David A. Riley's Blog, page 119

The Best Horror Stories of Karl Edward Wagner

I have just ordered the two-volume set, Best Horror Stories of Karl Edward Wagner: Where the Summer Ends, Volume 1; and Walk on the Wild Side, Volume 2, published by Centipede Press.

These should arrive early next week according to Amazon.

Karl was one of the best horror writers ever, though his Kane stories are some of the most outstanding novels in the annals of heroic fantasy fiction.

Volume 2 of Best Horror contains a special story for me. Gremlins was originally published in the first issue of  Beyond, which my wife and I edited in 1995. Karl was the first writer I wrote to for a story for the magazine and the one I was more eager than any other to have in it. My hope was that he would become a regular contributor. That wasn't to be. Plans for Beyond were started in 1994, which was when Karl mailed the story to me. I met him later that year at Fantasycon where we talked about the magazine, which was scheduled to be published the following year. Sadly, less than a month after meeting him Karl died. Gremlin appeared in our first issue, which we dedicated to him.

Eyes to See by Joseph Nassise

EYES TO SEE by Joseph NassiseTOR Books, 2011318 pages
This is the first in a series of novels about a new occult hero, Jeremiah Hunt. Though set in the modern world, it is a world where ghosts, witches, demons and shapeshifters proliferate, unseen by the bulk of humanity. It could be our world, of course, because until Hunt takes part in a ceremony to enable him to “see that which is unseen” he is as unaware as the rest of us of its existence. This ceremony, part of his desperate bid to find his abducted daughter, has far reaching results. While it enables him to see the spirit world, in particular ghosts, at the same time his normal ability to see is destroyed. Burned out by visions of the full scope of reality, his eyes are blind in normal light and can only see in pitch darkness or via the eyes of ghosts.  
Still searching for his daughter, Hunt is occasionally consulted by a local Boston police detective for his “psychic” abilities. The cases he becomes involved with eventually centre on a series of bizarre brutal murders which, piece by piece, he comes to realise have a bearing on the unknown fate of his daughter. In his search he finds help from two unlikely sources, a young, talented witch, a worshipper of Gaia, and a huge Russian bar-owner with frightening abilities of his own. What they are up against, though, makes even their combined abilities seem puny by comparison. It’s an ancient evil, stretching back into America’s distant colonial past, which is manipulating Hunt without him realising how he is being used and bringing him closer to an horrific fate.
Fast paced, with plenty of twists and turns in its storyline, this is an accomplished novel of supernatural evil, with tenuous links to the author’s other series of occult novels involving modern Knights Templars. Jeremiah Hunt is a credible hero, deeply flawed but determined. It is a dark urban fantasy of the darkest, most horrific kind.

Paperback Fanatic issue 22

The latest issue of the Paperback Fanatic arrived in the post today. This digest-sized 86-page publication contains a wealth of fascinating information and some astounding full colour illustrations. The main attraction for me this time is an article on two very different but truly iconic British horror writers, Charles Birkin and R. Chetwynd-Hayes, including reproductions of most of their paperback book covers. Not far beind is a history of two major SF magazines from the 60s and 70s, Galaxy and If, with some fascinating behind the scenes details of their ups and downs and eventual closure under editors Horace Gold (who famously rejected  Flowers for Algernon because writer Daniel Keye wouldn't change the ending to a happier one), Frederick Pohl, Ejler Jakobsson, Jim Baen, and finally Hank Stine.

Other articles which I haven't yet had chance to read are the early pulps of future best-seller Martin Cruz Smith, Confessions of a Sex Researcher and Robert Bloch covers, together with regular features.

Well worth every penny.

Ralan.com

Used Ralan.com last night to look up some markets for stories. As a result I sent two off online, one a brand new unpublished story, the other one that was previously published. What struck me was how difficult some of these markets are to submit stories to, mainly as a result of cumbersome online forms and others, usually the lowest paying, for their pernickety formatting guidelines. Why do some have offbeat formatting requirements? Is it essential for their well being or some kind of ego trip? I really do wonder.

Regardless, Ralan.com is a brilliant source for uptodate information on the pro, semi-pro, paying markets.

The Divide

Watched a DVD of The Divide (2011) last night - or most of it. As much as I could stand. It was one of the most depressing, repugnant, senseless films I have tried to watch in a long time. I didn't expect it to be a bundle of fun. It was after all a post-Apocalyptic movie. But is that any reason to have most of its characters as complete arseholes? Surely part of the interest in movies like this is watching how people react to and try to overcome the dire situation into which they have been plunged by catastrophic events? Surely it's what has happened that should be horrific, not the random cast of characters? Most of the ones in this film did not deserve to survive. The crunch came when one of the characters, played by Michael Biehne (wasted here), was tortured by some of the others for the combination of a locked door leading into a secret inner room. This resulted in him having one finger graphically sliced off his hand. It was a stupid, senseless scene and I could neither believe the character's stubbornness that resulted in this nor the glee with which he was assaulted. Was this to illustrate how events were making the characters degenerate into savagery? If so, it didn't convince me.

