Living After Midnight

All hail the new flesh, er, the new media!

The advent of e-readers and near instantaneous delivery of a book over the internet is alarming to some, but is a great opportunity to others. Some savvy authors have adopted this as a method of cutting out the middle man, and as a way to get closer to the reader, and the possibilities going forward are frankly exciting. Of course, this places an even stronger burden on the consumer to tell the good from the bad without help from the marketing campaign of a major publisher. Today, some of the good stuff, a new anthology from editors David T. Wilbanks and Craig Clarke, called Living After Midnight.

(Caveat: counting the two editors and the contributors to this anthology, over half those involved are friends of mine to some degree. I believe this sort of information should be provided up front, so the reader knows of any possible bias. I try not to let personal feelings affect what I think about a story, but it is always possible I would be more kindly disposed to this book than to, say, Tales from the Taliban: The World’s Leading Terrorists Share Their Favorite Jihadist Fiction.)

There are six stories in Living After Midnight, all inspired by heavy metal/hard rock bands (each story title is the name of one such band). Less that discourage those of you who are fans of chamber music and Celine Dion, no knowledge of the heavy music scene is required to enjoy these stories, as the authors for the most part use a name or image as a starting point.

Randy Chandler’s story “Spooky Tooth” tells about a rocker’s connection to lycanthropy – with a twist.

Matthew Fryer’s story “Iron Maiden” features a ghostly galleon and eerie sirens luring men to their doom.

In “Black Sabbath”, Steven L. Shrewsbury’s characters inhabit a world after a zombie apocalypse. The zombies themselves have mostly rotted away, leaving the greatest danger to the survivors – each other.

Co-editor David T. Wilbanks gives us a story about magic and curses in “Judas Priest” a slam-bang story about dueling creatures from another plane of existence.

L. L. Soares provides the well-written “Slayer”, about an aging rocker’s inevitable encounter with the acolyte of great and powerful supernatural entity.

There has to be a favorite in every collection, and mine is “Motorhead” by Kent Gowran, a crime/chase/horror story that seems to have pure adrenaline mixed with its ink. Mr. Gowran understands the way a great pulp crime story is created: the writer strikes a match to the story on the first page, and watches it flame its way to the end. You’ll want to look for more from this author.

The book is well laid out, an important consideration, since typos and formatting errors are the pet peeve of the users of e-readers. Effort was put into this book to make sure that wasn’t a problem. The very cool artwork (seen to your right) is by Carrie Gowran.

Living After Midnight is available from Smashwords and Amazon, for the bargain price of just $2.99. It’s one of the things that make having an e-reader worthwhile, and I strongly recommend it to you.

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Obsessions

When people think of horror fiction (if they do), they mostly think of the great novels of the genre: Frankenstein, Dracula, Salem’s Lot, Ghost Story, The Keep. There’s nothing wrong with that, those are all very good novels, and if you aspire to be a knowledgeable horror fan, you should read each of them eventually. The real strength of the genre, however and in my opinion, is in the short story, where the real masterpieces lurk. Poe wrote mostly short stories, as did H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard. Many people say while Stephen King’s novels put and kept him on the bestseller lists, his best work has been done in the short form. I can’t think of a good horror novelist who hasn’t also penned some excellent short stories.

There is at least some indication that short stories are where good writers develop their voice and learn their craft, and this may be a problem for the genre at present. The market for short stories is slim today. Whereas the 80s and early 90s saw the publication of a flood of solid-to-outstanding horror anthologies, they are scarce on the ground today. Cemetery Dance publishes their Shivers series on an irregular basis, and Ellen Datlow is still able to publish a high-quality book of original short stories just about every year, but there isn’t much beyond that. Contrast that to twenty or so years ago, when you would find on the newsstands Charles L. Grants' Shadows series, Night Visions and it seemed that every month a new themed anthology appeared. (I’m told it’s all but impossible to sell a publisher on releasing a book of short stories today. The public seems to want its fiction super-sized.)

Being in a reflective mood of late, I thought I would pull some of the older, less well known anthologies off my shelves. The internet has made it easier than ever to track down out-of-print books, and if you are lamenting the end of Leisure’s horror line, this might be something to take its place. The first one I picked was 1991’s Obsessions, edited by Gary Raisor, author of the great vampire novel Less Than Human, and published by Dark Harvest, a defunct imprint which put out some great work in the 80s and 90s. I don’t think it is that well known today, but this is a wonderful group of tales. The credit for a good anthology lies mainly with the editor, so I’ll try to give my opinion why Raisor was so successful with Obsessions.

(As an aside, I always find anthologies the hardest to review, since every review boils down to “I liked some of the stories and some I didn’t” and whether it works or not is the ratio thereof. It’s also hard to say much about an individual short story without using spoilers.)

The first thing Editor Raisor got right was to assemble stories from a great group of writers. This statement sounds a little bit like a sneer, but it seems a lot of those who put together anthologies don’t get the concept that good stories come from good writers. (If you like crime fiction, a good example of this is the [City] Noir series, books of crime stories set in specific-to-that-volume cities. Some editors used the best crime writers they could get, and turned out good books. Some seem to have used their friends from their college, or maybe their bar, and their books are almost unreadable) Raisor chose Joe Lansdale, F. Paul Wilson, Dan Simmons, John Shirley, Thomas Monteleone, Dean Koontz and others of the best horror writers of the day, and got good work from them. Many of the others are less well-known names but were also kicking out some great work. I felt more than a little wistfulness looking at the table of contents. There are authors who have since died (Charles L. Grant), those who health is too poor to write (Edward Bryant), those who abandoned horror for more lucrative fields, no doubt from necessity (Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Nancy Holder, Bill Crider, Nina Kiriki Hoffman), and those whose current whereabouts are a mystery to me (A.R. Morlan, Glen Vasey).

