Five Horror Short Story Collections That Aren't My Favorites

Horror: (from the OED Online)

A painful emotion compounded of loathing and fear; a shuddering with terror and repugnance; strong aversion mingled with dread; the feeling excited by something shocking or frightful. Also in weaker sense, intense dislike or repugnance. (The prevalent use at all times.)

I strongly believe horror, as a genre, works best at the short story level. I've probably expounded on this before, but, wait, I'm going to again. It's a masterful novel that can maintain the suspense, fear, and atmosphere to deliver a good, unnerving chill to the marrow. Unfortunately, while I've read many very good horror novels (see this post), but, man, oh Manischewitz, I've read way more terrible, or just plain crappy, ones.

On the other hand, I've read great stories from mediocre novelists. Like a nightmare, a story only needs a little time to get in there and drive a spike into your brain or leach poison into your soul. No matter how lunatic the setup is, if it only last a dozen pages, it doesn't have to be able to hold up to deep scrutiny. If you want an evil, winking planet, you can do it ("The Tugging" by Ramsey Campbell). Short fiction is where the horror can run its freest and wildest.

In A Lonely Place (1983) by Karl Edward Wagner

It's been some time since I've read all of this nigh-perfect collection, but enough memories of the best stories in remain so I feel confident in writing about it. Wagner is probably best remembered as an editor of tremendous talent and a writer of topnotch swords & sorcery tales. What he also was, was a very, very good horror writer. If you don't believe me, just look up how many times "Where the Summer Ends" and "Sticks" have been anthologized. Wagner wrote more stories than the seven included in this volume, but these are the ones with which to start.

The Inhabitants of the Lake & Other Less Welcome Tenants (1964) by Ramsey Campbell
What can I say, I love this one, it's an absolute blast. Ramsey Campbell, one of the most respected names in horror, began, as most genre writers do, as a fan. Before he was a teenager, inspired by ghost stories he had read he turned his hand to writing his own. Later, as a teenager, he wrote Cthulhu Mythos tales that strove to be spitting images of HPL's own. At August Derleth's suggestion, Campbell rewrote them in an English setting. In 1964, at the age of eighteen, Arkham House published, Inhabitants, Campbell's first collection.

Replete with creepy, inbred denizens of spiritually corrupt towns, unwholesome tomes, and new Mythos deities of his own devising, these stories are an absolute hoot. Lin Carter tried to do the same thing in his Mythos stories, but they are mostly failures. I think the difference is, ultimately, even at a young age, Campbell was just a better writer and Carter never got that it was atmosphere more than demonic genealogies and lists of tomes that make these sort of stories work. Now, these stories are no great works of art, but Campbell knew for them to work their needed to be discomfiting, to be disturbing. The urban decay and moral rot that's a major part of Campbell's later, non-Mythos, writing can already be found in some of these early stories.


Owls Hoot in the Daytime and Other Omens (2003) by Manly Wade Wellman

This isn't the first and it probably won't be the last collection of Manly Wade Wellman's John the Balladeer stories, but it's the one I have. For those uninitiated to the wondrous magic of Wellman's yarns, these are essentially paranormal detective stories. Instead of fog-shrouded cities, they're set among the deep hollows and mountains of Appalachia and are filled with bits of real (and invented) rural folklore.

I have no memory of when I first encountered Wellman and his stories. It might have been the story "Owls Hoot in the Daytime" itself. It first appeared in Kirby McCauley's terrific anthology, Dark Forces, but I can't swear to it. However I found him, I became a fan years ago and find myself dipping back into his stories regularly. I like them all, but it's the John stories I find drawn back to most often.



Night Shift (1978) by Stephen King

What can I say except that this is the book, more than any other, which made me a lifelong Stephen King fan? I like many of his novels and collections, but the only one other than The Shining that I've read multiple times is this. I've read it maybe half a dozen times over the years, all at once or in bits and pieces. Including "Quitters, Inc.," "The Children of the Corn," and "Night Shift," this collects more of King's truly great stories than any of the other collections published over the years. Vampires, aliens, Lovecraftian horror, King leaves practically no horror stone unturned and it's a blast.

Looking at the table of contents, I was almost shocked at just how many of the stories in Night Shift have been filmed - eleven as standalone or parts of anthology films or tv-miniseries  and several more as non-professional shorts (the latter as part of a deal where King allowed student and amateur directors license stories for a dollar). Most of the films stink, but I'd be curious just how much King has profited from this single forty-one year old story collection. Whatever, if you aren't a King reader but are curious, this is still the best place to start.


