Showing posts with label horror. Show all posts
Showing posts with label horror. Show all posts

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, January 3, 2024

SSW: short stories by Lyn Venable (Marilyn A. Venable, 3 June 1927-31 March 2025): "Time Enough at Last" (the Twilight Zone favorite) and others: Short Story Wednesday (2 of 2)

Lyn Venable's work, as detailed by ISFDB (there are also chapbooks and podcast readings/possibly dramatizations cited for some of these stories), including that endlessly-rerun TZ adaptation...at least one US digital broadcast network, H&I, and one cable station, SyFy [koff], dusted it off again for their New Year's Serling marathons:

Featuring Lyn Venable's last? story (so far?)

Short Fiction

Lyn Venable, as far as I can tell, has only published seven short stories in her career, all of them in a stretch in the early-to-mid/late 1950s (1952-1957).  The second to see print, and easily the most famous, was her 1953 story "Time Enough at Last" in If: Worlds of Science Fiction for January 1953, edited and published by James Quinn. The short story is less heavy-handed than The Twilight Zone adaptation, one of the most widely-loved of first-season episodes (1959, notably after Venable had apparently stopped publishing), though Burgess Meredith's crowd-pleasing performance probably helps there. The short story's Mr. Henry Bemis is competent at work and slightly better at getting around his controlling wife's resentment of his spending any time reading, vs. socializing or watching television with her...and the portrayal of atomic war and its aftermath is rather better-presented in the story than in the television episode (TZ Bemis seems to think he'll be able to leave books from a destroyed public library in stacks in the exposed rubble of the building and they not fall prey to weather, or other problems, for example...he's not quite so foolish in the short story). The current Wikipedia entry for Venable suggests that the story is akin to Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, which it is not, except to the degree that Bemis is kept from reading by (rather less overarching) villains. However, Venable does write in a mode that is not altogether unlike Bradbury's, and in a few of her stories with rather less fake naivete than RB might slip into...the ending of "Time Enough" has been roundly dismissed as cruel by at least one latter-day reviewer, rather than, as I suspect it was meant, as a metaphor for how much misery modern warfare and its potential for massacre place on even those who hope to find some way to cope with it. Seems a pity she didn't (or couldn't) continue into the early '60s, at very least, and no doubt be courted by Gamma magazine, the home of Bradbury (and Patricia Highsmith, both on rare occasion) and the "Little Bradburys", and perhaps be reprinted by Judith Merril in her anthologies.

Her other best story, I'd suggest, from my quick whip-around her published work (I've yet to read her first, "Homesick", a 1952 publication in Galaxy, at that point the most popular and widely-imitated of the US sf magazines, and [since launched by an Italian firm moving into the US market] one with several foreign-language editions as early as its second year of publication), perhaps surprisingly, is the one published in a magazine that made an attempt to present itself as an essentially nonfictional magazine about supernatural phenomena, Mystic, while regularly publishing fiction written in no way "nonfictionally"...and edited by the team of Ray Palmer and Bea Mahaffey who were also producing Other Worlds and its sf/fantasy spinoff titles, before Mahaffey left and Palmer threw his fate in with all-woo-woo "nonfiction" with his magazines Fate and  Other Worlds remade as Flying Saucers from Other Worlds. An historical borderline suspense/horror story (it can be interpreted as either "realistic" or "fantastic" depending on how much one trusts the characters' perception of events). "Doppelganger" involves a gravid woman in suddenly problematic labor, her desperate husband and the midwife, who in better times had helped deliver him, who is reluctantly called into service in the growing emergency...and what they make of the one baby delivered who is suddenly joined in his crib by a twin whom no one remembers from previously. 


But "Punishment Fit the Crime" is a reasonably good variation on an Isaac Asimov sort of robot story, where a very specialized robot behaves in such a way that it is the one who needs protection from humans. This was Venable's one story in Other Worlds, and her only pair of stories to sell to the same editors, vs. "one-shots" in all her other markets.  

