Horror didn’t die in the nineties. It pulled back its reins, regrouped, and emerged as something different than we had in the eighties.
The market was flooded with weak product that eclipsed the truly worthy books being published. Those inferior books have ironically become more valuable collector’s items than most of the better titles of the time.
Society had, in a way, caught up with horror. The arts turned darker, with disturbing images in alternative music videos, a new hyper-realistic breed of violence in the movies, and the bright fashions of the eighties morphed into body art and modification.
Horror fiction was evolving in interesting ways. Splatterpunk, as we knew it in the eighties, was mostly dead. Things turned darker, more transgressive, and not as humorous. The Dell-Abyss line of paperback originals launched in 1991, starting with Kathe Koja’s groundbreaking The Cypher.
Erotic Horror grew in popularity, evidenced by the long-running Hot Blood series of anthologies from Jeff Gelb and Michael Garrett.
Other than a lot of vampires and serial killers, horror was becoming harder to find on the bookstore shelves. So editors and writers turned to independent publishing.
Indie publishers have always been a part of the literary world. Arkham House was the horror forerunner, and others followed suit in the decades to come. The most notable small presses of the eightes were Dark Harvest and Scream Press.
In 1988 an enterprising young horror reader and budding author named Richard Chizmar started an independent magazine called Cemetery Dance. It grew in popularity and Chizmar began publishing books in 1992.
Richard Chizmar’s editorial prowess was perfectly aligned with my own tastes right from the start. He published the writers I loved the most in CD magazine, and when a new voice was in its pages, I almost always became a fan.
Chizmar’s vision leaned more toward the suspense side of horror and not as much in the direction of dark fantasy. His literary roots presumably included noir fiction as well as the supernatural. Rich seemed more interested in the human side of horror. His own writing and his editorial choices delved into the psychology of evil more than cosmic entities and ancient monsters.
We’ve always had an abundance of talent in the horror field. Too much to confine to the pages of a quarterly magazine. Cemetery Dance eventually became known as a publisher of excellent anthologies, but before they released their first hardcover, Chizmar edited a book called Cold Blood. It was published by Mark V. Zeising in 1991.
I read about Cold Blood, but the book was unfortunately too rich for my poor blood in ’91. I was scraping by and lucky to be able to afford brand new paperbacks from WaldenBooks. The small press was out of my short reach.
I later obtained a copy of the trade edition of Cold Blood, and not at all to my surprise it became a favorite. The book is a perfect snapshot of the genre at the time. Older writers were present, and the new guard was punching its way into the field.
Look at the names in the table of contents. There was F. Paul Wilson, Chet Williamson, Ronald Kelly, Joe R. Lansdale, John Shirley, Bentley Little, Brian Hodge, Rex Miller, J. N. Williamson, Nancy A. Collins, William F. Nolan, Rick Hautala, Ed Gorman, Richard Laymon, Andrew Vachss, David B. Silva, Ramsey Campbell, and Douglas E. Winter.
Winter provides an erudite Introduction in which he discusses the nature of horror and horror fans. I’m sad that he no longer has a strong presence in the field. We desperately need his knowledge and intelligence in the current world of horror journalism.
The fiction in Cold Blood starts off with the very welcome return of Repairman Jack in a story from F. Paul Wilson. Other early highlights are a play adaptation of Lansdale’s cutting “By Bizarre Hands;” a nasty piece of work from Ron Kelly; Brian Hodge providing a media satire about serial killer lovers that predates Natural Born Killers; and a story of racial justice and injustice from Bentley Little.
There’s a touch of the usual midpoint anthology slowdown in Cold Blood, but things pick up considerably with “How It Was with the Kraits” by Nancy Collins. It’s followed by outstanding pieces from William F. Nolan, Rick Hautala, Ed Gorman, and Richard Laymon.
Cold Blood winds down with a wonderful David B. Silva story called “Bleed Red, Bleed White,” an excerpt from Ramsey Campbell’s novel-in-progress The Count of Eleven, and a truly bizarre story by Tom Elliott. I knew of Elliott from his work with Afraid magazine, but I believe “Colorado Gothic” is the only story I’ve ever read by the man. I need to seek out more.
Everything goes in the world of horror fiction today. It’s a mixed blessing. While there’s certainly no lack of great fiction to imbibe, it’s all too easy to get overwhelmed by the sheer volume of work being published. Back in ’91 I could keep up with the field and trying nearly every new author was feasible. It was a fine time to be a genre reader, and Cold Blood is as good a representation of the era as you’re likely to find.
The Zeising hardcover of Cold Blood is, as far as I know, the only limited edition ever published. It’s long out of print, which is too bad. It’s a lovely book, with a nice Arnie Fenner cover that brings to mind the art of Leo and Diane Dillon. There are stunning endpapers and a very cool spider and its web hanging down from the title on the stamped front of the book.
The good news is, as I write this you can find used copies of Cold Blood for well under the twenty dollar original price of the trade edition. This is one dead tree you’ll want to drag home and keep.
Mark Sieber learned to love horror with Universal, Hammer, and AIP movies, a Scholastic edition of Poe’s Eight Tales of Terror, Sir Graves Ghastly Presents, The Twilight Zone, Shirley Jackson’s The Daemon Lover, The Night Stalker, and a hundred other dark influences. He came into his own in the great horror boom of the 1980’s, reading Charles L. Grant, F. Paul Wilson, Ray Russell, Skipp and Spector, David J. Schow, Stephen King, and countless others. Meanwhile he spent as many hours as possible at drive-in theaters, watching slasher sequels, horror comedies, monster movies, and every other imaginable type of exploitation movie. When the VHS revolution hit, he discovered the joys of Italian and other international horror gems. Trends come and go, but he still enjoys having the living crap scared out of him. Cemetery Dance has published his nonfiction collections He Who Types Between the Rows: A Decade of Horror Drive-In and He Who Types Between the Rows 2: Horror Drive-In Will Never Die. He can be reached at [email protected], and at www.horrordrive-in.com.
