The Cutting Room: Dark Reflections of the Silver Screen (45 page)
Read The Cutting Room: Dark Reflections of the Silver Screen Online
Authors: Ellen Datlow
All eyes are accusingly upon me. “Thou art the man,” is written plainly on everyone’s faces. I admit it to myself, and the plague-ravaged company. We have brought Poe back. Neglected and despised in life, to his mind cheated of the riches and recognition due his genius, he has been kept half-alive in the grave, plagiarized and paperbacked, bought and sold and made a joke of. No wonder we have raised an angry Eddy, a vindictive and a spiteful genius. This time, he has caught on and he will not let go, not of us and not of the world. This is the dawning of the Age of Edgar Allan, the era of Mystery and Imagination. We have
ushered—
ahem—it in, but we are to be its mummified, stuffed, walled-up victims, the sacrifices necessary for the foundations of even the shakiest edifice.
I have a new horror. It seizes my brain like a vulture’s—no, a raven’s—talons. I hear the faint whisper of nails against wood, the tapping of hairy knuckles against a coffin lid, that first gibber of fear before the awful realization takes hold. I can hear Boomba, and know that—through my neglect—I have suffered him to be
buried alive
. The gibber becomes a snarling, hooting, raging, clawing shriek. The tapping, as of someone gently rapping, becomes a hammering, a clamoring, a gnawing, a pawing, a crashing, a smashing. Wood breaks, earth parts, and long-fingered, bloodied, torn-nailed, horribly semi-human hands grope for the bone handle of a straight razor.
Jim and Sam want to know what to do, how to escape. To them, every contract has a get-out clause. Roger and Vinnie know this isn’t true.
Without, a storm rages. The heavens rage at the sorrows of the world.
A door opens with a creak. The attenuated shadow of a chimpanzee is cast upon the flagstones, gleaming cruel blade held high. We turn to look, our capacity for wonder and terror long since exceeded.
Brushfires burn all around, struggling against the torrents. The crack that runs through the castle—the crack that runs through
California—
widens, with great shouts as of the planet itself in pain and terror. A million tons of mud is on the march, and we stand between it and the sea. The walls bend and bow like painted canvas flats. A candle falls and flames spread. A maiden screams. A burning bird streaks cometlike through the air.
The ape’s clutch is at my throat and the razor held high. In Boomba’s glittering, baleful eye I discern cruel recognition.
Vinnie, before the burning beams come down, has to have the last quote . . .
“‘. . . the screenplay is the tragedy Man, and its hero the Conqueror Worm!’—Edgar Allan . . .”
ELLEN DATLOW HAS been editing science-fiction, fantasy, and horror short fiction for more than thirty years. She was fiction editor of
OMNI magazine
,
Event Horizon
, and SCIFICTION and has edited more than fifty anthologies, including the annual
The Best Horror of the Year
;
Fearful Symmetries
, an unthemed anthology of horror and the supernatural;
Hauntings
, a reprint anthology of ghost stories and haunted houses;
Lovecraft’s Monsters
, a reprint anthology of stories, each involving at least one of H. P. Lovecraft’s creations;
Telling Tales: The Clarion West 30th Anniversary Anthology
;
Nightmare Carnival
and
Queen Victoria's Book of Spells: An Anthology of Gaslight Fantasy
(an adult anthology with Terri Windling).
Forthcoming are
The Doll Collection.
She's won multiple World Fantasy Awards, Locus Awards, Hugo Awards, Stoker Awards, International Horror Guild Awards, Shirley Jackson Awards, and the 2012 Il Posto Nero Black Spot Award for Excellence as Best Foreign Editor. Datlow was named recipient of the 2007 Karl Edward Wagner Award, given at the British Fantasy Convention for "outstanding contribution to the genre"; has been honored with the Life Achievement Award given by the Horror Writers Association, in acknowledgment of superior achievement over an entire career; and has just been awarded the World Fantasy Life Achievement Award for 2014, which is presented annually to individuals who have demonstrated outstanding service to the fantasy field.
She lives in New York and co-hosts the monthly Fantastic Fiction Reading Series at KGB Bar. More information can be found at www. datlow.com where she occasionally blogs. You can also find her on Facebook and on Twitter under the handle @EllenDatlow.
Stephen J. Barringer’s
first publication was the short story “Restoration” in the Canadian SF magazine
On Spec
; he has since won first and second prizes in the long-running Toronto Trek/Polaris media convention’s short-story competition and has written several gaming products for various RPG systems as well as a radio-play adaptation of E. F. Benson’s “The Room in the Tower” for Canada’s Dark Echo Productions. His story “Necessary Evil” will appear in
Kaleidotrope
sometime in 2015. A lifelong resident of Toronto, he is married to Gemma Files.