While "The Missing Room" is a rather deft more-or-less straightforward sf story she sold to Weird Tales, which, under editor Dorothy McIlwraith, always open to certain kinds of science fiction with a menacing element to it...an open house in a future (perhaps even still) suburb (commuters use personal helicopters) turns out to be a kind of alien's specimen trap. That Venable sold most of her large handful of stories to editors who were women or men who were particularly interested in publishing women writers (Hans Stefan Santesson at Fantastic Universe, Quinn at If, and certainly Ray Palmer and Galaxy's H. L. Gold weren't unwilling to publish women writers--given both her approach and subject matter, I'm a bit surprised that Anthony Boucher never took one of her stories for F&SF).  Her last two stories are a notch lower in originality, at least, with her one story in a non-U.S. magazine, the UK Authentic Science Fiction item "Parry's Paradox", being a mildly clever but slight time-travel tale, and the Big Twist in the ending of her otherwise rather nicely-detailed story of a first-encounter with another humanoid species, "Grove of the Unborn", being a rather too foreseeable twist.  


For more of today's Short Stories, please see Patti Abbott's blog, and/or the post just before this one, Paul Di Filippo on an issue of Lester Del Rey's magazine Space Science Fiction.

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Wednesday, December 27, 2023

SSW: Jeff Segal and Todd Mason on David Drake, 24 September 1945-10 December 2023



Drake's portrait on his website;
his blog/newsletters



Todd Mason:

As readers of this blog might've seen before, the fifth volume of The Year's Best Horror Stories: Series V edited by Gerald W. Page, was a kind of revelation to me...evidence that such favorite writers of mine already as Robert Bloch, Fritz Leiber, Manly Wade Wellman, Harlan Ellison and Joseph Payne Brennan were still actively writing new work...and look at all their similarly-active peers, whose work I would read in this volume for the first time (hell, Tanith Lee, Arthur Byron Cover, H. Warner Munn and Charles Grant had new, previously unpublished stories in the book). And one of the writers new to me, with an elegant dark historical fantasy (reprinted from F&SF), was David Drake...and I would come to welcome his short stories in this mode and related ones over the next decade as I found and read them, in YBHS, in the First World Fantasy Awards volume edited by Gahan Wilson, in Whispers anthologies (and, eventually, in issues of the magazine the anthologies were mostly drawn from--which Drake helped put together), and in Fantastic and Ramsey Campbell's anthology Superhorror, in Kirby McCauley's anthology Frights...and the only non-fantasy/horror story in the materials I had at hand was a "Hammer's Slammers" story in an issue of Destinies, a paperback magazine edited by James Baen for Ace Books, which was the last sf magazine my father would buy for himself, into early 1979. It didn't make as much of an impression on me. Eventually, I had a secondhand copy of the first Hammer's Slammers anthology, but only read some of it, without getting caught up in it--Jeff Segal had a much more engaged (and sensible) response.

David Drake continued to do interesting work in likely and unlikely places over the next several decades, until recent ill-health kept him from writing fiction any longer, but I had lost track of his work, while being aware of it being in the marketplace. I should still pick up some of his anthologies along with some of his novels and certainly his collections I let slip by. (I was a bit late on the scene to buy most of his and Karl Wagner's Carcosa collections of Manly Wade Wellman's work and others when they were new.)

Unsurprisingly, he has been remembered as a gracious friend and acquaintance by many, even those who might never, say, take part in, nor read, his collaboration on one book with Newt Gingrich and Marianne Ginther (at the time, still married to Gingrich). And among his fans who got to know him rather better than I did is my old friend Jeff Segal:



Jeff Segal:

An especially important author, and sometimes-editor, in my reading evolution, along with his late friends and associates Karl Edward Wagner and Manly Wade Wellman (though my appreciation of Wellman really kicked-in later, as I matured enough to appreciate the authentically Appalachian settings of a lot of his horror and fantasy fiction).

The first Drakes that ripped into my awareness were: one of his I-was-there Vietnam War-set horrors, the vignette "Best of Luck"; and the historical axe & sorcery (or is it sorcery?) chiller "The Barrow Troll", a tale with one of Drake's bitterly ironic finales.

