Fear

[dem bones]

Fear #13 (January, 1990)

Cover illustration & design: Oliver Frey

Guy N. Smith does very well out of this one, thank you! Apart from copping lead story in the Fear Fiction section, there's also an ace review of The Slime Beast ("It's a classic of bad taste trash") from Stuart Wynne and a guarded thumbs up from editor John Gilbert for The Camp - don't think about it too deeply, just read and enjoy is his advice. Elsewhere, Stanley Waiter interview's Robert Bloch, whose negative comments on Splatterpunk would provoke Skipp & Spector's excellently argued rebuttal in their zombie anthology, Book Of The Dead. Various big shots are canvassed for their favourites to compile Fear's Top Sixty Horror Movies (in a separate article, Shaun Hutson lists his personal top ten, as does Elvira). Loads of movie news and reviews, six pages worth of new books, Richard Rubinstein reveals his master-plan for Stephen King movies to achieve global multiplex domination, etc.

Fear Fiction this issue:

Guy N. Smith - The Decoy
Nicola Germain - Carlisle Hunter
Ian Harding - State Of The Art
Kirk S. King - Coup De Grace
Paul Mills - One Of The Gang
James M. Anderton - The Iron Ground
Martin Cook - Clancy

includes:

Guy N. Smith - The Decoy: I've run and re-run my generic, two line synopsis of The Decoy again and again over two boards, so let's just say it's a crabs classic in miniature and leave it at that.

Paul Mills - One Of The Gang: To join, Dave Taylor must first endure a macabre initiation - he's gonna be buried alive. To this end he and his heroes break into a funeral parlour and oust the unfortunate Benjamin Morgan from his pine coffin so Dave can take his place. After a night in the box, much of which, incredibly, he spends asleep, Dave wakes up to hear the Priest intoning the mass of the dead. Not long now and he'll be buried and the sooner the better, because then his mates will come and dig him up and he'll have proved himself worthy of full membership. Trouble is, the late Benjamin Morgan isn't down for burial ....

Kirk S. King - Coup De Grace: New York. Raymond takes a sixteen year old up to his bedsit, cuts out her heart and devours it, he doesn't know why. afterward, he can't even remember if she were alive or dead when he performed the grisly deed. Raymond is duly executed in the electric chair but is nonchalant to the last - and beyond.

James M. Anderton - The Iron Ground: "Then the door would squeal open and there he would be .... Who? Frankenstein, that was who. Or the Abominable Dr. Phibes ...". Donna finds herself alone in the gym with half an hour to go before she can lock up for the night. Normally that wouldn't be a problem, but right now she's terrified. there have been too many "accidents" of late, beginning with the gory scalping of busty Tina Dawson and now one of her clients has openly accused the expensive apparatus of deliberately trying to injure her. Donna tries to convince herself it's a lot of drama over nothing ... until every item of equipment in the gym launches itself against her. As the huge Pec-Dec machine advances destroying everything in it's path, she lifts the lid of one of the sun-bed's and climbs underneath...

[killercrab]

How many issues of FEAR where there? I don't think I ever ran across a copy anywhere. Sounds like a good mag.

KC

[David A. Riley]

It was an excellent magazine, which was great to me because it had the guts to print fiction too as well as articles on films, TV, etc. I still have most of my copies of it - which is quite a big pile. I'll have to take a look at them tonight and try and see how many I reckon there were.

My favourite is this edition (for purely selfish reasons - I have a story in it):



David

[dem bones]

Sept 15, 2008 1:49:53 GMT killercrab said:

How many issues of FEAR where there? I don't think I ever ran across a copy anywhere. Sounds like a good mag.

KC

It seems there were 34 issues in all, ade, the magazine only coming to an end when publishers Newsfield (who also brought us Frighteners) went into liquidation in 1991. I think it was most likely the usual case of a horror magazine being very easy get hold of .... provided you lived next door a branch of Forbidden Planet!

Fear #1 (Sept. 1988)

Oliver Frey

A decent debut with original fiction from Ramsey Campbell Eye Of Childhood, Shaun Hutson (The Prize) and Nicholas Royle (The Dandelion Woman): Basil Copper's (very!) concise history of horror literature followed by six pages of reviews: John Gilbert interviews Ramsey Campbell and Stephen Gallagher ("Big deal!" thinks Caroline. "So have I!"), Kim Newman meets John Carpenter and Philip Nutman chats with Skipp & Spector. This is all much appreciated, but arguably the best single item in #1 is David Perry debating film censorship with Ken Penry of the BBFC.

[David A. Riley]

I think it was most likely the usual case of a horror magazine being very easy get hold of .... provided you lived next door a branch of Forbidden Planet!

I think it was a bit easier than that to get hold of. I managed to buy every single issue published, mostly from WH Smiths in Preston, who seemed to stock it well in this neck of the woods.

Word at the time was that the failure of Frighteners was what brought about the collapse of the publishers, and Fear with it, though whether that's true I have no way of veryfying.

