STEPHEN JONES is the winner of the World Fantasy Award and seven-time recipient of The British Fantasy Award for Fantasy Tales, the paperback magazine of fantasy and terror. A full-time columnist, film-reviewer, illustrator, television producer/director and horror movie publicist (Hellraiser, Hellbound, Nightbreed etc.), he is the co-editor of Horror: 100 Best Books, The Best Horror from Fantasy Tales, Gaslight & Ghosts, Now We Are Sick and the Dark Voices series, and compiler of Clive Barker’s The Nightbreed Chronicles, Clive Barker’s Shadows in Eden and James Herbert: By Horror Haunted.
RAMSEY CAMPBELL is the most respected living British horror writer. After working in the civil service and public libraries, he became a full-time writer in 1973. He has written hundreds of short stories and the novels The Doll Who Ate His Mother, The Face That Must Die, The Parasite, The Nameless, Incarnate, Obsession, The Hungry Moon, The Influence, Ancient Images and Midnight Sun. A multiple winner of both the World Fantasy Award and British Fantasy Award, he has also edited several anthologies, broadcasts frequently on Radio Merseyside as a film critic, and is President of the British Fantasy Society. He especially enjoys reading his stories to audiences.
BEST NEW
HORROR
BEST NEW
HORROR
Edited by
STEPHEN JONES
and
RAMSEY CAMPBELL
Robinson Publishing
London
First published by
Constable & Robinson Ltd.
55–56 Russell Square
London WC1B 4HP
www.constablerobinson.com
Best New Horror series copyright © Robinson Publishing 1990
This selection copyright © by Stephen Jones and Ramsey Campbell 1990
Cover illustration © by Les Edwards 1990
All rights reserved.
ISBN 1 85487 058 0
eISBN 978 1 47211 361 0
Typset by Selectmove Ltd, London
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
The Guernsey Press Co. Ltd., Guernsey, Channel Islands
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS
Introduction: Horror in 1989
THE EDITORS
Pin
ROBERT R. McCAMMON
The House on Cemetery Street
CHERRY WILDER
The Horn
STEPHEN GALLAGHER
Breaking Up
ALEX QUIROBA
It Helps if You Sing
RAMSEY CAMPBELL
Closed Circuit
LAURENCE STAIG
Carnal House
STEVE RASNIC TEM
Twitch Technicolor
KIM NEWMAN
Lizaveta
GREGORY FROST
Snow Cancellations
DONALD R. BURLESON
Archway
NICHOLAS ROYLE
The Strange Design of Master Rignolo
THOMAS LIGOTTI
. . . To Feel Another’s Woe
CHET WILLIAMSON
The Last Day of Miss Dorinda Molyneaux
ROBERT WESTALL
No Sharks in the Med
BRIAN LUMLEY
Mort au Monde
D.F. LEWIS
Blanca
THOMAS TESSIER
The Eye of the Ayatollah
IAN WATSON
At First Just Ghostly
KARL EDWARD WAGNER
Bad News
RICHARD LAYMON
Necrology: 1989
STEPHEN JONES & KIM NEWMAN
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
THE EDITORS WOULD like to thank Kim Newman, Jo Fletcher, Jessie Horsting, Dennis Etchison, Tammy Campbell and Kathy Gale for their help and support. Thanks are also due to the magazines Locus (Editor & Publisher Charles N. Brown, Locus Publications, P.O. Box 13305, Oakland, CA 94661, USA) and Science Fiction Chronicle (Editor & Publisher Andrew I. Porter, P.O. Box 2730, Brooklyn, NY 11202–0056, USA) which were used as reference sources in the Introduction and Necrology.
INTRODUCTION: HORROR IN 1989 Copyright © 1990 by Stephen Jones and Ramsey Campbell
PIN Copyright © 1989 by The McCammon Corporation. Originally published in Blue World. Reprinted by permission of the author.
THE HOUSE ON CEMETERY STREET Copyright © 1988 by Cherry Wilder. Originally published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, December 1988. Reprinted by permission of the author.
THE HORN Copyright © 1989 by Stephen Gallagher. Originally published in Arrows of Eros. Reprinted by permission of the author.
BREAKING UP Copyright © 1989 by Alex Quiroba. Originally published in West/Word Volume 1, Spring/Summer 1989. Reprinted by permission of the author.
IT HELPS IF YOU SING Copyright © 1989 by Ramsey Campbell. Originally published in Book of the Dead. Reprinted by permission of the author.
