Death ed Stuart David Schiff

Death
ed Stuart David Schiff
1982, Playboy Paperbacks

Two Bottles of Relish by Lord Dunsany (orig Time & Tide, Nov 12, 1932)

A variation on a locked door mystery - a body disposal without leaving the house mystery. This one stayed with me since childhood, though the premise wasn't as locked in as it could be.

Deathtracks by Dennis Etchison

A Nielson family survey taker visits a couple who look for hidden messages in TV laugh tracks to explain why their son died in Vietnam.

Always Together by Hugh B. Cave

One elderly twin murders the other and keeps up a ruse that she's still alive. A good setup for a twist in the tale which never happens.

Toilet Paper Run by Juleen Brantingham

Engaging story set in a girls' reform school, but the ending felt tacked on to fit the genre.

The Green Parrot by Joseph Payne Brennan (orig Weird Tales, July 1952)

Another boring entry in the "that person you thought was alive turns out was already dead" style of ghost story.

Fragment from a Charred Diary by Davis Grubb

Comedy piece about a man using a voodoo doll to commit the political assassinations of the 1960s, escalating from there.

The Scarf by Bernice Balfour

A disfigured woman concealing her face with a scarf and a curious newspaper delivery boy.

Sentences by Richard Christian Matheson

Comedy twist in the tale about a man getting his life rewritten.

Prickly by David A. Riley

A child corrupting Satanist with a monkey familiar kills himself in a British tenement building. Years later, strange creatures scuttle the halls, and children sing nursery rhymes about Prickly.

The Kennel by Maurice Level (orig Tales of Mystery and Horror, 1920)

A cuckold husband finds the body of his wife's lover and disposes of it.

Onawa by Alan Ryan

An adoptive native girl with a taste for blood

A Telephone Booth by Wade Kenny

A gambler can get tips from the future from a pay phone.

Straw Goat by Ken Wiseman

Folk horror with murderous farmers and a sacrificial straw goat.

Horrible Imaginings by Fritz Leiber

Long piece about a creep being obsessed with his neighbor, which I skipped.

The Blind Spot by Saki (orig Beasts and Super-Beasts, 1914)

Comedy piece about a killer servant.

The Dust by Al Sarrantonio

A simpleton shut-in is obsessed with dust.

It Grows on You by Stephen King

A vignette of small town misery which feels more like background to a fuller story. It's been re-written a few times, and later versions may be more tied in to the Castle Rock mythos and be more explicitly horrific. Something about a house getting a new wing built connected with people dying, but not much meat on the bones here.

The Copper Bowl by George Fielding Eliot (orig Weird Tales, December 1928)

Nasty proto-shudder pulp yellow peril story of a French Legionnaire's love being tortured by a Chinese despot.

From Amazon https://amzn.to/3vkEvlR

Free Stuff: Creature! A Chrestomathy of Monstery ed Bill Pronzini

Creature! A Chrestomathy of Monstery ed Bill Pronzini

Available to borrow free at archive.org

TM Gallery: Beware the Beasts ed by Vic Ghidalia and Roger Elwood

Beware the Beasts ed by Vic Ghidalia and Roger Elwood

Paperback from AbeBooks

Shock Rock II edited by Jeff Gelb

Shock Rock II edited
by Jeff Gelb
1994

Favorite Song by Mark Verheiden: A drifter goes through a series of deadend jobs trying to find his favorite song.  Some good graphic violence from the guy behind the Timecop books and TV show.

The Last Time by Michael Garrett: A Mick Jagger lookalike tries to get laid.

The Sad Story of Billie Psych-Out and the Psyched Out Encyclopedia of Rock 'n' Roll by Tia Travis: The unpublished book of a rockabilly guy gets stolen by another rockabilly guy.  The first rockabilly guy drives his car off a bridge.  The end.  I went back to read it again to see if I missed a twist ending.  Not horror.

Elvis Can't Dance by Robert Weinberg and Tina L. Jens: Zombie Elvis gets violent revenge on rappers who think he's racist.

Better to Burn Out by Scott H. Urban: Rocker has been blows up arena.

Scream String by Edo van Belkom: Tell-Tale A string.  Rocker strangles his wife with a guitar string, which screams accusingly as he plays it, though the fact that he left her bloody corpse directly backstage with no effort to hide it probably would have done him in anyway.