The other element that failed to convince were those outside the cellar in which the characters had escaped the holocaust and were now trapped. These were military types in environmental protection suits, heavily armed with guns, living inside polythene tunnels, alongside which others were being experimented on in sealed chambers. How the hell was all this set up so quickly and, presumably, extensively after the devastation we saw at the start of the film? The whole thing seemed ill-thought out and ridiculous.

Maggie Dudgeon Presents

Finished a new short story yesterday, my shortest for a long, long time, at only 2,700 words! Maggie Dudgeon Presents is a slightly tongue in the cheek look at the amdram world, not so much a horror story as a tale of dark revenge.

The Lurkers in the Abyss & Others

Just a brief update on my collection, which may be delayed till the end of the year for reasons out of the control of my publisher. The first story in the collection will be the title story, which first appeared in the 11th Pan Book of Horror and was recently reprinted in Cemetery Dance's massive 2-volume anthology The Century's Best Horror Fiction, edited by John Pelan. The final story, and the only one not previously published, will be Lurkers, which is a sequel to The Lurkers in the Abyss (and just over twice its length).

Dead World by Shaun Jeffrey

Dead WorldBy Shaun JeffreyPublished by Deshca Press 2012£0.97 Kindle edition
Shaun Jeffrey has written an enjoyable romp through a post Apocalyptic world years after a zombie holocaust has devastated civilisation. Anna and her husband Isaiah live with their children in a tightly controlled community inside a former prison, safe from the undead that prowl around the outside world. Through a twisted theology the undead are regarded as gods because they are seen as immortal and any attempt to destroy them is regarded as heresy. Impoverished, living off what scraps of food can be produced inside their dreary concrete world, strict controls are maintained on numbers. For every birth there must be a counterbalancing loss in numbers. This is carried out through the use of a lottery; the names included normally being those amongst the elderly. The winner is honoured by being ejected into the outside world to become one of the gods. Anna has begun a guilt-ridden affair with Roman, a leading priest. When she tries to end it Roman takes his revenge by falsely reading out the name of one of her children as the winner of the next lottery. Even though her young daughter believes she is being honoured, that she will become a god, Anna is distraught. Roman lets her know what he has done, intending to use this as leverage against her to resume their affair. This sets off a train of events that result in catastrophe for most of the people in the community and revelations about what has really happened as Anna escapes from their community with her children in tow, and Roman, her husband and a band of enforcers set out in pursuit. This is a tense read, with plenty of action and credible characters. And a world in which it is often hard to decide who the real monsters are. Some humans have descended to cannibalism while others have succumbed to greed, enslaving others or selling them off as food. It is a harsh, cruel, merciless world in which there is little to hope other than to live through another day.

Extreme Zombies edited by Paula Guran

Pages: 384
Size: 6" X 9"
ISBN: 9781607013525
Publication Date: August 8, 2012
Price: $15.95[This book will be published August 2012]
It's too late! The living dead have already taken over the world. Your brains have been devoured. Nothing is left but spasms of ravenous need—an obscene hunger for even more zombie fiction. Forget the metaphors and the mildly scary. You want shock, you want grue, you want disturbing, gut-wrenching, skull-crunching zombie stories that take you over the edge and go splat. You want the bloody best of the ultimate undead. You have no choice...you...must...have... Extreme Zombies!
“Charlie’s Hole” by Jesse Bullington“At First Only Darkness” by Nancy A. Collins“The Blood Kiss” by Dennis Etchison“We Will Rebuild” by Cody Goodfellow “Dead Giveaway” by Brian Hodge “Zombies for Jesus” by Nina Kiriki Hoffman“An Unfortunate Incident at the Slaughterhouse” by Harper Hull“Captive Heart” by Brian Keene “Going Down” by Nancy Kilpatrick“On the Far Side of the Cadillac Desert With Dead Folks” by Joe R. Lansdale“Susan” by Robin D. Laws“Makak” by Edward Lee“The Traumatized Generation” by Murray Leeder“Meathouse Man” byGeorge R.R. Martin“Abed” by Elizabeth Massie“For the Good of All” by Yvonne Navarro “Home” by David Moody“Jerry’s Kids Meet Wormboy” by David J. Schow “Aftertaste” by John Shirley“Viva Las Vegas” by Thomas Roche“In Beauty, Like the Night” by Norman Partridge“Romero’s Children” by David A. Riley“Tomorrow’s Precious Lambs” by Monica Valentinelli“Provider” by Tim Waggoner “Chuy and the Fish” by David Wellington

