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

Wednesday, January 10, 2024

SSW: MIDNIGHT GRAFFITI edited by Jessica Horsting and James Van Hise (Warner Books 1992); THE WAYS WE LIVE NOW: CONTEMPORARY SHORT FICTION FROM THE ONTARIO REVIEW edited by Raymond J. Smith (Ontario Review Press 1986): Short Story Wednesday



Executive summary:
Anthologies from two of the more notable little magazines of their era; OR having lasted a third of a century, and this, the only anthology from it so far, drawing on its first dozen years, the magazine ending with the death of its editor and co-publisher Raymond Smith, as cofounder and widow Joyce Carol Oates chose not to continue it. MG having been more of a mayfly in the horror small press, but having gathered an impressive roster of contributors, with the editors and publisher continuing their writing careers afterward, if perhaps not robustly (not sure if their romantic/domestic partnership continues, another parallel); the book apparently includes reprints from the magazine and fiction perhaps still in inventory after the last issue of the initial run was published in 1992, or solicited for the book--with one story already a reprint when published in the magazine, and another possibly resold to Pulphouse after MG's long delays in publishing (two more issues, one a 1994 "special" and the 1997 other one apparently mostly nonfiction, sporadically followed the book's publication); for its part, the OR book includes a Margaret Drabble story (and not a hundred-word vignette) published two years before in the UK edition of Cosmopolitan, but not previously in North America. Both books rather neglected, even at time of release, with only two editions each...hardcover and apparently trade paperback editions of the Smith volume released by OR Press, and a mass market paperback original release from Warner Books and a Doubleday Book Clubs edition in hardcover for the MG volume. In their introductions, Raymond J. Smith and Jessica Horsting go out of their way to note how very much concerned with the world of today the fiction in their magazines has tended to be, perhaps even more so than that of most comparable magazines in the eclectic literary magazine and the horror and suspense fields (both magazines with dollops of satirical and other sorts of fantasy included), with these selections perhaps highlighting that tendency, which might even be why they seemed a good pair for an essay about just that (Raymond Smith even revising Trollope's novel's title to fit his anthology's tendencies); it's not as if, say, Conjunctions nor Whispers was oblivious to such concerns, but perhaps not quite as intent on being attuned to them. Also notable is the degree to which talented writers, from those who never need worry where their next meal was coming from to rather new and usually promising professionals, would place work with the magazines which presumably paid modestly if at a reasonable going rate. Smith is relatively restrained in presentation, running the stories alphabetically by author, and offering only brief contributor notes in the last pages, including the datum that Oates "helps edit" OR; Horsting is more intent on curation, breaking stories into themed batches, each with a brief introduction by her; each story also has an uncredited headnote, where perhaps an invisible hand of Van Hise is felt. Also notable is how starkly textual how both books feel, compared to the imagery, illustration, photography or otherwise, their magazines featured in each issue.

Both magazines leaned toward shorter fiction, rather than novellas or serialized or even excerpted novels; when one removes the dust jackets from both the hardcover volumes, one finds that the OR volume is red with black lettering on the spine, the MG black with red lettering, making for a sort of visual harkening to Stendhal jointly and severally. Unsurprisingly, Ways is a better-built volume, sewn in cloth-covered boards on better paper but with slightly less easy-to-read typesetting;  the book club edition of the other has a then-typical D-day glue binding on less sturdy boards containing slightly cheaper paper, but also depends on the more thoroughly professional typeface choices in play at Warner Books, and with fewer words per page, probably has about as much content as the thinner volume.

Neither book was too thoroughly reviewed, as far as I can tell, at time of release...the OR volume seems not to have been reviewed in such a way that I've found indexes for those reviews at all, while MG received a number of mostly unimpressive Goodreads responses and not too much more, though Will Errickson's womanfriend Ashley Louise did guest-review it for his blog in 2010.


