as his felicity with environs and character is obvious. Romantic ghosts promise meeting again. A similar encounter turns up in James Howard Kunstler's "Nine Gables," about a couple whose marriage is rekindled in the unlikeliest manner when they welcome guests into the titular inn they buy. From horror-writing couple the Tems, Steve Rasnic and Melanie, we get the terrific "Resettling." This is about the finest little haunted-house story I've read recently (after Michael Blumlein's "Keeping House"). It works every which way, a mature, insightful work that confronts family life's innumerable disappointments, with a true and bittersweet finale that oh-so-subtly upends ghost story protocol. The Tems really get - deliver - domestic horror.

Would an '80s horror antho be complete without Ramsey Campbell? Non. Utilizing a rare book of ghost-story author extraordinaire M.R. James, Campbell's "The Guide" is told in his usual slow-to-the-point-of-agony prose, but the payoff is claustrophobic and nightmarish, hinting at horrors scarcely imaginable: Imagine, if you will, a spider in human form with only four limbs, a spider both enraged and made ungainly by the loss, especially since the remaining limbs are by no means evenly distributed.

Visiting ghosts also appear to those whose pasts are unfinished. Sometimes these shades bring closure, as in Silva's "Brothers" or P.W. Sinclair's "Getting Back," but just as often bring a horrific justice. "The Ring of Truth" from Borderlands editor Thomas F. Monteleone is a longish tale of Vietnam survivors and insane murderous machismo. Hate burned like the heart of a star, and not even death can keep that feeling contained. The abused wife of Janet Fox's "The Servitor" escapes to an abandoned house in the country. Surprise: it's not so abandoned, and what's there demands a debt for its services. A finely-tuned depiction of a woman's desperate attempts to save herself, the story's final lines are chillingly pitiless.

Will it surprise regular readers of TMHF that my absolute favorite story in Post Mortem was Thomas Tessier's contribution "Blanca"? Here the ghosts are victims of historical/political tragedies. In Tessier's usual tone of detachment, dry wit, and maybe even resignation, his narrator begins:

When I told a few close friends that I was going to Blanca, their reaction was about what I had expected. "Why?" they asked. "There's nothing to see in Blanca. Nothing to do except disappear." Sly smiles. "Watch out you don't disappear." "Maybe that's why I chose it," I said with a smile of my own. "It might be nice to disappear for a while." 

Can there be any doubt the story will end the same way?

Another terrific story is the sensitive "Whisper of Soft Wings," by Melissa Mia Hall. It is very good but very sad: a little girl comes around to visit an elderly woman in a world that has less and less of a place for the old. With a rare sense of poignancy, Hall draws the two together in an intimate embrace. I will definitely be looking for more from Hall; but nothing new, I'm afraid, as she died several years ago.

Last, the somewhat interesting "Haunted World" - what if all the people who ever lived on earth came back to haunt us - is told in a cliched good ol' boy voice, which completely undermines the premise. The bland, obvious style of Robert McCammon proves to me once again why I have little interest in reading any of his novels, despite their seeming endless popularity with fans of '80s horror.

Final words: Post Mortem is a good but not truly essential horror fiction anthology. Fans of de Lint, Tessier, the Tems, Campbell, or Hall should find a copy, as their stories work in the classic ghost story mold but also are convincing and fresh in their modern settings and concerns. Me, I could've used a few darker tales, a few more nastier, eerie moments that lingered after I put the paperback back on my shelf. But it did reinforce my belief that nothing is so haunted as the human heart, and that the most unsettling ghost of all is the most recognizable, the one we live with every day, long before we die.

My Favorite Horror Reads of 2013

This year was the year I thought I had been dropping the ball on writing actual reviews of books I read. I found plenty of great horror covers to post, sure, but as far as reading, it seemed like I was slowing down, hitting too many snags with just okay books but not finding that something special I just had to share. But then I looked through this year's posts and saw that I'd really read some great books and short stories. Some were surprisingly satisfying rereads, and some were new and welcome to my pantheon of favorites. All would be stellar additions to your own bookshelves! Click on links to read my full reviews.

The Bad Seed by William March. The pitch-perfect exposé of a child's clinical sociopathy.
Borderlands edited by  Thomas F. Monteleone. One of the major anthologies of horror, filled with challenging, imaginative, unsettling short works.
The Brains of Rats by Michael Blumlein. Scalpel-sharp stories of medical madness and domestic doom.
Carrie by Stephen King. She still packs a powerful psychic punch after all these years.
Cast a Cold Eye by Alan Ryan. A quiet, cozy, creepy Irish ghost story.
Childmare by A.G. Scott. A teenage riot in sleepy London town.
Cold Moon over Babylon by Michael McDowell. Vengeful Southern ghosts, alternately quiet and grotesque.
Night Visions 3: The Hellbound Heart edited by George R.R. Martin. Stellar example of 1980s short horror fiction thanks to Clive Barker, Ramsey Campbell, and Lisa Tuttle.
The Penguin Book of Vampire Stories edited by Alan Ryan. Spectacular tales of the vampire from ages past and present.
Red Dragon by Thomas Harris. Unparalleled popular fiction that dives deep into the pool of psychopathia.

