The Mammoth Book(s) of Best New(old by now) Horror: 14 and 16:
Thank WhateverDeityYouWorship for anthology books, and the short stories they house, they really are the ideal format for horror fiction. Not that I devalue the importance of full-length horror novels, it's just that there's nothing quite like sitting back and browsing through a collection, reading the good stories again, avoiding the bad. It's like a buffet for the mind.
With Halloween coming up, and given that I'm not really in the mood to re-read any full-length horror novels again because I don't want to wear out their impact (there's nothing worse than getting bored with books you love except for being tied up and forced to watch Friedberg & Seltzer movies), I'm especially grateful.
Here's some two of the books I'll be picking and choosing from: The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror(volumes 14 & 16). Man, if dishonesty in advertising were a crime, Caroll & Graf publishing would have been locked up years ago. I've been wasting money each year on these volumes since they began and am beginning to wonder if there's some kind of addictive drug these books's pages are soaked with that seeps into your skin and makes you blindly keep coming back for more like an idiot.
Why is that? Because these books are the most consistently mediocre annual collections I've ever come across, in any form of literature. I mean, tastes are subjective, but god damn. Most of these stories are fun reads at best. Still, sometimes we all need a little minor pleasures in our reading material and these books deliver. I have a shitload of these books, and those that aren't being sold by me on Amazon or donated to charity(yeah, I'm a dick like that) end up bound up in boxes or banished to my shelf to be guarded by my bookends in the shape of dragons and skulls(what can I say? I love to make an impression on visitors. I've mentioned this before, but my mantelpiece is even more elaborate). After moving out for fumigation a few months ago and having to move all my shit out, these books are even more cluttered away.
Tonight I'm reviewing volumes 14 & 16 because they're the only ones at hand, but it wouldn't matter anyway since these volumes are always all the same. A years recap of what's going on in the world of horror that stretches into the hundreds of pages, a list of addresses, a brilliant or very clever story to kick off the volume with(usually by Neil Gaiman), some stinkers, a few clever ones, some dumb pastiches or attempts at humor, some crime story misrepresented as horror, a few "good stories, well told, whatever", one great story that's the last in the whole volume and that's it. Finish off with a listing of all genre people major and minor who have died that year. See you next time.
Volume 14 begins with Gaiman's inventive October in The Chair. As a prose writer, I often find Gaiman hit and miss, with ideas that are clever but aren't really fully explored, with most of the impact coming from one big visual in the middle of the story or the sheer weirdness of the concept. He's a visual writer, but not much else. His work feels more at home in comics, not that that's a slight against the comics medium. October, which sounds like some Bradbury-esque piece about an old man sitting in a chair contemplating the meaning of life during Halloween, is actually a piece of outright fantasy, going in a direction common of Gaiman, something meant literally. In this case, it involves the embodied months of October, November and what not having a meeting. Or does it? Not great, but a fun, clever piece.
Then there's pretty much crap afterwards, though I must mention David Schow's story The Absolute Last of the Ultra-Spooky Super-Scary Hallowe'en Horror Nights(try saying that out loud, real fast, with tabasco-flavored cheezits in your mouth). It's about a bunch of stupid hoodlums who enjoy modern slasher films that pretty much have VICTIM stamped on their heads from the moment we encounter them. They try and disrupt a Halloween attraction in LA. held by a movie studio and end up getting massacred by the traditional Universal Studios Monsters. According to the intro, this story was created as a joke to be read aloud at horror fanboy extraordinaire Bob Burns's Halloween party. It probably worked better there. I like the basic idea, I myself would love to see some idiotic modern horror fanboys get their asses kicked by the classic monsters who they see as harmless, but this story really doesn't do anything interesting with the concept and Schow gets some of the monster lore quite wrong (Jack the Ripper was one of the Universal Studios Monsters? Really?), it's also just a twee bit too mean-spirited and elitist to really hammer home Schow's point. If his point was to convert modern horror fans to appreciating the classics of yore, he failed miserably. I myself don't need any reminder of the greatness of classic horror, if I did, I would just pop in Hollow Man, watch it for about 20 minutes before growing bored and turning it off, and then pop in The Invisible Man and have myself a time.
Nights isn't the last call-out to classic horror in the book either, the final story in the volume, an entry in writer Paul McAuley's Mr. Carlyle series, should be obvious to what it's referencing with just the title; Dr. Pretorius and the Lost Temple. It's as awesome as it sounds, and makes me wonder if McAuley is a fan of Jose Phillip Farmer's Wold-Newton mythos.
