Tuesday, September 30, 2025

Friday's "Forgotten" Books: links to the reviews, et al. 26 September 2025

Patricia Abbott: Morningstar: Growing Up with Books by Ann Hood

Brad Bigelow: Bad Girl by Viña Delmar

Brian Busby: recent vintage Canadian lit reviews

Colman/Olman: A Chill Rain in January by L.R. Wright; Barking Dogs by Terence M. Green



This issue can be read at this link.

Tony Davis: Dorothy McIllwraith, editor of Short Stories and Weird Tales magazines

Martin Edwards: Words for Murder, Perhaps by "Edward Candy" (Barbara Neville); Dead Men at the Folly by John Rhode; Murder Squad

Eric: Missing in Action by William J. Linn; the short fiction of Charles Boeckman


Will Errickson: Such Nice People by Sandra Scoppetone; The Happy Man by Eric C. Higgs; The Farm by Richard Haigh: the final volumes of the Paperbacks from Hell reissue series

Curtis Evans: The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes by John Dickson Carr and Adrian Conan Doyle

Paul Fraser: Future Fantasy and Science Fiction, February 1943, edited by Robert W. Lowndes

Ted Gioia on David Foster Wallace and his more accessible work

Michael Gonzales: the prose and film-scripting of Eleanor Perry; The 1980s NYC Bookstore: Supper at Scribner's

Brea Grant and Mallory O’Meara: The Most Underrated Books of the Year

Aubrey Nye Hamilton: Pattern for Murder by Ione Sandberg Shriner (nee Elaine Mathilda Sandberg)

Bev Hankins: The Nine Waxed Faces by "Francis Beeding" (John Leslie Palmer & Hilary St. George Saunders)

 

Lisa Hill: Short Story September 2025

Lesa Holstine: "The Hunter" by Tim Sullivan (a DS Cross short story); Lin-Manuel Miranda: The Education of an Artist by Daniel Pollack-Pelzner 

Rich Horton: Changelog: Collected Fiction by Rich Larson; Bones of the Earth by Michael Swanwick

Jerry House: Black Creek Crossing by John Saul

Kate Jackson: Death in Ambush by "Susan Gilruth" (Susannah Margaret Hornsby-Wright); The Whisper in the Gloom by Nicholas Blake; The Immaterial Murder Case by Julian Symons; Death at Deepwood Grange by Michael Underwood 

George Kelley: Yalum by Matthew Hughes

Stephen King on Daphne du Maurier

Karen Langley: No Such Thing as a Free Lunch by Rosalind Brackenbury; Look at Me by Anita Brookner; Looking After Your Books by Francesca Galligan

Joe Kenney: Raga 6 by Frank Lauria

B. V. Lawson: Murderous Schemes edited by J. Madison Davis and Donald E. Westlake

Steve Lewis: Orbit 3 edited by Damon Knight ("Joachim Boaz", as well.)

Todd Mason: 2021 best horror fiction of the year annuals anthologies

Neeru: A Hundred Years Hence Reading Challenge

James Nicoll: Random Acts of Senseless Violence by Jack Womack; Bound Feet by Kelsea Yu

J. F. Norris: Now Seek My Bones by S, H, Courtier

Jim Noy: Cat and Mouse by Christianna Brand

James Reasoner: Climb a Broken Ladder by Robert Novak; Shield for Murder by William P. McGivern; Montana Fury by "Al Cody" (Archie Joscelyn), Lariat Story Magazine, May 1927; Detective Action Stories, October 1936; The Sandhills Shootings by "Chap O'Keefe" (Keith Chapman); Jebediah Smith by Alfred Wallon

Gerard Saylor: I Never Promised You A Rose Garden by Mannie Murphy

Steven H. Silver: The Graveyard Heart by Roger Zelazny and Elegy for Angels and Dogs by Walter Jon Williams (Tor Double #24) 

Gay Talese and Edward Sorel, with Mark Rozzo: "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold", Esquire, April 1966, edited by Harold Hayes

Kevin Tipple: Within Plain Sight by Bruce Robert Coffin

Bill Wallace: Weird Tales, October 1939, edited by Farnsworth Wright

...

