by Matt Cardin
The Dark Tower is King’s cult work, read by relatively few of his millions of Constant Readers. In part this is due to its history. Written in the late 1960s, the first volume in the series, The Gunslinger, was first published serially in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction between 1978 and 1981. In 1982 it was released as a limited edition of 10,000 copies by Donald M. Grant Publishers, making The Gunslinger a novel few of his fans knew. Grant published the second part in 1987, which was then released to the mass market by Sphere along with The Gunslinger, but sales of all the novels remained comparatively small.
The other reason why the series has not matched King’s usual success is that it is a fantasy rather than a horror text, and thus has not fit the King brand. However, during the 1980s and 1990s The Dark Tower exerted an increasing influence on King, whose novels began to connect to Roland’s adventures. Randall Flagg from The Stand (1978) appears in Wizard and Glass, while The Waste Lands features the enormous turtle from It (1986). Such links to his wider works increased in the final books, written after King was almost killed in an accident in 1999. Father Callaghan from ’Salem’s Lot appears, as does Ted Brautigan from Hearts in Atlantis (1999) and also King himself.
Because it is not considered part of the horror genre, The Dark Tower is rarely discussed as a canonical King text such as The Shining or The Stand. Yet because of this interconnectedness it is arguably the most significant of his works, and one that may come to define King’s legacy, not as a bestselling author, but as a writer and creator of worlds. In 2017, after a decade in development hell, a film adaptation titled The Dark Tower was released, starring Idris Elba as Roland and Matthew McConaughey as the sinister Man in Black.
Simon Brown
See also: Dark Fantasy; It; King, Stephen.
Further Reading
Furth, Robin. 2012. Stephen King’s The Dark Tower: The Complete Concordance. London: Hodder and Stoughton.
McAleer, Patrick. 2009. Inside the Dark Tower Series: Art, Evil and Intertextuality in the Stephen King Novels. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
Vincent, Bev. 2013. The Dark Tower Companion: A Guide to Stephen King’s Epic Fantasy. New York: Penguin.
DATLOW, ELLEN (1949–)
Ellen Datlow is an influential editor and publishing professional whose work as an anthologist of both reprint and original fiction has had a significant impact on the consideration of anthologies as important showcases for fantastic fiction. A number of stories first published in her anthologies have won the most prestigious awards in the horror and fantasy fields.
Datlow was hired as associate fiction editor at Omni magazine in 1979 and became fiction editor in 1981, a position she held until 1998 before moving on to online magazines Event Horizon and Sci Fiction. Between 1984 and 1989, she edited seven volumes of science fiction stories culled from the pages of Omni.
In 1988 Datlow and Terri Windling began editing The Year’s Best Fantasy (a.k.a. The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror as of 1991), a series that would run twenty-one volumes with Datlow picking the horror and (until 2004, when Kelly Link and Gavin Grant assumed duties) Windling the fantasy fiction. The series showcased the best short horror and fantasy fiction published in the decades when those genres established themselves as major categories in trade publishing. In 2009, after the discontinuation of The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, Datlow began editing The Best Horror of the Year.
In 1990, drawing on horror submissions that would not have been appropriate for Omni’s science fiction readership, Datlow edited Blood Is Not Enough, an anthology of new and reprint vampire fiction that expanded the definition of the vampire’s predatory proclivities. She followed this with an anthology of erotic horror and science fiction stories, Alien Sex (1990), and a second anthology of nontraditional vampire fiction, A Whisper of Blood (1991). In 1993, Datlow and Windling edited Snow White, Blood Red, the first in a series of anthologies in which contemporary writers of fantasy and horror retell classic fairy and folk tales for modern readers.
The themes of Datlow’s anthologies show considerable range and variety: sexual horror in Little Deaths (1994); supernatural cats in Twists of the Tale (1996); tributes to H. P. Lovecraft in Lovecraft Unbound (2009), Lovecraft’s Monsters (2014), and Children of Lovecraft (2016); movies and filmmaking in The Cutting Room (2014); carnivals and circuses in Nightmare Carnival (2014); and dolls and other simulacra in The Doll Collection (2015).
