Weird Tales #334. Darrell Schweitzer

      COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

      Copyright © 2004 by Terminus Publishing Co., Inc. All individual stories copyright © 2004 by their respective authors. All rights reserved; reproduction prohibited without prior permission. Weird Tales ® is a registered trademark owned by Weird Tales, Limited.

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      Ebook edition published by Wildside Press LLC.

      www.wildsidepress.com

      PREFACE

      Weird Tales was the first storytelling magazine devoted explicitly to the realm of the dark and fantastic. Founded in 1923, Weird Tales provided a literary home for such diverse wielders of the imagination as H.P. Lovecraft (creator of Cthulhu), Robert E. Howard (creator of Conan the Barbarian), Margaret Brundage (artistic godmother of goth fetishism), and Ray Bradbury (author of The Illustrated Man and Something Wicked This Way Comes). It continues to this day under the editorship of Marvin Kaye. Visit www.wildsidemagazines.com for more information.

      EDITORIAL STAFF

      Editors: George H. Scithers and Darrell Schweitzer

      Managing Editor: Carol Adams

      Art Editor: Diane Weinstein

      Assistant Editors: Kyle Phillips, Robert Waters, Joseph McCabe, Tim w. Burke, Myke Cole, Rocky Morrow.

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      Cover Illustration: Marianne Plumridge

      THE EYRIE

      Who Killed Horror? The Murder on the Orient Express Solution

      Here we were all set to write an editorial about something else, when, due to the vagaries of the international postal system, we only now (late September) received a copy of the April issue of that admirable British science fiction and fantasy magazines, Interzone, which contains a column by one of our favorite commentators, Gary Westfahl, with the arresting title of “Who Didn’t Kill Horror?” Well, we had to read that right away, and as a result pushed our other editorial idea forward an issue or two.

      Who killed Horror? Those of us old enough (or historically cognizant enough) to remember the 1961 Hugo Awards know that there actually was a publication called Who Killed Science Fiction? which won a Hugo for Best Fanzine that year. Yet Science Fiction isn’t dead, is it? Westfahl doesn’t think so. Nor does the editor of Interzone, obviously, but that is a discussion for another time and place. Horror has been reported dead many times. “Who Killed Horror?” panels have been mainstays at conventions for at least a decade by now, ever since…they found the body? Or did they? To the point, Westfahl concludes:

      “…in confronting what happened to horror, we arrive at a conclusion rarely observed in the literature of detective fiction: the detective eliminates all the obvious suspects and announces to the interested parties, “Something much more complicated than a simple murder is going on here, so we must launch a ­thoroughgoing investigation of the various factors that might have contributed to the victim’s death.”

      In sum, determining who—if anybody—killed horror does not demand the services of police officers or detectives to find a perpetrator; instead it requires a doctor of forensic medicine who is prepared to ­conduct an extensive autopsy and diligently search for the true cause or causes of death. On the basis of my cursory ­examinations, such a figure in the field of horror has not yet emerged. (p. 51)

      But at the same time, the unstated subtext of Westfahl’s article is the Murder on the Orient Express solution. Sorry if this is a spoiler, but we think that the novel—and film—are now so famous that most people know the ending: Agatha Christie, in the course of systematically breaking the “rules” of detective fiction one by one, finally went over the top and did a novel in which everybody participated in the murder, all the suspects, several hangers-on, and probably a few people nobody bothered to notice. Westfahl doesn’t succeed in eliminating any of the usual suspects, pointing out that, when horror was making lots of money, it was only natural that more writers, including less talented ones, would flock to the field, and that publishers were not about to say, “Well this isn’t very good, so, for the sake of the integrity of the genre, we’ll publish something less profitable.” Maybe for a time readers would tolerate the results. Then they didn’t. But other fields have undergone this sort of boom/flood-of-crud/bust cycle, including, most obviously, science ­fiction, which was at the bottom of a collapse when Who Killed Science Fiction? came out. It is very helpful for Westfahl to question the accepted wisdom on this matter. We’d like to ask a few more questions:

      Is the victim really dead? Here’s an anecdote. Back in the 1980s, when one of us (Darrell) began to sell stories to magazines like Night Cry and The Horror Show, we were given a bit of career advice by a very respected editor of the time. “Re-invent yourself,” he said. “Disown everything you have done up till now. Cut all connection with science fiction, fantasy, fandom, conventions, and fanzines and become a new person, a Horror Writer, whose career will be much more profitable. Dress differently. And oh, by the way, grow a moustache.” Well, we ­didn’t. For one thing, we were reluctant to disown everything we’d written up to that time, maybe out of sheer egotism. (We are still not at all embarrassed by The Shattered Goddess or the Tom O’Bedlam stories.) We also don’t like the idea of turning our back on old friends and associates merely for career advantage. Hey, fandom is our tribe. We are a part of it and it is a part of us. There might also be the objection that a moustache would mar such boyish good looks as we allegedly still possessed in those days or become a repository for week-old soup; but the more serious point is that if we had taken that editor’s advice, we might have found ourselves on the proverbial (or metaphorical) bread-line with the rest of the ex-horror writers. Instead, we went on to write The Mask of the Sorcerer and the other Sekenre stories, more Tom O’Bedlam, and quite a bit else which has pleased at least some readers. There might have been short-term career advantage to total re-invention as a horror writer. It worked for Dean Koontz, didn’t it? We might have had a couple good years around 1988, but by the early ’90s, something catastrophic had clearly happened to the horror field. Those black-covered books with the demonic children and the embossed drop of blood visible through the show-through outer cover were disappearing. With them went, frequently, the entire horror section in major bookstores. Publishing houses which used to have major horror lines and full-time horror editors now didn’t. The field imploded, largely collapsing down to the small-press or near vanity-press level, where one could become a “big name” with a print-on-demand novel that sold four hundred copies. The first sign of trouble was something we noted at the time in one of these editorials: the attempt to remove the supernatural elements from horror fiction and repackage it as “Dark Suspense.” Ramsey Campbell, in the interview we did with him for H.P. Lovecraft’s Magazine of Horror, discusses this candidly. He was told in no uncertain terms that ghostlies didn’t sell and he should remake himself in the image of Thomas Harris, he of The Silence of the Lambs fame. It was an astonishing thing to demand of an author who’d written more first-rate supernatural horror fiction than anybody, ever. Fortunately, the ghostly Mr. Campbell survived, and his career continues apace. Fortunately Weird Tales survived, and is now the equivalent of a still-living denizen of the Jurassic, rather like a shark or a ginko tree, which existed in pretty much the same form when dinosaurs ruled the Earth. Many of the ex-horror writers didn’t make it. One year at NECon (Northeast Regional Fantasy Convention, sort of a “summer camp for horror writers”) this was particularly evident when all the freebie books by attending writers were media tie-in novels. That’s where some of them went. Others (like Joe Lansdale) stayed in “dark suspense” and merged into the crime-fiction field (where Lansdale is doing very well, thank you). And a few, like Ramsey Campbell, are still writing what they always did. But it is impossible to deny that, if the field is not dead, it is at a low ebb, comparable to where science fiction was in 1960. We will continue to tap-dance around the question of who killed it. Publishing scuttlebutt has it that one very central, prominent mass-market horror imprint failed so badly, that with classic corporate logic, it was allowed to continue for the next five years with smaller and smaller budgets and print-runs, so accountants could spread the zillion-dollar loss out over several years, rather than take it all at once. When this was over, so