Severin Hedz by Thom "Th." Metzger: Psycho groupie.

Mr. Pants by Gary Brander: A loser learns the secret to rock star sex appeal - magic pants.

Dead Legends by Rick Hautala: Gee, all the pictures hanging in this recording studio are of dead rockers.  All the pictures were taken within a week of their death, we can tell somehow.  I had a hard time figuring where this was going, but luckily the entire story was just the premise being restated over and over.

Rockin’ On Home by Nat Gertler: A man meets a woman from another dimension in which all the fictional artists (Ziggy Stardust, Kilgore Trout, etc) are real.  Interesting.  Not horror.

The Undeadliest Game by Bill Mumy & Peter David: Multi-generational groupies meet ageless rockers.  From the kid from Lost in Space and the writer of X Factor.

The Red Sax by Graham Watkins: See Scream String, replace guitar with saxophone.

He’s Hot, He’s Sexy, He’s... by A. R. Morlan - Epistolary account of Jim Morrison bringing back from the dead by a voodoo priest and doing poetry tours.  Not horror.

Mike Baron - Oi Boy: A skinhead in an oi band gets a gypsy curse that forces him to play Culture Club.  From long time Punisher scribe who began writing horror novels decades later.

Track Eight by John F. D. Taff: Cursed extra track on a metal CD.

Graveyard Shift by Jeff Gelb: An abused woman calls in to a late night DJ

Inspiration by Don D’Ammassa: A pop star gets her greatest hits after the people she loves dies.

Shock Rock Jock by Rex Miller: A humiliated actress gets revenge on a Howard Stern stand in.  

The Songwriter by Jesse Sublett: A small band goes touring between Texas and Oklahoma.  The most literary of the bunch, well written aside from not really being able to figure out what happened. 

Rock ’n’ Roll Will Never Die by Max Allan Collins: We made it this far without a vampire story.  At least it's a comedy.

Drumbeats by Kevin J. Anderson & Neil Peart: A rock drummer wandering Africa finds a new sound. I didn't have high hopes for the collaboration of a Rush drummer and Star Wars expanded universe author, but I was pleasantly surprised.  I might even read their steampunk novelization of a Rush album unironically.  

Shock Rock edited by Jeff Gelb

Shock Rock
edited by Jeff Gelb
1992 Pocket Books

I recognize pretty much everyone in this rock n roll themed horror anthology.  Jeff Gelb tends to have some comic book writers in his anthologies who rarely turn to prose.

You Know They Got a Hell of a Band by Steven King: Lost travelers encounter a town taken over by the ghosts of dead rock stars.  Pretty much just the premise, restated several times.  "She and Clark had stumbled into Rock and Roll Heaven, only it was actually Rock and Roll Hell."  Hacky, down to a "This is like something out of the Twilight Zone" conversation.  This is the first King I've read in probably thirty years, and it's the worst thing of his that I can remember.

Bob Dylan, Troy Johnson, and the Speed Queen by F. Paul Wilson: A time-traveler uses his musical knowledge to impress Bob Dylan and take the place of the Byrds in rock history.  There was a better version of this in the 80s Twilight Zone.  There was a reason I've avoided ever reading Wilson that I can't remember, and this hasn't changed my mind.

Odeed by David J. Schow: A band rocks so hard they're a WMD.  Schow does a great job capturing the vibe of ridiculous hard rock testosterone - looking forward to reading The Kill Riff.

Vargr Rule by Nancy A. Collins: Werewolf sex rock.  I've made it this far in my horror reading career before encountering a pack of werewolves raping a dog to death.

Blood Suede Shoes by Ronald Kelly: Rockabilly with a cursed guitar.  Vibes of the Friday the 13th TV series.

The Dead Beat Society by Don D'Ammassa: Revenge from beyond the grave via music video.

Voodoo Child by Graham Masterton: Jimi Hendrix returns to save his soul from the voodoo spell that gave him his talent.

Rites Of Spring by Paul Dale Anderson: Concert goes get mind controlled, bang each other, and forget about it.

Dedicated To The One I Loathe by Michael E. Garrett: Radio station van ironic serial killer.  Felt like a proof of concept for a longer piece.

