The Year's Best Horror Stories: XVII

by Karl Edward Wagner (Editor), Nina Kiriki Hoffman (Collaborator)

Prozkoumejte nové dimenze hrůzy – od pronásledujících přízraků k drásavé noční můře… Hrůza se vkrádá na rušná náměstí i do opuštěných uliček, nekonečně prahne po chuti krve a lační po životě samém. Strach přichází z města na moři, které je v troskách daleko víc než dokáže napáchat zub času… až k člověku, prokletému snít krvavou realitu… k sochaři se schopností stvořit umělý život – nebo smrt. Dívejte se do očí turistovi bez zpáteční jízdenky… reportérovi chycenému do pasti dětské hry, daleko nebezpečnější než si dovede představit. Sledujte paleontologa, který narazil na hrůzné tajemství ukryté před dávnými časy v hlubinách oceánu… Teď stojíte v bráně k myriádám říší strachu. Podejte ruku K. E. Wagnerovi a nechte se vést po stezkách děsu v krajích, které pro vás zmapovali slavní mistři hororu, jako jsou Charles L. Grant, Dennis Etchison, Harlan Ellison, Ramsey Campbell a další. Sedmnáct zajatců v zemích plných hrůz čeká jen na vás…

Genres: Horror, Anthologies, Short Stories

351 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published October 3, 1989

About the author

Karl Edward Wagner (12 December 1945 – 13 October 1994) was an American writer, editor and publisher of horror, science fiction, and heroic fantasy, who was born in Knoxville, Tennessee and originally trained as a psychiatrist. His disillusionment with the medical profession can be seen in the stories "The Fourth Seal" and "Into Whose Hands". He described his world view as nihilistic, anarchistic and absurdist, and claimed, not entirely seriously, to be related to "an opera composer named Richard". Wagner also admired the cinema of Sam Peckinpah, stating "I worship the film The Wild Bunch".

Reviews

[Shawn · Rating 3 out of 5]

This will probably be the last YEAR'S BEST HORROR review I do for a while. It's the last one in the pile, and I think I only need 4 or 5 more to have them all. Of course, I wasn't reviewing or even on GOODREADS when I read the majority of the run, so theoretically I could go back and re-read those to review. But the likelihood of me re-reading anything nowadays seems remote, and they're all packed away. Perhaps, perhaps....

Anyway, here's volume 17 of the long-lived series that was (mostly) edited by Karl Edward Wagner. See previous entries for my feeling about Wagner - solid, pulpy writer and he really did try to stretch the range of story types that could show up in a "Year's Best" of horror stories, keeping pace with the times. Here, we jump ahead to the 1989 edition, which means stories published in 1988.

To be honest, I almost gave this edition a rating of 2. If we could do half stars, I would (why do I remember that we could?). This is a pretty mediocre installment of the anthology - even the "old dependables" seem either flagging or turning out mechanical, if not technically bad, stories. But all is not lost.

First, though, as per pattern, the "lost" should get swept away. Actually, let's start with an asterisk - "The Daily Chernobyl" by Robert Frazier is a poem and poetry and me have a very tough time seeing eye to eye. Oh, I know poetry is great, don't get me wrong, but I seriously need to work at learning how to approach it. So I didn't read this piece and so it might be amazing - it's some kind of rumination of radiation and pollution on some strange parallel world, or something.

Now then, the stinker of the book is "Nobody's Perfect" (apt) by Thomas F. Monteleone. Looking at my notes, it seems I am not a fan of Mr. Monteleone's work in general (only his "Spare The Child" in YBH #11 was considered noteworthy by me) so maybe it's just a style thing. But this story starts promisingly - a serial killer sizes up new potential victims and a certain beauty catches his eye. He sets his traps and gets himself all worked up before realizing she has a withered thalidomide limb. Pretty promising so far (we're in that fertile period of the 80's for horror writers where "serial killers" as a concept had begun to supplant "psycho killers" in popular culture, with all the attendant signifiers getting brushed up and replaced - out go mother fixations and mood swings, in come sociopathology, dead-eyed, predator stares and obsessive fixations. We're still years from the serial killer becoming a cartoon - they've all got a complicated M.O. - informed by movie representations). Anyway, the idea of a killer wrestling with conceptions of beauty and "worthiness", and all the potential inherent in that, is pretty much ignored for an ending so silly I'm not even going to tell you what it is. Let's say, it's one of those ideas that writer's know they shouldn't be able to pass off but somehow hope their evocative prose can make it work. It doesn't.

"Lost Bodies" by Ian Watson is his second in this collection - a reflection on England's new yuppie culture featuring some creepy ideas (the crawling, decapitated head of a hunted fox that just will not die!) and some baffling ones (a woman who will not let her husband see her nude. Why? Perhaps I misread, but it doesn't seem like that big of a deal, and certainly not worth the reactions given). Odd tale.

