The Year's Best Horror Stories XVI, ed. by Karl Edward Wagner (1988): Savage Amusement

Sorry to say that nothing quite as terrifying as J.K. Potter's cover illustration appears inside this 16th installment of The Year's Best Horror Stories (DAW Books, October 1988). Which is not to say this anthology isn't worthy of a place on your horror bookshelf; indeed, any self-respecting vintage horror fiction fan probably has at least a few of these, published from 1974 to 1994. It is to say that the stories collected here by Karl Edward Wagner are generally on the more mature end of horror, stories written with flair, intelligence, and only a little gratuitous grue—though there are several worthy exceptions to this observation. As book designs go, I dig this one a lot: the bold red, the gargoyles bordering the bizarre image, as well as something not seen: a tacky blurb noting the presence of a new Stephen King story! Most paperbacks then would've blasted that info from here to kingdom come.

 

This new King story, first printed in the J.N. Williamson anthology Masques II, "Popsy," wouldn't appear in an King book till 1993, in his third short-story collection, Nightmares and Dreamscapes. Wagner puts it first, although its vibe doesn't really give you much of a feel for what comes after. It's a mean little story, with pulpy crime fiction elements, probably King was reading a lot Jim Thompson, Ed McBain, and Andrew Vachss at the time. Dude owes lots of money from gambling debts, a mysterious criminal boss wants little kids, so dude's gotta step up, doesn't wanna know what'll happen to either himself or the kids if he doesn't. But he kidnaps a child who has more to protect him than simply human parents. Wish I'd read this one back in the day, with a terrific climax, oh that delicious King snap: and his breath was like flyblown meat.

Children's and young adult author Jane Yolen (above) brings us her "Wolf/Child," a fine little tale of colonial exploitation, native superstition, and comeuppance. As one character says, "There are many odd things out here in the jungle... It just takes an observant eye, my boy." The title is perfectly literal, the payoff perfectly delivered. In David Campton's "Repossession" a middling accountant becomes fascinated by a light burning in the window of a derelict factory building. Soon he's having visions in which he imagines himself inside the factory, seeing a man in a black Victorian frock-coat, which you know isn't good.

 

Well-known genre practitioners appear: quiet horror maestro Charles L. Grant's "Everything to Live For" is a thoughtful exploration of teen life, one of my least favorite topics, and encroaching death. A sadness at the core makes for chilly reading. Pure Grant goodness. Ramsey Campbell wrote "Merry May" for his 1987 collection of "sex and terror" stories, Scared Stiff (heh). Campbell mixes his brand of urban decay with some folk horror, and the result is truly unsettling: a creep drives a few towns over for some illicit vacation satisfaction promise from a magazine ad and  gets a fine how-do-you-do from the villagers celebrating May Day in their own special way.

 

Wagner reaching across Ramsey Campbell, 1980s

 

"The Scar," Dennis Etchison's entry, is one of his oblique and metaphoric works of psychic anomie, and in his intro Wagner notes its "mood of paranoid urgency," but this one truly left me scratching my head, alas. Guy has a violent freakout in a diner, woman with a disfigured face... Wagner also mentions Etchison "is planning a new anthology, Double Edge, to follow his tremendously successful Cutting Edge." A sequel to Cutting Edge, the terrific 1986 anthology?! It never came to be, alas, although Etchison did publish a Dell novel with that title in 1997.

Noted film historian Leslie Halliwell (below) provides some great suspense and claustrophobia in "La Nuit des Chiens," bringing to life a  rich European paradise. A group of old friends make their way through a small town celebrating a local festival, looking for an upscale restaurant, but find themselves on darkened unfamiliar streets, an increasingly large number of dogs following them... and in imagination he felt the savage amusement of beasts at the group's clumsy, hesitant progress. The unexpected appearance of the n-word surprised me, although I got it—British Halliwell is referencing the British-only title of the world's bestselling mystery novel, but I wish maybe Wagner had simply bleeped it out. But story trades on its twist which isn't truly worthy of the careful buildup before it. Have you noticed that when people who aren't horror writers try to write horror they think it's only about that twist ending? And cannibalism? 

 

The man behind the endless psychic vampire Necroscope saga, Brian Lumley, presents "The Thin People." It elicits some absurdist shivers with the literalization of its title—but it only made me think of this classic "Simpsons" bit, sorry. R. Chetwynd-Hayes is in top form, in his witty yet still scarily effective "Moving Day." This title is euphemism, to the horror of the man who's gone to live with his great-aunts, surely always a poor idea. "Give your Auntie Edith a nice kiss, dear!"

