It's the last week before Halloween, and I decided it was time to do another anthology post. This time, I have two horror anthologies, one from 1984 and one from 1992. Fittingly, one is from a well-regarded anthologist and scholar while the other is sketchy on who if anyone put it together. To kick things off, here's the newer, more prestigious and much fatter book.
This is an anthology called Foundations of Fear by the respectable David G. Hartwell, published in 1992 by TOR, with a total of 660 pages plus the introduction, table of contents and other odds and ends. It's everything you would expect from the kind of horror anthology that peaked around the 1980s: Spanning decades; full of works by famous new and old names; and so massive you could use it as bludgeon to fight off the undead. A little more unusually, this isn't just short stories, either. The contents includes the entirety of Lovecraft's "At The Mountains Of Madness", and with this book's format and print size, even that is only a little over 60 pages. While I'm at it, here's the back.
As for the contents, this book is as close as you can get to an anthology that's a classic in its own right. What impressed me since I first discovered it in the public library is that there is almost as much science fiction as there is supernatural horror. Besides Lovecraft, there is "Who Goes There?" by John Campbell, the basis for The Thing, "Sandkings" by George R. R. Martin, and stories by Theodore Sturgeon, Robert Silverberg, Frederik Pohl and Philip K. Dick (see my post on the PKD collected works). Then there are a fair number of less classifiable pieces, like "Duel" by Richard Matheson (see my review of the movie). Then there is plenty of "modern" horror, some good (see below) and some unpleasant.
As usual, what really makes this collection interesting is the obscure stuff, and Hartwell has done a good job covering his bases. Two of the most impressive come early and back to back, the Victorian tale "The Little Room" by Madeline Yale Wynne and "The Shadowy Street" by Jean Ray. Both read as much like urban fantasy as horror (the latter more so), with reality-bending themes and vibes that feel like what might have been if Philip K. Dick had gone into fantasy instead of science fiction. Another semi-obscure story is "Longtooth" by Edgar Pangborn, of all things a Bigfoot tale. It's a fine piece I'm not sure if I ever read more than once but vividly remember; unfortunately, its strangeness is a good indicator of why the polished and well-regarded author never managed to be more than a peripheral figure in 1950s/ '60s science fiction. Perhaps the best in the collection is "The Entrance" by Gerald Durrell, an author otherwise known for humorous science and travel writing, published in 1980. It's another tale close to what I would count as fantasy, about a mirror whose reflections don't quite match our world. It starts out like Alice And Wonderland and ramps up into cinematic horror, with a willfully villainous undead entity so gruesome I have honestly wondered if the author had been influenced by any of the 1970s zombie movies.
Now it's getting late and I need to get through the rest of this quickly. It's titled Chamber of Horrors and bears the publisher name Gallery Books and the year 1987. However, the copyright is 1984 from Octopus Books, an outfit I definitely have at least one other collection from. Based on this sample, their hallmarks were anonymous editors, dodgy copyright documentation and very mixed quality. Then there's the cover (virtually the same front and back), which has a certain charm. Here's a couple pics.
For the contents, the emphasis is on "classics" that would have been either in public domain or in the hands of an estate. The highlights of these are "The Red Lodge" by deconstructionist-Gothic master H.R. Wakefield, whom I first encountered of old in the alleged Alfred Hitchcock anthologies, and William Hope Hodgson's "The Derelict", which I had in mind reviewing Horror of the Zombies. Other big names include Ambrose Bierce, W. W. Jacobs, Guy De Maupassant and H.P. Lovecraft himself. Outliers include "The Bird" by Thomas Burke, originally part of his racially charged Limehouse Nights, and "A Woman Seldom Found" by William Sansom, a 1950s tale of love gone awry that has ended up on public domain sites. Of course, there is representation from the middle to low end of the modern era, including a science fictional but very horrific piece "Edifice Complex" by Robert Bloch (see also "No Way Home" by Bryan Lumley, briefly mentioned in my Death Bed review), Stephen King's unbooked early tale "Night of the Tiger", "Wood" by Robert Aickman, "Royal Jelly" by Roald Dahl, and "Back From The Grave", a buried-alive tale by Robert Silverberg. The high point on the modern end is "The Wall" by Robert Haining, apparently originating from the Pan Book of Horror Stories series, a Kafkaesque absurdist piece about a young man who finds himself bricked up in his own apartment. Dishonorable mention goes to "The Cradle Demon" by R. Chetwynd-Hayes, a truly vile, tasteless and misogynistic tale that I will admit is impressive in its own way.
With that, I'm wrapping this up. This has been perhaps brief and definitely more random than usual. But that's the appeal of anthologies. I can definitely say that both these books have impacted my tastes, my own writing and my life. That's enough to call it a night. That's all for now, more to come!
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