THE VALANCOURT BOOK OF
WORLD HORROR STORIES
THE VALANCOURT
BOOK OF WORLD
HORROR STORIES
VOLUME ONE
Edited by
James D. Jenkins & Ryan Cagle
VALANCOURT BOOKS
Richmond, Virginia
MMXX
The Valancourt Book of World Horror Stories, Volume One
First published December 2020
All stories copyright by their respective authors.
This compilation copyright © 2020 by Valancourt Books, LLC.
All translations copyright © 2020 by Valancourt Books, LLC, except ‘The Time Remaining’ © 2020 by Luca Karafiáth, ‘Pale Toes’ © 2020 by Sanna Terho, and ‘Mechanisms’ © 2020 by Mara Faye Lethem. The Acknowledgments pages on pp. 17-18 constitute an extension of this copyright page.
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the copying, scanning, uploading, and/or electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitutes unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher.
Published by Valancourt Books, Richmond, Virginia
http://www.valancourtbooks.com
Set in Bembo Book MT
Editors’ Foreword
Most horror readers, to the extent they’ve thought about it at all, have probably always assumed that horror fiction is an Anglo-American phenomenon. From Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe to Edgar Allan Poe and M. R. James, to H. P. Lovecraft, Shirley Jackson and Stephen King, horror has always been first and foremost a product of the United States and the British Isles, right? Aside from a handful of 19th-century French or German or Russian stories that crop up every so often in an old anthology, or the occasional name bandied about by horror fiction connoisseurs, but whose works are largely unavailable and seldom read, such as the Belgian Jean Ray (1887-1964), there’s not really much ‘international horror fiction’ to speak of. Everybody knows that, right?
But what if everybody was wrong? What if there were a whole world of great horror literature out there being produced by writers in distant lands, in books you couldn’t access and languages you couldn’t read? To an avid horror fan, what could be more horrifying than that?!
If you’re still struggling to come up with the names of international horror writers, don’t feel bad. You’re not alone. Even in countries where fine horror fiction exists, it has often been ignored or forgotten. For example, in the introduction to his anthology of all-original Dutch horror fiction, editor Robert-Henk Zuidinga laments that ‘few Dutch-language writers have ventured [to write in the field of the] literary horror story’1, a judgment that neglects the psychological horror tales of Felix Timmermans (1886-1947) (recently published by Valancourt), the Aickman-style strange stories of Jacques Hamelink (b. 1939), and the elegant ghost stories of Kathinka Lannoy (1917-1996), to name a few. Similarly, the popular Norwegian thriller writer André Bjerke recounts that he was approached to edit an anthology of ghost stories from around the world and a separate anthology featuring only fantastic tales from Norway. In his response to the publisher, he warned that the Norwegian ‘anthology is naturally leaner than [the international one], both in terms of quality and quantity’ and wrote that, ‘here I could wander like [explorer Henry Morton] Stanley in the undiscovered primeval forest – for no one has gone into this terrain before me’.2 And yet, despite his initial misgivings, in the end Bjerke managed to compile an impressive volume of some two dozen fine Norwegian horror stories spanning 1840 to 1977, including one we’ve chosen for the present volume. To cite one more example, the Argentinian author of weird tales Mariana Enríquez recently declared that, ‘There is no tradition of horror or weird writing in Spanish’,3 a debatable pronouncement that would no doubt come as a surprise to the Spanish writers featured in the present volume.
The moral of the story is that if one takes the trouble to look hard enough, there’s a much larger body of world horror fiction out there than any of us would suspect. However, as Bjerke suggested, it often involves deep digging and venturing into uncharted waters.
In fact, international horror fiction has been around just about as long as it has existed in the English-speaking world. Not long after Horace Walpole kicked off the craze for Gothic fiction with The Castle of Otranto (1764), William Beckford published his masterpiece Vathek (1786), written in French and issued in Switzerland. And in the 1790s, while Ann Radcliffe’s bestsellers like The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) were flying off British circulating library shelves, the Polish Count Jan Potocki was writing, again in French, his own Gothic masterpiece, The Manuscript Found in Saragossa. Ukrainian-born Nikolai Gogol was writing tales in Russian that might be called ‘Poe-esque’ before Poe himself began publishing stories in America. During the Romantic era, while Gothic horror was popular in England and America, it also flourished in France, Germany,4 Italy,5 Sweden6 and Spain7, and throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, many European countries, as well as places as far apart as Argentina8 and Japan,9 had a tradition of what might be termed horror or weird fiction. And, as you’re about to find out from this book, horror fiction is alive and flourishing in nearly every corner of the world in the 21st century.
The impulse towards horror appears to be a universal phenomenon, running through the literatures of a great many cultures over a very long period of time. If horror fiction as we think of it today is a relatively modern concept, the trappings of horror can be found in writing from all over the world throughout all of human history. From the witch Circe, murderous Sirens and man-eating Cyclops in Homer’s The Odyssey to the Bible’s stories of demons and devils, to the Roman writer Pliny the Elder’s accounts of werewolves, it is not hard to find the precursors of modern-day horror in ancient texts from around the world.
