The Mammoth Book of the Best of Best New Horror Page 2
Of course things and even Things have changed. One is the onset of the Internet. Whereas when we began Best New Horror our readers were protected from the slush pile, unless they worked in publishing, these days the kind of material that made editors blench can be read online. Just because everybody uses language, that doesn’t mean that they can write even tolerable prose. If some of the stuff out there has any merit, it’s to show people the kind of thing that editors protect us from.
We begin this Best of Best as we mean to continue, with the unexpected. “No Sharks in the Med” is one of Brian Lumley’s occasional tales that have no fantastic or supernatural element. Perhaps there’s just a hint of revenge from beyond the grave, but the tale draws its power from its vivid evocation of the kind of Greece we tourists seek and from the classically gradual revelation of the dark that lurks beneath it, all this in the kind of Mediterranean sunlight we might think inimical to shadows. It was originally published in Weird Tales, a magazine that broke its pact with weirdness by reprinting, in one of its last issues of the 1950s, Merle Constiner’s “The Skull of Barnaby Shattuck”, a Western novelette first published in Short Stories. As a young horror fan I read the tale and waited for the wretched skull to scream or do a jig or put on any kind of a show at all, but no such luck. Brian’s story wouldn’t have disappointed me, however, in delivering horror.
The year 1990 brought us Michael Marshall Smith, and it’s quite an event. You may be reminded here and there of Bradbury’s small-town lyricism or Steve King’s way with a flavoursome phrase, but Mike’s voice is already unmistakeable. Though his prose has grown leaner over the years, it’s just as strong when it’s well fed, like the tiger in the story. For myself, I wouldn’t have less of it, and I’m delighted to renew my acquaintance with his fine first publication. It may owe some of its enviable fluency to having been written in a single day. Sometimes a debut feels as if a flood of talent has been undammed, as here.
Of my own tale, which Steve has been kind enough to include, I’ve little to say. When I wrote it I’d forgotten that John Ware had written one called “Spinalonga” for the thirteenth Pan Book of Horror Stories. That volume was graced by David Case’s novella “The Dead End” but also suffered from the rot that had set into the series. Amid the parade of child-burnings and dismemberments and mutilations that the book trots out for its fun-loving customers, Ware’s leprous anecdote seems tasteful – sufficiently so to have slipped my mind by the time the family and I went to Crete a decade later.
Ever since the Gothic novel, horror fiction has been inspired by landscapes, and that island off Elounda was too tempting a location to waste. Incidentally, I’ve just discovered that my yellowing copy of the Pan book contains a souvenir from an earlier owner – the counterfoil of a postal order bought at Bank on December 13, 1977 and sent to Cooking for Outline of Purfleet. On the back the owner has listed the contents of the anthology with an observation about each, including “Sort of comment”, “Dead boring!!” and “Whooppeee?!!” Mysteriously, the only tale not listed is “Spinalonga”, which is replaced by something called “Max!” that’s summed up as “Rotten!!”
I digress. I do, you know. Perhaps I’m delaying thoughts of Norman Wisdom, though not of Christopher Fowler’s tale. In 2007 Sir Norm was rehoused in a nursing home on the Isle of Man. I’m sure his fellow tenants could never have imagined that their last days would be filled with memories of his routines – perhaps some old folks’ final moments may consist of them. This fate befalls several of the characters in Christopher’s splendid tale, which is both horribly funny and oppressively disturbing. Its portrait of nostalgia turned sour rings all too true, and the narrator is a memorable addition to fiction’s gallery of psychotics. One feels one may easily meet him.
Now behold the irrepressible Harlan, a man with a talent so large they might have named a county after him. He dislikes the word horror as applied to fiction, but several of his tales are splendid examples of it: “Shattered Like a Glass Goblin” for certain, and “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs” and “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream”, and equally the novella herein. His stories don’t often reach this length, but it sustains the blazing intensity of his best work without faltering. Several decades ago Harlan was kind enough to reminisce about a visit to San Quentin for a novel I was writing. He lent my chapter vividness but by gum, it’s nothing compared with his own use of the place. Read his tale, which (in the best sense) reads like the writing of a man possessed.
