Night Visions: In the Blood, ed. by Alan Ryan (1984): Growing into the Grave

Plucked this guy off my shelves at random, it's spooky season, right? The inaugural title in the long-running anthology series launched by specialty press Dark Harvest in November 1984, Night Visions 1 was intended as being a showcase for the best original short stories by the leading figures in both horror fiction and dark fantasy. Charles L. Grant was pretty well-established already as an author and editor, Steve Rasnic Tem had been a rising figure in genre fiction, publishing stories in various SF&F publications as well as Grant's Shadows series, and British fantasist Tanith Lee had already published two dozen novels by that year. Berkley Books reprinted the hardcover in paperback as Night Visions: In the Blood, in April 1988, named for one of Grant's stories. (Dig that cover art, totes appropriate, but I'll be damned if I can make out that tiny artist signature on bottom right; it looks so maddeningly familiar, so just out of reach. I'm determined to ID it however.)

In his erudite introduction, Alan Ryan (1943-2011) provides a background and the impetus for this anthology, making note of how the short story has always held a sort of precarious position in American letters, and how horror is often at its very best in the format. Writers who speak on panels at fantasy conventions very often find that their audiences are most knowledgeable and most vociferous when the subject is short fiction.

Grant (1942-2006) was famed for his understated, elusive, and whispered brand of horror fiction; for some readers, entirely too understated and elusive. His stories here, seven in all, read pretty much the same as all the other Grant I've read: sometimes good, sometimes meh, and a couple times excellent. My tastes have moved past Bradbury-esque small towns at night, cold winds blowing autumn leaves across empty streets and onto regular folks' porches and windows, with kids climbing trees, dads in the garage and moms in the kitchen, grampas in the easy chair. Sure, behind those windows lurk realistic "horrors" like the indignities of aging, disintegrating marriages, childhood nightmares, coming back home to family strife... but his touch is often too gentle, eschewing as he does most violence and bloodshed.

That said, I will note the highlights of his contributions. He's adept at putting in that final turnabout line that might give the reader an intellectual chill, and, especially in the title tale, ably describes the true aches and pains of loved ones' mortality: it was the dying he saw [in her] every day for a year, the wasting, the shrinking, the growing into the grave from the inside out.

Grant in 1981 (photo by Jeff Schalles, from Grant's FB page)

"That's What Deaths Are For" and "Family" well utilize his penchant for trapping his characters in a metaphysical hell, forced to relive/re-enact trauma for, well, eternity (at least, that's what I think is happening; Charlie Grant, master of elusion). "And We'll Be Jolly Friends" is a perfect example of Grant's melancholy M.O., and I'm not surprised it's the only story of his here that was reprinted, collected in his best-of Scream Quietly in 2016. Small town, parents, friendship, memory, wounding, death, and worse: present and accounted for, in Grant's slightly fractured, stream-of-consciousness prose:

go crazy
no, you ain't, you're just scared man, that's all
yeah, well, I don't wanna die
then stop bitching and hang on
jesus, i'm tryin', i'm tryin'

Tem in early 1980s, (photo by Karen Simmons, from Tem's FB page)

Next up are Tem's stories, also seven in number, and generally my favorites here. Tem's approach seems to me to be the most "modern," and one that other writers would employ as well. At times he can be, like Grant, a mite too obscure, but his mix of surreality and the quotidian hit me in the sweet spot. "The Men and Women of Rivendale" hides its menace till the end, hinting with imagery of mouths and red eyes again and again, subtle but insistent. "Spidertalk" won me over, with a frightened child, a caring teacher, and a menace both outside and inside the schoolhouse. The end of this one is shivery apocalypse, a common human fear becomes overwhelming both as symbol and substance; a perfect example of Eighties short horror fiction. But her fear was a living thing with a mind of its own,  that would not respond to her own sense of reason. 

In "Punishments," our father-narrator speaks disquietingly about his unfathomable daughter, ruminating on the alien nature of our offspring, how difficult it is to raise, nurture—and punish—these wayward creatures. When the baby moved away from us, crawling on the floor, she was back and head in her roomy flannel nightgown. I'd swear she was a crawling torso, born without arms and legs. And when I finally saw those little hands and feet I'd swear they were prosthetic appendages, so unnatural they seemed.

As gross as you might imagine, "Worms" finds a snobbish, racist, classist woman offended by her neighbors, and her comeuppance. Tem elevates this classic horror setup with his descriptive prose and quirky characterization. "The Overcoat" wowed me, a grimy glimpse into family strife and downtrodden lives, mixed with effective grue and imagery. In fact, to me, it is an almost proto-splatterpunk tale in that it highlights urban decay and uses it and its unfortunate denizens as a mirror for the human psyche, in stark contrast to the middle-class nuclear family units that generally populated the genre. It was always a case of when you should call the cops. Most of them time you didn't... You shut your door and turned up the TV. Pretty soon it was just white noise. I wasn't a saint.

