Thursday, July 20, 2006

A Few Thoughts on Horror

I consider myself very much a horror neophyte. Up until about a year ago, I read very little from the genre, but after being introduced to several writers, novels and stories, horror has taken up a good chunk of my reading. During the past year, I was delighted to discover two reference books edited by Stephen Jones and Kim Newman: Horror: 100 Best Books (1988) and Horror: Another 100 Best Books (2005).

Horror: 100 Best Books (hereafter referred to as 100) contains essays by authors and professionals in the field, citing their choices for the genre's best offerings. The book moves in chronological publication order, starting with Christopher Marloe's The Tragical History of Dr Faustus (ca. 1592) and ending with Ramsey Campbell's Dark Feasts (1987). Each entry provides a summary of the book and other interesting information, including whether (or how many times) the work has been adapted to film (and how successfully), after which follows the contributor's essay.

The majority of the essays offer insights into what makes the work classifiable as horror, sometimes surprisingly so. (Can you really consider Northanger Abbey a horror novel?) Most of the essays are quite good, disappointing only when the writer takes a trip down nostalgia lane ("I remember this story scaring the pee out of me...I was just a little tot when my mom gave me this novel, hoping to keep me off the streets" etc.), practically ignoring the attributes of the work at hand. But for the most part, readers will get a good glimpse into what the book is about and whether they should seek it out.

A word of warning: Some contributors give away too much. I don't know if I'll ever be able to forgive Malcolm Edwards for ruining the ending of Iain Banks' The Wasp Factory in 100.

With 100, the essayist's name isn't given until the end, which may not come for two or three pages. At first I was a little miffed at the practice of omitting the contributor's identity until the end, but it's probably a good idea. After all, if you're a writer, you might be negatively influenced by seeing Joe Schmoe's name at the top of the essay – the same Joe Schmoe who has rejected all 47 of your "Stinky the Vampire Boy" stories for his magazine.

My copy is a revised 1998 edition with a List of Recommended Reading in the back, followed by notes on the contributors.

With Another 100, you get the same basic format, except the contributor's name is placed before the book selected, (i.e. "Robert Silverberg on 'The Revenger's Tragedy' by Cyril Tourneur") with the contributor's biographical info immediately following the essay. The writing is generally very good and the excursions seem more limited than in 100. The List of Recommended Reading returns in Another 100, but also included is a Selected Webliography devoted to authors, contributors and titles.

One infuriating aspect of both books (which is no fault of the book or its editors) lies in the availability of the works chosen. Most of the newer books (and even some older titles in reprints) are readily available, but several of the selections were either published in limited editions or by a small press with low print runs (Jumbee and Other Uncanny Tales by Henry S. Whitehead an example of the former, Manly Wade Wellman's Worse Things Waiting the latter) or are simply too expensive. (The lowest priced edition of Michael Marshall Smith's More Tomorrow and Other Stories on Amazon.com is an ex-library edition going for $99.91. Bob Leman's 2003 book Feesters in the Lake will run you $127.25.) Still, reading copies of many of the 200 titles can be purchased on the cheap.

I noticed that several of the books in 100's Recommended Reading appendix were chosen for essay status in Another 100. I suppose you could look at that in a couple of ways. The obvious choices for the first book (Frankenstein, Dracula, Tales of Mystery and Imagination, etc.) open up the door for some overlooked titles to appear in Another 100. But does that mean lesser works might be considered for future volumes? I don't think so. It certainly seems obvious to me, pretty much a rank beginner, that the genre has more than adequate depth and richness for future volumes.

I was talking to my friend Kelly about the possibility and frequency of future volumes. Another 100 was published seventeen years after 100. I hope the interval between Another 100 and Yet Another 100 (or whatever Jones/Newman choose to call it) will be less than seventeen years. I'd love to see a volume every ten years and I think (and hope) that that is workable. In the meantime, we have summations of each year from Ellen Datlow and Stephen Jones (The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror and The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, respectively), as well as others.

In the meantime, you've got 200 books to get through.

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Today's Short Story = "The Rapid Advance of Sorrow" by Theodora Goss from In the Forest of Forgetting

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