Paperbacks from Hell [N.F. - Literature, Art]

Dark Fantasy and Quiet Horror

For every dancing skeleton who writes a horror novel, there must be a skeleton wrangler, a person who takes that skeleton to NECON (Northeastern Writers’ Conference), introduces it to the right editors, publishes its first story. Skeleton wranglers are the grease in the gears that make the pendulum swing; they’re the ones who buy the drinks, correct the manuscript, cut the checks.

Often we can spot wranglers by looking at horror periodicals and anthologies. David B. Silva’s quarterly magazine The Horror Show (1982–91) won a World Fantasy Award, and Silva published early work by future stars like Poppy Z. Brite and Bentley Little. Jeff Conner’s Scream/Press published limited editions of Stephen King, F. Paul Wilson, and Ramsey Campbell and issued the first U.S. hardcover editions of Clive Barker’s Books of Blood collections. Ellen Datlow was the fiction editor at Omni magazine from 1981 to its folding in 1998; she ushered dozens of authors into the spotlight before taking over editing The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror and The Best Horror of the Year, as well as numerous themed short-fiction anthologies.

But the biggest skeleton wrangler of them all was also one of the genre’s best-known editors and most prolific writers: Charles L. Grant. A Vietnam veteran who disliked Lovecraft and hated gore, Grant was a purveyor of what he first called “dark fantasy”—what was later called “quiet horror.”

The contents were quiet, but the covers were loud. Grant’s books got covers by some of the genre’s best artists, like Rowena Morrill (Night Songs) and Jill Bauman (Midnight). Credit 150

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Grant believed in creeping mist and full moons, he loved long titles and characters taking midnight strolls down empty streets. Like fog, he tended to blur lines rather than shatter boundaries. His characters are modern, dreaming of cars they can’t afford, and his ghosts go on dates and leave answering-machine messages. Like John Cheever, he enjoyed writing about suburban ennui, families crumbling under pressure from suspected infidelities, and which child liked which parent best. Four of his fictional New England towns spawned their own series, but the place he kept returning to was the imaginary town of Oxrun Station.

Grant knew everyone, and he made all the introductions. He published more than one hundred novels and wrote uncountable short stories under the pen names Felicia Andrews and Lionel Fenn, among others. But what made Grant the ultimate skeleton wrangler was Shadows.

Launched in 1978, Shadows was an anthology in which Grant tolerated no traditional monsters and no gore. Instead he published work by Alan Ryan, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Al Sarrantonio, and a couple of Stephen King’s quieter stories. As contributor Thomas Monteleone said, “If your stories weren’t appearing in Shadows, then you just weren’t cutting it.”

A truism is that horror functions best in short stories. Horror is about character and mood. Some of its most effective concepts felt a little threadbare stretched to a few hundred pages, and many of horror’s best writers (Dennis Etchison, Robert Aickman, Ramsey Campbell) did their finest work in the short form.

More than any other genre, horror kept short stories alive. In the early ’90s, as publishing collapsed, anthologies still sold well. So every few years someone decided to produce an anthology proving that horror could be literature, too. The first, and most important, came from superagent Kirby McCauley, who was inspired by Harlan Ellison’s game-changing Dangerous Visions science-fiction anthology from 1967. McCauley bundled together stories by Stephen King (“The Mist”), Dennis Etchison (then best known as the short-story writer’s short-story writer), Ramsey Campbell, Joyce Carol Oates, and Isaac Bashevis Singer for his landmark 1981 book, Dark Forces.

Etchison edited his own cutting-edge anthology called, natch, Cutting Edge (1986). Critic Douglas E. Winter did it with Prime Evil in 1988, and Monteleone took a stab with Borderlands in 1990. Even as the horror market collapsed in the early ’90s, themed anthologies stayed strong in paperback. But if ever there was a canary in the coal mine for the horror boom, it died in 1989 when Grant announced he was ending Shadows after ten volumes because the quality of the submissions had dropped “drastically.” After that, Grant wrote some media tie-ins for The X-Files, and then silence. As the industry descended into darkness, so, too, did Charles L. Grant.

Anthologies featured some of the best horror fiction of the ’70s and ’80s, from the spooky tales in Charles Grant’s taste-making Shadows to Dennis Etchison’s rule-breaking Cutting Edge. Credit 153