FFB: Instant Remainders: THE BEST FANTASY STORIES FROM THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION edited by Edward Ferman (Octopus, 1985); TALES OF TERROR edited by Eleanor Sullivan (attributed to Alfred Hitchcock)(Galahad, 1986)

"Instant remainders" are books, usually but not always hardcovers with the text on low-grade paper, published by such discount (and often short-lived) imprints as these volumes' "Octopus Books" and "Galahad Books" (in their first editions at least), meant to be sold inexpensively in the remainder shelves of (usually) chain bookstores; it's a pretty raffish and catch-as-catch-can corner of the publishing business, which is a pity when they offer (often in multiple editions, sometimes with slight variations in content, with the titles often changing along with the imprint names) two volumes such as these, the Ferman brilliant, the Sullivan at very least interesting and useful.

The Edward Ferman volume was the first sweeping anthology he or his predecessors had selected from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, that wasn't sparked by an anniversary of the magazine per se, though perhaps it had been meant to be published a bit earlier, in the 1984 35th anniversary year of the magazine, which is still publishing today. It's an excellent slice through the fantasy and some of the more "off-trail" fiction (sometimes surreal, sometimes merely odd) F&SF had been willing to publish over those first half of its run so far, without these latter stories having any explicit fantasticated content. Examples of this tendency are Shirley Jackson's whimsical "One Ordinary Day, With Peanuts" or the bit of psychodrama that is "The Vanishing American" by Charles Beaumont, and arguably, at least, the most famous "first story" the magazine has published, "Born of Man and Woman" by Richard Matheson, or the antic "outback" missionary story by Gary Jennings, the first of his Crispin Mobey series of stories. A few others are more arguably science fiction, even when more satirical than not, such as Kurt Vonnegut's widely reprinted "Harrison Bergeron," or Walter Tevis's "Far from Home" (the title work of The Hustler and The Color of Money author's wonderful collection of his fantasy and sf short stories). The balance, however, are all but inarguably fantasy fiction as we usually think of the term, and include such good to brilliant work as Robert Bloch's fable, the first inarguable fantasy story to win the Hugo Award, Arthur Porges's clever joke vignette, Avram Davidson's first story published outside the Jewish press, a deftly allusive borderline horror story that displays its wit so offhandedly as to nearly slip the nature of the magic at work past the reader, and R. A. Lafferty's typically audacious tall tale. More explicitly horror fiction ranges from Fritz Leiber's rather gentle "Four Ghosts in Hamlet" through the nostalgia and angst of Harlan Ellison's award-winner "Jeffty is Five," from the witty psychic investigation by Ron Goulart's Max Kearney (still my favorite series of stories I've read from Goulart) to haunting vampire stories by the young Joanna Russ (her first story she seemed very happy with) and the past-master, by time of writing and publishing "Pages from a Young Girl's Journal," Robert Aickman. Such stalwarts of F&SF as Bob Leman, Russell Kirk, Jane Yolen, Alfred Bester, Theodore Sturgeon, Kim Stanley Robinson, Robert Sheckley, Damon Knight, Thomas Disch and Jack Vance have stories joined by work from such more occasional visitors as Jack Finney, John Collier, J. G. Ballard, Bruce Jay Friedman, Parke Godwin, Tom Reamy and Thomas Burnett Swann, the latter two having their careers and lives cut far too short. About the only, not quite minor but not crippling complaint I have about this selection is the relative lack of women contributors, given how many have done impressive work for F&SF over the decades...in the fantasy volume, at very least Phyllis Eisenstein should have a story, and Lisa Tuttle; Carol Emshwiller had had at least borderline fantasy enough published there, as had Kate Wilhelm, while Kit Reed had gone well beyond borderlines thus. I've never thoroughly enjoyed Sterling Lanier's club stories, so might well've dispensed with that one if I had been the editor...though they apparently were a popular recurring feature in the magazine. Stephen King's F&SF work has also often been dispensable, if certainly providing an appeal to the casual reader. Really just a fine collection that shouldn't've slipped away from less casual publishers, as no F&SF anthology had done before nor has since. It deserves better than two (only) rather middling-packaged discount editions (the latter somewhat more succinctly if slightly less defensibly called simply Great Tales of Fantasy and Science Fiction)...though at least copies of both editions are reasonably priced in the usual secondhand markets (please consider, if ordering through Amazon, using the "button" at the bottom of the page, which adds no cost to your purchase, but provides a small finder's fee for this blog from each order...thanks.)

