Book Review: 'The Best Horror from Fantasy Tales'
2 / 5 Stars
Fantasy Tales was a semi-professional magazine published in the UK from 1977 to 1991 for a total of 24 issues (spaced over two Volumes).
Editors Stephen Jones and David Sutton consciously modeled their magazine on the classic pulp Weird Tales, and thus, Fantasy Tales published as many (if not more) horror stories than fantasy, and featured black-and-white and graytone illustrations by artists such as Stephen Fabian and Jim Pitts.
Fantasy Tales can be seen as the British counterpart to American semi-professional magazines of the 1970s and 1980s, such as Whispers, Grue, Cemetery Dance, and Midnight Graffiti.
Along with reprints of vintage stories from the Pulp era, each issue featured new stories by contributors who would go on to become prominent names in the genre. For many of these contributors, their earliest works appeared first in Fantasy Tales, giving the magazine a special place in the hearts of British fandom.
After 1991 Jones and Sutton decided to discontinue publishing Fantasy Tales and instead went into assembling and editing anthologies of horror and fantasy fiction incorporating previously published content as well as newly commissioned stories. As of 2021 three volumes of these anthologies have been issued: The Best Horror Stories from Fantasy Tales (1988), The Giant Book of Fantasy (1991), and The Giant Book of Fantasy and the Supernatural (1994).
Jones has had a very prolific and very successful career as an editor and packager of books on all aspects of fantasy media, including the 500+ page Best New Horror series of trade paperbacks (which, as of 2020, was up to Volume 30).
This Carroll and Graf trade paperback edition (268 pp.) of The Best Horror from Fantasy Tales was issued in 2003, with cover art by Brom, and features the original illustrations that accompanied the stories when they appeared in the magazine. With the exception of the reprints of Pulp era stories, all of the entries in The Best Horror first saw print between 1975 - 1986. Some are the recipients of the British Fantasy Award and / or the World Fantasy Award.
My capsule summaries of the contents:
The Forbidden, by Clive Barker (1985): a graduate student named Helen Buchanan, who is writing her thesis on 'Graffitti: The Semiotics of Urban Despair', investigates a notorious murder committed in a public restroom of the Spector Street Estate, a decaying Liverpool apartment complex. This novelette later became the basis of the 1992 film Candyman. It remains one of the best of Barker's works, and is the standout piece in this anthology.
The Dark Country, by Dennis Etchison (1981): Jack Martin, an American, is living a dissipated life in a crumbling beachfront hotel in Baja Mexico when an incident involving fellow gringos places a pall on the holiday atmosphere.
This is not a horror story, but a crime story with a simplistic plot and a narrative overloaded with figurative prose and empty sentences designed to communicate a noir-ish atmosphere:
He had been lost in a nightmare of domination and forced acquiescence before people who meant to do him harm. It returned to him in fragments. What did it mean ? He shook it off and rolled out of bed.
'The Dark Country' wouldn't have passed muster in an early 80s crime magazine or digest but when submitted to a horror magazine it was considered a great example of Quiet Horror. Meh !
Dead to the World, by Allen Lucas (aka Allen Ashley) (1982): the first-person narrator finds himself beset with an unusual medical condition.
The Generation Waltz, by Charles L. Grant (1984): on a rainy Fall day in Oxrun Station, a man attends the wake for his late Gram.........yet another 'Quiet Horror' dud from Grant. The bulk of the narrative is devoted to creating a 'disquieting' atmosphere, so much so that the closing page is an exercise in hurried silliness, as if Grant suddenly realized he was writing a horror story and not a psychodrama and needed to interject Something Disturbing into his denouement.
The Frolic, by Thomas Ligotti (1982): cozy in their living room, a prison psychiatrist and his wife converse about a very disturbing inmate. This early tale from Ligotti suffers from turgid prose. I found the ending to be too contrived to be effective.
The Strange Years, by Brian Lumley (1982): the End of the World, related within less than five pages. Tries to do too much within too little space, and comes across as hasty and unconvincing.
Ever the Faith Endures, by Manly Wade Wellman (1978): a North Carolina man finds ancient evil lurking at the family homestead in the UK. Another well-crafted 'folk horror' tale from Wellman.
Extension 201, by Cyril Simsa (1979): evil lurks in the dusty corridors of the Museum of Natural History........a 'traditional' horror story, done with straightforward plotting and competent prose (by an author for whom English was presumably not a first language, no less).
The Last Wolf, by Karl Edward Wagner (1975): in the future, books have been superseded by electronic-based media; the Last Writer stubbornly refuses to capitulate. This story is a homage to Ray Bradbury. I'm not a Bradbury fan, so I can't say it did all that much for me.
Tongue in Cheek, by Mike Grace (1984): When her car breaks down, Annabel is forced to walk down a dark, deserted road in rural England.......it's very spooky. This short story is amateurish, but it does feature an amazing illustration (below) by Mark Dunn.
The Bad People, by Steve Rasnic Tem (1984): another 'gringo in Mexico' entry. This time it's uneasy single father Cliff, who encounters a strange apparition roaming the hot and dusty streets of Mexico. A standard-issue 'weird fiction' tale, where you can't tell if the Horror is external, or simply a manifestation of the protagonist's psychological trauma. Meh.
A Place of No Return, by Hugh B. Cave (1981): an arrogant American academic investigates rumors of zombis in rural Haiti. While most readers undoubtedly will see the ending coming from a long way off, as always, Cave's prose is straightforward and unadorned and a welcome alternative to the clotted style of the Quiet Horror practitioners.
The Terminus, by Kim Newman (1985): a policeman investigates disappearances in the tunnels of the London Underground. This story, from early in Newman's career, is only three pages in length, but its denouement is as effective a demonstration of 'Quiet Horror' as anything Charles L. Grant, Dennis Etchison, and T. E. D. Klein ever wrote.
The Green Man, by Kelvin Jones (1983): an Anglican pastor discovers that disturbing things are taking place on the grounds of his church. A successful effort at infusing the classic English ghost story setting with a modern sensibility.
The Voice of the Beach, by Ramsey Campbell (1982): two friends staying at a beach resort on the English coast see strange apparitions in the surrounding landscape.
Reading this tale was like sputum forced from the distended lips of a sickly pensioner, clutching his stained tweed jacket with its odor of pipe tobacco left too long in its foil packet. I felt detached; why did the spectacle of the hazy sky project disquiet ? A trash can, spattered with seagull droppings, trespassed on the pedestrian walkway. Crossing the sand provoked a feeling of helplessness; from the corner of my eye, I noticed a patch of darkness appear on the verge. Did it writhe ? Another glance and it was gone; it had never been.
There are a number of reprinted Pulp Era stories: 'Dreams May Come' by H. Warner Munn (1939), 'Don't Open that Door' by Frances Wellman (1940), 'The Sorcerer's Jewel' by Robert Bloch (1939), and 'In the X-Ray' by Fritz Leiber (1949).
The black and white illustrations, done by Jim Pitts, John Stewart, Andrew Smith, David Lloyd, Dave Carson, Randy Broecker, Allen Koszowski, Alan Hunter, Russ Nicholson, Mark Dunn, and Tom Campbell, all are very good and perfectly capture the Weird Tales sensibility sought by the editors.
The verdict ? I finished The Best Horror from Fantasy Tales thinking that this anthology offered too little truly noteworthy material to be a must-have.
If you are a dedicated horror fiction enthusiast, then if you find a copy of The Best Horror from Fantasy Tales on the shelves of a used bookstore, and it's reasonable priced, you might want to pick it up. But all others can pass.