Drake was a vocal advocate for fantastic fiction, especially pulp magazine-era stories, and both his short fiction and novels often served as tributes to neglected books. Publishers Tor and Baen Books have repackaged his short fiction in many combinations, but also encouraged him to promote and harken back to worthy novels and stories by other hands, which too often had been half-forgotten over the decades. For example, his dark tale "The Automatic Rifleman" was inspired by Fritz Leiber's "The Automatic Pistol", which he also heartily recommended to his readers, and I would finally track it down some years afterward (Leiber's classic Weird Tales story opts for a supernatural premise, rather than the apocalyptic-sf direction Drake employed). 


I wrote to him, and eventually we corresponded about failed military missions; he steered me toward a classic, The March Up Country: A Translation of Xenophon's Anabasis, a primary-source historical and inspirational work (which the multi-lingual Drake likely read in its original Greek), and I dipped into it recently when studying the evolution of Walter Hill's movie The Warriors (1979) (Anabasis inspired both the Sol Yurick source-novel and the film).
My first exposure to the "Hammer's Slammers" mercenary yarns which made Drake famous...or notorious...was in a secondhand copy of the 1979 Ace paperback collection with that title. The stories, reinforced with contextual essays, displayed the universe from the POV of a far-future frontline warfighter. One of them, "Cultural Conflict", reads like a critique of the film Aliens, except it was published half a decade before that movie dominated the 1986 summer boxoffice (I saw it three times in theaters). I read the collection too swiftly and the effect of its concentrated violence was somewhat sickening at first, until I broke down how Drake achieved his effects on a literary level. The Slammers stories, and eventually novels and role-playing games, hammered Drake's name into the world of science fiction, though I'd argue that his finest military-oriented sf novel was the standalone Redliners (1996), which he admitted was a cathartic experience to write, allowing him to expel the toxins of war he hadn't known he still carried. It is also a magnificent achievement in creating, to borrow Harry Harrison's term, a "deathworld".

Drake's writing style, distinctly lean and ruthlessly efficient, and his raptor's eye for detail, plus his obsessions and quirks, would often stretch creative muscle over simple or awkward plotting. A case in point is The Dragon Lord, one of my favorite novels of his, a savage take on historical myth with the Camelot crowd, warts and all, serving as supporting players--its wonky back-and-forth traveling plot-structure was more than balanced by the quality of the writing, the research and some engaging characters (traveling and quests are often a part of Drake's longer works regardless of genre; for instance, his Lord of Isles cycle, an epic set almost a 1000 years after a fantasy world's apocalypse, is charmingly told, for all its ambition, in the kind of simple structure that Edgar Rice Burroughs built a successful career around--scatter your protagonists and send them off on separate adventures, while having them attempt to find one another). And The Dragon Lord demonstrated another of the author's talents: the ability to craft credibly menacing creatures with genuine impact and weight; the epic's maturing wyvern, conjured into the world by the scraggly Merlin at the behest of a typically cynical and Drake-esque King Arthur, intended to be employed as a WMD against those pesky Saxons, is used sparingly throughout the book...but it comes across as one helluva intimidating threat by the climax of the story.
Drake was adept in writing horror (primarily in short stories), fantasy (often based in realistically-rendered historical backdrops, though some of his work thus was set in newly-created worlds), and science fiction, the last in harsh military-sf or similarly rugged space opera. He had no qualms about mixing genres. The first and stronger of his two Tom Kelly espionage novels, Skyripper, is as devotedly a Cold War pursuit-thriller as any of its early-Reagan-era ilk, the McGuffin involving a cracked, ingenious Soviet scientist who wants to defect to the US in order to share his conceptual space-warfare plans with Uncle Sam to ward off "an alien invasion" he claims will occur...but there are hints that something is "off" during the brutal multi-threat spy hunt, which results in a hell of an ending, in the tradition of "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean THEY aren't after you.”
Drake had many interests I share, which would continuously come roaring into his fiction (paleozoology, for instance). History, myth and classical-era literature were integral to much of his bibliography, rather like a bloodthirsty Roger Zelazny (Zelazny's 1969 novel Damnation Alley offered a proto-Drake hardman in a killer vehicle on a nightmare-filled deathworld road-trip). Drake also demonstrated some fascinating contradictions, such as delight in battle-glory action-filled sword & sorcery stories by Robert Howard, and Fritz Leiber (whose Fafhrd and The Gray Mouser bromance tales were repeatedly a big influence on Drake's own characters, fantasy and otherwise) but...Drake's own haunted Vietnam War service acquainted him with the effects of genuine brutality, where there is little glory. [And Leiber, who leaned toward pacifism, was very aware of this in a way that Howard was not. --tm]

