The Year's Best Horror Stories by Gerald W. Page

Only a few of them can attract the sort of writing talent necessary to draw notice, and the majority are put together by people whose editorial abilities and taste are more hopeful than developed.

Most of them are of negligible quality, or else geared to forms of fantasy other than horror (particularly to heroic adventure). But since Derleth’s death in 1971 the small semi-professional magazine has played an increasingly important role in the field. It is true, of course, that at the demise of Weird Tales magazine in 1954, the anchor of the field became August Derleth through the agency of his editing and publishing of the Arkham House line of books. Where, just a few short years ago the challenge of putting together a book such as this one lay in finding enough good stories to include, today there is the anguish of deciding what must be left out because there is only so much space available.īrennan’s Macabre is no longer published, but in a large part the current growth of the horror field owes much to Macabre and its successors. Grant are preparing books of original stories. Anthologists as astute as Kirby McCauley, Ramsey Campbell and Charles L. Magazines as diverse as Fantasy and Science Fiction, Mike Shayne Mystery, and Penthouse make it a point to carry good horror fiction with some frequency. When this series of anthologies was launched a few years ago, there still was no regular professional magazine devoted to horror fiction. It differed from professional magazines in several respects, notably its small circulation, and the lack of newsstand distribution but it was not quite a fan magazine in the sense of the science fiction fanzines, either, principally because it was trying to provide a serious outlet for horror writing that did not exist at that time in any professional magazine.

In 1957 Joseph Payne Brennan began a small magazine called Macabre, which ran short weird fiction and poetry.

The Year's Best Horror Stories by Gerald W. Page