Some stories though, were a bit tough to get through and I found myself grinding through them to get to the next one. Or Stephen King's "Rainy Season," first published in this collection, a tale of small-town mores and a warning to travellers that even the most picturesque of towns may turn out to be lethal traps. This might be the lowest point of the book, that two authors expected to deliver the big hits are poorly represented. Come to think of it, there must have been a pretty good reason to quit reading anthologies in the first place, right? The rest of the stories in the book I didn't finish because either there was too much violence or I had no clue what went on and had to stop reading (something that I almost never do).

A collection of new horror stories includes contributions by Stephen King, Harlan Ellison, Dan Simmons, David J. The toads alone make this antho worthwhile, but I really enjoyed "Rant" by Nancy Collins (in the appropriately titled PSYCHOS section). The paperback version of the book, released after the movie, went on to sell more than two-and-a-half million copies. It's a fascinating look at horror, how it's changed over the years due to society, and why we're so entranced by horror novels/movies. Stories from Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, and an absolutely wonderful study on how Harlan Ellison process of writing from misheard words were a few of my favorites.

That said, I think it is important to bear in mind that some people can find stories that are designed to be pleasant, unpleasant. Eight issues were published in total, seven between 1988-1992, with the final Winter 1994/1995 issue (''Midnight Graffiti Special'') appearing several years later. In 2003, he received the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

It turns out that the cover illustration is actually by some total fraud named Martin Cannon, just some unfortunate slob without an original style of his own, proving he’s capable of producing something as derivative as possible of the style of Giger, sans talent.It did have a great line, jauntily poking fun at military/old man lingo: Goldilocks was SAC - Strategic Air Command - headquarters in Omaha, Nebraska; ETA was Estimated Time of Arrival. This was perhaps the first thing I noticed as I sat down to read the book, and this wasn’t very promising. I want to get married says the world's smallest man: I can't explain why I liked this story, as it was pretty strange. She opens the anthology with an eight-page introduction, smugly explaining to her readers every obvious, bromidic reason that people are fascinated by horror. I especially love horror in short story form, so I was delighted to find a new collection - and thrilled to find it so gratifying.

W. JETER, and JOHN SHIRLEY all bring you original tales from the farthest corners of the imagination that until now could only be found in the horror-haunted pages of . Then the last couple of stories reassured me that yes, I’m in the right genre (along with a few other reviews that echoed my thoughts). Lamont's "Sinus Fiction" was evocative of Simmons's 1990 science fiction masterpiece Hyperion - almost difficult to picture in its stark originality.Wait a second, that’s actually pretty crappy; if Giger committed this abortion he’d have set it aflame before it could leave his premises and tarnish his reputation. Many of the stories in this book were very fun to read, all of them being fairly enjoyable in their own sense. Years of abusing inhalants couldn’t possible do the damage that this alleged story manages to do in a few ridiculous pages, even with the women cooing ‘Mmmmm’ for their cherished Domino Man. Schow's "Bad Guy Hats," a detailed study of intraspecific predator-prey relationships and social ecology that will have you scrutinizing even the kindest-seeming of people with suspicion for years to come. His award-winning short story "The River Styx Runs Upstream" is easily one of my favorite short stories, ever.

They could blissfully continue to struggle through joyless slop like Dickens, I was getting a little taste of Harlan Ellison, Dan Simmons, J. Rather shockingly, Neil Gaiman, who I usually couldn’t care one way or the other about, actually has one of the few worthwhile reads within, with “Murder Mysteries”, a roundabout indictment of God’s alleged Master Plan and borrowing heavily from the once-popular mythos of something referred to as 'heaven' and ‘angels’. Further, Horsting attempts to flatter each author with an introductory bio, but just comes off overly congratulatory and all too chummy. It specialized in all kinds of horror and weird fantasy fiction from authors both new and established.I will give reasonable warning that the biggest difference with this collection from others I have read is the editing. Some of them are decent: the Gil Lamont yarn “Sinus Fiction” begins promisingly until falling apart in some misunderstanding-between-the-sexes codswallop, and the usually-reliable Dan Simmons and Harlan Ellison both offer up stories which are well below their standard, with “The River Styx Runs Upstream” and “Where I Shall Dwell in the Next World”, respectively. NANCY COLLINS demystifies the messiah reborn, an avenging angel of the suburbs with a strange and savage appetite.