Where the Summer Ends
Karl Edward Wagner
A psychiatrist by training and a writer by preference, Karl Edward Wagner gave up his practice of medicine to concentrate on his writing, especially his series of stories and novels—about a brooding warrior-adventurer named Kane—which have brought a remarkable new force and depth into the heroic fantasy field established by the late Robert E. Howard. To date, there are a half dozen published books about Kane, but Wagner plans many more. Wagner is also very much interested in the modern tale of terror and his story “Sticks,” published first in 1973, is regarded by many as a classic of its kind. In his mid-thirties, he lives presently in North Carolina. Wagner has set this story in his native Knoxville, Tennessee, and focuses chillingly on an increasingly familiar aspect of the Southern landscape.
The Bingo Master
Joyce Carol Oates
Joyce Carol Oates was born and raised in the countryside near Lockport, New York. She received degrees from Syracuse University and the University of Wisconsin. A prolific author—poet, critic, and fiction writer—she has published more than a score of books and has been honored with nearly that many accolades, ranging from the O. Henry Prize to the National Book Award. Her novels include Wonderland and Them, and among her short-story collections are Marriages and Infidelities and Night-Side. The last, a striking group of stories focusing on the eerie side of relationships and happenings, signaled in 1977 that Joyce Carol Oates has more than a passing interest in the literature of fantasy. She referred to this story as a “mock allegory” and observed: “It would have been impossible for me to translate this parable into conventional naturalistic terms—which is a reason why many of us choose to write, at times, in the surreal mode: the psychological truths to impart are simply too subtle, too complex, for any other technique.” This is not a story for those longing for clanking chains and cobwebbed castles or other traditional paraphernalia of the uncanny story. But in a carefully woven and stylish way, Ms. Oates displays here that she is one of our finest living short-story writers, and illuminates along the way some of the higher and most original possibilities of the form. And few who now meet Rose Mallow Odom are likely to soon forget her or her night-side encounter with Joe Pye the Bingo Master.
Children of the Kingdom
T. E. D. Klein
New Yorker T. E. D. Klein is a young fiction writer—his novelette, “The Events at Poroth Farm,” was nominated for the World Fantasy Award—who has also written articles for The New York Times. While studying at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, he became intensely interested in the works of Providence-born fantasy writer H. P. Lovecraft, who combined cosmic horror with a feeling for the atmosphere of New England. The story that follows owes something to Lovecraft, but much more to New York, specifically Manhattan’s Upper West Side, where Klein now makes his home. He deals here, in realistic fashion laced with flashes of grim humor, with the tenor of modern-day urban life, its dirt and squalor alongside opulence, its economic and racial tensions, and the sense of life on the edge of danger. He has also richly evoked New York as a city of mystery and fascination, a kind of stage where ancient terrors meet modern ones.
The Detective of Dreams
Gene Wolfe
Born in Brooklyn, a veteran of the Korean War, and now living in Barrington, Illinois, Gene Wolfe has been publishing fantasy and science-fiction stories and novels for about a dozen years. He has been frequently nominated for Hugo and Nebula awards in science fiction, and his 1973 novella, “The Death of Dr. Island,” won the latter prize, which is voted upon by the membership of the Science Fiction Writers of America. Wolfe’s work is elegant in its style and always carefully thought out and constructed. This story is that way, but it is also like nothing else he has published. To the casual reader, it might seem a parody on a certain kind of nineteenth-century style and genre, but a closer look reveals a statement of deep personal belief and commitment, wrapped in the manners and atmosphere of another century, one he perhaps sees as especially significant to the close of this one.
vengeance is.
theodore sturgeon
Theodore Sturgeon, born on Staten Island, New York, of old American stock dating back to 1640, is one of the acknowledged masters of modern fantasy and science fiction, both in his short work and in such fine novels as More Than Human and The Dreaming Jewels. His styles are many: witty, spare, hardboiled, and lyrically expressive. He’s a remarkably inventive and powerful writer and there is reason to suspect his best stories will be remembered long after those of nearly all now posing for posterity in academic circles and in the literary quarterlies. Harlan Ellison once observed that Theodore Sturgeon knows more about love than anyone he’d ever met. And, in fact, the Sturgeon you might meet is earnest, warm, and sympathetic, a man who you immediately feel cares and understands. But, as this story testifies, he also understands the hurtful, twisted side of human nature.
