The Books That Taught Me To Love Horror Part II: Multi-Author Anthologies

Part of why I started this blog is to enjoy the memories I've made along the way with horror fiction. These books have been companions. They've been stuffed into backpacks, brought on camping trips, bought, sold, bought again, checked out, renewed, interlibrary loaned, half-forgotten, joyously remembered, lost, found, and slammed shut in stark cold terror. I plan to take a close look at each of these books (and many more) in the weeks to come, but I want to set the stage and give a better view of the horror fiction that shaped me and cemented my lifelong love of the scary and the creepy and the gross and the soul-churning. Again, I read most of these either shortly before or shortly after junior high.

1) Ten Tales Calculated to Give You Shudders, ed. Ross Olney

Description: Straightforward collection of (mostly) classic horror tales.

Impact: Around this time in my life--5th grade--I was hitting an inflection point where I was about ready to level up from my current horror diet (Goosebumps and Poe and M.R. James) to some harder stuff. Within a year or so I'd be reading King and Koontz and then some of the other books at this list. But there's one book that bridged the gap between the old and the new, the hard and the soft, and that's Shudders (that's how I think of it, like it's a pet name). This book was at my old elementary school, and I read it probably twice a week for months. There aren't many surprises here; it's the same chestnuts you'd see in so many mid-century anthologies, but it was my first time with all of them. "Sweets to the Sweet" actually did make my blood run cold the first time I read it, but there was a time when almost all of these stories felt like a chamber of unutterable horrors. The more I read them, the more they became old friends. Scary old friends. This was a training ground for the material I was about to dive into.

 Stories That Stuck With Me: "Sweets to the Sweet" by Robert Bloch, "The Waxwork" by AM Burrage, "The Last Drive" by Carl Jacobi, "Second Night Out" by Frank Belknap Long

2) 999: New Stories of Horror and Suspense, ed. Al Sarrantonio

 

Description: Sarrantonio's tribute to Kirby McCauley's Dark Forces and Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions, and an attempt to kick-start a third horror golden age at the dawn of the new millennium.

Impact: One of my first big exposures to what was then the state of the art in horror fiction. This was my first taste of writers like Lansdale, Little, and Lee (and my last taste of Lee for a while, which is just as well considering how old I was). It was and is a dazzling array of styles and approaches to the dark side of fiction. It contained what remains the single scariest story I've ever read ("The Entertainment" by Ramsey Campbell). And, it taught me to think for myself as to when I didn't agree with the anthologist and thought a story was a piece of crap. This was also responsible for one of my first forays into writing short horror fiction, a story we'll discuss when I do a deep dive on this book.

Stories That Stuck With Me: "The Entertainment" by Ramsey Campbell, "Darkness" by Dennis McKiernan, "The Road Virus Heads North" by Stephen King, "ICU" by Edward Lee, "Amerikanski Dead at the Moscow Morgue" by Kim Newman

3) The Best of Cemetery Dance, ed. Richard Chizmar

 

Description: The best fiction from the first 25 issues of the horror magazine Cemetery Dance.

Impact: Bless whoever was doing acquisitions at the Iowa City Public Library and decided to plump for this behemoth. It became a Holy Grail for me later on; I stumbled upon a two-volume ROC paperback set at the late, lamented Cellar Stories in Providence, and that scratched the itch. Eventually, though, I upgraded to a fancier version. It just isn't the same without the pumpkin or the clown on the cover!

As for the book itself--this was another experience of developing my own taste and discernment in horror fiction: I remember sitting in the basement over summer vacation, sipping soda, and finishing James Kisner's "Shattered Silver" and thinking to myself, somewhat archly, "Wow. There, ah, sure are a lot of stories in here about a guy who kills women because of some weird sex fixation from his childhood, huh?" Be that as it may, this is an endless treasury of great '90s horror fiction, and a broad array of authors (including my first encounters with Douglas Clegg, Gary Braunbeck, Jack Ketchum, and Norman Partridge, among others).

Stories That Stuck With Me: "Haceldama" by Gary Braunbeck, "The Box" by Jack Ketchum, "Eater" by Peter Crowther, "Crash Cart" by Nancy Holder, "Weight" by Dominick Cancilla

4) Dark Masques, ed. JN Williamson

 

Description: The first two volumes of the 1980s-early '90s Masques anthology series, slammed together, stripped of introductory material (boo!!), and unleashed on the world in a single book.

Impact: Immense. I got this one cold night at Barnes & Noble with a birthday gift card that'd been burning a hole in my pocket. It had Stephen King on the cover, plus Ramsey Campbell and James Herbert (both of whom I'd wanted a taste of since I'd read about them in Danse Macabre). I hadn't heard of McCammon, but I had heard that "Nightcrawlers" was the high point of the Twilight Zone revival in the 80s. So I took a chance, and. . .I won't say this book changed my life, because I was already coming across stuff from the same time period and it's not like there was never a question of stopping the Gordon horror reading train at this point. If it hadn't been this book, it would have been another. But it was this one, and I love these stories. This book was sort of Ten Tales Calculated To Give You Shudders, part 2: It scared and disturbed me, and I read it over and over.

Stories That Stuck With Me: "American Gothic" by Ray Russell, "Soft" by F. Paul Wilson, "If You Take My Hand, My Son" by Mort Castle, "Splatter: A Cautionary Tale" by Douglas E. Winter

5) Masterpieces of Terror and the Unknown, ed. Marvin Kaye

Description: One of Kaye's gargantuan anthologies of horror fiction, casting an expansive net beyond the usual genre fishing waters to include some less obvious choices.

Impact: My entry point into 'literary' horror, and the almighty conte cruel. This anthology confused me a bit at first. From the title and the Edward Gorey cover art, I was expecting a big book full of old ghost stories and similar chillers that would be sophisticated but still obviously horror. The first section or two generally obliged--I found myself reading this doorstopper with my back against the wall, to avoid ghosts sneaking up--but even there I ran into weird 'non-horror' stories like Carole Bugge's "A Day in the Life of Comrade Lenin," Joanna Russ's "Mr. Wilde's Second Chance," and then...the contes cruels. These stories of human torment and cruelty, not at the hands of the supernatural, but at the hands of fate or nature or other men, were unlike anything I'd read before. I remember "The Necklace" and thrilling to the cleverness and the irony and the complete unfairness of it all. This book taught me that horror is all around us--you just have to keep your eyes and your mind open.

Stories That Stuck With Me: "Sagittarius" by Ray Russell, "Mr. Wilde's Second Chance" by Joanna Russ, "The Necklace" by Guy de Maupassant, "Bianca's Hands" by Theodore Sturgeon

6) READ If You Dare, ed. the Editors of READ Magazine

 

Description: YA anthology of horror stories published in READ Magazine.

Impact: A grade school bookfair pickup. One of my first two exposures to Stephen King in the form of "Battleground," which is exactly the King story to show a 10 year old kid. Every story in this collection thrilled and excited and creeped me out. And what a cover!  Also, this was my first exposure to "The Pardoner's Tale" from Chaucer, which I contend is the oldest EC Comics story in existence.

Stories That Stuck With Me: "Battleground" by Stephen King, "The Pardoner's Tale" by Geoffrey Chaucer, "The Right Kind of House" by Henry Slesar