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A review by megapolisomancy
The Year's Best Horror Stories: Series I by David Riley, Brian Lumley, Robert McNear, Celia Fremlin, Ralph Norton, Robert Bloch, Ramsey Campbell, Richard Matheson, Kit Reed, Richard Davis, Elizabeth Fancett, Terri E. Pinckard, Eddy C. Bertin, E.C. Tubb, Peter Oldale
2.0
The first ever collection (as far as I can find) of the "year's" "best" "horror" short stories. They're all short stories, but it's a stretch to call them all horror, they were actually published over a three year stretch (1968-1971), and they're certainly not the best of anything. "A witches' brew of S-F grue" the cover copy promises:
Double Whammy • (1970) • Robert Bloch
A carny barker on the early stages of a downward spiral into alcoholism finds himself unnerved by the geek he works with, a pathetic drunk whose fate hits a little too close to home. He’s even more frightened of the witchy grandmother of his inappropriately-young girlfriend, particularly after the teenager gets knocked up. Rod pressures her into a back-alley abortion, it kills her, and he ends up with the titular curse from the grandmother. What could be worse than being a drunken carnival geek? Being the chicken whose head the geek bites off. Standard Bloch – relatively solid construction and prose in service of an idea that doesn’t speak to me at all, concerned more than anything else with a quick plot building toward a predictable climax. Has more than its fair share of casual racism and sexism. I rarely enjoy horror stories predicated on making the reader hate the protagonist and anticipate terrible things happening to them.
The Sister City • (1969) • Brian Lumley
Cthulhu Mythos pastiche – the young Robert Krug, orphaned by the Blitz, leaves London after recuperating to wander the globe in pursuit of eldritch lost cities. Krug finds his body increasingly physically strange and his social life increasingly alienated as he travels searching for lost cities both real and imagined. He figures out eventually that he belongs to a race of lizard people (not the Deep Ones, exactly, but similar) worshiped as gods in ancient Ib (of HPL’s “The Doom That Came to Sarnath”) who had relocated beneath the moors of Northeast England. Bokrug was the chief lizard god and we get a painfully explicit Robert Krug = Bokrug explanation. The story is presented as a manuscript appended to a letter sent by Krug to the “North-East Coal Board” in order to stop a proposal of theirs to “set off underground explosions in the hope of creating pockets of gas to be tapped as part of the country’s natural resources” – which would, of course, destroy the lizard people and their servitors secreted away under the Earth. The letter is followed by a police report of a “funny man” committing suicide by drowning, and then an exchange of notes between officers investigating the suicide and a mysterious baby left in a Church (Krug having mentioned earlier that his race’s children are left as foundlings to be raised by humans until “the Change” begins to overtake them). The inverse of the Bloch – absolutely ham-handed prose and a disastrous structure, but not a totally awful conceit. Lumley’s absolutely breathless enthusiasm for the Mythos and for a misfit finding a place in the world (such an un-Lovecraftian theme for an utterly Lovecraft-derived story) is infectious. Apparently originally 14k words cut down to 4k for publication, and it reads that way, more of an outline of a story than a coherent story itself. Later (re-)expanded into a short novel called Beneath the Moors, which I can’t claim to be dying to read.
When Morning Comes • (1969) • Elizabeth Fancett
In a day-after-tomorrow dystopia, the Right Honourable Sir William Wellborn (an MP from a very illustrious family) is pushing abortions for all. He’s also hearing voices ("Herod. Herod. Herod.") and having visions of a Grey Man haunting the “Common House of Law Makers” and, surprise, the voices are aborted fetuses, and the Grey Man is the doctor who aborted Sir William Wellborn because double surprise, there’s an utterly nonsensical backstory about him having been aborted because his mother knew he was going to be born with a deformed foot. The fetus ghosts chant “One of us! One of us! One of us!” at him and he dies and reverts back to a decades-old aborted fetus. One of the worst stories I’ve ever read; a total failure on every level, from the nonsensical plot to the laughable prose to the reprehensible ideological underpinnings of the whole thing.