Midnight Graffiti

edited by Raymond J. Smith (Ontario Review Press, 1986; 0-86538-054-6, x+301pp, hc; 978-0865380554 tp)
        Details supplied by Dennis Lien, augmented by TM.
    • ix · Preface · Raymond J. Smith
    • 1 · Molly’s Dog · Alice Adams · ss The Ontario Review 21, Fall 1984/Winter 1985
    • 12 · The Man from Mars · Margaret Atwood · ss The Ontario Review 6, Spring/Summer 1977
    • 29 · Saving the Boat People · Joe David Bellamy · ss The Ontario Review 21, Fall 1984/Winter 1985
    • 45 · Town Smokes · Pinckney Benedict · ss The Ontario Review 25, Fall 1986/Winter 1987
    • 58 · My Life as a West African Gray Parrot · Leigh Buchanan Bienen · ss The Ontario Review 15, Fall 1981/Winter 1982
    • 69 · At the Krungthep Plaza · Paul Bowles · ss The Ontario Review 13, Fall 1980/Winter 1981
    • 74 · The Black Queen · Barry Callaghan · ss The Ontario Review 13, Fall 1980/Winter 1981
    • 77 · Homework · Margaret Drabble · ss Cosmopolitan (UK) November 1975; The Ontario Review 7, Fall 1977/Winter 1978
    • 84 · Death’s Midwives · Margareta Ekström · ss; translated by Linda Schenck, The Ontario Review 20, Spring/Summer 1984
    • 93 · Fruit of the Month · Abby Frucht · ss The Ontario Review 20, Spring/Summer 1984
    • 102 · A Pure Soul · Carlos Fuentes · ss; translated by Margaret S. Peden, The Ontario Review 12, Spring/Summer 1980 
    • 116 · The Harvest · Tess Gallagher · ss The Ontario Review 19, Fall 1983/Winter 1984
    • 129 · Some Gifts · Reginald Gibbons · ss The Ontario Review 5, Fall 1976
    • 137 · Black Cotton · William Goyen · ss The Ontario Review 17, Fall 1982/Winter 1983
    • 144 · Any Sport · William Heyen · ss The Ontario Review 24, Spring/Summer 1986
    • 152 · The Mango Community · Josephine Jacobsen · ss The Ontario Review 20, Spring/Summer 1984
    • 168 · A Metamorphosis · Greg Johnson · ss The Ontario Review 8, Spring/Summer 1978
    • 178 · On This Short Day of Frost and Sun · Maxine Kumin · ss The Ontario Review 5, 1976
    • 185 · Baby · Joyce Carol Oates · ss The Ontario Review 23, Fall 1986/Winter 1987
    • 199 · Confessions of a Bad Girl · Bette Pesetsky · ss The Ontario Review 23, Spring/Summer 1985
    • 209 · Tea Party · Sarah Rossiter · ss The Ontario Review 15, Fall 1981/Winter 1982
    • 221 · Shadow Bands · Jeanne Schinto · ss The Ontario Review 23, Fall 1985/Winter 1986
    • 235 · Rough Strife · Lynne Sharon Schwartz · ss The Ontario Review 7, Fall 1977/Winter 1978
    • 252 · The Girl Who Loved Horses · Elizabeth Spencer · ss The Ontario Review 10, Spring/Summer 1979
    • 267 · The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud: A Story · Daniel Stern · ss The Ontario Review 24, Spring/Summer 1986
    • 273 · Mourning · Robert Taylor, Jr. · ss The Ontario Review 14, Spring/Summer 1981
    • 281 · Interviews with Insufficiently Famous Americans · John Updike · vi series 
    •     281 · The Counselor · vi The Ontario Review 12,  Spring/ Summer 1980
    •     283 · The Widow · vi The Ontario Review 16, Spring/Summer 1982
    •     285 · The Undertaker · vi The Ontario Review 15, Fall 1981/ Winter 1982
    • 287 · A Lesson in the Classics · Gloria Whelan · ss The Ontario Review 18, Spring/Summer 1983
    • 299 · Contributors · Anon · bi

