Weird Tales #334. Darrell Schweitzer

Express. Not only did we not grow that moustache, but also we came away with a feeling of having missed the plane that crashed. There is something to be said for versatility. In the corporate world of bestseller-or-die publishing, this may be faulted as lack of focus, but we are still happy to have the ability to move, with some degree of success, between fantasy, horror, science fiction, and various types of non-fiction when conditions warrant. The last thing we wrote for pay before doing this editorial was an article on Urban Legends for a reference book to be published by Gale Research. We note, for instance, illustrious horror writers of the past, such as Fritz Leiber and Richard Matheson, have been well served by an ability to write more than just horror. Had we been giving that advice to a young writer, circa 1986, we would have said, “Never mind the moustache. Yes, horror looks like it’s getting big, so now is the time to write a horror novel. But don’t get yourself so typed that you haven’t got anything else to fall back on.”

      Was the victim ever alive? Westfahl suggests, probably without 100% belief, that maybe “horror is a form of narrative, like westerns, pirate stories, and jungle adventures, that is by its nature becoming outdated, a problem that cannot be solved by superficial transformations to accommodate contemporary sensibilities.” Perhaps, he goes on to say, it is a fad which cannot endure, like hula-hoops or pet rocks. We’re sure that Westfahl is just teasing us with this possibility, because he is a very knowledgeable critic, who is well aware that something identifiable as horror fiction has existed for centuries, and that the duration of hula-hoops and pet rocks is not even a blip on its timeline. But there is a serious question here: Was horror ever viable as a commercial genre? Of course there have been supernatural horror stories published for a very long time. Poe was active in the 1840s and hasn’t been out of print since. Dracula has never been out of print since its first publication in 1897. Weird Tales has published horror fiction (but was never a 100% horror magazine) in all its incarnations over the past eighty years. But such classic horror novels as The Haunting of Hill House (1959) were published as “mainstream” novels. The first attempt to make horror into a genre, in the sense of a category of publishing with its own packaged “look,” its own editors, imprints, and niche in the bookstore may have begun only about 1960 with a couple anthologies from Ace (Macabre and More Macabre) and, more significantly, by a series of Ballantine books, which had Richard Powers covers and a distinct design which told the reader that here was another of “those books.” The line was a modest success. It included a couple of Sarban titles, one H.R. Wakefield, and Fritz Leiber’s Shadows With Eyes (1962). We’re not old enough to remember where these books were placed in stores, but it was probably in the science-fiction section. There was certainly no horror section then, anymore than there had been in 1840 or 1897. Toward the end of the 1960s Lin Carter invented a publishing category. In the wake of the huge success of The Lord of the Rings in paperback, he created the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series. Most of the books were reprints, many dating back into the 19th century (and one, Beckford’s Vathek, to the 18th), but they were Carter’s attempt to build a canon, define a category and an audience, and create a new “kind” of book. Before that, fantasy books were published either as mainstream (e.g. The Once and Future King), as juveniles (the works of Alan Garner) or disguised as science fiction. Carter’s experiment worked. In fact it worked so hugely well that it completely absorbed the contemporary and more limited publishing phenomenon of Sword & Sorcery, which derived its content and imagery, not from Tolkien, but from Robert E. Howard. Why didn’t this work with horror, which tried to do the same thing with post-Exorcist, post-Stephen King supernatural fiction? Clearly it did not. Entirely too great an edifice was built on too small a foundation, and it came crashing down. This is not to suggest a definite solution. Westfahl is right that the matter will take more study and a careful autopsy. But we would add to the roster of everybody-did-it suspects (and we haven’t even begun to talk about the debasement of audience expectations due to the influence of slasher films) publishers, editors, and writers who define horror too narrowly. We saw symptoms of this long ago too. One of the other things one of the editors we knew in the ’80s told us, was that no matter how much he admired our horror fiction, he “couldn’t read” stories set in the historical past, in imaginary lands, or on other planets. He certainly couldn’t regard them as horror, for all we have consistently argued that a story about a man who comes back from the grave and crawls into bed with his wife (“Going to the Mountain,” in Refugees from an Imaginary Country) is still horror, whether set in contemporary New Jersey or in some ancient and fabulous land where gods still walk the Earth. We’ve always felt that Clark Ashton Smith stories are horrifying, whether set in the present day, in medieval Averoigne, pre-historic Hyperborea, or on the planet Mars. This blurs definitions, a corporate publisher’s salesman is going to object. You bet it does. We also think it’s one of the reasons why Weird Tales is still here and the paperback line which so thunderously carried off the core of the horror category in the middle ’90s is not. We have always done our best to broaden the definition of what we will publish, not narrow it. Our friends the horror editors of the ’80s were very insistent that they didn’t want horror fiction outside of a contemporary frame of reference. This seems to have applied to the whole field during the boom years. With such exceptions as Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s historical vampire novels (which are arguably selling as Romance, rather than horror), the rule seem to have always been that category horror could not be set prior to Victorian times. We can only ask: how many post-King books about lower-middle-class families in supernatural peril does anybody want to read? Maybe what happened is that repetition set in, caused by over-narrow definitions and expectations on the part of both producers and consumers of horror, and everybody just got bored. Maybe the “field” was too narrow to ever have been successful. It was a chimera. Nobody killed it because it was never alive. Maybe we’ll just have to go back to how things were from the beginnings of literature until about 1980, when horror and supernatural books and stories were published aplenty, but there was no “category” at all. At least for a while. After all this is horror we’re talking about, where things can’t be trusted to stay dead, even things that have never, strictly speaking, been alive.

