PulpRev Horror - What in Hell are you talking about?

Let me make no bones about it - I am a horror fiend. Have been since I was a wee little lad reading Scary Stories to Tell in the dark (and goddamn if Stephen Gammel isn't still one of the best artists I've run into for horror - self taught, too!) and watching the TV miniseries of Stephen King's IT. I was almost raised by the Twilight Zone, Monsters, Amazing Stories, and the Tales from the Darkside. I came later to Tales from the Crypt, but I devoured every horror paperback I could get my hands on. 

While I read my way through some of the 80s and 90s pulp horror doorstoppers that were popular in my youth, a love of horror inevitably leads one to short fiction. I have filled a dozen bookcases (most of them now sadly lost) with anthologies and collections, vignettes and short little spooker tales. Horror, much like its brother swords and sorcery, works at its strongest in the short form. Stephen King's early pulp-inflected horror collections - Night Shift, Skeleton Crew, etc. - culminating in his masterpiece of IT show the strength of the medium and format.

It is hard - damned hard - to find vintage pulp horror. The scifi and fantasy crowd has done a much better job of archiving their works and keeping them handy for future generations...and yet...

Listening to old horror radio dramas, I realize that they may actually form a better archive than the digitally scanned magazines flourishing online. As their publications died off, the horror writers of the 40s and 50s and 60s and 70s moved into the radio field, crafting weekly short tales of terror and suspense. The same ethos as the pulps - quantity yielding quality, with a focus on entertainment and the ability of the winking host to welcome new readers into the ghoulish joy of horror fandom - prevailed over the airwaves. Some shows, like the Weird Circle, worked exclusively with older material, adapting and in some cases translating and bringing forward the old works to new audiences.

Horror has always seemed to me to be on the whole more aware of its roots and traditions than the self-blinded fantasy and scifi genres. I learned about William Hope Hodgson and Arthur Machen because Lovecraft praised them. Henry Kuttner and Thomas Ligotti (whom I wouldn't call pulp, but damned if that isn't a man who has a vision of the world and isn't afraid to share it with you) and Laird Barron descend from him, and Ramsey Campbell is still turning out work and actively participating in life. Countless branches fork off from there, and that is without getting into the overseas extensions of the pulps - the strange, often erotic and frequently grotesque world of giallo comics and bizarre foreign horror films, or the swinging Sixties adventures of The Guardians. In the same way that the isekai genre brought portal fantasy to Japan and reflected it back to the world, Japan has also taken the cosmic and bizarre horror that roots back to Lovecraft and Hodsgon and and reflected it, enlarged, back out into culture through the brilliant and twisted pens of Junji Ito and Morohoshi Daijiro. The latter comes highly recommended, and both his Yokai Hunter and Ankoku Shinwa (Dark Myth) series are shockingly potent works of adventuresome horror.

'But where', I hear you ask 'O Pulprev, is the superversive angle? How is this any more than misery and death?' Here we tread close to holy things for me, for somehow in my life supernatural horror has become tangled up with an almost religious experience, and my tongue grows numb to express it.

Supernatural horror is the acknowledgement that the world is greater and weirder and wilder than we know. That there are Things and Powers beyond man, and our actions have consequences that extend beyond our sight. Sometimes it is a simple acknowledgement that the world will victimize us, and perhaps the best one can do is survive. Sometimes, a survivor will go back into the dark to save others, or seek their own salvation through explanation. Still others who have never been victimized by horror are nonetheless haunted by the certainty that there is something out there that is more than can be acknowledged - the occult detectives like Carnacki and Kolchak who pit their cunning and their souls against the unknown mysteries. If you want Appendix N cred, simply witness Silver John the Balladeer and his Appalachian horror adventures. 

Yes, Borginia, there are monsters. Yes, there are powers that could destroy you in an instant without a single thought. And yes, you may never understand how or why the Unknown came into your life to destroy you...but you can be reborn. If there is a pit of Hell, then how much higher does the vault of Heaven rise? If that Thing crawled down from the Stars, then you live in a world where you can say the right words, turn the right key and walk with your own feet on other worlds than these. There is a price to this knowledge, a price in blood and shattered illusions, but when the territories of the physical earth are exhausted, the inner territories of the soul and mind await. If that vile djinn wishes to bargain for your soul, then you know that you have a soul, and how wondrous a thing is that!

"...and you shall face that sea of Darkness, and all therein that may be explored." - Schweik, The Beyond, 1981