  • The stories: as too often, life has been less cooperative than I'd like in rereading the stories in either volume over the last week, but among those I refreshed my memory of, it's amusing to compare the fantasy stories "My Life as a West African Gray Parrot" by Leigh Buchanan Bienen and "Bob the Dinosaur Goes to Disneyland" by Joe Lansdale (the book never gives him his middle initial); the Buchanan Bienen, by a writer who had been and remains primarily a lawyer (particularly involved with women's rights cases, which informs the story), professor and author of legal volumes, as well as contributor of short fiction and critical essays to little magazines, involves said parrot, being as many non-human animals in the story a karmic? reincarnation of a human, recounting her less that joyous life with a human married couple who looked upon their purchased bird as  more conversation piece and investment than pet; all the reincarnated animals in the story, such as her keepers' tomcat, can converse with each other (somehow), but apparently another non-human animal she interacts with has not been blessed with reincarnation from human form nor a common language. While the Lansdale involves a present of a wife to a husband of an inflatable T. rex toy, which upon inflation begins to act like a young child, not altogether like Pinocchio, but unsurprising in this to its new "parents"...the plastic dinosaur quickly becomes obsessed with the prospect of going to the original Disney theme park and meeting the cartoon characters and the like, an excursion Bob's parents enable with perhaps surprising results. Animal/toy fantasy, a bird with an old soul awaiting its next incarnation and an artificial youngster recapitulating human childhood and adolescence. The Lansdale is funnier, if slighter, and has been reprinted more often; the Buchanan Bienen was included in the O. Henry Prize Stories volume for 1983, and both are a bit eccentric even for their first publication sites. 

Both books have a triptych of short fictions, the OR example by John Updike (arguably the "biggest name" in the Smith volume--though Oates, Margaret Atwood and Carlos Fuentes are among the many potential challengers there, particularly in 2024) and the MG being three of four stories by R. V. Branham, not quite a "discovery" of the horror/dark fantasy magazine (he'd gone through the Writers of the Future program and had sold several stories to Gardner Dozois's editorship of Asimov's Science Fiction), but the only fiction contributor to have two distinct entries in the Horsting/Van Hise volume. Not even Neil Gaiman, much less at time of the anthology's publication Lansdale, was as close as they are now to being nearly as prominent as Stephen King among the MG volume's contributors, which does have a rather lopsided representation of male to female contributors, vs. that of the OR.

  • Jessica Horsting



James Van Hise






















Raymond Smith and Joyce Carol Oates


To read some individual issues and contents of those issues, please see
and

For more of today's Short Story reviews, please see Patti Abbott's blog.


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Saturday, September 17, 2022

SSW/FFB: stories by Fritz Leiber, Brian Aldiss, Poul Anderson, C. B. Gilford, Mack Reynolds, Michael Avallone...and, supposedly, Boris Karloff: from THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION, April 1958, edited by Anthony Boucher, and TALES OF THE FRIGHTENED, August 1957, edited by Lyle Kenyon Engel (and/or Michael Avallone) and related books and records...(pt. 4)

Further reviewing the small slew of late '50s f/sf/h fiction magazines begun with this post: Fantasy/Horror/SF fiction magazine issues from the 1950s fantastica "End of Summer": THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION April 1958 edited by "Anthony Boucher"; FANTASTIC April 1959 edited by Cele Goldsmith; FANTASTIC UNIVERSE April 1958 edited by Hans Stefan Santesson; TALES OF THE FRIGHTENED August 1957 edited by Lyle Kenyon Engel; SCIENCE FANTASY April 1958 edited by John Carnell (and INSIDE SF's F&SF/Mercury Press parody issue/September 1958, edited by Ron Smith, and MACABRE, Summer 1958, edited by Joseph Payne Brennan)

and continuing with these: Short Story Wednesday: Kit Reed, Margaret St. Clair, William F. Nolan, Avram Davidson, Richard Wilson, and others: April 1958 fantasy (and related) stories from THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION and FANTASTIC UNIVERSE (part 2)

SSW: 1959 fantasy magazine fiction: Part 3: Kate Wilhelm, Harlan Ellison, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Gordon Dickson, Edward Wellen, Arthur & Irwin Porges: FANTASTIC, April 1959, edited by Cele Goldsmith (Lalli)



Note that the loving care with which this cover has been put together, as noted previously, includes attributing Poul Anderson's story to Mack Reynolds's pseudonym, and vice verse, and spelling Poul as "Paul"...also, an utter lack of page numbers on the issue's table of contents can't have helped a newsstand-browser's confidence...


But first, the two most famous stories in our April 1958 issue of F&SF: Fritz Leiber's cover story, "A Deskful of Girls" and the only story to follow it, Brian Aldiss's "Poor Little Warrior!".

