Science Fiction & Fantasy Remembrance

Something I don’t typically get to write about here is the topic of original anthologies, which is to say anthologies of short fiction comprised of material never before published. Of course, said fiction could later be reprinted in magazines, as has happened many times, but the implied purpose of an original anthology is fundamentally different from that of its sibling, the reprint anthology. Both involve similar work, with an editor trying to procure stories from authors or authors’ estates, as well as reading dozens upon dozens of stories, most of which end up not being worth printing. There’s the question of how many words/pages can be crammed between two covers. There’s the question of pricing, because an anthology will pretty much always be more expensive than a single magazine issue. Nowadays anthologies and magazines fill respective niches and try not to step on each other’s toes, since it’s no longer a problem of what can be printed in magazines, whereas in the days before Fortnite and even the internet there was the (true, at least up to a point) conventional narrative that editors and publishers of original anthologies were allowed to be more risqué than their magazine counterparts.

When Dangerous Visions hit shelves in 1967, its key appeal (at least for American readers) was that it was jam-packed with stories that could not be published in magazines of the era, on account of being too edgy, experimental, etc. You had a thick book (over 500 pages) from a mainstream publisher (Doubleday) with an all-star cast of authors, all of whom at least claimed to be putting forth their most mind-bending and transgressive material yet. You had such top talents as Philip K. Dick, John Brunner, Samuel R. Delany, Roger Zelazny, and so on, and commissioning this stuff could not have been cheap. The gambit paid off in spades, though. Dangerous Visions sold very well, remains in print to this day (a rarity for an anthology, especially an original one), and it even won a special Hugo. That Harlan Ellison, the editor, never quite recaptured that lightning, is beside the point. Not every story was a winner, but Dangerous Visions was the right book that entered the market at just the right time, serving as a harbinger of the New Wave. Just as importantly, publishers realized that there was some money to be made with original anthologies—maybe not on the same scale as Dangerous Visions, but rather cheap paperbacks of maybe half the size and half the number of stories; and maybe these books wouldn’t try to reinvent the wheel like their inspiration did, but instead took on more humble mission statements. You can have editors who are maybe not as discerning as Ellison was, who would also get the work done in a timelier fashion. It was a matter of quantity over quality.

There a meteor shower, or maybe a oversaturation, of original paperback anthologies from the late ’60s through much of the ’70s, until that particular bubble burst. These were books that often focused on science fiction, rather than fantasy or horror, although there was a trickle-down effect with those other genres. Still, standards had dripped, in large part (although he was not the sole offender) due to Roger Elwood’s extremely prolific tenure as editor for a few different publishers; the number of anthologies he edited between 1972 and 1976 alone is staggering. While he was able to procure work from big names, this work ran a good chance of being mid- to low-tier stuff that would’ve likely stayed on the shelf. A major exception was Epoch, which Elwood co-edited with Robert Silverberg, a lavish and well-received book, placing first in the Locus poll that year; but this is indeed an exception that proves the rule. By the end of the ’70s the market for original anthologies had inevitably gone into decline.

Meanwhile, in the waning days of the original anthology, Kirby McCauley made his living as a New York-based literary agent with some big talent on his hands. By 1980 he had already edited one well-received original horror anthology, with 1976’s Frights, which won the World Fantasy Award for Best Anthology/Collection. Frights was a hardcover original from St. Martin’s Press with a nice wraparound cover, but while McCauley procured stories by some of the top talent in horror at the time, including Ramsey Campbell and Robert Aickman, he found that he wanted to go one step further. The introduction for Dark Forces makes McCauley’s intentions with this bulky new anthology clear. McCauley’s inspiration was twofold, between August Derleth’s work as head of Arkham House and wanting to make a horror-themed counterpart to Dangerous Visions. Arkham House in its prime printed hardcover volumes with exquisite covers, all these being focused on horror, SF, and dark fantasy, from reprints of H. P. Lovecraft’s work to collections of never-before-published fiction by fresh young writers. McCauley grew up on books of horror that Derleth had edited, so in that way he overtly pays tribute to a fallen (Derleth had died in 1971) master of the field. The relationship that Dark Forces has with Dangerous Visions is more complicated, however, as there are a few major differences in how these books’ respective editors went about their businesses.

Consider that when Harlan Ellison edited Dangerous Visions, a process that took about two years, he was coming at it from the perspective of a reasonably successful author, which is to say he was a writer, first and foremost, as opposed to an editor or agent. This lack of experience with editing eventually came back to bite Ellison in the ass, with the shitshow that was the making of Again, Dangerous Visions, and far more infamously with The Last Dangerous Visions; but in the ’60s, it was novel for a writer with practically no editing experience to work with his fellow writers in such a way. Conversely, McCauley had already proven his ability with an original anthology, plus a couple reprint anthologies, and he was enough of a professional that he understood how to work with writers as people, and not just as practitioners of a certain craft. In the introduction he recounts his encouraging relationship with Stephen King while the latter wrote (first as a novelette, then ballooning into a long novella) The Mist. He also recounts having a get-together with Isaac Bashevis Singer in the latter’s apartment (they were both New Yorkers, and thus there had to be some inherent sense of kinship there), just months before Singer won the Nobel Prize for Literature. King and Singer are radically different in just about every way, in work ethic, style, and worldview, the former a flaming-liberal New Englander and the latter a conservative Polish-Jewish immigrant; yet McCauley makes it appear easy to work with both.