Aaand one alternate: The Hunger by Whitley Strieber, a rich, violent, seductive novel of vampirism.

Additionally, I hit the jackpot several times throughout the year, scoring dozens of paperbacks at a local yearly book fair, while on vacation driving throughout Colorado, a random day at a regular haunt, and a brief Christmas visit to my hometown and the used bookstore I worked at while in college.

So you can see I've got plenty of reading material for 2014 - again, some rereads and some all-new to me - coming up, a review of a fairly well-known '80s horror novel in the next few days...

Scars and Other Distinguishing Marks by Richard Christian Matheson(1987): Do the Ultra Twist

Long before Joe Hill made horror a family tradition, Richard Christian Matheson was born of legendary Richard Matheson and began cranking out short-short genre fiction that appeared in The Twilight Zone and Night Cry magazines and 1980s anthologies edited by Charles L. Grant, Dennis Etchison, and Stuart David Schiff. While his name alone could have gotten him published, Matheson garnered much attention in the field on his own skill for stripping his stories to the absolute bone, with some consisting solely of one-word sentences or very nearly that. During an era in which horror showed a tendency to bloat and stuffing, some editors and readers found Matheson's pared-down work refreshing, while still maintaining edge and bite. For a short while he was aligned with the splatterpunks, mostly because he was young and had a background in television (you know--so modern) and palled around with Skipp, Spector, Schow, et. al. My first experience with him was in 1986's Cutting Edge, which included "Vampire." It's just two pages of:

In the '80s I found it quite striking, and the title is more metaphor than literal. Today, I dunno, it seems more gimmicky than powerful. Which is the problem with Matheson's whole style of clipped brevity: does it engender more chills for the reader, is it essential to the story to be told so? What's frustrating about this wildly uneven collection (first published by Scream/Press in 1987, Tor Books paperback July 1988) is that the style is in service to stories that are threadbare and obvious, rife with twists and fillips that depend only on leaving out crucial details. Oh, the servant is a human and the served is a robot! Oh, they're not people, they're endangered whales! Oh, the little girl is death itself! If he'd just told us that stuff at the beginning then maybe there'd be an interesting story. Stories often end just when they should be beginning. They seem like tales told inside-out, writerly warm-up exercises to get to the good stuff. Except that never really happens, not like I remembered from first reading Scars in the early '90s.

Too many scenarios are redolent of moldy "Twilight Zone" and "Night Gallery" tropes: beware "Sentences," "Obsolete," "Intruder," "Beholder," "Incorporation." Did Rod Serling come over and babysit a young Matheson?! Treacly beyond endurance, "Holiday" rolls out a real Santa Claus, while the 60-page teleplay for an episode of the Steven Spielberg-produced '80s TV anthology "Amazing Stories" is well-nigh unreadable. Ballplaying kids and their grampas and dopey dogs in a Norman Rockell town... oh god, spare me. Please. Try to read "Cancelled" without cringing at the ridiculous slangy stream-of-consciousness and labored satire of crass network television shows. "Conversation Piece" was done with more subtle chills, sincerity, and thoughtfulness by Michael Blumlein with his "Bestseller." Graphic unsettling violence rears an ugly head--or ugly bump--in "Goosebumps," a bit of meta-horror that would be silly were it not for the image of a guy stabbing a butcher knife into his own mouth. It's still silly but now it makes you wince, so...

Is it ironic that "Graduation," which I'd read in Whispers, is probably Matheson's best work, and it was his first published? Written with strength and style and its only gimmick is the letter-writer's references to "you-know-who" and even on this second read I have no idea who that's supposed to be. Unreliable narrators can be great devices for horror but not when the reader has no way to grasp the truth. Still, I found it vivid and unsettling; "Graduation" has a precision that briefer works lack. Other standout works--the aforementioned "Vampire," "Mr. Right," "Red," "Dead End"--can be found in various anthologies. Editors chose wisely (Paul Sammon included the broiling, LA's burning, high-pressure radio-DJ nightmare "Hell" in Splatterpunks). I believe it was "Red" that got Matheson attention in the first place, and how could it not? It's about SPOILER a guy picking up parts of his daughter's mangled corpse off the road after he accidentally dragged her behind his car. Of course Matheson doesn't spell that out like I just did and while it's pretty shocking it kind of stretches the boundaries of belief. Would the police and EMTs even allow that?!

