The Best New Horror 6

by Stephen Jones

  S.T. Joshi edited two issues of Lovecraft Studies and H.P. Lovecraft in the Argosy: Collected Correspondence from the Munsey Magazines. He also teamed up with David E. Schultz for H.P. Lovecraft: Letters to Samuel Loveman & Vincent Starrett and a re-edited edition of Lovecraft’s The Shadow Over Innsmouth, and they added Will Murray to the editorial team for The H.P. Lovecraft Dream Book.

  As usual, Necronomicon Press also published some attractive fiction booklets, including Irrational Numbers by David Langford, containing three new stories, and Four Shadowings by Donald R. Burleson featuring a quartet of tales. “The Hoard of the Wizard Beast” and One Other by Robert H. Barlow and revised by H.P. Lovecraft included “The Slaying of the Monster” and an introduction by Joshi.

  A horror boom in Australia resulted in a number of new small press titles. Although the début issue of Bloodsongs edited by A. Masters and Steve Proposch ran into problems with the Australian censor, it still managed to publish interviews with Ramsey Campbell and D.F. Lewis in its first two issues. Meanwhile, David Carroll and Kyla Ward’s Tabula Rasa, subtitled “A History of Horror”, continued to include entertaining and intelligent features, interviews and reviews.

  Frederick S. Clarke’s Cinefantastique published special features on Batman, The Shadow and Tim Burton’s Ed Wood, and its sister magazines Imagi-Movies and Femmes Fatales continued to thrive. Tim Lucas’s Video Watchdog described itself as “the Perfectionist’s Guide to Fantastic Video”, and it certainly lived up to that claim with some excellent retrospective articles, including tributes to the late Peter Cushing and Cameron Mitchell. Stephen Payne’s Starburst continued to concentrate on Star Trek and other TV fare such as The X Files and Babylon 5, while its sister magazine Shivers got a new look and a new editor with David Miller.

  To kick off its Summer Fiction Series, the June 24–26 issue of the Chicago Sun-Times’ USA Weekend magazine included a new short story by Clive Barker, “Animal Life”.

  The New York Review of Science Fiction kept to its monthly schedule and featured a study of Peter Straub’s fiction. John Gregory Betancourt’s Horror: The News Magazine of the Horror & Dark Fantasy Field once again failed to keep to any regular schedule, although a “special double issue” included interviews with Tor editor Melissa Ann Singer, Thomas Ligotti, Kathryn Ptacek and artist Harry O. Morris. Although smaller in scope, Afraid, The Newsletter for the Horror Professional appeared somewhat more regularly from editor Mike Baker. However, the only certain way to keep up with what was happening in genre publishing was still to subscribe to either Locus or Science Fiction Chronicle.

  Magazines I Remember was a personal memoir about writing for the pulp magazines by Hugh B. Cave, taken from his prolific correspondence with fellow writer Carl Jacobi, published in trade paperback by Tattered Pages Press.

  Arthur Machen & Montgomery Evans: Letters of a Literary Friendship, 1923–1947 was an associational collection of letters between the author and book collector Evans, edited by Sue Strong Hassler and Donald M. Hassler, and published by Kent State University Press. Greenwood Press published The Critical Response to Bram Stoker, a collection of reviews edited by Carol Senf.

  Although The Complete Vampire Companion by Rosemary Ellen Guiley didn’t quite live up to its title, The Vampire Book: The Encyclopedia of the Undead by J. Gordon Melton made a good attempt. Raymond T. McNally and Radu Florescu’s In Search of Dracula: The History of Dracula and Vampires was a completely revised and updated edition of their ground-breaking 1972 study.

  From McFarland & Co. came Harris M. Lentz III’s second supplement to his indispensable 1983 volume Science Fiction, Horror & Fantasy Film and Television Credits, listing credits through 1993, including some missing from the previous volumes. The Fearmakers edited by John McCarty included twenty essays about horror filmmakers, including Browning, Carpenter, Corman, Cronenberg, Romero and Whale, among others.

  The Creature Features Movie Guide Strikes Again by John Stanley was a fourth revised edition, reviewing 5,614 science fiction, fantasy and horror movies. The Addams Family and The Munsters Programme Guide was a useful reference volume compiled by John Peel. Stephen Jones’s The Illustrated Frankenstein Movie Guide contained reviews of more than 500 titles with special lightning bolt ratings, along with an introduction by Boris Karloff.