Nocturnes (2004) by John Connolly

I discovered John Connolly through the Kevin Costner horror movie, The New Daughter (2009). The movie is not bad, if not great, still some things about it - the inevitability of its conclusion particularly - lodged themselves in my brain and wouldn't let go. When I discovered the movie was based on a story by someone named John Connolly, I decided to get a copy. A quick search brought me to Nocturnes. Since then, I've read nineteen books of Connolly's, seventeen of them part of a series, and not one has disappointed me.


From the King-like "The Cancer Cowboy Rides Again," to the MR James-like "Mr Pettinger's Dæmon," to the supernatural detective novella, "The Reflecting Eye." this book supplies all the chills and shudders I want from horror stories. Nine of the fifteen stories began as a radio scripts and that shows in their ghost-story-around-the-fireplace feel. I wrote a standalone post about the collection when I first found it that you can read HERE. I only describe the stories above as "like" King or James to give you a sense of what they're like. Connolly doesn't hide his influences, but he is not pasticheur. He writes with an authority and eloquence that verges into the poetic many, many times, and its all his own.

The best thing to come out of discovering Connolly was finding his series character, Charlie Parker. Again, I've written about the books HERE. I cannot recommend them enough.

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I could write a dozen posts about another sixty collections I've loved over the decades, but these five are among the very best and among the ones I've gone back to again and again. Not every story in any of them is perfect. Some are even bad, still each of these contains among some of the very best spooky writing from the last half century.

Haunting Short Story Collections

The best horror comes in small doses. Just like that harsh creak in the night becomes some skeletal prowler in our imaginations and just the sound of an old house settling, an author's darkest terror can fade away into nothing when exposed to the harsh light of five hundred pages of storytelling. Restricted to the confines of a ten or forty pages, and that terror will leave you feeling there's something wrong with the universe or something's lurking just outside of your peripheral vision, waiting for you to make a false move. Just think about some of the most famous and best names in horror - Machen, James, Blackwood, and Lovecraft are all known best for their short stories.

As I described in the previous post, horror took a turn toward novels in the seventies that continues to this day. The general turn away from short stories in publishing only accelerated that trend. Today, though, some of the best horror is once again found in short stories. Laird Barron has written a few novels, and they're good. His stories, though, are among the finest, most unsettling weird stories I have ever read.

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The children's librarian at the Stapleton Library, Miss Herz, knew exactly what kids wanted to read. Alongside all the books that we needed for school papers, book reports, or that our parents thought we should read, were Andre Norton, Robert A. Heinlein, and collections of scary stories. There were a bunch of different books, but there's only one I have any memories of: Witches, Witches, Witches, edited by Helen Hoke. I haven't seen a copy of this in years, but I remember it being pretty frightening. If the few interior illustrations I've been able to find it might still provide a little jolt of terror. Unfortunately, other than finding someone posts saying it holds a mix of fairy tales and legends, I have no idea what is actually in the book. I'd like to find out more, because they were some of the very first scary stories I ever read.

There are tons and tons of horror anthologies and single-author collections. Just looking at my e-book library, I've bought a stack of collections over the past few years that I'd never read before. Among them are four collections by Brian Lumley, three collections by Laird Barron (and one top-notch tribute collection inspired by Barron), Voodoo Tales: the Ghost Stories of Henry S. Whitehead, The Dead of Night: The Ghost Stories of Oliver Onions, and the monumental The Weird, edited by Jeff and Ann VanderMeer.

The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer (2012)

This book is a monster - in its effort to explore a century's worth of weird stories, it's 1153 pages long and has 110 stories and novellas. The VanderMeer's goal was to show the evolution of weird fiction over that span. While it includes horror, weird, as they define it, is more than just haunts and ghouls. Looking to the Old Man of Providence, the VanderMeers have this to say:

A 'weird tale', as defined by H.P. Lovecraft in his nonfiction writing and given early sanctuary within the pages of magazines like Weird Tales (est. 1923) is a story that has a supernatural element but does not fall into the category of traditional ghost story or Gothic tale, both popular in the 1800s. As Lovecraft wrote in 1927, the weird tale 'has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains'. Instead, it represents the pursuit of some indefinable and perhaps maddeningly unreachable understanding of the world beyond the mundane - a 'certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread' or 'malign and particular suspension or defeat of...fixed laws of Nature' through fiction that comes from the more unsettling, shadowy side of the fantastical tradition.

I wasn't sure what to expect from this, and it sure as heck surprised me. In the early years, there're plenty of classic stories, like HPL's "The Dunwich Horror" and Algernon Blackwood's "The Willows, there's also less genre-bound things like Franz Kafka's "In the Penal Colony" and Jorge Luis Borges' "The Aleph". As the collection progresses down the century, the tendency is towards authors less and less beholden to the pulp tradition, and for want of better terms, more to literary or experimental writing. So, while Laird Barron and T.M Wright are included, so are Ben Okri and Haruki Murakami.