Up next is Volume 16, which is much more consistently good. This also starts out with a Gaiman story, and like Schow's story in 14, also has a long, spoofy title, the difference is that it's genuinely funny; Forbidden Brides of the Faceless Slaves in the Nameless House of The Night of Dread Desire. It starts off as a hilariously well-done tribute to just about every classic gothic horror story ever written, and then reveals itself as an answer to that long-standing question; what kind of horror stories do monsters and people who live in worlds where the supernatural is an everyday occurence read? This story made me Laugh out Loud when I first read it, still does.
The next two stories are okay, but not really memorable, then there's Brian Keene's ''The King'', in: Yellow. It's about just what it says, and may just be one of the most insanely great premises for a horror/humor story ever thought up. Who'd have thought Robert W. Chambers went well with celebrity impersonator/zombie musicals? Following King is Tina Rath's darkly romantic A Trick of the Dark, which is one of the few entries in the "Judge for yourself what the hell's going on" sub-genre of horror that actually works. It's about a sickly, bed-ridden young woman who develops an attraction to a man who may or may not be real, and may or may not be a vampire. What makes it unsettling is how quickly you come to realize just how preferrable the supernatural interpretation is.
Shortly after Dark comes Christa Faust's disturbingly kinky story Tighter, which is about just what you can guess. One of the best entries in the horror/BDSM sub-genre. Just read it to appreciate it's perversity. I'm not saying any more. There are a few good stories afterwards, like Tanith Lee's Israbel, which offers a fascinating variation on the vampire myth and the concept of vampires being invisible in mirrors, but is kinda marred by the truly silly mental image that results when it's revealed that vampires drink blood through their hair(yes). Probably the most disturbing story in the book is Glen Hirshberg's Safety Clowns, which ponders the question; aren't drug dealers, in their own way, simply folks who make a living making unhappy people happy? Even more disturbing is the implication that, amoral as it is and likely to bring about a violent death, wouldn't it pay more to be a succesful criminal for a short while than an unsuccessful loser with no future and no hope for happiness? It's a brilliantly poignant piece that sociologists could have a field day analyzing, but Hirshberg's writing style is pretty overbaked, and the story itself really is only horror in the existential sense.
The most entertaining piece in the whole volume is Dale Bailey's Spells for Halloween: An Acrostic, which is not a story, but an acrostic puzzle spelling out ''Halloween'' with definitions for each of the words which make up each letter. Don't expect something standard like "A" is for Apple Bobbing, but for something considerably more classically-inspired and intellectual, like "O" is for Ouroboros or "H" is for Hecate, or something really offbeat and not recognizably supernatural or Halloween-related, like ''E'' is for Eunuch. Bailey manages to make each of the descriptions both fun and profoundly disturbing. Takes his description of ''Eunuch'' for example:
E is for Eunuchs, the sexless ones. The mushroom people are not born, they grow. Deep in the sewers underneath our cities, far down in the bowels of the planet, they stir themselves to life. Who can say how they came to be, what spore of cast-off intelligence took root and flourished there, in that black and foetid muck? But they exist. In their secret cities underneath our feet, they batten on human waste and nurse their hatred of the sunlit regions of the world. Their strength and courage grows. Their plans ripen. Already they creep up into our moonlit streets to snatch away unwary late-night walkers and sate more sanguinary hungers. Beware the shadow under the grate. Beware the pad of distant footsteps. The assault draws near.
Man. It takes some real imagination to make mushroom people who eat turds scarier than being a castrated Indian servant. After that, the best and last story in the book is, surprise! surprise! Another Gaiman story. This one, The Problem of Susan, is an examination of the subtexts inherent in C.S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia, and is truly terrifying in it's implications if you are a christian or a fan of the books. I'm no Christian, that's for sure, and although the books hold a special place in my heart, I haven't read them in years. It's still a powerful and imaginative story, which takes such simple themes like Coming of Age and uses them for some high-impact nightmare fuel. Gaiman got a blast of hate mail by brainless Narnia fangirls online for writing this story, probably because it used the same ideas they had wanted to use for their slash fics. More power to him, I say.
All in all, these anthologies are wildly inconsistent and are mostly just impressive for the humor, curios that don't even qualify as stories, non-horror stories and pastiches they offer, but there's still some fun to be had if you wade through all the crap that gets published in these volumes, and there's a lot of crap, so much that I didn't even bother reviewing any of it, and it's gotten worse with each year. I'll still probably continue to buy each volume that comes out though, like an idiot. At least selling them fetches me a pretty penny online.
