Douglas E Winter - Prime Evil

[dem bones]

Douglas E Winter (ed.) - Prime Evil (Bantam 1988/ Corgi, 1989)

Douglas E. Winter - Introduction

Stephen King _ The Night Flier
Paul Hazel - Having A Woman At Lunch
Dennis Etchison - The Blood Kiss
Clive Barker - Coming To Grief
Thomas Tessier - Food
M. John Harrison - The Great God Pan
Peter Straub - The Juniper Tree
David Morrell - Orange Is For Anguish, Blue For Insanity
Charles L. Grant - Spinning Tales With The Dead
Thomas Ligotti - Alice's Last Adventure
Ramsey Campbell - Next Time You'll Know Me
Whitley Strieber - The Pool
Jack Cady - By Reason Of Darkness

Blurb:
THE BEST IN MODERN HORROR
From the breath-taking energy of Stephen King and the subtlety of Peter Straub to the elegant craftmanship of Paul Hazel and Thomas Ligotti and the brooding power of M. John Harrison and Clive Barker, PRIME EVIL is a classic collection of horror stories from the best exponents of the genre writing at the height of their powers.

Each of the thirteen contributors offers something fresh and new - from the mannered eroticism of Whitley Strieber and Thomas Tessier and the gripping terror of Jack Cady and David Morrell to the bloody vengeance of Dennis Etchison and the haunting pieces of Charles L. Grant and Ramsey Campbell.

PRIME EVIL is the most important collection of horror writing in recent years: an extraordinary book that no reader of the dark, the monstrous and the downright terrifying can afford to miss.

Not at all sure i made sense of all the stories on first acquaintance, and there were two tried my patience beyond endurance - will see if relations have improved when i eventually get around to them. Playing it safe, have opted to first revisit ....

David Morrell - Orange Is For Anguish, Blue For Insanity: "Tortured souls writhing beneath, perhaps producing, incomparable beauty. I call them 'secondary images.' In your ad work I guess they'd be called 'subliminal.' But this isn't commercialism. This is a genius artist who had the brilliance to use his madness as an ingredient in his vision."

Myers' determination to solve the secret to Van Dorn's impressionist painting technique was always going to be precarious for a man of his fragile temperament. The great nineteenth century artist stabbed out his own eyes, as have several who have studied his work in subsequent years. His friend and our narrator, a commercial artist at an ad agency, is made of stronger stuff and after Myers' funeral at Van Dorn's home village, La Verge in the South of France, handles the distressing business of packing the suicide's possessions - several Van Dorn prints, related papers, etc. - and shipping them back to the States. Clarissa, the nurse who tended Myers in his final weeks, sleeps with him out of sympathy and urges him to go home, "don't destroy yourself like the others." Postponing his imminent wedding and alienating his fiancée suggests that he's not about to listen ...

Paul Hazel - Having A Woman At Lunch: Waymarsh, Malesherbes, Pendennis and our narrator (gives his first name as Desmond), three confirmed bachelors, one widower, contentedly set in their ways. So when the fat director announces that he's introducing young Miss Cecily Hart to the executive staff as head of purchasing, his decision is met with sullen resentment. A woman in the workplace (or this anthology)? That really is one concession to modernity too far! Mr. Pendennis, clearly the progressive of the outfit, does his best to smooth the waters by inviting their new colleague to lunch. Mr. Malesherbes, still sulking, disgraces himself.

Ramsey Campbell - Next Time You'll Know Me: Oscar, an unpublished author of stupendous genius, is the blatant victim of mass psychic plagiarism, every contemporary literary superstar stealing his ideas and pre-dating their subsequent best-sellers to conceal the crime. There may even be a mole among those jealous bastards at the amateur writing circle. And now his beloved mother has gone to her maker, assisted, no doubt, by all the stress, Oscar is determined to get even. With everybody.

Stephen King The Night-Flier: Richard Dees, leading photographer with gutter press newspaper Inside View, is hot on the trail of a vampiric serial killer. 'The Night Flier', as he dubs himself, pilots a Skymaster Cessna and commits all his murders on remote airfields, and trust me on this, they're of a particularly sadistic nature (one poor old girl fortuitously comes to grief while reading Interview With A Vampire). The last six pages make for great suspense as Dee crash lands at Wilmington just in time to witness the most appalling slaughter, bodies flying through the window and all. When he is pulp he is very, very pulp and this is King's Drome Of The Living Dead

Bantam, 1998

[Will E.]

