Yet another oldie salvaged by wrecking crew from Vault Mk. 1. Calenture pitched in with a wonderful blow-by-blow account of the contents but I'd prefer him to transfer it across, so if you're reading this, Rog?
Until then, those who wish to can read the thing in it's entirety
HereRamsey Campbell (ed.) – New Terrors Volumes 1 & 2 (Pan 1980)
Cover photography by Andrew Douglas Volume 1Introduction – Ramsey Campbell
Robert Aickman – The Stains
Steve Rasnic – City Fishing
Lisa Tuttle – Sun City
Manly Wade Wellman – Yare
Tanith Lee – A Room with a Vie
Daphne Castell – Diminishing Landscape with Indistinct Figures
Marc Laidlaw – Tissue
Peter Valentine Timlett – Without Rhyme or Reason
Bob Shaw – Love Me Tender
Gene Wolfe – Kevin Malone
Joan Aiken – Time to Laugh
Kit Reed – Chicken Soup
James Wade – The Pursuer
Graham Masterton – Bridal Suite
Dennis Etchison & Mark Johnson – The Spot
Cherry Wilder – The Gingerbread House
Russell Kirk – Watchers at the Strait Gate
Karl Edward Wagner – .220 Swift
Ramsey Campbell – The FitBlurb:
A brand new blood curdling selection of the horrible, the haunting and the hideous from such masters of terror as Robert Aickman, Manly Wade Wellman, Tanith Lee, Bob Shaw, Joan Aiken, Kit Reed, Karl Edward Wagner and Graham Masterton.
Sun City - imagine dark figure haunting you night after night —a figure dressed in a cloak of decayed human skin...
A Room with a Vie - a hotel room which seems almost alive...
Love Me Tender - an old man living in a deserted woodland shack — and his macabre secret that lurks behind his bedroom door...
Chicken Soup - a mother's almost desperate affection for her son leads to a stomach-churning climax at the dead of night...
Nineteen new tales to chill the blood in this mammoth feast of stark terror – but remember, keep the door locked and don't turn that light off too soon.. .
NIGHTMARES WERE NEVER QUITE LIKE THIS...Volume 2Christopher Priest – The Miraculous Cairn
John Brunner – The Man Whose Eyes Beheld the Glory
Robert Bloch – The Rubber Room
Giles Gordon – Drama In Five Acts
Jack Sullivan – The Initiation
John Burke – Lucille Would Have Known
Rosalind Ashe – Teething Troubles
R. A. Lafferty – The Funny Face Murders
Marianne Leconte – Femme Fatale
Stephen King – Big Wheels: A Tale of the Laundry Game
Greg Bear – Richie by the Sea
Margaret Dickson – Can You Still See Me?
Dorothy K. Haynes – A Song at the Party
Felice Picano – One Way Out -
M. John Harrison – The Ice Monkey
andrew j. offutt – Symbiote
Charles L. Grant – Across the Water to Skye
Kathleen Resch – The DarkBlurb:
A second chilling anthology of white-knuckled terror from such master horrorsmiths as Stephen King, Robert Bloch, Christopher Priest, John Brunner, Rosalind Ashe, R. A. Lafferty and Kathleen Resch.
Femme Fatale - beware of Ira, frenzied motorbike demon, hounding Parisian streets in search of innocent young girls ...
One Way Out - a New England hitch-hiker is plunged into the horrors of a nuclear holocaust – or is it ... ?
The Initiation - the New York subway holds macabre secrets for a young traveller on a nightmare journey ...
The Rubber Room - a padded cell reserved for the screaming depths of insanity ...
Eighteen spine-prickling original stories to make your palms clammier, your bed that little bit colder. So settle down and ignore that strange moving shadow behind the billowing curtain ...
YOU'LL HATE YOURSELF FOR BUYING THISGod, the epic struggles I've had with
New Terrors!
I'm almost certain these were originally published as some mammoth oversized paperback before Pan broke them down into the more manageable two volumes (or maybe it was the other way around). Whatever, the
New Terrors were the cutting edge anthologies Sutton, Davis and the more out there Parry collections were building towards and, for brains here, it was all a bit of a challenge. Look - there's a man who insists on his name being written entirely in lower case! And can I really risk owning a book which includes a story entitled
Diminishing Landscape With Indistinct Figures? You just don't face these kind of moral dilemma's with Robert Lory.
I nearly gave up on these a number of times. There were a string of stories in each that bamboozled me senseless, but, just when all seemed hopeless, up would pop the likes of the exceptional vampire novella,
The Dark, Campbell's
The Fit, Masterton's raunchy (for 1980!)
Bridal Suite or the more trad horrors of Bloch's nasty Nazi epic, and I'd find the strength to continue.