• The Best Fantasy Stories from The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
• Editor: Edward L. Ferman
• Year: 1985-00-00
• ISBN: 0-7064-2568-5 [978-0-7064-2568-0]
• Publisher: Octopus Books
• Price: $9.98
• Pages: 792+[8]
• Binding: hc
• Type: ANTHOLOGY
• Cover: Steve Crisp

• 9 • Far from Home • (1958) • shortstory by Walter Tevis [as by Walter S. Tevis ]
• 13 • My Dear Emily • (1962) • shortstory by Joanna Russ
• 33 • The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule • [Griaule] • (1984) • novelette by Lucius Shepard
• 59 • The Vanishing American • (1955) • shortstory by Charles Beaumont
• 69 • The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D • [Vermilion Sands] • (1967) • shortstory by J. G. Ballard
• 85 • The Invasion of the Church of the Holy Ghost • (1983) • novelette by Russell Kirk
• 125 • The Accountant • (1954) • shortstory by Robert Sheckley
• 134 • The Fire When It Comes • (1981) • novelette by Parke Godwin
• 176 • My Boy Friend's Name Is Jello • (1954) • shortstory by Avram Davidson
• 181 • San Diego Lightfoot Sue • (1975) • novelette by Tom Reamy
• 222 • Sooner or Later or Never Never • (1972) • novelette by Gary Jennings
• 250 • Jeffty Is Five • (1977) • shortstory by Harlan Ellison
• 269 • The Third Level • (1950) • shortstory by Jack Finney
• 274 • The Silken-Swift • (1953) • shortstory by Theodore Sturgeon
• 292 • Another Orphan • (1982) • novelette by John Kessel
• 334 • The Manor of Roses • [John & Stephen] • (1966) • novella by Thomas Burnett Swann
• 389 • Please Stand By • [Max Kearny] • (1962) • shortstory by Ron Goulart
• 409 • Downtown • (1983) • shortstory by Thomas M. Disch
• 419 • Man Overboard • (1960) • novelette by John Collier
• 441 • One Ordinary Day, with Peanuts • (1955) • shortstory by Shirley Jackson
• 451 • Yes, We Have No Ritchard • (1960) • shortstory by Bruce Jay Friedman
• 459 • The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet • (1984) • novella by Stephen King
• 504 • That Hell-Bound Train • (1958) • shortstory by Robert Bloch
• 517 • Will You Wait? • (1959) • shortstory by Alfred Bester
• 524 • Sule Skerry • (1982) • shortstory by Jane Yolen
• 533 • La Ronde • (1983) • shortstory by Damon Knight
• 546 • Narrow Valley • (1966) • shortstory by R. A. Lafferty
• 559 • Not Long Before the End • [Magic Goes Away] • (1969) • shortstory by Larry Niven
• 570 • $1.98 • (1954) • shortstory by Arthur Porges
• 574 • The Tehama • (1981) • novelette by Bob Leman
• 594 • Ghost of a Crown • [Brigadier Ffellowes] • (1976) • novelette by Sterling E. Lanier
• 634 • Pages from a Young Girl's Journal • (1973) • novelette by Robert Aickman
• 666 • Narapoia • [Dr. Manly J. Departure] • (1948) • shortstory by Alan Nelson
• 672 • Born of Man and Woman • (1950) • shortstory by Richard Matheson
• 675 • Mythago Wood • (1981) • novelette by Robert Holdstock
• 711 • Harrison Bergeron • (1961) • shortstory by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
• 717 • Four Ghosts in Hamlet • (1965) • novelette by Fritz Leiber
• 748 • Gorilla Suit • (1958) • shortstory by John Shepley
• 756 • Green Magic • (1963) • shortstory by Jack Vance
• 768 • Black Air • (1983) • novelette by Kim Stanley Robinson

The "Hitchcock" volume, attributed shamelessly in various editions' packaging to the several years deceased Hitchcock (by time of first publication), was instead the work of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, and stablemate Ellery Queen's MM, (now also late) editor Eleanor Sullivan; their magazines continue to publish, as well; several publishers and decades ago, EQMM and F&SF had both been founded as revenue-generating support for the less-reliably popular mostly-political and critical magazine American Mercury (AM's predecessor magazine, The Smart Set, had been similarly helped along when editors H.L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan had also founded the major crime-fiction pulp Black Mask...they sold BM to another publisher rather quickly, though not before two new writers, Dashiell Hammett and Cornell Woolrich, had tried contributing to both, joining the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Eugene O'Neill in the one and Paul Cain and Horace McCoy at the other. James M. Cain would write for the Mercury after it started, while also growing increasingly annoyed with his editorial job on the staff of The New Yorker). Tales of Terror is apparently also the second volume from the AHMM staff to be an instant remainder offer (Galahad Books, I belatedly discover, had issued the similar The Best of Mystery first in 1980, albeit that one was edited by Harold Q. Masur, of whom more below), and has seen several editions sporadically up to the present...it adds to the confusion around anthologies attributed to Alfred Hitchcock in at least two manners, as one of the series of hardcover anthologies taken (in this case mostly) from the magazine (when previously to 1977, the anthologies from the magazine had only appeared in Dell paperbacks, while Dell also did the paperback editions of Alfred Hitchcock Presents: anthologies originally published by Random House in hardcover, and originally edited by Robert Arthur from their beginning in 1956 up through Arthur's early death in 1969; Harold Q. Masur would edit AHP: books from then till 1980 and Hitchcock's death. In 1977, AHMM's new publisher, Davis Publications, began offering Alfred Hitchcock Anthology, a fat semi-annual  reprint magazine similar to the longstanding Davis Ellery Queen's Anthology...Dell's hardcover arm, the Dial Press, did hardcover editions of the anthologies simultaneously with the magazine issues, mostly for the library market one assumes. (Then there are the YA anthologies and the Three Investigators series of YA novels, initially also Arthur's work.) A slightly less complex confusion also can arise from one of the contributions to Tales of Terror, a 1953 story attributed to Pauline C. Smith, which was presumably one of the relatively few reprints published over the years in AHMM...this Smith being one of Robert Arthur's pseudonyms, the one under which he'd ghost-edited the first AHP: volume in '56...but another writer, actually named Pauline C. Smith, began contributing to AHMM and other crime-fiction magazines in the late '60s and continued into the 1980s, so confusion between those two can arise easily as well. Meanwhile, the casualness with which instant remainders are often treated with by library catalogers and indexers is much in evidence here, as many different online sources carefully replicate the error that Robert Bloch's fine suspense story "A Home Away from Home" is by Barry N. Malzberg...while not mentioning Barry's actual contribution to the book, the somewhat relevantly titled "After the Unfortunate Accident".  Tales of Terror is something of a misnomer, as many of the same online reviewers will tell you, as most of the stories are suspense or even relatively straightforward mystery stories, some lighthearted...it isn't as brilliant a representation of AHMM as the other book is of its magazine, but it's another good cross-section and core sampling, and offers work by a number of the same writers, such as Bloch, Arthur Porges and Ron Goulart.

