Name: A Century of Horror 1970-1979: The Greatest Stories of the Decade
Rating: 3.92 (3 reviews)
ISBN: 9781567311570

Shawn

951 reviews234 followers

July 4, 2010

The central concept behind this anthology is an interesting one: a broader "best of" covering a decade should not only assure a selection of great stories (I mean, you've got 10 years, whereas, for example, Karl Edward Wagner's YEAR'S BEST collections only have a particular year) but also illuminate growing and dying movements and trends within a given genre (assuming you have an open-minded editor with a large personal or, through contacts, professional knowledge of a range of stories). On the other hand, the rights to famous stories are expensive to procure (trust me!), so this project overall was ambitious - an ad insert shows volume for Horror, Mystery, Fantasy and Science-Fiction (the 70s, the 50s, the 80s, and the 80s, respectively) and a quick check indicates these all came out but there were no follow-up volumes. Which is a shame, because it really is/was a promising concept.

In the particular, the 70s was an interesting time for short horror fiction. The novel market had had huge financial success with bestsellers like The Exorcist, The Omen, The Amityville Horror and the like, and yet the death of American popular support for the short fiction format was still ongoing (and still is) compared to the height of its popularity in the 20s through the 50s. As with the rest of the economy, a fragmentataion into smaller sub-markets was happening, as there were still (and always will be) people who loved the format and the genre, and so there were still people reading and writing short horror fiction, there just weren't enough to support a print magazine on the newsstands, hence the continuing growth and popularity of small press publication and zines. Many writers who would go on to write popular, widely selling genre novels in 80s honed their craft composing short fiction in the 70s, including names like Ramsey Campbell and Stephen King.

And within these small markets, changes were occurring in the horror genre itself, while the science fiction, mystery and fantasy genres still dominated the market. The pulp style saw a revival under writers like Karl Edward Wagner, after the counterculture/campus rediscovery of H.P. Lovecraft in the 1960s. The psychological/suspense style was still moving full bore under talented writers like Richard Matheson. Charles L. Grant was carefully formulating what would eventually germinate into the dark fantasy/quiet horror style. There was a lot going on, but the genre's identity itself was in flux, incorporating influences from the more popular genres. In some sense, there seemed to be very few "horror fiction" writers as much as there were science fiction, fantasy, mystery or literary writers who turned out the occasional "dark" tale.

My approach to reviewing anthologies still holds: I will usually consider a general anthology a success if I like 1/2 to 3/4 of the stories, as it's unlikely every choice will hit the mark. I review the stories in reverse order, worst (or let's say least successful) to best. This book is a nicely rounded selection of what the 70s offered in horror fiction and, although I'd previously read half the stories (somewhat inescapable due to my interests and voracious anthology reading), it was still a very satisfying read and would make a good investment (or library rental) for someone wanting to expand their knowledge of the genre. You won't like everything, but you might like more than you expect.

There are a few clunkers, of course. I'd previously read Charles L. Grant's "Come Dance With Me On My Pony's Grave" and wasn't impressed (as I've said before, I like the *idea* behind Grant's brand of quiet horror, but run hot and cold on the execution) so I didn't reread it. The same was true of David Morrell's "The Dripping" and, to a lesser extent, "Something Had To Be Done" by David Drake (the editor of this volume. IIRC, the story had something to do with a werewolf and the Vietnam war) and "Belsen Express" by Fritz Leiber (I called it "an interesting, if slightly perfunctory, examination of the continuing echoes of the Nazi death camps" when I reviewed it in The Year's Best Horror Stories Series V for Goodreads).

Next up were two stories that were solid but a little underwhelming. Robert Bloch's "A Case of the Stubborns" is an effective Southern retake on an idea also explored in Ray Bradbury's much earlier "There Was An Old Woman" - the cantankerous old person who refuses to accept that they've died. A comic tone holds sway, which makes it palatable if not exactly what I'd call scary, although a visit to the local swamp-dwellin', conjurin' witch is a highlight. "Armaja Das" by Joe Haldeman is a strange mash-up of the venerable "gypsy curse" trope with the burgeoning technology of computers. It's an awkward hybrid, especially at this stage in technology where computers were beginning to move out of their sci-fi portrayal and move into reality. It's not bad, and there's a nice grim coda set in a dark future, but I have to admit the characterization of the talking computer just seemed goofy (compare with "Best Interests" in this same volume).

Now we arrive at the solid entertainers. Darrell Schweitzer's "Divers Hands" is a fun and creepy story in the dark/heroic fantasy subgenre. Featuring his ongoing character Knight Julian in a Byzantium-era setting, this spotlights a hell of a lot of ambulatory (and flat-out flying) disembodied hands. "Seasons of Belief" by Michael Bishop is delightful, as a father and mother, ensconced in a fire-lit den on a cold winter's night, tell their children the terrible story of an monster called a Grither, who only stalks after people who tell his story. Quite an enjoyable monster fairy tale. Joyce Carol Oates continues her occasional explorations into the Gothic with "Night-Side", set in the milieu of 19th century spiritualists and seances. There's some very subtle writing here (to be expected from the woman who turned out a classic in "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?"), and the story is an interesting variant of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Facts In The Case of M. Valdemar" in which longed-for contact across the veil of death is established, except the message received is not one anyone wants to hear. "Ladies In Waiting" by Hugh B. Cave, a noted writer for the pulps, is exactly that - a pulpy haunted house story with an odd set-up: a couple returns to an old house where they had been stuck overnight due to a blizzard about a year before. The husband is disturbed because of some unfocused memories, but the wife seems driven by something else. I found the story noteworthy for the atypical (for the pulps), frankly sexual aspect of the ending. Along the same lines (pulpy, not sexual) is Karl Edward Wagner's "Sticks", in which a man explores an old, decaying building in a rural boondock (led their by strange little talismans fashioned of sticks) and finds something terrible in the basement. The fascinating imagery conjured up of the stick-figures helps sustain an outre atmosphere, even if the ending is a bit predictable. Then there's "Duel", the prosaic, suspenseful tale of a man who passes a slow truck-driver....the wrong truck driver, as it turns out, and gets pursued across hill and dale. Richard Matheson's taught, terse, well-paced story is a gem - crafted out of simple detail and plot logic, it was filmed as a made-for-tv movie in the mid-70s by a young director named Steven Spielberg.

