Nasty and Brutish Shorts: Reading & Writing Short Horror Fiction

                                                                                                        I love the old small press magazines from the 1980s and 1990s-- Cemetery Dance , Deathrealm , The Horror Show , and so on. Sure, the Internet has made it even easier for 'zines to get made and distributed--there's no shortage of short horror fiction magazines and podcasts online--but, like most analog media, there's a magic to the old school magazines. A lot of it is in the imperfections, which, like the shot-on-video horror movies that were proliferating in the same period, add either goofy charm on lo-fi creepiness. In some cases, as with this cover for Deathrealm #27, it's both...

                                                                                                  I've been looking forward to this. . . Before a few years ago, with one notable exception (we'll cover it below), I hadn't read any Robert McCammon. I was aware of him, but I was too busy chasing down John Halkin novels about critter attacks and working through Richard Laymon's bibliography to make room for him.  Then I finally picked up a copy of Blue World and I felt something I hadn't felt since I'd first dived into Stephen King years and years ago: Electrifying, joyful excitement! It was like a summer camp for the imagination, with clean, crisp writing, creative attention to detail, and a gen...

                                                                                                              I've been looking forward to this one for a while.  A Datlow anthology is always going to have contemporary horror of the highest literary quality, and in this case, a couple of vintage reprints as well. I'll discuss more below, but it's one of those reprints that got me excited about this. That's because we have a story about Charles Birkin, the 20th century master of the British horror short story. If you're in the know, then just hearing that name may make you tense up a little, because Birkin has a deserved reputation for both quality and cruelty...