Borderlands, edited by Thomas F. Monteleone (1990): Wake Up in the Night with a Fear So Real

An admission: I almost didn't read this one back in the day. The cover art of a skeleton driver at the wheel almost turned me off Borderlands (Avon, Nov 1990), the first in the anthology series edited by Thomas F. Monteleone. At that time I was just so over skulls and skeletons on covers, thinking that whatever was inside was just as cliched and tiresome. But I finally succumbed to that wonderful blurb from Peter Straub, had already enjoyed Wagner, Klein, and Lansdale, and so found Borderlands to be a terror treasure trove, stuffed with inventive, colorful, eclectic stories I remember fondly - well, I remember fondly that I enjoyed them almost 25 years ago. I've been wanting to revisit and review Borderlands since I began this blog more than three years ago....would it hold up on this reread?

Some of the titles have jumped around in my head for ages, as did a few of the authors names, both because some became favorites and others because they seemed to become nothing. What Borderlands offers is stories that feature all kinds and styles of horror, from the non-supernatural to the otherworldly, from the quiet whisper to the shockingly violent, from dark fantasy to urban realism, psychological thriller to fairy tale, gritty suspense to gothic decadence. There's something here for the proverbial everyone. This means you.

The tone is set, wisely, with the first story, "The Calling." It's by the recently late David B. Silva, who edited one of the essential horror magazines of the 1980s, The Horror Show (many of the writers in this antho sold their first stories to Silva). Grim and despairing and all too real: a man caring for his mother as she slowly succumbs to cancer. This is horror of humiliation and embarrassment, failure and resentment. With a delicate yet graphic touch, Silva deftly explores what we choose to ignore. The ending is the essence of horror. And I just learned "The Calling" won the 1990 Bram Stoker Award for best short story; no surprise there.

"Scartaris, June 28th" is Harlan Ellison in Deathbird Stories (1975) mode: What happens to gods after their last believers die? Here Ellison's anger and impatience are tempered by a more forgiving, more understanding nature. A nameless man wanders the globe, giving a cessation of suffering to some, simply a hard time to others who deserve to be confronted about their outmoded beliefs. Ellison drops arcane comparative mythology knowledge on the reader and it'll help if you know who Arne Saknussemm is. Ellison's story is the most sophisticated and ambitious of works here and it contains some of his finest-ever writing.

(Speaking of Ellison, Borderlands was also my very first introduction to Poppy Z. Brite, whom Ellison lauded to the sky and back. "His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood" is a goth-punk update of Lovecraft's "The Hound," both factors endearing her to me at once. I wrote about this story here.)

1994 reprint from White Wolf, cover art by Dave McKean 

It was a pleasure to reread tales I'd half-remembered: "Muscae Volitantes" by Chet Williamson, but mostly unforgotten since I've been plagued by the titular condition for years. A husband's lover threatens to reveal the truth to the wife. Surely the husband can see his way out of this untenable position? And things get wonderfully, maniacally surreal in "Oh What a Swell Guy I Am," a story Monteleone happened upon out of the hundreds of unsolicited manuscripts he received. Jeffrey Osier, a regular contributor to small press mags like Deathrealm and The Horror Show, possesses a strong, passionate prose style; his bizarre images are conveyed fully formed, which resonated uncomfortably with me. In a good way. The title... is literal. Oh man, is it literal.

A quick stop in lycanthropy land, in which Les Daniels upends who's monster and who's man; like his other fiction, "By the Light of the Silvery Moon" uses standard horror tropes with wit and irony but is no less the horrific for it. Pure entertainment. John Shirley's "Delia and the Dinner Party" is part child's-eye view of the titular event and splatterpunk reveal, while Nina Kiriki Hoffman's creepy short-short "Stillborn" reminded me just a bit of the underseen 1990 film The Reflecting Skin, children obsessed with... well, no spoilers!
 

Ed Gorman's (above) "The Man in the Long Black Sedan" has a family man in the grip of madness - or utter calm rationality? - confront a most innocuous villain in a motel room. Gorman is more known for his crime fiction but wrote quite a few pulp-horror novels under the name Daniel Ransom. Likewise, "Suicide Note" by Lee Moler isn't necessarily horror but more dark erotic suspense, a man obsessed with carnality till the very end of life.

In a more general vein, two looming specters over horror fiction of this era appear in Borderlands: religious fundamentalists and sexual abuse/incest. Today these topics seem a little shelf-worn in fiction, tropes that inexperienced or lazy writers can trot out and use to push readers' buttons all too easily (it's not just in genre lit either you can be sure). But when these themes starting appearing in horror fiction it signaled efforts to make horror more serious, more real, more involved with the world at large than retreating into the vagaries of the imagination à la Lovecraft, say. These themes date Borderlands but negate it little.

Bizarre hands indeed

Fortunately their appearances here are for the most part handled with intelligence. And, yes, irreverence: Joe R. Lansdale's "By Bizarre Hands" trades in both businesses, riding the edge of irreverent black humor and down-home horror in his own inimitable style as a pedophiliac preacher/conman drives the dusty roads of Texas looking for simple-minded girls he can "save" with the Good Lord's help. Joe's story ends Borderlands on a very high note, no surprise there. And "The Good Book" from G. Wayne Miller works the Lord works in mysterious ways just right, I thought.

