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  Also by J.N. Williamson

  Novels

  The Ritual 1979

  Babel’s Children 1984

  The Houngan 1980

  Ghost 1984

  (1984, reprinted as Profits)

  The Offspring 1984

  The Tulpa 1981

  The Longest Night 1985

  Premonition 1981

  Wards of Armageddon 1986

  Horror House 1981

  (with John Maclay)

  Queen of Hell 1981

  Evil Offspring 1987

  Death-Coach 1981

  Noonspell 1987

  Ghost Mansion 1981

  Dead to the World 1988

  The Banished 1981

  The Black School 1989

  Death-Angel 1981

  Shadows of Death 1989

  The Evil One 1982

  Hell Storm 1990

  Horror Mansion 1982

  The Night Seasons 1991

  Playmates 1982

  Monastery 1992

  Brotherkind 1982

  Wardogs 1992

  Death-School 1982

  Don’t Take Away the Light

  Death-Doctor 1982

  (work in progress)

  The Dentist 1983

  As Julian Shock

  Extraterrestrial 1982

  Novellas

  Hour 1983

  Flags! 1984

  Collections

  Anomalies 1983

  Nevermore! 1984

  The Naked Flesh of Feeling 1991

  (Untitled; in press, scheduled 1992)

  Editor

  Masques 1984

  Masques II 1987

  How to Write Tales of Horror,

  Fantasy and Science Fiction 1987

  The Best of Masques 1988

  Masques III 1989

  Masques IV 1991

  Nonfiction (Humor)

  The New Devil’s Dictionary (Creepy Clichés and Sinister Synonyms) 1985

  Sherlockiana (Editor)

  Illustrious Client’s Case-Book 1946 (Foreword by Vincent Starrett)

  Illustrious Client’s Second Case-Book 1949 (Introduction by Ellery Queen)

  Illustrious Client’s Third Case-Book 1953 (Introduction by Christopher Morley)

  Critical Work (Juvenilia)

  A Critical History and Analysis of the “Whodunit” 1950

  Copyright © 1991 by J.N. Williamson. All rights reserved. Printed in the

  United States of America. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number

  91-66380. ISBN 0-940776-26-X.

  Maclay & Associates, Inc., P.O. Box 16253, Baltimore, MD 21210.

  “Collaborationists” general introduction, and author/story introductions copyright © 1991 by J.N. Williamson.

  “The Pack” copyright © 1991 by Chet Williamson.

  “Children” copyright © 1991 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

  “Sea Gulls” copyright © 1991 by Gahan Wilson.

  “The Coming of Night, The Passing of Day” copyright © 1991 by Ed Gorman.

  “Please Don’t Hurt Me” copyright © 1991 by F. Paul Wilson.

  “Splatter Me an Angel” copyright © 1991 by James Kisner.

  “Untitled Still Life with Infinity Perspective” copyright © 1991 by Rex Miller.

  “Pratfall” and afterword copyright © 1991 by John Maclay.

  “The Heart of Helen Day” copyright © 1991 by Graham Masterton.

  “Nothing But the Best” copyright © 1991 by Brian McNaughton.

  “Somewhere” copyright © 1991 by Denise Dumars.

  “Milestone’s Face” copyright © 1991 by Gary Brandner.

  “Julia’s Touch” copyright © 1991 by David T. Connolly.

  “Savages” copyright © 1991 by Darrell Schweitzer.

  “The Collapse of Civilization” copyright © 1991 by Ray Russell.

  “Animal Husbandry” copyright © 1991 by Bruce Boston.

  “Sounds” copyright © 1991 by Kathryn Ptacek.

  “Whispers of the Unrepentant” copyright © 1991 by t. Winter-Damon.

  “Obscene Phone Calls” copyright © 1991 by John Coyne.

  “The Children Never Lie” copyright © 1991 by Cameron Nolan.

  “The Other Woman” copyright © 1991 by Lois Tilton.

  “Love, Hate, and the Beautiful Junkyard Sea” copyright © 1991 by Mort Castle.

  “Sources of the Nile” copyright © 1991 by Rick Hautala.

