Weird Tales #313 (Summer 1998). Darrell Schweitzer
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Hodgson’s 1908 classic The House on the Borderland.
And what about magazines? There was a lot of talk about magazines at the World Horror Convention. What particularly threw me for a loop was that I found myself regarded as a hugely-successful, senior figure. What this turned out to mean was that Worlds of Fantasy & Horror (the Once and Future Weird Tales) is one of two bookstore-distributed magazines in the field which has been around for more than a couple of years and has a circulation in four figures. (The other one is Richard Chizmar’s Cemetery Dance.) The editors on the magazine panel with me spoke of 200-copy print-runs. Writers told how wonderful it was to get a whole cent a word for fiction, and how they’d take just copies if need be, to get published. (Weird Tales and Cemetery Dance pay three cents a word and up.)
Now I had never seen ours as a large operation at all. But then I always saw us to be in the broader spectrum of fantastic-fiction magazines, along with The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and Interzone. In that company, yes, we are one among many. In the context of what was being accounted as “the horror field” in Niagara Falls, I guess WoF&H must have seemed a titan. Or, to use an architectural metaphor, after all the skyscrapers and castles and gigantic temples have crumbled into dust, two modest little cabins in the back woods—ours and Richard Chizmar’s—are the only things left standing, and therefore the most colossal edifices in the world. Perhaps the “field” is defined too narrowly.
I had another quite interesting conversation in Niagara Falls, with a fellow who ran a “horror” bookstore and boutique in California, one of those places where you can get, in addition to books and magazines, black t-shirts, skull jewelry, etc., etc.
The gentleman’s store moved a lot of books and magazines, he said, particularly anything about vampires. Would he want to carry Worlds of Fantasy & Horror? Well, no. It isn’t “horror.” But our title says “Horror,” and the current issue’s cover has a naked demoness popping out of an eyeball, and we publish Thomas Ligotti, Ramsey Campbell, David Schow, and any number of top horror names.
No, he explained. That’s not “horror.”
Well, by way of a thought experiment, I asked (knowing perfectly well where this was heading): Would his “horror” bookstore carry a book by Clark Ashton Smith, surely one of the most nighmarish writers of all time?
No. Smith has some “dark” elements, I was told, but isn’t horror.
Well how about Edgar Allan Poe? Not “The Masque of the Red Death”? Probably not. I don’t want to tell the bookstore owner his business. He knows better than I what he can and cannot move, but I think this is the heart of the problem: If we define “horror” as scary fiction (with no other emotional tones allowed) which exists only in a modern setting, perhaps only in a Generation-X frame of reference, and if a “horror magazine” is one which publishes such material, to the exclusion of all else, then the field is very small indeed. There is a very intense, very narrow audience for punk/Goth/vampire fiction, but this is—dare we say it?—a passing fad, likely last no longer than the “psychedelic” science fiction of 1967, or a story Henry Kuttner did in the late 1930s about space explorers who landed on the Planet of the Jitterbugs.
An editorial policy of all modern-scene horror—and nothing else—is limiting, especially for a magazine. Of the stories in our last issue, Ian Watson’s “My Vampire Cake” wouldn’t exactly do because it’s funny. The Tanith Lee and Darrell Schweitzer stories are not “horror” because they have imaginary settings. (Which was why the bookstore owner disqualified Clark Ashton Smith. The paradox is this: If the story’s about a Vile, Rotting Thing from beyond the grave, and it’s set in New Jersey in 1997, that’s “horror.” If it’s about a Vile Rotting et cetera and set on the Earth’s last continent in the far future, or in ancient Hyperborea, that is “fantasy.”) The Dunsany and Shipley stories in recent issues don’t quite make it either, leaving, at best, Ligotti’s “Teatro Grottesco” and R. Chetwynd-Hayes’s “The Chair.” So, in the eyes of that California store owner, our magazine isn’t “horror” enough for his clientele, and he may be right.
While we’d like to get our magazine into that California store, at the same time we have to stop and realize that there’s been a severe winnowing out, and we’re just about all that’s left standing. We must be doing something right. This isn’t the time for us to start emulating the losers.
Our magazine continues to be what it’s always been. Weird Tales, throughout its 75-year history, has presented a range of imaginative fiction, from Conan the Barbarian to H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos to the psychic-detective stories of Seabury Quinn. It found room for stories of childhood terrors by Ray Bradbury (most of the ones that make up his classic collection, The October Country,) and H. Rider Haggard-esque (or Indiana Jonesish) Lost Race novels by Edmond Hamilton. We intend the same, with a common denominator, which may be best expressed by a wonderful phrase, used by a correspondent several issues back, to describe the ideal Weird Tales story: “ominous and magical.”
Roll that phrase around in your mind. Balance both halves of it carefully. That’s what the whole field needs. Magic. Imagination. The ability to get out of a completely mundane frame of reference. Fantastic horror.
Too much horror has no imaginative content at all anymore. There’s only room for so many serial-killer books. If writers, booksellers, editors, and even readers start seeing horror only in terms of gore and crazy people with knives, then everyone will tire of it very quickly. By all indications, that’s already happened. The field is wasteland. Dare we suggest that the public is bored with more and more imitations of fewer and fewer books?
Good horror attracts as much as it frightens. It does not repel. It is a careful balance of wonder and terror—as Fritz Leiber so well articulated in various essays, and practiced superbly in his fiction. It does not, Stephen King’s disastrous advice to the contrary, “go for the gross-out,” something which King himself, fortunately, doesn’t do very often.
At the Convention, a small-press publisher was gleefully reading from a new novella which went for the gross-out as much as possible—in fact to a degree seldom seen in legally circulated literature.
Well, fine. This is all very amusing, even as small boys amuse themselves at camp with disgusting stories told in the dark. But that direction seems to me a dead end. It’s a great way to sell about four hundred copies in an expensive, limited edition and no more.
Meanwhile, H.P. Lovecraft sells in the hundreds of thousands of copies, all over the world. I’ve since suggested another topic for a convention discussion: “What Can the Horror Field Learn from Lovecraft?”
What indeed? Lovecraft was around before the rise of “Modern Horror” and he’s still there after its demise. So maybe he knew something too:
Wonder and terror, carefully balanced.
* * * *
Now we (lapsing imperious once again) admit we’re speaking from the position of a winner (or at least a survivor), but none of the foregoing is intended to suggest we’re happy with the state of affairs. We note with guarded optimism that horror books are still being published. As it was a couple decades ago, horror books now have to be slipped into other categories: mystery, science fiction, fantasy, and mainstream.
Bestsellers are bestsellers. King and Koontz still sell. They will continue to sell. Otherwise we suspect that horror fiction is going to have to hide out in the small presses for the next few years, until the buyers for the large bookstores forget just how badly all those horror paperbacks of the boom years sold. Then it will be time to start again, cautiously. We hope there will be more Wonder and less Gross-Out next time around.
More successful magazines will strengthen us all. One hopeful sign is Wetbones, a new magazine started by Paula Guran, who was at that World Fantasy Convention, with an attractive new issue, which, alas, hasn’t had much distribution so far. (Our first impulse was to help. We carried copies back on the plane, to test-market in Philadelphia.) Send her a subscription. See her ad elsewhere in this issue.
We’d like to see other editors and publishers