My appreciation of horror poetry begins and ends with Baudelaire, so I'm not sure what to make of t. Winter-Damon's "Martyr without Canon" other than it's a jumble of nonsense, like those liner notes a Beat-besotted Bob Dylan used to write for his albums back in the Sixties. It appeared first in Grue magazine, which I don't think I'd heard of before this, a semi-pro zine that ran from 1985 to 1999. Winter-Damon, whose poetry appeared in many small-press horror publications, died in 2008. Another small-press poet, Wayne Allen Sallee, provides "The Touch," a non-supernatural bit of gritty, everyday violence, always Sallee's stock-in-trade.

 

British periodical that ran 1979-2001, first appearance of "Echoes from the Abbey"

 

Fans of more old-fashioned frights, like prior to the 20th century, shouldn't miss "The Bellfounder's Wife" by A. F. Kidd and "Echoes from the Abbey" by Sheila Hodgson. These two women, neither of whom I was familiar with till now, are at ease evoking subtle terrors in the manner of M.R. James: My last impression was of a series of gaping mouths set in folds of dirty linen. These are as far from typical "Eighties horror" as it is possible to get, and Kidd's ice and fire ghost is one of this antho's most arresting entities... 

She was almost close enough to touch, now, and I saw with a sort of fascinated revulsion that the whole of her side and her arm were boiling, like milk on a stove, bubbles rising to the surface and bursting. The flesh hissed and simmered, and I felt the heat which radiated from it. Her ruined face drew close to mine, and then she smiled.

 

Wagner finishes on a high note with Michael Shea's "Fat Face," originally published as a chapbook by Axolotl Press. Patti is a prostitute working in a Los Angeles massage parlor in a cheap hotel; across the street in an office building a man sits at his office window and looks down on the activity below. Despite the mockery of her colleagues, Patti feels kindly toward him as he runs an animal shelter there, and one day decides to visit. While I found it over-written and overlong, the payoff is a wonderfully disgusting bit of Lovecraftian grue, body horror so gooey and grotesque it would've been a perfect Stuart Gordon vehicle. 

 

Nightmare ought not to be so simply there before her, so dizzyingly adjacent to reality. That the shapes should be such seething plasms, such cunning , titan maggots as she had dreamed of, this was just half the horror...

I haven't mentioned all the stories, however they're fine if lacking a bit of real bite. Wagner's brief introductions provide biographical background on each contributor, which is great because I knew virtually nothing about a handful of them (many included were more SF&F writers, which may be why). He also states "these stories are chosen without regard to theme or method, style or approach," and that well-known writers appear along with the not-known. That's certainly how I myself learned my way in and around the genre back in the Eighties, buying and devouring anthologies filled with names I only dimly was aware of, and then sought out more work by the authors who had the most effect on me—I'm sure you've done the same.

While I enjoyed this volume as I read it, impressed by the high-caliber, professional-grade prose and imaginative flair on display, I began to feel there was little potency, little that reached down deep to disturb, to linger. Not to say this title isn't full of good horror moments; it is, with lots of the authors working at the top of their respective games. But I often wonder, when reading a vintage horror for the first time, if I would have enjoyed it had it on its original publication. That's why I chose this Volume XVI: it came out in late 1988, when I was starting my senior year in high school and really ramping up my horror intake. Would I have been impressed by the stories herein? Not sure, as nothing here is as inventively ground-breaking as what Clive Barker or Joe Lansdale or Michael Blumlein or Poppy Z. Brite were doing back then. Still, anything with Wagner's name attached is a must-have for your horror paperback library, and I look forward to collecting every volume—only three left to go for me!—of Year's Best Horror.

Lovecraft's Legacy, ed. by Weinberg & Greenberg (1990): A Debt No Honest Man Can Pay

What creative artist doesn't enjoy the opportunity to speak to those who inspired them, express their gratitude, and perhaps even engage in some flattering imitation? That's the impetus behind Lovecraft's Legacy (Tor hardcover, Nov 1990/St Martin's trade paperback 1996, cover art by Duncan Eagleson), an anthology celebrating the 100th anniversary of his birth. A baker's dozen of authors of various genre backgrounds contribute their literary thank-you notes (literally too in short afterwords appended to each story) to one of the most influential authors of the 20th century. I think one can state that pretty unequivocally these days, right? In the quarter-century since Legacy was pub'd, HPL's rep has grown to, well, cyclopean proportions, so... fuck it, yes one can. 

