Fantasy Tales 6

by Stephen Jones, David Sutton

Genres: Fantasy

Synopsis

In this frighteningly full issue of Fantasy Tales you will find:

Foreign Parts, a bizarre tale of sex and death by the award winning Neil Gaiman (award-winning comics writer and co-author of the bestselling Good Omens).

Thomas Ligotti opens a window into the beyond in The Spectacles in the Drawer.

And a stomach-churning meal is on the menu in Gobble, Gobble by Logan's Run author William F Nolan.

Plus non-fiction by Clive Barker and stories, verse and art by Kim Newman, Ronald Chetwynd-Hayes, Marvin Kaye, Janet Fox, J.K. Potter and others.

Release date: October 10, 2013

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 160

Sample

Horror, fantasy, dark fantasy, high fantasy, science fantasy, science fiction, cyberpunk, steampunk, splatterpunk . . . In recent years genre fiction has been separated, sub-divided, and then downright ghettoized by publishers, editors and the writers themselves in an attempt to break away from what many see as the restrictions of current publishing categories or else to distance themselves from other practitioners working in the same field.

Over the past couple of years we have seen a number of major anthologies produced that have restricted the types of submissions to either “invitation only” (i.e only interested in “Big Names”) or a specific gender (the glut of women-only horror anthologies). There is no doubt in our minds that this type of fractionating could dangerously dissolve the already precarious critical standing imaginative fiction holds in the wider field of literary endeavour.

One of the great strengths of “our” genre is its unity: taken together, science fiction, fantasy and horror make up a large percentage of the total number of books sold every year. Amongst our ranks we can number such well-known authors as Stephen King, James Herbert, Isaac Asimov, Anne McCaffrey, Piers Anthony, Dean R. Koontz, Anne Rice, Terry Pratchett and many others who, collectively, make the field of fantastic fiction a substantial force to be reckoned with in both terms of quality and success.

But as soon as we start departmentalizing these and other writers, when we call what they do “saga fiction” or “thriller fiction” or “splatterpunk” or whatever, then we begin to lose that strength of unity and with it our distinctive voice in the marketplace.

Of course, this is nothing new. Over the years many of our finest fantasists have been spirited away by the so-called “mainstream” because their contributions to literature have been deemed too important to be labelled simply “fantasy”. In this issue’s “FT Forum”, writer/film-maker/artist Clive Barker argues persuasively that it is about time we reclaimed some of these writers and their works for the fantastique. It is an argument we wholeheartedly support.

We have never purposely limited the contents of Fantasy Tales. Since we began publishing as a small press magazine in 1977, the title has been an open market for both newcomers and established names. This has not always had positive results, however, and we have quite a large backlog of accepted material still waiting to be published. Therefore our criteria for accepting manuscripts have grown stricter in recent years and we’d like to take this opportunity to thank all those writers who have been waiting to see their work published in these pages for their patience—with our expanded format and regular publishing schedule it shouldn’t be too long until we get around to your story.

In the meantime, this latest volume of Fantasy Tales once again offers a fine selection of all types of imaginative fiction, with horror represented by Neil Gaiman, Kim Newman, Thomas Ligotti, Michael D. Toman and Phillip C. Heath, sword & sorcery in the shape of tales from Janet Fox and Mike Chinn, and even some offbeat science fiction courtesy of R. Chetwynd-Hayes, Marvin Kaye and William F. Nolan.

But then again, let’s forget about categories. However you want to describe these stories, we hope you’ll find them entertaining and perhaps thoughtful examples of the fantastique at its best. And, after all, isn’t that what matters?

The Editors

Clive Barker made his impressive debut as a horror writer in 1984 with six volumes of short stories, collectively titled Clive Barker’s Books of Blood. Since then he has written such bestselling novels as The Damnation Game, Weaveworld, Cabal, The Great and Secret Show and has directed the cult movie hits Hellraiser and Nightbreed. Upcoming projects include a new novel, Imajica, and two new films: a remake of The Mummy and an epic science fiction adventure, both for Universal Pictures. Clive has been a regular contributor to Fantasy Tales over the years, and here he shares with us some of his favourite books of the fantastique . . .