When you look at Matheson's TV-ography as a writer, it's prolific but the quality is actually rather dismal. Highlights include such well-loved but not terribly brilliant shows like "Three's Company," "Knight Rider," "The A-Team," and "The Incredible Hulk," as well as not so-well-loved and not terribly brilliant shows like "B.J. and the Bear" and "The Powers of Matthew Star." With that in mind, the horror stories make more sense: they're not changing the world, they're just entertaining you for 22 or 45 minutes or so. But they're entertaining you not because they've got a new vision; they're entertaining you because it's the familiar dressed up in unfamiliar garb. The only raison d'être is that twist, that surprise, so anything that would get in the way of that--character, dialogue, realism--is jettisoned. As I said, perhaps in the 1980s a writer could have gotten away with this--and obviously, he did!--but today, as a much more experienced reader and fan, I find Matheson's approach to horror fiction incredibly jejune.

I began to think of this collection as high-concept horror: ideas that seem intriguing at first but are little more than tiny gimmicks, not actual stories about real people and situations. His penchant for writing stories made up of one-word sentences is interesting at first, but when it's over you think, That's all? Despite the introductory encomiums from Stephen King and Dennis Etchison, I was very little impressed with Scars, and despite the Matheson family name, found it not very distinguishing at all.

Dell/Abyss Books: The Paperback Covers

It was 20 years ago this month that the Dell/Abyss line of contemporary horror fiction began publication. Yes, 20 years! Ah, I remember it well. This imprint from Dell Publishing was spearheaded by Bantam Doubleday editor Jeanne Cavelos in an attempt to give the paperback horror genre a boost of originality and conviction - and, of course, a boost in sales - as it had long been plagued by tired cliches and half-hearted imitations of better books and writers. The appropriately-named Abyss was intent on publishing works that plumbed dark depths of psychology and the supernatural not for cheap, exploitative, escapists thrills but for more disturbing and revelatory chills. This kind of horror was interiorized, found not in a Gothic mansion or small town overrun by vampires but in the blasted landscape of the human mind.

The Abyss paperback originals used striking cover design - haunting, creepy, anguished faces and tormented bodies, albeit perhaps sometimes a tad clumsy - to separate themselves from the anonymous bloody skulls, graveyards, and evil babies then on horror covers. The icon on the spine of its books was a mark of distinction; indeed, Abyss even had a mission statement:

Launched in February 1991 with Kathe Koja's stunningly bleak and unsettling The Cipher, Abyss published one title a month, ending up with more than 40 titles overall. Most of the authors were first-time novelists, or at least writers with only a few books under their belts, but in the case of MetaHorror (July 1992), an anthology edited by ever-present '80s author Dennis Etchison, the line also featured well-known horror masters. Women writers were plentiful - the most successful was easily Poppy Z. Brite, but also Tanith Lee, Nancy Holder, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Melanie Tem - and guys like Brian Hodge and Rick R. Reed really got started here. What they all had in common was a desire to do something new with horror fiction. But, for various industry reasons, Abyss folded later in the '90s and my love of current horror pretty much went with it.

Obsessed, Rick Reed (July 1991)

Deathgrip, Brian Hodge (June 1992)

I'm not exactly sure how I first heard of the Abyss books; it may have been a Linda Marotta review in Fangoria, or maybe a review from the Overlook Connection catalog. Reading Koja, Brite, Hodge, and others back then was a revelation, one of the most exciting times I've had as a horror fiction reader. I doubt all the novels and two short story collections were as "cutting edge" as promised, but I always loved the ambition and the effort. Some writers launched new careers, others weren't heard from again. I've read a handful over the years but nothing could compare to Koja's first two novels, or Hodge's Nightlife (March 1991). Still, the Dell/Abyss line was a great moment in paperback horror, and deserves to be remembered today. Most titles are readily available used, cheap (ah, except The Cipher, which has now gone to collectors' prices!) on Amazon, eBay, ABE, and the like. The following are a random sample.

Whipping Boy, John Byrne (March 1992)

Facade, Kristine Kathryn Rusch (February 1993)

Lost Futures, Lisa Tuttle (May 1992)

Post Mortem, ed. by Paul Olson and David Silva (January 1992)

X, Y, Michael Blumlein (November 1993)

Anthony Shriek, Jessica Amanda Salmonson (September 1992)

Shadow Twin, Dale Hoover (December 1991)

The Wilding, Melanie Tem (November 1992)

Tunnelvision, R. Patrick Gates (November 1991)

Making Love, Melanie Tem & Nancy Holder (August 1993)

Dusk, Ron Dee (April 1991)

Dead in the Water, Nancy Holder (June 1994)

Bad Brains, Kathe Koja (April 1992)

Shadowman, Dennis Etchison (January 1993)

You can read here a long, detailed, scholarly look at the nuts-and-bolts of the Dell/Abyss line, "The Decline of the Literary Horror Market in the 1990s and Dell's Abyss Series": What makes the Abyss line a cultural phenomenon worthwhile of study is its self-conscious positioning within the declining horror market. Its marketing strategies, text selection, and construction of a commodity identity speak volumes on the horror market and its transformation at the time.

This image thanks to Trashotron