Nightmare Magazine, Issue 48 (September 2016) by John Joseph Adams

Author:John Joseph Adams [John Joseph Adams]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Joseph Adams
Published: 2016-08-30T22:49:48+00:00

©2014 by Usman T. Malik. Originally published in Truth or Dare?, edited by Max Booth, III. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Usman T. Malik is a Pakistani writer of strange stories. His work has won the Bram Stoker Award and been nominated for the Nebula. He resides in two worlds.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight

NONFICTION

The H Word: The People of Horror and Me

Nick Mamatas | 1455 words

The horror fiction field most often reminds me of a particular comic strip from the long-running series Cathy. I was never a huge fan of the strip, but this one stuck with me: Cathy has an epiphany. She doesn’t actually have that many bad hair days; she has a perception problem. One time, a decade prior, she looked in the mirror and her hair was utterly perfect. That apex one-time-only great hair day became in her mind what she looked like on average, and thus she was constantly bedeviled by bad hair days. So too the horror field, and the boom in horror fiction that lasted from the mid-1970s through to the late 1980s.

I was part of the target demographic of the horror boom, but I never really got into it. Freddy and Jason I didn’t care for, and the paperbacks I read ranged from the modern classics (Carrie, The Boys from Brazil) to stuff like Mendall Johnson’s Let’s Go Play at the Adams’ (which I still like!) and Rex Miller’s Slob, which was actually read to me at work. In college I was a camera operator for my university’s teaching hospital, taping everything from symposia to kidney transplants, and the technical director liked to keep himself amused by doing Chaingang’s victims in different voices into my headphones. But I was more interested in science fiction, and in the “transgressive” fiction of Kathy Acker and Dennis Cooper. I even came to Lovecraft, not thanks to classic horror collections, but thanks to the 1995 anthology This Starry Wisdom, which I picked up because it contained work by J. G. Ballard, William S. Burroughs, and Michael Gira. Brian Lumley? “Who he?”

Thanks to having only a marginal attachment to the work of the horror boom, when I started writing and submitting for publication, my work was first accepted by anywhere but horror venues. Men’s magazines. Fiction journals so obscure they can barely be Googled. Literal underground publishers—my first book was published by a building janitor who ran a publishing company out of a basement on Ludlow Street in New York’s Lower East Side. But I was attracted to horror as a field, partially because the boom was long over. Other than Leisure Books and the occasional Kensington title, and a few hold-outs among bigger publishers (Caitlín R. Kiernan, Bentley Little, F. Paul Wilson), horror was a non-commercial enterprise. As a non-commercial writer, I grew interested. I was so non-commercial that a chance look at the remaindered book dump at St. Mark’s Bookshop, where I saw a book of

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