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A review by modernzorker
The Year's Best Horror Stories, Series 1 by Richard Davis
3.0
After some recent dalliances with episodes of the old school Twilight Zone television program, I thought it would be fun to delve into the world of horror from back before I was born. Unfortunately, as I researched, I discovered that I was already well-acquainted with much of the more well-known tales and authors: William Peter Blatty, Shirley Jackson, Thomas Tryon, H.P. Lovecraft, Robert Bloch, and so on. Then I stumbled across just what I was looking for: an anthology series of horror-themed short stories collated not by subject matter but simply by year of publication: DAW's The Year's Best Horror Stories.
My curiosity was piqued for several reasons, chief among them being that DAW was known for being a sci-fi publisher. Rather than put me off, this inspired me, for I saw names like Richard Matheson and Brian Lumley on the cover, which (hopefully) meant I could look forward to horror in a more cerebral or psychological sense a-la Twilight Zone as opposed to the more in-your-face, serial-killer-with-a-machete sense. I dove in, and was pleased to discover that, for the most part, I was right.
* * * * *
Double Whammy by Robert Bloch
Bloch will forever be remembered for introducing Norman Bates to the world in Psycho, but Double Whammy introduces us to a down-on-his-luck carnival barker who entices guests to pay for a look at the sideshow freaks. While he's fine with most of the acts, the one which never fails to disturb him is the geek. The geek is an equally-down-on-his-luck alcoholic who caps off the sideshow by chewing the head off a live chicken and frolicking in the blood. Our barker can't imagine a fate worse than this to which a man could be reduced, and it's an image which haunts his dreams.
The carnival is presided over by an aged woman of gypsy ancestry, who, according to some other members of the carnival, has the power to curse others using the dreaded double whammy. All it takes is for her to catch her victim's reflection, and some awful fate will soon result. After a tragedy resulting from a tryst with the carnival owner's young daughter, our protagonist finds himself constantly looking over his shoulder, always on the lookout for the old woman who he fears somehow will learn he's to blame and come after him. The story's twist ending is telegraphed well in advance, but this one plays out like a competently-executed story of revenge commonly seen in the EC Comics of the day. Three out of five stars.
The Sister City by Brian Lumley
This one has Lovecraft written all over it--small surprise, considering Lumley originally published it in Arkham House's "Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos" in 1969. This pastiche to "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" takes the form of an epistolary story, where the tale is conveyed through the writings of others. A man realizes at a young age he is very different from his peers, and sequesters himself away from civilization after his parents are killed when the Germans bomb his childhood home.
Setting out into the world to learn about his bizarre ancestry, he travels across continents, under the ocean, and into long-forgotten ruins, putting together the pieces about who his parents were, where he came from, and why he is so different from other humans. Being familiar with Innsmouth, it was fairly obvious where this was going from the start, but the execution (especially the baffled notes of the police appended to the manuscript's end) is competent and well in keeping with the Lovecraftian spirit. Four stars out of five.
When Morning Comes by Elizabeth Fancett
A particularly heavy-handed and axe-grinding account of a British MP haunted by the spectres of aborted fetuses who died because of laws he's thrown his support behind over the years. The reason for his haunting is divulged early on, the man's a thoroughly unsympathetic character, you can see the ending coming a mile away, and Fancett's clearly unfamiliar with the concept of subtlety. As a polemic, it works fine. As a horror story, it's an eye-rolling incompetent failure even for the late 60's/early 70's, and I'm forced to wonder what got bumped from the anthology in order to make room for it. One star out of five.
Prey by Richard Matheson
If you saw the 1975 anthology film Trilogy of Terror, you're familiar with this story of a woman who buys a Zuni fetish doll infused with the spirit of a hunter named "He Who Kills". An accident removes the binding chains on the doll, and it animates and attacks the woman in her apartment. The twist at the end is pure Matheson, and if you needed a palette cleanser after the last story, you couldn't ask for a better one than this. Five out of five stars if you've never read it, but four out of five stars if you have.
Winter by Kit Reed
Two middle-aged sisters living in a winter-ravaged area of the countryside have stocked their larders and sharpened their tongues in preparation for the long season ahead of them. One day, however, they find a sickly young man who claims to be a soldier having deserted his regiment. He asks for help hiding him for a while, and the lonely women are only too happy to have a strapping young man join their company. Unfortunately for the sisters, the young man is a master manipulator who uses their naivety and weakness for bickering against them, allowing the women to buy his affection at increasingly exorbitant prices...until the women catch on to his game and start playing the player. By the time this happens, supplies are running low in the farmhouse, and there's not enough to sustain all three until the spring thaw, but it's surprising what lengths some people will go to in order to survive.