Prey • (1969) • Richard Matheson
A woman tries and fails to cancel plans with her awful, overbearing mother to spend time with her boyfriend on his birthday. Things take a turn when the Zuni fetish doll ("He Who Kills") she got him for his birthday comes to life and tries to kill her. Not the most interesting story in the world, but Matheson does do a masterful job of continually ratcheting up the tension and using short, declarative sentences to drive the action forward. Not a lot to say about this one that hasn't already been said.
Winter • (1969) • Kit Reed
A beautifully stylized portrait of rural isolation and aging and womanhood, as two spinster sisters take in a young man who appears on their farm after, he claims, going AWOL from the marines. They're both fixated on him ("It was like being young, having him around") and compete for his affection by giving him valuable gifts and food they can't afford to go without. He's a parasite, of course, but also becomes a signifier for everything they've ever wanted and never had and their frustrations with each other and the world at large. Structurally it's a Bloch-ian affair that builds to a horrific final sentence, but unlike his stories that exist only to justify that last line, this was an exceptionally deep and thoughtful story.
Lucifer • (1969) • E. C. Tubb
Groundhog Day, but evil - opens discussing the Special People, "dilettantes of the Intergalactic Set," who have decided on a lark to spend time on Earth when one of them is killed in a freak accident. Turns out they have nothing to do with the story and that was just a goofy setup to get the mortician's assistant, a sadist with a bum foot, one of their rings, which lets him jump 57 seconds back in the past at will. What does he use this power for? Mostly assaulting women and amassing a gambling fortune. Eventually he's on a trans-Atlantic flight that crashes, trapping him in an endless loop of resetting time as he falls to the sea. Just to confuse/complicate things, he has an inexplicable vision of the crash just before it happens. A mean-spirited little story.
I Wonder What He Wanted • (1971) •Eddy C. Bertin
Diary fragments from a teacher who rented a summer house she shouldn't have. The listless summer heat is captured well, as are the initial intimations of an unfriendly presence (the previous tenant, who just so happened to be a horror writer), shading into possession and blurred identities. Much is made of her seemingly-endless waiting for her fiance (the titular he) to join her, but work keeps detaining him. Nothing earth-shattering, but a solid enough story (which makes it one of the stand-outs here) that could have used some fleshing out.
Problem Child • (1970) • Peter Oldale
A telekinetic baby causes problems for her parents, but mostly her mother, because her father spoils her and her pediatrician immediately assumes the mother is lying and/or suffering some sort of mental illness. The mother is blamed after the baby almost burns the house down and is institutionalized. As the father is carrying the baby away from the asylum, she pulls her mother through a second-story window to her, killing them both (mother and baby, that is, the father is fine). An author might not have been able to get away with that ending then, but otherwise this very much feels like a story from the 1940s or '50s.
The Scar • (1969) • Ramsey Campbell
A man with an obnoxious brother-in-law (in Brichester, of course) also turns out to have an even more bothersome doppelganger. Nice quickly-sketched characters, thematic checks on class anxieties and crime, and creepy elements. A clear precursor to his oft-reprinted "The Brood" (and a lot of his other post-HPL-pastiche work, although it's less oblique than he would eventually become). A standout, of course.
Warp • (1968) • Ralph Norton
Charges out of the gate with "I did not murder Paul Ledderman. I'm not quite sure what I did to him, but it was not murder." A man visits an old friend in his "self-designed servo-house" where he's been in total seclusion for three years. Turns out he's invented some sort of shaft that reverses anything dropped down it and returns it through the ceiling above. And if you drop the same thing down again it reverses along a different axis. "What happens the third time?" "It doesn't come back." The inventor has passed himself through once already (as you do) and now lured the protagonist here out of sheer loneliness - he's tethered to the device because he has to pass all of his food through it (some sort of mumbo jumbo about sugars being reversed, the weakest aspect of the story). Of course the protagonist, resisting being tossed into the thing, knocks the scientist in, to a horrific end. A nice updating of haunted house tropes by means of science fiction, strong foreshadowing/buildup, and a truly nightmarish ending - Norton appears to have published just a handful of stories and a single novel (as Ralph Norton Noyes), which is a shame, unless this was a real outlier.