Genre makes a most reliable noose; a man could strangle himself a dozen times attempting to separate the threads of one fictional form from another. It’s true that both publishers and booksellers make the process seem easy, dividing Romances from Thrillers from Science Fiction from Horror Fiction, as though these definitions were self-evident. To slicken the process still further, many authors actively strive to produce work that merely echoes previous pieces (their own, or other people’s) thus offering little challenge to the generic status quo. The most interesting work, in any genre, however, is surely going on at the perimeters, where definitions blur. This is nowhere more evident than in the group of books collectively stamped horror. Here there are brilliantly constructed thrillers (try Thomas Harris’s Silence of the Lambs); there are baroque romances (Anne Rice has put the blood back into bodice ripping); there are subtle, psychological pieces (our own Ramsey Campbell has long been a master of that particular form). All the above could be categorized as horror fiction, but in approach, purpose and style they are utterly different from one another.

Asked to define my own place in this parade of dark fictions I’d ask to be filed where some dyslexic clerk might slip me, somewhere between Baum and Burroughs (William, not Edgar Rice); by which I mean that the kind of fiction I write is often a fiction of invented worlds (even when it’s set on earth; or perhaps especially then): the traveller’s tale as written by a man just back from Hell by way of Oz and 42nd Street.

The first such stories I read, inevitably, were fairy tales. I had several volumes as a kid, and found in their darkest corners images and ideas I never tired of examining. Back and back I’d go to keep company with cannibal witches and lunatic queens, dragons and phantoms and malignant spirits, passing over the simpery stuff (kissing and orphans; orphans and kissing) to get to the business of the Wild Wood.

I was by no means alone in my fascination with the chilling stuff; most children show a healthy appetite for the monstrous. It’s only later we’re shamed and bullied into suppressing that appetite, so that for many readers horror fiction is still a guilty pleasure.



Transformations and miracles . . . What more could I ask for? (Art: Clive Barker)

One of the greatest purveyors of said pleasure is Ray Bradbury, and his short fiction, mingling horrors and wonderments in equal measure, were a major discovery in my early teens. With hindsight some of the passages I adored to read aloud to myself seem overwrought, but Bradbury is indisputably a master. Whether set in Illinois or Mexico, or on Mars, his work has the courage of poetry, which is so often missing in contemporary dark fantasy. Without it, this kind of storytelling can so easily become a heartless catalogue of atrocities, or simply ludicrous. The author of the fantastique has not only to present the remarkable, but evoke it, get inside its impossible skin.

Third up on this list of greats comes a play: Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. My interest in theatre was fuelled by annual pantomime visits, but then nearly quenched when I discovered most contemporary theatre to be seen in my native city did not much believe in transformations and miracles. But Faustus, ah Faustus! Poetry, perversity, farce and damnation! What more could I ask for? I adored its rapid changes of tone, its sheer theatricality. Later, when I turned to the subject of infernal bargains myself, in a book called The Damnation Game, it was not Goethe’s thesis-as-theatre which inspired me but Marlowe’s fever-dream.

Marlowe’s work is familiar to a large audience. Not so that of Arthur Machen, who described himself, late in life, as a man who’d “received as his reward insult, cruelty, beggary.” He is still undervalued. Writers with a vision as desolate as his (Poe, for example) are widely read, taught and analyzed; others whose style cannot touch Machen’s (for instance H.P. Lovecraft) are regularly reissued and reprinted. But Machen, though he has a small, devoted following, languishes. Only The Bowmen, published in 1914 in the Evening News, may be familiar; a story of supernatural intervention during the Battle of Mons, which became folklore. It’s a fine story, but just the tip of Machen’s talent.