Karl Edward Wagner and Drake cowrote a short story that was published in the 1974 first issue of the "little"/"semi-pro" fantasy-fiction magazine Midnight Sun. The tale predated the cult films Without Warning (1980) and Predator (1987) but anticipated something of the alien hunter/predator-on-Earth scenario, though set in ancient Rome. In the '80s, Drake and Wagner nursed the tale into a full-length novel, Killer, which I enjoyed, despite Drake's bad experience with this particular project. The Roman Empire and its frontiers provided a backdrop for his cycle of short bromance historical fantasies featuring the lethal Centurion, Vettius, and his cunning two-fisted merchant pal Dama, as they confront menaces both human and unnatural. Rome also was the setting or inspiration for some of his other short and long fiction. He may have gained a larger audience with the short tale "Ranks of Bronze", which, along with Orson Scott Card's "Ender's Game", I first encountered in the initial volume of Jerry Pournelle's anthology There Will Be War. "Bronze" was expanded into a well-received Bildungsroman novel, which inspired some follow-up books (I first learned about Bildungsromane on his website, an invaluable resource for his fans and scholars).

Not all of Drake's work "popped" for me. For instance, the first and only novel in his proposed "Crystal Walls" series, The Sea Hag, displayed some lively imagination but fell short of the Jack Vance-ian heights he was aiming for. And the follow up to Skyripper seemed to be set in an alternate universe where the conundrum the first book had been building up to was erased. However, a lot of his odd experiments rocked. I warmed up to his "RCN" space-opera series, based, sometimes literally, on Patrick O'Brian's historical Aubrey/Maturin novels. His expansion of Jim Kjelgaard's 1951 paleolithic novel Fire Hunter, The Hunter Returns, enthralled me as much as the original had. His two novels based on Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore's "Clash By Night", The Jungle and Surface Action, were crammed full of terra-formed Venusian future-naval dreadnaught engagements and horror-choked jungles and seas, another striking deathworld. His take on the Cthulhu Mythos, by way of Joseph Conrad, "Than Curse the Darkness",
was a uniquely feral entry into the pantheon and provided a frightening and absolutely inhuman interpretation of Nyarlathotep, the Dweller in Darkness itself; no chatty Dark Man avatar for this version of the Crawling Chaos (unlike the walking dudes of Robert Bloch's early "The Shadow from the Steeple" and Stephen King's much later The Stand)--Drake's Nyarlathotep was an other-dimensional alien cancer attempting to metastasize throughout our world, summoned to the Congo by those who had been maimed by the Colonials. After humanity has been granted a breather to continue existing, the survivors reflect upon the situation; an American gunslinger, retained as a bodyguard, realizes that he and the singularly unempathic party he is with are the "good guys" and has himself a good laugh. A patented David Drake approach to their victory. That yarn scarred me quite deeply as did a lot of Drake's other efforts.
Finally, he could be quite prescient. His three "Jed Lacey" stories, involving a diagnosed sociopath who is subjected to a behavior-modifying aversion/Ludovico Technique due to his crimes, but who is subsequently "repurposed" as an investigator because he's useful to his AI-governed society, is set in a "Nation without Walls," a near-future United States riddled with omnipresent surveillance technology...a reality accepted by much of the population. When these stories began appearing in the 1970's, a Nation without Walls must have seemed comfortably like fanciful speculative fiction to most readers... 
David Drake and his contributions won't be forgotten by me.

--Jeff Segal

For more of today's short-story posts, please see Patti Abbott's blog.

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