  Although we didn’t need another one, we still got The Films of Stephen King by Ann Lloyd. The lacklustre The Dean Koontz Companion edited by Martin H. Greenberg, Ed Gorman and Bill Munster featured a long interview, the author’s first story, and non-fiction by Koontz, plus various short articles and a basic bibliography. Roald Dahl by Jeremy Treglow was a recommended biography of the children’s and horror writer. Arkham House published Miscellaneous Writings by H.P. Lovecraft, edited by S.T. Joshi and containing various articles on a wide range of topics by Lovecraft, reprinted from Amateur Journalism. Clive Barker’s Short Stories: Imagination as Metaphor in the “Books of Blood” and Other Works by Gary Hoppenstand appeared from McFarland & Co. with an introduction by Barker.

  Flesh and the Mirror: Essays on the Art of Angela Carter contained thirteen studies of the late writer, edited by Lorna Sage. Anne Rice by Bette B. Roberts was a critical appraisal of the author’s life and work, while Katherine Ramsland’s reference guide to Rice’s “Lives of the Mayfair Witches”, The Witches’ Companion, wasn’t. However, Ramsland’s The Anne Rice Trivia Book was exactly what it purported to be. On the same level, Stephen J. Spignesi’s unauthorised The V.C. Andrews Trivia and Quiz Book was particularly useful if you wanted to know what colour panties Cindy was wearing when she first returned to Foxworth Hall . . .

  In 1994 one of the longest-running and most successful small press publishers, Underwood-Miller, split into two separate imprints, Underwood Books and Charles F. Miller. Spectrum: The Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art was the first in a proposed series of annual collections edited by Cathy Burnett and Arnie Fenner from Underwood Books. Among the nearly 100 contributors were Michael Whelan, Frank Miller, Thomas Canty, John Bolton and the Chesley Award winners. Miller released Virgil Finlay’s Far Beyond, covering a wide selection of the artist’s black and white work from the 1930s to the 1960s, introduced by Brian J. Frost, and from the same publisher came a welcome new edition of Bernie Wrightson’s Frankenstein with an introduction by Stephen King.

  Clive Barker Illustrator II: The Art of Clive Barker featured text by Fred Burke and was one of the last releases from Eclipse. Still Weird featured more than 450 examples of Gahan Wilson’s grotesquely humorous cartoons (100 previously unpublished), and Morpheus International’s Mind Fields combined the paintings of Polish artist Jacek Yerka with thirty-three short-short stories by Harlan Ellison.

  The unbeatable team of writer Neil Gaiman and illustrator Dave McKean collaborated once again on a very dark graphic novel, The Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy of Mr. Punch: A Romance. James Herbert continued his popular saga of “The Rats” with a fourth instalment in graphic novel format, The City, illustrated by Ian Miller. Clive Barker’s short story Rawhead Rex appeared as a graphic novel from Eclipse with some stunning art by Les Edwards, and Boxtree collected Brian Lumley’s Necroscope comic into a graphic novel edition.

  DC Comics/Vertigo finally published Joe R. Lansdale’s Bram Stoker Award-winning mini-series Jonah Hex: Two-Gun Mojo as a graphic novel. Matt Wagner and Steven T. Seagle teamed up to bring back the first (and best) Sandman in Vertigo’s four-part Sandman Mystery Theatre: The Vamp, about a series of grisly murders set in 1938 New York City. This was not to be confused with the imprint’s other mini-series, Vamps, which was about five vampire biker babes. John Ney Rieber continued to develop some of Neil Gaiman’s concepts in Vertigo’s The Books of Magic series, and another Gaiman spin-off was Vertigo’s three-part mini-series Witchcraft.

  Following the success of the Jim Carrey movie, Dark Horse Comics collected John Arcudi and Doug Mahnke’s second mini-series, The Mask Returns. NBM continued to publish The Ray Bradbury Chronicles, with cover art by Dave
McKean, Jim Steranko and others.

  According to Variety, 1994 was the best-ever year for movies with ticket sales in the US estimated at $1.21 billion. Although films such as Disney’s The Lion King, Forrest Gump, True Lies, The Santa Claus and The Flintstones dominated the box office charts, darker fare such as the surprise hit The Mask, Interview With the Vampire (Anne Rice publicly changed her mind about the casting of Tom Cruise as Lestat), Wolf and The Crow also featured among the year’s top titles.