A handful of contributions leave the reader spooked but bewildered, such as "The Pounding Room" by Bentley Little (above). An author whose only work I've read have been this story, twice now. Neither read has gotten me interested in reading more of his stuff, but that's me. Obviously lots of readers like the inexplicability of this story, this style, revealing the unbelievable horrors that lurk behind, beyond, beneath the mundane. But to what end? Perhaps that's the point: the horror of incomprehension. He would become one of the big paperback horror writers of the turn of the century but oh well.

Nazis, chemical pollution, and the nightmare of a homeowner's lawn care make John DeChancie's "The Grass of Rememberance" an intriguing read; the connection of these disparate elements didn't quite come together for me. "Alexandra," from '80s anthology essential Charles L. Grant, was quite good but again, the ultimate intent seemed to dance away from me at the last moment. A subtle and powerful woman befriends an Oxrun Station physician. Cool, but you all know Charlie: it's what he leaves out that is probably the most important aspect of his fiction. Sometimes I wish he'd just left it in.

Works from my faves: several times Karl Edward Wagner (above) has written sensitively of the fallout of the Vietnam War; in "But You'll Never Follow Me" a veteran still beholden to his war-torn battlefield ethic must now deal with his aging, ailing parents. It's a sad, sad story, without a trace of the unreal, and the climax hits a lot harder today than it did in 1990. Read it, and see what I mean. Ouch.

In "Evelyn Grace," by Thomas Tessier, a young man feels up a female corpse in a funeral home. Then things get weird. This one ends with very nearly the most objectionable word in the English language... and it is oh so right. Another one outta the park for Tessier; he's batting 1.000 here at TMHF. The ever-welcome-but-rarely-seen T.E.D. Klein contributed one of his few short stories of the '90s, "Ladder." Fate is a gamesman, a wordsmith, trailing an Irishman as he travels the globe. Klein's sense of place and locale is impeccable, and his brand of Borgesian wordplay tickle the intellect but unsettle it too; surely we are not gamepieces for an idle god...

One of the more infamous short stories of its day - the impact of which I've never forgotten even if the specifics were vague - "Stephen" ruminates upon bodily disfigurement in several disturbing ways, none of which resort to the supernatural. Elizabeth Massie (above) knows that while it was once proper to look away from the physically unfortunate, we all want to stare. And stare she does, unblinking, sympathetic, but without pity. Anne Zaccaria volunteers at a nursing home for the disabled and learns to confront her own deformities - not of the body but of her mind, her past, her family - thanks to the title character. "Stephen" is perhaps the most emotionally wrenching tale in Borderlands, never faltering in places where a lesser writer may have stumbled into grotesque tastelessness - well, I suppose there's some grotesque tastelessness here, but that's life. Excellent stuff, and another Bram Stoker Award winner, for best long fiction.

When I solicited material for what I hope will be the first of many volumes, I made it clear I didn't want stories that employed any of the traditional symbols and images of the genre. I wanted writers to expand the envelope, to look beyond the usual metaphors, and bring me something new... They are all extremely well-written. Some stories will dazzle, while others will quietly subvert, but they will all reach down and grab for the soft parts.

So says Tom Monteleone (above) in his intro, and he really deserves kudos for his editing skill here - and I don't have room to go into everything included. There is an air of conviction in all the stories; every one means business, even the "lesser" stories. No juvenile hijinks mar the carefully crafted terrors, no lapses in the write stuff to break the spells cast. Even the tales that get under the skin in a surreal yet inexplicable manner are serious in intent and purpose but without that sense of literariness of, say, 1988's Prime Evil; it's not so high-minded as that anthology. Borderlands (and the subsequent volumes, of which I own only the second today) promises to take us far, and it does, oh it does. What you will see there you've not seen elsewhere, but it's a one-way trip. So be warned: you'll have to find your way back on your own.

Tor Horror Paperbacks of the 1980s

Tor Books really held nothing back when it came to designing their horror paperbacks during that beloved 1980s boom. They were probably the most prominent purveyor of the day, even putting out titles in hardcover editions with usually the same cover art as seen here. Bold title fonts, breathless blurbs, highly charged color schemes, images that were sometimes subtle, sometimes absurd, sometimes even actually creepy. Their roster of authors included giants like Robert Bloch and Richard Laymon, as well as up-and-comers like K.W. Jeter and Lisa Tuttle, and folks who never made much of an impact in the genre either (I shall refrain from mentioning them, you know how I don't like to hurl my opinions about). I present simply a few...

Hellbound Hearts: Horror Anthologies of the 1980s

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.

Other '80s horror anthologies that I've already reviewed: Cutting Edge (1986), Prime Evil (1988), and Silver Scream (1988). Which ones did I miss?

Shadows, edited by Charles L. Grant (1978): "Soon You Shall Be As We"

A stark and simple cover image introduces Shadows, first in the long-running quiet horror/dark fantasy anthology series put together by quiet-horror maestro Charles L. Grant. At this period in the 1970s horror fiction had apparently not yet quite found its full and singular identity in the publishing world; Grant solicited tales by fantasy and science fiction writers - and in at least one case, crime writers - to fill out this original volume. The anthology itself won the 1979 World Fantasy Award, as the Bram Stoker Award was still years off; and the lead story, (the maddeningly elusive) "Naples" by SF writer Avram Davidson, won Best Short Fiction as well.

First though - what's up with the refrigerator magnet alphabet cover?! Ew boy. Playboy Press really went all out, no? Berkley Books, who published the reprint a few years later, used the same artwork but subsequent volumes fortunately had more oomph. Like this one, from '88.

Some of the stories in this first Shadows may be so quiet as to have their final import unheard or unrecognizable - common enough in this style of horror; others end with an unexpected shout in a dark silent room. But the caliber of writing, the actual prose, is uniformly good, from the capable strong hands of the known and unknown author alike. Grant writes intros for each, praising the writer for letting the reader's imagination do most of the work, for carefully crafting tales that lull us into dark and dangerous places, for "leaving out" that "final" sentence which might break the delicate spell of quiet horror: stories that are, as he puts it, like a razor that summons pain after the blood has been spilled. Nice.

Charles L. Grant c. late '70s

Overall the stories vary widely and well. Eternal horror anthology staple Ramsey Campbell contributes two stories: one long, "The Little Voice," and one very short, "Dead Letters." I found the latter, about a drunken suburban seance, to be chilling good fun; it would have made a fine, light "Night Gallery" episode. The former is in that classic Campbell style that either sneaks up on you and creeps you out, or bores you to tears as you trudge through his subtle allusions and asides in the pluperfect tense. I appreciated the haunting guilt of the main character but found the execution interminable.

Published 1987 as Shadows II for whatever reason in the UK

Two very little known writers give us two good stories: "Butcher's Thumb," by William Jon Watkins, is a grimly funny EC Comic, and "A Certain Slant of Light" by Raylynn Moore is a sensitively written haunted house story. Mystery writer Bill Pronzini muses longingly upon sex and death in the fractured "Deathlove" (natch). R.A. Lafferty's "Splinters" is odd, quirky, playful; I can't believe I had to Google "eidolon." Cover-noted Stephen King presents his fatalistic tale of a college student and drifter swept up in madness and crime, lust and murder, "Nona." Filled with creepy Freudian psychosexual imagery, it's marred only slightly by a trite final line. He really should have followed Grant's advice and left it out.

A college-age King

But my favorite was about a young Italian-American man who travels to his family's mother country for genealogical research. "Where All the Songs are Sad" by Thomas F. Monteleone is the longest story and very effective, evoking the rustic superstitions of the old country that aren't quite superstitions. With details of Italian villages so real and minute, he may even be writing an autobiographical piece, and uses a setting similar to Bradbury's marvelous "The Next in Line."

...they came upon the somber entrance to a very old cemetery. Pausing, he was arrested by the starkness of the gates, as if the gray stone and rusted ironwork led into a colorless, other dimension - as perhaps they did. He saw an inscription above the gate in the form of a short couplet: "Un tempo fummo come voi, Presto sarete come noi.""What does it say?" he asked Victoria, who stood silently watching him.
A shudder seemed to pass through her, her eyes lost their sparkle for a moment. "It says: 'Once we were as you, Soon you shall be as we.'"

Thomas F. Monteleone

(In the '90s Monteleone would himself edit an anthology series, the ambitious and experimental Borderlands - I can't believe I don't have my copies anymore! Must re-buy and review). Now, is "Ellisonian" a literary adjective? Because it should be. So let's say "Mory" from SF writer Michael Bishop is Ellisonian: a dark fantasy about an older man plagued by what first appears as a robber, yet without a weapon, in the man's liquor store; what he takes from him will be everything, everything and more. Not even Clark Griswold had a worse time at an amusement park. I wasn't too thrilled with Dennis Etchison's "The Nighthawk" when I read it recently in his The Dark Country, but I suppose it does fit the hushed fantastical tone Grant was looking for.

Doubleday hardcover 1978 - note "science fiction" label

"Picture" is Robert Bloch's wryly morbid entry, a Faustian fable of devilish deals gone wrong, so blackly comically wrong. Classic Bloch. And John Crowley is one of those not-so-prolific fantasy writers who has garnered effusive praise from folks who would never read fantasy (his classic Little, Big sits on my shelf in its original hippy-dippy 1981 paperback edition) and for Shadows he presents "Where Spirits Gat Them Home," a Wallace Stevens-titled tale of distant family relations, lost time, and even religious heresy... oh and death that awaits us patiently no matter what our intentions.

John Crowley

And deaths are well-met everywhere in these Shadows stories. Death inescapable, foreordained, a meeting whose arrangements have been made since long before you were you and we were we (No, the Things that live at the bottoms of old wells and the tops of old houses are old themselves, far older than anybody's ghost). Call it what you will: fate, destiny, bad luck, but it will be there for us all, and often and ironically not even in a respectful darkness but in a bright and unclouded noon, shadowless.