The Best of Cemetery Dance

by Various, Richard Chizmar (Editor)

Overview

From the World Fantasy Award-winning pages of Cemetery Dance—the premier horror magazine in the field—comes The Best of Cemetery Dance. This incomparable anthology showcases the best short fiction from the magazine’s first 25 issues, featuring the greatest names to ever set pen to paper and let the nightmares come out.
 
Featuring stories by:
• Stephen King
• R. C. Matheson
• Bentley Little
• And many more
 
“This hefty and satisfying anthology is superbly representative of the state of contemporary horror and dark fantasy. Selections showcase the talents of leading luminaries whose work defines the art of darkness. An embarrassment of riches about which everyone can be proud.”—Publishers Weekly

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780451458049
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	11/01/2000
Series:	Best of Cemetery Dance , #1
Edition description:	Volume 1
Pages:	400
Sales rank:	948,856
Product dimensions:	6.07(w) x 8.95(h) x 1.14(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

Editorial 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 andremarkably diverse field of horror fiction in America. For those who like to dance with the dead, well worth the price.

Kirkus Reviews