With her darkly fantastical tales of myth, legend, and family legacy, prolific British author Tanith Lee (1947-2015) stands in contrast to the more grounded works of Grant and Tem. Her characters have names like Sephaina, Marcusine, Araige, Jenver, and one always wonders, are they gods? immortals? vampires? otherworldly creatures beyond our ken? Surely they cannot be merely human. Her style seduces, sucks you into a breathless world of high drama, high culture, secrets, lies, and illicit lusts between (sigh) family members. Only once had she ever discovered herself in the wish that Jenver were not her brother, that the notion of making love with him did not revolt her...

Loved "Simon's Wife," top-tier stuff, a realistic tale of modern love and adultery. A woman travels to a married man's home while his wife is away, and faces her fears head-on when Simon is called away on business for a few hours the morning after their consummation. Unnerving, at times unpleasant, but for me, a real winner. I wandered this house like a ghost, no familiar possession of mine in sight, a lost traveler without a landmark... landmarks of Simon's wife, whose name I did not yet know, whose picture I was forming by irresistible slow degrees.

Her other stories, "The Tree: A Winter's Tale," "The Vampire Lover" and something something about a unicorn, I mostly skimmed: Lee's writing is sure and strong, all blood-drenched—yet not particularly scary at all—fairy-tale vibes, but my taste for that kind of medieval lore and imagery is practically nil. Still, I'm sure others whose tastes do run in that direction will find them perfectly satisfying.

All in all, In the Blood is a perfect little starter for getting familiar with the more sophisticated styles of Eighties horror: literate yet chilling as it exposes the secret recesses we hide, highlighting those fears without resorting to excessive bloodshed or random limb-pulling (although there is a bit of that, here and there). You've got Grant's homespun domestic horrors of the everyday; Tem's sometimes surreal, sometimes esoteric, sometimes gritty entries; and Lee's lush, romantic, adult Gothic dark fantasies. Splatterpunk would come along in a year or two to rabble-rouse the grown-ups, sure, but much of what is written here is as about as good as horror fiction got back then. In the Blood will allow readers to look back and get a taste of these three authors' personal worlds of darkness, and what grave discoveries they have revealed.

New Terrors, edited by Ramsey Campbell (1980): There's a Place for You In Between the Sheets

Throughout the 1980s paperback horror boom, there was no shortage of horror anthologies. Sure, prior decades had seen their share of tomes of short horror fiction, but often they were mixed with tales of science fiction, fantasy, and crime. The American paperback original edition of New Terrors (Pocket Books, October 1982), showcased writers of various genres right there on the cover. As the '80s wore on this practice was seen less and less and horror anthologies began to feature solely horror writers. For the most part, horror anthos were a treat, even if they were uneven; useful for voracious readers to sample writers they were unfamiliar with, to see what short sharp shocks they could deliver, to learn in a bite-size morsel who might be worth reading an entire novel by and who might be best to avoid.

Pan Books UK, 1980

The American edition doesn't include all the stories as the 1980 original from across the pond, but it does have an utterly delightful cover. Lisa Falkenstern, illustrator extraordinaire, painted vivid portraits of the macabre that have become icons of the era. Sure, okay, the lovely wrapped in bedsheets doesn't exactly align with what's going on between the covers (heh) but who cares? Did anyone ever try to return a book because what was depicted on the cover never actually occurred inside?

As an author Ramsey Campbell is one of the modern horror greats, that hardly needs to be stated, and he is no slouch as an editor either. For New Terrors he's chosen short works of various styles and themes, but which are wrought with fine instruments, presented with an artist's care, then deployed just so for maximum horror impact. The authors wield scalpels, not sledgehammers. The caliber of imagination at work here and the general quality of the prose in its service is impeccable. There is no jokiness, no ill-timed humor, very little grue. The writers strive for elevated implication rather than spell-it-out twists. For the most part the writers succeed at this distinctive style of quieter horror—indeed, many if not most stories have a Campbellian quality to them.

Aickman (1914-1981) 

New Terrors reveals its high pedigree from the first. It begins with one of Robert Aickman's inimitable stories, "The Stains," and it is the longest tale here at nearly 60 pages. Stephen is a middle-aged widower who visits his brother at his small parish in the British moors, where Stephen goes on long lonesome walks. He meets a young woman collecting lichen-covered rocks for her father; Stephen's brother is an amateur expert on the topic but she seems unimpressed, and knows her illiterate father won't care either. This is Aickman's version of "meet cute." He entices the girl to meet him the next day, and they do, exploring an abandoned primitive country home which contains an old mattress in a small room upstairs, where:

...every night the moon shone across their bed and their bodies in wide streaks, oddly angled. "You are like a long, sweet parsnip," Stephen said. "Succulent but really rather tough." "I know nothing at all," she said. "I only know you." The mark below her shoulder stood out darkly, but, God be praised, in isolation. What did the rapidly deteriorating state of the walls and appurtenances matter by comparison with that?  

