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

• Publication: The Year's Best Horror Stories: Series VII
  
• Editor: Gerald W. Page
• Date: 1979-07-00
• ISBN: 0-87997-476-1 [978-0-87997-476-3]
• Catalog ID: UJ1476
• Publisher: DAW Books
• Pub. Series: DAW Collectors
• Pub. Series #: 346
• Price: 
  $1.95
• Pages: 221
• Format: 
  pb
• Type: ANTHOLOGY
• Cover: The Year's Best Horror Stories: Series VII by Michael Whelan
• Webpages: archive.org--however, only available thus to those with print disabilities, alas, beyond the introduction and table of contents/previous publication credits.

• Contents:
• 7 • Introduction (The Year's Best Horror Stories: Series VII) • essay by Gerald W. Page
• 11 • The Pitch • non-genre • (1978) • short story by Dennis Etchison (Whispers, October 1978)
• 20 • The Night of the Tiger • (1978) • short story by Stephen King (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, February 1978)
• 34 • Amma • [Nyumbani Universe] • (1978) • novelette by Charles R. Saunders [as) by Charles Saunders] (Beyond the Fields We Know #1, Autumn 1978)
  
• 54 • Chastel • novelette by Manly Wade Wellman (first publication here)
• 78 • Sleeping Tiger • (1978) • short story by Tanith Lee (Dragonbane, #1, Spring 1978)
• 87 • Intimately, with Rain • (1978) • short story by Janet Fox (Collage, November 1978)
• 94 • The Secret • (1966) • short story by Jack Vance (first publication in the US; first published in Impulse:The New Science Fantasy, March 1966)
• 103 • Hear Me Now, My Sweet Abbey Rose • (1978) • short story by Charles L. Grant (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, March 1978)
• 118 • Divers Hands • [Julian • 11] • novelette by Darrell Schweitzer (first publication)
• 144 • Heading Home • (1978) • short story by Ramsey Campbell (Whispers, October 1978)
• 149 • In the Arcade • (1978) • short story by Lisa Tuttle (Amazing Science Fiction, May 1978)
• 159 • Nemesis Place • (1978) • short story by David Drake (Fantastic, April 1978)
• 173 • Collaborating • (1978) • short story by Michael Bishop (first published in the anthology Rooms of Paradise, edited by Lee Hoffman [Quartet Books Australia])
• 192 • Marriage • (1977) • novelette by Robert Aickman (first US publication: The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, April 1978)
• bibliographical information from ISFDB and the FictionMags Index.

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.