courtesy The Hitchcock Zone:

Tales of Terror: 58 Short Stories Chosen by the Master of Suspense [sic]

• published in September 1986 in the USA by Galahad Books (hardback)
• edited by Eleanor Sullivan
• ISBN 0883657104
• 631 pages

Contents

1. Killed by Kindness by Nedra Tyre
2. Just a Minor Offense by John F. Suter
3. A Home Away from Home by Robert Bloch
4. Death of a Derelict by Joseph Payne Brennan
5. The Arrowmont Prison Riddle by Bill Pronzini
6. The Dettweiler Solution by Lawrence Block
7. The Whitechapel Wantons by Vincent McConnor
8. Cora's Raid by Isak Romun
9. Life or Breath by Nelson DeMille
10. A Private Little War by William Brittain
11. Have You Ever Seen this Woman? by John Lutz
12. Joe Cutter's Game by Brian Garfield
13. A Cabin in the Woods by John Coyne
14. The Long Arm of El Jefe by Edward Wellen
15. Kid Cardula by Jack Ritchie
16. Career Man by James Holding
17. The Perfidy of Professor Blake by Libby MacCall
18. Sea Change by Henry Slesar
19. The Blue Tambourine by Donald Olson
20. Graveyard Shift by William P. McGivern
21. A Bottle of Wine by Borden Deal
22. Man Bites Dog by Donald Honig
23. Never Trust an Ancestor by Michael Zuroy
24. Another War by Edward D. Hoch
25. Sparrow on a String by Alice Scanlan Reach
26. The Missing Tattoo by Clayton Matthews
27. The Fall of Dr. Scourby by Patricia Matthews
28. The Loose End by Stephen Wasylyk
29. That So-Called Laugh by Frank Sisk
30. A Very Special Talent by Margaret B. Maron
31. The Joker by Betty Ren Wright
32. The Very Hard Sell by Helen Nielsen
33. The Tin Ear by Ron Goulart
34. The Time Before the Crime by Charlotte Edwards
35. After the Unfortunate Accident by Barry N. Malzberg
36. The Grateful Thief by Patrick O'Keeffe
37. The Inspiration by Talmage Powell
38. Death is a Lonely Lover by Robert Colby
39. The Witness was a Lady by Fletcher Flora
40. Scheme for Destruction by Pauline C. Smith
41. To the Manner Born by Mary Braund
42. Black Disaster by Richard O. Lewis
43. The Marrow of Justice by Hal Ellson
44. Innocent Witness by Irving Schiffer
45. We're Really Not that Kind of People by Samuel W. Taylor
46. Pocket Evidence by Harold Q. Masur
47. The Death Desk by S.S. Rafferty
48. A Left-Handed Profession by Al Nussbaum
49. Second Spring by Theodore Mathieson
50. Bank Night by Arthur Porges
51. The Contagious Killer by Bryce Walton
52. Bad Actor by Gary Brandner
53. Free Advice, Incorporated by Michael Brett
54. The Real Criminal by James M. Gilmore
55. The Hard Sell by William Dolan
56. The Prosperous Judds by Bob Bristow
57. The Dead Indian by Robert W. Alexander
58. The China Cottage by August Derleth

Both books will reward your attention, and deserve at least some more serious attention from critical historians and bibliographers. 

For more of today's books, please see Patti Abbott's blog.