Allusive, symbolic, literary, lightly weird: yep, this is vintage Aickman, and it won the 1981 British Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction. I appreciated its mild earthy eroticism, the "stains" that creep up on Stephen and slooowly subsume him. Give yourself some time to savor this mature master.

Wellman (1903-1986) 

"Yare" by Manly Wade Wellman is written in his own country grammar, which I can enjoy in doses very small. But Wellman's pen is sure and fine as he characterizes well rough-hewn working men with good trustworthy hunting dogs and backwoods superstitions that turn out to not be superstitions at all. One man has been summoned: "Hark at me good. It ain't no fox that we come out here tonight to have the dogs run." A tale of rural dark fantasy, it's good, but I think it would would have been more at home in Stuart David Schiff's Whispers anthologies.

One of Steve Rasnic's earliest stories, "City Fishing," has two men and their two young sons going out on a fishing trip. Simple. Except they had to physically restrain the mothers:  Jimmy overhears his mom: "You can't take them!"... then there was a struggle as his dad and Bill's dad started forcing the women to the bedrooms. Bill's mother was especially squirmy, and Bill's father was slapping her hard across the face to make her stop. His own mother was a bit quieter, especially after Bill's mother got hurt, but she still cried. Yikes. The travelogue that follows grows more surreal as the men drive into a city that grows more and more decrepit but buildings begin to appear hung down from the sky on wires. Is this an initiation rite of toxic masculinity? Perhaps; its weirdness stands on its own.

Lee (1947-2015) 

Filled with graceful contours and female perception, the late Tanith Lee's "A Room with a Vie" (that's not a misspelling) has no mythic dark fantasy, but an English country vacation home, a rented room, a former tenant now deceased, and Caroline, who must get away. But escape from one's past and personal problems is impossible in horror, and her "hallucinations of fecundity" will bring the room to life. "Oh, Christ, please die," she said. Her lucid prose, even when depicting impossibilities, as well as a tinge of black humor at the climax, make Lee's story a standout.

"Tissue" by a young Marc Laidlaw has some unsettling imagery of the flesh as you might guess by its title, and it works beautifully. Macabre, insane family issues come to the fore when a young man brings his girlfriend to meet his father after the death of his mother. Dad's idea of family? "One optimally functioning individual organism." Laidlaw gets literally under the skin with some startling imagery and ideas, assisted by certain Campbellian touches. Another high point.

Shaw (1931-1996) 

Bob Shaw was a beloved Irish science fiction writer. His "Love Me Tender" reads like a '40s crime story with an escaped convict named Massick on the lam, trudging through muddy forest, following train tracks, a city boy in a prehistoric landscape. He comes upon a shack and an old man drinking whiskey, sorting dead butterflies for the university nearby, talking about mimics and lookalikes. When Massick gets a look inside the shack's sole locked door, he's eager... but of course all that stuff about lookalikes wasn't idle chatter, and the common noir trope of femme fatale becomes all too literal. Good stuff, great payoff.

Another science fiction author offers another very good story: "Kevin Malone" by the highly-regarded Gene Wolfe. A couple in dire straits answer an ad for free living arrangements in exchange for "minimal services." Oh my god, seriously people?! Do not do this ever. Though brief, in his stately, sophisticated prose Wolfe's literate story bewitches: I felt that pricking at the neck that comes when one reads Poe alone at night.

Reed (1932-2017) 

"Chicken Soup" is about Harry, who loved being sick, and thus develops a rather unhealthy relationship between Harry and his mother. Another writer known for SF as well as mystery, Kit Reed, in addition to be a revered professor and who died last fall, ventures into domestic Shirley Jackson territory, with perhaps a hint of Harlan Ellison's 1976 darkly comic story of Jewish guilt, "Mom." Like all happy couples they had their fights which lasted only an hour or two and cleared the air nicely. Reed wraps it all up in traditional horror manner. Not bad. Neither "The Pursuer" by James Wade nor "The Spot" by Dennis Etchison and Mark Johnson rose higher than "that was okay" for me: the former is a rescue from 1951, an "urban horror" not unlike Beaumont or Matheson; the latter is, as Campbell even notes "more allegorical than most of the tales in this book," make that "too allegorical for its own good."

Wilder (1930-2002) 

New Zealand SF/F author Cherry Wilder contributes "The Gingerbread House," which has some familiar touches but a couple fresh notes. Amanda visits her brother Douglas, newly divorced and cranky as hell, living in a German cottage owned by a madwoman now in a sanitarium. Together they face ugly secrets about themselves: he may have killed a child in a hit-and-run, she suffers from anorexia (a rare acknowledgement of the disease in that day).

"You must stop running away." 