The co-existence of so-called reality with sacred and supernatural forces much preoccupied another and far more ambitious myth-maker: William Blake. He had more on his mind that writing a chilling page-turner, but then so, I suspect, do a lot of explorers of the fantastique. The agendas may be kept secret, but on those lists I think you’d find such heavyweights as the problem of Belief, the nature of Evil, and the possibility of the Miraculous in a stubbornly rational world. Blake, of course, had no trouble believing in miracles. He saw angels on Peckham Rye. The imagination was, he repeatedly argued, the source of all comprehension: without it, everything fell prey to the reductionists. Paradoxically his work has been taken to the bosom of the very critics and academics who presently scorn with indifference the work of most writers of imaginative fiction, unless it’s in translation. To be a magic realist is worthy of review space, while to write books packaged as science fiction, horror or fantasy is by and large not. I hereby claim William back (though I’d rather there was no need for the struggle; rather the fantastique was allowed its celebrants in the pages of the influential journals just as Le Carre’s work now is, or Chandler’s). I claim him as a star in a particular heaven, which seems to have hung over the British Isles for centuries. So many of the seminal works of fantastic literature—books by Shelley, Stevenson, Stoker, Tolkien, Lewis, Peake, Barrie, Aldiss, Ballard, Wells, and so on—were created in these Isles; a rich tradition which is worthy of more attention than it gets.

Speaking of profusion—and a lot of these choices seem to be inclusionist rather than ex—may I recommend a collection, edited by Kirby McCauley, called Dark Forces, which gathers stories by talents as diverse as Isaac Singer, Stephen King and Joyce Carol Oates, allowing each author space to speak from their dreams. The result is a book in which every story is unlike the one preceding; perfect proof that a genre which is so often perceived as limiting is, in truth, a continent for the roaming.

Finally, to one of the greatest of all source books. The one with the most horrors and miracles, the cruellest ironies, the most hideous revenges. I’ve always been pleased that hotels chose a book of the fantastique for those nights when the TV was dull. Moralists come and go; but stories keep coming back. I never tire of finding in the ancient versions rumours of tales to come. The fiction of our fears is at its best also a fiction of transformation and transcendence; seldom comforting, often paradoxical; by turns hallucinatory and chillingly detached; one moment an account of tribal origins; the next poetry and metaphysics. In the beginning was indeed the word. But only one genre takes such conspicuous account of the void from which that word was uttered.

Neil Gaiman has contributed reviews, interviews and articles to a wide variety of publications, including Time Out, The Good Book Guide, Foundation and Penthouse, amongst numerous others. His short fiction has seen a similarly diverse range of outlets, such as Knave, Tales from the Forbidden Planet 2, Words Without Pictures, Digital Dreams, Midnight Graffiti and Winter Chills. Neil is also co-editor of Ghastly Beyond Belief and Now We Are Sick and the author of The Official Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Companion. He was interested in writing for comics from an early age, and in recent years he has become an award-winning scriptwriter for such titles as 2000 AD, Revolver, DC Comics’ Black Orchid, The Sandman and The Books of Magic, plus the graphic novel, Violent Cases. He is also the co-author (with Terry Pratchett) of the bestselling novel Good Omens. Neil first appeared in these pages in 1989 with a poem, but the grim, contemporary tale that follows marks the author’s first fiction in FT.

The VENEREAL DISEASE is disease contracted as a consequence of impure connexion. The fearful constitutional consequences which may result from this affection,—consequences, the fear of which may haunt the mind for years, which may taint the whole springs of health, and be transmitted to circulate in the young blood of innocent offspring,—are indeed terrible considerations, too terrible not to render the disease one of those which must unhesitatingly be placed under medical care.

Spencer Thomas M.D. L.R.C.S. (Edin.)

A Dictionary of Domestic Medicine and Household Surgery: 1882.

Simon Powers didn’t like sex.

Not really.

He disliked having someone else in the same bed as himself; he suspected that he came too soon; he always felt uncomfortably that his performance was in some way being graded, like a driving test, or a practical examination.

He had got laid in college a few times, and once, three years ago, after the office New Year’s party. But that had been that, and as far as Simon was concerned he was well out of it.

It occurred to him once, during a slack time at the office, that he would have liked to have lived in the days of Queen Victoria, where well brought up women were no more than resentful sex-dolls in the bedroom: they’d unlace their stays, loosen their petticoats (revealing pinkish white flesh) then lie back and suffer the indignities of the carnal act—an indignity it would never even occur to them that they were meant to enjoy.

He filed it away for later, another masturbatory fantasy.

Simon masturbated a great deal. Every night—sometimes more than that, if he was unable to sleep. He could take as long, or as short, a time to climax as he wished. And in his. . .