Secondly, themed anthologies need to be built around a theme sufficiently precise enough to give it cohesion, but not so restrictive as to inspire boredom (an anthology of zombie stories set in Toledo, Ohio may seem like a cool idea, but about page 200, you’ll probably be rooting for the zombies). Obsessions, whose theme I hope needs no further explanation, fits the bill well, as our obsessions provide nearly endless possibilities for stories, but are diverse enough to avoid a deadly sameness to the stories. The tales spun here range from the expected sexual obsessions to the less erotic (possibly) ones connected to book collecting, which should be familiar to many readers.

The final piece of the puzzle at which Raisor triumphs here is where craft ends and art begins, and the one most impossible to reproduce by just anyone: the ability to detect what is and isn’t a good story. Like a good fastball in baseball, you either have it or you don’t, and if you don’t, there’s nothing you can do about it. Raisor here demonstrates he has it in spades. As far as I know, only the Koontz story was a reprint, and while I liked some stories better than others, there isn’t a single one I felt was a waste of time. This is a rare achievement.

My favorite story in Obsessions doesn’t come from one of the superstars. It is “The Bookman”, by Chet Williamson, a story that could be Lovecraftian, a ghost story, or maybe just about a touch of madness. It’s the one that stuck with me the longest after reading, although it had stiff competition.

Obsessions was illustrated by Roger Gerberding, and as of this writing, there are used copies available through Amazon and other on-line vendors, some shockingly cheap. Who knows, if readers can re-connect with a love of the shorter story, maybe anthologies and collections will come back into style, and it just might re-vitalize a genre that too often seems stale nowadays.
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A Dark And Deadly Valley

A while back, I mentioned my love for the Weird Western Tales comics of my youth. Right up there with those were Weird War Tales, which concerned supernatural happenings during wartime (usually World War II). When I ran across A Dark and Deadly Valley, edited by Mark Heffernan and published by Silverthought Press, I jumped on it. It is an anthology of mostly original horror stories set against the backdrop of World War II, just like the old comics.

I’ve mentioned before it is getting difficult to compile a good anthology of original material in this day and age. For various reasons, economics makes it hard to pay the rates necessary to attract the biggest names. Well, either editor Heffernan has figured out a way around this, or a number of great writers just wanted to be included, because the table of contents is filled with a roster of the best of the new breed of horror writer.

To the editor’s credit, unlike most anthologies, I didn’t feel there was a truly weak story in this lineup. If I had to choose favorites, I’d say the entries by Steve Vernon, Brian Keene, Scott Nicholson, and Gary Braunbeck were the best, but you can’t go wrong with any of them. Definitely recommended. Very cool cover, too.
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Somewhere South of Hell

A lot of changes in the marketplace have made it difficult to put together top-notch horror anthologies. The days when Dark Forces, Prime Evil, etc. propelled the genre seem to be in the distant past. This may be about to change, as what looks like the best horror anthology in twenty years has been announced.

Ronald Kelly has announced he is editing Somewhere South of Hell: An Anthology of Southern-Fried Horror. The subject matter is near and dear to my heart, but look at the lineup: Joe R. Lansdale, Brian Keene, Alan M. Clark, Alex McVey, James Newman, Deborah LeBlanc, Scott Nicholson, Bryan Smith, Elizabeth Massie, Stephen Mark Rainey, Bev Vincent, Nate Southard, Jason Brannon, John Hornor Jacobs, Mari Adkins, Joan Turner, Randy Fox, Mark Justice, Donn Gash, Ronald Kelly.

Wow. That is an impressive amount of firepower. There may be more to come, but that is already a knockout list. The anthology should be published in mid-2010. For more information, go to Ronald Kelly’s blog, and watch for updates.

Razored Saddles

Razored Saddles was one of the seminal anthologies of the 80s (first published in 1989) and one of the few I missed on the first go-around, so I was understandably stoked when I finally obtained a rather expensive copy of the original hardback. I was also excited that the anthology was edited by a favorite author, Joe R. Lansdale (with Pat LoBrutto). And finally, there was the subject matter.

When I was a kid and comic books were the center of my reading universe, one of my favorites was a book called Weird Western Tales. This was a blend of horror material and the western genre, with cowboys fighting ghosts, zombies, and the like. The best known continuing feature in this vein was Jonah Hex, about a hideously disfigured gunfighter (Lansdale himself wrote two great story arcs for Jonah Hex in the late 90s). Razored Saddles was ostensibly in this milieu, so I had looked forward to it. Lansdale hisownself referred to it as the first “cowpunk” anthology.

All anthologies are somewhat up and down, with a variety of different authors with differing takes on the theme, and I was prepared for this to hold true here, but I expected it to be generally good, with great writers like Lansdale, Lewis Shiner, Howard Waldrop, and others. The book started off well, with a Robert McCammon story, “Black Boots” about a gunman fleeing an unkillable foe. But the pleasant vibe dissolved in a haze of New Wave SF blandness. The majority of the stories ignored the weird western idea in favor of flat uncompelling narratives. It did pick up near the end, with “Yore Skin’s Jes’s Soft ‘n Purty” by Chet Williamson, but most of the stories were a major letdown. Lansdale himself has written a number of outstanding western/horror hybrids, so if that's what you're looking for, I'd suggest seeking one of his collections. To me, Razored Saddles was a missed opportunity.