Stephen Jones & David A. Sutton - Best of Dark Terrors

[dem bones]

Stephen Jones & David A. Sutton [eds.] - The Best of Dark Terrors (Subterranean Press, Oct. 2021).

Bob Eggleton

Acknowledgements
Introduction – Jo Fletcher
Foreword – Stephen Jones

Michael Marshall Smith - More Tomorrow
Karl Edward Wagner - I’ve Come to Talk with You Again
Brian Lumley - A Really Game Boy
David J. Schow - (Melodrama)
Caitlin R. Kiernan - To This Water (Johnstown, Pennsylvania, 1889)
Harlan Ellison - The Museum on Cyclops Avenue
Ray Bradbury - Free Dirt
Poppy Z. Brite - Self Made Man
Neil Gaiman - The Wedding Present
Stephen Baxter - Family History
Dennis Etchison - Inside the Cackle Factory
Lisa Tuttle - My Pathology
Christopher Fowler - At Home in the Pubs of Old London
Richard Christian Matheson - Barking Sands
Tanith Lee - The Abortionist's Horse (A Nightmare)
Gwyneth Jones - Destroyer of Worlds
David Case - Pelican Cay
Ramsey Campbell - The Retrospective
Glen Hirshberg - The Two Sams
Don Tumasonis - The Prospect Cards

Afterword – David A. Sutton
Appendix: Index to Dark Terrors
About the editors


Blurb:

Between 1995 and 2002, Dark Terrors: The Gollancz Book of Horror was Britain's premier non-themed anthology of original horror stories. Over six volumes, it published some of the biggest names in the field as well as many newcomers who have gone on to forge impressive careers in the genre.

Edited by the World Fantasy Award-winning team of Stephen Jones and David A. Sutton, Dark Terrors established itself as a cutting-edge market for some of the most literary and disturbing fiction being produced on both sides of the Atlantic, winning the British Fantasy Award and the International Horror Guild Award in the process.

Now The Best of Dark Terrors collects together twenty of the most memorable stories from the original books in a new volume, which also includes reminiscences by both the editors and their original publisher, Jo Fletcher, along with an Index detailing the authors and their work that were included in the legendary anthology series. For fans of superior horror fiction, the Terrors just got very Dark indeed..."

A version of this book appeared in October 2015 as Darker Terrors: A Best of Dark Terrors via Spectral Press, whom, if I recall, run into some distribution problems around the time. This revived edition adds three stories, David J. Schow's (Melodrama), Tanith Lee's The Abortionist's Horse and, from Dark Terrors #5, David Case's glorious novella, Pelican Cay.

We've individual threads [trans: glorified stub posts] for each individual volume.

Dark Terrors: The Gollancz Book of Horror Stories, 1995
Dark Terrors 2, 1996
Dark Terrors 3, 1997
Dark Terrors 4, 1998
Dark Terrors #5, 2000
Dark Terrors 6, 2002.

Thanks, David!

[dem bones]

Made a start on this overnight.

David J. Schow - (Melodrama): "Before you could say 'Dig that crazy grave,' I became soul proprietor to an edifice complex ..." Gravely, last of the great 'fifties horror hosts, rescues the heroine, ascends to hokey horror paradise to rapturous applause from a loving audience. If above quoted Gravelyism is not clue enough just who this story pays tribute to, the dramatis personae include Robert Blake (program director of KSLA-TV), Sherry Malone, Winston Kane, Jim Kjelgaard (Stump, Gravely's hook-pawed werewolf sidekick) and a gofer, Will Folke. Story also includes a dig at Elvira as very poor downgrade on Vampira.

Poppy Z. Brite - Self-made Man: Justin, a Ray Bradbury and Frank Sinatra loving gay cannibal serial killer, prowls LA clubland in search of his latest conquest. Tonight it's the turn of Suko, a beautiful Thai prostitute. Justin has something special in mind for this one. Reads like a fanboy/ girl homage to Milwaukee man-eater, Jeffrey Dahmer.