Not as Twilight Zone-ish in its execution, but still well done in its own way, Winter is a decent entry here, even if the ending is telegraphed. The sisters are delightfully catty towards one another, which makes for some humor in this otherwise-morbid tale. Three stars out of five.
Lucifer by E. C. Tubb
A mortician receives the corpse of a man who died under extremely bizarre circumstances, and is drawn to a particular ring worn by the deceased. He snaffles it from the corpse, and eventually figures out that it allows the wearer to travel back in time, but only in fifty-seven second increments. Naturally the mortician realizes that fifty-seven seconds allows one to get away with all sorts of mischief, but as you can expect from this type of story, there's a price to pay for meddling with forces beyond one's own comprehension.
This is a fantastic story with a beautifully Twilight Zone-esque twist which sees the mortician condemned to a hell of his own making. Tubb himself was a prolific author who produced hundreds of works under dozens of pseudonyms over the course of his life, everything from short stories and novellas to full-fledged sci-fi series and books based on other properties like Space: 1999. A top-notch tale which comes in, does what it needs, and exits without overstaying its welcome. Five stars!
Wonder What He Wanted by Eddy Bertin
A ghost story in the Shirley Jackson sense, Wonder What He Wanted sees a young woman renting a house which was once home to a reclusive horror author. The longer she stays in the house, the more she finds herself taken with the macabre and the art of storytelling. While the payoff is obvious long before the story's end, the atmosphere Bertin manages to work up is suitably spooky and menacing despite this shortcoming. Three out of five.
Problem Child by Peter Oldale
This is a gruesome little story about a young mother who is positive that her infant daughter possesses psychic powers. The only problem is they never seem to manifest when other people are around to witness them, leaving her husband to wonder if she isn't imagining things. While the wrap-up here comes extremely fast, being delivered on the final page, it's definitely one you won't see coming even if you know that bad things are going to happen. Four out of five.
The Scar by Ramsey Campbell
I'm a huge fan of Campbell's work, but this one just didn't click with me at all. As wonderfully atmospheric as Campbell's writing is, I found the story difficult to understand, and ultimately I wasn't able to work out what he was going for. I'll probably come back and give this one another go, but it seemed to peter off into a lackluster payoff considering how well he appeared to be setting everything up. Rod Serling did doppelgangers much better, much creepier, and much earlier in the 1960 episode of The Twilight Zone called "Mirror Image". Two stars.
Warp by Ralph Norton
After the let-down of The Scar, Ralph Norton's tale of a scientist who opens a door into a parallel dimension is most welcome. The story follows one of the few friends of said scientist who contacts his former colleague and invites him to dinner out of the blue. Once at the scientist's house, which looks more like a fortress than a simple home, the man reveals he's figured out how to bridge the gap between parallel realities. Dubbing it "the Loop", it's a gateway that accepts physical matter in one side, and spits out a reverse duplicate of that object on the other. He demonstrates with a glove, which goes in right-handed and floats out left-handed. As the story continues, we discover how far the scientist has gone with his experiment, and the horror of what happens to once-reversed things that make the trip through the Loop again is terrible than one could possibly imagine.
This is a fantastic story, one which I have brooded over for several days, and it just won't leave me alone. One of the best in the collection, and an easy five out of five.
The Hate by Terri Prickard
This story of a young woman harassed by a supernatural animosity she is powerless to control wants to be spooky, but comes off contrived. The answer to the question of what is causing the anger and hatred to manifest is unsatisfying, and ultimately the story just falls flat. There's a good idea in here, but it's looking for a more competent execution than what Prickard offers. More to the point, it's not scary, or even creepy, in the slightest. It's just odd. This one falls out of memory faster than any of the other pieces in the anthology. One star.
A Quiet Game by Celia Fremlin
Having been raised by a single mother, I'm particularly sympathetic to the protagonist of this story, who lives in a high-rise apartment building with her two young children and is surrounded by tenants who hate the noise made by the children when they play. As someone who has dealt with noisy neighbors, though, I'm also sympathetic to their desire to not be disturbed at all hours of the day by stomping feet, screaming, and pounding. The apparent solution to the problem comes when the mother purchases a large-sized plush carpet, which she places on the floor to stifle footfalls. The children instantly take to the carpet, and transform it into an imaginary transport to a make-believe land where they have all sorts of adventures between when mother calls them back to the real world for tea time or dinner. Unfortunately, even this game starts to lose its appeal after a while, and in her effort to bring back some of the magic, the hapless mother makes things worse for herself. This isn't a bad story, but it isn't frightening either. Much like "The Hate", I question why it appeared in this anthology. Two out of five stars.
