Holmes Vs. Evil

Gaslight Grimoire: Fantastic Tales of Sherlock Holmes (2008) edited by Charles Prepolec and J.R. Campbell, containing the following stories:

The Lost Boy by Barbara Hambly; His Last Arrow by Christopher Sequeira; The Things That Shall Come Upon Them by Barbara Roden; The Finishing Stroke by M.J. Elliott; Sherlock Holmes in the Lost World by Martin Powell; The Grantchester Grimoire by Rick Kennett and Chico Kidd; The Steamship Friesland by Peter Calamai; The Entwined by J.R. Campbell; Merridew of Abominable Memory by Chris Roberson; Red Sunset by Bob Madison; and The Red Planet League by Kim Newman.

The first of Canada's EDGE Publishing's anthologies of weird Sherlock Holmes homages is fun, for the most part, with a few stand-outs. When putting Holmes into supernatural situations, writers tend to either make Holmes a stubborn denier, regardless of the evidence, or to make his detection ethos flexible enough to admit any possibility. Sometimes writers go even further, generally by reimagining Holmes as someone who's always been a believer in the supernatural. 

The 'fantastic' herein involves a lot of stories that combine Holmes with other fictional or historical characters. Team-ups pair Holmes with Peter Pan ("The Lost Boy") , supernatural investigator Flaxman Low ("The Things That Shall Come Upon Them"), supernatural investigator Carnacki ("The Grantchester Grimoire") , and Arthur Conan Doyle's own Professor Challenger ("Sherlock Holmes in the Lost World"). Holmes also visits WW2-era Los Angeles to play a part in a horror/hard-boiled detective mash-up ("Red Sunset"). 

And it's a Holmes-homage tradition to have at least a couple of stories about cases briefly mentioned during Arthur Conan Doyle's original stories but never fully told. These references have always formed a sort of Black Casebook of Holmes adventures for later writers to imagine in their entirety. Here, "Merridew of Abominable Memory" and "The Steamship Friesland" develop these fleeting references of Doyle in unusual ways. 

Finishing the anthology is Kim Newman's blackly comic, Holmes-and-Watson-less adventure of Professor Moriarty and his right-hand man Sebastian Moran. Newman riffs on H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds, but probably not in the way one expects. In all, an enjoyable anthology. Recommended.

Gaslight Arcanum: Uncanny Tales of Sherlock Holmes (2011) edited by Charles Prepolec and J.R. Campbell, containing the following stories:

Sherlock Holmes and the Diving Bell by Simon Clark; The Greatest Mystery by Paul Kane; The Adventure of the Six Maledictions by Kim Newman; The Comfort of the Seine by Stephen Volk; The Adventure of Lucifer's Footprints by Christopher Fowler; The Deadly Sin of Sherlock Holmes by Tom English; The Color That Came To Chiswick by William Meikle; A Country Death by Simon Kurt Unsworth; From the Tree of Time by Fred Saberhagen (1982); The Executioner by Lawrence Connolly; Sherlock Holmes and the Great Game by Kevin Cockle; and The House of Blood by Tony Richards.

The third of EDGE Publishing's series of Weird Sherlock Holmes anthologies is solid and often deadly serious as these things go. The editors pay homage to one of Holmes's finest homagists, Fred Saberhagen, by reprinting a 1982 short story featuring Holmes and his distant ancestor and sometime-ally, Saberhagen's semi-heroic version of Dracula.

The rest of the anthology is new and, for the most part, ranges from enjoyable to excellent. Stand-outs include Stephen Volk's excellent chronicle of a young Sherlock Holmes in Paris, Simon Unsworth's horror story, and Kim Newman's comic adventure of Moriarty, Moran, and six dangerous supposedly magical items. Along the way, Holmes will also visit modern-day Las Vegas, hang out with Frankenstein's Creature, and battle Lovecraftian horror and Death itself. Recommended. 

Best New Horror; Not-so-good Old Horror

Best New Horror 25 (2013/Published 2014): edited by Stephen Jones, containing the following fiction: "Who Dares Wins," Kim Newman; "Click-Clack the Rattlebag," Neil Gaiman; "Dead End," Nicholas Royle; "Isaac's Room," Daniel Mills; "The Burning Circus," Angela Slatter; "Holes for Faces," Ramsey Campbell; "By Night He Could Not See," Joel Lane; . "Come Into My Parlour," Reggie Oliver; "The Middle Park," Michael Chislett; "Into the Water," Simon Kurt Unsworth; "The Burned House," Lynda Rucker; "What Do We Talk About When We Talk About Z------," Lavie Tidhar; "Fishfly Season," Halli Villegas; "Doll Re Mi," Tanith Lee; "A Night's Work," Clive Barker; "The Sixteenth Step," Robert Shearman; "Stemming the Tide," Simon Strantzas; "The Gist," Michael Marshall Smith; "Guinea Pig Girl," Thana Niveau; "Miss Baltimore Crabs," Kim Newman; and Whitstable by Stephen Volk.