"So must you," he said, with a reassuring touch of the old self-righteousness. "Yes," she said, "yes, I promise. I'll eat... I'll put on ten pounds, twelve. Only we must leave this house... this is a rotten place. It plays tricks." 

His eyes swiveled nervously in the direction of the cupboard. 

"You may be right," he whispered.

Wagner (1945-1994)

".220 Swift" is one of Karl Edward Wagner's long, major works. It's a sweaty, claustrophobic tale of two men heading into a cavern in a North Carolina hillside, inspired by, as Wagner put it, "archaeological curiosa." Solid dialogue, solid grounding in reality, solid everything, it has all the components that made Wagner a legend in his lifetime. While I could do without passages about guns and ammo (it's the title), I realize this is something Wagner knew intimately. And Campbell's own contribution "The Fit" also hit my horror sweet spot; it also features everything that makes Campbell great. Rather alienated young man spends holidays with his aunt who is a dress-maker. She runs afoul of local crone named Fanny Cave (I kept imagining her in her cottage, her long limbs folded up like a spider's in hiding) who lives down by the water. Notes of uncomfortable sexual tension and inanimate dress dummies and clothing that take on sinister agency appear—Eventually I managed to sleep, only to dream that dresses were waddling limblessly through the doorway of my room, towards the bed. Add a shuddery finish and you've got a maybe a precursor to his classic The Face That Must Die. 

New Terrors ends on a celebrity note, and Stephen King's name looks great on the cover, but wow has this one always been one of my least favorites by the man. I first encountered "Big Wheels: A Tale of the Laundry Game" in Skeleton Crew, when it was published some years after first appearing here, and in that collection it was rewritten for whatever reason and to whatever effect. Either version is a lesser work. One creepy image can't make up for these characters' drunken, tiresome, pointless antics. "This is his strangest story," Campbell notes, sure, but it offers little else.

Taken as a whole, New Terrors does feature some terrific writing, effectively horrific scenarios, and a couple first-rate stories, but today, some weeks after reading it, I'm hard-pressed recalling specifics about the lesser stories. Strong works from Aickman, Lee, Laidlaw, Wolfe, Wilder, Wagner, and Campbell; okay ones from the others and a couple "why bother?" equal around a 75 or 80% competency rate, so like a C+ or B if we're grading. However that Falkenstern cover is an A+ on its own merits, I think you'll agree!

Fangoria Nightmare Library Reviews, Sept 1987

Another stellar crop of Fangoria mag fiction reviews of works by esteemed '80s horror writers, including erstwhile Eric C. Higgs. I really can't thank reader Patrick B. enough for sending these along to me! I'll get back to reviewing in the new year if not before.

MetaHorror, ed. by Dennis Etchison (1992): Beyond Man's Fears

In 1992, with Dell's horror imprint Abyss up and running, it made good sense for the publisher to hire Dennis Etchison to put together their first anthology of original fiction. As we saw in his 1986 anthology Cutting Edge (a personal and important favorite of mine, both then and now), his pedigree of intelligence and taste, willingness to experiment in the genre and test boundaries, made him the right man to acquire even cutting-edgier stories. We got MetaHorror (July 1992). Right from the start you can see the ambition: check the prefix meta. Now that's a scholarly, academic word, this meta, one not generally bandied about by readers and purveyors of paperback horror fiction. What gives?

I was definitely into this idea of horror that went beyond horror, horror aware of its history, horror that left behind its tepid tropes and banal cliches in search of real true darkness, horror aware of its place in the literary pantheon (that is, nowhere) and eager to show its intellectual bonafides. I mean, we got Joyce freakin' Carol Oates on the cover! MetaHorror hit me at the right time: I'd been moving away from horror, reading more and more crime, more science fiction, more literary fiction, more world classics. I was in college at the time and reading serious academic books too (one title that I recall fondly that combined horror and academia was Lee Siegel's City of Dreadful Night—which I read about in Fangoria!). So yeah: I was all about some meta. Problem was, I seem to recall reading the few duds in the anthology first, which put me off reading the rest. So I've been meaning to get back to MetaHorror for years...

MetaHorror begins with "Blues and the Abstract Truth" by Barry Malzberg and Jack Dann, which is followed by the not dissimilar "Are You Now?" by Scott Edelman. All three authors were more known for their science fiction than horror—I'm not doing headstands here. These two openers are weak Xerox copies of the masterful futurist J.G. Ballard: fractured, dissociated, clinical tales of men still in thrall to the sociopolitical events of the 1950s and 1960s, searching for the (Freudian? Jungian? McLuhanian?) key that will unlock their tortured psyches. My psyche was tortured by Ballard's books throughout the 1990s, and while I absolutely adored them, if I'm going to revisit their corrosive obsessions I'd just as soon pull The Atrocity Exhibtion off my shelf and read it again (I don't think I read these two stories on my initial encounter).

