The Best of Cemetery Dance - Hardcover

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9781881475248: The Best of Cemetery Dance

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1881475247 ISBN 13: 9781881475248

Publisher: Cemetery Dance Pubns, 1998

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From Kirkus Reviews:

Mammoth-sized roundup of the 60 best dark-fiction entries in the first 25 issues of Cemetery Dance magazine--a quarterly devoted to works of particularly dark horror, and one distinguished by the quality of its contents. Four of the stories have previously been reprinted in hardcover (including Stephen King's ``Chattery Teeth,'' one of his most amusing, and oddest, tales), though all the fiction first appeared in Cemetery Dance. The tastiest big-ticket item is an interview with Dean Koontz, done for this collection by Robert Morrish, in which Koontz reveals some secrets of his trade--such as deciding to junk Freudian determinism in favor of free will in his fiction--and admits to rewriting the embarrassingly atrocious Demon Seed (which was done in his 20s) for its latest softcover reprint. Morrish also interviews Chizmar about the birth of Cemetery Dance, first published in 1988, and about the problems encountered in bringing out an admittedly esoteric quarterly. As for the stories, standouts include two tales by Peter Crowther, ``Rustle'' (a dreamy doorway leads to some rustling, sibilant, never defined but very hungry ``things'') and ``Eater'' (a necrophage keeps his freezer well stocked with human parts). Also tops are Poppy Z. Brite's stylish ``A Taste of Blood and Altars'' (vampires on sultry spring nights in New Orleans, an excerpt from Brite's knockout first novel Lost Souls), and William F. Nolan's ``Fyodor's Law'' (Raskolnikov's truly extraordinary man, unbound by conventional moral standards, comes to Los Angeles as a wealthy photographer obsessed with pictures of dismembered bodies). The anthology, in fact, serves as a kind of introduction to, and overview of, the zestful and remarkably diverse field of horror fiction in America. For those who like to dance with the dead, well worth the price. -- Copyright �1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Booklist:

When a high-school teacher had his class read Stephen King's "The Monkey" aloud, he made a horror fan out of Richard Chizmar. Some years later, Chizmar took the demise of The Horror Show as his cue to launch his own horror specialty magazine--Cemetery Dance, a quarterly full of "dark suspense" (exemplified by a creepy Richard Christian Matheson four-pager in which a guy talks an idiot into confessing to someone else's serial killings) as well as horror stories, which sells out its never-more-than 11,000-copy print run. This fat volume culls 60 stories from the magazine's first nine years and aims to win new subscribers to keep it going "for a long time to come," Chizmar says. With contributors constituting a who's who of horror (including King, natch, and, in an interview, Dean Koontz, too), it may be a roaring success in its aims. In any event, the book is a primer for learning what horror and dark suspense are all about. Ray Olson

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