The Brood
Ramsey Campbell
A lifelong resident of Liverpool, Ramsey Campbell began his writing career as a transatlantic protégé-by-mail of August Derleth. Derleth brought out Campbell’s first collection of stories in 1964, when he was only eighteen. Since then Campbell has published several further books, including a much praised collection, Demons by Daylight, and a fine, long horror novel, The Parasite. Campbell’s approach to the contemporary horror tale is oblique and subtle and colored by a gray view of the world that often has the cumulative effect of a nightmare from which one cannot awaken. The story at hand, set in his native Liverpool, conjures up fearful things in a distinctly urban setting, not unlike the manner in which his friend and fellow fantasist T. E. D. Klein does in New York.
The Whistling Well
Clifford D. Simak
Clifford D. Simak’s fiction is noted for its warm attention to human values and love for the American rural countryside. Simak is, in fact, a kind of folk writer, juxtaposing details of middle American life against the vastness of cosmic space. This vision sustains such science fiction classics as City and Way Station and has made Simak one of the field’s foremost writers. Now retired, he spent most of his career as a Minneapolis newspaperman, covering everything from medical science to the Wisconsin murder case which inspired the famous novel and film Psycho. Now a resident of Minnetonka, Minnesota, he was raised on a farm in southwestern Wisconsin, the area that forms the setting for the story that follows, with its unique Simakian statement.
The Peculiar Demesne
Russell Kirk
Russell Kirk is a political theorist, essayist, lecturer, scholar, novelist, and short-story writer, and author of the watershed book The Conservative Mind. From his home in the small town of Mecosta, Michigan, Kirk contributes regularly to William F. Buckley, Jr.’s, The National Review, and his polemic writings are valued and respected by those on both sides of the political aisle. Dr. Kirk has written a number of remarkable uncanny tales, which at once are firmly traditional, often noticeably allegorical, and tinged with Old Testament morality. This one, an episode in the career of his shadowy hero Manfred Arcane—who figures in two of Kirk’s novels, A Creature of the Twilight and Lord of the Hollow Dark—is a baroque entertainment of uncommon quality, set in an Africa on no known map.
Where The Stones Grow
Lisa Tuttle
Lisa Tuttle, still in her late twenties, is a Texan. Born in Houston, she attended college at Syracuse University, and once wrote a daily column about television for the Austin American-Statesman. Ms. Tuttle has published about two dozen stories to date, mainly in the genres of fantasy, horror, and science fiction. She collaborated with George R. R. Martin on “The Storms of Windhaven,” which was nominated for a Nebula Award as the best science-fiction novella of 1975. She and Martin later added to that novella and published a novel simply entitled Windhaven. Her interests include occult investigation and membership in the National Organization for Women (NOW).
The Night Before Christmas
; Robert Bloch
Robert Bloch has been contributing to the field of suspense and supernatural horror for more than forty years. Born in Chicago, he has been living in southern California for the last two decades, devoting much of his time to movie and television work. His most famous book is Psycho, but he has written several other fine novels of suspense, including The Scarf and Firebug. And he has published hundreds of short stories, the best of them being among the finest supernatural horror stories of our time, such as, “That Hell-Bound Train,” “The Animal Fair,” and “Yours Truly, Jack The Ripper.” Very few writers can match his skill at portraying the ticking mechanism of the psychopath, as this story powerfully demonstrates.