Requiem by Brian J. Hodge: A bootlegger records the ghosts of a dead band.  There are two stories about how music bootleggers deserve violent death - I didn't think folks who traded Dead tapes in the 90s were that reviled?

Heavy Metal by R. Patrick Gates: Comedy Poe tribute about a sculptor's plan to silence a troublesome boombox.

Bunky by Rex Miller: A DJ is trained to lure in a grossly overweight serial killer.  What is it with Rex and fat psychos?

Bill Mumy & Peter David by The Black '59: Cursed guitar

Groupies by Richard Christian Matheson: A quick interview with an underaged S&M groupie.  Dark, if maybe trying to hard.

Michael Newton - Reunion: Riff on the Stones/Hell's Angels Altamont killing.

Bootleg by Mark Verheiden: In Russia, bootleg plays you.

Weird Gig by Ray Garton: Band plays an undead corporate.

Hide In Plain Sight by John L. Byrne: Groupie werewolf story with a twist straight out of a 50s horror comic.  Yes, this is the same John Byrne from Fantastic Four and the X-Men.

Addicted To Love by Thomas Tessier: Music snob does necrophilia on a Robert Palmer fan. 

Flaming Telepaths by John Shirley: Possibly demonic beings and a tele-evangelist at an alternative club.  Captures the kind of scene in the early 90s, where punk, industrial, metal, new wave, goth, and a little country all mixed together.

Read more: http://vaultofevil.proboards.com/thread/547/jeff-gelb-ed-shock-rock#ixzz5XDZj7O75

Dead Bait 2

Dead Bait 2
Severed Press 2011

A themed horror series that is both horror and stays on theme!  Be still be bleeding heart.  Not as good as the first installment, or maybe the novelty is wearing thin - I suspect these are leftover submissions from the first series.  I'm impressed that they've managed to spread out the topics and types of fish to avoid too much repetition.

Captain Fontaine and the Man Eater by Raleigh Dugal
A midlife crisis tale of shark fishing.  There's a brief hallucinatory scene with a mermaid or something, so you can take that for Magic Realism if you want, but not really horror.

The Mer-Monkey by Paul A. Freeman
An anthropologist goes looking for Fiji mermaids with a stupid twist that doesn't make sense.

Heavy Weather by Murphy Edwards
A sea Captain promises the biggest catch, for a price.

Lonely After Dark by Tim Curran
A vengeful ghost lurks beneath the ice on Spider Lake.  My favorite of the collection, but there's a lot of leftover potential in ice-fishing horror.

Ferry-Moans by J.M. Harris
A guy fishing in the Amazon kills a native girl who becomes bait.  Starts to play off the whole "women are good at fishing because of pheromones" thing before it just fizzles out.

Raised by the Moon by Ramsey Campbell
A college student's car breaks down in a desolate coastal town.  He finds shelter with an old, miserable couple who deliver him to a horde of sea people.  I've never had much luck with Campbell, and this one I had trouble following some of the prose.  We've come this far without a Dagon reference, and I'm genuinely surprised it didn't come up here.

A Summer on Quiet Island by Cody Goodfellow
Another small town with a dying fishing industry, this time on an inbred island with mostly deaf inhabitants and a lot of creepy juvenile sexuality.

Lost in Time by Steve Alten
Noirish double crosses unearthing a buried pirate treasure and prehistoric fish.

The Fish Thing by Guy N. Smith
Smith doesn't even bother phoning it in - the title is about as creative as this gets.  A man kills his unfaithful Romany lover and throws her in a lake.  He goes back to the lake and she turns into the Fish Thing, the end.

Shiners by Michael Hodges
Man fishes with son, man catches weird looking fish, man gets snatched into the sky by some kind of bat thing.

The Worst Thing Ever by Anthony Wedd
Shark attack, written from the viewpoint of an annoying British teenager.  Some decent gruesomeness.

"The Krang" by James Robert Smith
A mercenary shanghais a one-armed beggar to hunt the Krangin an old-timey fantasy.  Slight horror overtones, but I enjoyed it so I'll forgive going a little off-genre.

Available from Amazon for Kindle.

Click here for an excerpt.