  Further down the charts were the underrated The Shadow, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Wes Craven’s New Nightmare. The animated Batman: Mask of the Phantasm, Addams Family Values and Nightmare Before Christmas all added to their 1993 totals, while hanging around the lower depths were Brainscan, Leprechaun 2 (imaginatively retitled One Wedding and Lots of Funerals in the UK), Cronos and Abel Ferrara’s remake of Body Snatchers.

  Among the year’s more interesting releases were Tim Burton’s delightful Ed Wood (a look at one of the worst film directors ever), Michele Soavi’s Dellamorte Dellamorte and Robert A. Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters. John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness owed quite a debt to both H.P. Lovecraft and Jonathan Carroll, Brian Yuzna’s Necronomicon was also loosely based on Lovecraft’s fiction, as was Lurking Fear.

  Tobe Hooper’s The Mangler used the Stephen King story as inspiration, Beyond Bedlam was adapted from the novel by Harry Adam Knight, Christopher Lee made a guest appearance in the low-budget British production Funny Man, big bugs were back in Ticks and Skeeter, Body Melt and Shrunken Heads managed to disgust, Boy Meets Girl managed to disturb, and the shelves were clogged with direct-to-video sequels like The Revenge of Pumpkinhead: Blood Wings, Bloodlust: Subspecies III, Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest, Phantasm: Lord of the Dead, Ghoulies IV, Puppetmaster IV, Trancers 4: Jack of Swords and Trancers 5: Sudden Deth.

  On television, The X Files proved to be the year’s biggest hit on both sides of the Atlantic, but such shows as Tales from the Crypt, RoboCop, Highlander, Forever Knight and the re-vamped Babylon 5 (with its Lovecraftian subplots) all had their darker moments. Mick Garris’s mini-series of Stephen King’s The Stand started well, but eventually ran out of steam after eight hours. HBO’s Witch Hunt was a slightly disappointing sequel to Cast a Deadly Spell, with Dennis Hopper taking over the role of private eye H. Phillip Lovecraft from Fred Ward. Richard Christian Matheson executive produced and co-scripted Full Eclipse, about a group of elite werewolf cops, while The Birds II: Land’s End was an unnecessary sequel to Hitchcock’s classic.

  At the 66th annual Academy Awards, Steven Spielberg finally picked up the award for Best Director, but it was for his Holocaust epic Schindler’s List (which also won another seven awards). The director’s box office smash Jurassic Park only managed Oscars for Best Sound, Best Sound Effects Editing and Best Visual Effects.

  The 1994 World Horror Convention was held over March 3–6 in Phoenix, Arizona. Dan Simmons, Charles L. Grant, Gahan Wilson and Edward Bryant were the guests of honour, and the absent Anne Rice was awarded the 1994 Grand Master Award.

  The Horror Writers of America held their annual meeting and Bram Stoker Awards Banquet at the Sahara Hotel, Las Vegas, over June 3–5. Peter Straub won in the Novel category for The Throat, and First Novel went to Nina Kiriki Hoffman’s The Thread That Binds the Bones. Jack Cady’s “The Night We Buried Road Dog” (from The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction) and Harlan Ellison’s “Mefisto in Onyx” (from Omni) tied for Novella, Dan Simmons’ “Death in Bangkok” (from Playboy) won Novelette, and Nancy Holder’s “I Hear the Mermaids Singing” (from Hottest Blood) won Short Story. Alone With the Horrors by Ramsey Campbell picked up Best Collection, Robert Bloch’s autobiography Once Around the Bloch won Non-Fiction and Joe R. Lansdale’s comic book Jonah Hex: Two-Gun Mojo was voted top in the new Other Media category. A Special Trustees Award went to Vincent Price, and guest speaker Joyce Carol Oates was presented with the Life Achievement award.

  FantasyCon XIX, the annual British Fantasy Convention, was held over September 30–October 2 in Birmingham. The British Fantasy Awards were presented to Ramsey Campbell’s The Long Lost for Best Novel (the August Derleth Award), Dennis Etchison’s “The Dog Park” (from Dark Voices 5) for Best Short Story, David Sutton and Stephen Jones’s Dark Voices 5 for Best Collection/Anthology and Pam Creasis’s Dementia 13 for Best Small Press. Les Edwards was presented with the Best Artist award, Conrad Williams accepted the Best Newcomer Award on behalf of Poppy Z. Brite, and the special Committee Award went to David Sutton for his contributions to the genre.