Laird Barron
is the author of several books, including
The Imago Sequence
,
Occultation
,
The Croning
, and
The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All
. His work has appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including
The Best Horror of the Year
,
Blood and Other Cravings
, and
Lovecraft Unbound
. An expatriate Alaskan, Barron currently resides in upstate New York.
Gary A. Braunbeck
is the author of twenty-four books, among them the acclaimed novel
In Silent Graves
, first novel in the ongoing Cedar Hill Cycle. His fiction has been translated into Japanese, French, Italian, Russian, and German. More than two hundred of his short stories have appeared in various publications, including
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science
Fiction
and
The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror
. He was born in Newark, Ohio, the city that serves as the model for the fictitious Cedar Hill in many of his stories. As an editor, Gary completed the latest installment of the
Masques
anthology series created by Jerry Williamson,
Masques V
, after Jerry became too ill to continue, and also co-edited (with Hank Schwaeble) the Bram Stoker Award–winning anthology
Five Strokes to Midnight
. Gary’s work has been honored with six Bram Stoker Awards, an International Horror Guild Award, three Shocklines “Shocker” Awards, a
Dark Scribe Magazine
Black Quill Award, and a World Fantasy Award nomination. Visit him online at www.garybraunbeck.com.
Edward Bryant
began writing professionally in 1968 and has had more than a dozen books published, including
Among the Dead
,
Cinnabar
,
Phoenix without Ashes
(with Harlan Ellison),
Wyoming Sun
,
Particle Theory
,
Fetish
(a novella chapbook), and
The Baku: Tales of the Nuclear Age
. He initially made his reputation as a science-fiction writer (winning two Nebula Awards for science-fiction short stories in the late 1970s), but he gradually strayed into horror and mostly has remained there, writing a series of sharply etched stories about Angie Black, a contemporary witch; the brilliant zombie story “A Sad Last Love at the Diner of the Damned”; and other marvelous tales.
Dennis Etchison’s
stories have appeared in magazines and anthologies since 1961. He is a three-time winner of both the British Fantasy Award and the World Fantasy Award and served as president of the Horror Writers Association from 1992 to 1994.
His collections include
The Dark Country
,
Red Dreams
,
The Blood Kiss
,
The Death Artist
,
Talking in the Dark
,
Fine Cuts
, and
Got to Kill Them All & Other Stories
. He is also a novelist (
Darkside
,
Shadowman
,
California Gothic
,
Double Edge
), editor (
Cutting Edge
,
Masters of Darkness I–III
,
MetaHorror
,
The Museum of Horrors
,
Gathering the Bones
), and scriptwriter. He adapted 150 episodes of the original
Twilight Zone
television series for radio in addition to writing original scripts for
The New Twilight Zone
Radio Dramas
and Fangoria Magazine’s
Dread Time Stories
, and he wrote Christopher Lee’s commentaries for more than two hundred episodes of
Mystery Theater
.
Forthcoming work includes a career retrospective from S. T. Joshi’s
Masters of the Weird Tale
series (Centipede Press) and a volume of new short stories,
A Long Time Till Morning
. Much of his backlist is currently available as e-books published by Crossroads Press.
“Deadspace” was originally published in
Whispers V
, edited by Stuart David Schiff.
Gemma Files
was born in London, England, but is a Canadian citizen who has lived in Toronto, Ontario for her entire life (thus far). She has been a film critic and a teacher of screenwriting and Canadian film history. In 1999, her story “The Emperor’s Old Bones” won the 1999 International Horror Guild Award for Best Short Fiction. She is best known for her Hexslinger series of weird west novels,
A Book of Tongues
,
A Rope of Thorns
, and
A Tree of Bones
(all from ChiZine Publications), but she has also published two collections of short stories—
Kissing Carrion
and
The Worm in Every Heart
—and two chapbooks of poetry.
A Book of Tongues
won the 2010 Black Quill Award for Best Small Press Chill (both Editors’ and Readers’ Choice) and was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award in the Best First Novel category. Five of her short stories were adapted as episodes of the 1998–1999 U.S./Canadian horror television series
The Hunger
, for which she also wrote two screenplays. She is currently hard at work on her next novel.
Daphne Gottlieb
is the author of nine award-winning books, most recently the nonfiction title
Dear Dawn: Aileen Wuornos in Her Own Words
(with Lisa Kester) and the poetry collection
15 Ways to Stay Alive
. She lives in San Francisco, where she works with the casualties of America’s class war.