Harlan Ellison - The Museum on Cyclops Avenue: Gordon Stapylton, Professor of Classics at North Carolina University, finds love and lust at first sight while attending a Conference in Stockholm. Miss Agnes Wahlstrom, an impossibly attractive museum curator and noted scholar of mythology, reciprocates - to a point. Breaking from their latest frenzied grapple, Agnes invites the besotted Stapylton on a private tour of her "Gatherum of extraordinary existences," each exhibit - a gorgon, unicorns, the minotaur, hydra, etc. - hunted down and slain by herself. And there is the problem. Agnes exists for the thrill of the chase. She could never devote herself to Stapylton as snaring him cost her no effort. Come the following morning Agnes, the museum, and the unnerving, perma-soggy Dr. Fuchs have vanished. The professor returns home to Chapel Hill both ecstatic and lost.

The Schow is quite lovely after its own fashion, and Ellison less annoying than is too often the case. Poppy Z. Brite was greeted as the Second Coming off the back of Exquisite Corpse and the Swamp Foetus collection, never really got it, but then I never went a bundle on Clive Barker, either.

[dem bones]

Stephen Baxter - Family History: Having made and blown a fortune in London during the pre-millennium IT boom, Valler, 40, is desperate for cash to finance his lavish lifestyle. Nothing for it but to return to Northumberland, persuade his old man to move into a care home so he can sell the cottage. Valler senior, however, is equally desperate for his son to undergo initiation and succeed him as Father of the Temple of Mithras, the unconquerable God of the Romans; he has even donned full ceremonial robes for the occasion.

Cursing a wasted journey, Valler spots a girl entering the ancient crypt at back of the local church. Is she giving him the come on? He pursues her deeper and deeper through the slimy, maze-like tunnel ....

Richard Christian Matheson - Barking Sands: An American family holidaying in Hawaii. They drive out to Kanai to spend an afternoon on a beach where the spirits take violent exception to litter louts, profaners, selfie obsessives and those who would dare profane a sacred burial ground.

[dem bones]

Dennis Etchison - Inside the Cackle Factory: A young woman takes work as a market researcher at the AmiDex television centre, San Bernando, testing audience reaction to pilot shows. Lisa Anne had an ulterior motive in applying for the job. She can't move on until she finds out why, after three massive hits with comedy Western, Wagon, ho!, The Fuzzy Family and the Funnyboner, her father's subsequent shows inexplicably bombed, the rejections ultimately triggering a fatal heart attack. Why do so many appalling shows get made when superior work is rejected? How can Dario, You So Crazy (featuring Roberto Benigni and Rowan 'Mr. Bean' Atkinson) possibly have flopped before today's paid volunteers? And why are the faceless execs so keen to keep underlings like her away from the War Room?

Couldn't make sense of this one on first reading, but second time around it strikes me as a neat, contemporary companion to Robert Bloch's paranoid Hollywood conspiracies, The Movie People in particular.

Christopher Fowler - At Home in the Old Pubs of London: As title suggests, a very creepy crawl around the capital's surviving trad drinking dens. Who will be tonight's luckless victim? Story anticipates recent 'spiking' panic although I'm almost certain author was reacting to a contemporary scare. Of the thirteen pubs scouted by protagonist, this reader now up to seven. I guess a few will have since gone to the wall. See also Dark Terrors 5.

[dem bones]

Three properly upsetting horrors, CRK's near Biblical retelling of the Johnstown flood an epic in under twenty pages.

Caitlin R. Kiernan - To This Water (Johnstown, Pennsylvania, 1889): A week on from being gang-raped in an alley behind the saloon, Magda, the daughter of Hungarian immigrants, despairs of her life. Her father's attempt to take matters into his own hands only lands him a night in jail and a warning to hold his peace if he and fellow Eastern Europeans wish to keep their jobs. Tom Givens, the one witness to the despicable episode, is tortured by guilt at his non-intervention. Within days of her suicide he sees Magda rise from the river, a Rusalky - essentially the Slavic equivalent of a malevolent mermaid - raising a flood to destroy the town and drown two thousand of its residents.