After an introduction by Robert Bloch, who as a teen corresponded with HPL (but you knew that), Mort Castle roars out of the gate with with the excellent "A Secret of the Heart," the narrator of which relates how he's made himself immortal thanks to the "Other Gods" revealed to him by his physician father over 100 years before. When the family's beloved adopted daughter succumbs to a gruesome painful death aged only 11, the father resorts to drinking and traveling far and wide, dabbling in black arts to ease his grief. Castle wrote one of my favorite horror stories, Still Dead's "Old Man and the Dead", and "Secret of the Heart" features the same kind of literary in-joke. What Castle does when he links a character to another fiction is especially apt and unexpected; the circle is complete, a circle I think Lovecraft would've been too humble to include himself in.

Mort Castle

What about mixing up the highest of Elizabethan high culture with works almost forgotten in the grotty pulps of pre-WWII era? The reliable Graham Masterton presents us with "Will," a terrific little mashup of the Bard of Avon and the Gentleman from Providence: it seemed as if Shakespeare had achieved his huge success as a playwright by striking a bargain with 'Y'g Southothe,' which was some kind of primeval life force 'from a time when God was not.'" You can bet this reward comes at a price. Masterton's uses real Shakespeare history, of course, and some bold imaginative origins for the Globe Theater and the fire that destroyed it to create one of Lovecraft's Legacy best stories.

A highly-respected author of literate and challenging science fiction, Gene Wolfe (pictured) contributes "Lord of the Land," which contains some startling imagery deployed in a Faulkner-esque piece about a scholar's interview of a country patriarch for stories about the mythic "soul-sucker." What connection does it have to pre-Greek gods and rites? Hungry jackals, moonlit cities, starry alien skies, and mouthfuls of worms lend their welcome Lovecraftian flavor. The science fiction of Brian Lumley's "Big 'C'" brings to mind the Quatermass stories of the '50s and '60s and conflates one big C—cancer—with another you can probably guess. Not too bad, as Lumley has a hale, chummy style, and gets the humor in his gross, somewhat silly apocalyptic scenario.

Chet Williamson's "From the Papers of Helmut Hecker" is an epistolary piece about a snobby literary writer whose work keeps getting compared to Lovecraft's, which enrages him; he's the heir to Kafka and Borges, winner of the Booker Prize and Faulkner Award! Poor guy gets what's coming to him. "The Blade and the Claw" from Hugh B. Cave is set in Haiti, so it's nice to get out of the usual environs, but I found the story lacking in Lovecraftiana, and its happy ending dampens the horror. 

"Meryphillia" was easily my favorite tale in Lovecraft's Legacy. She is "the least typical ghoul in the graveyard," pining for a poet who visits this charnel yard to sing odes to his unrequited love. It's a tale of love and glory, of midnight feasts and the stench of decay; Brian McNaughton (above) writes with a noxious, devilish wit, regaling the reader with a Clark Ashton Smith-style bit of grave and grue, recalling HPL's own "The Hound" or "The Tomb." It's sweet, funny, gross, completely satisfying. I must have more McNaughton! And I kinda hope there are more stories of Meryphillia and her "coffin-cracking jaws."

Gahan Wilson's "H.P.L." is the most affectionate story included, a charming trifle of the writer still alive at nearly 100 and how he got that way. A fellow pulp scribbler visits Lovecraft at his home in Providence, and today he's a successful author living in his upkept childhood home that boasts an enormous two-story library. Wish-fulfillment at its finest—what HPL fan would not want to peruse that man's book collection? You'll be able to tell where Wilson's going but it's a worthwhile trip just the same.

Crime writer Ed Gorman delivers a killer serial killer tale, "The Order of Things Unknown," written in  no-nonsense prose and tersely invoking a "vile god" and a burial ground for sacrificial victims. Quite good; I'm gonna have to look into Gorman's crime novels I think.

He stood as if naked in the moonlight and looked up and saw the moon and the stars and sensed for the first time that beyond them, somehow, there was another reality, one few ever glimpsed, one that filled early graves and asylums alike. 

