Such other respected names as Sydney J. Bounds, Phyllis Eisenstein, Charles L. Grant and E.C. Tubb are also represented with classic tales of unease, and there is more recent or original work from Pat Cadigan, Christopher Fowler, Neil Gaiman, Glen Hirshberg, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Terry Lamsley, Brian Mooney, Kim Newman and Michael Marshall Smith, many of whom were only just starting their professional careers when the first volume of Terror was originally published.
Finally, I am delighted to present two powerful collaborations between rising stars Tim Lebbon and Brian Keene and the talented writing team of married couple Tanith Lee and John Kaiine, along with David Case’s classic psychological novella “Among the Wolves” which, like all the author’s early work, deserves to be back in print again.
So there you have it – another bumper volume of contemporary terror, brought to you by some of the finest writers currently working in horror fiction. And remember, if you enjoyed this volume, then there are many more stories out there just waiting to be told . . .
Stephen Jones
London, England
BRIAN LUMLEY WAS BORN on England’s north-east coast nine months after the death of H.P. Lovecraft. He claims that is just a coincidence. He was serving as a sergeant in the Corps of Royal Military Police when he discovered Lovecraft’s fiction while stationed in Berlin in the early 1960s. After deciding to try his own hand at writing horror fiction, initially set in HPL’s influential Cthulhu Mythos, he sent his early efforts to editor August Derleth. The latter’s famed Arkham House imprint published two collections of Lumley’s short stories, The Caller of the Black and The Horror at Oakdene and Others, plus the short novel Beneath the Moors.
Lumley’s many other books include the Psychomech trilogy, Demogorgon, The House of Doors, Fruiting Bodies and Other Fungi, A Coven of Vampires, The Whisperer and Other Voices and Beneath the Moors and Darker Places.
More recent publications include Freaks, a collection from Subterranean Press that includes a new story, and a reprinting of Khai of Khem from Tor Books. Delirium has reissued the first Hero of Dreams novel in a very limited leatherbound edition, and the third issue of H.P. Lovecraft’s Magazine of Horror is a “Brian Lumley Special” that features two original tales.
These days Lumley is best known as the author of the popular Necroscope vampire series. Published in 1986, the first book in the series made him a best-seller all over the world. That initial volume was followed by Necroscope II: Wamphyri! (aka Necroscope II: Vamphyrif), Necroscope III: The Source, Necroscope TV: Deadspeak and Necroscope V: Deadspawn. The Vampire World trilogy appeared in the early 1990s, and that was followed by the two-volume Necroscope: The Lost Years, the three-volume E-Branch series, and the collection Harry Keogh: Necroscope and Other Weird Heroes! Forthcoming is The Touch, a new “E-Branch” spin-off.
In 1998 he was named Grand Master at the World Horror Convention, and The Brian Lumley Companion, co-edited with Stanley Wiater, appeared from Tor in 2002.
“‘Fruiting Bodies’ won a British Fantasy Award in 1989,” reveals the author. “It had some stiff competition and I count myself lucky to have won. Whether it’s frightening or not is for you to decide. If it’s entertaining, and gives that certain frisson, then I’m satisfied.
“One thing’s for sure, there isn’t any blood here: mushrooms don’t bleed.”
MY GREAT-GRANDPARENTS, and my grandparents after them, had been Easingham people; in all likelihood my parents would have been, too, but the old village had been falling into the sea for three hundred years and hadn’t much looked like stopping, and so I was born in Durham City instead. My grandparents, both sets, had been among the last of the village people to move out, buying new homes out of a government-funded disaster grant. Since when, as a kid, I had been back to Easingham only once.
My father had taken me there one spring when the tides were high. I remember how there was still some black, crusty snow lying in odd corners of the fields, coloured by soot and smoke, as all things were in those days in the north-east. We’d gone to Easingham because the unusually high tides had been at it again, chewing away at the shale cliffs, reducing shoreline and derelict village both as the North Sea’s breakers crashed again and again on the shuddering land.
And of course we had hoped (as had the two hundred or so other sightseers gathered there that day) to see a house or two go down in smoking ruin, into the sea and the foaming spray. We witnessed no such spectacle; after an hour, cold and wet from the salt moisture in the air, we piled back into the family car and returned to Durham. Easingham’s main street, or what had once been the main street, was teetering on the brink as we left. But by nightfall that street was no more. We’d missed it: a further twenty feet of coastline, a bite one street deep and a few yards more than one street long had been undermined, toppled, and gobbled up by the sea.
That had been that. Bit by bit, in the quarter-century between then and now, the rest of Easingham had also succumbed. Now only a house or two remained – no more than a handful in all – and all falling into decay, while the closest lived-in buildings were those of a farm all of a mile inland from the cliffs. Oh, and of course there was one other inhabitant: old Garth Bentham, who’d been demolishing the old houses by hand and selling bricks and timbers from the village for years. But I’ll get to him shortly.
So there I was last summer, back in the north-east again, and when my business was done of course I dropped in and stayed overnight with the Old Folks at their Durham cottage. Once a year at least I made a point of seeing them, but last year in particular I noticed how time was creeping up on them. The “Old Folks”; well, now I saw that they really were old, and I determined that I must start to see a lot more of them.
Later, starting in on my long drive back down to London, I remembered that time when the Old Man had taken me to Easingham to see the houses tottering on the cliffs. And probably because the place was on my mind, I inadvertently turned off my route and in a little while found myself heading for the coast. I could have turned round right there and then – indeed, I intended to do so – but I’d got to wondering about Easingham and how little would be left of it now, and before I knew it . . .
Once I’d made up my mind, Middlesbrough was soon behind me, then Guisborough, and in no time at all I was on the old road to the village. There had only ever been one way in and out, and this was it: a narrow road, its surface starting to crack now, with tall hedgerows broken here and there, letting you look through to where fields rolled down to the cliffs. A beautiful day, with seagulls wheeling overhead, a salt tang coming in through the wound-down windows, and a blue sky coming down to merge with . . . with the blue-grey of the North Sea itself! For cresting a rise, suddenly I was there.
An old, leaning wooden signpost said EASINGH – for the tail had been broken off or rotted away, and “the village” lay at the end of the road. But right there, blocking the way, a metal barrier was set in massive concrete posts and carried a sign bearing the following warning: