The Year's Best Horror Stories 21

INTRODUCTION: COMING OF AGE

Watch out! The Year’s Best Horror Stories has turned 21.

As they say, we have come of age. The series now embarks upon its third decade of collecting the very best of horrors, selected from the many hundreds of nasty creepy depraved terrifying unsettling grim horrifying strange gruesome weird mind-blowing tales published during the past year.

And, if this past year is any indication, we’re all in for a wild ride by the time The Year’s Best Horror Stories turns 30. The past two decades have witnessed powerful changes within the horror genre. If you’re lucky enough to have them, delve through a file of all twenty-one volumes, and you can follow the rise of such then relatively unknown writers as Stephen King, Ramsey Campbell, Brian Lumley, Dennis Etchison, Charles L. Grant, David Drake, and many others. You can also follow the perseverance of an older generation of horror writers (sadly, some of them no longer with us): Manly Wade Wellman, Hugh B. Cave, R. Chetwynd-Hayes, Robert Bloch, to name a few. In recent volumes, you can watch the emergence of a new field of horror writers: Wayne Allen Sallee, Joel Lane, D.F. Lewis, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Kim Antieau, Joe R. Lansdale, and many more. You read and decide which of the new talents will become the Grand Masters of the next century.

Other aspects of change are readily apparent—stylistic as well as thematic. When The Year’s Best Horror Stories first appeared in 1971, markets for short horror fiction were few and far between. Much of what did find print was a bad imitation of the adjective-laden prose of H.P. Lovecraft, who was himself on the cutting edge of horror some four decades earlier. (“Even as I pen this, the polymorphous nacreous mass of putrid blasphemy is macerating my right leg!!”)

As Lovecraft passed from vogue, the trend shifted toward plotless violence and explicit sex, presumably inspired by the outpouring of countless and interchangeable splatter films. Basic premise: A group of teenagers have sex and show some T&A, then get horribly murdered by some unkillable fiend, who will hang about for another dozen sequels of more of the same. The result was a similar outpouring of small press horror magazines. Good news for beginning writers. Bad news for readers who wanted something more than a few pages in which the expendables have sex and meet gory deaths. (“The typewriter keys began to chew off her youthful breasts, even as the carriage ripped its way down her screaming throat.”)

Well, I like a good laugh as much as the next person, and I need a sense of humor to wade through the thousands of stories I’ve read over the years for The Year’s Best Horror Stories. However, through it all, I’ve had the very genuine pleasure of finding excellent stories in unlikely places, of discovering new and brilliant writers as they emerge from the pack. It makes my job exciting, and my job is to plunge recklessly headlong until I find the best, and then to present the best to you.

So. Here’s the most excellent news.

In a field of proliferating small press and Big Press markets, the new horror writers are getting good. They, too, are coming of age. They now write about genuine characters rather than cardboard expendables. Violence, whether graphic or restrained, has become inherent to the story rather than gratuitous. Sexual themes are now being used intelligently and are crucial to the story, as opposed to the teenage wish-fulfillment jerk-off exercises too often seen before.

I have often wondered how many of the exuberant sex-and-gore writers are actually virgins and are incapable of cutting up a chicken or cleaning a fish. Or peeling a potato.

Much of this new sophistication in treating violence and sexual themes in horror fiction is due to the fact that the new writers are coming of age. However, the relaxing of taboos has made it possible for writers to explore themes and material that were forbidden not too many years ago. Personally, I have had three stories rejected (then placed elsewhere) because of their sexual themes. Ramsey Campbell in his introduction to “The Limits of Fantasy” (which you are about to read within these pages) explores the area of society-imposed and self-imposed censorship far better than I can, so I’ll leave you to him. I just hope you’re over 21—and have no dependents.

So, then. Here are 26 stories: the best horror stories of 1992. As usual, about half of the writers presented here have never before appeared in The Year’s Best Horror Stories—proving that the horror genre is a dynamic and changing genre. All types of horror are offered to you here: traditional, experimental, gore, surreal, psychological and psychotic. Screams and shivers. We don’t play favorites here—writers or themes. Horror fiction has no boundaries, defies all categories, sneers at those who would try to tame it.

Boundaries? We don’t need no stinking boundaries.

Political correctness? We spit in the milk of political correctness.

After all, The Year’s Best Horror Stories is 21.

—Karl Edward Wagner

Chapel Hill, North Carolina