Unsurprisingly, the staff and clientele of California book-dealer Barry R. Levin voted J. K. Rowling the Most Collectable Author of the Year. Charnel House won the Collector’s Award for Most Collectable Book of the Year for the lettered-state edition of From the Corner of His Eye by Dean Koontz, and the Lifetime Collectors Award went to Henry Hardy Heins for his outstanding bibliographic contributions to the study of the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs.
I guess it was inevitable that, in view of the terrorist attacks of September 11th on New York’s World Trade Center and Washington’s Pentagon building, and their continuing consequences for the entire world, any other topic I might attempt to address in this introduction would just seem trivial, even in context.
Like millions of others, I watched dumbfounded as events unfolded live on television. As a babyboomer, born after World War II, the images I saw that afternoon were amongst the most horrific I have ever witnessed. Yet there was also a sense of awe. A sense of unreality. I was genuinely astonished that anybody could create such wholesale destruction and massive loss of life in what I, probably naively, considered to be a ‘civilized’ world. I was appalled that something I had only ever encountered in the movies or science fiction was actually happening in real life while the world tuned in.
Perhaps more than anything else, I was aware that the events taking place in front of us all would shape the still-fledgling twenty-first century for years, perhaps decades, to come.
So what has all this to do with horror — the fictional kind?
Well, in the aftermath of ‘9/11’ (as American media pundits quickly dubbed the attacks) fiction sales dropped dramatically around the world. Almost immediately, and especially in America, reading tastes shifted towards non-fiction titles and self-help books. With media coverage focused on terrorism and war news, new books were unable to get the publicity they needed. This, coupled with a looming global economic recession, meant that the already struggling horror field was even further marginalized.
In general publishing, the New York Times claimed that book sales had slumped by at least 15 per cent, while bestselling novels by top authors were off by as much as 25 per cent to 40 per cent. Although the Harry Potter books and The Lord of the Rings reissues continued to sell well, supported by blockbuster movies, new books from such authors as Stephen King, Anne Rice and James Herbert were said to be selling well below expectations. And if those authors were not doing well, you can imagine how much worse it was for mid-list horror writers.
Meanwhile, the series of anthrax attacks through the mail in America resulted in some publishing houses refusing any longer to accept unsolicited manuscripts.
Although fiction sales began to pick up again in mid-December, publishers were already having to tighten their belts by laying off staff (including editors), cancelling sales conferences, cutting the number of books published, reducing authors’ advances and marketing budgets, and cutting print runs.
The consequences of these actions will affect the publishing industry for a long time to come.
Perhaps even more bizarrely, given the movie industry’s knee-jerk reaction to the attacks, the US Army held a meeting with Hollywood writers and directors (including Danny Bilson and Spike Jonze) to brainstorm ways to prevent further terrorist assaults on America. Life really was beginning to imitate art.
Soon after the attacks I expressed publicly my concern that once again the horror genre, which was still desperately trying to crawl out of a decade-long recession, would be caught in some kind of moral and media backlash. We had seen it happen before, and there was no reason to assume that this time — given the immensity of the tragedy — events would be any different.
Thankfully, my fears ultimately proved to be unfounded. A few days after the attacks, Stephen King’s radio station WKIT raised money for the American Red Cross Disaster Relief Fund with listeners pledging a minimum of $10.00 to hear a song. Stephen and Tabitha King matched all pledges dollar-for-dollar, and the estimated total raised reached $140,000.
The New York City Chapter of the Horror Writers Association published Scars, a charity anthology whose proceeds also went to the Red Cross on behalf of victims of the World Trade Center attack. Authors involved in the project included Gerard Houarner, Jack Ketchum, Michael Laimo, Gordon Linzner and Monica O’Rourke.
As Halloween approached, there was a real possibility that parents more concerned with anthrax spores or hijacked airplanes would prevent their children from celebrating ghoulies, ghosties, and things that go bump in the night.
However, according to one Internet source, Uncle Sam, Lady Liberty, Rudolph Giuliani and firefighter and rescue-worker masks were big sellers at Halloween. We were already beginning to adapt.
Horror writers have always argued that their stories can be cathartic — by embracing our fictional fears we can sometimes overcome our real-life demons — and this was never more evident than in 2001.
As critic Douglas E. Winter has said: ‘Great horror fiction has never really been about monsters, but about mankind. It shows us something about ourselves, something dark, occasionally monstrous… Its writers literally drag our terrors from the shadows and force us to look upon them with despair — or relief. ’
Proof that horror could perhaps be therapeutic was evidenced when Stephen King and Peter Straub’s collaborative novel Black House, initially released the week of the terrorist attack, finally reached the top of the American bestseller lists, despite an initial postponing of print advertising.
‘The current context makes these things more relevant, more important,’ Straub was quoted as saying. ‘You say, yes, the world is really like this. The writing my colleagues and I do is to awaken people to the fragility of existence and the possibility of extremity.’
For the foreseeable future the world has new monsters to fear, new bogeymen to keep us awake at night. It may not mean much in the greater scheme of things, but horror fiction also has a role to play in our recovery.
The world as we knew it before that fateful day will never be the same again. Yet horror fiction, as it has always done, can help us move towards confronting our fears and, by allowing us to recognize them for what they really are, we can use it to hopefully lessen the hold they have over us.
The Editor
May, 2002
Chico Kidd
Mark of the Beast
Chico Kidd has been writing ghost stories since 1979 under the name of A. F. Kidd. They have been published (mostly illustrated by the author) in such small-press magazines as Ghosts & Scholars, Dark Dreams, Peeping Tom, Enigmatic Tales, All Hallows and the author’s own series of chapbooks.
Others have appeared in anthologies such as Vampire Stories, The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories 2, The Year’s Best Horror Stories X, XVI and XVIII, and the hardcover Ghosts & Scholars. She remains, apparently, the only non-Antipodean author to appear in the Australian magazine of SF and fantasy, Aurealis.