Abyss proved that horror fiction still had room for original voices telling new stories about everything from psychoactive plants (Nightlife) to gender identity (X, Y) to Poppy Z. Brite’s re-re-reinvention of vampires (Lost Souls), and Nancy Holder’s hallucinatory sea story (Dead in the Water). Credit 178
Written in chilly, precise, clinical prose, Michael Blumlein’s X, Y feels like the fruit of a collaboration between J. G. Ballard and David Cronenberg. The only thing tying it to the old-school horror market is the fact that its main character is a stripper. After she passes out onstage and wakes up convinced that she’s a man, Blumlein dives into the complicated swamp of gender difference, territory that no other horror novel had broached. Rather than worrying about identity politics or liberation narratives, he boils everything down to biology. And then he keeps on boiling. By the time he’s finished, Blumlein has made a case that our assumptions about our identities aren’t built on bedrock but on ever-shifting sand. It’s probably the only book to cite the Journal of Neuro-Medical Mechanics in its endnotes, and it’s also more dark science fiction than flat-out horror, much like Lisa Tuttle’s quantum narrative Lost Futures, about a woman who begins to simultaneously experience all the lives she could have led.
Abyss’s breakout star was Poppy Z. Brite, whose Lost Souls was the line’s first hardcover book; it earned Brite a six-figure, three-book deal with Dell. His books revolve around the fictional town of Missing Mile, North Carolina, which is populated by sensitive psychic musicians, bisexual vampires, runaway waifs, serial killers, and cannibals. Dripping with graphic sex and violence, refusing to pay lip service to conventional tsk-tsking over runaway kids, Brite’s books are the R-rated, younger, sexier, more rebellious version of Anne Rice’s gothic vampire epics. His characters ditch the lives and families they’d been assigned at birth to build their own stronger, braver, more inclusive families on the margins. Brite had been associated with the splatterpunk movement, but he had something that eluded most of that gang, and he used it wisely: restraint.
For the next three years, Abyss published one new horror title every month. Financially, the line was moderately successful, but its books won awards and were unlike anything on the market. Dennis Etchison published with the line, as did Lisa Tuttle, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, and even Michael McDowell. Their books didn’t set the world on fire, but they did set individual readers’ minds ablaze.
In July 1994, Jeanne Cavelos left Abyss to focus on her own writing and teaching. She was supposed to be replaced by a new editor, but never was. An editorial assistant took over and Dell lost confidence in the line, refusing to publish the third title on Brite’s contract, Exquisite Corpse, due to its “extreme” content. Abyss, with around forty-five titles on its list, withered and died shortly thereafter. And with it went the last echo of the horror boom.