So, Leiber's "A Deskful of Girls" pretty much blew my mind as a  teenager, first reading it around 14 or so years old in The Best of Fritz Leiber most likely, the 1974 volume that was released perhaps a bit prematurely, but Leiber at his best might well've been the best writer to come out of the fantasy/sf magazine community, ahead of such inspirations as Lovecraft and Heinlein, and ahead of such peers as Bradbury and Sturgeon and heirs such as Le Guin and Emshwiller and Russ, and his almost direct colleague in Lovecraft-mentorship (and HPL-transcendence), Robert Bloch. Rereading it this last week doesn't impress me much less, despite familiarity, and all the others, Norman Mailer, Joyce Carol Oates and all, who have similarly traced the passage through her later life that "Marilyn Monroe" took...though Leiber published his account of a rather obvious Monroe analog in 1958, with her rapacious "therapist"/"analyst" and the genuinely exploitive as well as supernatural means he has discovered for controlling her and other women "patients"--removing aspects of themselves through a kind of ritual that pulls parts of their selves away from them, in a kind of psychic yet tangible self that the story's protagonist refers to as "ghostgirls." The tangible selves, wispy as their physical form is, can be used by the villain of the piece in several fashions, explicitly and implicitly addressed, when he doesn't simply take them from his file drawer and toy with them, or show them off, as to his somewhat different male temporary victim, Leiber's protagonist, hired by an actor, whose relation with the Monroe-correspondent resembles Joe DiMaggio's post-divorce interaction, to discover what's going on with his ex-wife and this extortionist. The vicious psychologist/parapsychologist has his run-in with the Monroe character, and it doesn't go as he might've expected. It's a hell of story, and is by the slimmest thread tied into Leiber's Change War stories (a quick reference to some of the supernatural technology several characters employ being provided by the time-travelers involved in the the truer CW stories), but it's mostly a remarkably grounded horror story for its time, feminist in approach even when even the more sympathetic male characters fail to fully appreciate the what some women can and will do, in the face of various sorts of exploitation or paternalistic "protection"...Leiber coming from an acting family, himself mostly raised by the women in his family, and having a brief, peripheral Hollywood career himself might not've hurt his insights here.

While the Aldiss story is good early work by him, an interesting mix of what Boucher correctly suggests is a Bradburyian lavishness in the prose (but with a lighter and more jazzily discursive touch than Bradbury usually managed), but also a kind of rather contemporary consideration of what might drive a married man to go back in time to be a "Poor Little Warrior!", hunting a brontosaurus on what amounts to a potted safari...but one that isn't quite as foolproof as one might desire in a distracting vacation...in his case to help him forget about his failing relation with his wife, which is touched upon in terms that take the story in a vaguely Updike or Amis or Philip Roth direction (rather than the more thoroughly mournful flavor John Cheever gave such matters in fantasies such as "The Enormous Radio"). This is not the story that will make me forget such early Aldiss as "Let's Be Frank", but I can see why it's an old favorite of many.

This ever-more impressive F&SF issue can be read here. While the highly uneven, but not altogether negligible latter issue of Tales of he Frightened can be read here.

Tales of the Frightened was one of three fiction magazines that Lyle Kenyon Engel and Republic Features Syndicate launched in 1957, along with one in 1956, all four seeing only two issues each, and each with a somewhat better covers on their first issues than their second issues would offer:

both issues of American Agent

and both issues of their slightly older cousin...

TotF, at least, was tied to an essentially stillborn syndicated radio series of short fillers, read by Boris Karloff, written by Michael Avallone...who probably was the actual editor of at least the two fantastica magazines (Engel is listed in them as Editorial Director), even as Avallone had been credited as editor of the two slightly earlier issues (1956-57) of Private Investigator Detective Magazine, both featuring Avallone's series detective Ed Noon (and please see below for Avallone's reported account), and Avallone also the likely author of some of the stories bylined by the utterly obscure among contributors to the magazines...when they weren't by other old pros such as Mack Reynolds, also in hiding. (American Agent apparently had a similarly planned unsuccessful radio run, getting as far as hiring veteran actor Lee Bowman as lead, according to the inside and outside back-cover blurbs for six planned Republic Features syndicated radio series--the others non-fictional or joke-laden in content--but as far as I know at this point, none of the others saw even raw recordings for the eventual initial pair of record albums, nor the book collecting the prose form of the radio vignettes, that the horror package would eventually produce). At least one report online has Republic Features Syndicate going under in '57, hence the end of the magazines (while Peter Enfantino reports at the link below that Avallone recalled a distributor's workforce-strike killed them--which seems unlikely, given the haphazard packaging of the second issues, unless the strike predated their preparation, but perhaps Avallone misremembers the stock-speculation-driven collapse of the dominant magazine distributor of the time, the American News Co.) and lack of radio penetration for whatever was actually recorded. Engel went on to decades of book packaging, Avallone to decades of writing. And the single vignettes in both issues of TotF attributed (more or less) to Karloff are Avallone's, from the radio vignette series and as collected in the book.