The Stupid Joke
Edward Gorey
Edward Gorey, a Midwesterner by birth, has been a unique fixture of the New York literary and artistic scene for over a quarter of a century, delighting a band of enthusiasts with wonderfully droll and macabre illustrated books brought out in limited editions. It has only been in recent years—with the publication of the two volumes of his collected works, Amphigorey and Amphigorey Too—that he’s gained a large popular following. Gorey’s work is witty, sad, ironic, elegant. It hearkens back to Victorian and Edwardian times, and is filled with references to opera, theater, and the ballet. Yet beneath the sophistication and stylization there is a vulnerable innocence—a kind of baffled and helpless awareness of the unhappy things fate holds in store for so many. The cumulative effect of his illustrated stories, beautifully drawn and written, is both touching and haunting.
A Touch of Petulance
Ray Bradbury
A book such as this would be incomplete without a story from Ray Bradbury. He is a multitalented author: poet, playwright, essayist, screenwriter, short-story writer, and novelist. But Bradbury’s first important work was in the genre of modern fantasy and horror stories, beginning in the early 1940s in the pulp magazine, Weird Tales. His early stories of fantasy, set mainly in the Midwest of his dreams and evoking the poetic memory of childhood and small-town life, opened up the form in an important way. In contrast to Lovecraft and most of the Victorian and Edwardian writers of fantasy, with their relatively impersonal protagonists or narrators, Bradbury depicted the supernatural in believable modern settings, and populated his stories with identifiable, ordinary people. After publication of Dark Carnival in 1947, with notable exceptions such as his masterful novel, Something Wicked This Way Comes, Bradbury has tended to focus on science fiction, creating such famous works as The Martian Chronicles and Fahrenheit 451. His contributions to both fields are enormous in both influence and artistry and it’s a privilege to offer here a new story of fantasy by Ray Bradbury.
Lindsay and the Red City Blues
Joe Haldeman
Born in Oklahoma City, raised in the Washington, D.C., area and now living in Florida, Joe Haldeman is widely regarded as one of the finest younger science fiction writers in America. His novel The Forever War, which won both of the major science fiction awards of its year, the Nebula and the Hugo, drew powerfully on his experiences in Vietnam as a combat demolition specialist. Haldeman holds a masters degree in English and taught a course on creative writing at the University of Iowa before devoting himself to full-time writing in 1975. His fiction is noted for its lean, realistic style and wry point of view. This story, which interestingly parallels Edward Bryant’s, “Dark Angel,” grew out of a visit Haldeman made to North Africa and expresses effectively some of the fears involved in contact with exotic foreign cultures.
A Garden of Blackred Roses
Charles L. Grant
Charles L. Grant is a versatile and talented New Jersey writer in his late thirties, who has made his mark in a number of fields, from science fiction to historical novels, but his first allegiance has always been to the tale of supernatural fantasy. In that field he has written a series of novels set in the fictional Connecticut town of Oxrun Station, beginning with The Hour of the Oxrun Dead in 1977. His work in fantasy is distinguished by its poetic imagery and subtle, delicate handling of fear—fear of loneliness, of loss, of the unknown. Those qualities, together with his feeling for the realities and mysteries of small-town America—a different approach to some of the same themes as the early Bradbury—makes for a compelling combination of the strange and familiar.
Owls Hoot in the Daytime
Manly Wade Wellman
In his long and varied career, spanning more than half a century, Manly Wade Wellman has published dozens of books and hundreds of stories. One of his Southern regional histories, Rebel Boast, garnered him a nomination for a Pulitzer Prize. He is perhaps most appreciated, however, for his tales of horror and the supernatural, many of them set in the rural South and revolving around a character named, simply, John, a wandering ballad singer who, silver-stringed guitar in hand, travels through the Southern mountains seeing all manner of strange things. Wellman’s stories are a bit in the tradition of Mark Twain and Irvin S. Cobb. They have a wonderful simplicity about them and abound in local color and the true Southern rural spirit.