  “My Private Memoirs of the Hoffer Stigmata Pandemic” copyright © 1991 by Dan Simmons.

  “The Secret” copyright © 1956 by Steve Allen.

  All characters and events depicted in this book are purely fictitious.

  Cover and title page design by Judith M. Asher.

  Masks illustration by Allen Koszowski.

  Contents

  Introduction - J.N. Williamson

  Acknowledgments

  The Pack - Chet Williamson

  Children - Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Sea Gulls - Gahan Wilson

  The Coming of Night, the Passing of the Day - Ed Gorman

  Please Don’t Hurt Me - F. Paul Wilson

  Splatter Me an Angel - James Kisner

  Untitled Still Life with Infinity Perspective - Rex Miller

  Pratfall - John Maclay

  The Heart of Helen Day - Graham Masterson

  Nothing But the Best - Brian McNaughton

  Somewhere - Denise Dumars

  Milestone’s Face - Gary Brandner

  Julia’s Touch - David T. Connolly

  Savages - Darrel Schweitzer

  The Collapse of Civilization - Ray Russell

  Animal Husbandry - Bruce Boston

  Sounds - Kathryn Ptacek

  Whispers of the Unrepentant - t. Winter-Damon

  Obscene Phone Calls - John Coyne

  The Children Never Lie - Cameron Nolan

  The Other Woman - Lois Tilton

  Love, Hate, and the Beautiful Junkyard - Mort Castle

  Sources of the Nile - Rick Hautala

  Collaborationists - J.N. Williamson

  My Private Memoirs of the Hoffer Stigmata Pandemic - Dan Simmons

  The Secret - Steve Allen

  Afterword

  Introduction

  (“There were much glare and glitter and piquancy and phantasm . . . There were much of the beautiful, much of the wanton, much of the bizarre, something of the terrible, and not a little of that which might have excited disgust . . . The masquerade license of the night was nearly unlimited . . .”

  —The Masques of the Red Deathby Edgar Allan Poe.)

  Eight years ago when Maclay & Associates Inc. and I agreed to create Masques, horror fiction was said to be in decline. In that category Stephen King’s novels were the only ones regularly making hardcover best seller lists. I’d published a dozen novels by then but had recently learned one of my publishers was giving up the ghost (it was reincarnated later), a second was being subsumed (moving from Chicago to New York, and oblivion), and a third was reaching the decision that they could live without me. (As they did for six years before offering me a four-novel contract.) It appeared a dreadful time for a Baltimore-based local publisher to seek a national marketplace with an anthology of horror/supernatural fiction—even if Edgar Allan Poe did have not one but two gravesites in the marvelously Gothic cemetery John Maclay showed me.

  That first Masques was notably well-reviewed, and nominated for a major award; several of its stories drew raves, and more honors.

  Seven years to the month since I wrote the introd
uction to this series’ progenitor, the fiction of fright is once more said to be slumping—yet the fourth book of Masques is being published in hardcover, in a boxed, signed, and numbered edition, and in trade paperback form. And Stephen King’s novels have been joined on the best seller lists by those of Dean R. Koontz, Anne Rice, Thomas Harris, and occasionally one or two other novelists who may eschew the horror category but certainly imbue many of their suspenseful works with the moods or principles of horror.

  Who says it isn’t a viable category?

  Being less flippant about it, how many novels of other categories—even true crime books—sell with gusto and deeply involve their readers by employing the ideas, surprises, violence, and atmosphere of horror fiction? (And how many honest horror novels might continue to sell as briskly as ever if they were in disguise?) In what painstakingly explicated but understandable way do books about “the mob” or serial murders—“real life” ghostbusters and haunted houses—movie tie-in novels or collections linked to super heroes (or villains), comic book detectives or monsters or ventures into sword and sorcery fantasy—differ in terms of the elicitation of chills or revulsion, inquiry into evil-doing and warped minds, astonishment in the face of revelation, unusual perceptions of reality, tension, wonder, sheer scariness?

  At least as importantly . . . why does anyone think they are superior?