And then here come the flood of "pretty good but not all that great or satisfying" stories. Charles L. Grant has two of his "quiet" horror tales in here. I've mentioned before that I tend to like the idea of Grant's work better than its execution. "Now And Again In Summer" features a traveler in London who decides to throw caution to the wind and leave the city on a locomotive whim, randomly jumping off at some isolated train station. Really isolated, as it turns out. Lots of atmosphere and mood in this, but it strikes me as an unsupported idea. "Snowman" features London proper, stuck in a blizzard that transforms the familiar streets into a strange wasteland and a setting for a meeting between a odd young man and a lost woman trying to find her hotel. Again, lots of atmosphere (literally AND figuratively). Again, lots of mood. Again, the feeling that the story is just a little *too* suggestive, a style that borders on hand waving. I don't need answers (hell, I love Robert Aickman and Ramsey Campbell's work) but a little more meat to the tease would have helped. "What Dreams May Come" by Brad Strickland features a chance meeting at an amusement park that ends up not so amusing for one of the gentleman. It was okay but kind of familiar. "Regression" by genre stalwart R. Chetwynd-Hayes ("Monsters Rule OK!") is a twisty weird tale in which a suicide attempts ends up offering a man a second chance. And then offering that same chance again. And again. Solidly written but also a bit familiar. "Bleeding Between The Lines" by Wayne Allen Sallee is a weird metatextual tale that kind of assumes you've read two previous stories of his ("Rapid Transit" and "Take The A Train") that were in previous YEAR'S BEST. I had...and wasn't that fond of them. This is a slight improvement on those, as the author of those tales sees a psychiatrist about his continuing mental problems arising from penning the grue. Cute but, yet again, familiar.

Oh, but here's some Ramsey Campbell, things are looking up, right? Well, "Playing The Game" is certainly solid Campbell with some creepy imagery, but it also feels kind of paint by numbers as a man gets lost in an urban dockside maze of crumbling buildings and culverts while being stalked by some moon-y faced thing. Can he climb the walls and escape? Think of the game snakes and ladders.... in the intro, Campbell mentions that this is a rewrite of an earlier story and all I can say is it's still missing a little more ummph somewhere. "Ours Now" by Nicholas Royle has a hard-driving London yuppie run afoul of the nascent bondage/piercing cultural underground. It's delirious and grotesque but I'll admit that at this late date, also kind of hard to read as to whether we're supposed to see the weirdos as inherently disturbing, or their implied liberation disturbing for the unlikable main character. Odd story #2.

Finishing up the mediocre is the last, longish piece in the book, Leonard Carpenter's "Recrudescence". I shouldn't really say mediocre. What you have here is a long, pulpy tale about oil rigs and new-age cults and horrors from the sea that tops off in some lurid Mesozoic hothouse imagery that links J.G. Ballard's The Drowned World to some Robert E. Howard slam-bam action and Lovecraftian weird menace. Not a lot to think about, but some cool imagery. Unfortunately, it also strikes me as obviously a failed run at a novel that the writer put in a drawer back in the late 70's and dusted off for publication a while later. I say that because the scene is painstakingly, if prosaically, set and then a huge chunk of very important stuff (being indoctrinated into a new-age mind control cult and its bizarre beliefs) is just rushed through with some hasty narration so we can hurtle to the ending - and oil spills and mind-control/secret wisdom cults may not BE specifically "1970's". but they sure feel that way. Odd misfire #3

So, was there anything good here? Oh, sure. Brian Lumley, a writer I'm not particularly familiar with (and don't have a very high opinion of, but that's probably just bias) has a nice, solid piece of quasi-Lovecraftiana in "Fruiting Bodies", in which a seaside town that is slowly falling into the sea is also being consumed by a virulent fungus. Nina Kiriki Hoffman's "Works Of Art" is a short tale about sacrifice and creativity, nicely done. "She's a Young Thing And Cannot Leave Her Mother" may not be top drawer Harlan Ellison, but it's ghoulish enough and nicely historic. Ian Watson's first tale in the book, "The Resurrection Man" is also oddly historic, but also oddly surreal, as the preserved stray body part from a notorious individual works some arcane magic.

As I've said before, I respect Dennis Etchison without feeling like I get a lot of his oblique stories. "Call 666" is a nicely done addition to the "accidental discovery that the underpinnings of the world have slipped and secret, evil shit is going on all the time" subgenre, this time involving phone-sex ads and accidental wrong numbers. "The Great God Pan" by M. John Harrison (paying homage to the classic Arthur Machen tale with the same title) is similarly oblique - we never know exactly what bizarre, arcane experiment these shattered individuals got up to back in their college days, but the echoes still leave them blasted and shaking and there's maybe more than echoes pursuing them. This story almost seems like a teaser for a larger novel, one I'd gladly read (*UPDATE* - it turns out it was, the book being The Course of the Heart). Very adult, literary and nothing like the pandering worst of the genre. "Souvenirs From A Damnation" by Don Webb plays almost like a stripped down variation of "Pan", as small objects of occult and personal detritus spell out a hideous intimation of a story still unfolding. Elizabeth Hand strikes familiar if effective territory with "The Prince Of Flowers", a strange Javanese shadow-puppet that a bored Smithsonian archivist uncovers by accident one day (Richard Matheson's "Prey" with more supernatural content is a reasonable summation). Nice lush, sweaty and surrealistically lurid descriptions here that echo "Recrudescence" later in the book - and we bought it and turned it into a free episode of the PSEUDOPOD podcast available here, with audio production by moi, if you'd like to hear it read!