Peter Enfantino reviews (in 2010) the Michael Avallone collection of vignettes and the issues of the magazine here...and reaffirms my suspicion (and might well've been my initial source for it) that Avallone ghost-edited the magazines for Engel...Enfantino identifies the "Mark Dane" story in the issue as also Avallone's.

And this is apparently the first edition of the Avallone book (1963):

and these the Karloff recordings, the Mercury LP "Volume 1", also from '63: Side 1

Side 2

And Volume 2, complete:

The stories I've read first in the Frightened issue have run to those by my old favorites, unsurprisingly...crime-fiction writer (and more than occasional horror-fiction writer for such CF magazines as Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine in its early decades) C. B. Gilford, whose story is this issue isn't the only one to cross-over from crime fiction to horror. "The Lucky Coffin" of the title confers a sort of immortality, apparently, on those wise enough to have purchased it...including the parsimonious, cantankerous (to say the least) and generally unpleasant uncle of the protagonist, and his long-suffering fiancee, and what it takes to make their dreams come to fruition. A fine and cheerful story, about the morally bankrupt.

Even better, and dealing with a similar class of anti-hero, is Poul Anderson's "Mr. Tiglath", the name offered by a dealer in persons trapped, like genies, in bottles of various sorts, and whom can be put to various uses. It's unsurprisingly best not to make such deals, even if Mr. Tiglath might not be Satan himself so much as an associated figure, and eventually meeting the prices one might pay. The story has excellent detail and even makes a reasonable case why the protagonist might be foolhardy enough to take the chance.

The attributed Mack Reynolds vignette, the joke-story "Dead End", is pun-laden enough so that Isaac Asimov and co-editors snapped it up for Microcosmic Tales, largely devoted to vignettes, but as Peter Enfantino similarly noted a dozen years ago, it's rather an anemic pun, to not quite make another myself, even if it is one of the few stories here to ever be reprinted. The other Reynolds story, attributed to "Mark Mallory", is a slightly clumsy bit of supernatural hugger-mugger called "The Man Who Stole His Body", in which the spirit of an accomplished surgeon strikes a desperate bargain with his guide on the way to an afterlife, and tries to convince another surgeon on staff at his hospital to perform extreme measures to keep his potentially dead body alive. Quite beyond the supernatural elements of the story, the narrative would like us to accept that a modern surgical suite would have rusty, as opposed to perhaps recently-used and in need of cleaning, instruments at tableside, or that either the rushed living or the living dead doctor would look upon the seconds, at most, to pull on surgical gloves to make a lick of difference, even while eschewing scrubbing up for several minutes beforehand. It verges on being a clever conceit of a story, but one can see why Reynolds stuck a pseudonym on this one over even the mildly clever if forced pun story.

The Avallone vignette in this issue, headnoted with an advisory that the radio series was meant to be broadcast as The Frightened, is attributed only to Karloff, as if he were writer as well as narrator. As reprinted in the various formats of the Avallone collection Tales of the Frightenend, this one leads off the book, under the title "The Man in the Raincoat"...we are, I think, supposed to realize the strange man in the titular coat has an oddly-shaped umbrella somewhat suggestive of a scythe, but that is not spelled out in the story, such as it is as published here (or as recorded). The apparently two other Avallone stories here, one mildly reprinted, might well average better, and I will see soon.
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Friday, October 23, 2020

FFM (Friday's "Forgotten" Magazines): May 1960 Horror and Fantasy Fiction Magazines: F&SF, FANTASTIC, SHOCK, FEAR!, SCIENCE FANTASY (April), FANTASTIC UNIVERSE (March), MACABRE (Summer)--Friday Fright Night

Some newsstand fantasy and horror (and sf and suspense fiction) in Spring of 1960:












Macabre, Summer 1960 
Price: $0.40
Pages: 28

So...why May 1960 issues?