David

[dem bones]

Sept 15, 2008 10:03:31 GMT David A. Riley said:

I think it was a bit easier than that to get hold of. I managed to buy every single issue published, mostly from WH Smiths in Preston, who seemed to stock it well in this neck of the woods.

Ah! Well I got that all wrong just for a change! I'm still finding odd copies junked in with my other mags and they're far better than I remember them. The thing is, I was never really one for mainstream horror mags like Fangoria with their - to me - over-reliance on stills from FX-laden modern slash flicks, too much "whatever-Clive Barker-says-about-anything-goes!" and stupid Freddy Krueger gloves. After picking up the first issue of Fear I dismissed it as more of the same which was doubtless unjustly harsh: the fact that it was prepared to devote a generous amount of space to new fiction was laudable enough on it's own.

[Johnlprobert]

I had the entire run of Fear magazine as it was even easy to pick it up in Welsh branches of WHSmiths. Dumped the lot when I had a space problem, though, as none had anything particularly memorable in them.

I kept my Dark Sides because they did more interesting stuff like their two issue Pete Walker special.

[dem bones]

Yeah, we really ought to get around to The Dark Side, Shivers too. One of the very early Dark Side's sticks in my mind, an oh-so-tasteful Jack The Ripper special! I'll see if I can root out a copy as I'm sure to have kept something like that. But for the moment, let's see if we can get some more mileage out of Fear ....

Number 11 (Nov. 1989. Oliver Frey cover posted above by Mr. Riley), and the big news in horror films was apparently Robert Englund in another Phantom Of The Opera remake and George C. Scott in 'proper' sequel, Exorcist 1990. Moving swiftly on and there's Peter Crowther's interview with Paul McGrath (Blood And Water, The Grotesque which was made into a doubtless awful film because Sting was in it, etc). One of McGrath's earliest stories will surely strike a chord with many our readers: Hand Of A Wanker concerns a severed limb haunting a Gentleman's club.

The Fear Fiction department is firing on all cylinders with original stories from Christopher Fowler, David A. Riley, Stephen Harris (Harry's Black & Decker, Sara J. Townsend (The Top Floor) , Jeff Vandermeer (So The Dead Walk Softly) and D. W. Sheridan. Tried three earlier, will hopefully get around to the rest!

Christopher Fowler - Jumbo Portions: London, West End in and around Tottenham Court Road. Typists Sharon and Tracy have a seemingly insatiable appetite for junk food. When Tony, Sharon's boyfriend, has a fatal freak accident in the Fried Chicken Takeaway, the unscrupulous owner has to dispose of the corpse somehow ...

David A Riley - Winter On Aubarch 6: How much could a man consume of himself and live?"

Smuggler Arrach Gudgeon is a fugitive, marooned on a largely uncharted planet in a tiny but durable escape module after his Transporter was blasted from the sky. Rather than give himself up and face a brutal prison sentence, he decides to stay put for a year by which time he'll have been forgotten. All is well at first, but as the bitter winter approaches his supplies dwindle and even the huge swamp worms he's been dining upon are no longer around. inspiration comes in the unlikely form of some bizarre horror story he once read by some obscure 20th century author named Stephen King ...

D. W. Sheridan - Mud: Grisly Vietnam experience of Danny Littlewood from Bakers Heights, Ohama, as he becomes progressively dehumanised and, just like his colleagues, indulges in all the murder, rape and torture that initially disgusted him. Comes the day he finds himself crawling through the stinking mud, dodging the occasional snipers bullet, passing through row upon row of corpses until he yearns for death. As he inches forward, he stumbles upon what are clearly the corpses of Nazi soldiers - what are they doing here? - and passes on toward the last dreadful revelation ...

Here's the bleedin' horrible cover of #25 (January 1991).

Les Edwards

A sneaky peek inside at the Les Edwards feature and there's our other great friend, the "banned" cover of Lawrence James' The City in all it's gory glory.

[mattofthespurs]

I never had much problem picking Fear up in any of the WH Smiths dotted around North London.
I have a complete collection mouldering away somewhere.
May have to go and dig them out now.

[benedictjjones]

spiffing moustache in that photo david

[Jaqhama]

The front cover of FEAR #1 is just superb!

Even as a scanned pic on the board; the way the hand comes toward you is just amazing.

Excellent painting!

[andydecker]

I got the magazine via an overseas subscription, I think I got it complete. It was a treasure of information at the time, and the art was so good.

It introduced me to a lot of writers I had never heard about.

Ah, memories ;D

[andydecker]

I pulled a few of them from the shelf. I really had forgotten how good they were.

And it is sad to see how many of the proposed projects fell through. They wanted to make a movie of Fowler´s Roofworld?

Whatever happened to John Gilbert, btw?

[caminoreal]

I wish I knew what had happened to John Gilbert. I knew him slightly when I was a member of the British Fantasy Society. We met up in London a couple of times and I think I went round to his house on one occasion. He always used to wear a red jumper. The last time I saw him was at the World Fantasy Con in London in the last 80's.

[H_P_Saucecraft]

Some more cover scans for you: