I hope you will enjoy the tales that follow as much as I did. Many thanks to all of the authors who allowed us to collect their work here.
Summation 1992: Horror
Nineteen ninety-two will be remembered in the horror field as the Year of the Vampire. The latest volume in Anne Rice’s vampire chronicles, The Tale of the Body Thief, made the national best-seller lists, and Francis Ford Coppola’s film version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula dominated the media for months, pre- and postrelease, even though the film itself failed to perform up to expectations (despite its operatic beauty). These two major works were just the most visible in yet another apparent resurgence of popularity for the vampire. Vampires and vampirism have continually retained a hold on the imaginations of readers and film-goers (particularly since Anne Rice’s The Vampire Lestat), but 1992 seems to be a peak as anthologies, novels, short stories, movies, and related nonfiction books combined to reach a new high.
For me, though, the most exciting event of the year in horror was the Academy Awards’ honoring Jonathan Demme’s film of Thomas Harris’s psychological horror novel The Silence of the Lambs with five Oscars: Screenplay, Actor and Actress, Direction and Best Picture. Another SF/horror film, Terminator 2: Judgment Day deservedly dominated the technical awards.
The first U.S. trade paperback edition of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses was published by “The Consortium, Inc.,” an anonymous collection of publishers, with the support of writers and rights groups. It appeared March 25, in a reported print run of 100,000, to initially lackluster sales. In the meantime, negotiations between British and Iranian officials about lifting the fatwa (death sentence) against Rushdie failed to make progress in May. Despite this, Rushdie made unannounced public appearances in Spain, and Boulder, Colorado.
And in the final year of the Bush administration, censorship got in its last licks, with the ban of certain “offensive” trading cards. In April, before Eclipse even issued their True Crime trading cards, The New York Post screamed “Pols Vow Crackdown on Cards of Killers” and ran a photograph of the mother of a murdered young woman under blow-ups of the Charles Manson, Richard Speck, and Jeffrey Dahmer trading cards. By June, Nassau County, New York, banned the sale of the cards to children under seventeen and legislatures around the United States were trying to do the same.
Former President Bush’s opinion to the contrary, the recession was still in full swing, causing a major upheaval at Bantam where new president and publisher Irwyn Applebaum cut the mass market list from thirty to twenty titles, cut the hardcover list by a third, streamlined the company by combining hardcover, trade paperback, and mass market responsibilities, and laid off between forty and fifty full-time and contract employees. This transpired only months after Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine (now called Asimov’s Science Fiction), Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, Ellery Queens Mystery Magazine, and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, their inventory, plus subsidiary rights in published stories, were sold by Davis Publications to Dell Magazines, part of the Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group. The new publisher is Christopher Haas-Heye, president and publisher of Dell Magazines.
Pulphouse Publishing virtually collapsed, at least temporarily, as a major player in the fields of science fiction, fantasy, and horror by the end of 1992 with the departure of crucial members of the editorial and production staff for different parts of the country. Production has slowed to near-zero until a new crew is trained. Pulphouse magazine, which skipped its December issue, will continue to be published under the editorship of Jonathan Bond. All book production has been put on hold, with about ten short story paperbacks plus three Axolotl Press novellas planned for 1993. Pulphouse has also dropped production work for other publishers. Only time will tell whether or not the corporation will return to its former prominence.
The Abyss horror line edited by Jeanne Cavelos for Dell Books published its first hardcover in October under the Delacorte/Abyss imprint. It was Lost Souls, a first novel by Poppy Z. Brite about vampires.
Weird Tales decided to drop its oversize-digest format for a more conventional 8!/2-by-ll size and return to saddle-stitched covers. The new format will be much cheaper to produce and is preferred by advertisers and distributors; Space and Time, the long-standing small-press fiction magazine edited by Gordon Linzner, has been sold to Jonathan Post’s Emerald City Publishing. Linzner continues as editor, and the magazine, which publishes fantasy, science fiction, and horror, will maintain its twice-yearly schedule but switch to a 96-page perfect-bound format; John Pelan, founder and former publisher of Axolotl Press has announced the founding of a new company, Silver Salamander Press, issuing limited editions in variant states, following “the same editorial direction that made the first several Axolotl titles so successful.” Pelan plans to release “no more than three or four titles per year.”
Publishers Weekly ran a half-page ad from Zebra Books on June 15, announcing the withdrawal of two horror novels by a pseudonymous writing team, explaining that sections of each novel were found to be plagiarized from Dean R. Koontz’s 1983 novel Phantoms. Koontz took legal action after a fan alerted him to the copying in a letter giving specific instances of plagiarism and similarities to his novel. The ad was part of a legal settlement.
British news:
The various publishing imprints once owned by Robert Maxwell’s Macdonald Group have been absorbed into Warner/Little Brown with Macdonald and Scribner’s to become Little, Brown; Sphere and Futura will become part of the new Warner imprint. A few imprints will remain unchanged, including Orbit, the SF/ fantasy list. Victor Gollancz, Ltd., at one time the leading British SF publisher as well as a publisher of quality fiction, has been sold for the second time in three years, this time to British publisher Cassell. The acquisition means Gollancz will become an imprint, ending its distinguished sixty-three-year history as a separate company; the new British SF line, Millennium, part of Anthony Cheetham’s Orion group, launched its first list in September 1992 with simultaneous hardcovers and trade paperbacks of three American science fiction and fantasy titles. Cheetham also bought Chapmans, a general hardcover trade publisher started three years ago by Ian Chapman, former head of Collins. Chapmans publishes about forty trade books per year, and some will feed the Orion mass market line launched in July 1993. Fantasy Tales, the twice-yearly paperback anthology, is negotiating with a new distributor. In light of possible changes in format, price, and frequency, the eighth issue has been delayed. Savoy Books has had partial success in its appeal against the 1989 seizure and destruction order against the novel Lord Horror by David Britton and the comic Meng & Ecker. In a Manchester court ruling July 30, 1992, the novel was declared not obscene, reversing the order for the book's burning; however, the ruling against the comic stood.
The British Fantasy Awards were announced in Birmingham, England, over the weekend of October 2-4, 1992, at FantasyCon XVII. Jonathan Carroll's novel Outside the Dog Museum won the August Derleth Award. The other awards were: Anthology/Collection: Darklands, Nicholas Royle, ed; Short Fiction: “The Dark Lands,” Michael Marshall Smith; Artist: Jim Pitts; Small Press: Peeping Tom. The Icarus Award for best newcomer went to Melanie Tem, and a special award went to Andrew I. Porter. The awards are voted on by the British Fantasy Society.