Hauling Like A Brooligan

Stephen Gallagher

Scares on the Shelf

Twice the Terror is a second collection of material from The Horror Zine, Jeani Rector’s Sacramento-based webzine of dark-themed fiction, art and poetry.

The previous print collection, And Now the Nightmare Begins, featured a range of contributors, from the newly-launched to the likes of Ramsey Campbell, Simon Clark, and Joe R Lansdale.

I have to come clean and say that I have a dog in this fight – volume two includes my short story Not Here, Not Now.

From the book’s Amazon entry:

The Horror Zine presents its second in-print anthology, a wicked brew of stories with relentless suspense that ride side-by-side with haunting poetry and eye-popping artwork. Volume 2 from The Horror Zine unveils a fresh approach to basic fears and has twisted, unexpected endings. “Twice the Terror: THE HORROR ZINE” contains contributions from such famous writers such as Graham Masterton, Bentley Little, Joe R. Lansdale, Deborah LeBlanc, Ed Gorman, Stephen Gallagher, Terence Faherty, and Hugh Fox. But it also contains deliciously dark delights from morbidly creative people who have not yet made the big time… but they will soon.

Mainstream publishing falls in and out of love with dark fiction, whereas it seems to me that the core readership’s appetite remains fairly steady. Kudos to The Horror Zine for giving a platform to new writing in a context of the genre’s more recent traditions.

Here are a couple of random picks from the quality artwork on the site. This one’s Mercy by Isiah Stephens:


While these strange dolls are the creations of Beth Robinson.

Steve

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2 responses to “Scares on the Shelf”

  1. How patchy my engagement is with certain aspects of the community…I might well've heard/read of THE HORROR ZINE, but haven't looked at the site till just now…and how she's gathering such material with no payment (at least for the website run) suggests either she's a damned nice person and/or the better stories are negotiated for entry into the anthology with payment made upfront…or am I missing something altogether still?

  2. To my eye it's basically a technological updating of the traditional fan-produced small-press ficzine toward which I've been steering would-be new writers for years. Something between a sandbox and a showcase. The Campbells and the Lansdales of this world tend to donate the odd one-off reprint right in a gesture that helps to validate the enterprise and, hopefully, raise everyone's game.