The Hate • (1971) • Terri E. Pinckard
Opens reflecting Professor Guildea, which I will never stop beating the drum about: "Nadine first felt the cold touch of the thing creeping, pawing at her as a dog paws at a bone." and heads into Shirley Jackson territory, making it even more up my alley, before utterly crashing and burning. "Pawing... as a dog paws" should have been my first warning, I guess. It's Nadine and Jeff's first anniversary, they're having a party, and this increasingly-violent invisible poltergeist ("the Hate") starts harassing her as she tries to figure out who could possibly be directing such malice her way. Echoes "Prey" (and SJ) in the buildup of violence in the usual sites of banal domesticity, until finally she and her husband are sharing glasses of champagne in front of their friends and her in-laws - only, "it wasn't a love cup--it was a Hate cup" and as she chokes to death she hears mocking laughter and a voice saying "Now my son is mine again!" Please avoid.
A Quiet Game • (1970) • Celia Fremlin
Hilda's apartment neighbors are being driven mad by her noisy young twins. Mad, mad, mad, they say! Desperate, she convinces the twins to pretend to fly to "Inkoo Land" on a magic carpet (ie their rug), and that works and quiets them down, until it doesn't, because they're small children, and then, can you believe it, it's Hilda who goes mad, and tries to fly the magic carpet out the window herself, before being stopped by one of the neighbors. I wouldn't have called this horror, and its anti-modern, anti-urban screeds are tiresome, but at least it wasn't "The Hate."
After Nightfall • (1970) • David A. Riley
Before reading I was all set to rant about this one because of Riley's noxious political beliefs but this isn't a vile fascist piece, but one so nondescript it isn't even worth getting worked up over. An anthropologist visits a backwoods town, is confused by the local "degenerates" setting bowls of meat out at night before locking their strangely stout doors and then gets eaten by ghouls when he doesn't follow their example. Blah blah blah.
Death's Door • (1969) • Robert McNear
A WI reporter goes to an a small island town to report on a basketball game. It's located on the other side of the strait called "Porte des Morts, or Death's Door," which has a long history of drownings and nefarious goings-on. While crossing on the ferry he sees an old Model A drive by on the ice and, wouldn't you know it, it turns out the last championship team they had was in 1947 and they all drowned on their way to the game. The story muddles along repetitiously and with absolutely atrocious dialogue before revealing that actually the team was tricked into the fatal drive by their coach for all assaulting his daughter. This reveal is totally incongruous with the goofy, quippy manner of the rest of the story.
Double Whammy • (1970) • Robert Bloch
A carny barker on the early stages of a downward spiral into alcoholism finds himself unnerved by the geek he works with, a pathetic drunk whose fate hits a little too close to home. He’s even more frightened of the witchy grandmother of his inappropriately-young girlfriend, particularly after the teenager gets knocked up. Rod pressures her into a back-alley abortion, it kills her, and he ends up with the titular curse from the grandmother. What could be worse than being a drunken carnival geek? Being the chicken whose head the geek bites off. Standard Bloch – relatively solid construction and prose in service of an idea that doesn’t speak to me at all, concerned more than anything else with a quick plot building toward a predictable climax. Has more than its fair share of casual racism and sexism. I rarely enjoy horror stories predicated on making the reader hate the protagonist and anticipate terrible things happening to them.
The Sister City • (1969) • Brian Lumley
Cthulhu Mythos pastiche – the young Robert Krug, orphaned by the Blitz, leaves London after recuperating to wander the globe in pursuit of eldritch lost cities. Krug finds his body increasingly physically strange and his social life increasingly alienated as he travels searching for lost cities both real and imagined. He figures out eventually that he belongs to a race of lizard people (not the Deep Ones, exactly, but similar) worshiped as gods in ancient Ib (of HPL’s “The Doom That Came to Sarnath”) who had relocated beneath the moors of Northeast England. Bokrug was the chief lizard god and we get a painfully explicit Robert Krug = Bokrug explanation. The story is presented as a manuscript appended to a letter sent by Krug to the “North-East Coal Board” in order to stop a proposal of theirs to “set off underground explosions in the hope of creating pockets of gas to be tapped as part of the country’s natural resources” – which would, of course, destroy the lizard people and their servitors secreted away under the Earth. The letter is followed by a police report of a “funny man” committing suicide by drowning, and then an exchange of notes between officers investigating the suicide and a mysterious baby left in a Church (Krug having mentioned earlier that his race’s children are left as foundlings to be raised by humans until “the Change” begins to overtake them). The inverse of the Bloch – absolutely ham-handed prose and a disastrous structure, but not a totally awful conceit. Lumley’s absolutely breathless enthusiasm for the Mythos and for a misfit finding a place in the world (such an un-Lovecraftian theme for an utterly Lovecraft-derived story) is infectious. Apparently originally 14k words cut down to 4k for publication, and it reads that way, more of an outline of a story than a coherent story itself. Later (re-)expanded into a short novel called Beneath the Moors, which I can’t claim to be dying to read.