With Halloween coming up, and given that I'm not really in the mood to re-read any full-length horror novels again because I don't want to wear out their impact (there's nothing worse than getting bored with books you love except for being tied up and forced to watch Friedberg & Seltzer movies), I'm especially grateful.
Here's some two of the books I'll be picking and choosing from: The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror(volumes 14 & 16). Man, if dishonesty in advertising were a crime, Caroll & Graf publishing would have been locked up years ago. I've been wasting money each year on these volumes since they began and am beginning to wonder if there's some kind of addictive drug these books's pages are soaked with that seeps into your skin and makes you blindly keep coming back for more like an idiot.
Why is that? Because these books are the most consistently mediocre annual collections I've ever come across, in any form of literature. I mean, tastes are subjective, but god damn. Most of these stories are fun reads at best. Still, sometimes we all need a little minor pleasures in our reading material and these books deliver. I have a shitload of these books, and those that aren't being sold by me on Amazon or donated to charity(yeah, I'm a dick like that) end up bound up in boxes or banished to my shelf to be guarded by my bookends in the shape of dragons and skulls(what can I say? I love to make an impression on visitors. I've mentioned this before, but my mantelpiece is even more elaborate). After moving out for fumigation a few months ago and having to move all my shit out, these books are even more cluttered away.
Tonight I'm reviewing volumes 14 & 16 because they're the only ones at hand, but it wouldn't matter anyway since these volumes are always all the same. A years recap of what's going on in the world of horror that stretches into the hundreds of pages, a list of addresses, a brilliant or very clever story to kick off the volume with(usually by Neil Gaiman), some stinkers, a few clever ones, some dumb pastiches or attempts at humor, some crime story misrepresented as horror, a few "good stories, well told, whatever", one great story that's the last in the whole volume and that's it. Finish off with a listing of all genre people major and minor who have died that year. See you next time.
Volume 14 begins with Gaiman's inventive October in The Chair. As a prose writer, I often find Gaiman hit and miss, with ideas that are clever but aren't really fully explored, with most of the impact coming from one big visual in the middle of the story or the sheer weirdness of the concept. He's a visual writer, but not much else. His work feels more at home in comics, not that that's a slight against the comics medium. October, which sounds like some Bradbury-esque piece about an old man sitting in a chair contemplating the meaning of life during Halloween, is actually a piece of outright fantasy, going in a direction common of Gaiman, something meant literally. In this case, it involves the embodied months of October, November and what not having a meeting. Or does it? Not great, but a fun, clever piece.
Then there's pretty much crap afterwards, though I must mention David Schow's story The Absolute Last of the Ultra-Spooky Super-Scary Hallowe'en Horror Nights(try saying that out loud, real fast, with tabasco-flavored cheezits in your mouth). It's about a bunch of stupid hoodlums who enjoy modern slasher films that pretty much have VICTIM stamped on their heads from the moment we encounter them. They try and disrupt a Halloween attraction in LA. held by a movie studio and end up getting massacred by the traditional Universal Studios Monsters. According to the intro, this story was created as a joke to be read aloud at horror fanboy extraordinaire Bob Burns's Halloween party. It probably worked better there. I like the basic idea, I myself would love to see some idiotic modern horror fanboys get their asses kicked by the classic monsters who they see as harmless, but this story really doesn't do anything interesting with the concept and Schow gets some of the monster lore quite wrong (Jack the Ripper was one of the Universal Studios Monsters? Really?), it's also just a twee bit too mean-spirited and elitist to really hammer home Schow's point. If his point was to convert modern horror fans to appreciating the classics of yore, he failed miserably. I myself don't need any reminder of the greatness of classic horror, if I did, I would just pop in Hollow Man, watch it for about 20 minutes before growing bored and turning it off, and then pop in The Invisible Man and have myself a time.
Nights isn't the last call-out to classic horror in the book either, the final story in the volume, an entry in writer Paul McAuley's Mr. Carlyle series, should be obvious to what it's referencing with just the title; Dr. Pretorius and the Lost Temple. It's as awesome as it sounds, and makes me wonder if McAuley is a fan of Jose Phillip Farmer's Wold-Newton mythos.