Even more than Harlan, Paul J. McAuley is more usually associated with science fiction than with horror. The gulf is less wide than it’s sometimes perceived to be, however. Where Brian Aldiss cites Frankenstein as the first work of modern science fiction, other commentators – Lovecraft, for instance – claim it for horror, and so it’s entirely appropriate that Paul’s tale should evoke Mary Shelley’s seminal novel. He recalls James Whale’s gay romp Bride of Frankenstein as well (in which, it seems to me, the title applies to Dr Pretorius, who seduces Frankenstein away from an unconsummated marriage to help him give birth to a creature). Paul brings to this story all the attention to detail that makes his science fiction so vivid and convincing. Its terror and pathos are worthy of the original Frankenstein. I would happily have helped to choose it for that year’s volume of Best New Horror, but 1994 was the year I fled as editor, leaving stalwart Steve to sift the mounds of rubbish with which the field was laden. There was plenty of first-rate fiction, but the task of reading the worst of the rest was just too dispiriting. Whose gravestone graces the cover of that year’s book? Whose skeletal hand claws at it from the earth?
The year 1995 brought us the fantastic Neil Gaiman – brought him to horror, that is, where he intermittently perches before soaring away on another flight of wonder. Can I take a little credit? Ten years before, as a young journalist he’d interviewed me in the resoundingly empty house to which my family and I were about to move. In “Queen of Knives” he’s drawing on much earlier experiences, though. Like his superb work in comics, poetry enables him to say a great deal in enviably few words. What exactly has been said seems to shift and grow with every re-reading. Note the appearance, as in the Fowler tale, of a British comedian from the past. Comedy and horror intersect in many ways.
I can certainly congratulate myself over Terry Lamsley – or over putting out the word about him, at any rate. Having picked up his first collection, Under the Crust, at the 1993 Ghost Story Society convention in Chester, I was on the phone days later to Steve Jones, enthusing about a new master of the spectral. Soon I wrote the introduction to Terry’s next book, Conference with the Dead, from which “The Break” is taken. Like Neil’s piece, this story finds weirdness in a family holiday. Not that in many cases it needs much finding; after all, one of the strangest places most of us are likely to end up is our own childhood. Often the point of the child’s viewpoint in a horror story is not just to enhance the terror but to remind us what it was like. “The Break” is a fine example of a tradition that began with Machen’s masterly “White People”.
In his great novel I Am Legend (thrice indifferently filmed) Richard Matheson showed us the world overtaken by vampires, and his prophecy has come to pass, at least in terms of copies on the shelves. Series of books proliferate everywhere: erotica (Muffy the Vampire Layer), same-sex erotica (Duffy the Vampire Gayer), dog stories (Wuffy the Vampire Bayer), stories of a seaside donkey (Gruffy the Vampire Brayer), a football saga (Cloughie the Vampire Player), tales of the priesthood (Stuffy the Vampire Prayer), dietary aids (Puffy the Vampire Weigher), memoirs of feisty old folk (Toughie the Vampire Greyer) . . . Sequels to Dracula are a genre in themselves, ranging from the hilarious Carmel (written by a bishop, it gives us the tip that vampires don’t stutter and includes the line “Imagine my horror when he pulled a decapitated head from the carrier bag he was holding – and asked ‘Do you recognize it?’”) to Caitlín R. Kiernan’s fine tale here. Its poetic compression gives it the substance of a novel in fewer than
twenty pages. Like her friend Poppy Z. Brite, she brings lyricism to horror and to the theme of vampirism.
The year 1998 is Peter Straub’s year. I’m especially happy to be associated with an anthology in which he appears. Back in the 1970s I did my best to tempt him into New Terrors but (like Harlan Ellison and Anthony Burgess, among others) he couldn’t be lured. Herman Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener: a Story of Wall-street” is central to his tale that follows, “Mr Clubb and Mr Cuff”. In 1957 Melville’s story appeared in the Faber book I cited at the outset, Best Horror Stories, preceded by the editor’s admission that many readers might not call it horror. I’d say it was, but all the same, it might lead you to expect Peter’s story to be a little staid. You’d be wrong. When he wrote Floating Dragon he set out to encompass all horror, but as you’ll see, he didn’t exhaust his imaginative capacity for it. “Mr Clubb and Mr Cuff” is as intensely grisly as anything he has yet given us.