As of 2016 Datlow has been nominated for the World Fantasy Award forty-three times and won ten times, the most for any one person. She was awarded the Horror Writer Association’s Bram Stoker Award and the World Fantasy Award for lifetime achievement in 2011 and 2014, respectively.
Stefan R. Dziemianowicz
See also: Bram Stoker Award; Link, Kelly; World Fantasy Award.
Further Reading
“Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling: Depth and Heart.” 2016. Locus 76, no. 6: (June): 12–13, 56–58.
“Ellen Datlow: Horror’s Queen.” 2001. Locus 46, no. 3 (March): 6, 83–84.
Gee, Robin. 1990. “Close-up: Ellen Datlow.” In 1990 Novel & Short Story Writer’s Market, edited by Robin Gee, 368. Cincinnati: Writer’s Digest Books.
Hoagland, Ericka. 2009. “Datlow, Ellen.” In Women in Science Fiction and Fantasy, edited by Robin A. Reid, 81–82. Westport, CT: Greenwood.
Interview with Ellen Datlow
October 2016
Datlow here draws on her long career as an editor of horror, science fiction, and fantasy to talk about what defines horror literature as such, and to clarify its relationship with science fiction and several other well-defined genres such as Westerns and crime fiction. She also discusses her editorial process for identifying high-quality horror fiction, and she describes what she views as the negative impact of the late twentieth-century boom in horror publishing on horror literature itself. She concludes by offering some recommendations for classic and contemporary horror reading. In the latter capacity, she identifies what she regards as the most important trend in contemporary horror publishing.
Matt Cardin: Early in your career you distinguished yourself as a science fiction editor. Then you became prominently associated with horror. These two have a long history together, with the blending of horror and science fiction having yielded interesting—and in some cases, classic—results in both areas. What do you see as the relationship between SF and horror? Where does the one start and the other leave off? And why do they work so well together?
Ellen Datlow: There is a long tradition of SF/horror in literature: Frankenstein, The Fly, Who Goes There?, “Leiningen vs. the Ants,” Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Midwich Cuckoos, and much of Harlan Ellison’s short fiction, such as “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.”
It’s easy to see how dystopian and postapocalyptic fiction (Ellison’s novella A Boy and His Dog, and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale) blur over into horror, as dystopias by their nature are horrific. So it’s quite a natural relationship.
Horror, which is more defined by tone than anything else, combines well with several genres—as it’s not in itself a genre. Romance mixed with horror becomes the classic Gothic; Westerns as written by Joe R. Lansdale and James Lee Burke often contain elements of horror. Crime fiction such as the novels of Thomas Harris featuring Hannibal Lector are most definitely horror.
MC: What are your guiding principles as an editor and anthologist of horror fiction? Obviously, themed anthologies, such as your various projects centered on vampirism and Lovecraft, have their own specific sets of needs and rules. But when it comes to your “best of” anthologies, how do you go about deciding what to include? What, in your view, marks a given work of short-form horror fiction as being truly good, or even great?
ED: While reading year round for my next Best Horror anthology, I make a note when I find an especially good story that is horrific. Then, when the time comes for me to begin making decisions, I count up the wordage of the stories I’ve marked and reread them. I kn
ow how many words I have in my annual, and I always end up with as much as twice the number of words I can fit. So the rest of the process is eliminating stories to bring the book down to a reasonable size. Sometimes I’ll read a story three or four times. If I still love a story after rereading it: still find it startling, still find that it provides a deep abiding feel of unease, that it continues to unnerve me—that story will likely end up in the book.
During my career I’ve reprinted some stories multiple times. Those are the stories that stick with me, that continue to impress me. They’re the ones that I consider the best over the years. New stories are added to that “best” over time.
But essentially for any anthology, it must be the editor’s personal reaction to each story that counts.
MC: In addition to vampirism and Lovecraftian fiction, your themed horror anthologies have focused on sexual horror, carnivals and circuses, dolls, and movies. Why do you think horror is so portable, as it were? Why is it so applicable to virtually any type of plot, setting, theme, or motif? And what exactly characterizes it? What makes a given story a horror story instead of (or in addition to) something else?
