E
D
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T
E
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DAVID G. HARTWELL
RAYBRADBURY
STEPHEN KING
v
RUSSELL KIRK
H. P. LOVECRAFT
SHIRLEY JACKSON
J. SHERIDAN LeFANU THE1
“ For a sample of the current excellence and variety of
horror, one could do no better. ’ ’
—Newsday
“ Undoubtedly the most important anthology of the year,
if not the decade. An incredible book, which attempts to
detail the history of horror literature in its short story form
. . . [and] succeeds brilliantly.
“ The finest [shprt stories] ever written. Truly an enormous
feast of fear.
“ Hartwell is a man who knows where the richest blood
lies and has skillfully tapped that vein for our own gruesome
pleasures.”
—Fangoria
“ A must-read for all readers [of] horror. It provides an
overview of past and contemporary horror that’s unmatched
in any other collection.”
— Weird Tales
‘ ‘This is undoubtedly the definitive anthology of short horror fiction. ’ ’
—Science Fiction Chronicle
The Dark Descent
edited by David Q. Hartwell
The Color o f Evil
The M edusa in th e Shield
A Fabulous F orm less D arkness
The Dark D escent
Vol. 1
edited by David G. Hartwell
k.
T D R
HORROR
A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK
NEW YORK
NOTE: If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware
that this book is stolen property. It was reported as "unsold and destroyed”
to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any
payment for this “ stripped book.”
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this
book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real people or events is purely
coincidental.
THE COLOR OF EVIL
Copyright © 1987 by David G. Hartwell
This book first appeared as part of the Tor hardcover, The Dark Descent.
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions
thereof, in any form.
A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.
49 West 24th Street
New York, N.Y. 10010
ISBN: 0-812-51898-5
First printing: September 1991
Printed in the United States of America
0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Dedication
To Tom Doherty and Harriet P. McDougal and the Tbr Books
Horror imprint, and especially Melissa Ann Singer, editor,
for support and patience.
l b Kathryn Cramer and Peter D. Pautz for their hard work
and enthusiasm, as well as provocative discussion.
To Patricia W. Hartwell for letting the books pile up and the
piles of paper fall over throughout the house and still loving
me.
A c k n o w l e d g m e n t s
This anthology grew out of three years of weekly discussions
with Peter D. Pautz and Kathryn Cramer on the nature and
virtues of horror literature, and its evolution. Peter’s knowledge of the contemporary field and Kathryn’s theoretical bent were seminal in the genesis of my own thoughts on what
horror literature is and has become. Jack Sullivan, Kirby
McCauley and Peter Straub were particularly helpful in discussing aspects of horror, and Samuel R. Delany contributed valuable insights, as well as the title for Part III. And I owe
an incalculable debt to the great anthologists—from M. R.
James and Dashiell Hammett, Elizabeth Bowen, Dorothy
Sayers through Wise and Fraser, Boris Karloff and August
Derleth to Kirby McCauley, Ramsey Campbell and Jack Sullivan—whose research and scholarship and taste guided my reading over the decades. Robert Hadji and Jessica Salmon-son gave valuable support in late-night convention discussions, and the World Fantasy Convention provided an annual environment for advancing ideas in the context of the fine
working writers and experts who make horror literature a
vigorous and growing form in our time. Finally, my sincere
thanks to Stephen King for Danse Macabre.
C o p y r i g h t A c k n o w l e d g m e n t s
Grateful acknowledgment is extended for permission to reprint the following:
“ The Reach” by Stephen King. Copyright © 1981 by Stephen
King. Reprinted by permission of the author’s agent, Kirby
McCauley, Ltd.
“ Evening Primrose” by John Collier. Copyright © 1941, 1968
by John Collier. Reprinted by permission of Harold Mat-
son Company, Inc.
“ There’s a Long, Long Trail A-Winding” by Russell Kirk.
Copyright © 1974 by Kirby McCauley for Frights. Reprinted by permission of the author’s agent, Kirby Mc
Cauley, Ltd.
“ The Call of Cthulhu” by H. P. Lovecraft. Copyright © 1963
by August Derleth. Reprinted by permission of the author
and the author’s agents, Scott Meredith Literary Agency,
Inc., 845 Third Avenue, New York, New York 10022
“ The Summer People” by Shirley Jackson. “ The Summer
People” from Come Along With Me by Shirley Jackson.
Copyright © 1950 by Shirley Jackson. Copyright renewed
© 1977 by Laurence Hyman, Barry Hyman, Mrs. Sarah
Webster and Mrs. Joanne Schnurer. Reprinted by permission of Viking Penguin, Inc.