Clarissa Brincat: Novels with a certain structure are more likely to be classics

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Monday, September 29, 2025

2021: Best of the Year horror fiction annual volumes in English: as edited by Ellen Datlow, Stephen Jones, Paula Guran, and Randy Chandler and Cheryl Mullenax: "Forgotten" Books

In 2021, we had four "best of the year" horror-fiction annuals (that I'm aware of) published in English, as a few others had, sadly, ceased in just previous years. And this quartet included two that were also to be the last volumes published in their respective series, the Stephen Jones, and Hardcore Horror...Ellen Datlow offers the 13th volume of her second (first solo) series, while Jones's was his 31st volume (the first few in collaboration with Ramsey Campbell, as Datlow's first annual series was in tandem with Terri Windling, then with Kelly Link and Gavin Grant). I enjoy the mirroring in the numbers there; Guran's is her second with Pyr, after her former annual's publisher hit hard times, and this would be the sixth and last from Mullenax and Chandler. UK- and Australian/New Zealander-specific horror annuals, and the notably "line-crossing" Weird Fiction annual, had folded in the previous several years.

The Best Horror of the Year: Volume Thirteen, ed. Ellen Datlow (Night Shade Books, November 16, 2021, 978-1-949102-60-4, $15.99, xlvi+383pp, trade pb, annual, cover by Reiko Murakami)





Stury reviews forthcoming...it's been a busy weekend.
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Wednesday, September 24, 2025

UNo MAS magazine: Number 3 (1991) and some other issues; short stories by Zachary A. Barocas and Dan Vergano: Short Story Wednesday



Back cover

The third issue of the ambitious and variously artistic "zine" UNo MAS, features two short stories in its mix, one by Zachary A. Barocas, perhaps still most famous as the second and more-recorded drummer for the DC-based punk band Jawbox (a great favorite of mime from their first shows); and Dan Vergano, who might just be the same DV who is now a senior editor at Scientific American.

The Barocas vignette, "Past Tense", is a very mildly surreal psychodrama involving someone living a bit of a hermit's life, perhaps beginning to enter a crisis of dissociation from consensus reality. A rather good scratch board illustration is uncredited.

The Vergano is a slightly more extended short story, "Eseentially Not Enough Morbidity" (with an illustration by Gareth Kaple) but also a stream of consciousness, albeit from the point of view of a more garrulous alcoholic protagonist, engaged with one friend or drinking partner or another as it skips from conversation to conversation regarding the ghosts which haunt him, in some cases quite literally in nesting in several of his body's organs. 

#ShortStorySeptember

Founding co-editor/publisher Jim Saah. And an interview with him.

For more of today's and future/past Short Story Wednesday entries, please see Patti Abbott's blog:







The online version of UNo MAS as retained by Archive.org's Wayback Machine.

The fiction archive preserved thus.

Founding editor Jim Saah's 2001 interview with writer/memoirist Frank McCourt









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Friday, September 19, 2025

Friday's "Forgotten" Books: links to the reviews and more: 19 September 2025

Patti Abbott: The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa (translated by Stephen Snyder)

Douglas A. Anderson: The Smoking Leg and Other Stories by John Metcalfe

Brian Busby: A Fair Affair by Paul Champagne

"Dead Yesterday": Sleep Long, My Love by Hillary Waugh

Eric: Crash Course by Kathryn Johnson

Martin Edwards: Dead Men at the Folly by John Rhode

Will Errickson: Night Visions: In the Blood: stories by Charles L. Grant, Tanith Lee and Steven Rasnic Tem, edited by Alan Ryan

Michael Gonzalez: Richard Prince prose and film-scripting, not least Sea of Love: Donald Westlake's Parker novels and their films, set in Harlem and elswhere

Charles Gramlich: the Sword and Planet fiction of Leigh Brackett

Bev Hankins: Panic in Paradise by "Alan Amos" (Kathleen Moore Knight)

Lesa Holstine: A New Lease on Death by Olivia Blacke

Rich Horton: "It Opens the Sky" among the stories of Theodore Sturgeon; The Blighted Stars by Megan  O'Keefe: Angel by Elizabeth Taylor

Jerry House: Kill Now, Pay Later by Robert Terrall (aka "Robert Kyle"); Steve Lewis in 2023

Aubrey Hamilton: The Seven Black Chessman by John Huntingdon

Kate Jackson: The Jealous One by Celia Fremlin

George Kelley: Quicksand and The Book of John Brunner by John Brunner

Karen Langley: Mapping the North by Charlotta Forss; Jasmine Tea by Eileen Chang

B. V. Lawson: Thorne in the Flesh by Rhona Petrie

Todd Mason: Fantastic, August 1976, edited by Ted White, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, August and September 1976, edited by Edward Ferman