This is an amazing book, and not just because dozens of these authors and stories were completely new to me. The VanderMeers set out to survey the evolution of not a genre, but a style. Recently, Raphael Ordonez wrote: 

"a genre is a dead thing, a pigeonhole in a commercial classification system depending on the presence or absence of various material elements."

That is exactly what The Weird rejects utterly. This book is filled with the scary, the creepy, the mad, and the bizarre. Like the book coming up, this should be part of any horror reader's library.

Dark Forces, edited by Kirby McCauley (1980)

I can't emphasize how important the late and lamented, at least by me, Barrett Book Trader on Staten Island was to me. It opened sometime in the mid-seventies and remained so until the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century. In my youth, the only thing I cared about was it great, double-stacked sci-fi and fantasy section. As my tastes widened, I discovered the equally good mystery and literature sections. 

Thinking back, though, my favorite section was the horror section. It was located at the very back of the store, perhaps to keep the folks browsing the romance shelves from coming across the bloody skulls and creepy children on horror covers. I reveled in those stacks of gore-dripping drenched. That's where I discovered Robert Bloch, Ramsey Campbell, Hugh B. Cave, and many others. It's also where I discovered a battered and worn copy of Kirby McCauley's Dark Forces.

McCauley was a superstar agent, repping authors like Roger Zelazny, George R.R. Martin, and most significantly here, Stephen King. With Dark Forces, he planned to create an anthology for horror that would possess the "same scope and dynamism" of Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions (1967). The latter was a collection of original speculative fiction stories by a diverse crowd of writers, ranging from old hands like Robert Bloch and Frederik Pohl to up and comers like Larry Niven and Roger Zelazny. 

To achieve that goal, McCauley approached "every living writer who had tried his or her hand at this type of story." Many were unable to respond, by time or a lack of inspiration. In the end, though, he snagged twenty-three contributions from Stephen King, Gene Wolfe, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Robert Aickman, and nineteen other true greats. 

This is a book I love, and I write that while admitting there are some stories in it I have read only once, when I first bought it. On the other hand, Stephen King's "The Mist", T.E.D. Klein's "Children of the Kingdom", and Dennis Etchison's "Night Shift" and Karl Edward Wagner's "Where The Summer Ends" are stories indelibly stained on my brain. Again, if you read horror and have any degree of self respect, you should own this. I myself have a battered old paperback, but discovering the e-book is only $4.99, just bought that too.

Other collections like these worth finding are the late David G. Hartwell's two lengthy genre surveys: The Dark Descent (1987) and Foundations of Fear (1992). Both are excellent, and thick, collections of stories stretching from around the mid-19th century to the late 20th.

Two I want, having only read library copies of once, are the Boris Karloff edited Tales of Terror and And The Darkness Falls. Tales he edited chose and edited himself. According to an essay by David Hartwell, for Darkness, M. Edmund Spears sent Karloff a huge stack of stories to read. Karloff, while on tour with Arsenic and Old Lace, selected sixty-nine. Sure, it's a bit of clever marketing, but these are really good collections.

In A Lonely Place (1983) by Karl Edward Wagner

While Wagner is well known for his Kane swords & sorcery stories, he wrote some of the best horror tales of the last century. If you need proof of that, this is where to go. This single, slim book holds all of Wagner's very best horror stories. Along with the Oliver Onions-inspired "In the Pines," there's the urban terror of "Where the Summer Ends," the Lovecraftian "Sticks," the paranoid of "The Fourth Seal" along with three other great stories.

I bought this at the Manhattan Forbidden Planet during college. I had already read "Where the Summer Ends" in Dark Forces, but I all the rest were totally new to me. Since then, I've probably read this a half dozen times and picked it up and read a story or two at random another half-dozen times.

Wagner is one of the most important figures in 20th horror. As a writer, he was one of the best. As the editor of The Year's Best Horror for DAW for fifteen years, he was as important to the genre as Lin Carter had been for fantasy. According to his forwards, Wagner scoured every pro, semi-pro, and fanzine he could find for each volume's contents. When big novels dominated the field, were a reminder of the power of short stories. Sadly, I lost my copies to basement flooding.

There are too many single author collections to mention them all. From contemporary authors, all of Laird Barron's collections are good, but as it's got the deeply unsettling "The Men from Porlock," I suggest you check out The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All (2013) first.

From older authors, Hugh B. Cave's Murgunstrumm and Others (1977) is a must-own. As the magazine market for horror shorts had dried up, by the late sixties Cave had retreated from the field. In the early seventies, Karl Edward Wagner and David Drake established Carcosa Press, and as a labor of love published this massive collection of twenty-six stories. Not only did it remind the world of Cave's existence, it revived his career as a horror writer, and he wrote nearly a dozen novels and dozens of stories between its publications and his death in 2004.