Stephen Graham Jones
is the author of thirteen novels and four collections. Most recent are
Zombie Sharks with Metal Teeth
,
The Least of My
Scars
, and
Flushboy
. Up soon are the novels
The Gospel of Z
, and
Not for Nothing and the collection of flash fiction, States of Grace
. Jones has had some one hundred fifty stories published, many included in Year’s Best collections. He has been a Shirley Jackson Award finalist, a Bram Stoker Award finalist, and a Colorado Book Award finalist, and he has won the Texas Institute of Letters Award for fiction, the Independent Publishers Award for Multicultural Fiction, and an NEA fellowship in fiction. He teaches in the MFA programs at CU Boulder and UCR Palm Desert. Find out more at http://demontheory.net or by following him on Twitter (@SGJ72).
Garry Kilworth
has been writing fantasy and science-fiction stories for almost forty years, and he still gets a kick when a fresh idea jumps into his head.
Attica
, his fantasy novel set in an attic the size of a continent, with three adventurers on a quest through a dangerous land terrorized by animated junk, is in production with Johnny Depp’s movie company, Infinitum Nihil.
The Fabulous Beast
, his latest collection of short stories, has recently been published by Infinity Plus, and
Poems, Peoms and Other Atrocities
, a poetry collection created in a collaboration with his departed friend Robert Holdstock, is available from STANZA (PS Publishing).
Joel Lane
was a British novelist, short story writer, poet, critic, and anthology editor. Although most of his short fiction could be categorized as dark fantasy or horror, his two novels,
From Blue to Black
and
The Blue Mask
, were more mainstream.
He received the World Fantasy Award in 2013 for his most recent collection,
Where Furnaces Burn
, and he won the British Fantasy Award twice. His short stories have been collected in five volumes. He died in 2013.
Gary McMahon
is the acclaimed author of nine novels and several short-story collections. His latest novel releases include
Beyond Here Lies Nothing
(third in the Concrete Grove series, published by Solaris),
The End
(an
apocalyptic drama), and
The Bones of You
(a supernatural mystery), and his short fiction has been reprinted in various Year’s Best volumes.
Gary lives with his family in Yorkshire, where he trains in Shotokan karate and likes running in the rain.
Read more about at www.garymcmahon.com.
David Morrell
is the critically acclaimed author of
First Blood
, the novel in which Rambo first appears. He holds a Ph.D. in American Literature from Penn State and was a professor in the English Department at the University of Iowa. His numerous
New York Times
best-sellers include the classic spy trilogy
The Brotherhood of the Rose
(the basis for the only television miniseries to premiere after a Super Bowl),
The Fraternity of the Stone
, and
The League of Night and Fog
. An Edgar, Anthony, and Macavity awards nominee, Morrell is the recipient of three Bram Stoker awards from the Horror Writers Association as well as the prestigious lifetime Thriller Master Award from the International Thriller Writers Organization. He has also been nominated for two World Fantasy awards. His writing book,
The Successful Novelist
, discusses what he has learned in his four decades as an author.
You can find out more about David and his work at http://www. davidmorrell.net.
Steve Nagy
lives and works in Michigan. He spends his days providing phone support to newspapers throughout the United States and overseas. His evenings belong to his family. The dark hours after everyone goes to bed belong to his muse. His stories have been reprinted in
The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror
and
The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror
.
He maintains a website at http://stephenwnagy.wordpress.com/, where he usually blogs about writing and how it influences his life.
Kim Newman
was born in Brixton (London), grew up in the West Country, went to university near Brighton, and now lives in Islington (London).
His most recent fiction books include
Where the Bodies Are Buried
,
The Man from the Diogenes Club
, and
Secret Files of the Diogenes Club
under his own name and
The Vampire Genevieve
as Jack Yeovil. His nonfiction books include
Ghastly Beyond Belief
(with Neil Gaiman),
Horror: 100 Best Books
,
Horror: Another 100 Best Books
(both with Stephen Jones), and a host of books on film. He is a contributing editor to
Sight & Sound
and
Empire
magazines and has written and broadcast widely on a range of topics, including scripting radio documentaries, role-playing games, and TV programs. He has won the Bram Stoker Award, the International Horror Critics Award, the British Science Fiction Award, and the British Fantasy Award. His official website,
Dr. Shade’s Laboratory
, can be found at www.johnnyalucard.com.
Nicholas Royle
is the author of
First Novel
as well as six earlier novels, including
The Director’s Cut
and
Antwerp
, and a short-story collection,
Mortality
. He has edited numerous anthologies, including
Darklands
,
Murmurations: An Anthology of Uncanny Stories about Birds
and three volumes of
The Best British Short Stories
(2011–2013).