      The Most Popular Story in issue 331, we may have to give up on as a lost cause. Voting has been very light. We do, however, have enough in hand to declare Robert E. Waters’s first published story, “The Assassin’s Retirement Party” the winner for issue 332. Second place goes to “Shatter” by Kelly McCullough, and third to “The Archpriest’s Potion” by Keith Taylor.

      We continue to get letters, though never enough of them, including the following from Christopher Dunn, who writes: Dear Gibbering Degenerates, or is it Degenerate Gibberers? Delighted to hear of Great Cthulhu’s 75th, & paper party hat. As it is written (according to the new, true, & authentic demysticized translation): Nor is it to be thought, that man is either the oldest or the last of the earth’s party animals, or that the common dolt and life of the party stumbles on alone. The Old Ones partied, the Old Ones party, and the Old Ones shall party. Not in the discos we know [Yes, Alhazred mentions disco.…] but between them they whirl, stomp, and pirouette in steps undecipherable and to us unseemly. Yog-Sothoth knows the gait; Yog-Sothoth is the gait…

      Or as Alhzared summed it up:

      That is some hangover which must eternal lie. After strange revels He may wish he could die.

      Being entirely unable to respond to that one—there’s a limit even to eldritch blasphemy—we shamble hastily on to the following epistle from Steve Allseys: With great interest I read your latest Eyrie article about the true nature of Lovecraft’s fictional universe and the inadequate way Derleth attempted to reproduce it. I believe, however, that there are still some mistaken notions about the Mythos that linger on even now. These may be the result of drawing assumptions from HPL’s biography and then superimposing them upon the Mythos. You remark upon this context by saying that in HPL’s story, “there is no moral order to the universe, no God or ‘spirit’ in any sense…” A few lines down, is the statement that “Lovecraft was describing, unflinchingly, the universe revealed by science.” (Page 6, issue 332.) Really? Is this Arthur C. Clarke, then, we are talking about? When we think back to Lovecraft’s longest “series” about his clearly delineated alter-ego Randolph Carter, I can think of many instances that demonstrate the existence of all kinds of supernatural manifestations in his tales. Do you really believe that creatures such as Cthulhu exist in a materialistic, scientific