Superhorror (1976) edited by Ramsey Campbell

“....One so often does behave like a character in a pantomime.” (Robert Aickman)

Readers unfamiliar with Superhorror may wish to read my notes only after reading the anthology.

I have seen Superhorror priced anywhere from fifty dollars to $212.52 on Amazon. Happily, I no longer have a taste for physical books, thanks to allergies. So I have read Superhorror’s contents in other anthologies and collections where they subsequently appeared.

Untraceable contents have been struck off, as they could not be found in any ebook library systems I searched.

“The Viaduct” by Brian Lumley

No Sharks in the Med and Other Stories (2012)

A masterpiece of thickening dread. Two boys decide they will cross the local mine's railroad viaduct. Too bad they first antagonized the "village idiot.”

There is a thin vein of unforgettable short stories in Lumley’s bibliography. I have written about some of them here.

“Fog in My Throat” by R. A. Lafferty

Mischief Malicious (And Murder Most Strange) (1991)

Scientists test a drug designed to alleviate fear of death. Lab rat recipients begin singing and playing rudimentary instruments. But clearing evolution’s curtain of death-fear from human consciousness has another effect, and offers other revelations.

Ghost-fears and night-horrors were parts of it, hysterical fear of falling was a part of it, strangulation was a part and being buried alive was a part, form-changes and walking corpses and intolerable loneliness were parts of it, and the temptation-choice between extinction and hell, and the choking fog that is a pursuing person.

And the other parts of it — No, no, no! There are aspects of the clarified and cloud-cleared death-vision that cannot—

“Christina” by Daphne Castell

“The Case of James Elmo Freebish” by Joseph F. Pumilia

“The Hunting Ground” by David Drake

Balefires (2007)

“The Hunting Ground” is a forceful work of horror. Like his “Something Had to be Done,” it is direct, contemporary, and slick as hell – in the best sense. Several Vietnam Vets in Chapel Hill fight to adjust to civilian life, and then fight simply for their lives, and those of their neighbors.

“The Petey Car” by Manly Wade Wellman

“Wood” by Robert Aickman

Compulsory Games (2018)

“Wood” is everything we are left to believe an Aickman story should be. It is deeply, deeply weird; meandering the way only life at its most macabre does, yet too outlandish for realism. There may be midgets, morticians, and carpenters making coffins, houses, and perhaps marionettes: all distracting our architectural researcher narrator.

Any reader of Aickman should beware, but especially when an Aickman narrator says:

[....] then in the very last month [of the Great War], more or less when Wilfred Owen was killed, if I have it right, I was, not killed, but badly knocked out, since when I have never been quite right in any way, even though I made a good recovery, and a remarkably swift one.

Magnificently, the story then proceeds.

“The Pattern” by Ramsey Campbell

My Favorite Horror Story (2000)

“The Pattern” is the best horror story since E. F. Benson's “The Face.” The whole pattern of chance, of the natural world's dangerous and predatory succulence, is brilliantly valorized. The concept of a “stone tape” apprehended only in reverse challenges the spectrum of popular fiction’s operations. The richly adumbrate plot also recalls David Morrell’s 1988 masterpiece “Orange Is for Anguish, Blue for Insanity,” another depiction of a landscape vibrating with menace.

“Dark Wings” by Fritz Leiber

Heroes and Horrors (1978) by Fritz Leiber

Leiber's stories about women confronting the revelation of their secret selves raises him far above most writers of his generation. His responsiveness and solidarity are beautifully articulate. "Dark Wings" is his finest story, free of all the trappings of genre "horror." The young women are perfectly and sympathetically delineated, as Leiber has them recount some true horrors of everyday life before the sublime finale.

Superhorror lives up to its title. Long out of print, its stories repay attentive hunting-down.

Jay

6 January 2025