Another year, another solid Best New Horror anthology from editor Stephen Jones. The 25th such annual anthology, as it turns out. Besides the stories, the lengthy sections devoted to works that came out in 2013 are excellent, as is the sad-making Necrology of deaths of people connected in some way to the horror genre.

The anthology is book-ended on the fiction side of things by two standalone sections from Kim Newman's Anno Dracula series. They're enjoyable and deeply metafictional and possess horrifying elements, though they're not particularly horrifying. Neil Gaiman's short-short story, "Click-Clack the Rattlebag," apparently wows when read aloud by the author. On the page, it's the slightest of slight jaunts.

My favourite stories herein include "Holes for Faces" by Ramsey Campbell, a mournful look at the inner life of an endlessly put-upon child; "The Gist" by Michael Marshall Smith, a sad look at a wasted life; and "Isaac's Room" by Daniel Mills, an effective tale of an Internet-augmented haunting that gains a lot of effectiveness from its low-key, under-stated nature. 

Joel Lane's "By Night He Could Not See" is a poetic and ultimately twisty tale of revenge from beyond the grave, while "Come Into My Parlour" by Reggie Oliver deals with a child's much-disliked aunt in another of Oliver's excellent riffs on the classic English ghost story epitomized by the stories of M.R. James.

Stephen Volk's short novel Whitstable also stands out. It's far and away the longest tale in the anthology. It's also one of the two or three best, and well worth the length. Volk takes the germ of a concept from Fright Night, among other works, in this story of a boy who comes to Peter Cushing for help because the boy's soon-to-be-stepfather is a vampire. 

The story goes off in a completely different direction that what one might expect from this beginning. It's a deeply researched look at Peter Cushing's life, set in the months after his beloved wife died of emphysema in the early 1970's. It makes Cushing a sympathetic character, but it also extends some level of pity to the monster he chooses to pursue. It's really lovely writing.

All in all, a solid year for Best New Horror. Highly recommended.

The Hell of Mirrors (1965): edited by Peter Haining, containing the following stories: The Werewolf (1839) by Frederick Marryat (excerpt: chapter 39 of The Phantom Ship)); Ligeia (1838) by Edgar Allan Poe; The Black Cat (1843) by Edgar Allan Poe; Young Goodman Brown (1835) by Nathaniel Hawthorne; Schalken the Painter (1835) by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu; The Damned Thing (1893) by Ambrose Bierce; The Middle Toe of the Right Foot (1890) by Ambrose Bierce; The Squaw (1893) by Bram Stoker; Who Knows? (1890) by Guy de Maupassant; The Drowned Man (1888) by Guy de Maupassant; The Caterpillar (1929) by Edogawa Rampo; The Hell of Mirrors (1926) by Edogawa Rampo; The Knocking in the Castle (1964) by Henry Slesar; The Fanatic (1964) by Arthur Porges.

Extraordinarily odd anthology is really only noteworthy as being prolific anthologist Peter Haining's first editorial work. And he would put together many volumes superior to this one. But we've all got to start somewhere.

Why is it odd? More than half the book consists of out-of-copyright stories, many of them classics. But The Hell of Mirrors doubles up on entries by several authors. Then we jump from the 1890's to two weird tales in translation from Japanese fantasist Edogawa Rampo. The we jump another 35 years to two solid but undistinguished stories from the same science-fiction magazine, both released the year before this anthology came out. It looks like a job of selection that must have taken about an afternoon, with no apparatus other than a brief introduction to explain to us who the writers are and why these particular stories are important.

If you came across this for a couple of bucks in a used bookstore somewhere and hadn't been exposed to the stories by Poe, Bierce, and Le Fanu, then I suppose it would be worth the purchase. But for the most part, the best stories are much-anthologized and the lesser stories by Slesar and Porges, while mildly enjoyable, can easily be skipped. Not recommended.

Horrors Old and New

The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 24 (2012) (published 2013): edited by Stephen R. Jones with non-fiction material by Kim Newman, containing the following:

Witch Work by Neil Gaiman: It's a poem. And not a good one.

The Discord of Being by Alison J. Littlewood: Solidly written, but I actually can't remember what it was about. And I just read it a week ago.