Up next is Volume 16, which is much more consistently good. This also starts out with a Gaiman story, and like Schow's story in 14, also has a long, spoofy title, the difference is that it's genuinely funny; Forbidden Brides of the Faceless Slaves in the Nameless House of The Night of Dread Desire. It starts off as a hilariously well-done tribute to just about every classic gothic horror story ever written, and then reveals itself as an answer to that long-standing question; what kind of horror stories do monsters and people who live in worlds where the supernatural is an everyday occurence read? This story made me Laugh out Loud when I first read it, still does.
The next two stories are okay, but not really memorable, then there's Brian Keene's ''The King'', in: Yellow. It's about just what it says, and may just be one of the most insanely great premises for a horror/humor story ever thought up. Who'd have thought Robert W. Chambers went well with celebrity impersonator/zombie musicals? Following King is Tina Rath's darkly romantic A Trick of the Dark, which is one of the few entries in the "Judge for yourself what the hell's going on" sub-genre of horror that actually works. It's about a sickly, bed-ridden young woman who develops an attraction to a man who may or may not be real, and may or may not be a vampire. What makes it unsettling is how quickly you come to realize just how preferrable the supernatural interpretation is.
Shortly after Dark comes Christa Faust's disturbingly kinky story Tighter, which is about just what you can guess. One of the best entries in the horror/BDSM sub-genre. Just read it to appreciate it's perversity. I'm not saying any more. There are a few good stories afterwards, like Tanith Lee's Israbel, which offers a fascinating variation on the vampire myth and the concept of vampires being invisible in mirrors, but is kinda marred by the truly silly mental image that results when it's revealed that vampires drink blood through their hair(yes). Probably the most disturbing story in the book is Glen Hirshberg's Safety Clowns, which ponders the question; aren't drug dealers, in their own way, simply folks who make a living making unhappy people happy? Even more disturbing is the implication that, amoral as it is and likely to bring about a violent death, wouldn't it pay more to be a succesful criminal for a short while than an unsuccessful loser with no future and no hope for happiness? It's a brilliantly poignant piece that sociologists could have a field day analyzing, but Hirshberg's writing style is pretty overbaked, and the story itself really is only horror in the existential sense.
The most entertaining piece in the whole volume is Dale Bailey's Spells for Halloween: An Acrostic, which is not a story, but an acrostic puzzle spelling out ''Halloween'' with definitions for each of the words which make up each letter. Don't expect something standard like "A" is for Apple Bobbing, but for something considerably more classically-inspired and intellectual, like "O" is for Ouroboros or "H" is for Hecate, or something really offbeat and not recognizably supernatural or Halloween-related, like ''E'' is for Eunuch. Bailey manages to make each of the descriptions both fun and profoundly disturbing. Takes his description of ''Eunuch'' for example:
E is for Eunuchs, the sexless ones. The mushroom people are not born, they grow. Deep in the sewers underneath our cities, far down in the bowels of the planet, they stir themselves to life. Who can say how they came to be, what spore of cast-off intelligence took root and flourished there, in that black and foetid muck? But they exist. In their secret cities underneath our feet, they batten on human waste and nurse their hatred of the sunlit regions of the world. Their strength and courage grows. Their plans ripen. Already they creep up into our moonlit streets to snatch away unwary late-night walkers and sate more sanguinary hungers. Beware the shadow under the grate. Beware the pad of distant footsteps. The assault draws near.
Man. It takes some real imagination to make mushroom people who eat turds scarier than being a castrated Indian servant. After that, the best and last story in the book is, surprise! surprise! Another Gaiman story. This one, The Problem of Susan, is an examination of the subtexts inherent in C.S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia, and is truly terrifying in it's implications if you are a christian or a fan of the books. I'm no Christian, that's for sure, and although the books hold a special place in my heart, I haven't read them in years. It's still a powerful and imaginative story, which takes such simple themes like Coming of Age and uses them for some high-impact nightmare fuel. Gaiman got a blast of hate mail by brainless Narnia fangirls online for writing this story, probably because it used the same ideas they had wanted to use for their slash fics. More power to him, I say.
All in all, these anthologies are wildly inconsistent and are mostly just impressive for the humor, curios that don't even qualify as stories, non-horror stories and pastiches they offer, but there's still some fun to be had if you wade through all the crap that gets published in these volumes, and there's a lot of crap, so much that I didn't even bother reviewing any of it, and it's gotten worse with each year. I'll still probably continue to buy each volume that comes out though, like an idiot. At least selling them fetches me a pretty penny online.