Finally, Gregory Nicholl's "Dead Air" is a story I read before in a Jack The Ripper compilation but it's still effective and suspenseful, as a late-night disc jockey might or might not be stalked through her empty radio station as she struggles to keep her show running and get that odd Screaming Lord Sutch request on the air after her Blue Oyster Cult super-set ends.....

So that's it. Guess what? There was no hit-it-out-of-the-ball-park, absolutely excellent story in this edition (pushed, I'd probably make it a three-way tie between "Call 666", "The Great God Pan" and "Dead Air"). Honestly, though, writing this review has caused me to reconsider the good stuff (and even the okay but not solid stuff) and decide that maybe 3 stars is just right.

Another notch in the belt, another book on the shelf. If I get any of the other volume's I'm missing, you're much more likely to see reviews for those before I start re-reading the volumes I haven't reviewed.

[Mike (Hail Horror Hail) · Rating 4 out of 5]

As with any anthology, you can expect a range of content and enjoyability. These were ones I thought exceptionally interesting:
Fruiting Bodies by Brian Lumley
Works of Art by Nina Kiriki Hoffman
She's a Young Thing and Cannot Leave Her Mother by Harlan Ellison
Now and Again in Summer by Charles L. Grant
Call 666 by Dennis Etchison
What Dreams May Come by Brad Strickland
Nobody's Perfect by Thomas F. Monteleone
Dead Air by Gregory Nicoll

[Susy · Rating 2 out of 5]

2 stars

Vruchtlichamen***.5
Kunst***.5
Ze is nog jong en kan niet zonder haar moeder*
De herrijzenis*
Zo nu en dan in de zomer***
Bel 666*.5
De grote God Pan*
Wat dromen teweeg brengen**.5
Terugkeer***
Souvenirs van een fiasco*.5
Bloed tussen de regels*.5
Speel het spel**
Verloren lichamen*.5
Van ons*
Prins van de bloemen**.5
De sneeuwman**
Niemand is volmaakt**.5
Radiostilte**.5
Openbreken*.5

[Joseph Hirsch · Rating 3 out of 5]

Once again, the tension between the gothic and stately tales on the one hand, and the visceral and Splatterpunk on the other, shows. And once again, this tension causes the wire to snap rather than drawing it perfectly taut.

There are some good tales mixed in here: Brian Lumley's "Fruiting Bodies," is a suitably eerie yarn about decay, molting, the inevitability of the earth reclaiming her wayward children. "Nobody's Perfect" by Thomas Monteleone, a story about a girl with a deformed arm kidnapped by a sadist, is a strangely empowering (maybe even disablist and feminist) take on the shrieking girl in slasher films riff. "Lost Bodies" by Ian Watson, a tale about a decapitated fox head that seems to live on, is easily the queasiest, most unsettling offer. Last (both literally in the collection, and in my own list here) is "Recrudescence," by Leonard Carpenter, in which we get a SoCal version of the Kaiju monster, although this primordial beast is born of ecological terrors rather than the bombing of Japan.

But getting to the good requires a lot of sifting through the muck of the indifferent and the downright taxing. Ramsey Campbell turns in a disappointingly underdeveloped variation on his usual lysergic Liverpudlian going about his day and slowly having a breakdown. Don Webb, usually a dependable stalwart in these things, strikes out more due to bold experimentation than due to a lapse in skill. "Dead Air" by Gregory Nicoll is so cliché-ridden that the reader can't help but think the man is playing with tropes, and is about to pull a 180 at the end. But then the ending comes, exactly as anticipated, and you wonder what the editor saw in it. Last and probably least is "Works of Art," by Nina Hoffman. It embodies for me everything that's wrong with "serious horror," with its dourly postmodern aesthetic in which the story feels more like a self-pitying therapy session than something visceral or dread-laced.

Cut the collection in half (from twenty stories to ten) and you might have something. R.I.P. to editor Karl Edward Wagner, whose stewardship of the series ranged from the yeomanlike during the bad years to the stellar during the boom times. This was a bad year. R.I.P. also to any of the artists featured in this collection who've passed away in the intervening decades. Here's hoping those still among the living are still writing, and thriving.

[Knight Reader · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5. Letter rating, C.
As most anthologies, there's some good and some bad. There's a few good ones in here but many are long winded, boring, and overdone (the two last, the longest ones in the book, fit the latter category. I skimmed my way through them.)
I want to feel that "frisson" when I finish a well-written short story. Too many are just lazy..there's no 'punch', no 'gasp', no anything, at the end. Presumptuous, at times.
I own much of this set (Year's Best Horror Stories) so will read them all..I think this is the latest in the series that I own; I usually find earlier is better in horror anthology series.

[Charles · Rating 5 out of 5]

A really fine collection, but then almolst all those edited by Karl Edward Wagner were well chosen. The best tales here are from Dennis Etichsion and Wayne Allen Salee.

[Kevin Lucia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent. These collections should be on all young horror writers' lists.