  There are, of course, some answers. Please don’t reply “believability.” Nor subtlety. Nor credibility gained by uncertainty of story line since the bad guys in “real” books have generally been captured or else the writer couldn’t do a drawn-out profile of them, and the dead victims are going to remain dead however greatly we may empathize with them. Nor, least of all, should you reply “literary quality.” A few of the non-fiction writers in true crime and some screenwriters are quite talented but the majority make the horror writers who faded from sight during previous “soft” stages seem like literary giants. (And Jess Cagle and Ty Barr, writing in Entertainment Weekly; defined “screenwriter” this way: “In Los Angeles, anything with opposable thumbs.”)

  A question that is probably better—because it can be answered without bringing a lot of unhappiness to other people—is this: Why has Masques endured and arrived at a fourth volume when many anthology series, writers, editors, lines of horror, and publishing houses have so thoroughly relinquished their ghosts that reincarnating them would definitely require divine intervention?

  An answer: Some very good publishers, specialty houses among them, learn how to pinpoint and, yes, specialize for their audiences. They’re not in the position of needing to make a national best seller list for various reasons including the fact that they cannot advance huge sums of money to anyone or invest big dollars in advertising, and they cannot take many chances on dubious ideas (or writing hopefuls). If they did, they would be in the same position as larger publishers who must then count on other categories picking up the slack. Most of the time, specialty publishers simply don’t publish “other categories”; instead, they focus on a couple—or a couple of authors or editors with whom they can get along pleasantly—and wind up doing (more times than not) two remarkable things: Publishing a handsome book on which they have lavished personal attention and care, and marketing the product in a manner that by any measurement except leading best seller lists exceeds the capability and inclinations of a diverse and high risk-assuming larger publishing house.

  It may well be the way the majority of books is published in the future with the exceptions of educational books, those by authors with an international reputation, and throw-away books of revelation (or exhibitionism!) by or about this week’s celebrities.

  Other answers: Upwards of seventy-five writers have now been included in the quartet of Masques books, forty-two—till now—one time each. The line preceding those sentences of Poe’s at the beginning of this introduction reads, “. . . It was his own guiding taste which had given character to the masqueraders.” Although such writers as Rex Miller, Ray Russell, Ramsey Campbell, Bob Bloch, Ardath Mayhar, Graham Masterton, Chet Williamson, Jim Kisner, Joe Lansdale, Jessica Salmonson, Gahan Wilson, and Tom Monteleone haven’t needed me or anybody else to give them character, I will accept the responsibility for believing that three principal ingredients should go into the making of Masques: Front to back originality. The interchange, from volume to volume, of established writers, rather than the easier method of drawing from a “stable” of friends. And carefully selected newcomers (meaning both people with one book or a few commercially-published tales to their credit, and those who were either completely unpublished in fiction or making their debuts in hardcover books—of whom four are present here in MIV).

  Standard publishing houses often wince if anthologies they’re contracted to do don’t include work by King, Ray Bradbury, Miller, Campbell, the Wilsons Gahan or F. Paul, Bloch, Masterton, Charlie Grant, Chet, Ed Gorman, Dennis Etchison, Gary Brandner, Rick McCammon, Kathryn Ptacek, or Dan Simmons. All have attended these Masques, and more than 25% of the yarns or poetry appearing in the first three books of the series were nominated for or won awards, collected by individual authors, or reprinted in annual “bests of.”

  But these anthos have also introduced, one way or the other (and among others), Kisner, Alan Rodgers, Katherine Ramsland, Stanley Wiater, Gary Braunbeck, G. Wayne Miller and Joseph A. Citro. In a supposedly near-finite field of fiction writers, ten Masques “I”, II or III contributors went on to publish their own books for the first time. Overall, ten percent of the anthology’s wordworkers have been newcomers.

  Originality; fresh imagination. According to the results of a recent survey conducted by Kathryn Cramer (“The Horror Field Now,” Part 1) in The New York Review of Science Fiction (May ’91), those qualities rank as the third most important in good horror fiction. Utilizing the sixty-seven responses filled in after she passed out one hundred questionnaires at World Fantasy Convention in November of ’90, Dr. Cramer found effective characterization mentioned first, the rather ambiguous “good writing” in second place.