  The 1994 World Fantasy Awards were presented on October 30 at the World Fantasy Convention at the Clarion Hotel in New Orleans. This year the awards had a somewhat science fictional flavour with Lewis Shiner’s Glimpses winning Best Novel, Full Spectrum 4 edited by Lou Aronica, Amy Stout and Betsy Mitchell winning Best Anthology, and Jack Williamson receiving the Life Achievement award. Newcomer Terry Lamsley won the Best Novella award for “Under the Crust” (from his self-published collection of the same title), Fred Chappell’s Necronomicon Press booklet The Lodger won Best Short Fiction, and Necronomicon’s Marc Michaud also collected the Non-Professional Special Award. Ramsey Campbell’s Alone With the Horrors was presented with Best Collection, the Best Artist was a tie between Alan Clarke and J.K. Potter, and in their last year of publishing together, Underwood-Miller received the Special Award – Professional.

  Californian book dealer Barry R. Levin announced that Anne Rice won his firm’s Collectors Award for 1994 for Most Collectable Author of the Year. The limited first edition of Stephen King’s Insomnia, published by Mark V. Ziesing books, was voted Most Collectable Book of the Year, and Jack L. Chalker was awarded the special Lifetime Collectors Award for his important contributions to the collectability of fantastic literature as author and bibliographer.

  Despite the apparent stabilisation of the number of titles being published in the horror market, there is little doubt that the genre is in for a rough ride over the next few years. In a blatant example of creating their own self-fulfilling prophecy, publishers on both sides of the Atlantic are cutting back or even discontinuing their horror lines, then turning around and pointing to their own much-heralded warnings of a collapse of the market as the primary reason for these extreme measures.

  The wheel has now nearly turned full circle since the horror boom of the late 1980s, and there are almost certainly going to be bad times ahead for everyone. But if we are really honest with ourselves, it is the horror field itself which is primarily to blame for this downturn in its own fortunes.

  During the height of horror’s popularity, publishers were buying up and releasing inferior-quality books as fast as authors could churn them out. For now, vampire novels and young adult horror appear to be selling well, so once again publishers are falling over themselves to buy books in these categories – with little thought given to the quality of what they are marketing. In much the same way as Hollywood’s reaction to the latest trend in blockbuster movies, most publishers are jumping on the bandwagon far too late, and as soon as the market for these types of books reaches saturation point, then they will start looking around for some other area to exploit.

  But until that happens, the bookshelves will be swamped with sequels, inferior copies, share-cropped worlds, media novelisations and role-playing tie-ins, most of them written and published with little or no thought given to their intrinsic value or lasting worth.

  Of course, this is a purely commercial decision by writers and publishers alike, and until the law of diminishing returns finally results in the market collapsing, few people are going to worry about what they are doing to their own reputations or those of the genre while the cash keeps flowing in. And perhaps it doesn’t really matter, as this is the type of fiction that the majority of people apparently want to read. You only have to compare the sales figures for these kinds of books with those of works by many of the field’s most critically acclaimed authors to realise t
hat quality does not necessarily equal success in the world of literature.

  The market will continue to be saturated with one-idea anthologies based around a single “high concept” or media event, so long as the readership for them is still there. Few of the stories that appear in these books have any lasting worth, and most are quickly forgotten as soon as they are finished. Simply compare most of the short fiction being published today to some of the classic horror stories of the past, and ask yourself how much of it will be kept in print by anthologists in decades to come . . .

  For many people, the small press is seen as the saviour of the horror field, yet writers and artists with little or no talent (and even less professional experience) are lionised to the point of adulation. These days it appears that you don’t need to have been published outside the fanzines to win awards, be a guest of honour or have entire publications devoted to your work.

  But in the real world all this still counts for very little. Despite all the back-patting that goes on at conventions, it doesn’t make the slightest difference to the number of people who are out there buying the books.

  Until the publishers, editors, writers and (perhaps most importantly of all) readers learn to discern between what is worthwhile and what is not, the horror field is destined to drift towards another slump that it could take years to recover from. Of course, excellent work will always continue to appear, and all the Big Names will still turn up on the bestseller lists (whether they are willing to admit to writing horror or not), but it will be much more difficult for new writers to break into the shrinking market or for those authors who are already establishing themselves in the field to survive and develop their skills.