In 1999 Tim Lebbon ruined the world, in the best sense. The greatest fiction in the field reaches for awe, and “White” certainly delivers that. To combine it with psychological incisiveness and contemporary gruesomeness is a considerable feat, not least of balance and the modulation of prose. It’s the work of a writer at the height of his powers (but let me add that Tim is still at that pitch). It also confirms that the novella length is especially hospitable to horror.
And here’s another. The Other Side of Midnight was previously the title of a mammoth melodrama, dully directed by Charles Jarrott. (Where’s Douglas Sirk when you need him?) But 2000 brought us Kim Newman instead, and he’s just as subversive. Despite my previous complaint about vampire clones, I’ll happily read Kim’s vampire fiction. Not only here, he demonstrates that modernism and horror aren’t mutually exclusive. He has a good deal of inventive fun with aspects of the text, but despite his witty alternate worldliness, he conveys a real sense of evil. He also summons up a film that this reader would like to see almost as much as a restored Ambersons. Perhaps the surviving footage can be found on one of the Criterion editions of Welles.
The year 2001 is the year of Clarke and Kubrick and Elizabeth Hand. Despite its evocative title, “Cleopatra Brimstone” doesn’t seem so visionary at first, but it keeps its magic in reserve. In due course it wriggles forth from its pupa of realism to reveal its glorious nature, in explosions of imagery as rich as anything in her more immediately fantastic work (which is fantastic in all the best senses). It’s a true and wondrous original, but then so is its author.
In 2002 Best New Horror revealed Joe Hill to us. “20th Century Ghost” is simultaneously horrifying and poignant, a combination all too rare in the field. Its ghost is drawn by a love of movies, but equally she’s the embodiment of loss and yearning. The final resolution of all the story’s themes is as deft as it is very moving. The economy and range of effects are entirely typical of the author, and it lent its title to his first collection. The book was rightly hailed as a major debut and an important contribution to the field, though the odd commentator complained that it had succeeded other than by merit. It had no need.
The year 2003 saw publication of the first collection by Mark Samuels, and about time too. Its title tale, “The White Hands”, is here. In my introduction to his later book Glyphotech I did my best to celebrate his mastery of the urban weird tale (a form I suggested was distinct from other kinds of urban supernatural horror). He may be described as the British Ligotti, which isn’t to imply any imitation. Like that author, the sense of terror in his work is rooted in his philosophy and his aesthetic of horror – indeed, the three elements form a single entity, and an uncommonly disturbing one. If there are faint echoes in “The White Hands” of Lovecraft and more obviously (in a character’s name) of M. R. James, they seem to be heard in a nightmare that is all the author’s own.
The year 2004 was the year of Lisa Tuttle’s great novella “My Death” (or, since it appeared as a book in itself, My Death). I’m not alone in playing with the phrase, which means a great deal more in the tale. How disconcertingly personal is this narrative? While there’s a faint whiff of The Aspern Papers (no, not The Astern Papers, despite the prompting of my spellcheck), the story is utterly Tuttle. It epitomizes the kind of subtle disquiet we’ve rarely seen in fiction since the days of Aickman and Walter de la Mare, but it couldn’t have been written by either of them. It’s a true tale of unease – the term might have been invented for it – and preserves its profound ambiguity to the end. Like Lisa, I’ll take enigma over explanation any time.
The year 2005 brought Clive Barker back to horror, but the process isn’t so simple. Long before his Books of Blood amazed the world, Clive had been creating fantasy, not least on stage. Many of the tales in the Books of Blood are essentially fantastic, but equally some of his later fantasies – Weaveworld, Coldheart Canyon – delve into horror. “Haeckel’s Tale” couples the two forms in a way that’s uniquely Barker: witty, unnervingly erotic, philosophically challenging – altogether an enrichment to the imagination. It’s worth noting that despite the vividness of his imagery, Clive is far more restrained than many of his imitators. They should learn that from him.