Where There’s a Will
Richard Matheson &
Richard Christian Matheson
It is not unusual for a son to follow in the writing footsteps of his father, but it’s uncommon for the two to collaborate. Here is a rare and fortunate exception. Richard Matheson is a successful Hollywood screenwriter, author of many classic throat-gripping short stories and novels of terror—“Duel,” “Prey,” A Stir of Echoes, The Shrinking Man, I Am Legend—as well as one of the key writers to work with the late Rod Serling on the famous Twilight Zone television series. His son, Richard Christian Matheson, still in his mid-twenties, has already sold a number of short stories to magazines and anthologies and has begun a career in television scripting. He shows promise of making a strong mark of his own. Their combined talents concentrate here on the claustrophobic aspects of terror.
Traps
Gahan Wilson
A native of Evanston, Illinois, Gahan Wilson once remarked humorously that he is the only “admitted cartoonist” to have graduated from the Chicago School of Art. His cartoons—a sort of combination of Charles Addams and James Thurber—have appeared in The New Yorker, Playboy, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and The National Lampoon, where, even at their most ghoulish, they are considerably more wistful and gentle than most of the other things in that magazine. Wilson’s interest in the macabre goes far beyond the comic concerns of his cartoons, however. He has a considerable knowledge of, and respect for, the supernatural tradition in literature, and has, when prevailed upon, produced superb short stories. Because of the steady demand for his cartoons, Wilson has regrettably had time to write only a half dozen or so stories to date, this deliciously macabre and funny example being the latest.
The Mist
Stephen King
Stephen King is a literary phenomenon. While in his twenties, he burst on to the book scene with a best-selling novel of horror called Carrie, about a lonely high-school girl with awesome psychic powers. He has followed that with other astonishing successes, one after the other, making him one of the most popular writers in the world. King has a remarkable eye and feeling for the lives of ordinary Americans and the places they live. They’re the people you might see buying a McDonald’s hamburger, or at a local baseball game, or your neighborhood hardware store. And, indeed, that’s a key to understanding King’s way. He has carried on what Ray Bradbury pioneered: his stories are always about identifiable people whose lives are altered by paranormal events and forces. His characters and their worlds ring uncannily right, and he involves one intensely in their predicaments. That, as much as his superb touch with terror, is what readers respond to. All those King qualities are evident in this terrifying short novel, as well as his gift for visually rich, well-paced, gripping storytelling. In true King fashion, ordinary people come face-to-face with the stuff their nightmares are made of, in a familiar place not far from home.
A Conversation With
Kirby McCauley
Conducted by
Kealan Patrick Burke
KPB: Kirby, thanks a million for taking the time to do this interview. I’d like to start off by asking if you’d mind telling me a little bit about your background, specifically what led you to horror, New York, and ultimately the publishing business.
KM: I have always loved supernatural horror, fantasy, and science fiction. My mother loved books. She used to read Sax Rohmer and Agatha Christie, even Weird Tales. So in a sense I think my mother being a great reader influenced me. She respected, even revered books and the arts in general. I read a bit of everything, but I was averse to so-called children’s books. I’d always go for adult stuff. I don’t think, however, that I got the love only from my parents, but also from my sister. We read tons of pre-code 1955 horror comics and listen to the old radio shows: Suspense, Inner Sanctum, The Shadow, etc. We’re all products of our environment, and the times in which we are raised, and I saw a lot in my time, more than you’d probably be comfortable hearing about in an interview (laughs).
And I still read a bit of everything. I’m a big mystery fan, “mainstream”—Thomas Mann, Joseph Conrad, Maugham—but I especially zoomed in on horror. There was a guy back in Minneapolis in the late ’50’s who used to sell Weird Tales from the 1930s for a dollar a piece. One of the first tales I read was “The Hills of the Dead” by Robert E. Howard and it knocked the socks off me. Then I discovered Arkham House. When August Derleth and I first started to correspond I was probably about sixteen. I first visited him in 1957, or ’58. I drove down there from Minneapolis and he was very chatty and open.
Dark Forces: The 25th Anniversary Edition Page 62