Necrosis by Dale Bailey: Enjoyable, somewhat enigmatic "Club Tale."

The Hunt: Before, and the Aftermath by Joe R. Lansdale: Lansdale creates a plausible new horror for the Zombie crowd. The disturbing elements build throughout to a truly gut-wrenching final few pages.

The Cotswold Olympicks by Simon Kurt Unsworth: Nice variation on the whole Town With a Secret sub-genre of horror.

Where the Summer Dwells by Lynda E. Rucker: Well-written but fatally inconclusive bit of what I've started to think of as Lifestyle Horror rather than The New Weird. Something Happened, but Not Much, and It Didn't Really Change Anything Anyway.

The Callers by Ramsey Campbell: Campbell makes Bingo scary, and is that Tubby Thackeray from The Grin of the Dark as the bingo caller?

The Curtain by Thana Niveau: Deep-sea horror builds to an apocalyptic climax.

The Fall of the King of Babylon by Mark Valentine: Nicely written but underplotted and underdeveloped bit of Magical History.

Nightside Eye by Terry Dowling: Interesting use of a paranormal detective with an extremely odd power within the long-standing trope of the Haunted Hotel.

The Old and the New by Helen Marshall: Nicely written but seriously underdeveloped bit of relationship horror somehow makes the bone-filled catacombs of Paris seem mundane.

Waiting at the Crossroads Motel by Steve Rasnic Tem: Creepy bit of American Lovecraftiana with some startlingly odd images.

His Only Audience by Glen Hirshberg: Fun paranormal detective adventure riffs on The Deal with the Devil.

Marionettes by Claire Massey: Weirdly, this is basically a much better version of "The Old and the New." Compares favourably to the work of Robert Aickman.

Between Four Yews by Reggie Oliver: A prequel to M.R. James' "A School Story" works well in the shadow of James by dealing with a facet of the supernatural that James himself would have avoided because of era and inclination.

Slick Black Bones and Soft Black Stars by Gemma Files: Marvelous homage to The King in Yellow via Pitcairn Island.

The Other One by Evangeline Walton: Posthumous doppelganger horror.

Slow Burn by Joel Lane: Police detective investigating the paranormal; you'll wish it were longer.

Celebrity Frankenstein by Stephen Volk: Funny commentary on our current celebrity/reality-show culture.

Blue Crayon, Yellow Crayon by Robert Shearman: Weird, not entirely successful piece starts strong and then takes the train to WTF?

October Dreams by Michael Kelly: Solid little mood piece tips a Halloween hat to Bradbury.

The Eyes of Water by Alison J. Littlewood: Build-up of mystery and suspense ends in a sort of nothing rather than the Sublime it seemed to be aiming for. Let-down.

In all: Lots of good and nothing really 'bad,' though the fatal inconclusiveness of the New Weird appears to be seeping more and more into the choices. As always, the Necrology listing of deceased writers, artists, actors, and others is comprehensive and useful. Recommended.


Witch House by Evangeline Walton (1945): Almost forgotten Haunted House novel reads like an odd sort of bridge between sub-genre Megaliths The Haunting of Hill House and Hell House. Walton's version of the supernatural would now be called New Agey, though it really draws on a long tradition of mysticism and pseudo-science that's been cropping up in horror stories and novels since J. Sheridan Le Fanu's "The Familiar" and "Green Tea."

What this means for the novel is that the supernatural, while not having a scientific basis, nonetheless obeys mystical rules rather than the basic rules of the Personal Haunting. Walton's psychic investigator herein has a solid grounding in both Eastern Mysticism and pseudo-scientific technobabble. He's also a little too infallible to allow for much suspense, a trait shared by Algernon Blackwood's similarly hyper-competent mystic John Silence.

Walton's interest in building a consistent mystical background to explain the goings-on at Witch-House leaves the novel oddly sketchy in the development of a historical narrative for the house in question. The horror doesn't really build -- it just flares up, only to be dealt with again and again by the psychic detective.

The engine of the plot is a little girl in peril who only sporadically seems to be really be in peril. But this is really a Novel of Ideas, expounded upon at length. Walton throws in reincarnation, Buddhism, telepathy, a brooding seascape, Orientalism, telekinesis, poltergeists, a couple of wizards' battles, ectoplasm, a giant black rabbit, a supernatural kitten, paintings that seem to look at people, a Family Curse, a malign Will, sadomasochism, and a bunch of other stuff. The novel might actually be twice as good at twice the length. Lightly recommended.

First the Horror

Best New Horror Volume 1 (1989) edited by Stephen Jones and Ramsey Campbell, containing the following stories: "Pin" by Robert R. McCammon; "The House on Cemetery Street" by Cherry Wilder; "The Horn" by Stephen Gallagher; "Breaking Up" by Alex Quiroba; "It Helps If You Sing" by Ramsey Campbell; "Closed Circuit" by Laurence Staig; "Carnal House" by Steve Rasnic Tem; "Twitch Technicolor" by Kim Newman; "Lizaveta" by Gregory Frost; "Snow Cancellations" by Donald R. Burleson; "Archway" by Nicholas Royle; "The Strange Design of Master Rignolo" by Thomas Ligotti; "...To Feel Another's Woe" by Chet Williamson; "The Last Day of Miss Dorinda Molyneaux" by Robert Westall; "No Sharks in the Med" by Brian Lumley; "Mort au Monde" by D. F. Lewis; "Blanca" by Thomas Tessier; "The Eye of the Ayatollah" by Ian Watson; "At First Just Ghostly" by Karl Edward Wagner; and "Bad News" by Richard Laymon (Collected 1990):

The first of the still-running Best New Horror anthologies is mostly excellent and manages to look at a broad slice of horror sub-genres. Cherry Wilder's Holocaust-tinged "The House on Cemetery Street" is literally and figuratively haunting, as is Thomas Tessier's Central American nightmare "Blanca." "The Last Day of Miss Dorinda Molyneaux" by Robert Westall does a terrific job of homaging the style and content of M.R. James in a more modern context, while the Thomas Ligotti piece included here is an emblematic bit of WTF? embodying Ligotti's unnerving fictional universe.

Ian Watson's piece is a black-comic horror-satire dealing with the fatwa against Salman Rushdie issued after the publication of The Satanic Verses. Ramsey Campbell's story also satirizes religious fundamentalism, in this case against the backdrop of a world-wide zombie apocalypse, while Kim Newman's tale visits death and destruction on people who colourize movies (sort of). Only the Karl Edward Wagner tale is a bummer from a formerly great talent on his tragic way down, an unscary, unfunny homage to TV's The Avengers that features yet another alcoholic, self-loathing, sexually charismatic Wagner protagonist. Recommended.

The Year's Best Horror XXII-1993 edited by Karl Edward Wagner (1994)

The Year's Best Horror XXII-1993 edited by Karl Edward Wagner (1994) containing "The Ripper's Tune" by Gregory Nicoll; "One Size Eats All" by T.E.D. Klein; "Resurrection" by Adam Meyer; "I Live to Wash Her" by Joey Froehlich; "A Little-Known Side of Elvis" by Dennis Etchison; "Perfect Days" by Chet Williamson; "See How They Run" by Ramsey Campbell (aka "For You to Judge"); "Shots Downed, Officer Fired" by Wayne Allen Sallee; "David" by Sean Doolittle; "Portrait of a Pulp Writer" by F. A. Pollard [as by F. A. McMahan]; "Fish Harbor" by Paul Pinn; "Ridi Bobo" by Robert Devereaux; "Adroitly Wrapped" by Mark McLaughlin; "Thicker Than Water" by Joel Lane; "Memento Mori" by Scott Thomas; "The Blitz Spirit" by Kim Newman; "Companions" by Del Stone, Jr.; "Masquerade" by Lillian Csernica; "Price of the Flames" by Deidra Cox (aka "The Price of the Flames"); "The Bone Garden" by Conrad Williams; "Ice Cream And Tombstones" by Nina Kiriki Hoffman; "Salt Snake" by Simon Clark; "Lady's Portrait, Executed In Archaic Colors" by Charles M. Saplak; "Lost Alleys" by Jeffrey Thomas; "Salustrade" by D. F. Lewis; "The Power of One" by Nancy Kilpatrick; "The Lions in the Desert" by David Langford; "Turning Thirty" by Lisa Tuttle; "Bloodletting" by Kim Antieau; "Flying Into Naples" by Nicholas Royle; "Under the Crust" by Terry Lamsley.

This was editor Karl Edward Wagner's last Year's Best horror-short-stories volume for DAW Books before his death at the age of 49 due to complications caused by chronic alcohol abuse. His was a tragic end long foretold, based on most accounts I've read, a slide that went on for more than a decade. Through that slide, he edited more than a dozen volumes of this annual collection (the only such annual collection for horror at the time), and while his writing petered out over that awful span, his editing remained sharp and idiosyncratic right up until the end.

