Confederacy of the Dead

by Martin H. Greenberg (Editor), Richard Gilliam, Edward E. Kramer

A collection of Civil War fantasy and horror stories by William S. Burroughs, Anne McCaffrey, Michael Moorcock, and other writers

Genres: Horror, Short Stories, Fantasy, Anthologies, Westerns, Historical Fiction, Science Fiction

496 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1993

About the author

Martin Harry Greenberg was an American academic and speculative fiction anthologist. In all, he compiled 1,298 anthologies and commissioned over 8,200 original short stories. He founded Tekno Books, a packager of more than 2000 published books. In addition, he was a co-founder of the Sci-Fi Channel.

For the 1950s anthologist and publisher of Gnome Press, see Martin Greenberg.

Reviews

[Craig · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an anthology of original stories about the Civil War that Greenberg edited in collaboration with Kramer and Gilliam. It's much longer and darker in tone than his Civil War Fantastic anthology that DAW published, but the two can be seen as companion volumes. The contributors include William S. Burroughs, Anne McCaffrey, Ed Gorman, Lee Hoffman, Owl Goingback, Charles Grant, and quite a few other well-known names. I especially liked the stories by Michael Moorcock, Nancy A. Collins, Karl Edward Wagner, and George Alec Effinger.

[Quentin Wallace · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've always thought the Civil War a great setting for horror stories. The war itself was horrible, so throw in monsters and the supernatural and it's just going to get even more horrific.

This collection was like many with some good stories and some not as good, although there were more good than bad. There's plenty of potential for future Civil War horror stories and novels.

[R.]

Win and lose, round and round.
Wind it up, it's running down.

Scrounged this for one story: "Death Fiend Guerillas" by William S. Burroughs, a four-page tale that was nominated for a Bram Stoker award in 1993. Not so much a horror story as a macabre vignette that takes on the desolation of war - pick one, really - and the notion that God has a Hand down here stirring up the bottomless pot. I don't really recommend tracking the story down - it's late Burroughs and certainly there are some nice phrases, but it's way too brief and much too skeletal. The Stoker nomination was probably an attempt to recognize past mastery in the subject...Kind of the way colleges and universities drape Billy Joel with honorary doctorates when - what? - it's been over 20 years since An Innocent Man.

[Charles · Rating 4 out of 5]

My cover is different but I thought this was a really well conceived anthology and that it had a lot of good stories. Imagine George Romero's Night of the Living Dead set in the Civil War.

[Stephen Antczak · Rating 3 out of 5]

A story I co-wrote with Anya Martin, "The Master's Time," is in this book.

[Eric · Rating 2 out of 5]

This sat on my shelf for, no exaggeration, two+ decades. It took social isolation time to finally have me slog through it. I want to like it, have been wanting to like it since the mid-90s when I first picked it up. But, alas, I didn't.

[Jacquie]

Includes a rare short story by Anne McCaffrey
McCaffrey's sentimental plantation claptrap

[Royal Hinshaw · Rating 3 out of 5]

Three and a half stars. This collection of horror and fantasy stories connected to the War Between the States was released in 1993. I read it not long after, while I was in college, and recently revisited a few of the stories that made an impression on my memory. The one that stuck with me the most is horrifying in an entirely different and more real way: Nancy A. Collins’ “The Sunday-Go-To-Meeting Jaw”. My favorite of the more conventional horror tales is Doug Murray’s “The Crater”, in which the miners digging tunnels to lay charges under the Confederate fortifications around Petersburg encounter something else underground. Other highlights for me included the entries from William S. Burroughs, Anne McCaffrey, Jerry and Sharon Ahern, Nancy Holder, and the collaboration between Anya Martin and Steve Antczak. Unsurprisingly, most of the stories are set in the South and, especially the ones that tilt towards horror, in the late stages of the war. With so much death and despair everywhere, it should not surprise that a number of the stories involve zombies. Unfortunately, I don’t share most people’s apparent fascination with the undead, so none of these stand out in my memory.

[Dollie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Wasn't really all that impressed with the stories.

[Dhavok · Rating 4 out of 5]

A well-chosen collection of short stories.