Nasty and Brutish Shorts: Reading & Writing Short Horror Fiction

  Here's a series I'd been curious about but never got into until recently: John Pelan's Darkside series. I don't think this was an "official" series like Masques or Whispers or Shadows , but from the mid-90s through the mid-00s, John Pelan edited five collections of horror from, in most cases, newer horror writers who emerged in the 80s and 90s, mostly I think in the small press and midlist categories (and some even more obscure). All of these books use the word "Darkside" or something similar, so I do think of them as sort of a series. I don't know a ton about Pelan himself.   A lot of his work was in the splatterpunk/extreme horror area, including in collaboration with Edward Lee; I think of him as one of the guys like Lee and Robert Devereaux who picked up the extreme horror torch over the course of the '90s. However, he was also erudite when it came to dark fiction--he edited the gargantuan Century's Best Horror Fiction retrospect...

       That cover sort of reminds me of this immortal ad , which was running around the same time the book came out.  Anyway. . .an obscure Halloween surprise today, this is Octoberland , edited by Jack Fisher and published in 2002 by the New Jersey-based Flesh and Blood Press. Per ISFDB (which, by the way, is a fantastic website about, well, the fantastic), F&B put out 14 books in the early 2000s, mostly collections and anthologies.  This book seems pretty obscure, and it wasn't cheap to acquire. However, it did contain  a surprise. . . Ouch! Sorry, Mark!  But deaccessions do happen, I get it. And in this case, Davenport's loss may be our gain. So let's crack this open and take a look inside! Octoberland by Wendy Rathbone Synopsis : Nothing to summarize, just a quick little poem about October and Halloween. Trick or Treat? Treat, but it's candy corn: Seasonally appropriate and it wouldn't be Halloween without it, but not incredible. Thought...

  I love short horror fiction, and even short-short horror fiction, because at its best it's a quick ice pick through the back of your skull. No time to brace yourself, no time to prepare, just boom.    The first thing I do when I pick up a new horror collection is look for the shortest story I can find, because i) it lets me get a quick taste, and ii) those stories are often some of the most surprising and nasty pieces. Short-shorts/flash fiction can often be more gimmicky than good, but there are some writers who have made a masterpiece out of them. In terms of horror fiction specifically, Richard Christian Matheson (whose collection Scars and Other Distinguishing Marks  provides the image for today's post), Jeff Strand, and Michael Arnzen come to mind as particularly effective. Some of these are more 'short short' than others--but this is my blog, so they're what I consider "short-short." Some of these are true flash fiction; others are a couple of page...

  How's this for a Halloween season treat? Right after I got the blog up and running, Chad Anctil reached out with some ARCs of anthologies to see if I'd be interested to review some. The answer being, "Yes, of course, obviously." My focus here is generally horror stories from the small to mainstream press from that mid-80s to mid-2000s period, but I'm interested anytime, anywhere anyone is telling stories that are dark or horrific. And one of these anthologies, Circus of the Dead , grabbed my attention. Obligatory disclosure about conflict of interest or lack thereof: Chad provided me with the ARC, but otherwise there's no quid pro quo here of any sort. I had some qualms going in because of Scary Clowns. I'm not scared of clowns, I don't love clowns, I'm generally indifferent towards clowns. And, there have been some great scary clowns ( Anctil identifies most of them in his introduction), but (like creepy kids and sinister dolls), too often t...