Well, this was one of the rare instances in which two newsstand horror-fiction magazines were launched with the same cover date...and the same lack of capitalization. Both Shock and Fear! were to last only briefly, three issues for Shock, two issues for Fear!...Winston Publications launched Keyhole Mystery Magazine at the same time, and with the same editor (though Dan Roberts didn't hide behind a Frankenstein's behemoth and an intelligent spider for the crime-fiction magazine--cutesy editorial fictions rarely help) and many of the same contributors, managed three issues before folding. Fear! was the product of Great American Publications, which had bought King-Size Publications' two fiction magazines (The Saint Mystery Magazine and Fantastic Universe--the US edition of the British New Worlds was launched with the March 1960 issue perhaps in part to make up for the folding of FU) and then added a small slew of other fiction magazines in an excess of enthusiasm, or at very least optimism...which overextension apparently contributed to Great American's crashing and burning by the end of 1960...they had folded Fantastic Universe, after an 8-year run, after beginning but never continuing the serialization of Fredric Brown's horror-adjacent sf novel The Mind Thing, and offering an uncredited translation of the first Jorge Luis Borges story to appear in an English-language fantasy magazine, in March (meaning it probably was still sitting on a few newsstands, at least, by the time the others here were issued).  The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (F&SF), Fantastic and the UK's Science Fantasy (the more fantasy and horror-receptive stablemate of New Worlds) would continue apace for some years, as would Joseph Payne Brennan's modest little magazine, the most prominent of those devoted to publishing weird fiction and poetry in 1960, Macabre.  

F&SF always included some horror in its mix, as did Fantastic, Fantastic Universe and Science Fantasy also...F&SF's first mooted title was Fantasy and Terror, though that was not seen as a particularly easy sell in the immediate postwar years, despite the continuing popularity of horror fiction and horror drama on radio and to some extent in film; the first issue, as edited by founders "Anthony Boucher" (William White) and J. Francis McComas, was titled simply The Magazine of Fantasy when released in 1949, and the current title (it's the only magazine in our array here still publishing, though the most recent revival of Fantastic folded only a few years ago) came with the second issue, as sf magazines had already established that they had a receptive self-conscious audience (while horror and fantasy readers were less likely to see themselves that way until the attempts to market to them began began consistently succeeding in the 1970s and '80s). Fantastic (founded in 1952), Fantastic Universe (in 1953) and Science Fantasy (established as a professional magazine under that title in 1950) all were ready from the start to announce their openness to sf...FU almost to a ridiculous extent, though in a sense it has perhaps the most cheerful and optimistic title of any professional fantasy/sf magazine so far (and in moments of anger, the initials work).

As noted, Shock was the stablemate of a crime-fiction magazine, most of Fear!'s freshet of stablemates were crime-fiction as well (and a couple of those were tv-series-tie-in magazines, 77 Sunset Strip and Tightrope, which mixed in non-series-related stories), and F&SF was seen as a fantasticated offshoot, in most ways, of its original stablemate Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine; the relation of The Saint Detective Magazine and Fantastic Universe was in imitation of F&SF and EQMM. Fantastic, while its first two editors were at least as much interested in crime fiction as speculative, was for its initial 1952-80 run the consistent partner of the sf magazine Amazing, much as Science Fantasy was of New Worlds.  Brennan's little magazine was launched in 1957, as an attempt to provide a focus for those hoping to see a revival of Weird Tales magazine, which had folded in 1954, with Brennan as one of its last major "discoveries" (he had published more widely as a poet than a fiction writer, though had published a number of western stories, before WT in its last years published, most famously, such short horror fiction of his as "Slime" and "The Calamander Chest").

That said, it's perhaps also a mark of the times that led their publishers to try to launch horror/suspense magazines...a few publishers, particularly Ballantine Books, were starting up horror lines, however tentatively (and some of the crime-fiction book lines were showing an increasing willingness to dip back into at least borderline horror, tagging some titles as "novels of menace" and the like); the increasing embrace of horror hosts on television film packages, local and syndicated, seemed to be embraced by the culture at large in a way that horror comics had not been, even though they both had their roots in radio horror and suspense hosts--on series which in their turn had inspired some short-lived magazines in the 1950s, the eclectic Suspense and The Mysterious Traveler, and the later and somewhat more affectionately than respectfully remembered Tales of the Unanticipated. Television dramatic anthologies touched on horror and sometimes jumped in with both feet (following in the footsteps of such radio series transplants as Suspense and Lights Out), and odd hybrids such as Alcoa Presents/One Step Beyond arose, and then the first long-term success in US fantasticated tv drama anthologies, The Twilight Zone, beginning in 1959. In the UK, such writers as Nigel Kneale were offering wildly popular drama dancing on the line between sf and horror. And British horror films, from Hammer and other studios, were doing well in the States, as were some rather more sophisticated horror and suspense films than the low-budget monster movies that had flooded in with the advent of drive-ins and lots of teens with spending money. Such borderline horror as Psycho couldn't've have hurt the sales pitches for horror/borderline horror magazines to their publishers and distributors. 