While I was a big fan of Prime Evil when it came out, re-reading it a year or two ago I found less to like about it. The Straub, Strieber, Tessier, and Ligotti stories are very good, and Morrell's is an all-time horror fave, but the rest I found too stuffy, dull, or overwritten. King, Grant, Etchison and Campbell have vastly better tales elsewhere. Winter seemed to be trying too hard to get non-horror fans to like horror, which I think is a bad proposition. However Winter's introductory essay, in which he famously states that "horror is an emotion, not a genre," is a must-read.

My full review:
toomuchhorrorfiction.blogspot.com/2011/08/prime-evil-edited-by-douglas-e-winter.html

[erebus]

Got the old Hardback of this somewhere. I don't recall the stories striking a chord with me or standing out only THE NIGHT FLIER. It was many years back, and I am ccurrently on a big anthology and short stories pase at the moment so this is getting resurrected to the read pile very soon.

[droogie]

I must agree with Will on this one; the book got heavily publicised at the time of its release but was a major disappointment overall. As for member erebus, I'm sure you know this already, but the anthologies "Silver Scream" and "Cutting Edge" both blow away Prime Evil, as well as Hot Blood, Shock Rock, Masques and Modern Masters of Horror (edited by Frank Coffey) as well as numerous others from that time period.

[dem bones]

I would add Skipp & Spector's Book Of The Dead and Hotter Blood (but not Hottest Blood) to droogie's essential anthologies from the late 'eighties.

For me, Prime Evil, though far from the worst offender, continued a shift away from good-time, macabre entertainment into the self-indulgent, spot-the-horror, pretentious bollocks I detest. My step-dad, who'd been reading horror on and off throughout his life, used to try something like say, Ellen Datlow's A Whisper Of Blood, and pull the most extraordinary face - i pictured his wonderful "what is this shit?" expression recently while revisiting J. D. Beresford's The Misanthrope.

[droogie]

Thank you, Mr. Demonik! I agree that your 2 suggestions are easily to be added to that list. Speaking of anthologies, I guess it is too late to start a new topic / thread called "Essential Anthologies" (credit to you for that title from your recent posting)? I'll throw "Halloween Horrors" into that ring any day of the week.

[dem bones]

Mar 18, 2013 13:20:09 GMT droogie said:

Thank you, Mr. Demonik! I agree that your 2 suggestions are easily to be added to that list. Speaking of anthologies, I guess it is too late to start a new topic / thread called "Essential Anthologies" (credit to you for that title from your recent posting)? I'll throw "Halloween Horrors" into that ring any day of the week.

Go ahead, doogie, though my inclination would be to include .... every single one - they all have something to recommend them. Even to continue the family vendetta versus A Whisper Of Blood is self-defeating because i'd not be without Karl E Wagner's magnificent contribution, The Slug, and David J. Schow's A Week In The Unlife likewise hit the spot (though Ramsey Campbell's The Dead Don't Die is still far and away my favourite deranged vampire-hunter story). Off the top of my head, Hugh Lamb, Haining, Michel Parry, Mary Danby, Richard Dalby, Chetwynd-Hayes, the Pans & Fontanas, the 'Not At Nights', 'Creeps', 'Thrills', the Mammoths, 'The Black Books of Horror' & so on & so on, I can't help thinking that, if Vault is about anything much, it's a massive, ever-expanding catalogue of "essential anthologies."

[Shrink Proof]

I reckon I've read more anthologies than anything else in the horror genre (and SF and fantasy too, come to that). Originally it was to introduce myself to lots of writers to see which I liked and wanted to pursue (which it successfully did) but later things changed. In a sense, it was because I found that I almost couldn't lose. At best I'd find something stunningly excellent and at worst, well, it was only one story and who knows what the following one would bring? It's very rare that I've had to give up on a short story compared to a whole novel...

"Prime Evil", by the way, I only read a year and a half ago. I scored it good rather than great. Messrs Campbell and King topped the bill on this one.