My tale had been called "The Attic Window," and appeared in the January, 1922, issue of Whispers. In a good many places, especially the South and the Pacific coast, they took the magazines off the stands at the complaints of silly milksops, but New England didn't get the thrill and merely shrugged its shoulders at my extravagance.
- Lovecraft, "The Unnamable" (1925)
In the early 1970s, a young military dentist named
Stuart David Schiff began a seeming inexhaustible labor of love by putting together a little magazine of original horror and dark fantasy stories, which he titled, in a nod to HPL,
Whispers. Finding the horror genre lacking in outlets for good writers, Schiff simply created one himself, was able to offer money, and attracted the attention of an impressive roster of scribes, both the classic -
Robert Bloch,
Fritz Leiber,
Manly Wade Wellman - and the (then) newly minted -
Dennis Etchison,
Karl Edward Wagner,
Ramsey Campbell, as well as folks never heard from again. Illustrators too, were welcomed, some hearkening back to the original Arkham House days, like
Frank Utpatel and
Lee Brown Coye - Schiff's editorial senses were impeccable.
Whispers #1, July 1973 - great cover art by Tim Kirk
Later in the decade anthologies of the best stories were published in hardcovers, and then, of course, came the paperbacks. In February 1977 the first
Whispers paperback was released, from Jove/HB. You can see the cover art below, by
Rowena Morrill, and how it features not a single real image of horror; it seems more fantasy-oriented, I mean, what is that, a dragon, and a princess? (Actually it's inspired by Wellman's adventure tale of Native American mythology, "The Dakwa").
At the top you see the June 1987 Jove reprint and its startling cover art by
Marshall Arisman, intimating distorted psychological states in the sleek metallic sheen of a modern world, terror for the end of the century. But that's not what
Whispers is; the terrors of
Whispers are of the comforting old-fashioned sort, evil fantasies vividly told, well-oiled engines of weirdness and frightful fun that invoke demons and devils, Lovecraftian entities, vengeful madmen, landscapes of legend and myth, and other staples of the much-loved pulps era... with a few new twists.
Editor Schiff today
Almost to a one, the stories Schiff has compiled are solidly entertaining.
Whispers starts off strongly with "Sticks." Originally written as a kind of horror writer's in-joke,
Karl Edward Wagner's (pic below) story mixes
Weird Tales art, anthropology, and vague cosmic malice to terrific effect, and it has become a classic in that Mythos; it won the 1975 British Fantasy Award for best short story and has been reprinted plenty (you'll also note its striking similarity to a popular indie horror movie that came along two decades later). Amazingly enough it was inspired by real-life events! A pulp horror artist comes across a strange collection of bundled lattices of sticks in the lonely woods of upstate New York.
It should have been ridiculous. It wasn't. Instead it seemed somehow sinister - these utterly inexplicable, meticulously constructed stick lattices spread through a wilderness where only a tree-grown embankment or a forgotten stone wall gave evidence that man had ever passed through.
And things just get worse from there. Really worse. Pretty great, unique, disquieting, although I could have done without the little explanatory afterword included, just a paragraph down from the story's final doom-laden lines.
Whispers #9, July 1976- eerie art by Steve Fabian
I've noted before that with the explosion of paperback horror in the 1980s the quality of the writing itself suffered much, but that in the '70s the genre was still populated by professional authors who could
actually and truly write. How refreshing! There is the delicate style of
Robert Aickman's (pic below) tale "Le Miroir," in which
the most complex of ordeals sometimes finds its own resolution, and now Celia sat before the beautiful mirror or looking glass, now in one new dress, now in another, and intermittently without troubling to put on a dress at all.
Dark fantasy elder statesman Fritz Leiber's penchant for horror set in the current day appears in "The Glove." A tale of rape and guilt written in a smartly casual manner, Leiber's narrator wonders,
Gloves are ghostly to start with, envelopes for hands - and if there isn't a medieval superstition about wearing the flayed skin of another's hand to work magic, there ought to be. Although I'm not a fan of sword-and-sorcery, and
Brian Lumley's "House of Cthulhu" is firmly in that field with its medieval vocabulary and dialogue (speaking in "ayes" and "Os" and names with lots of Zs, Hs, and Ys), the story began to charm me, especially because of its skin-crawl climax and Cthulhu references.