CLOSED CIRCUIT Copyright © 1989 by Laurence Staig. Originally published in Dark Toys and Other Consumer Goods. Reprinted by permission of the author’s publishers, Pan/Macmillan Children’s Books, London.
CARNAL HOUSE Copyright © 1989 by Steve Rasnic Tem. Originally published in Hot Blood: Tales of Provocative Horror. Reprinted by permission of the author.
TWITCH TECHNICOLOR Copyright © 1989 by Kim Newman. Originally published in Interzone No.28, March/April 1989. Reprinted by permission of the author.
LIZAVETA Copyright © 1988 by Gregory Frost. Originally published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, December 1988. Reprinted by permission of the author.
SNOW CANCELLATIONS Copyright © 1989 by Donald R. Burleson. Originally published in 2AM No.13, Fall 1989. Reprinted by permission of the author.
ARCHWAY Copyright © 1989 by Nicholas Royle. Originally published in Dark Fantasies. Reprinted by permission of the author.
THE STRANGE DESIGN OF MASTER RIGNOLO Copyright © 1989 by Thomas Ligotti. Originally published in Grue No. 10, Fall 1989. Reprinted by permission of the author.
. . . TO FEEL ANOTHER’S WOE Copyright © 1989 by Chet Williamson. Originally published in Blood Is Not Enough. Reprinted by permission of the author.
THE LAST DAY OF MISS DORINDA MOLYNEAUX Copyright © 1989 by Robert Westall. Originally published in Antique Dust. Reprinted by permission of the author.
NO SHARKS IN THE MED Copyright © 1989 by Brian Lumley. Originally published in Weird Tales No.295, Winter 1989. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agent.
MORT AU MONDE Copyright © 1989 by D.F. Lewis. Originally published in Dagon No.26, October-December 1989. Reprinted by permission of the author.
BLANCA Copyright © 1989 by Thomas Tessier. Originally published in Post Mortem: New Tales of Ghostly Horror. Reprinted by permission of the author.
THE EYE OF THE AYATOLLAH Copyright © 1989 by Ian Watson. Originally published in Interzone No.33, January/February 1990. Reprinted by permission of the author.
AT FIRST JUST GHOSTLY Copyright © 1989 by Karl Edward Wagner. Originally published in Weird Tales No.294, Fall 1989. Reprinted by permission of the author.
BAD NEWS Copyright © 1989 by Richard Laymon. Originally published in Night Visions 7. Reprinted by permission of the author.
NECROLOGY: 1989 Copyright © 1990 by Stephen Jones and Kim Newman.
For
KARL EDWARD WAGNER
friend and fellow editor
INTRODUCTION:
HORROR IN 1989
FOLLOWING THE EXPLOSION OF horror fiction in 1988, growth in the genre appeared to level off in 1989. However, horror still accounted for almost 15% of all the books published in America and 9% of the British total. According to the trade newspaper Locus, this is still a long way behind science fiction and fantasy (which each account for nearly 25% of the totals). How
ever, the field is much more fruitful than during the first half of the decade.
1989 saw new novels from most of the big names: Stephen King followed up the commercial and critical success of Misery with an equally well-received tale of the horrors of authorship, The Dark Half; Clive Barker’s The Great and Secret Show was the first part of a sprawling magnum opus that threw in almost everything but the kitchen sink; James Herbert turned his talents to the traditional ghost story in Haunted; Ancient Images by Ramsey Campbell combined the quest for a lost Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi movie with something older and more dangerous; while Dean R. Koontz (not a horror writer, he insists) continued to please his crowds of fans with another bestseller, Midnight.
One of the most ambitious horror novels of the year was Dan Simmons’s tale of psychic vampires, Carrion Comfort. Robert R. McCammon gave us a fast-moving combination of lycanthropy, espionage and Nazis in The Wolf’s Hour. Two masters of the macabre moved closer to the suspense novel, Stephen Gallagher with Down River and Peter Straub with Mystery, while a master of suspense, James Elroy, moved towards horror with The Big Nowhere. Subtle terrors were also to be had from T.M. Wright (The Place), Robert Robinson (Bad Dreams) and Peter Ackroyd (First Light), the latter confirming the mastery of the supernatural novel which Ackroyd displayed in Hawksmoor. The Ackroyd and Robinson books were published as if they lay outside their field, and this was also true of Patrick McGrath’s first novel The Grotesque and Katherine Dunn’s extraordinary Geek Love, though Stephen Gregory’s The Woodwitch was mysteriously transmuted into a horror novel as it crossed the ocean to America.