I have a full set of the S.T. Joshi edited, late 80s Arkham House Lovecraft collections. Together, the four books include all of HPL's original stories and revisions he did for others.

There's a special place in my heart, though, for the very first collection of Lovecraft stories I ever read: The Shadow Over Innsmouth and Other Stories of Horror (1971). It was actually published by Scholastic Books. It's a haphazard mix of good stories ("The Colour Out of Space" and "The Shadow Over Innsmouth") and lesser ones ("The Transition of Juan Romero" and "The Festival"), but between nostalgia and the cover, I'm glad to have a copy of this on my shelves.

Stephen King reputation rests on his novels, but he started as a short story writer. His first collection, Night Shift (1978) is chock full of greats (as well as being the source material for several nigh unwatchable films - The Mangler, Children of the Corn, Lawnmower Man, and Maximum Overdrive) that have held up to multiple rereadings. His second collection, Skeleton Crew (1985), is equally good. Later collections are more hit or miss, but never without their gems.

One of the coolest things about the e-book revolution is the availability of free versions of public domain books. Twenty years ago, I searched high and low before I found an overpriced paperback copy. Now, along with Algernon Blackwood, M.R. James, and Robert W. Chambers (and many, many others), you can get most of his work for free. Same for the more literary ghost stories of Henry James and Edith Wharton.

That's plenty of stories that should carry you through the Halloween season and beyond. And they don't even scratch the surface. Let me know what collections you find yourself reaching for each year when the temperatures cool down, the leaves turn, and the air fills with the vile smell of manufactured pumpkin spice.

Short Stories

I like short stories. Some people don't, preferring to only read big, thick books that they can get lost inside of for hours at a time (as described in this old Howard Andrew Jones post). While I'm willing to go all in for big books on occasion (I still need to get a copy of R. Scott Bakker's The

In the past two weeks, I reviewed twenty-one stories in my two-part Summer Roundup at Black Gate. That's a great big fat anthology worth of stories, and I absolutely loved it. It didn't matter that while some were quite good, while other swere only eh. What mattered was instead of being locked into a single narrative, I was treated to nearly two dozen.

From my earliest days reading fantasy and science fiction, I've been a reader of short stories. The infamous boxes in my old attic hold scads of anthologies and collections, such as The Great Science Fiction Stories Volume 1, 1939, Flashing Swords!, Ancient, My Enemy, etc. My dad kept bringing new ones home all the time, and I kept reading them.

Unlike a novel, they only required a commitment of less than an hour. Even back in my youth, when many fantasy and sci-fi novels barely broke 200 pages, it took me a couple of days to finish them. I could sneak another story in between finishing homework and going to bed.

Some great ideas can't support a great, big story. Twenty or thirty pages, though, are perfect. Henry Kuttner's "Mimsy Were the Borogoves" is a perfect story. Same with Cyril Kornbluth's "The Little Black Bag." Would either benefit from being expanded to novel length? More importantly, could either bear the weight of more words? "The Cold Equations" exists solely to make a specific point. Godwin didn't need to take time detailing the sickness killing the colonists, or even the nature of the colonists itself.

It's also "easier" to maintain a single mood or theme over only thirty pages than several hundred. Glen Cook's "Filed Teeth," and Karl Edward Wagner's "Lynortis Reprise" are doom-heralding bolts of S&S. Steven Erikson's Gardens of the Moon has moments like them, but then surrounds them with hundreds of pages of side plots and world-building. In and of themselves, those things aren't bad. When I want fast or scary, though, they're roadblocks to the next sequence.

This isn't to denigrate novels or even lengthy series. My copy of R. Scott Bakker's The Great Ordeal should be waiting for me when I get home from work today. The thing is, by the time I finish that, I'll probably have read at a dozen or more stories, each one unique and standalone.

The last thing I want to say about short stories, is they expose me to tons of new writers. I only knew a handful of the writers I reviewed for the Summer Roundup. Now, I have a stack of new names to look for in the future. Even if you're not a big fan of shorts, they give you a test drive of an author's work before wading into some great big novel. For me, Adrian Tchaikovsky springs to mind.  If I pick up his novels, it'll be because I really liked a story of his in Grimdark Magazine. It's the reason I've read books by James Enge and Howard Andrew Jones: I read and dug their short stories.