Weirdbook Press, 1984
Some comic relief too: Bob Bloch contributes a mordantly self-referential piece, "The Closer of the Way" (his first book was entitled
The Opener of the Way; get it?). "Mirror, Mirror" has a classic deal with the devil gone wrong,
Ray Russell's satiric swipe at vain Hollywood types. You'll dig the Cockney cannibal of "The Inglorious Rise of the Catsmeat Man" by
Robyn Smith. And
Richard Christian Matheson's "Graduation" is an epistolary tale of a college student's clever, insightful, but not-quite-self-aware letters home; he keeps mentioning
you-know-who but, sadly, I'm not quite sure who that was... but I don't think I'd want to be there when he comes home for spring break.
Matheson - Man I gotta find & reread his Scars
And
Whispers ends with a bang: "The Chimney," one of the best Ramsey Campbell stories I've read. A child learns of Santa in the worst way, much too young, a fiend on television:
I'd seen two children asleep in bed, an enormous crimson man emerging from the fireplace, creeping toward. They weren't going to wake up! "Burglar!" I'd screamed. "No, dear, it's Father Christmas," my mother said. "He always comes out of the chimney."
Perhaps if she'd said "down" rather than "out of"...
This is one of Campbell's straightforward tales of quiet creeping dread, and the payoff lingers, finding that our deepest childhood fears resonate throughout our - and perhaps others' - entire lives. Stellar stuff. And winner of the 1978 World Fantasy Award for best short fiction.
Doubleday hardcover, 1977
And so many other satisfying tales of vintage weirdness, perfect for reading while curled up before the proverbial fireplace: "The Pawnshop" by
Charles Fritch; "Goat" by
David Campion; another with a good Lovecraft vibe, "The Willow Platform" by
Joseph Payne Brennan. There are darker, more realistic stories here too, especially Etchison's murder-on-coed-campus "White Moon Rising," which hints at the fragmented types of stories he'd produce for the next several decades. But mostly
Whispers presents carefully-crafted works that evoke the 19th and early 20th century masters, just the kind of horror that Lovecraft himself always loved.
At the top you see the June 1987 Jove reprint and its startling cover art by Marshall Arisman, intimating distorted psychological states in the sleek metallic sheen of a modern world, terror for the end of the century. But that's not what Whispers is; the terrors of Whispers are of the comforting old-fashioned sort, evil fantasies vividly told, well-oiled engines of weirdness and frightful fun that invoke demons and devils, Lovecraftian entities, vengeful madmen, landscapes of legend and myth, and other staples of the much-loved pulps era... with a few new twists.
And things just get worse from there. Really worse. Pretty great, unique, disquieting, although I could have done without the little explanatory afterword included, just a paragraph down from the story's final doom-laden lines.
Doubleday hardcover, 1977
Ah, '80s horror anthologies! These were really my favorites back in the day when I was working in a used bookstore and reading horror fiction with an all-consuming appetite. I ordered these titles like crazy, waiting impatiently for the UPS guy to arrive with boxes of new books ordered from Ingram and Baker & Taylor, ready with the boxcutter to slice 'em open and get at the goodies inside. First up? Why, it's Hot Blood (1990) from Pocket Books! Stories of horror and sex and their twining, by Harlan Ellison, Ramsey Campbell, Robert Bloch, Theodore Sturgeon, Graham Masterton, Ray Garton, David J. Schow, Skipp & Spector - oh my cup it do runneth over! I didn't know who Jeff Gelb was, but my days as a teenage Jersey metalhead had made me familiar with Lonn Friend, who edited the essential metal mag RIP.
Of course the Hot Blood series turned into quite a long-running one as the 1990s wore on; there were myriad ways to make sex and horror mix and mingle...
The Night Visions series, originally published in hardcover by specialty horror press Dark Harvest, were reprinted in paperback by Berkley. Lots of great names here, although I really only read a very few. 
This series also continued into the '90s. Night Visions 3 from '86 was the first appearance of a little novella by Clive Barker called The Hellbound Heart; I think it was the basis for some movie or other.
Now we reach the Borderlands, and here there be dragons. I will always remember this great series for introducing me to Poppy Z. Brite, Karl Edward Wagner, and Joe R. Lansdale, so as you might imagine, it holds a special place in my own hellbound heart! (Oh look, it was originally published in October 1990 - no matter, it was the '80s up till at least Nevermind, if not Pulp Fiction, hope you don't mind me mixing my pop cultural metaphors.) The Borderlands went on for another four or five books, and were even reprinted by specialty gaming publishers White Wolf, and editor Thomas Monteleone started his own Borderlands Press. I simply must replace my long-gone copies for a reread.
As a young burgeoning liberal dude with female friends who all wanted to be writers (Anais Nin, to a one!) I consciously branched out with Women of Darkness (1988), and recall the bizarre delights of tales by Nancy Holder, Kit Reed, and Elizabeth Massie. Indeed there was a sequel to this as well, but I don't think I ever read it.
Whispers began as Stuart David Schiff's labor of love magazine, then in the late '70s became paperback anthologies, which were reprinted in the '80s by Jove Books, as you see here. Love the tormented silvery faces (predicting the covers of the Dell/Abyss series to come; the artist is Marshall Arisman). The stories herein seem to be much more quiet horror, and names like Charles L. Grant, Robert Aickman, Fritz Leiber, William F. Nolan, Alan Ryan, Manly Wade Wellman, Dennis Etchison, Campbell, Wagner, and the like predominate. Pretty sure I read some of this stuff well before I read even any King, but damn that was a long time ago.
Of course Texas born-and-bred Joe Lansdale his ownself edited an anthology of western-themed horror stories! Nicely titled too: Razored Saddles (1989). This one was labeled as "cowpunk" on its spine, a jokey nod to splatterpunk. Now honestly I've never really cared about westerns at all - something about all that brown dust, brown sand, brown storefronts, and brown horses bores me to impatience (the brown liquor's okay though) - so I've never read this one at all. Surely one of you folks out there has.
Horror fiction thrives in short story form. Starting in the 1970s this aspect of the genre was reinvigorated after lying fallow for decades after the demise of Weird Tales magazine and others of its kind of the 1930s. Dozens of new magazine titles, self-published and not, specialized in publishing stories from up-and-coming writers, as well as more famous names (which were placed prominently on the cover, of course). Most of the magazines didn't last more than a few years or a handful of issues. Virtually every horror writer of the 1980s had their start in one or more of these magazines so I find it entirely appropriate to explore them a bit here.
The Horror Show, debuting in 1986, is fondly remembered for its J.K. Potter covers and for first publishing Poppy Z. Brite.
You can see the names on the covers that would soon be famous in the field: Lansdale, Brite, Ligotti, Schow. And certainly many more folks just disappeared from the scene. Night Cry was the horror spin-off from Twilight Zone magazine. Great girly-mag style covers here, thanks again to J.K. Potter! 
Cemetery Dance came a little later but is still going strong today, 20 years later, and has also published hardcover books from all the best writers. Well, probably some crappy writers too, I'm sure.
These '70s magazine covers for Whispers have no authors listed but actually it's the first of its kind, edited by Stuart David Schiff, and intended as a throwback to the pulp fiction days of yore. In the late '70s he started editing paperback anthologies under the same title; I remember reading them probably in 7th or 8th grades and am trying to track down some for review here.
The glossier Midnight Graffiti has already been covered on this blog here. These following covers are from magazines I'd never heard of until now. I've seen some of them on eBay but they're going for more than I like to pay for vintage horror fiction stuff. If you want to see more stuff like this, Locus magazine's archives are indispensable.