The year 2006 is represented by Glen Hirshberg. In some ways the tale is typical of him: the immediacy and vividness of the detail, the psychological incisiveness. In my preface to his first collection, The Two Sams, I wrote “He brings enviable skills to his work: a stylistic precision that comes of loving language, an unerring eye for character and the moments that define or reveal it, a keen sense not just of place but how light and the time of day transform his settings. It’s his sense of the spectral, however, that puts him up there with the best.” All this is true of “Devil’s Smile”, but nothing in his earlier work quite prepares us for the sheer horror it very gradually and insidiously accumulates. Its sense of maritime mystery and terror is worthy of Hodgson, and it has the potency of an actual myth. Davy Jones forbid that the creature is more real than that, but it’s certainly unforgettable.
The story for 2007 gives me the chance to reiterate my old saw (not to be confused with Saw) that many of the greatest horror stories reach for awe or the numinous: masterpieces by Machen and Blackwood and Lovecraft, among many others, come to mind. With “The Church on the Island” Simon Kurt Unsworth adds a fine tale to this honourable tradition. Over the decades Steve has supported many new writers who have continued to distinguish themselves and their field. I predict Unsworth will be another, and I wish his career all success.
For 2008, we name the man responsible – responsible in large part for the wave of horror fiction from which we fished so many treasures. I recall my agent Kirby McCauley exhorting me in New York at Halloween of 1976 to pick up a novel by a new writer who’d impressed him. I still have that Signet paperback with its mysterious front cover – glossy black without title or author, just an embossed face drooling a single drop of blood – on my shelf. And we all still have Steve King, no longer a young Turk but a grand old (well, elderly) man. (I can say that, being more than a year older.) Let me suggest that his story here epitomizes one of his traits that are too seldom celebrated: his willingness to address themes that are difficult or uncomfortable for the reader (and, I suspect, for the author too). Pet Sematary will always come to mind, and even some of his titles – Misery, Desperation – are confrontational, challenging his audience to take the risk he’s taken. In the present tale he brings an omnipresent contemporary fear out of the depths of our minds and takes on the afterlife with typical bleakness – inimitable, actually, though hordes have tried to copy the easy stuff. All this he achieves in less than four thousand words. And watch out for that title! He’s still at the peak of his talent. Long may he tower there.
And long may Best New Horror rescue riches for posterity. Meanwhile, there’s no better history or treasury of the last twenty years of our field.
Ramsey Campbell
Wallasey, Merseyside
May 4, 2009
1989
No Sharks in the Med
Brian Lumley
IN 1989, PUBLISHER Nick Robinson decided to create a companion volume to Gardner Dozois’ excellent The Year’s Best Science Fiction series (retitled Best New SF for the UK market).
So when he asked me if I would be interested in editing an annual “Year’s Best” horror anthology, containing a selection of stories chosen from those initially published in the preceding year, I immediately agreed. However, I had a couple of stipulations.
The first was that I ask Ramsey Campbell – in my opinion one of the most intelligent and knowledgeable authors in the horror field – to co-edit the book with me. The second was that I check first that it was okay with my old friend Karl Edward Wagner, who was currently editing The Year’s Best Horror Stories series for DAW Books. (Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling had started The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror for St Martin’s Press a couple of years previously, but I did not consider that direct competition as half the book was made up of fantasy stories.) Karl graciously gave us his blessing (which is why the first volume was dedicated to him), and Ramsey and I started reading everything we could get our hands on.
That first volume contained twenty stories, and marked the only time we used tales by Robert Westall and Richard Laymon, who both passed away far too early. Our Introduction, which was an overview of horror in 1989, covered just seven pages, and Kim Newman and I carried our Necrology column over from the defunct film magazine Shock Xpress. It ran one page longer than the Introduction.