When Morning Comes • (1969) • Elizabeth Fancett
In a day-after-tomorrow dystopia, the Right Honourable Sir William Wellborn (an MP from a very illustrious family) is pushing abortions for all. He’s also hearing voices ("Herod. Herod. Herod.") and having visions of a Grey Man haunting the “Common House of Law Makers” and, surprise, the voices are aborted fetuses, and the Grey Man is the doctor who aborted Sir William Wellborn because double surprise, there’s an utterly nonsensical backstory about him having been aborted because his mother knew he was going to be born with a deformed foot. The fetus ghosts chant “One of us! One of us! One of us!” at him and he dies and reverts back to a decades-old aborted fetus. One of the worst stories I’ve ever read; a total failure on every level, from the nonsensical plot to the laughable prose to the reprehensible ideological underpinnings of the whole thing.
Prey • (1969) • Richard Matheson
A woman tries and fails to cancel plans with her awful, overbearing mother to spend time with her boyfriend on his birthday. Things take a turn when the Zuni fetish doll ("He Who Kills") she got him for his birthday comes to life and tries to kill her. Not the most interesting story in the world, but Matheson does do a masterful job of continually ratcheting up the tension and using short, declarative sentences to drive the action forward. Not a lot to say about this one that hasn't already been said.
Winter • (1969) • Kit Reed
A beautifully stylized portrait of rural isolation and aging and womanhood, as two spinster sisters take in a young man who appears on their farm after, he claims, going AWOL from the marines. They're both fixated on him ("It was like being young, having him around") and compete for his affection by giving him valuable gifts and food they can't afford to go without. He's a parasite, of course, but also becomes a signifier for everything they've ever wanted and never had and their frustrations with each other and the world at large. Structurally it's a Bloch-ian affair that builds to a horrific final sentence, but unlike his stories that exist only to justify that last line, this was an exceptionally deep and thoughtful story.
Lucifer • (1969) • E. C. Tubb
Groundhog Day, but evil - opens discussing the Special People, "dilettantes of the Intergalactic Set," who have decided on a lark to spend time on Earth when one of them is killed in a freak accident. Turns out they have nothing to do with the story and that was just a goofy setup to get the mortician's assistant, a sadist with a bum foot, one of their rings, which lets him jump 57 seconds back in the past at will. What does he use this power for? Mostly assaulting women and amassing a gambling fortune. Eventually he's on a trans-Atlantic flight that crashes, trapping him in an endless loop of resetting time as he falls to the sea. Just to confuse/complicate things, he has an inexplicable vision of the crash just before it happens. A mean-spirited little story.
I Wonder What He Wanted • (1971) •Eddy C. Bertin
Diary fragments from a teacher who rented a summer house she shouldn't have. The listless summer heat is captured well, as are the initial intimations of an unfriendly presence (the previous tenant, who just so happened to be a horror writer), shading into possession and blurred identities. Much is made of her seemingly-endless waiting for her fiance (the titular he) to join her, but work keeps detaining him. Nothing earth-shattering, but a solid enough story (which makes it one of the stand-outs here) that could have used some fleshing out.
Problem Child • (1970) • Peter Oldale
A telekinetic baby causes problems for her parents, but mostly her mother, because her father spoils her and her pediatrician immediately assumes the mother is lying and/or suffering some sort of mental illness. The mother is blamed after the baby almost burns the house down and is institutionalized. As the father is carrying the baby away from the asylum, she pulls her mother through a second-story window to her, killing them both (mother and baby, that is, the father is fine). An author might not have been able to get away with that ending then, but otherwise this very much feels like a story from the 1940s or '50s.