ED: I think I started to answer that in my response to the first question. Horror is not a genre. It’s a tone, a way of approaching character, plot, and place. In a horror story the protagonist loses something—things are not what they seem. There is evil lurking—underground, around the corner, in an abandoned house. Even when characters survive, they usually lose something: their innocence, their sanity, their certainty in the way things should work. In addition to SF/horror, there’s supernatural horror consisting of ghosts, vampires, werewolves, zombies, witches, ghouls, and so on. And there’s the conte-cruel, nicely defined by H. P. Lovecraft as fiction “in which the wrenching of the emotions is accomplished through dramatic tantalizations, frustrations, and gruesome physical horrors.”
MC: You worked right through the great horror publishing boom of the 1980s and 1990s, so you had a “boots on the ground” perspective on the whole thing. What do you see as the lasting results of that phenomenon? How is the field different today because of what happened then?
ED: It hurt the field immensely. Because almost every book publisher found it expedient to create a horror line and thus fill a specific number of “slots” per month, a lot of mediocre horror was published. And most of those books did not sell. This created the perception that no horror but the big names such as Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Clive Barker, and Anne Rice sold, and also that most horror was bad. It also encouraged a spate of awful, generic book covers that didn’t help. It’s taken decades for horror as a “market” to recover. It demonstrated quite clearly that it’s better for publishers and editors to be passionate about what they publish, than just randomly publish anything that’s submitted. If they care nothing about what they’re publishing, why should potential readers care?
Some writers who were regularly selling novels and receiving high advances discovered that once the bubble burst, they couldn’t sell their books at all, or else couldn’t make as much money with them as they had. Some writers stopped writing.
The best writers continued to create ambitious horror and to sell it. Some writers switched gears to concentrate on crime/thriller writing. Serial killer novels became quite popular for a period of time; they were often horrific but were not designated horror.
Today a lot of horror novels are published by mainstream publishers, and the reader must guess (or read reviews) to discover which are horror and which are not. It all depends on your definition of horror. I’m more open than some others in the field to what I consider horror.
I don’t think anyone in the 1980s or 1990s could have foreseen the range of short horror fiction being published today, especially by young writers from different cultures. This is a thrilling time for anyone who loves short stories. Horror stories are being published in venues ranging from small and large literary magazines, to science fiction and fantasy magazines, to webzines of all kinds. The challenge is finding them. There were never many horror magazines; even in the pulp era, most of those magazines published a mix of horror, dark fantasy, and fantasy.
MC: What classic works and authors of horror fiction would you recommend to the interested reader who might be looking to further his or her knowledge of the field? Can you name a few that are absolutely indispensable?
ED: As a short story reader, I advise readers to pick up anthologies and single author collections. Anthologies such as Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural, the huge reprint anthology edited by Phyllis Cerf Wagner and Herbert Wise that included mainstream writers along with the Gothic writers. A Second Century of Creepy Stories, edited by Hugh Walpole. The Playboy Book of Horror and the Supernatural. Karl Edward Wagner’s old Bests of the Year. My old Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror series. Stephen Jones’s Best New Horror. Checking out current Bests of the year is the quickest, easiest means to find out what’s going on in the field from year to year. Those are all reprint anthologies.
Kirby McCauley’s Dark Forces, published in 1980, featured all new stories by a variety of writers. Isaac Bashevis Singer, Edward Gorey, and Joyce Carol Oates rubbed shoulders with Gene Wolfe, Lisa Tuttle, Ray Bradbury, Ramsey Campbell, Theodore Sturgeon, and Joe Haldeman, among others.
MC: What about contemporary horror? Who and what should readers be watching? What are the most important trends? Where is the cutting edge located?
