Ghoulish Grab-bag

Nameless Places: edited by Gerald W. Page, containing the following stories: Glimpses by A. A. Attanasio; The Night of the Unicorn by Thomas Burnett Swann; The Warlord of Kul Satu by Brian N. Ball; More Things by G. N. Gabbard; The Real Road to the Church by Robert Aickman; The Gods of Earth by Gary Myers; Walls of Yellow Clay by Robert E. Gilbert; Businessman's Lament by Scott Edelstein; Dark Vintage by Joseph F. Pumilia; Simaitha by David A. English; In the Land of Angra Mainyu by Stephen Goldin; Worldsong by Gerald W. Page; What Dark God? by Brian Lumley; The Stuff of Heroes by Bob Maurus; Forringer's Fortune by Joseph Payne Brennan; Before the Event by Denys Val Baker; In 'Ygiroth by Walter C. DeBill, Jr.; The Last Hand by Ramsey Campbell; Out of the Ages by Lin Carter; Awakening by David Drake; In the Vale of Pnath by Lin Carter; Chameleon Town by Carl Jacobi; Botch by Scott Edelstein; Black Iron by David Drake; Selene by E. Hoffmann Price; The Christmas Present by Ramsey Campbell; and Lifeguard by Arthur Byron Cover (1975).

Some of this classic (and never-reprinted) Arkham House anthology from the demon-haunted 1970's consists of stories submitted to Arkham co-founder August Derleth before his death in 1971. Overall, there's no real theme to the anthology, as editor Gerald Page notes in his introduction. It's simply a large collection of often very-short stories of horror, dark fantasy, and the supernatural.

This being an Arkham House release, and Arkham having been originally founded to get the stories of H.P. Lovecraft into permanent hardcover editions, there's more than a soupcon of Lovecraftian shenanigans at work here. Lin Carter and a few others pastiche for all they're worth, both Cthulhu Mythos-era HPL and earlier Dunsanian HPL.  Joseph Payne Brennan refers to Lovecraft in his story, though the style and content of "Forringer's Fortune" remain much in line with Brennan's other work, written in a much more demotic plain style than anything Lovecraft assayed.

It's interesting to me that two horror writers who began as Lovecraft pastiche writers, Brian Lumley and Ramsey Campbell, both give us tales of non-Lovecraftian supernatural horror set on trains. Both tales are effective, though Campbell's "The Last Hand" is the more effective simply because he doesn't try to explain outright the true identities of the three passengers his protagonist must engage in a poker game with.

Several stories herein have been much anthologized, including Campbell's Christmas-short "The Christmas Present." We also get Arthur Byron Cover's poignant story of small-town inertia, a couple of stories from a young David Drake, and an extraordinarily good riff on Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos that I've never seen anthologized elsewhere -- A. A. Attanasio's "Glimpses." The quality of the stories is mostly high, and the relatively large number of very short stories means that dissatisfaction with one story may quickly be soothed by another story. Highly recommended.

Ancient History

Year's Best Horror VII: 1978: edited by Gerald W. Page and containing the following stories: "The Pitch" by Dennis Etchison, "The Night of the Tiger" by Stephen King, "Amma" by Charles R. Saunders, "Chastel" by Manly Wade Wellman, "Sleeping Tiger" by Tanith Lee, "Intimately, With Rain" by Janet Fox, "The Secret" by Jack Vance, "Hear Me Now, My Sweet Abbey Rose" by Charles L. Grant, "Divers Hands" by Darrell Schweitzer, "Heading Home" by Ramsey Campbell, "In the Arcade" by Lisa Tuttle, "Nemesis Place" by David Drake, "Collaborating" by Michael Bishop, "Marriage" by Robert Aickman. (1979):

Solid but unspectacular Year's Best Horror from DAW, Gerald Page's last volume as an editor. Robert Aickman is weird and unnerving as ever, as are Dennis Etchison and Ramsey Campbell (though Campbell's story is intentionally funny in a Tales from the Crypt way, with a punning title to boot).