Wagner's editorship tended to focus on short stories rather than novellas and novelettes, which meant that his volumes -- especially the later ones, with much-increased page counts -- sometimes have a ridiculously large table of contents. I think sometimes there must have been one novella out there that year that was better than three of the included short stories, but Wagner's commitment to a certain level of volume introduced readers to a lot of writers who might otherwise have remained mostly unknown.

This isn't Wagner's best Year's Best volume. There are a few too many gimmicky punch-line stories for my taste, and a few too many generic stories with generic titles. But there's also excellence here from Dennis Etchison -- maybe the least well-known great horror writer of his generation due to his concentration on the short story.

And there's a concluding double-punch of fine novellas by little-known writers, "Flying into Naples" by Nicholas Royle and "Under the Crust" by Terry Lamsley, that highlights Wagner's career-long strength as a finder and provider of excellence from unexplored corners of the publishing world. When Wagner died, the DAW series was buried with him. Poor Wagner, but what a legacy he left, singing out of darkness. Recommended.

New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird: edited by Paula Guran (2012)

New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird: edited by Paula Guran (2012) containing the following stories:

"The Crevasse", Dale Bailey & Nathan Ballingrud; "Old Virginia", Laird Barron; "Shoggoths in Bloom", Elizabeth Bear; "Mongoose", Elizabeth Bear & Sarah Monette; "The Oram County Whoosit", Steve Duffy; "A Study in Emerald", Neil Gaiman; "Grinding Rock", Cody Goodfellow; "Pickman’s Other Model (1929)", Caitlin Kiernan; "The Disciple", David Barr Kirtley; "The Vicar of R'lyeh", Marc Laidlaw; "Mr. Gaunt", John Langan; "Take Me to the River", Paul McAuley; "The Dude Who Collected Lovecraft", Nick Mamatas & Tim Pratt; "Details", China Mieville; "Bringing Helena Back", Sarah Monette; "Another Fish Story", Kim Newman; "Lesser Demons", Norm Partridge; "Cold Water Survival", Holly Phillips; "Head Music", Lon Prater; "Bad Sushi", Cherie Priest; "The Fungal Stain", W.H. Pugmire; "Tsathoggua", Michael Shea; "Buried in the Sky", John Shirley; "Fair Exchange", Michael Marshall Smith; "The Essayist in the Wilderness", William Browning Spencer; "A Colder War", Charles Stross; "The Great White Bed", Don Webb.

Editor Paula Guran's mandate here is focused -- the best Lovecraftian stories of the first 11 years or so of the new millennium. If there's a disappointment here, it lies in something that's only going to be immediately apparent to a reader who buys a lot of Lovecraft-influenced anthologies and collections.

However, as I imagine a high percentage of people who read this sort of thing do just that, I'll note the disappointment: too many stories taken from the same original anthologies (eight of the stories herein appear in just three other original anthologies) and a fairly significant overlap (four stories) with the 2011 anthology The Book of Cthulhu, the mandate of which was to collect Lovecraft-influenced stories from the last thirty years or so.

In a pinch, I'd suggest going with The Book of Cthulhu. Its overall quality is higher, though that's obviously a factor of a longer span of time to choose from. Furthermore, choosing a lot of stories from other anthologies strikes me as somewhat problematic -- I've got several of these stories in three anthologies already, a pretty heavy load for a story published in, say, 2008 to be carrying. This may indicate taste rather than laziness, but it feels like laziness. And a couple of the multiple stories from other anthologies really sort of stink. Others are a stretch for the anthology, especially for one with a big picture of Cthulhu on the cover.

Nonetheless, there are some corkers here, both too often repeated ("The Oram County Whoosit" is a terrific tale -- so terrific I've now seen it in three different anthologies) and relatively new to this anthology (the offerings from old pros Michael Shea and John Shirley are especially gratifying). Shirley's almost reads like a Cthulhu Mythos story semi-sarcastically super-collided with a Young Adult novel. Shea's story about Clark Ashton Smith's blobby toad-god addition to the Lovecraft pantheon (subsequently described by HPL in At the Mountains of Madness) is squishy and, thankfully, not the over-anthologized, excellent "Fat Face".

Neil Gaiman impresses with a Sherlock Holmes/Cthulhu Mythos crossover, but not only was it in a fairly high print-run anthology, the story also appeared on Gaiman's website free of charge for several years. China Mieville's terrific "Details" also appeared in an anthology that, ten years later, remains in print.

There's a problem of over-fishing the same ponds over and over again. Ponds filled with the Deep Ones. What is it with all the stories about people who identify with Lovecraft's Deep Ones? Yeuch. Alan Moore was on to something with Neonomicon. Lightly recommended.