Several established horror writers produced enduring work: K.W. Jeter (In the Land of the Dead and The Night Man), Brian Lumley (Necroscope III: The Source), Chet Williamson (Dreamthorp) and Charles L. Grant (In a Dark Dream and Dialing the Wind). Nor should we forget Robert Bloch (Lori), Graham Masterton (Walkers), Joe R. Landsdale (The Drive-In 2 [Not Just One of Them Sequels]), Tim Powers (The Stress of Her Regard) and Jonathan Carroll (the remarkable A Child Across the Sky). Among the newer writers whose work attracted favourable comment were Mark Morris (Toady), Peter James (Dreamer), Michael Paine (Owl Light), Randall Boyll (After Sundown), Bruce McAllister (Dream Baby), David C. Smith (The Fair Rules of Evil), Scott Bradfield (History of Luminescence), Kim Newman (The Night Mayor and, as “Jack Yoevil”, Drachenfels) and Nancy A. Collins (Sunglasses After Dark).
It was a good year for collections. Arkham House published a substantially corrected edition of H.P. Lovercraft’s The Horror in the Museum, while the British publisher Equation brought out books of previously uncollected tales by E.F. Benson and Algernon Blackwood, among others. Living writers who published important collections included John Shirley (Heatseeker); Michael Blumlein (The Brains of Rats); Keith Roberts (Winterwood and Other Hauntings); Joe R. Lansdale (By Bizarre Hands); Robert R. McCammon (Blue World); F. Paul Wilson (Soft); Christopher Fowler (The Bureau of Lost Souls); Laurence Staig (Dark Toys and Consumer Goods, published as children’s fiction); and Robert Westall (Antique Dust, an adult book by a writer whose children’s fiction has considerable adult appeal). And the much underrated Thomas Ligotti saw an expanded and revised edition of his acclaimed 1986 collection Songs of a Dead Dreamer from Robinson.
The anthology market fared less well. John Skipp and Craig Spector’s Book of the Dead boasted contributions by King, McCammon, Schow, Winter and Lansdale, but despite the packaging, by no means all the contents were set in the world of George Romero’s zombie trilogy. Ellen Datlow’s Blood is Not Enough was a little too bloodless, and Graham Masterton’s laudable charity collection, Scare Care, was a decidedly mixed bag of delights, as was Hot Blood: Tales of Provocative Horror, in which some of the tales chosen by Jeff Gelb and Lonn M. Friend seemed to be straining to rise to the book’s subtitle. Masques III edited by J.N. Williamson, Stalkers edited by Ed Gorman and the ubiquitous Martin Greenberg, Night Visions 7 (nominally edited by Stanley Wiater and containing tales by Richard Laymon, Chet Williamson and Gary Brander), Post Mortem: New Tales of Ghostly Horror edited by Paul F. Olson and David B. Silva, and the burgeoning Pulphouse: the Hardback Magazine anthologies included substantial material. Editor Joe R. Lansdale blended the western with horror (and virtually every other genre) in Razored Saddles (with Pat LoBrutto) and New Frontiers.
In Britain, the unstoppable Pan Book of Horror Stories limped into its 30th anniversary as the world’s longest-running horror anthology series under the editorship of Clarence Paget, while Chris Morgan’s Dark Fantasies tried to make a case for “quiet” horror. In The Year’s Best Fantasy Second Annual Collection Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling provided a hefty grab-bag of fantasy and horror, and Karl Edward Wagner displayed more obscure gems in the seventeenth volume of his always-reliable The Year’s Best Horror.
Not before time, contemporary women writers of horror and dark fantasy were showcased in Kathryn Ptacek’s Women of Darkness, while Jessica Amanda Salmonson explored the tradition of feminist supernatural fiction in What Did Miss Darrington See?, both an excellent selection of reprints and an essential guide to further reading. Salmonson did much the same for fanzines and the small presses in her anthology Tales By Moonlight II.
On the magazine front we bid farewell to Twilight Zone Magazine (which followed its stable-mate Night Cry into oblivion) and The Horror Show, one of the best of the semi-professional journals. The occasional horror story turned up in the science fiction magazines, Omni and Interzone among them, as well as in more traditional outlets such as Fantasy Tales, Fear and the revived Weird Tales. However, the small press magazines dominated the field, with good material appearing in 2AM, Grue, Dagon, Midnight Graffiti, Haunts, Deathrealm, Ghosts & Scholars, Back Brain Recluse, Dark Regions, Eldritch Tales and The British Fantasy Society’s Winter Chills.
