Monumental Sausage Party

Prime Evil edited by Douglas Winter, containing the following stories (1988):

The Night Flier by Stephen King: One of King's five or six worst short pieces (and it's a long short piece, by the way) seems to have been written solely for the central image. What a terrible, dumb, illogical story otherwise.

Having a Woman at Lunch by Paul Hazel: A weak bit of misogynistic whimsy from someone whom Winter notes has never written a horror short story before. It's like a bad EC Comics horror short, right down to the misogyny, but at least EC could defend itself by noting the time it existed.

The Blood Kiss by Dennis Etchison: Solid bit of Hollywood weird from Etchison, though with nothing particularly scary in sight.

Coming to Grief by Clive Barker: A fairly gentle Barker piece about loss and childhood fears.

Food by Thomas Tessier: Slight but enjoyable gross-out.

The Great God Pan by M. John Harrison: Subtle and elliptical novella about the aftermath of some sort of supernatural event that's never fully explained; the connection to the great Arthur Machen story of the same name seems to me to be so faint as to be perhaps problematic.

Orange is for Anguish, Blue for Insanity by David Morrell: Brilliant horror piece from a writer generally known for his thrillers (and for creating John Rambo). Painting and secrets and the danger of seeing what cannot be unseen.

The Juniper Tree by Peter Straub: Disturbing tale of childhood sexual abuse could use a stronger, or at least more direct, conclusion, but still effective.

Spinning Tales with the Dead by Charles L. Grant: A representative bit of elusive, elliptical dark fantasy from Grant.

Alice's Last Adventure by Thomas Ligotti: Great piece from Ligotti, though in some ways it reminds me more of Ramsey Campbell than Ligotti in terms of subject matter and the treatment thereof.

Next Time You'll Know Me by Ramsey Campbell: A copy-editing mistake screws up some of the humour of the story, though it's still a droll (though non-frightening) bit of business.

The Pool by Whitley Strieber: Blech. Terrible stuff.

By Reason of Darkness by Jack Cady : Viet Nam horror evokes Conrad and Apocalypse Now in equal measure; its effect is weakened by an overly long climax when more development of events 'In Country' would have been far more welcome.

Beginning in the late 1970's, horror fiction seemed to cough up at least one attempt at a genre-defining/re-defining original anthology every decade or so. Notable entries in this accidental enterprise include Ramsey Campbell's excellent New Terrors, Kirby McCauley's Dark Forces, and Al Sarrantonio's 999.

Douglas Winter seems to have been going for the same thing with Prime Evil, though it's a much shorter anthology than any of those mentioned above. And it's also a bit underwhelming. There are good stories included here, the best being David Morrell's terrific novella about painting, madness, and the supernatural. In the end, though, Prime Evil is an interesting, deeply flawed snapshot of some of what horror fiction was up to in the late 1980's. Lightly recommended.

Weird Science

The Complete EC Archives: Weird Science: Volumes 2 and 3: written and edited by Al Feldstein; illustrated by Al Feldstein, Wally Wood,  Al Williamson, Jack Kamen, Joe Orlando, Bill Elder, Harvey Kurtzman, and others (1951-52; collected 2007): EC Comics' wild and wooly science-fiction anthology series stands the test of time, and testifies to what was lost in American comic books with the inception of the Comics Code in the mid-1950's. These are stories for adults that can be enjoyed by kids, with nary a superhero to be found.

There are, of course, a plethora of shock endings -- this is EC Comics, and EC specialized in shock endings in every genre. Most work, some don't, and some really weren't necessary. The overall standard of writing on both the original stories and on adaptations of stories by Ray Bradbury is consistently high thanks to Al Feldstein. Oh, a few zingers go awry, but the humour is generally appropriate.

Much of the art is wonderful, whether by the matter-of-fact Jack Kamen, the occasionally grotesque Joe Orlando, the romantic Al Williamson, or the phenomenal, lush, detailed Wally Wood. Wood entered what many consider to be the peak of his artistic career on the stories included here and in other EC Comics of the time. He was only 24. The dissonance between his humans -- gorgeous women and heroic men -- and the storylines they find themselves in generates a zingy level of cognitive dissonance.

It would all be over too quickly. But the stories that remain really are, on the whole, astonishing. Some are surprisingly criticial of the United States military, and of America's paranoia in general. Some are really, really bizarrely, almost anachronistically boundary-pushing.

We've got a sex-change story. We've got a time traveller who sleeps with his own mother. We've got beautiful alien women who impregnate human men. And we've got people being eaten all over the place. And stepped on. And tortured. And asphyxiated. All in bright, glorious colour, and rendered by some of the finest artists to ever work in American comic books.

Feldstein had a tendency to wordiness that was a symptom of the era -- these are really dense stories, most of them seven pages long but packed with the information of about 25 pages of modern comic-book information. That wordiness can sometimes be skimmed, as Feldstein often describes exactly what one sees in the panel, but it also allows for character-building and world-building. On a couple of notable occasions, somebody, whether Feldstein or publisher William Gaines, saw fit to actually explain the climax of a story. I don't think it was necessary in either case, but then again, I'm not eight years old. I'd also love to know what happened the first time an easily outraged parent took a look at the sex-change story. Hoo ha, indeed! Highly recommended.