Tanith Lee - The Abortionist's Horse (A Nightmare): Naine, pregnant and happy after a one night stand, learns that the house she has moved into was once home to Alice Barterlowe, "an old lesbian" bereaved of her companion. Miss Barterlowe dressed in filthy labourers clothes, but kept her hands immaculately scrubbed and ready to go to work at a moment's notice. Just lately, Naine has been troubled by dreams of the abortionist's horse clip-clopping along the drive ...

Gwyneth Jones - Destroyer of Worlds: Three years have passed since Christopher 'Fery' Connor was snatched while mum Hazel was queueing in the Post Office. Dad Eric is remains under suspicion, seemingly for no better reason than he has a computer and the Police have absolutely no leads. Fery would be seven now. All but his mother have given him up for dead, although it's only she sees his ghost wandering Delauney's park, the local wino and delinquent hang out.

In the afterword the author explains; "This was inspired by a newspaper report I read, about a little boy killed in the same way as suggested in the story. The details stuck in my mind as a parent's worst nightmare, and showed me that none of the horrors of being haunted by a ghost need necessarily be supernatural."

[dem bones]

Lord Probert's dream patient and a trip to the museum. Creepy, that's the word I'm looking for.

" But there were other dreams in which I gave birth to things which were not babies. Sometimes it was a deformed creature, armless, and legless, or looking like a foetal pig; once it was a wizened, evil looking old man who bit off my breast; another time it was an egg-shaped thing, glowing red-hot, the passage of which woke me screaming in pain."

Lisa Tuttle - My Pathology: Bess's romance with Daniel, the Rayner's Lane alchemist, hits crisis when a [Northwick Park] hospital examination reveals that she is not, as joyfully anticipated, with child but with tumour. Daniel insists they are wrong, she is birthing the philosopher's stone, and under no circumstances must the mystical pregnancy be terminated. Surely her ovaries are a small price to pay in return for immortality? If Daniel is prepared to do anything to achieve his goal then so too is Beth, no matter what or who she need sacrifice in the process.

Ramsey Campbell - The Retrospective: The London train delayed, draughtsman Nigel Trent has an hour to kill in the home town of parents he's not visited in an age. A guilty conscience gets the better of him. The reunion is excruciating as anticipated. Mum and Dad's fractured conversation suggests that they are already dead and he'll soon be joining them. Trent makes his excuses and again inexplicably misses his train. Rather than retrace his steps he takes refuge in the museum currently hosting a "Memories of Stoneby" retrospective, featuring disconcerting waxwork models of neighbours he recalls from schooldays — the policeman, priest, shopkeepers, the till-ladies from the cake shop, and, finally, the hated headmaster of his nightmares. The replica's give the impression of being horribly alive and ill-disposed toward him.

[dem bones]

This first of these is particularly superb!

Don Tumasonis - The Prospect Cards: A set of 74 picture postcards, Balkan or, possibly, Middle Eastern in origin and dating from circa 1920-30. Offered by Barnet & Cort, Antiquarian travel books & ephemera - catalogue price, £1 ,650. The diary-in-cards — "Make sure that Mildred doesn't read this!!!"— relates the fragmented tale of English treasure hunters/ temple looters fallen foul of a Snake Goddess cult given to gruesome torture (plenty of it), punishment rape, male genital mutilation and monster births. As told by the last white man standing, whose ultimate fate is perhaps the ghastliest of all.

Ray Bradbury - Free Dirt: A young man takes advantage of the offer, helps himself from a pile of excavated graveyard dirt to use as top soil for his back yard. The vegetable patch should see a bumper crop next spring!