All that said--what of the stories (and nonfiction features)? One thing that's hard to miss is how each of the magazines offers reprints--Shock almost to a fault, and the minor fiddling with titles of reprints in that issue seems almost as if they're hoping you won't recall those titles--seven out of 13 stories are good to excellent reprints, but some are definitely going to be familiar to most readers of horror--and if the magazine was aimed at kids (as the editorial fiction cuteness suggests), Theodore Sturgeon's "Bianca's Hands" probably wasn't going to be one of those reprints (though this is its first US magazine appearance, after beating a Graham Greene story in a contest in the UK magazine Argosy--after having appeared in at least a Groff Conklin horror anthology and Sturgeon's second, and horr0r-heavy and brilliant, collection). Such originals as Avram Davidson's "The Tenant" are nothing to be ashamed of, either. (The cover story in the third issue of Shock is Robert Bloch's brilliant suspense piece "The Final Performance", a new story--which, of course, editor Roberts presented as "Final Performance".) The least mining the past we see is in the Macabre issue, apparently...I haven't found a copy to read, so I don't know if Brennan's own H. P. Lovecraft essay builds on his nonfiction about HPL he'd published in the '50s; though it's amusing to note that this is certainly HPL month for nonfiction pieces, between Damon Knight's brief dismissal of how Lovecraft avoided overexposing his monstrous presences definitely to a fault and Sam Moskowitz's typically clumsy historical/critical profile; Brennan's is probably more adeptly written, and it would be interesting to see if it's more generally critical than Moskowitz chose to be.  In the Science Fantasy issue, the reprint is the similar Moskowitz essay about A. Merritt, which series ran on a several-month delay from their original appearances in Fantastic. Accompanying the essay in Fantastic is a reprint, from the very early and fairly elaborate 1935 fanzine Fantasy Magazine issue in which two quintets of writers were requested to write round-robin stories with the title "The Challenge from Beyond"--one group of five asked to take a science-fictional approach, the other, Weird Tales stars all save A. Merritt who was more an even earlier big draw in the likes of the US Argosy and All-Story magazines, to collaborate on a Cthulhu horror story. So, Catherine L. Moore (my favorite of this five), Abraham Merritt, H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard and Frank Belknap Long fell to and produced the story reprinted here. (You are invited to imagine the prices copies of this issue of the 1935 magazine go for when made available.) 

Fear! dusts off a Wilkie Collins story from 1874, albeit one with a complex history; Fantastic Universe's only "true" reprint appears to be an Israeli news story (polymath editor H. S. Santesson might not've translated the Borges story, collected in Spanish as well as English in the versions of The Universal History of Infamy, as he refers in his editorial to Borges as a Mexican, rather than Argentine, writer...but perhaps it was a momentary slip). F&SF, as does Shock, reprints a John Collier story, only a relatively new 1956 item from The New Yorker, rather than a chestnut originally from Harper's in 1931 in the latter case; the F&SF issue also reprints a Joseph Hansen poem from Harper's, from the previous year. Shock reprints its Anthony Boucher story from F&SF in 1954; F&SF would eventually return the favor, reprinting Davidson's "The Tenant" a decade later, in 1971. 

And, Fantastic and F&SF in these issues offer impressive new stories by Fritz Leiber, one each in his most sustained series: a Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser story, "When the Sea King's Away" in the Fantastic issue, and a Change War story in the F&SF, "The Oldest Soldier"...

More to come. (It's been a surprisingly and suddenly busy two days.) Perhaps some pruning of the above, definitely some digging in with the horror fiction offered by each...

[late bulletin--alas, no, but a Very belated correction of one of my typos...]








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