You may have noticed also that Singer is not a name that comes up much, if at all, in horror circles, because while a good portion of his fiction involves the supernatural, he’s not a “horror writer.” Thus we have another big difference between Dangerous Visions and Dark Forces, because while Ellison reached out to everyone in the SF field he could get his hands on, McCauley reached outside the field of horror and dark fantasy, the result being that there are authors in Dark Forces who are not primarily horror writers, and there are even a few who are known to be “literary” types. It’s not so unusual today, but back in 1980 it was a novelty for acclaimed novelist (and prolific tweeter) Joyce Carol Oates to appear in a horror anthology. You have some of the usual suspects of horror from that period (King, Campbell, even Robert Bloch late in his career, etc.), but you also have a really left-field choice like Davis Grubb, who was known at the time as author of The Night of the Hunter. You have writers like Edward Bryant and Joe Haldeman who, while they have sometimes written horror, are much more known for writing science fiction. You have a surprise appearance from Ray Bradbury, who by 1980 had long since entered the literary mainstream, and who also didn’t write much of anything at this point in his career. One can have gripes with who made it in and especially who didn’t (there are only two female authors here, Oates and Lisa Tuttle), but I can readily believe McCauley when he says he tried getting stories from everyone.

It’s also worth mentioning that McCauley didn’t construct Dark Forces with the intention of it being a boundary-pusher for the field of horror (he even explicitly says he didn’t want it to be “as revolutionary” as Dangerous Visions), and this ends up being to its benefit. True, there are a few stories here that may have been transgressive for 1980 (I’m thinking of Theodore Sturgeon’s tale of venereal agony, “Vengeance Is.,” and if I had a nickel for every “pregnant man” story in this book, I would have two nickels), but being extra-gross or what have you was not the name of the game. What might be Dark Forces‘s secret weapon and the biggest reason for its having aged pretty well is how its contents cover pretty close to the whole span of short horror literature up to circa 1980. While we don’t have much dark fantasy a la Robert E. Howard’s weird Conan stories, or the “extreme” horror that would start making the rounds in the proceeding years, there’s a great deal of variety in these 500 pages. We have traditional ghost stories such as Singer’s “The Enemy,” a rendering of the Sweeny Todd narrative with Robert Aickman’s “Mark Ingestre: The Customer’s Tale,” a cautionary tale of one unlucky busybody and a nest of vampiric creatures with Campbell’s “The Brood,” some rural “redneck” horror with Grubb and Manly Wade Wellman’s stories, and so on. There are also a couple non-supernatural tales of terror, as with Oates’s “The Bingo Master” (a personal fave of mine) and Bloch’s “The Night Before Christmas.” There are even a couple stories that fall into a certain genre that’s become rare in recent decades, that being the Christian allegory, with Gene Wolfe’s “The Detective of Dreams” and Russell Kirk’s “The Peculiar Demesne.”

And then there’s The Mist.

A story that “gets away” from the author, as it were, can sometimes be a bloated abomination, but in the case of The Mist we have one of King’s best and most tightly wound stories. Indeed King’s bad habits are pretty much absent here, and the fact that he’s able to reconcile ’50s B-movie monster action with genuine eeriness shows the level of craftmanship he’s capable of when he stops fucking around and focuses on what really matters. While the movie adaptation has a radically different ending (one that many, including King himself, prefer), I do have a soft spot for the novella’s ambiguity and cautious optimism. It was a simple choice for McCauley to put the longest story last, making The Mist the grand finale of Dark Forces, but it’s an example of how sometimes the simplest choice is also the best. Unlike the King collection Skeleton Crew, which sees The Mist as the protracted opening salvo, its position as the closing story of Dark Forces gives one the impression that the whole book had been building up to this moment. It was risky to include such a long story here (it takes up about 1/4 of the book), since if it failed then it would majorly tarnish what is otherwise a good read and leave a sour taste in the reader’s mouth; thankfully The Mist was a success, and has become one of King’s most beloved stories.

Dangerous Visions has, as far as I can tell, never gone out of print, although sadly the same can’t be said for Dark Forces. Anthologies, and especially original anthologies, have a bad tendency to have one or maybe two print runs, then go out of stock until the end of time. The only time Dark Forces has been reprinted this century was a super-expensive limited edition from Lonely Road Books in 2007. Bantam apparently did a paperback printing of Dark Forces in the early ’80s, but otherwise it’s only ever been published in hardcover in the US. It could be that Dangerous Visions was such a monolith at the time of its release, and has gone down as such an important entry in SF history, that its status (despite understandable attempts to knock it down a peg, especially as it continues to show its age more and more) has been more or less secured for the foreseeable future. Dark Forces is arguably a better book and set a better precedent (it served as an inspiration for Clive Barker to get into writing horror, and as we all know, the rest of that is history), but it also now reads, with hindsight, as one of the last big gasps for short fiction as a significant player in the realm of horror. Starting in the ’70s, both novels and movies started taking larger slices out of the pie in terms of what “mattered” for innovation and trends in horror, a field that historically largely hinged on the short story and novella. There would be major practicioners of the short horror story (see Barker, also Thomas Ligotti) to come after 1980, but Dark Forces celebrated (again, with hindsight) the short story as a form with authors who are, by and large, happiest and at their best when writing short stories and novellas.