Short stories used to be the lifeblood of fantasy and science fiction. It was on the pages of Weird Tales and Astounding that the genres as we know them were birthed and matured. Swords & sorcery in particular, flourished and, still, works best as short stories. My experience with novel-length S&S is that the slow bits (you know, the stuff that gives novels their weight and depth), detract from what I want. What I want is rousing action, exotic locations, and dark atmosphere and horror. The Hour of the Dragon is alright, but for me, it doesn't measure up to "Red Nails" or "Queen of the Black Coast." Same thing with Kane. Bloodstone is not equivalent to "Reflections for the Winter of My Soul." The stories are tighter and more dynamic, which is what I want from heroic fantasy.

If you only read big, thick books you can "lose yourself in," don't let that dissuade you from checking out short stories at Heroic Fantasy Quarterly of Swords and Sorcery Magazine. Give them a chance and you will be treated to high and low adventure, trips to a host of different worlds, and tales of derring-do by a wide variety of heroes, rogues, and villains. Check out the MAGAZINES list over to the right of this article for a list of others, including several science fiction ones as well.

There must be something in the air, as, while I started this, Jeffro over at the Castalia House blog posted about his love of short stories. Just the day before, Alex wrote one about writing them. Alongside the old hands (HFQ, SSM, etc.) and all the new and recent magazines (Grimdark, Cirsova, Skelos, etc.), there are lots of venues with diverse attitudes about heroic fantasy and related genres for you to choose from, so dive on in.

Last Year and This Year

This past year was a haphazard one here at Swords & Sorcery: A Blog. First I tried to review all of Chaosium's Cthluhu Mythos anthologies, but Lin Carter killed that for me. Really, it was just too much of too much of the same stuff over and over again. To get to the really good stories I had to wade through lots of meh, to lousy, to hair-torn-out-at-the-roots bad stories. So after only a few volumes that whole business crashed and burned.

Then, in reaction to reading nothing but fantasy and being driven nuts by the state of the nation and the world, I turned to the Long 19th Century Project. While it crashed and burned as well, I will still go back to it. 

The rise of Western Imperialism and its attendant wars is one of the most compelling and interesting periods of world history. The great powers of today, save China, were forged into their modern versions during this era: industrialized America and Japan, Germany and Italy both united, Russia's completion of its southward and westward expansion, England and France chopping up Africa. 

My problem was I went overboard, trying to cram a vast stack of of books into my brain too quickly. I will definitely return to this in the coming year, just not with as concentrated attention, probably no more than a book or two at a time, but I will return.

Finally, there was, and still is, EPIC. It's going to be around at least until I finish the several series I've already started reviewing: First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, Riddle-Master of Hed, and Fionavar. I need to read the next Kencyrath book from P.C. Hodgell, To Ride A Rathorn. Heck, I might even throw another Shanarra book in just for the heck of it. If I can think of anymore good stand-alones like Red Moon and Black Mountain I read/review them as well.

Then there are the reviews I've been asked to do (or will be shortly). The next Charles Saunders book should show up soon (oh, yeah!), a Gonji collection. Some other things I don't even know what they are yet.

And, as I've been doing for several years now, my short story reviews. I really don't read much new fantasy except in bite-size form, which suits me just fine. I get to read a wider array of authors, styles, and encounter dozens more ideas in a stack of doorstoppers. 

I do read a few books, mostly by people I know now, but very little of the popular stuff the kids are digging. With their terrible photo-realistic covers and their monstrous thickness and endless sequels, they just don't catch my eye. I need to read from people whose taste run similar to mine that a new book's good for me to chance it. I'm turning fifty this year, so I'm allowed to be crotchety.

And, of course, other posts about things that catch my fancy. Genre related things just not necessarily about a specific book or story, though they could be. You know, whatever.

I hope nobody got too bored or frustrated with my rapidly changing interests here during the last year. I like to believe I'm providing decent value (or amusement) for your dollar. I hope everyone sticks with me for the next twelve months. I don't know what it'll really bring, but I'm still having fun here and at Black Gate, so I with any luck that'll be apparent in what I write. Here's hoping, and a Happy New Year to everybody!

Chaosium's Mythos Fiction

   Way back in October 1993, Chaosium, publisher of the Call of Cthulhu RPG, started publishing what was to become a long line of short story anthologies centered around various elements of Lovecraft's fiction. From the very first book, The Hastur Cycle, edited by Robert M. Price, it was clear this was going to be an intriguing series. Not only was it going to include Lovercraft's own stories and those of authors inspired by him, it was also going to include other writers who had served as influences on him. This meant Bierce, Dunsanay, Machen and Chambers were going to get a chance to be read alongside the Lovercraft stories they helped inspire.

   I've managed to get my hands on the most of the series. I bought most of them in the  NYC Compleat Strategist as they were published. They looked more like game supplements than fiction anthologies and were stacked on the shelf right next to the CoC rules and supplements. Later ones I picked up via Amazon. 