After Nightfall by David Riley
Another Lovecraftian pastiche, this time about an anthropologist who visits a rural town which observes strange rituals after the sun goes down. After questioning the innkeeper and a few of the townsfolk about the heavy shutters and stout locks on their doors, but receiving only evasive answers, he decides his best course of action will be to stay up late and see what happens after dark. To say this is a terrible choice would be the understatement of the week. This is a very good tale up through the climax, but I'd love to read an expanded version which explained how everything came to be in the first place. This one needed to be about five pages longer. Four out of five stars.
Death's Door by Robert McNear
A Wisconsin-based sports reporter visits a nearby island where the local high school basketball team is playing a home game for the state championship title, something they haven't done in several decades. While on the ferry over to the island to meet the team and coach, the reporter sees a bizarre sight: an old-model car tooling across the ice, heading in the other direction, filled with a group of partying teenagers. When he asks the ferry captain about it, the man becomes brusque and abrasive, and has him removed from the bridge. The locals aren't interested in hearing about it either, with one exception: the man who captained the championship team back in the 1940's. He has a story to tell about the team and the tragedy which befell the group after their victory...but it's one the reporter will never be able to print.
Damn, what a phenomenal way to cap this anthology! "Death's Door" is atmospheric, mysterious, and full of everything that makes for a spooky tale. McNeal's tale of supernatural tomfoolery and vengeance would have been right at home on The Twilight Zone, and this one got under my skin and simmered there all night. To my knowledge, I've never read anything by McNeal prior to this, and he's not even one of the writers name-dropped on the cover, but this is an absolute gem, and a must-read for anyone trying to capture that "Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark" vibe for an adult audience. Five well-earned stars out of five!
* * * * *
So, all told, we have a mixed bag when it comes to this anthology. There are a few top-notch works, a couple outright stinkers, and a heavy weight towards the middle-of-the-road. Most need to be read in consideration of the time period they were published, as I'm sure I'm a more jaded reader today than I would have been even twenty years prior, to say nothing of how contemporary audiences would have viewed this collection.
What's most impressive is that, with the exception of David Riley's "After Nightfall", these stories all rely on the reader's imagination filling in the gaps with regards to violence and gore. Again, this is a collection of mostly supernatural tales as opposed to stories of the ordinary, so if your tastes run toward sex-crazed teens being fed through a wood chipper, you'll want to give this one a miss. If, on the other hand, you enjoy the likes of The Outer Limits, One Step Beyond, The Twilight Zone, or other programs which focus on the bizarre over the grotesque, this is a fine piece to add to your library.
Three-and-a-half out of five stars total.
My curiosity was piqued for several reasons, chief among them being that DAW was known for being a sci-fi publisher. Rather than put me off, this inspired me, for I saw names like Richard Matheson and Brian Lumley on the cover, which (hopefully) meant I could look forward to horror in a more cerebral or psychological sense a-la Twilight Zone as opposed to the more in-your-face, serial-killer-with-a-machete sense. I dove in, and was pleased to discover that, for the most part, I was right.
* * * * *
Double Whammy by Robert Bloch
Bloch will forever be remembered for introducing Norman Bates to the world in Psycho, but Double Whammy introduces us to a down-on-his-luck carnival barker who entices guests to pay for a look at the sideshow freaks. While he's fine with most of the acts, the one which never fails to disturb him is the geek. The geek is an equally-down-on-his-luck alcoholic who caps off the sideshow by chewing the head off a live chicken and frolicking in the blood. Our barker can't imagine a fate worse than this to which a man could be reduced, and it's an image which haunts his dreams.
The carnival is presided over by an aged woman of gypsy ancestry, who, according to some other members of the carnival, has the power to curse others using the dreaded double whammy. All it takes is for her to catch her victim's reflection, and some awful fate will soon result. After a tragedy resulting from a tryst with the carnival owner's young daughter, our protagonist finds himself constantly looking over his shoulder, always on the lookout for the old woman who he fears somehow will learn he's to blame and come after him. The story's twist ending is telegraphed well in advance, but this one plays out like a competently-executed story of revenge commonly seen in the EC Comics of the day. Three out of five stars.
The Sister City by Brian Lumley
This one has Lovecraft written all over it--small surprise, considering Lumley originally published it in Arkham House's "Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos" in 1969. This pastiche to "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" takes the form of an epistolary story, where the tale is conveyed through the writings of others. A man realizes at a young age he is very different from his peers, and sequesters himself away from civilization after his parents are killed when the Germans bomb his childhood home.