Giallo Fantastique

Giallo Fantastique
edited by Ross E. Lockhart
2015 Word Horde

Themed horror anthologies have a hard time staying on topic, and here's one with a pretty ill-defined premise to begin with.  The idea is that these are Giallo mixed with Fantastique.

Giallo is better known as a genre of films: Dario Argento, Mario Bava, that lot.  They're named after yellow-covered paperbacks published in Italy, but instead of it being it's own distinct genre, these were just translations of relatively mundane English language detective novels: Agatha Christie, Edgar Wallace, etc.  Neither the books nor the movies tend towards the supernatural.

Fantastique is a broad French fantasy subgenre in which the supernatural intrudes on the real world and the characters react to it, similar to magic realism.

Let's see how far I get:

Minerva by Michael Kazepis: A woman goes through her dead brother's things.  There is an eccentric detective.  Structured like a giallo, maybe one of the 90s made for TV crappy gialli, up to a surreal, confusing, unsatisfying end.  I wouldn't mind seeing this one fleshed out, but as it is it comes across unfinished.

In the Flat Light by Adam Cesare: A retired giallo director is interviewed for TV.  He passes out and remembers an actress being set on fire on the set of one of his films.  He wakes up and the TV crew is gone.  A decent start, let's see ... oh, that's it.

Terror in the House of Broken Belles by Nikki Guerlain: Bizarro splatterpunk.  Men who did bad things to kids are sexually tortured in Hell.

The Strange Vice of ZLA-313 by MP Johnson: A Jetsons style satire with robots.  I'm guessing it's a satire - turns out I have little tolerance for reading "bot" as a suffix to every other noun.  I skipped ahead to:

Exit Strategies by Brian Keene: The only author I've heard of in this anthology.  The first person narrator gives a paranoid rant about how the US highway system is built on ley lines and spells out sigils and by the way I'm a serial killer and you die now.  Not bad, at least in comparison to the rest, but I get the feeling he had a library of unsold stories and he just pulled this one out to submit.

I really like the cover.

Available for Kindle.

Read a sample.

Look for more horror in the Trash Menace Bookstore.

Trash Menace Bookstore - Alfred Hitchcock Anthologies

Things With Claws

Things with Claws
ed Whit & Hallie Burnett
Ballantine Books 1961

I had to check the book cover several times to make sure these were supposed to be tales of horror, or terror, or even suspense.  Let's see how they did.

The Birds by Daphne du Maurier - The Birds:
You know this one, it's a classic, fine.  The story, or even the radio adaptation, is better than Hitchcock's version.

The Cats by T. K. Brown III:
A couple has two cats put down because they have no room, and this is a metaphor for the couple not having a frank discussion over whether to have children.  We know this because the author mentions it several times, as if a freshman English paper was integrated into the text.  Thrills!

The Cocoon by J. B. L. Goodwin:
A bratty kid gets his comeuppance after pinning moths and butterflies to his wall.  I think there was an EC comic where a guy gets pinned down by giant aliens.  That would have been cooler, but at least we're in the neighborhood of terror.

Baby Bunting by Radcliffe Squires:
A widow hires a mildly creepy guy as a gardener.  He makes her uncomfortable, so she asks him to leave, which he does without incident.  Chills!

The Red Rats Of Plum Fork by Jesse Stuart
A farm has a lot of rats until they figure out how to get rid of them.  Terror!

Butch by Oreste F. Pucciani
A woman is torn between her dog and a suitor before killing the dog with a fire poker.  At least somebody dies.

The Salamander by William B. Seabrook:
A crazy guy wants to catch a salamander for its alchemic properties.  He dreams he catches one, then wakes up and sets his house on fire.  There are no salamanders.

Return Of The Griffins by A. E. Shandeling: 
An ambassador sees griffins that nobody else can see.  This may be a metaphor for world peace.  Horror!

Congo by Stuart Cloete:
The only story I wanted to see more of.  After a miscarriage, a scientist's wife raises a baby gorilla as her own.  The violent ended occurs off page and is summarized in about as many words as this review.

The Cat Man by Byron Liggett:
We've saved the best for last.  A reclusive author takes his pet cats to a private island, where they breed out of control.  This is before the days of reality TV, so I guess it seems horrific that two hundred cats live on an island a mile long.  You can fit that many into a double wide.

Read more at Vault of Evil.