In certain cases I didn't pick up second editions (The Book of Eibon) when they became available, while in others I did (The Hastur Cycle, and Encyclopedia Cthulhiana). I only bought the new editions when they had something extra to offer. The Hastur Cycle wasn't able to get the rights to Joseph Payne Brennan's "The Feaster from Afar" the first time around.

Maybe the book collecting gods think that's sacrilegious but I've always been more interested in the contents of a book than the cover. The Tindalos Cycle, published not by Chaosium but by Hippocampus Press, I'm only finally getting while typing this. I also never bought The Klarkash-Ton Cycle: Clark Ashton Smith's Cthulhu Mythos Fiction as I already owned the magnificent Night Shade Books omnibuses and I can't justify the replication. Again, those book collecting gods must be looking to toss a lightning bolt or two my way.

 It's an amazing series. Price is one of the leading authorities on HPL's fiction and weird fiction in general. He's not the sole editor of the series but he seems to have been the driving force behind it. He brings a fan's love of the stories and some often pretty serious literary theorizing to his essays in each collection that lacks (mostly) the often arrogant style of S. T. Joshi, the other great HPL authority. I sometimes think Joshi dislikes pulp fiction and want to elevate HPL above his origins while Price seems to revel in the good, pulpiness of many of the original Mythos stories. That said, the volumes of Robert W. Chambers and Arthur Machen's fiction are edited by Joshi.

   The stories, mostly reprints, are a great amount to one the greatest surveys of Mythos fiction. Stories by Chambers are contained in the same volume as ones by Karl Edward Wagner, Richard Lupoff, Lin Carter, and Lovecraft himself. Several of the volumes are reprints of earlier significant volumes of Mythos stories. If you want to see how this sub-genre of weird fiction was born and evolved over the decades this is one of the greatest ways to do it. 

1. The Hastur Cycle, ed. Robert M. Price

2. Mysteries of the Worm by Robert Bloch

3. Cthulhu's Heirs, ed. Thomas M. K. Stratman

4. The Shub-Niggurath Cycle: Tales of the Black Goat With a Thousand Young, ed. Robert M. Price

5. Encylopedia Cthulhiana by Daniel Harms

6. The Azathoth Cycle: Tales of the Blind Idiot God, ed. Robert M. Price

7. The Book of Iod by Henry Kuttner

8. Made in Goatswood: New Tales of Horror in the Severn Valley, ed.  Scott David Aniolowski

9. The Dunwich Cycle: Where the Old Gods Wait, ed. Robert M. Price

10. The Disciples of Cthulhu: 2nd Revised Edition, ed. Ed Berglund

11. The Cthulhu Cycle: Thirteen Tentacles of Terror, ed. Robert M. Price

12. The Necronomicon: Selected Stories and Essays Concerning the Blasphemous Tome of the Mad Arab, ed. Robert M. Price

13. The Xothic Legend Cycle: The Complete Mythos Fiction of Lin Carter, ed. Robert M. Price

14. The Nyarlathotep Cycle: The God of a Thousand Forms, ed. Robert M. Price

15. Singer of Strange Songs: A Celebration of Brian Lumley, ed. Scott  David Aniolowski

16. The Scroll of Thoth: Tales of Simon Magus and the Great Old Ones by Richard L. Tierney

17. The Complete Pegāna: All the Tales Pertaining to the Fabulous Realm of Pegāna, ed. S. T. Joshi

18. The Innsmouth Cycle: The Taint of the Deep Ones, ed. Robert M. Price

19. The Ithaqua Cycle: The Wind-Walker of the Icy Wastes, ed. Robert M. Price

20. The Antarktos Cycle, ed. Robert M. Price

21. Tales Out of Innsmouth: New Tales of the Children of Dagon, ed. Robert M. Price

22. The Book of Dzyan by Madame Blavatsky

23. The Yellow Sign and Other Tales: The Complete Weird Tales of         Robert W. Chambers, ed. S. T. Joshi

24. The Three Impostors and Other Stories: Machen 1, ed. S. T. Joshi

25. Song of Cthulhu: Tales of the Spheres Beyond Sound, ed. Stephen       Mark Rainey

26. Nameless Cults: The Cthulhu Mythos Fiction of Robert E. Howard, ed. Robert M. Price

27. The Book of Eibon, ed. Robert M. Price

28. The Disciples of Cthulhu II, ed. Ed Berglund

29. The White People and Other Stories: Machen 2, ed. S. T. Joshi

30. The Terror and Other Stories: Machen 3, ed. S. T. Joshi

31. The Tsathoggua Cycle: Terror Tales of the Toad God, ed. Robert M. Price

32. The Yith Cycle: Lovecraftian Tales of the Great Race and Time Travel, ed. Robert M. Price

33. The Tindalos Cycle ed. Robert M. Price
34. The Klarkash-Ton Cycle: Clark Ashton Smith's Cthulhu Mythos Fiction

Those are the books I have and the ones I consider the real series started all those years ago with The Hastur Cycle. Chaosium published a few novels under the series banner but I've dismissed them. They don't serve as part of the massive survey of Mythos short fiction. All are otiginal, contemporary works and haven't had any time to play in the development of this massive body of communal work that goes back over eighty years.