The Female of the Species by Richard Davis

The Female of the Species & Other Terror Tales
By Richard Davis
("Writers from the Shadows #1")
Shadow Publishing 2012
Paperback 240 pages, £7.99
ISBN: 978-0-9539032-4-5
Cover Artwork by Caroline O'Neal

  Richard Davis, who died in 2005, was always far better known as an editor than as a writer, with The Year’s Best Horror Stories, Tandem Horror, Space, Spectre and the Armada Sci-Fi series, not to mention his work on television with the BBC’s Late Night Horror and Out of the Unknown. But he was also an extremely good writer, as this collection shows. All the stories here were previously published in anthologies from the 60s and 70s, such as the Fourth and Sixth Pan Books of Horror, The Ghost Book, New Writings in Horror and the Supernatural, No Such Thing as a Vampire, and The Jon Pertwee Book of Monsters, which contains Richard’s last story in 1978, The Nondescript. The collection is rounded off with an introduction by David A. Sutton, an article that Richard wrote (What We Were Looking for in Horror), an interview originally published in 1969 in the literary fanzine Shadow, a further article by Richard (Horror in Fiction) and a bibliography.
These constitute all of Richard Davis’s stories, and illustrate the versatility of his subject matter and the easy style of his writing, which reminds me very much of R. Chetwynd-Hayes without the (often unwanted) humour. The title piece, The Female of the Species, is written as a journal, detailing the protagonist’s increasing fears about his sinister wife, both before and after her death. It’s a chilling story that grows increasingly tenser, involving love, death, and witchcraft. Elsie and Agnes is a straight forward ghost story, though with more than one twist, and involving one of Richard’s recurring themes of a loveless, wasted life. A Day Out is another ghost story, full of the joys of a 1960s seaside resort but with a final dénouement that may not come as a total surprise but is nonetheless shocking. The sadness of a wasted life is again the central theme of The Lady by the Stream. Elizabeth is the harried minder for her over demanding wheelchair-bound mother. Never having had the chance to marry and have a family of her own, she finds fleeting warmth from the friendship of a ten year old boy she meets by a stream, fishing. The inability of other people to let this innocent relationship endure, though, results in an appalling climax, perhaps the most violent and chilling in this collection. The Inmate is a tale of bestiality in the truest meaning of the word. I found it to be the weakest, least convincing story, though it is well written, with Richard’s customary skills at characterisation. In A Nice Cut off the Joint Helen Bentley, a surgeon, finds that doing a native chief a favour in saving his life results in a Voodoo curse, presumably from a local witchdoctor put out by her skills, and the growth of a dangerous, all demanding appetite for fresh meat. Guy Fawkes Night, Richard’s earliest story, originally appeared in the Fourth Pan Book of Horror Stories. A period piece that starts in the 1920s it tells in retrospect what happened one fateful Guy Fawkes Night when the father of the protagonist’s friend disappears. Nearly everyone believed he ran away with his mistress, but thirty years later the horrific truth comes out. In The Sick RoomRichard returns to the supernatural with a boarding house with a bedroom that may have an evil spirit. A man decorating has already slipped and broken his back for no apparent reason. Everyone who stays there either dies or murders whoever they’re with. A dark, grittily told story. The Clump is set on a small Caribbean island. The clump in question is the local name for a small wood. This one, though, has a sinister reputation. Unfortunately, the young boy who wanders in to explore it when the cruise ship he is on stops by doesn’t know this at the time. Nor does his father, who is more concerned over his plans to poison his wife. The description of the entity that haunts the wood reminds me of the kind of thing depicted in much more recent Japanese horror films. The Nondescript is a nineteenth century artefact made of a fish tail and the shaved torso of a monkey, cleverly joined to look like a grotesque creature. Young Bob finds one in the family attic in a glass case. Shortly he comes across another, better preserved, under a large rock close to a local pond. Unlike the first this may not be an artefact at all, as his father finds out when he discovers what happened at a ruined mansion whose owner, a collector of curiosities, died many years ago under suspicious circumstances. This is a rollicking tale, with some great descriptions of the Nondescript and a fittingly action-packed climax.
As Dave Sutton remarks in his introduction these stories are firmly set in the era in which they were written. To me that only adds to their charm. It’s a shame Richard Davis did not write more, but at least, thanks to Shadow Publishing, what there are have been collected together and made available.