Neil Gaiman - The Wedding Present: Gordon the architect and Belinda the vet get hitched. Among the gifts, an typewritten account of their wedding day on a single sheet of cream paper, which self-rewrites when neither are looking. The anonymous author has a nasty imagination.

[mrhappy]

Apr 10, 2022 12:45:03 GMT dem bones said:

Don Tumasonis - The Prospect Cards: A set of 74 picture postcards, Balkan or, possibly, Middle Eastern in origin and dating from circa 1920-30. Offered by Barnet & Cort, Antiquarian travel books & ephemera - catalogue price, £1 ,650. The diary-in-cards — "Make sure that Mildred doesn't read this!!!"— relates the fragmented tale of English treasure hunters/ temple looters fallen foul of a Snake Goddess cult given to gruesome torture (plenty of it), punishment rape, male genital mutilation and monster births. As told by the last white man standing, whose ultimate fate is perhaps the ghastliest of all.

When I came across the news that Don Tumasonis had recently passed away I went back and reread this tale. Oh my goodness is this ever a great little story. The delivery (using postcards with incomplete snippets of dreadful events) allows for pitch perfect mixes of grotesque horror and subtle bleak humor. One postcard which on one side features a man being saddle ridden as a probable punishment (but states that, while discreet, there is definitely a board protruding from the gentleman's posterior) flips over to describe a man being bent forward and preparing to be impaled with a sharp spike by a large mallet. A further card details the impaled man calmly smoking a cigarette (complete with whisps of smoke that are starting to escape where the stake is starting to pierce through his shoulder) inquiring why women and children are eagerly gathering around his dying form. It is only when his companions relate that they are getting ready to posthumously immasculate him that he starts to panic. The postcard's photo shows a pierced sausage on a large pronged fork. This is a beautifully written brutal piece.

Mr Happy

[jamesdoig]

Apr 10, 2022 17:39:56 GMT mrhappy said:

When I came across the news that Don Tumasonis had recently passed away

Gee, I didn't know that - that's terrible news. He always seemed to be around publishing wonderful stories in the early 2000s - a fine writer and also critic/reviewer.

[dem bones]

Sad news. Saw him give a reading at the Best New Horror 18 booklaunch in Goodge Street alongside MMS, Christopher Fowler and Mark Samuels. Wish I'd been aware of The Prospect Cards at the time so I could've told him how much I'd "enjoyed" it.

Apr 10, 2022 17:39:56 GMT mrhappy said:

One postcard which on one side features a man being saddle ridden as a probable punishment (but states that, while discreet, there is definitely a board protruding from the gentleman's posterior) flips over to describe a man being bent forward and preparing to be impaled with a sharp spike by a large mallet.

Yes, that's a card I found particularly disturbing. He mentions in the afterword that the story was intended as a comedy but something went wrong.

Karl E. Wagner - I've Come To Talk To You Again: More decades ago than it would be wise for him to admit, John Holsten, successful American author of Lovecraftian horrors, acquired a copy of The King in Yellow in a New York bookshop. The purchase condemned him to an eternity on earth as a fantasy convention equivalent of Typhoid Mary, visiting disease and death upon those who cross his path. We join Holsten a London pub for a reunion with industry friends not long for this world.

Brian Lumley - Such A Game Boy: Sheriff Tuttle investigates the mysterious disappearance of thirteen-year-old Willy Jay, whose psychotic practical jokes invariably end in someone's death, like that time the little church girl drownded when he said the wood spirit was after her. The lawman calls on eighteen year old Zeb Whitley, the community retard, known to be on good terms with the youngster. Zeb insists that Willy Jay's fine, he's taking an "endurance test" in the abandoned barn.

Glen Hirshberg - The Two Sams: New to me and the one story I didn't care for. Lizzie, pregnant for the third time, lives in constant fear of another miscarriage. Husband Jake is haunted to insanity by the ghosts of their two lost babies.

Which leaves only Pelican Cay and More Tomorrow. Dilemma. Dare I revisit them and risk disappointment?