But this isn’t the place or time for a full exploration of horror throughout the ages or throughout the world.10 The point we’re trying to make is that horror is neither an exclusively modern phenomenon nor an exclusively Anglophone one, and moreover – and what might be most surprising – some of the world’s best horror fiction has come (and continues to come) from elsewhere.
Yet although there is a lot of high-quality horror fiction continuing to be produced around the world, very little of it is being published for English-speaking readers. There have been a couple of encouraging exceptions in recent years – Dutch author Thomas Olde Heuvelt’s internationally bestselling witch novel Hex (2016) and French writer Grégoire Courtois’ harrowing The Laws of the Skies (2019) come to mind – but for the most part, on the rare occasions when foreign horror is published for an American or British audience, it’s an isolated appearance of a short story in an obscure periodical, or publication online in some little-frequented corner of the web.
But even if not much foreign horror has made its way into U.S. bookshops, it’s a big deal in its home countries. Did you know that in the tiny principality of Andorra, nestled in the Pyrenees between France and Spain, there is an annual government-sponsored competition open to all the country’s residents, with the writer of the best horror story earning 600 euros? Or that Bulgaria and Denmark have active horror writers’ associations? (In Denmark there’s so much horror fiction being published that they even give out annual awards for the best; one of the winners is featured in this book.) In tiny Iceland, and in the Spanish
region of Galicia, publishers have launched versions of the seminal Weird Tales magazine in their local languages. In Catalonia, one small publisher annually chooses four prominent Catalan authors to lock up in a reputedly haunted castle for a weekend to write horror tales, then publishes the results in a yearly volume. In recent years, horror anthologies have even begun to crop up in languages most people have never heard of, like Western Frisian and Corsican.11 The closer you look, the more you find that horror fiction really is everywhere.
So why isn’t more of it being made available to English-speaking readers?
Well, it’s pretty simple really. For starters, most horror these days is published – both here and abroad – by small presses. Small American and British presses probably don’t have someone on staff who can read and evaluate the quality of Romanian, or Swedish, or Afrikaans horror stories, while conversely the small Romanian, Swedish, and Afrikaans publishers might not have the financial wherewithal to commission English translations of their books and send them out to potential U.S. or U.K. publishers. So in many cases the material remains appreciated only by the comparatively small audience able to read it.
The idea of compiling a volume of world horror fiction is one we’ve been kicking around for a while, but although the idea seemed a good one, it immediately gave rise to all kinds of questions and problems. Should the book focus on classic stories from the 19th and 20th centuries, present-day writing, or a combination of the two? If we were to exclude American and British work, what about other English-language stories (e.g., from Australia, New Zealand, or India)? Would we collect previously translated material or concentrate on stories that had never before appeared in English? And if the latter, how were we to find them?
Ultimately we decided to feature contemporary writing in this first volume and save older and classic material for a potential future project. We also chose to focus primarily on non-English-language fiction, and specifically on material that had never before been translated. Recognizing, however, that many countries – some of them significantly underrepresented in American publishing – use English widely (for example the Philippines, featured in this volume), we ended up excluding only English-language contributions from the U.S., U.K., Canada, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. On the other hand, authors from those countries writing in another language were eligible for inclusion (such as Spanish-language writers from Puerto Rico, Francophone writers from Quebec, or an author writing in Irish or another indigenous language).
We posted a call for submissions on our website and social media accounts in early 2019, inviting submissions for this volume. Stories written in one of the fifteen or so languages we were able to read could be sent in their original language; others had to be accompanied by some sort of synopsis or rough translation to give us an idea of what the story was about and whether it seemed like the sort of thing we might like to commission a professional translation of. Though the call for submissions did not result in a large number of entries, it did bring in several very high-quality tales, including two ultimately chosen for this volume, by Attila Veres (Hungary) and Marko Hautala (Finland).
The process of finding the rest of the stories mostly involved a great deal of research. In a few cases our jobs were made easier by foreign editors who had compiled anthologies of the best horror stories from their countries. But when all else failed, we went to Google and ran searches like ‘mejores escritores de terror mexicanos’ and ‘skräckberättelser på svenska’, and spent months poring over books, articles, websites, reviews, etc., to learn who were the preeminent horror writers in those different countries and languages. Then we sought out those authors’ works – sometimes with a fair amount of difficulty – and spent countless hours reading through them to find the very best ones. In the end, we read more than 200 stories from around 40 countries, originally written in around 20 different languages, narrowing it down to the ones we thought were the best and most interesting for this book.