Neeru: Exit John Horton by J. Jefferson Farjeon

James Nicoll: The Graveyard Apartment by Mariko Moike, translated by Deborah Bolivar Boehm; Geodesic Dreams: The Best Short Fiction of Gardner Dozois by (and presumably selected by) Gardner Dozois

J. F. Norris: Greymarsh by Arthur J. Rees; Death at Ash House aka The Undesirable Residence by Miles Burton

Jim Noy: The Secret of the Downs by Walter S. Masterman

Colman/Ohlman: A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul

J. Kingston Pierce: Ordinary Bear by C. B. Bernard

James Reasoner: Climb a Broken Ladder by Robert Novak

Steven H. Silver: A Tor Double: novellas Riding the Torch by Norman Spinrad and Tin Soldier by Joan D. Vinge

Kevin Tipple: Beyond the Truth by Bruce Robert Coffin

"TomCat": "Death at the Porthole" (1938) and "The Eye" (1945) by Baynard Kendrick

David Vineyard:  Who He? aka The Rat Race by Alfred Bester

A. J. Wright (III): Petrochemical Nocturne and Nobody Knows When It Got This Good by Amos Jasper Wright IV; 3 generations of A. J. Wrights' books at the University of Alabama at Birmingham's Sterne Library



Todd Mason

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Wednesday, September 17, 2025

Short Story Wednesday: THE YEAR'S BEST HORROR STORIES: SERIES VII (1979), edited by Gerald W. Page


I was moving around stacks of books in one of the various rooms of the house festooned with such stacks, and that's how I turned up my copy of The Eyes Still Have It the other week (see George Kelley's late review of the book, in today's list of Short Story reviews...I read it when it was newish, damned near 30 years ago, and the next book in that pile was today's subject, my copy, from 1979, of Gerald W. Page's fourth volume in The Year's Best Horror Stories, and the seventh to be published (the first three were reprints of a British annual, and Karl Edward Wagner would edit the annual for the next two decades). My first volume of the annual had been the fifth, which I discovered as a reasonably new book in '77, and it was one of the spurs that pointed me toward picking up new issues of the fiction magazines I could find on the newsstands, or even via mail order....

This was the first volume to gather fiction first published in 1978, though the only story included I had read previous to picking up this volume was the Charles Grant story, as many of his series of stories set in Oxrun Station, his haunted New England town creation, first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, in the first new issue I'd bought and read, March 1978. Page, unlike Wagner, would also sprinkle a few first-publication stories into his volumes, such as the Wellman and Schweitzer stories as the only examples here...but I had been reading Wellman in anthologies since I was eight years old, and was always ready for more.

I could recommend all the volumes in this DAW Books annual series, which ended, sadly, with the even sadder death of Wagner, but this one is among my very favorites. 

Among the most powerful stories, for me, was the lead-off story by Dennis Etchison, "The Pitch", which ISFDB somewhat clumsily tags as "non-genre", by which they mean it's not actually fantasy, sf, nor horror...which it isn't, but it is the kind of suspense fiction which deals with psychopathic behavior, of a sort Etchison seemed to be able to publish in the horror press more readily than in crime-fiction magazines or anthologies, perhaps because of its intensity. I think such fiction might not have as much trouble finding a cf market today. Likewise, Michael Bishop's closing story, involving a two-headed (but one body) sort of conjoined twins, runs all along the edge of the fantastic without planting a flag firmly on either side...a rather unsettling and brilliant story, particularly upon first reading.

Likewise among the better works in an impressive set, the Janet Fox story, "Intimately, with Rain"; first published in the now-obscure Collage, a West Coast university little magazine for November 1978; this below might be an earlier issue:


The weakest story in the volume was (for me, unsurprisingly) Stephen King's "The Night of the Tiger", from the F&SF issue before the first new one I bought. But even that one is better than such contemporary items as his "The Cat from Hell", which I read in Terry Carr's first volume of Year's Finest Fantasy the year before, or the Gunslinger stories, which first saw publication in F&SF beginning with the October 1978 "All-Star" anniversary issue.

Page was also not unwilling to include no little sword and sorcery/horror crossover fiction in his volumes, something that (perhaps surprisingly) Wagner was less wont to do (though horror published as horror was finding ever more markets in the decades Wagner was editing the series.

Please see Patti Abbott's blog for more of today's Short Story reviews entries, and, I am somewhat disappointed this long-out-of-print volume is available in the Archive.org facsimile text at the link above if one has difficulties with standard print. I shall post links to other online texts, if time permits.

An index to the entire run of The Years's Best Horror Stories, volumes from all three editors the series had.
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