Nasty and Brutish Shorts: Reading & Writing Short Horror Fiction

  We're back for Part II of our first trip to Greystone Bay . This is mostly a quick wrap-up, since I'm working against a deadline (see below for more), but there's still plenty of meat on the bone for us to talk about. Night Catch by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro Synopsis : The fishermen of Greystone Bay have fantastic catches. But there's a, well, catch. . . Thoughts : RIP to the recently late Yarbro , whose classy and literate Count Saint-Germain vampire stories popped up in many Grant anthologies. To be honest, I've never liked them that much: Vampires, when they do it for me, are repulsive bloodfeasters , snarling and fetid and obscene. Saint-Germain is precisely not that.  Yarbro's stories are impeccably well-written--it's just a matter of personal taste. So, I was excited to read a non-vampire story from her. This is great--a story of fishermen and dark pacts and secrets and terrors of the deep. It's amazing how just a string of simple sentences, one af...

  I know last week I teased doing a write-up of Women of Darkness , and I'm working on that. But now that we're past October and Halloween, but still in the throes of autumn, I wanted to turn to an atmospheric series that captures the feeling of the cold and the dark. So we are headed to Greystone Bay , on this, the 40th anniversary of its literary founding (the town's "real" founding, as we'll see, is much older). I don't know all the background of the Greystone Bay series. In the acknowledgments section at the beginning of the book, Charles Grant thanks Tor's Harriet McDougal for the idea. By this point in the 1980s, Grant's relationship with Tor was in full swing, and it's not surprising that Tor might have wanted in on the "Grant-edited anthology series" action, as Grant's "quiet horror" Shadows series was killing it over at Doubleday. The premise is a haunted seaside town, founded by a group of mysterious settlers ...