“ The Whimper of Whipped Dogs” by Harlan Ellison. “ The
Whimper of Whipped Dogs” by Harlan Ellison appeared
in the author’s collection, Deathbird Stories; copyright ©
1963 by Harlan Ellison. Reprinted by arrangement with
and permission of the author and the author’s agent, Richard Curtis Associates, Inc., New York. All rights reserved.
“ The Crowd” by Ray Bradbury. Reprinted by permission of
Don Congdon Associates, Inc. Copyright © 1943 by Weird
Thles, Inc.; renewed 1970 by Ray Bradbury.
‘The Autopsy” by Michael Shea. Copyright © 1984 by Michael Shea; reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agent, Owlswick Literary Agency.
‘Sticks” by Karl Edward Wagner. Copyright © 1974 by Stuart David SchifF. Reprinted by permission of the author’s agent, Kirby McCauley, Ltd.
‘Larger Than Oneself” by Robert Aickman. Copyright ®
1966 by Robert Aickman. Reprinted by permission of the
author’s agent, Kirby McCauley, Ltd.
‘Belsen Express” by Fritz Leiber. Copyright © 1975 by Fritz
Leiber, in The Second Book o f Fritz Leiber.
‘Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper” by Robert Bloch. Copyright
© 1984 by Robert Bloch. Reprinted by permission of the
author’s agent, Kirby McCauley, Ltd.
‘If Damon Comes” by Charles L. Grant. Copyright © 1978
by Charles L. Grant.
/> ‘Vandy, Vandy” by Manly Wade Wellman. Copyright © 1953
by Fantasy House, Inc.; renewed 1981 by Mercury Press,
Inc. Reprinted by permission of the author’s agent, Kirby
McCauley, Ltd.
Contents
Introduction to The Dark Descent
1
Stephen King
The Reach
18
John Collier
Evening Primrose
43
M. R. James
The Ash-Tree
57
Lucy Clifford
The New Mother
73
Russell Kirk
There’s a Long, Long Trail A-Winding
87
H. P. Lovecraft
The Call of Cthulhu
126
Shirley Jackson
The Summer People
161
Harlan Ellison
The Whimper of Whipped Dogs
177
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Young Goodman Brown
198
J. Sheridan Le Fanu
Mr. Justice Harbottle
214
Ray Bradbury
The Crowd
252
Michael Shea
The Autopsy
264
E. Nesbit
John Charrington’s Wedding
308
Karl Edward Wagner
Sticks
317
Robert Aickman
Larger Than Oneself
342
Fritz Leiber
Belsen Express
373
Robert Bloch
Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper
388
Charles L. Grant
If Damon Comes
408
Manly Wade Wellman
Vandy, Vandy
422
/
In t r o d u c t i o n t o T h e D a r k D e s c e n t
To taste the full flavor of these stories you must bring
an orderly mind to them, you must have a reasonable
amount of confidence, if not in what used to be called
die laws of nature, at least in the currently suspected
habits of nature. . . . To the truly superstitious the
“ weird” has only its Scotch meaning: “ Something
which actually takes place.”
—Dashiell Hammett, Creeps by Night
The appeal of the spectrally macabre is generally narrow because it demands from the reader a certain degree of imagination and a capacity for detachment from everyday life. Relatively few are free enough from the
spell of daily routine to respond. . . .
—H. P. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in
Literature
I
On a July Sunday morning, I was moderating a panel
discussion at Necon, a small New England convention
devoted to dark fantasy. The panelists included Alan Ryan,
Whitley Strieber, Peter Straub, Charles L. Grant and, I believe, Les Daniels, all of them horror novelists. The theme of the discussion was literary influences, with each participant naming the horror writers he felt significant in the genesis of his career. As the minutes rolled by and the litany of names, Poe and Bradbury and Leiber and Lovecraft and
Kafka and others, was uttered, I realized that except for a
ritual bow to Stephen King, every single influential writer
1
2
The Dark Descent
named had been a short story writer. So I interrupted the
panel and asked them all to spend the last few minutes commenting on my observation. What they said amounted to this: the good stuff is pretty much all short fiction.
After a few months of thought, I spent a late Halloween
night with Peter Straub at the World Fantasy Convention,
getting his response to my developing ideas on the recent
evolution of horror from a short story to a novel genre. My
belief that the long-form horror story is avant-garde and experimental, an unsolved aesthetic problem being attacked with energy and determination by Straub and King and others in
our time, solidified as a result of that conversation.