Historical fantasy occupies a surprising amount of this volume, with "Amma", "Sleeping Tiger", "Divers Hands" and "Nemesis Place" all occurring in exotic locations of history and legend. Lisa Tuttle goes to the future instead in a story that's quite unnerving, though improbable once one thinks about it too much. Manly Wade Wellman offers another adventure of his ghost-buster Judge Pursuviant; the Schweitzer and Drake stories are also tales of recurring ghost-facers.

The Stephen King story is a curiosity insofar as King hasn't reprinted it in any of his collections. It's not a particularly memorable King offering, which may explain its omission from his collected short stories to this date. Recommended.

　

Year's Best Horror III: 1972: edited by Richard Davis: containing the following stories: "Pages from a Young Girl's Journal" by Robert Aickman, "The Long-Term Residents" by Kit Pedler, "The Mirror from Antiquity" by Susanna Bates, "Like Two White Spiders" by Eddy C. Bertin (aka Als Twee Grote Witte Spinnen), "The Old Horns" by Ramsey Campbell, "Haggopian" by Brian Lumley, "The Recompensing of Albano Pizar" by Basil Copper, "Were-Creature" by Kenneth Pembrooke, "Events at Poroth Farm" by T.E.D. Klein (1973).

Feast or famine in Davis's third and last Year's Best Horror volume. On the plus side, one has Robert Aickman's astonishing vampire story "Pages from a Young Girl's Journal", a fitting companion piece to Sheridan LeFanu's seminal "Carmilla" and one of Aickman's sharpest and most keenly observed psychological studies. One also has an enigmatic story from Ramsey Campbell's transitional phase, a somewhat obvious gross-out from Brian Lumley, and a funny but slight and distinctly unscary story about the cut-throat politics of the publishing industry from Basil Copper.

One also gets the first version of T.E.D. Klein's marvelous "Events at Poroth Farm," a novella that would grow to become Klein's epic and towering The Ceremonies by the mid-1980's. The novella has its own hideous and unnerving charms, along with some fairly unusual intertextual play with the stories and novels that helped shape horror fiction in English up to the point at which Klein wrote his novella. It's like a snarky graduate seminar class and a horror story! Recommended.

Strange Choices

DAW Year's Best Horror Stories Series V (1976), edited by Gerald W. Page (1977), containing:
The Service by Jerry Sohl; Long Hollow Swamp by Joseph Payne Brennan; Sing a Last Song of Valdese by Karl Edward Wagner; Harold's Blues by Glen Singer; The Well by H. Warner Munn; A Most Unusual Murder by Robert Bloch; Huzdra by Tanith Lee; Shatterday by Harlan Ellison; Children of the Forest by David Drake; The Day It Rained Lizards by Arthur Byron Cover; Followers of the Dark Star by Robert Edmond Alter; When All the Children Call My Name by Charles L. Grant; Belsen Express by Fritz Leiber and Where the Woodbine Twineth by Manly Wade Wellman.

An odd entry in DAW's long-running horror annual with a lot of previously unpublished stories and several stories that aren't really horror at all, the latter most notably those by Munn, Bloch, and Cover. The best stories here are by Wagner, Drake, Lee, and Leiber, the last of which is one of the oddest and most affecting Holocaust stories I can think of. Manly Wade Wellman contributes a fairly representative tale of backwoods supernatural goings-on, more tall tale told around the cracker barrel than actual horror.

The Cover story is something of an unpleasant mess, while Brennan's story starts strong with weird occurences in shunned places before veering into what almost seems like self-parody with the revelation of the hidden menace. Munn's novella -- the longest piece in the anthology -- is a somewhat overripe bit of Westernized Orientalism. Lee and Wagner offer us intriguingly offbeat riffs on fairy tales and legend. Not a great volume in the series, but fairly solid. Recommended.