A book like this one has obvious limitations. First, in terms of space: with nearly 200 countries in the world and some 7,000 living languages, there is no way to include a comprehensive selection of all the world’s horror fiction in just one volume. And then of course there’s the matter of language: having decided to focus primarily on stories that haven’t previously appeared in English, we were limited to stories in languages we could understand (though fortunately some of these, like French and Spanish, have a broad international reach) or ones that were submitted to us with accompanying translations. To the reader who is disappointed her favorite country – China, Russia, Turkey, or wherever it may be – was not included, we can only say that this is the first in a projected series of similar volumes and we hope that the success of this book will lead to an even wider geographical selection of submissions for future books.
In terms of the stories we did choose, we aimed for as diverse a group of entries as possible, both in terms of geographical diversity (North, Central, and South America, the Caribbean, Europe, Africa, and Asia are all represented in the book), a wide range of themes and content, and a diverse lineup of authors that ensured a high rate of inclusion of women writers, authors of color, and LGBT-interest material. We also made a specific effort to seek out contributions from countries whose literatures are less well known to American readers, like Ecuador, Senegal, and Martinique. Finally, we aimed to find stories that used horror in interesting and novel ways, such as Flavius Ardelean’s ‘Down, in Their World’, in which the author incorporates age-old superstitions from his native Transylvania, or Bathie Ngoye Thiam’s ‘The House of Leuk Dawour’, which updates oral Senegalese folklore traditions into a modern-day horror tale, or Flore Hazoumé’s ‘Menopause’, which manages to be both an unsettling horror story and a clever piece of social commentary on women’s roles in Ivory Coast society. The resulting selection of stories is an eclectic mix that we hope horror readers will enjoy as much as we did.
There’s an oft-cited statistic that only 3% of the books published in the U.S. are translated works. As you’re about to see from the following stories, the reason for this is not a lack of high-quality foreign language material. The primary reason is almost certainly cost: professional translation services are extremely expensive and cost-prohibitive for all but the largest publishers. For that reason, we translated all but three of the stories in this volume in-house, in consultation with the authors, for whose edits and suggestions we’re very grateful. We welcome comments and feedback from readers about the translations or the book as a whole. Let us know which stories you liked best, which of these authors you’d love to read more from, and what you’d like to see in a potential second volume.
Whether you call them horror stories, griezelverhalen, historias de terror, skräckberättelser, racconti dell’orrore, or (perhaps our favorite) spookstories, there’s something universal about the telling and reading of a good, creepy tale. A whole new world of horror is awaiting your discovery. Turn the page and encounter the international side of horror . . .
James D. Jenkins & Ryan Cagle
Valancourt Books
April 2020
James D. Jenkins and Ryan Cagle founded Valancourt Books in 2004 and since that time have republished over 500 lost and neglected texts, primarily in the fields of Gothic, supernatural, and horror literature, with an aim to making these books available in affordable editions for modern readers. They are also the co-editors of the four volumes of the acclaimed The Valancourt Book of Horror Stories series. James holds a BA in French and an MA in Romance Languages and Literatures and also studied Dutch and Italian at university; he has since learned over a dozen more languages and took advantage of his language studies in translating many of the stories for this volume.
1 Robert-Henk Zuidinga (ed.), Uit den boze: Oorspronkelijke griezelverhalen (Amsterdam: Sijthoff, 1984), p. 7. The translation is ours.
2 A
ndré Bjerke (ed)., Drømmen, draugen og dauingen: grøssere og selsomme historier i norsk prosa (Oslo: Den norske Bokklubben, 1978), p. 5. The translation is ours.
3 Mariana Enríquez, ‘Creating a New Tradition of Latin American Horror’, https://lithub.com/creating-a-new-tradition-of-latin-american-horror/, Oct. 31, 2018 (accessed April 17, 2020).
4 See, e.g., Daniel Hall, French and German Gothic Fiction in the Late Eighteenth Century (Bern: Peter Lang, 2005).
5 See Riccardo Reim (ed.), Da uno spiraglio: Racconti neri e fantastici dell’Ottocento italiano, (Roma: Newton Compton, 1992).
6 See the collections of rare 19th-century Swedish horror fiction published by Aleph, e.g., Nattens paradis: Svenska sällsamheter, ed. Rickard Berghorn (Stockaryd: Aleph, 2017).
7 See, e.g., Miriam López Santos, La novela gótica en España (1788-1833), (Vigo: Editorial Academia del Hispanismo, 2010).
8 Probably more fairly termed ‘weird’ than outright ‘horror’, Argentine writers such as Jorge Luis Borges, Silvina Ocampo, and Julio Cortázar might be cited here, along with contemporary writer Mariana Enríquez, whose fine collection Things We Lost in the Fire (2016) was a rare international horror title to see wide release in English.
9 For example, Lafcadio Hearn’s Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things (1904), Edogawa Rampa’s Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination (1954) or Koji Suzuki’s Ring (1991) and its sequels.
10 Such a book is yet to be written; however, Jess Nevins’s recent scholarship, published in Horror Needs No Passport: 20th Century Horror Literature Outside the U.S. and U.K. (self-published, 2018) and Horror Fiction in the 20th Century (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Praeger, 2020), is probably the best place to start.
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