Nasty and Brutish Shorts: Reading & Writing Short Horror Fiction

  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 ...

Oh, hell yeah. Look, sometimes sequels are better even though the original was great. Mad Max and The Terminator ? Both great pieces of genre entertainment. The first sequel to each? Lightning in a bottle. And that's the situation we have here. Last week , I set out my 'floor and ceiling' framework of story collection criticism: The floor is the minimum general quality of each piece in the collection, and the ceiling is the maximum quality of the best pieces in that collection. The best is when you have a high floor and a high ceiling. And, guys, we have one here.  I love this book. I'm really excited to discuss it. Just to say it, this will probably be the blog post for Thursday as well, because while I like to get a whole week's worth of material out of a book, I wanted to give this book the sort of massive review it deserves. Think of this as getting a king-sized candy bar from a trick or treat house. A quick note on the introduction, which is that IMO you shoul...

                                                                                                              I'm excited about this one! I love vintage paperback horror, and I've been glad to see it getting the attention it deserves over the last decade or so. Many of my favorite summer memories involve having a mass-market horror paperback at the beach or on the porch and happily reading away while demons or bobcats or whatever the fiend du jour is eviscerate a small community. Before we jump into the book, I want to talk about my ideas of floors and ceilings in terms of quality. I don't think this is a new concept, and I think it's one that comes up in business a d...