But it seemed to me too early to generalize as to the nature
of the new horror novel form. What, then, I asked myself,
has happened to the short story? The horror story has certainly not up and vanished after 160 years of development and popularity; far from it. As an administrator of the annual
World Fantasy Awards since 1975,1 was aware of significant
growth in short fiction in the past decade. And so the idea of
this book was conceived, to conclude the era of the dominance of short-form horror with a definitive anthology that attempts to represent the entire evolution of the form to date
and to describe and point out the boundaries of horror as it
has been redefined in our contemporary field. For it seemed
apparent to me that the conventional approach to horror codified by the great anthologies of the 1940s is obsolete, was indeed becoming obsolete as those books were published,
and has persisted to the detriment of a clearer understanding
of the literature to the present. It has persisted to the point
where fans of horror fiction most often restrict their reading
to books and stories given the imprimateur of a horror category label, thus missing some of the finest pleasures of this century in that fictional mode. I have gathered as many as
could be confined within one huge volume here in The Dark
Descent, with the intent of clearing the air and broadening
future considerations of horror.
Introduction
3
Fear has its own aesthetic—as Le Fanu, Henry James,
Montagu James and Walter de la Mare have repeatedly
shown—and also its own propriety. A story dealing in
fear ought, ideally, to be kept at a certain pitch. And
that austere other world, the world of the ghost, should
inspire, when it impacts on our own, not so much revulsion or shock as a sort of awe.
—Elizabeth Bowen, The Second Ghost Book
The one test of the really weird is simply this—
whether or not there be excited in the reader a profound
sense of dread, and of contact with unknown spheres
and powers.
—H. P. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in
Literature
II The Evolution of Horror Fiction
For more than ISO years horror fiction has been a vital
component of English and American literature, invented with
the short story form itself and contributing intimately to the
evolution of die short story. Until the last decade, the dominant literary form of horror fiction was the short story and novella. This is simply no longer the case. Shortly after the
beginning of the 1970s, within a very few years, the novel
form assumed the position of leadership. First came a scattering of exceptionally popular novels— Rosemary’s Baby, The Other, The Exorcist, The Mephisto Waltz, with attendant film
successes—then, in 1973, the deluge, with Stephen King on
the crest of the wave, altering the nature of horror fiction for
the foreseeable future and sweeping along with it all the living generations of short fiction writers. Very few writers of horror fiction, young or old, resisted the commercial or aesthetic temptadon to expand into the novel form, leading to the creation of some of the best horror novels of all time as
4
The Dark Descent
well as a large amount of popular trash rushed into print.
The models for these works were the previous bestsellers,
/> popular films and the short fiction masterpieces of previous
decades.
When the tide ebbed in the 1980s, much of the trash was
left dead in the backlists of paperback publishers, but the
horror novel had become firmly established. This is significant from a number of perspectives. Rapid evolution and experimentation were encouraged. All kinds of horror literature benefited from the incorporation of every conceivable element of horrific effect and technique from other literature and film and video and comics.
The most useful and provocative view we can take on the
horror novel in recent years is that it constitutes an avant-
garde and experimental literary form which attempts to translate the horrific effects previously thought to be the nearly exclusive domain of the short forms into newly conceived
long forms that maintain the proper atmosphere and effects.
Certainly isolated examples of more or less successful novel-
length horror fiction exist, from Frankenstein and Dracula to
The Haunting o f Hill House, but they are comparatively infrequent next to the constant, rich proliferation and development of horror in shorter forms in every decade from Poe to the present. The horror novels of the past do not in aggregate form a body of traditional literature and technique from which the present novels spring and upon which they depend.
It is evident both from the recent novels themselves and
from the public statements of many of the writers that Stephen King, Peter Straub and Ramsey Campbell, and a number of other leading novelists, have been discussing among themselves—and trying to solve in their works—the perceived
problems of developing the horror novel into a sophisticated
and effective form. In so doing, they have highlighted the
desirability of a volume such as The Dark Descent, which
represents the context from which the literature springs and
attempts to elucidate the whole surround of horror today.
Horror novels grow to a very large extent out of the varied
Introduction
5
and highly evolved novellas and short stories exemplified in
this book. Our perceptions of the nature of horror literature
have been changing and evolving rapidly in recent decades,
to the point where a compilation of the horror story, organized according to new principles, is needed to manifest the broadened nature of the literature.
Before proceeding in the next section to begin an anatomy
The Color of Evil - The Dark Descent V1 (1991) Page 1
