Ghastlies, ghosts, ghouls, and gators
Be afraid! Be very, very afraid!
Ghastlies, ghosts, and ghouls are the order of the season. All right, maybe
not.
Let’s face it: Scaring people isn’t
so easy anymore. If nothing else, we’ve become acclimated to fear. Natural
disasters abound and horrific stories grace our television screens all day
long. Alternatively, scary stories have been told since someone first wanted a
little nookie by the fire. Halloween demands something a bit different.
You should know this: I have a
stuffed baby alligator. Currently, it’s perched on a wall. The poor, dead beast
passed down in my family from brother to brother like a bad reputation in
middle school.
A long time ago, when I was still
green, in the Berkshires, when everything was brown, I ran a weird old mansion
at the end of a weird old street. I was cook, janitor, and houseboy. One
October night I was called upon to provide some entertainment for some
young’uns out by the campfire. I hid the gator carcass under my jacket. I spun
some yarn, mixing equal parts urban myth and ancient specter. I don’t remember
the details of the tale rightly, but the conclusion allowed me to whip out my
mummified reptile and wave it spookily at the audience. I seem to recall that
one of the youths puked.
There’s nothing like a good scary
story. And you don’t need to make it up yourself. People who scare people, it
turns out, like to do so in print as well as around the campfire.
Poe and King, Straub and Koontz are
reasonably accessible, but let’s surprise the kids this year. Independent
houses are publishing some of the best spooky stories in small runs (usually
less than 1000 books — sometimes much less). This often makes the books
expensive, but they also come with all sorts of frightening bonuses, like
slipcases, author signatures, artist sketches, and vials of blood…. Horror
authors are a different breed.
Ash-Tree
Press (www.ash-tree.bc.ca) started in 1994 in Wales with 150 copies of a
quintet of frightening stories. Three years later, the operation moved to
Canada. Hundreds of macabre stories later, the press is going strong, with
paperback and hardback editions. Ash-Tree took its name from a tale by the man
who dragged the ghost story away from the campfire and into the modern era,
M.R. James. An English don who developed a reputation for telling spooky tales,
James gave in to the clamor and published his first collection a century ago.
These eerie narratives remain the standard against which all ghost stories must
be measured. Classic ghost story collections often have one or two.
Almost 15 years ago, the owner of a
Cleveland bookshop offered me free copies of Cemetery DanceMagazine (www.cemeterydance.com) and Zippy Comics. Apparently they had been shipped to
him as a promotion in the hope that he could inspire some interest among his
clientele. No one else was interested. I took both, acting pleased, but I was a
little put off by the Cemetery Dance cover. For weeks, the scary little magazine sat on the table, mocking my fear.
When I cracked the cover, I was addicted. Then, they started publishing books.
Over the years, all the big names have cropped up in Cemetery Dance Publications, because they do fancy books with all
the geegaws: limited editions, slip-cased, signed, black gold, in Beverly
Hills. Children’s stories to splatterpunk have all been treated with the care
usually reserved for Easton Press pablum.
Arkham
House (www.arkhamhouse.com) is the granddaddy of the creepy small presses.
Started in 1939, Arkham had the primary intent of keeping the freaked-out
oeuvre of H.P. Lovecraft in print. The wonderful story, Pickman’s Model, alone, was worth the effort. Near the end of World
War II, Arkham expanded its mandate to include books about Lovecraft, or his
characters… or his friends… or the publisher’s friends. In recent years, the
mandate faded away and science fiction books tended to dominate the Arkham
catalog, but the world would have had a few less cold shivers and willies
without their efforts.
— Craig Brownlie
This article appears in Oct 19-25, 2005.