When he put the girl in the trunk, he was careful to set her on the tarpaulin. She had begun to leak.

The anthology closes with F. Paul Wilson's "The Barrens." Wilson wisely utilized the mysterious wilderness of his native New Jersey's Pine Barrens, into which the narrator and an old college friend venture so the latter can explore the legends of the Jersey Devil, and perhaps more. Strongly in "Colour out of Space" mode with a welcome lack of garbled phonetics, Wilson's rather pedestrian prose isn't up to the task of imbuing those dark forests and empty landscapes with dread or weirdness. He reaches for it, it's a good story, but it didn't quite get there for me; no frisson of Lovecraftian (or Blackwoodian) menace. Obviously the editors thought highly of it, and I've seen it referenced elsewhere. Maybe it's just me...

Lovecraft's Legacy is an easy recommendation: only a small number of stories are below par; a solid many are quite good, and three or four are terrific and deserve to be included in future Lovecraft anthologies not consisting of original material. Mythos fans probably already have a copy but if not, go for it. I got the hardcover as an Xmas gift back in the godforsaken year of 1990 and had only ever read a couple stories in it. Never got rid of it and so this scary solstice season I'm glad I finally went back!

Brian Lumley: The Lovecraftian Titus Crow Paperback Covers

On this day in the year 1937 the stars were right and born of man and woman was Brian Lumley, a British human whose tales of Lovecraftian and vampiric mayhem and mystery have been part of our beloved horror fiction for decades now. In addition to his ever-popular epic Necroscope series (many moons ago I got about 100 pages into the first volume and was overwhelmed by what I recall as ESP sensitives and Cold War espionage - topics which make me deliriously bored), Lumley added deeply and uniquely to the Cthulhu Mythos. Unlike the usual whey-faced antiquarian professor or amateur genaeologist that populate the Providence Gentleman's tales, Lumley's characters - particularly one Titus Crow - face the octopoid and batrachian obscenities with courage and high good humor, neither of which Lovecraft supplied in any real capacity.

Honestly I've not read any of these vintage-looking science-fiction horror paperbacks; I have however seen recent trade paperback editions that collect these and other Titus Crow stories. Guess which I prefer?

The Burrowers Beneath (at top, Daw 1974, art Tim Kirk) is a perfectly conceived landscape of Lovecraftiana; next, The Transition of Titus Crow (Daw 1975, art Michael Whelan). Also see a UK paperback of Burrowers, from Grafton with art by Alan Hood.

Third: A Clock of Dreams (Jove 1978), which looks more like a contemporary fantasy, particularly with note of the legendary Philip K. Dick and the mighty Harlan Ellison, definitely two writers of genre the who'd carved their own niches in that speculative field. Dude's beard gives a real hearty '70s sensitive masculinity vibe too. I'm safely guessing this novel takes place in Lovecraft's Dreamland of Kadath, Celephaïs, Sarnath and who can forget the Plateau of Leng? Good times for all, I'm sure.

Spawn of the Winds (Jove 1978), is apparently more of a Robert E. Howard-style men's adventure, even in prose style, despite the in the terrifying tradition of H.P. Lovecraft tag. With its cover art by Vallelejo - a polar bear? dude - how could it not be? Lumley apparently deepened the Mythos in a way few other writers did, even though it sounds like he deepened it in a direction I have no interest in, both by adding derring-do fisticuffs and fantastical alien fairie princesses and more insight into otherdimensional deities. I like my Mythos dank and sepulchral and maddening, thank you! The title font makes it look like a historical romance.

Same goes for In the Moons of Borea (Jove 1979): this is not the kind of Lovecraft-inspired fiction that I crave, seems like Edgar Rice Burroughs got in there somehow. And we all know old HPL would want nobody bare-assin' it on the cover of one of his books! Fine for some readers, not so much me. Ah well. I like those early DAW covers, as this UK paperback of the final volume in the Titus Crow series, Elysia: The Coming of Cthulhu (1989/Grafton 1993 with George Underwood art) recalls.


Cthlulhoid tentacles crawling, all evil, upon a coffin which contains... what? Humanity? Our world? The universe? Don't even bother telling me if I'm wrong. And finally, a '90s Tor paperback for Lumley's many short stories through the decades, the awesomely-titled Fruiting Bodies and other Fungi. That's a missed opportunity title for an aged Arkham House edition if I ever heard one!

Brian Lumley