Weird Tales #313 (Summer 1998). Darrell Schweitzer
COPYRIGHT INFO
Weird Tales #313 is copyright © 1998 by DNA Publications, Inc. Copyright assigned to Wildside Press LLC. All rights reserved. For more information, contact the publisher, Wildside Press.
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Cover art by Jason Van Hollander.
STAFF
Editors: Darrell Schweitzer and George H. Scithers.
Managing Editor: Carol Adams.
Art Editor: Diane Weinstein.
Assistant Editors: Kyle Phillips, Jan B. Berends, Pat Buard, and Robert Waters.
THE EYRIE, by the Editors
“That Is Not Dead Which Can Eternal Lie…”
We’re ba…a…ck!
Welcome, just in time for our 75th anniversary, to the pages of Weird Tales, The Unique Magazine, the greatest of all American pulp magazines, once home to H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Ray Bradbury, and even (believe it or not) Tennessee Williams.
To fill you in briefly: Terminus Publishing Company revived Weird Tales in 1988 and published nineteen issues, numbers 290 through 308, up until 1994. Then we lost our license when Hollywood came calling and offered Weird Tales Ltd., the owners of the title, scads of money for use of the title in a television project. Quite sensibly, WT Ltd. took the aforesaid scads. The television project, ultimately, failed to pan out. Now Terminus has been able to lease the title again and resume publication where we left off.
Have we ever been away?
You will notice that this issue is numbered 313 and the last “official” issue was #308, so that implies that the four issues of Worlds of Fantasy & Horror count as Weird Tales. For one thing, we find it enormously convenient to avoid renumbering everyone’s subscriptions. But there’s more to it than that.
When we lost our license back in 1994, we didn’t want to quit. The obvious alternative was to think up another title which fit behind the big red W on the cover and keep on publishing, with continuity, so that the letter column in the first Worlds of Fantasy & Horror referred back to the previous Weird Tales. But for the title on the cover and contents page, it was the same magazine. So, think of Worlds of Fantasy & Horror as Weird Tales-in-exile, a means of keeping the magazine alive until we could get the title back.
What’s in a name? If the name is Spicy Oriental Zeppelin Stories, maybe not very much, but Weird Tales has, for most of this century, commanded respect. We can only promise you that we intend to continue with a magazine worthy of that name.
We are pleased to announce that we have also acquired a new publisher, Warren Lapine, of DNA Publications, who is one of the most successful and capable fiction magazine publishers in the business. His science fiction magazine Absolute Magnitude and his vampire-fiction magazine Dreams of Decadence actually make money in a time when most magazine publishers are feeling a sense of doom and gloom, and, particularly, small-press horror magazines seem to be dying like mayflies. We we have joined Warren Lapine’s stable and feel very comfortable there. Our future seems brighter than it has been in a long time. Quarterly publication of Weird Tales will resume, as of this issue. You will continue to see stories by your favorites—and by bright new talents—in future issues. We have some on hand by S.P. Somtow, Tanith Lee, Nicholas DiChario, and quite a few others.
One other change: since George Scithers is no longer officially Publisher, he and Darrell Schweitzer share the position of Co-Editorship, and the “Editorial We” becomes, once again, a genuine plural.
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Meanwhile, half of the aforesaid “We,” Darrell, found ourselves, flattered, honored, and more than a little surprised by events at the 1997 World Horror Convention in Niagara Falls, New York. We attended in the capacity of Editor Guest of Honor and found the whole thing decidedly eye-opening—
Let’s dispense with the formalities. This is Darrell here. The other guests of honor were writers Joe Lansdale, Poppy Z. Brite, and Ramsey Campbell, and artist Rick Berry. In such company the thought inevitably occurred to me that, after attending (by now) literally hundreds of other conventions in lesser roles, Maybe I Had Arrived.
But arrived at what? Conditions in the horror field have been so dire in the past few years that I was left wondering if there would be anything left to have a World Convention about.
“I have a feeling this may be either a pep rally—or a wake,’’ I said before the affair. It was neither. It was more like a visit to an intensive care ward. Reports of the patient’s demise may be a trifle exaggerated, but Horror is, right now, on the critical list.
Let me say right away that it was a pleasant weekend, everyone was very nice, the Falls are as wet as ever (though the Americans turn them off at night) and the twin towns of Niagara Falls themselves (New York and Ontario) retain that subtle atmosphere of down-at-the-heels tackiness so reminiscent of a somewhat run-down section of the Atlantic City boardwalk plunked down in the middle of the continent.
It might best be summed up in the fun-house maze called Dracula’s Haunted Castle on the Canadian side, which has an impressive exterior; loud, blaring speakers announcing the frightful delights within; and enormous, dripping fangs between which one walks to reach the entrance. But the inside is not quite as good—and scarcely more elaborate—than the “haunted house” you may have put together with your friends at Halloween when you were twelve.
In fact, the one the twelve-year-olds in my neighborhood put together, which scared the crap out of me when I was perhaps six, was considerably more imaginative. There was this girl dressed up as a witch in what might have been an old wedding gown. She glowed from the blue light behind her, and she offered me a jar of what I later realized were olives. “Reach in,” she said in an alluring, spooky voice, “and feel the eyes.” At that point I ran out screaming.
And she didn’t have to rely on a guy popping a paper bag behind your back to deliver the frights, which, I kid you not, the Niagara Falls Dracula castle did.
Delivering the frights is what the game is all about, and the impression I got at World Horror was that no one is delivering much of anything right now. The convention was notably lacking in professional activity, in stark contrast to the bustling World Fantasy Conventions, where authors, agents, editors, and publishers gather by the hundreds to make the deals that determine what you’ll be reading for the next year or so. Representatives of the major New York publishers were conspicuously absent.
I try to convince myself that the Niagara Falls Dracula castle isn’t quite the appropriate metaphor for the state of the horror field right now. And yet…
At the time of the convention, there was no “horror editor” at any publishing house in the United States. There was a time, ten or so years ago, when great quantities of black-covered, gold-embossed paperbacks with demon children or show-through drops of blood poured into the bookstores, when becoming a horror writer was actually a valid strategy for a beginning novelist who wanted to make a living. There was, admittedly, a flood of crud; but lots of good books got published too. The Dell Abyss line promised (and sometimes delivered) great things. The horror field gleamed with prosperity. Writers left fantasy or science fiction, hoping for greener pastures (and bigger paychecks) in the horror field. Editors gathered at conventions to court the writers. The writers gathered to court the editors. The New York publishing world spent lots of money on parties and promotional events.
That’s all gone. At the Niagara Falls convention there was talk that A Certain Publisher Who Shall Remain Nameless was starting a horror line with the worst possible contracts and might get away with it, as the only game in town.
The great Empire has fallen; and the surviving writers, if lucky, will be serfs.
Take a look in the horror section at your local chain bookstore. It’s a lot smaller. Once you take away the brand-name writers who don’t need a category to make their books sell—King, Koontz, McCammon,