At times Clive Barker seemed to dominate the comics industry, with adaptions of his work appearing in Tapping the Vein Books One and Two and spin-off stories from his movie mythos turning up in the first volume of Hellraiser. Another British author, Neil Gaiman, used Sandman, and the willingness of DC Comics to deal with disturbing themes, to turn an old idea into some of the most daring and poetic fiction to appear in comic books in recent years. Bryan Talbot’s ambitious and astonishing epic The Adventures of Luther Arkwright, which has much of awe and horror to offer, finally appeared in a collected edition. Taboo and Fly In My Eye, anthologies of new adult comics, were commendably determined to break new ground; the second issue of Fly even presented a graphic version of Ramsey Campbell’s autobiography!
As usual, reference books ranged from the useful to the useless. Stephen King suffered further second-hand exposure in no less than three new volumes: Feast of Fear, a signed, boxed, numbered book of interviews edited by publishers Underwood-Miller; The Stephen King Companion edited by George Beahm; and Tyson Blue’s The Unseen King. Emily Sunstein’s biography Mary Shelley, subtitled Romance and Reality, explored the complex life of the teenage creator of Frankenstein. Brian J. Frost examined vampirism in literature in The Monster With a Thousand Faces, while Norine Dresser published American Vampires. Leonard Wolf’s Horror: A Connoisseur’s Guide was too sloppily researched to deserve its subtitle. By contrast, the revised and updated Arkham House Companion by Sheldon Jaffrey was indispensable. Kim Newman’s revised Nightmare Movies was meticulously researched and thought-provoking, and Horror: 100 Best Books, edited by Newman and Stephen Jones, received a new lease of life in an American edition, its first edition having been all but aborted by the British publisher. Peter Cannon’s H.P. Lovecraft was a terse and insightful introduction to the work of that controversial writer.
The most successful horror movie of 1989 was Pet Sematary, scripted by Stephen King from his own novel; it earned around $60 million at the box office. However, this was well behind top grossers Batman, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. The Fly II, Fright Night Part II, Ghostbusters II, Hellbound: Hellraiser II, Nightmare On Elm Street V, Hallowe’en V
and Friday the 13th: Part VIII all proved to be disappointments for their makers, and it looks as if the sequel as a species may go back into its hole for a while. Among the critical successes were Paperhouse, Parents, Dead Ringers and The Dead Can’t Lie but, like other releases, such as Phantom of the Opera, Lair of the White Worm, 976-Evil, The Horror Show and Wes Craven’s hit-or-miss Shocker, all held the middle ground. It looks as if most horror films are still destined (many deservedly) to be cast straight into the outer darkness of video during the 1990s.
One of the most impressive movies of the year was Nigel Kneale’s adaptation of Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black, which was made for television, but with such fare as Freddy’s Nightmares, Monsters, Tales from the Darkside, and the intermittently rewarding Tales from the Crypt and Friday the 13th: The Series clogging up the airwaves, television looks increasingly in need of real imagination. However, Twin Peaks is both disturbing and David Lynch’s funniest work to date, and makes up for a good deal of dross elsewhere.
Ronald Chetwynd-Hayes and Ray Bradbury collected Life Achievement Awards at the second annual Bram Stoker Awards Weekend, staged by The Horror Writers of America in New York in June of last year. Superior Achievement in Novel was awarded to Thomas Harris’s The Silence of Lambs; Kelley Wilde’s The Suiting received the First Novel award, and Joe R. Lansdale’s “Night They Missed the Horror Show” (from Silver Scream) the Short Story; David Morrell’s “Orange is for Anguish, Blue for Insanity” (from Prime Evil) was the Novelette. Roger Anker’s selection of tales by the late Charles Beaumont, some of them previously unpublished, was voted Fiction Collection of the year.
Ramsey Campbell’s The Influence won the August Derleth Award for Best Novel at Fantasycon XIV, held in Birmingham, England in October 1989. Other British Fantasy Award winners were Brian Lumley’s “Fruiting Bodies” (Best Short Story), Beetlejuice (Best Film), Carl T. Ford’s Dagon magazine (Best Small Press), and Dave Carson (Best Artist). The Icarus Award for Best Newcomer went to John Gilbert, editor of Fear, and R. Chetwynd-Hayes collected the Special Award for services to the field.
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