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The Year's Best Horror Stories: XVIII

The Pit-Yakker by Brian Lumley. Copyright © 1989 by the Terminus Publishing Company, Inc. for Weird Tales, Fall 1989. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author's agent, the Dorian Literary Agency.

INTRODUCTION:

Horror From Angst To Zombies

Don't let anyone try to tell you that the horror boom is over.

A dozen years back when I started out as editor of The Year's Best Horror Stories, I used to reserve space on one shelf for genre publications with room for stories of note published outside the horror field. For 1989 hardcover and paperback anthologies alone crammed one long shelf, while small press magazines and booklets filled three Jack Daniels' cartons — this in addition to the ordered rows of monthly magazines ostensibly devoted to science fiction. This reflects a yearly progression, and there's no sign of things leveling off. While one anthology series dies, another takes its place; when one magazine folds, two more take its place — rather like the old story about the Hydra.

As a consequence, your overworked editor is being crowded out of his house by tottering stacks of horrors. And you, gentle reader, need only to settle down in your comfy chair and open your copy of The Year's Best Horror Stories: XVIII — this tidy, compact volume of concentrated horror. Only your dauntless editor, who probably will have to trade in his mirror shades for bifocals, has chosen the best of the best for you from amongst the many hundreds of horror stories of 1989 — painstakingly and painfully.

Don't think it's all been fun.

Increasingly in recent years as the genre has proliferated the criticism has been leveled that far, far too much current horror fiction is absolute rubbish. This, unfortunately, is all too true. Skipping over the dismal quality of most horror films and novels, the short story has also fallen victim to pure and simple bad writing. Plots, when present, are too often so obvious and trite that one can only wonder as to why the author is bothering to clone a cliché. Characterization is too often lacking, motivation absent, and writing skills laughable. One piece of evidence of this is the shrinking average word length of the horror story. This reflects a growing trend in horror writing simply to introduce a few faceless expendables and rush them to a grisly end — the grislier the better. Your editor yawns and turns to the next and similar pointless exercise.

How then to explain the increasing popularity of horror fiction? It's a sad combination of diminished expectations on the part of the reader and of limited aspirations on the part of the writer. A readership grown up on a fast-food diet of stalk-and-slash splatter films expects the same brainless level of entertainment in what it reads. The same generation of writers has never read beyond Stephen King and thinks that expanding the frontiers of horror fiction means going for the grosser gross-out. The result is rather like shoving your basic chainsaw-zombies tape into the VCR and fast-forwarding through all the dull bits between the bare tits and the exploding heads. No need to think, and no one expects you to. Put your brain in park, and pass the Twinkies and salsa.