Next up: two so-so short-shorts by Lawrence Watt-Evans and Richard Christian Matheson, all blood 'n' blades stuff, then Joyce Carol Oates shows up with "Martyrdom" and shows everybody how it's done. I don't always like her short fiction—I've been dipping in and out of her 1977 collection Night-Side for ages—but this one is a doozy. Oates strikes a bold contrast between a woman who marries into high-society and the life of a city rat (yes, you read that right); when the two meet it's the most unsettling scenario this side of (then-current) American Psycho. Densely packed with disgusting imagery and written with consummate skill, "Martyrdom" is a marvel.

Mr. X grew systematically crueler, hardly a gentleman any longer, forcing upon his wife as she lay trussed and helpless in their marriage bed a man with fingernails filed razor-sharp who lacerated h er tender flesh, a man with a glittering scaly skin, a man with a turkey's wattles, a man with an ear partly missing, a man with a stark-bald head and cadaverous smile, a man with infected draining sores like exotic tattoos stippling his body...

 Oates

"Briar Rose" features a young woman regaining her identity through tattoos ("I'm my own Sistine Chapel"). Kind of a dated concept today, sure, but Kim Antieu's perceptive pen confers a fresh eye to the conceit. Plus it was 1992. I've liked her stories in Borderlands II and other anthos, and this one is no exception. Old-schoolers William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson had decades of publications to their name even in 1992. I know it's impolitic of me to say, but I inwardly sigh when I see their names on an anthology roster. Their stories here—"The Visit" and "The Ring of Truth" respectively—are relatively quaint, the "unexpected" twists of the genre long utilized by themselves and their colleagues but painfully dated today (or "today"). They're outclassed by the deeper, darker, more finely wrought and conceived works that MetaHorror also contains.

Tem

Steve Rasnic Tem's "Underground" was a favorite: a sensitive, penetrating work about a man's friend slowly dying of AIDS who doesn't want to be buried after the disease finally wins. This is juxtaposed with the excavation of a city block near the man's home; Tem fills the story with imagery of raw earth, dirt, blood, bodies, loss. The fear is palpable. One of MetaHorror's finest.  

On the news they'd reported the discovery of a human skull, thought to be over a century old. Foul play was not suspected. They thought it might have drifted down from the cemetery a half-mile away. Tom tried to imagine such a thing, dead bodies drifting underground, swimming slowly through what most of us liked to think of as too solid ground.

Editor Etchison

I quit Strieber's story as soon as it was clear the protagonists were Barbie and Ken dolls.

MetaHorror ends strong, with two solid powerful works that, however, seem less like horror fiction than straight-up war literature. Chelsea Quinn Yarbro offers some of the best prose in the anthology; her piece "Novena" reads more like a novel excerpt. In a nameless wartorn city reduced to rubble, rubble that houses wounded children, a nun/nurse is desperate to provide service and comfort. She has little luck. It's confident and affecting, but almost too bleak on its own as it offers no relief from its scenario, which is why it seemed to me a part of a larger story. Genre giant Peter Straub's "The Ghost Village" is part of his "Blue Rose" universe, which includes at least three novels and a handful of short stories about a group of men before, during, and after the Vietnam war. This one is set in the war itself, and it's chilling, nightmarish, ugly; one of the best stories I've read so far in 2016 and reminds me I just have to get to those other books.

There are other good stories (and others not so good) in MetaHorror from favorite names: Tessier, Wagner, Tuttle, Campbell, Morrell; I'll get to them in a follow-up review.

Halloween Horrors, ed. by Alan Ryan (1986): Midnight... All Night

Happy Halloween, one and all! On this day of days I offer up a mixed bag of treats: Halloween Horrors (Charter Books/Oct 1987), one of Alan Ryan's several horror anthologies from the 1980s. Each short story is set at Halloween, of course, which allows for mining of all its myth and legend for the background details. You'll recognize all the familiar faces tonight, masked or unmasked, peering out at you from the pages, eager to have you step inside for a surprise, take one, won't you, or two, maybe three or more...

1988 Sphere paperback, UK

First up is "He'll Come Knocking at Your Door" by Robert McCammon. I've read this one before, in his 1990 anthology Blue World. It has a decent setup and payoff (intimate payment for townspeople's good fortune required by... someone) but, again, suffers from what I like least about McCammon: his square, earnest, almost dopey style; he's the John Denver of '80s horror. If he just took his gloves off more often, like he does in the stories final images—and even those could've been honed to a sharper edge–I'd like his stuff more. Ah well. On to "Eyes" from Charles L. Grant, a writer I can appreciate in the abstract but in the literal act of reading his stories, not always. But here his allusive, understated style fits a tale of grief and guilt and horror wrapped up tight together. A father can't forget or forgive when it comes to the death of his disabled son. The kicker is ironic, tragic, unshakeable. I think I'm gonna call this kinda thing heartbreak horror.

