The Satyr's Head: Tales of Terror

INTRODUCTION

DURING THE EARLY part of the 1970s I had begun editing and producing my fanzine Shadow: Fantasy Literature Review. This was in response to the numerous horror and fantasy fanzines then being devoted to film. And there was a lot happening on the literary side. The Pan Book of Horror Stories was in its middle age. The Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series had emerged in the mid-sixties, reprinting many classic works and later contemporary fantasy writers. Arkham House, having recently published Thirty Years of Arkham House in 1969, was to enter its most productive two decades, with something like seventy-plus titles from both contemporary, classic and "pulp" writers. Many paperback anthologies edited by August Derleth, Peter Haining and numerous others were popping up. The UK paperback publishers were all keen to have a horror genre line, thus Pan, Panther, Four Square, Sphere, Corgi, Fontana, Tandem, and so on all were bringing out horror series or one-off anthologies.

One of the paperback houses, Sphere Books, contacted me after seeing and being impressed with the copies of Shadow FantasyLiterature Review I had sent them. Their editor, Anthony Cheetham, commissioned me to edit a series of annual anthologies called New Writings in Horror & the Supernatural, exclusively to bring out previously unpublished tales of horror by new and well-known genre writers. On the other side of the coin, Sphere hired Richard Davis to edit the Year’s Best Horror Stories series. Alas, Sphere backed away from New Writings after two volumes. Year’s Best fared a little better, but was eventually dropped by Sphere. (Luckily it was continued by Daw Books in the USA under editors Gerald W. Page from volume four and Karl Edward Wagner from volume eight). In 1972 I was busy compiling the contents for New Writings volume three when the expected contract failed to materialise…

With a batch of stories already to hand, I then contacted Corgi Books, a division of Transworld Publishers, and pitched to them a one-off anthology called The Satyr’s Head & Other Tales of Terror. They liked the concept and the book was duly published in 1975 and quickly went out of print. Now, nearly forty years later here is The Satyr’s Head: Tales of Terror, a new incarnation for a new generation of horror readers!