There are also a few anthologies that have been produced without the guiding hands of Robert Price. They also don't look as good as the ones he oversaw. For both those reasons I haven't bothered buying them.

Keith West's review of Lin Carter's The Spawn of Cthulhu got me thinking about "The Whisperer in the Darkness", one of my favorite HPL stories. That in turn got me thinking about this series. It's on the top shelf so I don't pull any of its volumes down that often. Considering the time and effort I spent acquiring the books that seemed a little sad. 

So I'm going to start rereading them and reviewing them. I'd love to read one a week but I know that's not going to happen. I'm too slack and I don't want to fall behind in my other reviewing plans and obligations.

I'm also not sure if I'll review all of them. Some, like The Book of Eibon and The Book of Dzyan are really collections of "esoteric wisdom", explicitly fictional in the first and purportedly true but obviously nonsense in the second. I'm probably not going to do more than skim them. I've already read and reviewed Richard Tierney's The Scroll of Thoth several years ago (didn't like it), so I'm not going to do it again.

However this works out, it's going to be a fun project and I hope folks find it interesting. 

Back at Black Gate

So my vacation from Black Gate ended this morning with my monthly roundup of short stories. Swords and Sorcery Magazine continues to be a decent site. Not many surprises but not many clunkers either. Heroic Fantasy Quarterly remains my favorite short fiction site. Sean P. Robson's "Tomb Robber's Tale" is a nice and gruesome. I also really liked Liz Colter's "A Breath of Darkness,"enough that I'm curious about her other stories.

I have a lot of reading to do these days. I'm reading Sabatini's Captain Blood books and The Queen's Necklace by Teresa Edgerton, among several others for review.  For myself I'm rereading Charles Willeford's Hoke Moseley books. I want to read Laird Barron's The Croning and a book of Joe Lansdale short stories.  I love reading this stuff but it's almost starting to feel like a real job. Oh, well, it could be worse. No one's forcing me to do this and I could be stuck reading contemporary literary fiction.

I haven't been listening to much music lately but I did see a great show this past weekend. The Buzzcocks played Webster Hall and they were electrifying. I've seen great shows by them in the past but there was something extra about this show. Maybe now that Steve Diggle and Pete Shelley are pushing sixty they feel the need to remind people just how good they are.

Beautiful Covers of a Series I've Never Read

First, I just reviewed short stories published in June over at Black Gate. Some alright stuff, but I really dug Stephen Case's "The Unborn God" from Beneath Ceaseless Skies #150. It's got a single moment of really fun inventiveness that made me exclaim out loud. Really, it did. Any author who do that to me is worth paying attention to. 

Next - Derek Kunsken posted an article at Black Gate about his love for the Deryni Chronicles of Katherine Kurtz and TSR's Dragon Magazine. My dad loved those books, or at least read all the ones published before 2001. For some reason I've never even picked them up.

I have most of them. I still keep them on my book shelf in fact (admittedly, stacked in the back). I've always loved the early covers by Bob Pepper and Alan Mardon. Later covers were done by Darrell Sweet. As much as I love him they don't compare. But here, take a look at the various covers for the first trilogy, The Chronicles of the Deryni.

While I'm still listening to Dream Theater on my bike rides, at home and in the truck I'm listening to the Godfathers. I read once that Oasis was the first serious loud guitar band to hit the UK after punk's heyday in the late seventies. There's all sorts of reasons that's a load of bunk, but the very existence of the Godfathers is enough to trash the assertion.

On four aggressively loud albums in the late eighties and early nineties, the first three produced by the great Vic Maile, the Godfathers produced some of the best rock 'n' roll of the time. Then they slipped away for sometime before finally resurfacing again a few years ago. 

I saw them back in 1989 for the More Songs About Love & Hate tour. They were one of the most forceful bands I've ever seen. Naked Raygun, whom I a big fan of, opened for them and were really solid. The Godfathers blew them away. A few folks tried to get a pit going for Raygun but it didn't amount to much. When the Godfathers hit the stage in their suits, things went wild and bodies went flying. I remember singer Peter Coyne sitting on the stage at one point just watching over the chaos unfolding on the floor. An amazing night of what I still want most from rock 'n' roll; chaos, urgency, noise and the hint that things might go terribly wrong.