  Strieber: Hates Nixon

Whitley Strieber's "The Nixon Mask" is a droll satire of that ol' crook Richard Nixon. As a peek into the machinations of high office it's kind of funny, but Tricky Dick's paranoia gets the best of him. I liked the tone of this one, absurdist humor turning into horror, Ballardian big deals going on and on that have nothing to do with the people supposedly served and in fact the Watergate break-in is okayed on this eve. What happens when Dick Nixon wears a Dick Nixon mask? Oh, it's riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. I dug this one myself but I don't know how much mileage it'll have to a reader born after, say, the Carter administration. "Samhain Feis" by Peter Tremayne delves into Celtic Halloween lore, has some nice scenery in the desolate Irish countryside, a bit of deserved comeuppance in the end. No biggie.

"Trickster," from Steve Rasnic Tem, hits true emotional notes absent from other works here. A man mourns his dead brother, who from childhood was an incorrigible practical joker, distrusted by his own family thanks to truly horrible pranks (like pretending to be dead or even pretend-killing a baby relative. Hilarious!). Murdered on Halloween night a year earlier, our protagonist reminisces about how their lives growing up and growing apart. This Halloween he thinks—improbably, impossibly—he sees his brother out cavorting in a Halloween parade in San Francisco, where he'd died, and spends a hallucinatory night chasing after this phantom. "Trickster" feels like a story about real people, written by someone who's been there. It's sad at moments and that final trick really stings. Another case of heartbreak horror.

1986 Doubleday hardcover

Editor Ryan's own contribution, "The Halloween House," doesn't display the careful sophistication of his other tales I've enjoyed; I suppose that wouldn't have fit this story of randy teens exploring a haunted house. An original idea there at the end, absurd even, but some nice horror imagery of a house, er, melting; otherwise it's as trite as its title. Guy N. Smith's "Hollow Eyes" gets a big no from me, some old dad complaining about his daughter's shifty, ugly boyfriend, searching for them during a Halloween rave-up, all wrong, no go, return to sender. "Three Faces of the Night" is Craig Shaw Gardner's  ambitious and complex tale, told in three time frames, of love and college parties. The two don't mix.
"Pumpkin" from crime writer Bill Pronzini (pictured) delves into Halloween and harvest lore, not bad but not memorable.

Weird Tales scribe and HPL pal Frank Belknap Long gives us "Lover in the Wildwood," a tale of criminal lust in the backwoods; somewhere I can here the Crypt Keeper cackling and I wish someone would just shut him up. "Apples" is Ramsey Campbell's minor chiller about kids stealing fruit from an old man's garden. Campbell gets kids' dynamics right and the climax offers a nice frisson of nausea and creepiness, I mean I hate raw apples too (She'd spat out the apple and goggled at it on the floor Something was squirming in it). Not one of Campbell's best but a highlight of this anthology. The concluding story is from Robert Bloch, is a mean-spirited little gem of a neighborhood's trick-or-treat session gone horribly wrong. "Pranks" seems light-hearted at first but grows in menace till its great reveal removes all doubt of malicious intent.

Okay then, now for the final trick: for my money the star of this Halloween Horrors is Michael McDowell's (pictured above) "Miss Mack." The first of his few short stories, it is as sure and capable as any of his novels, simply condensed to an essence of cruel terror. I read it several years ago and it's haunted me ever since, which is surprisingly rare. Our Miss Mack is a beloved schoolteacher in Pine Cone, Alabama (also the setting of The Amulet) who befriends young Miss Faulk, recently hired by Principal Hill. But Principal has designs on this lovely innocent girl and cannot bear the fast, intimate friendship between the two women. Stoked by jealousy and, okay, yes, the occult secrets of his mother, Principal Hill puts a hex on Miss Mack. McDowell writes so well, his quiet evocation of locale and character so confident and matter-of-fact, you won't want the story to end. And in a way it doesn't. The final sickening, maddening horror upends all human notions of time and place, and without those, what are we? Lost in a night that never ends looking for a place that does not exist. When she waked, it was night—still Halloween night. "Miss Mack" has become a favorite of mine from the '80s era.

1988 Severn House hardcover, UK

While enjoyable overall, I do wish Halloween Horrors had a few more tricks to play on readers; many of the stories are slight, mild, unremarkable. Still, a cheap copy is worth searching for, as a couple treats indeed have a razor blade tucked within...

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.

Shadows 3, edited by Charles L. Grant (1980): Death is No Dream

I am so glad that I continued to read all of Shadows 3 (Berkley Books Jan 1985, cover art by David Mann I believe), even when some of the stories were pretty underwhelming. Couple times I was about to put it back on the shelf half-read, but I bore on and was treated to "Cabin 33," Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's longish tale that ends the book. It is easily one of the best horror short stories I've read in ages. It's so wecomingly well-told, with a vivid sense of place - resort cabins in the mountains for vacationing folks with a little money to spend - strong, true dialogue, and characters given enough room to live and breathe (and die, of course). As editor Charles L. Grant writes in his little intro, "For those of you familiar with Hotel Transylvania, Blood Games, and The Palace... welcome to Cabin 33; for those who are not... read this first, then go buy the books." I can only hope her novels of the vampire life are as thoughtfully written and just fun to read as "Cabin 33." I think I can trust Grant on that.

Yarbro

I cannot however trust Grant about Bruce Francis, a writer who apparently only ever published two stories: he states Francis has a long career ahead of him. Not with the frustratingly elusive and fractured short-short, "To See You With, My Dear." I felt like something's going on, but I - just -couldn't - grasp - it. Some nice imagery that I think was supposed to link together to imply... Lycanthropy? Dream transference? Psychotic delusion? Grrr. Same thing with Steve Rasnic Tem's "At the Bureau," a sort of eternal-recurrence riff that ends uneasily if vaguely. "Opening a Vein," from crime duo Bill Pronzini and Barry Malberg, is only a page long, jumping off with an I Am Legend-inspired pun to imagine a new genesis by a familiar demiurge. Mostly these were stylistic experiments rather than full short stories.

Onward: "The Partnership," from perennial William F. Nolan, is hokey and silly; next. Peter Pautz's "Ant" is another all-too-quiet, subtle story of an odd young boy's first experience of death, parental strife, and perhaps how the two are entwined. I preferred "Wish Hound," by science-fiction scribe Pat Murphy, which has a nicely nasty ending, and Ray Russell's "Avenging Angel," a black-comic revenge story about a particularly unlikable painter artiste. I really have enjoyed what I've read of Russell's work and really need to get a copy of Sardonicus, his 1961 modern-gothic story. "Tell Mommy What Happened" is Alan Ryan's little gem of dawning revelation, that moment when the seemingly inconsequential trivialities of everyday life open up unexpected vistas of horror. Aw yeah!

A pensive Grant.  

But there is seldom a doubt that the shadow over there, 

the one in the middle of the noonday desert, 

doesn't belong.

Other good stuff: for fans of the politely told and old-fashioned tale of weirdness and mystery (literally Holmesian in one), there are "The Ghost Who Limped" by R. Chetwynd Hayes, "Janey's Smile" by Juleen Brantingham, and "The Brown Recluse," by Night of the Hunter author Davis Grubb. These are, along with "Cabin 33" and "Tell Mommy," the best in this volume, with carefully-chosen language appropriate for the subject matter. Hayes and Grubb are master craftsmen indeed. They also feature that sort of last-line climax so often seen in horror fiction, and I think they really work.

Altogether, Shadows 3 offers entertainments of the "macabre and bizarre," as the 1980 hardcover states. I don't want to say the stories are light-hearted, but they don't often seem to have that gravitas - or is it pretension? - that I see in short horror fiction later in the decade, when younger writers seemed more intent on disturbing and upsetting readers rather than providing them with cozy chills. Then again, I'd say there were more real writers working in the field in the '70s and early '80s, or there were fewer less talented writers being published (of course Grant would disagree with none of what I'm saying, I'm sure). The series is called Shadows, after all, not Wounds or Headshots or Guts. While the good writing is much appreciated, and the solid composition of the stories bespeak experience and skill, sometimes I like my horror fiction to cut closer to the bone, or engage the world at large, or aspire to bigger concerns than the simple formality of tales-well-told. These stories are like a bit of warm milk spiked with a only tiny splash of whiskey to help you get to sleep.

But it would really be unfair to criticize something for being what it is not; rather I should - and did - enjoy Shadows 3 for precisely what it is: mostly mildly satisfying short stories of the weird and the uncanny with occasional touches of excellence. It's not nearly as good as the first volume in the series, but I believe I will be dwelling amidst these Shadows for some time to come...

Cutting Edge, edited by Dennis Etchison (1986): You Gotta Be Cruel to Be Kind

The 1980s saw plenty of horror anthologies that sought to broaden the scope of the genre, to encourage its growth both as a literary force as well as a mode of delivering fear as entertainment. Horror fans will well recall anthologies like Dark Forces (1980), The Dark Descent (1987), and Prime Evil (1988) as some of the most prominent and well-respected of their day; in 1986, editor Dennis Etchison presented Cutting Edge, which can stand near and perhaps above some of that heralded class.

Thoughtful and ambitious horror writers wanted their works to become more real, more penetrating, more relevant, and therefore more terrifying, than ever before and Cutting Edge illustrates that effort. The stories Etchison collected subtly explore very adult concerns and are not much for the supernatural; serial killers and car crashes, drug trips and gender confusion, sexual abuse and Vietnam PTSD wend their way through all the stories. When I first read them as a teenager this approach perplexed me a little, but this reread was much more satisfying.