Setting out into the world to learn about his bizarre ancestry, he travels across continents, under the ocean, and into long-forgotten ruins, putting together the pieces about who his parents were, where he came from, and why he is so different from other humans. Being familiar with Innsmouth, it was fairly obvious where this was going from the start, but the execution (especially the baffled notes of the police appended to the manuscript's end) is competent and well in keeping with the Lovecraftian spirit. Four stars out of five.
When Morning Comes by Elizabeth Fancett
A particularly heavy-handed and axe-grinding account of a British MP haunted by the spectres of aborted fetuses who died because of laws he's thrown his support behind over the years. The reason for his haunting is divulged early on, the man's a thoroughly unsympathetic character, you can see the ending coming a mile away, and Fancett's clearly unfamiliar with the concept of subtlety. As a polemic, it works fine. As a horror story, it's an eye-rolling incompetent failure even for the late 60's/early 70's, and I'm forced to wonder what got bumped from the anthology in order to make room for it. One star out of five.
Prey by Richard Matheson
If you saw the 1975 anthology film Trilogy of Terror, you're familiar with this story of a woman who buys a Zuni fetish doll infused with the spirit of a hunter named "He Who Kills". An accident removes the binding chains on the doll, and it animates and attacks the woman in her apartment. The twist at the end is pure Matheson, and if you needed a palette cleanser after the last story, you couldn't ask for a better one than this. Five out of five stars if you've never read it, but four out of five stars if you have.
Winter by Kit Reed
Two middle-aged sisters living in a winter-ravaged area of the countryside have stocked their larders and sharpened their tongues in preparation for the long season ahead of them. One day, however, they find a sickly young man who claims to be a soldier having deserted his regiment. He asks for help hiding him for a while, and the lonely women are only too happy to have a strapping young man join their company. Unfortunately for the sisters, the young man is a master manipulator who uses their naivety and weakness for bickering against them, allowing the women to buy his affection at increasingly exorbitant prices...until the women catch on to his game and start playing the player. By the time this happens, supplies are running low in the farmhouse, and there's not enough to sustain all three until the spring thaw, but it's surprising what lengths some people will go to in order to survive.
Not as Twilight Zone-ish in its execution, but still well done in its own way, Winter is a decent entry here, even if the ending is telegraphed. The sisters are delightfully catty towards one another, which makes for some humor in this otherwise-morbid tale. Three stars out of five.
Lucifer by E. C. Tubb
A mortician receives the corpse of a man who died under extremely bizarre circumstances, and is drawn to a particular ring worn by the deceased. He snaffles it from the corpse, and eventually figures out that it allows the wearer to travel back in time, but only in fifty-seven second increments. Naturally the mortician realizes that fifty-seven seconds allows one to get away with all sorts of mischief, but as you can expect from this type of story, there's a price to pay for meddling with forces beyond one's own comprehension.
This is a fantastic story with a beautifully Twilight Zone-esque twist which sees the mortician condemned to a hell of his own making. Tubb himself was a prolific author who produced hundreds of works under dozens of pseudonyms over the course of his life, everything from short stories and novellas to full-fledged sci-fi series and books based on other properties like Space: 1999. A top-notch tale which comes in, does what it needs, and exits without overstaying its welcome. Five stars!
Wonder What He Wanted by Eddy Bertin
A ghost story in the Shirley Jackson sense, Wonder What He Wanted sees a young woman renting a house which was once home to a reclusive horror author. The longer she stays in the house, the more she finds herself taken with the macabre and the art of storytelling. While the payoff is obvious long before the story's end, the atmosphere Bertin manages to work up is suitably spooky and menacing despite this shortcoming. Three out of five.
Problem Child by Peter Oldale
This is a gruesome little story about a young mother who is positive that her infant daughter possesses psychic powers. The only problem is they never seem to manifest when other people are around to witness them, leaving her husband to wonder if she isn't imagining things. While the wrap-up here comes extremely fast, being delivered on the final page, it's definitely one you won't see coming even if you know that bad things are going to happen. Four out of five.
The Scar by Ramsey Campbell
I'm a huge fan of Campbell's work, but this one just didn't click with me at all. As wonderfully atmospheric as Campbell's writing is, I found the story difficult to understand, and ultimately I wasn't able to work out what he was going for. I'll probably come back and give this one another go, but it seemed to peter off into a lackluster payoff considering how well he appeared to be setting everything up. Rod Serling did doppelgangers much better, much creepier, and much earlier in the 1960 episode of The Twilight Zone called "Mirror Image". Two stars.