An awful, awful man gets his comeuppance in Harlan Ellison's interesting "The Man Who Was Heavily Into Revenge", but leave it to the author to posit a twist that makes the (unconscious) initiator of the karmic havoc just as much a recepient as the bad man, due to some kind of moral physics. Another awful man gets another kind of comeuppance in "Eumenides in the Fourth-Floor Lavatory", although this time the form is a hideous little creature that appears in his tenement bathroom and that just won't stay dead, eventually forcing a dramatic reappraisal of his character. The surprising aspect of this dark, bitter tale by Orson Scott Card is that it touches on a topic that really didn't get much play in horror fiction until the 90s (to say more would be a spoiler). Another author better known for their fantasy and sci-fi, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, appears here with "Best Interests", which presents a future in which our homes are run by computers that control the environment, prepare food, keep track of our time, etc. and then asks the question "what if your computer decided your girlfriend was not working out for you?". It's cute and Yabro has a nice way with dialogue and relationship dynamics, even poisonous ones.

Brian Lumley has always struck me as a solid, but pedestrian and workmanlike writer with very little spark (granted, I haven't read a lot by him). "The Viaduct" has that clunkiness, but the scenario (two boys attempt a dangerous dare of passing hand over hand under a bridge that spans a gorge, a stunt that turns from merely dangerous to deadly) is so compelling and suspenseful (reminding me of Stephen King's "The Ledge") that it's easy to overlook (maybe it helps that I'm scared of heights). The story has some powerful twists, although I found the very end a bit exploitative and tacky. Dennis Etchison is famous for his complex and obtuse style - to be honest, he's a writer who I haven't really "cracked" as of yet, but I give him the benefit of the doubt. His story here, "It Only Comes Out At Night", begins with a very Matheson-esque setup, as a couple drive across the Mojave desert late at night, eventually stopping at a rest stop that appears populated, but which evidences no actual people. I liked the build up to this and also the ambiguous ending, although others may find it unsatisfying. In truth, the story skirts the edge of just how much a writer can get away with without actually giving the reader anything in the end - it's all psychological and "real world" detail underlying an odd situation that doesn't so much resolve as climax.

As would be expected, there are a number of truly exemplary stories. Ray Bradbury's "Gotcha" is strangely moving - a husband and wife play a midnight game of fear, but the wife's skill exposes more of her than the husband wishes he knew. That may sound odd and, yes, it's an odd story that's hard to unravel as to its exact intention (something about the sudden realization of the mismatched capacity for imagination, or change, in a relationship?) but, still, oddly moving as well. "Mackintosh Willy" is an excellent example of Ramsey Campbell's particular style of urban horror - a boy relates the tale of the neighborhood boogeyman, a homeless drunk who haunts the dark recesses of an urban park, and how his influence extends into the boy's life even after death. Psychological and cultural details of adolescence drive the plot while eerie events accumulate in the background, leading to a horrifying ending. Great stuff, almost like a nastier take on Bradbury's idyllic tales of rural youth.

I'm always surprised by how much I enjoy stories by Tanith Lee as, on the surface, she deals in genre areas that usually don't work well for me (heroic fantasy bridging into dark fantasy). Reading "Red As Blood", and marveling at her clear-cut, lyrical language and economy of description in a beautiful recasting of "Snow White" as a vampire tale, it finally struck me that she approaches the same area of fairy tales touched on by Angela Carter, although Carter comes from Literature and Lee comes from Fantasy. Excellent storytelling! Equal to the Bradbury, Campbell and Lin is "The Events At Poroth Farm" by T.E.D. Klein. It's a longish tale (that he eventually expanded into the novel The Ceremonies, which I've intended to read for years) about a young scholar who retires for the summer to an isolated farm in Northern New Jersey in an attempt to do some heavy reading of Gothic literature. But events on the farm, which is run by a young Quaker-esque religious couple, have strange overtones and even the very aspect of Nature turns threatening and corrupt. This very Lovecraftian tale is staggeringly effective, building an aura of bizarre infection through small details and the monstrosity of nature. Many writers attempt to emulate Lovecraft through surface means, but few capture a new twist of the worldview like Klein.

And that's it. Quite a collection and, as I said, worth scaring up if you'd like to know what the many faces of horror were up to in the era of Nixon, Vietnam, Glam, Punk and Disco.

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A Century of Horror 1970-1979: The Greatest Stories of the Decade

David Drake (editor), Michael Bishop, Joyce Carol Oates

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