Etchison's longish yet insightful introduction serves as a shorthand lesson in the failures of genre fiction during the modern era: Tolkien, Heinlein, and Lovecraft impersonators who refused to engage with the fracturing world around them. It's obvious he sees this anthology as "explorations of the inscape," bold new writers unwilling to look backwards, who wish to forge unafraid into untamed territory without regard for genre limitations or, indeed, monetary reward. These stories fall through publication cracks: too raw and intense for the mainstream; not supernatural enough, perhaps, for horror fans bred on "haunted houses and fetid graveyards," as Etchison disparages. He is dead serious; there is none of that obnoxious chumminess that mars so many other anthology introductions. It's this dead seriousness that could seem to be pretension; this may be nearly unavoidable when writers try to class up any genre.

1986 Doubleday hardcover

Just what is "cutting edge"? Besides the obvious reference to mutilation and murder, it's about a style of horror that wants to explore human fear and pain without the typical generic conventions. It can be an experiment in language, as in Richard Christian Matheson's unique "Vampire," a two-page story made up of one-word sentences; it can be the extreme sexual dysfunctions of Karl Edward Wagner's "Lacunae" or Roberta Lannes's "Goodbye, Dark Love"; or it can be the detonated bombscape psyche of Vietnam vets in Peter Straub's excellent, sad, disturbing "Blue Rose" and The Forever War author Joe Haldeman's (pic below) "The Monster." Straub's long story deals with the worst kind of child death and its shattering effect on an already distant and emotionally volatile family and is part of a character cycle that includes his novels Koko (1988), Mystery (1990) and The Throat (1993). His prodigious literary skill is part and parcel of this "cutting edge."

In one of the few stories to use a supernatural creature - Clive Barker's "Lost Souls," with his noir-ish detective Harry D'Amour - the demon is dismissed with a curt "Manhattan's seen worse," meaning, the horrors of a modern world belittle otherworldly chaos, not pale before them. Leave it to old grandmaster Robert Bloch (pic below) to feature the Grim Reaper himself in "Reaper," in which an aging man attempts to deny the final disgrace of death. Classic Bloch, but also fitting in here, in that it confronts a man dismayed by growing old and who'll do anything to miss that last and final appointment.


Lots of us are mixed on Ramsey Campbell but I found "The Hands" to be very good, albeit a bit dense. It's a tense, claustrophobic tale of a man who, after stepping into an old church to get out of the rain, is tricked into "a test of perceptions" by a strange woman with a clipboard, always a sign of officialdom. He's given a pamphlet with the most appalling image of violence he had ever seen. With that vision spinning in his head as well as childhood fears of a vengeful deity, he tries to leave but gets lost in a nameless building and stumbles upon horror.

Drugs and sex figure largely in Wagner's "Lacunae," which is unsurprising, as he often wrote of the dangers of both in a way that spoke of real experience and not just a pose. There's a new drug that fills in the gaps of our conscious minds, all those lost moments finally regained, but perhaps we need those gaps to retain sanity, to keep apart dangerous, contradictory aspects of our most intimate selves. A few years after first appearing in Cutting Edge, "Goodbye, Dark Love" by Lannes was collected in Splatterpunks (1990), and for good reason: it's a short but extremely graphic story of a young woman exorcising the abuse she suffered at the hands of her father. Mixing this kind of psychological insight with unflinching sex and violence was splatterpunk's specialty; hoping for a catharsis instead of just the gross-out. I believe Lannes, and her female protagonist, succeeded.


In both "Lapses" and "The Transfer," by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro and Edward Bryant respectively, women try to deal bravely with random moments in life that open up to unexpected violence and our capacity for both committing and enduring it. There is darkest humor, however, in "They're Coming for You" by Les Daniels and "Muzak for Torso Murderers" by Marc Laidlaw. Other stories, by luminaries such as Charles L. Grant, George Clayton Johnson, and original Playboy associate editor Ray Russell, as well as newcomers like W.H. Pugmire and Nicholas Royle, are all worthwhile.

 
Steve Rasnic Tem (pictured) contributes "Little Cruelties," one of my favorites, which "excavates" the everyday hurts that we visit upon loved ones. But a father regrets more and more the pain he's caused, and reflects how anonymous cities have almost bred this carelessness inside us. Tem writes strongly and suggestively, with an affectlessness that heightens the prosaic horror.

The final story, "Pain," is Whitley Strieber's mix of tinfoil-hat crankdom - UFOs, the Vril Society, pagan mythology - with a clear-eyed glimpse into the depths of a different kind of S&M. Waxing rather philosophical about death, "Pain" is one of the best stories in Cutting Edge and the perfect end to the anthology, encapsulating as it does all that has come before it. A writer meets a fetching young woman who knows a thing or two about pain:

I wait as she comes scything down the rows of autumn. Although her call will mark the last stroke of my life, it will also say that my suffering is not particular, and in that there is a kindness. She comes not only for me but for those yet unborn, for the old upon their final beds, and the millions from the harvest of war. She comes for me, but also for you, as in the end for us all.