  It’s the hope all of us share that every piece of writing we read the rest of our lives will be well-written, of course. Interesting, credible characterization is one of the hardest things to accomplish in the short fictional form and certainly ranks with the basic idea for a story in motivating the horror writer, I think. Readers of the first Masques will readily recall McCammon’s gaunt, skinny, fatigue-clad Price—“Charlie’s in the light”—in “Nightcrawlers”; F. Paul Wilson’s “Soft” protagonist with his “limp and useless muscles squishing”; Dennis Hamilton’s massive Nuñez (“the monstrous groaning of the staircase”) in “The Alteration.” Masques II included King’s “Popsy” (“stroking the boy’s hair gently, with great love”); Bill Nolan’s memorable junkyard owner, Latting (“You got severe internals”); Lansdale’s perfectly envisioned feline (“Cat hangs claw in Dog’s eye” in Joe’s “Dog, Cat, and Baby”); and Tom Sullivan’s “The Man Who Drowned Puppies” (Maclver: “You could not allow fallowness or death or the smell of death to collect in the villages”).

  And in Masques III, remember these jewels of characterization? “He was not an ignorant man and in some ways he was extremely intelligent . . . He was grossly abnormal” (Rex Miller); “His voice was windy-sounding, like air through a straw” (Citro); “And you know, I think I could be a coal miner, bent over in those endless, low tunnels, without any fear” (John Maclay); “And then, as always, it was happening. But not to me. Never, to me” (Diane Taylor); “The wind almost knocked her off-balance—but she held firm, knowing something about feelings and night, love and tears: all of them could only be judged by what they drew from suffering” (Braunbeck); and “Kevin O’Toole was almost my age, but sometimes it seemed that he was five years older and five years younger than I at the same time. He read a lot” (Simmons).

  In Dr. Cramer’s survey, she asked participants to specify the leading influences on their ideas about horror, and short fiction was menti
oned first, horror novels second, anthologies third. To my unscientific mind, that amounts to replying that horror stories in anthologies are the respondents’ primary influence—at least since the demise of Night Cry and Twilight Zone magazines and before the emergence of Pulphouse and Pulphouse Weekly.

  You see, it’s difficult for me to imagine—because of their striking originality; their ideas—the tales in Masques IV by Chet Williamson, Kisner, Rex Miller, Dan Simmons, Lois Tilton, Rick Hautala and Gahan Wilson being published anywhere today except in an anthology or individual collection. Those writers have things to say that might be far too strongly expressed for most newsstand publications. I also think that the development of character exemplified here by Ed Gorman, Mort Castle, Maclay, newcomer David Connolly, Ptacek, Bruce Boston, Tilton, and Darrell Schweitzer—and the poetic insights of t. Winter-Damon and Denise Dumars—required either the freedom of a small press magazine or a permanent book. Editors and publishers say they want a lot of things; acceptance of the unique and creative, sometimes outrageous yarns of some of the authors I already cited plus that of Cameron Nolan, Ray Russell, John Coyne, Kris Rusch, Paul Wilson, Brian McNaughton, Gary Brandner, and Graham Masterton is (or could have been) something else.

  Which sums up the singular usefulness of the commercially-detested anthology: Writers and readers alike who truly want to peer briefly down the labyrinthine corridors of the human mind, heart and soul have rather little choice except to look for top-flight horror anthologies.

  And probably those books won’t be published by the giant houses. “We don’t do well with them” is the standard answer to an agent or editor with the proposal for a new antho. “We just contracted the one we’re doing this season.” They give the impression that such books are almost never published—but that simply isn’t the case. Since Masques the First came out in ’84, short fiction of mine—though my name does not start with “K” as do, say, Koontz, King, T. E. D. Klein, and Jim Kisner—has been chosen for thirty-four anthologies, roughly five per year. Things clearly aren’t quite how they might appear—especially when I can recall without strain a dozen or more anthos during the same period to which I wasn’t invited!