New Terrors also set me to seeking out more stories by a modern-day pulp king, the late, great Karl E. Wagner, and I seem to recall
Femme Fatale introduces a female lead who is part vampire, part motorcycle.
It's quite likely that I've still not read all of these stories, and a stone cold certainty that I won't live enough centuries to understand and appreciate many of those I have.
But every few years I find myself being lured back
includes:
Robert Bloch - The Rubber Room: Another from Bloch's stable of mother-fixated psycho's, and it's very effective. Emery is locked up in a padded cell after strangling a little girl. Emery is convinced that the Jews are a race of terrorists spying on his every move, waiting to strike him down because he knows the truth. Knowing that nobody will believe his defence - the Jews had sent the child to destroy him - he turns to his idol Adolf Hitler for inspiration as to how he should dispose of the corpse.
Ramsey Campbell - The Fit: The narrator's parents pack him off to his aunt Naomi's house in Keswick during the school holidays. On a trek through the woods he discovers a path which leads to a tiny cottage obscured by gorse and herbs. He later learns from his aunt that this is residence of Fanny Cave, a half-crazed crone whom the locals are terrified of - and with good reason. Naomi is the only person who will stand up to her.
A year later he returns to learn that, after her last confrontation with his aunt, Fanny Cave lost her footing on the way home and perished in the stagnant water of the pond. She now persecutes Naomi from beyond the grave and entices her to sleepwalk to the pond. The narrator arrives just as the hag rises from the filth, luring Naomi to her doom. He saves her, but at a terrible price to himself.
Marianne Leconte - Femme Fatale: "Beware of Ira, frenzied motorbike demon, hounding dark Parisien streets in search of innocent young girls .."
Girl and bike are literally as one, and the vampiric chopper ravages then feeds on the blood of its victims.
John Burke - Lucille Would Have Known: After Lucille's death, her friend Madge takes over as organiser of the annual Getaway Tour to the romantic castles of the North East. Lucille's ghost is among the party and, under her influence, they bury Madge in the sand. They're on their way home and the tide is coming in before Lucille releases them from her spell.
andrew j. offutt - Symbiote: Philip is under the influence of a mind parasite, Joe, who encourages him to commit crimes indiscriminately. They soon discover that Phil is happiest carrying out the torture murders of young women and they gleefully film him in action with a bound stripper - it takes him three days to kill her. As a sideline, they write up details of his slayings as best selling short stories. Comes the day that Joe gets bored with his partner ....
Rosalind Ashe - Teething Troubles: John Milton Austin, son of a rag & bone man, builds his empire on the back of a series of unscrupulous activities including the factory farming of battery hens. Austin decides he wants to found a college and he builds it with the insurance money he raked in when one of his farms mysteriously burnt down. But the college is not to be a success due to the strange manifestations around the new building: animal fat is smeared all about the place, the smell of carrion pervades the rooms and an abundance of feathers are discovered where they have no business to be. The Poltergeist activity is enough to have the workmen quitting in droves. The finale, during the inaugural Christmas feast, sees Austin suffer a stroke after an attack by paper napkins which almost peck him to death.
Dr. Terror wrote:
"... I'm almost certain these were originally published as some mammoth oversized paperback before Pan broke them down into the more manageable two volumes (or maybe it was the other way around)" Probably separately first, then as The Omnibus of New Terrors.
Watch out for American editions though if you're looking for these. For instance there's one that contains 14 stories from NT1 and one story from NT2. Whilst another has 12 from NT2 and 3 from NT1!
I've been dipping into New Terrors 2 today. There's some good 'uns in here.
Priest's revelation caught me out.
John Brunner's concerns events on a Greek island, i'm sure there's enough of those for an anthology.
Teething Troubles, and Symbiote have particularly fine endings.
Symbiote is the only horror story i can recall by Offutt.
He's probably known best for his fantasy and sci-fi.
A lot of his fantasy fiction is barbarian swords and sorcery. This includes three Conan Novels, and several novels featuring Cormac Mac Art - another Robert E. Howard character.
He is also a contributor to the Thieves' World series, and edited the Swords Against Darkness anthologies.
His by-line doesn't always appear in lower case, Offutt is always present but he's either Andy or Andrew, and sometimes there's the middle initial J.
And then there's a load of pseudonyms as well, house name, John Cleve looks to be the most common but also used have been: Jeff Douglas, Farrah Fawkes, Baxter Giles, John X. Williams, and Turk Winter.
demonik I remember they had the "Omnibus" in the local library - a bloody monstrous thing. I wonder if anybody ever managed to get through it cover to cover? I think I prefer the 2 volumes set - at 330 plus pages a go, they're bulky enough as it is.
