Book Review: 'The Best of Modern Horror' edited by Edward L. Ferman and Anne Jordan
The 24 stories in this anthology first were published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction during the interval from 1951 to 1986.
My capsule summaries of the contents:
Window, by Bob Leman (1980): a secret government experiment leads to an astonishing discovery……or so it seems. Featuring a nasty little plot twist, this is one of the best stories in the anthology.
Insects in Amber, by Tom Reamy (1977): after a storm washes out a road in rural Kansas, a group of travelers are forced to spend the night in a haunted house.
This novelette starts off as a standard haunted house tale but introduces various sci-fi tropes, albeit not very successfully, in my opinion.
Free Dirt, by Charles Beaumont (1955): Mr. Aorta is devoted to getting something for nothing – usually at the expense of others. His comeuppance is due…..
Rising Waters, by Patricia Ferrera (1987): Rory enjoys lazing on the bank of the river and taking the occasional dip. One afternoon he sees something interesting out in the river………….what could possibly go wrong ? Well-written, with a creepy conclusion, this entry was author Ferrera’s first published story.
The Night of the Tiger, by Stephen King (1977): a traveling circus is troubled by a conflict between its lion tamer, Mr. Indrasil, and the mysterious Mr. Legere…….King’s prose gets overly purple at times, but this remains an effective story.
Poor Little Warrior, by Brian W. Aldiss (1958): a variation on the time-traveler-hunts-dinosaurs theme. Aldiss relates this short story using a strange argot of hipster and Beat prose, which makes things truly awful:
Never mind ! Quaff down your beakers, lords, Claude Ford has slain a harmless creature. Long Live Claude the Clawed !
Nina, by Robert Bloch (1977): Watch out for those South American jungle girls…..a short, but effective, tale from Bloch.
Werewind, by J. Michael Reaves (1981): struggling actor Simon Drake finds that the Santa Ana winds can have a sinister aspect. Making things worse is the fact that a serial killer, called ‘the Scalper’, is loose in Los Angeles……
Dress of White Silk, by Richard Matheson (1951): a short-short story that essentially recycles the plot of Matheson’s 1950 tale ‘Born of Man and Woman’.
Gladys’s Gregory, by John Anthony West (1962): Mordant humor regarding obesity suffuses this story.
By the River, Fontainebleau, by Stephen Gallagher (1986): something strange is going on in an impoverished farm in rural France. A disturbing ending makes this story one of the better entries in the anthology.
Pride, by Charles L. Grant (1982): in Oxrun Station, someone has brutally murdered five young men. Lawyer Brian Farrell is convinced it’s not his client, Syd Foster. But then, if Syd isn’t the culprit, who is ? Grant takes care in setting up his plot, but his denouement opts for ambiguity and vagueness, making ‘Pride’ another ‘Quiet Horror’ misfire.
Longtooth, by Edgar Pangborn (1969): something with sharp teeth and an appetite is loose in the snowy Maine woods……..
While at times overwritten, this novelette, with a well-defined plot and an ending that avoids contrivance, is one of the best entries in the anthology. Pangborn is as good as, if not better, than Stephen King in depicting rural Maine and its people.
Glory, by Ron Goulart (1986): two Hollywood hustlers make a fateful decision to investigate the grave of a Silent Era legend. This story relies on mordant humor, rather than horror.
Bug House, by Lisa Tuttle (1980): Ellen Morrow travels to a lonely, dilapidated house by the ocean to see her aging Aunt May. And something, it turns out, is very wrong with May………an effective tale that lives up to the implications of the title.
Hand in Glove, by Robert Aickman (1978): while touring a strangely arrayed churchyard, a woman contemplates life without her unpleasant boyfriend. Like those other few stories of Aickman’s that I have read, the plot is meandering and the prose style ponderous (the boyfriend’s full name, we are told, is ‘Nigel Alsopp Omasthwaite Ticknor’........).
Stillborn, by Mike Conner (1981): a young, newly-wedded bride is obliged to make friends with the elder women of a 19th century mining town. There is something disturbing about the underground chamber where they gather to socialize………..a competent tale, with a bit of a steampunk flavor.
Balgrummo’s Hell, by Russell Kirk (1967): Rafe Horgan, a self-confident thief, decides to plunder the dilapidated old mansion where Lord Balgrummo, it is rumored, has some very valuable paintings hanging on the walls………Kirk’s ornate prose pads what is, at heart, a rather conventional story.
The Old Darkness, by Pamela Sargent (1983): when the power goes out, bad things start to happen to the inhabitants of a city apartment complex.
The Night of White Bhairab, by Lucius Shepard (1984): set in Nepal, this story features an American expatriate named Eliot Blackford, who looks after the abode of Mr. Chatterji when the latter is out of town. Things get complicated when a ghost decides to make an appearance. This story is less horror than a humorous fantasy, and seems more than a little out of place in this anthology.
Salvage Rites, by Ian Watson (1986): Tim and Rosy, an English couple of modest means, take a trip to the town dump…….which, they discover, has its problems.
Set among the depressing landscapes of contemporary Britain, with its horror content surfacing in a deliberate manner, this tale starts off much as a Ramsey Campbell story might. However, author Watson carefully avoids mimicking Campbell’s florid prose and oblique plotting, and delivers a genuinely creepy ending. In so doing, ‘Salvage’ stands as something of a homage to Clive Barker’s style of horror writing, and is one of the better stories in this anthology.
Test, by Theodore L. Thomas (1962): short-short story with an ending I found to be unconvincing.
The Little Black Train, by Manly Wade Wellman (1954): Wellman’s recurring John the Balladeer / Silver John character encounters a cursed abode in the North Carolina Hills.
The Autopsy, by Michael Shea (1980): Dr. Winters travels to Bailey, a Western mining town, to perform autopsies on the bodies of 10 miners who died in a cave-in. However, the circumstances of the cave-in have raised suspicions that something quite unusual has been happening in Bailey…….
This story is considered by some observers as the first true ‘splatterpunk’ story, because of its detailed recounting of the process of performing an autopsy. Be that as it may, this is one of the weaker stories in the anthology: badly overwritten, with passages that are so poorly worded that I failed to understand them even after multiple re-readings. The science-fiction sub-plot is awkwardly introduced in the closing pages, and I found it unconvincing.
Summing up, there are enough worthwhile stories to give ‘The Best of Modern Horror’ a three-star score. While I wouldn’t go searching for it, if you happen to see it on the shelf, it’s worth picking up.
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