ED: Short horror fiction is in a golden age. That’s something I and my fellow horror editors all agree upon. There are fabulous short story writers not only from the United States, Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom, but from Japan, India, and the Philippines. Some names to watch: Priya Sharma, Alyssa Wong, Usman T. Malik, Carmen Maria Machado, Ray Cluley, Tom Johnstone, Tamsyn Muir, Livia Llewellyn, Alison Littlewood, and Carole Johnstone. That’s just a tiny example of relatively new writers.
Then there are more established writers working in SF/F/H who are less noticed by horror readers because they do play the field: Elizabeth Hand, Brian Evenson, Jeffrey Ford, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Dale Bailey, Garth Nix, Kelly Link, Kaaron Warren, Angela Slatter, Pat Cadigan, Margo Lanagan, Paul McAuley, Stephen Graham Jones.
I could name a few dozen more easily.
In my opinion, the most important trend is the influx of new voices from non-Western cultures and an increase of females and people of color into the field (at least in short fiction). Small presses are filling the gap in single-author collections left by large, mainstream publishers who only publish them rarely.
MC: With the field being so broad and bristling right now, do you have any parting advice for readers who want to make the most of this new golden age of horror fiction?
ED: Horror stories can be found in many more places than you might think. Because horror is as much about tone as anything else, it can reside in all kinds of fiction. Literary journals, crime magazines and anthologies, science fiction and fantasy magazines all publish horror. So be open-minded.
DE LA MARE, WALTER (1873–1956)
Walter John de la Mare was born in Kent, England, on April 25, 1873, into a wealthy family (his father, James, worked at the Bank of England) and grew up to become one of twentieth-century Britain’s most prolific writers. A short story writer and novelist, de la Mare is probably best known for his poetry for children, among which “The Listeners” (1912) is most remembered by legions of schoolchildren and students. He also made significant contributions to the horror genre.
“Seaton’s Aunt”: A Tale of (Possible) Psychic
Vampirism
Published originally in The London Mercury in 1922, and collected in 1923 in The Riddle, and Other Stories, “Seaton’s Aunt” is one of de la Mare’s finest and most chilling psychological horror stories, and one of the foremost examples of the inconclusive ghost story for which he was known. The eponymous “Aunt” is the relative of Arthur Seaton, one of the narrator’s schoolmates, with whom he agrees to stay during the h
olidays. Seaton’s aunt is obsessed with death, and Seaton believes she is in communion with demonic spirits. While the narrator, Withers, refuses to believe that Seaton’s aunt wishes her nephew dead, he too becomes disturbed by her increasingly erratic behavior, and the story concludes with the death of Seaton in mysterious circumstances.
The strength of the story as a work of psychological horror lies precisely in the reader’s confusion as to whether Seaton’s aunt truly is a psychic vampire who wishes him harm, or whether the reader believes, with Withers, that Seaton is embellishing details. While de la Mare provides evidence to substantiate both viewpoints, the underlying issue is not whether something horrifying is happening, but what form exactly the horror takes. If one sides with the more rational Withers, then one must acknowledge that the aunt’s neglect of her charge is a consequence of disturbing psychological abuse that it is hinted she experiences at Seaton’s hand. De la Mare successfully heightens the ambiguity of the narrative by couching the real human horrors of ageism and emotional abuse in ambiguous supernaturalism, and succeeds in crafting a horror narrative that disturbs on a number of levels. The story was masterfully brought to life on screen as part of the British supernatural anthology television series Shades of Darkness in 1983.
Ian Kinane
After an education at St. Paul’s Cathedral Choir School in London, de la Mare worked as a statistician for Standard Oil Company from 1890 to 1908, during which time he began to write. His first published work, a short story entitled “Kismet,” was published in The Sketch magazine in 1895, after which de la Mare applied himself to compiling a collection of poetry for children—which later became his first published book, Songs of Childhood, published in 1902 under the pen name “Walter Ramal.” This was followed by his first novel, Henry Brocken (1904), an intriguing romance in which the wanderer-protagonist journeys through literature, encountering all manner of characters from Jane Eyre and Rochester to Shakespeare’s Titania and Bottom. It was not until 1912, though, that de la Mare achieved literary renown for his children’s collection The Listeners and Other Poems (1912).
