Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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1.0 out of 5 stars
Another underwhelming volume in this DAW series, October 18, 2008
I must have bought eight or nine of these DAW `Year's Best Horror Stories' from the mid-70's to the early 90's. It was rare to find more than three or four good stories in any volume. Mostly this was due to the uninspired editorship of Gerald Page, and after him, Karl Edward Wagner.
Too often too many stories were chosen from the same limited cohort of authors: the amazingly overrated Ramsey Campbell; Charles L. Grant; Dennis Etchison; Arthur Byron Cover; Michael Bishop; Steven King.
Sometimes things would get really bad, such as Series X (1982) when Wagner burdened the reader with TWO Campbell tales. Both Page and Wagner had a snobbish dislike of stories with more than a hint of graphic horror; indeed, as best I can tell, the first appearance of a genuine `splatterpunk' tale was David Schow's `Jerry's Kids Meet Wormboy' in Series XVIII (1990) . The majority of the selected stories tended towards `psychological' horror, which, as everyone knows, is a sophisticated way of saying `boring'.
If you were lucky, you'd sometimes get a rewarding story by Manley Wade Wellman or Harlan Ellison. Joseph Payne Brennan, David Drake, and once in a while, M. John Harrison, could also be counted on to deliver something reasonably good.
Nowadays some of the older volumes fetch high prices in the used book market. So is Series IV (1976) worth picking up ?
`The Year's Best Horror Stories: Series IV' (1976) doesn't stray too far from the median in terms of the quality of the collected tales. Edited by Page, it includes 14 stories and an essay by E. Hoffman Price, all seeing print in 1975. Among the best stories are Drake's `Something Had to be Done', a nice mix of old-world horror and troubling flashbacks of the Viet Nam war. R. A. Lafferty's `The Man With the Aura' is not really a horror story, but its deeply satirical take on human foibles makes it a worthy read. Brennan's `The House on Stillcroft Street' isn't one of his more memorable stories but in this anthology it stands as one of the better `classical' horror entries.
Alas, the other stories are disappointing. A too-long and slow-moving story by Hal Clement, `A Question of Guilt', has nothing to do with horror, being more of a historical tale set in Roman times and dealing with hemophilia. Its inclusion makes clear editor Page's decision-making process; underwhelming stories from `name' authors were always welcome, while great stories by no-name authors were casually dismissed.
Campbell's `Christmas Present' is purple prose at its most awful. Entries by Cover, Leiber, Grant, and Frank Belknap Long are all thin gruel.
The decision to include Price's essay is bewildering, since it deals with the controversy engendered in H. P. Lovecraft Fandom by the publication of "Lovecraft: A Biography" by Sprague de Camp. Price tries to soothe the outraged Lovecraft devotees who felt that de Camp's biography paid insufficient homage to The Master. It's all very much a tempest in a teapot and serves to remind us that, while the term `fanboy' didn't exist back in 1975, there certainly were plenty of socially awkward, and emotionally frustrated, individuals who deserved the label.
The book contains a large number of typos; even for a book issued in the pre-computer-based proofreading era, these editorial blunders are excessive.
In my opinion, `Series IV' isn't worth shelling out more than three or four dollars, unless you're adamant about collecting every volume in the series.
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