I'm also listening to another great band from the same time, The Screaming Blue Messiahs. While mostly known for their goofy novelty track "I Wanna Be a Flintstone" from the Vic Maile produced Bikini Red, these guys were way more than that. Singer/guitarist Bill Carter laid down some blistering, psychotic sounds on all three of their albums. I read on wikipedia that he'd play with his fingers and use the thickest strings possible to keep from shredding his fingertips too much. Still, blood would be shed when he played. My buddy saw them open for the Cramps for which I will always be jealous. When they broke up in 1990, Bill Carter seemed to fall off the face of the earth. Which is a shame.

Go Read the Stories!

Eel Witch by Jon Hodgson

My monthly review of the last month's short stories just went up at Black Gate. Not a bad batch of stories and well worth a reader's time. I particularly liked "Mouth of the Jaguar" by Evan Dicken and "The Challenger's Garland" by Schuyler Hernstrom, both in Heroic Fantasy Quarterly #20.

The other day, the illustrious Janet Morris asked something I found interesting: "Here's a question for you, s&s fans and writers. Does your hero need a quest, or can he be motivated by long-standing goal, or revenge, or something as simple as his given word?"

My answer was quests are fine, but how many of REH's heroes adventures just happen when they're traveling from Point A to Point B? Like in real life, things just happen. Sometimes an overheard word leads them to a treasure, other times a fight leaves them on the wrong side of the law. The thing is, the heroes can be motivated by any variety of things.

It's one of the reasons I like short stories best when it comes to heroic fiction. Characters aren't locked into participating in some epic, endless plot. They maintain a bit of freewill in choosing what they'll do with their lives. 

I think of S&S characters as the blue collar heroes of fantasy. They want to get through the day, make some money and relax. It's not that they're not ambitious, they just don't have the breaks in life (inherited magic item, secret genetic inheritance making them the Chosen One, etc.) that set them up to be responsible for the world's destiny. I want to see S&S characters facing off against an uncaring and unfair world - and winning - not finding the lost Foofrah, the only thing that can stop the Evil Omni-Lord. A good S&S hero is too sensible to actively look to get caught up in that sort of dangerous nonsense.

S&S and long, questy sort of stories can work. Just look at Charles Saunders' Imaro or Ted Rypel's Gonji for proof. Still, I think those are exceptions. As good as Hour of the Dragon is, I'd rather reread "Beyond the Black River" or "Red Nails." Same with Karl Edward Wagner. The stories in Night Winds and Death Angel's Shadow are much better than the novels Bloodstone or Darkness Weaves. 

Next week I'm going to be reviewing Michael Chabon's Gentlemen of the Road. Even if McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales wasn't that good I really like Chabon's foreword calling for literary fictioneers to return to plot and genre. I've read much of his non-fiction but the only fiction so far is his Sherlock Holmes pastiche, The Final Problem. Not a groundbreaking book but a decent, heartfelt homage to the great detective.

I was inspired to finally crack the cover of Gentlemen because I'm still working my way slowly through Harold Lamb's Swords from the West. I'm hoping the Chabon book will be a nice companion piece to Lamb's. Here's hoping!

Short Story Reviews and Mail Bag

My monthly survey of new short fiction is over at Black Gate as of today. As always, go read the magazines, drive up their traffic and let them know what you think. Got to keep whatever markets for short stories pumping.

Damn, all you bloggers, reviewers, and Amazon recommenders out there! I just keep buying stuff that I have no idea when I'll get around to actually reading. At least some of these are short story collections so I can dip into them for a tale or two before and move on to something else.

This one I bought because of Sue Granquist's article on Black Gate about the 2013 Stoker nominees. I read about each book and thought this sounded good. I've actually read it already and I liked its bloody, pulpy creepiness.

Another horror book. Keith's West review of the new novel in the series intrigued me, so I bought the original novel (with bonus stories attached).

For $2.99 apiece, Subterranean's made a whole bunch of Brian Lumley short fiction available in e-book form. I was only hooked on him when I picked up Singer of Strange Songs, the Lumley-inspired volume in the Chaosium Mythos Fiction series. Later I picked up the his great anthology, The Horror at Oakdeene and Others. I think simply because he's written so many huge books he gets short shrift sometimes from a critical perspective, but I stand by him and especially his short stories as being real solid spook stories.

One of the problems with going on a Brian Lumley binge is you will never run out of books to buy. How many Necroscope books are there actually? I've read a few of these S&S stories and figured, why not?

Finally, in the wake of reading the excellent Echoes of the Goddess and a solid recommendation from John Fultz, I got this one. Still astonished at my lack of significant contact with his work until last year. Got to love that cover just reeking of peyote and psilocybin.