Warp by Ralph Norton
After the let-down of The Scar, Ralph Norton's tale of a scientist who opens a door into a parallel dimension is most welcome. The story follows one of the few friends of said scientist who contacts his former colleague and invites him to dinner out of the blue. Once at the scientist's house, which looks more like a fortress than a simple home, the man reveals he's figured out how to bridge the gap between parallel realities. Dubbing it "the Loop", it's a gateway that accepts physical matter in one side, and spits out a reverse duplicate of that object on the other. He demonstrates with a glove, which goes in right-handed and floats out left-handed. As the story continues, we discover how far the scientist has gone with his experiment, and the horror of what happens to once-reversed things that make the trip through the Loop again is terrible than one could possibly imagine.
This is a fantastic story, one which I have brooded over for several days, and it just won't leave me alone. One of the best in the collection, and an easy five out of five.
The Hate by Terri Prickard
This story of a young woman harassed by a supernatural animosity she is powerless to control wants to be spooky, but comes off contrived. The answer to the question of what is causing the anger and hatred to manifest is unsatisfying, and ultimately the story just falls flat. There's a good idea in here, but it's looking for a more competent execution than what Prickard offers. More to the point, it's not scary, or even creepy, in the slightest. It's just odd. This one falls out of memory faster than any of the other pieces in the anthology. One star.
A Quiet Game by Celia Fremlin
Having been raised by a single mother, I'm particularly sympathetic to the protagonist of this story, who lives in a high-rise apartment building with her two young children and is surrounded by tenants who hate the noise made by the children when they play. As someone who has dealt with noisy neighbors, though, I'm also sympathetic to their desire to not be disturbed at all hours of the day by stomping feet, screaming, and pounding. The apparent solution to the problem comes when the mother purchases a large-sized plush carpet, which she places on the floor to stifle footfalls. The children instantly take to the carpet, and transform it into an imaginary transport to a make-believe land where they have all sorts of adventures between when mother calls them back to the real world for tea time or dinner. Unfortunately, even this game starts to lose its appeal after a while, and in her effort to bring back some of the magic, the hapless mother makes things worse for herself. This isn't a bad story, but it isn't frightening either. Much like "The Hate", I question why it appeared in this anthology. Two out of five stars.
After Nightfall by David Riley
Another Lovecraftian pastiche, this time about an anthropologist who visits a rural town which observes strange rituals after the sun goes down. After questioning the innkeeper and a few of the townsfolk about the heavy shutters and stout locks on their doors, but receiving only evasive answers, he decides his best course of action will be to stay up late and see what happens after dark. To say this is a terrible choice would be the understatement of the week. This is a very good tale up through the climax, but I'd love to read an expanded version which explained how everything came to be in the first place. This one needed to be about five pages longer. Four out of five stars.
Death's Door by Robert McNear
A Wisconsin-based sports reporter visits a nearby island where the local high school basketball team is playing a home game for the state championship title, something they haven't done in several decades. While on the ferry over to the island to meet the team and coach, the reporter sees a bizarre sight: an old-model car tooling across the ice, heading in the other direction, filled with a group of partying teenagers. When he asks the ferry captain about it, the man becomes brusque and abrasive, and has him removed from the bridge. The locals aren't interested in hearing about it either, with one exception: the man who captained the championship team back in the 1940's. He has a story to tell about the team and the tragedy which befell the group after their victory...but it's one the reporter will never be able to print.
Damn, what a phenomenal way to cap this anthology! "Death's Door" is atmospheric, mysterious, and full of everything that makes for a spooky tale. McNeal's tale of supernatural tomfoolery and vengeance would have been right at home on The Twilight Zone, and this one got under my skin and simmered there all night. To my knowledge, I've never read anything by McNeal prior to this, and he's not even one of the writers name-dropped on the cover, but this is an absolute gem, and a must-read for anyone trying to capture that "Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark" vibe for an adult audience. Five well-earned stars out of five!
* * * * *
So, all told, we have a mixed bag when it comes to this anthology. There are a few top-notch works, a couple outright stinkers, and a heavy weight towards the middle-of-the-road. Most need to be read in consideration of the time period they were published, as I'm sure I'm a more jaded reader today than I would have been even twenty years prior, to say nothing of how contemporary audiences would have viewed this collection.
What's most impressive is that, with the exception of David Riley's "After Nightfall", these stories all rely on the reader's imagination filling in the gaps with regards to violence and gore. Again, this is a collection of mostly supernatural tales as opposed to stories of the ordinary, so if your tastes run toward sex-crazed teens being fed through a wood chipper, you'll want to give this one a miss. If, on the other hand, you enjoy the likes of The Outer Limits, One Step Beyond, The Twilight Zone, or other programs which focus on the bizarre over the grotesque, this is a fine piece to add to your library.
Three-and-a-half out of five stars total.