The Scar • (1969) • Ramsey Campbell
A man with an obnoxious brother-in-law (in Brichester, of course) also turns out to have an even more bothersome doppelganger. Nice quickly-sketched characters, thematic checks on class anxieties and crime, and creepy elements. A clear precursor to his oft-reprinted "The Brood" (and a lot of his other post-HPL-pastiche work, although it's less oblique than he would eventually become). A standout, of course.
Warp • (1968) • Ralph Norton
Charges out of the gate with "I did not murder Paul Ledderman. I'm not quite sure what I did to him, but it was not murder." A man visits an old friend in his "self-designed servo-house" where he's been in total seclusion for three years. Turns out he's invented some sort of shaft that reverses anything dropped down it and returns it through the ceiling above. And if you drop the same thing down again it reverses along a different axis. "What happens the third time?" "It doesn't come back." The inventor has passed himself through once already (as you do) and now lured the protagonist here out of sheer loneliness - he's tethered to the device because he has to pass all of his food through it (some sort of mumbo jumbo about sugars being reversed, the weakest aspect of the story). Of course the protagonist, resisting being tossed into the thing, knocks the scientist in, to a horrific end. A nice updating of haunted house tropes by means of science fiction, strong foreshadowing/buildup, and a truly nightmarish ending - Norton appears to have published just a handful of stories and a single novel (as Ralph Norton Noyes), which is a shame, unless this was a real outlier.
The Hate • (1971) • Terri E. Pinckard
Opens reflecting Professor Guildea, which I will never stop beating the drum about: "Nadine first felt the cold touch of the thing creeping, pawing at her as a dog paws at a bone." and heads into Shirley Jackson territory, making it even more up my alley, before utterly crashing and burning. "Pawing... as a dog paws" should have been my first warning, I guess. It's Nadine and Jeff's first anniversary, they're having a party, and this increasingly-violent invisible poltergeist ("the Hate") starts harassing her as she tries to figure out who could possibly be directing such malice her way. Echoes "Prey" (and SJ) in the buildup of violence in the usual sites of banal domesticity, until finally she and her husband are sharing glasses of champagne in front of their friends and her in-laws - only, "it wasn't a love cup--it was a Hate cup" and as she chokes to death she hears mocking laughter and a voice saying "Now my son is mine again!" Please avoid.
A Quiet Game • (1970) • Celia Fremlin
Hilda's apartment neighbors are being driven mad by her noisy young twins. Mad, mad, mad, they say! Desperate, she convinces the twins to pretend to fly to "Inkoo Land" on a magic carpet (ie their rug), and that works and quiets them down, until it doesn't, because they're small children, and then, can you believe it, it's Hilda who goes mad, and tries to fly the magic carpet out the window herself, before being stopped by one of the neighbors. I wouldn't have called this horror, and its anti-modern, anti-urban screeds are tiresome, but at least it wasn't "The Hate."
After Nightfall • (1970) • David A. Riley
Before reading I was all set to rant about this one because of Riley's noxious political beliefs but this isn't a vile fascist piece, but one so nondescript it isn't even worth getting worked up over. An anthropologist visits a backwoods town, is confused by the local "degenerates" setting bowls of meat out at night before locking their strangely stout doors and then gets eaten by ghouls when he doesn't follow their example. Blah blah blah.
Death's Door • (1969) • Robert McNear
A WI reporter goes to an a small island town to report on a basketball game. It's located on the other side of the strait called "Porte des Morts, or Death's Door," which has a long history of drownings and nefarious goings-on. While crossing on the ferry he sees an old Model A drive by on the ice and, wouldn't you know it, it turns out the last championship team they had was in 1947 and they all drowned on their way to the game. The story muddles along repetitiously and with absolutely atrocious dialogue before revealing that actually the team was tricked into the fatal drive by their coach for all assaulting his daughter. This reveal is totally incongruous with the goofy, quippy manner of the rest of the story.