More than any other genre, horror kept short stories alive. In the early ’90s, as publishing collapsed, anthologies still sold well. So every few years someone decided to produce an anthology proving that horror could be literature, too. The first, and most important, came from superagent Kirby McCauley, who was inspired by Harlan Ellison’s game-changing Dangerous Visions science-fiction anthology from 1967. McCauley bundled together stories by Stephen King (“The Mist”), Dennis Etchison (then best known as the short-story writer’s short-story writer), Ramsey Campbell, Joyce Carol Oates, and Isaac Bashevis Singer for his landmark 1981 book, Dark Forces.
Etchison edited his own cutting-edge anthology called, natch, Cutting Edge (1986). Critic Douglas E. Winter did it with Prime Evil in 1988, and Monteleone took a stab with Borderlands in 1990. Even as the horror market collapsed in the early ’90s, themed anthologies stayed strong in paperback. But if ever there was a canary in the coal mine for the horror boom, it died in 1989 when Grant announced he was ending Shadows after ten volumes because the quality of the submissions had dropped “drastically.” After that, Grant wrote some media tie-ins for The X-Files, and then silence. As the industry descended into darkness, so, too, did Charles L. Grant.
Anthologies featured some of the best horror fiction of the ’70s and ’80s, from the spooky tales in Charles Grant’s taste-making Shadows to Dennis Etchison’s rule-breaking Cutting Edge. Credit 153
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In 1986, war was declared. War on metal!
“The cassette or CD player in too many teens’ rooms is an altar to evil, dispensing the devil’s devices to the accompaniment of a catchy beat,” warned televangelist Bob Larson. In the 1983 book Backward Masking Unmasked, author Jacob Aranza warned that Queen’s song “We Are the Champions” was “the unofficial national anthem for gays in America.” Larson listed all the satanic bands out to seduce our children, balancing the usual suspects—Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, Black Sabbath—with Electric Light Orchestra, the Beatles, and the Eagles, as well as the Beach Boys (transcendental meditators), Bee Gees (believers in reincarnation), and John Denver (once tried aikido). Fueled by Michelle Remembers, James Egbert III’s disappearance (see here), and other sinister claims, by the mid-’80s the Satanic Panic was in full swing, possibly because the threat of secret satanists was a welcome distraction from the real dangers threatening to kill us all, like a foreign policy based on mutual assured destruction.
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Pop culture was the battlefield in this new holy war, and heavy metal music was on the front lines. In 1985, the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) issued their “Filthy 15” blacklist of objectionable bands, whose only real effect was to guide curious kids to the smuttiest music on the market. Made up of the wives of power brokers and politicians in Washington, D.C., the PMRC publicly demanded that record labels reassess the contracts of musicians who performed violent or sexualized stage shows. They managed to hold Senate hearings on explicit lyrics and “porn rock,” which accomplished little except to show Americans that Twisted Sister’s Dee Snider was more levelheaded and informed than Tipper Gore. The group’s only lasting impact was the explicit lyrics sticker on CDs and cassettes, immediately making those recordings one hundred times more desirable to kids.
Clive Barker (far left) made a name for himself with his debut multivolume short-story collection, inspiring the splatterpunk movement of gory horror fiction. David Schow coined the term, and John Skipp and Craig Spector were among its founding fathers (right). Credit 156
Horror responded in the most metal way possible. When televangelists denounced horror movies, books, and games as causing cannibalism, murder, suicide, depression, and domestic violence, horror writers and metal bands doubled down, firehosing ever-more-offensive content into the faces of conservatives. In Providence, Rhode Island, at the 12th World Fantasy Convention in 1986, this weaponized brattitude took horror fiction one step closer to extinction when Fangoria columnist David Schow coined the term splatterpunk, named for a new school of fiction oozing out of the crypt. At the vanguard was Clive Barker, whose debut six-volume short story collection The Books of Blood, published in the U.K. in 1984, was released in the U.S in 1986 in the form of six terrible-looking paperbacks.
There had always been American writers, like Jack Ketchum, who refused to blink when describing gore, but the complete conviction, serious craft, and forensic eye for grotesque detail that Barker brought to his stories, about zombie actresses giving blowjobs and an army of disembodied hands declaring war on the human race, unleashed the beast. All at once, a pack of young dudes— Ray Garton, Joe R. Lansdale, Richard Christian Matheson, John Skipp, Craig Spector, and Schow—were delivering bloody books featuring all the ways a human body could be folded, spindled, curb stomped, flayed, eaten alive, castrated, blow torched, pierced, meat hooked, and mutilated. Powered by a rejection of literary style and an embrace of short, sharp, stripped-down sentences, these edgelords rejected God, America, Reagan, romance, and even the splatterpunk label, which they took great pains to denounce at every opportunity (even within the pages of anthologies with the word splatterpunk on the cover). Almost exclusively a boys’ club (the most prominent female purveyor of splatterpunk, Poppy Z. Brite, is a trans man), and deeply white-bread (the PMRC targeted gangsta rap as hard as heavy metal, but no writers took up that torch), splatterpunk started as a trickle of short stories before erupting into a mudslide of novels, zines, and anthologies.
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The only thing as stupid and outrageous as splatterpunk was rock. Heavy metal was being hit with hard cultural radiation in the ’80s, and although hair metal and arena rock dominated, in underground chambers, music was mutating into death metal, thrash, and grindcore as bands like Cannibal Corpse, Rigor Mortis, and Megadeth clawed their way toward daylight. Splatterpunk and metal were a match made in hell, both genres delivering attention-seeking spurts of juvenile nihilism alongside gleeful gushers of gore.
Much like the multiplying subgenres of metal, splatterpunk was not just a marketing label but a movement. Its advocates felt they were the future of horror, a resistance pushing back against the Moral Majority, confronting humankind with our bleakest impulses and offering a community for the freaks and geeks left behind by Reagan’s America. But more than a movement, they wanted to be a band. The splatterpunk authors could picture nothing cooler than being in a punk band (and a few of them were, notably John Shirley, as well as John Skipp and Craig Spector). They made sure they were photographed together as often as possible, worked together on anthologies, and cited one another’s work in articles.
Horror fiction and heavy metal were a match made in hell, thanks to books like Stage Fright and The Scream (notable for the Stan Watts mini pull-out poster concealed behind the paperback’s cover). Credit 158
Schow lived out both his splatterpunk and rock fantasies in The Kill Riff (1987), whose narrative did not star the novelty shotgun guitar depicted on the cover but did feature an unfortunately named metal band, Whip Hand, who disbanded after thirteen kids were killed in a riot at one of their concerts. Among the dead was angelic Kristen, whose dad, Lucas Ellington, was (regressively enough) a Vietnam War veteran. After he spends a year in an asylum “resting,” his therapist Sara pronounces him cured, although she worries about his occasional nightmares. No biggie. Once Lucas is out in the world, murdering the members of Whip Hand (who have splintered into solo acts), his bad dreams clear right up.