Editors’ Foreword

Most horror anthologies these days are organized around some kind of gimmick. Sometimes it’s a monster (The Big Book of ______ Stories [Vampire/Ghost/Mummy/Werewolf]), or else a theme (stories in imitation of H. P. Lovecraft, tales written in homage to Stephen King, an entire volume of stories set in haunted houses, or on Halloween, etc.) One problem with these sorts of anthologies is that they can start to pall after a while. When preparing our Valancourt Book of World Horror Stories, we came across a 416-page anthology of Romanian zombie stories. It doesn’t matter how good the writing is; there are only so many Romanian zombie stories the average person can stand to read back-to-back.

Our Valancourt Book of Horror Stories series of anthologies has a gimmick, too, but it’s of a very different sort. All of the stories in this book (and in the previous three volumes) are written by authors whose books we have previously published. If we published exclusively new horror fiction, such an idea for an anthology wouldn’t be especially noteworthy, nor particularly hard to assemble: we could simply send out a mass e-mail to all our authors, ask them whether they had any stories lying around in a drawer, and then put them together in a book. But instead Valancourt publishes an extremely heterogeneous array of books and authors, spanning from the 1760s to the 2000s, from 18th-century Gothic romances and Victorian-era potboilers to Golden Age mysteries and thrillers, mid-century science fiction, vintage LGBT-interest works, ’70s and ’80s paperback horror novels, humorous fiction and satire, modern literary classics, translated international works, and much more. A collection of horror stories culled from such diverse writers and such different time periods is bound, if nothing else, to be quite unlike any other horror anthology out there. This curious self-imposed limitation – that the story must be written by a Valancourt author – forces us in some cases to dig deep, and you know what happens when you dig deep: most of the time you don’t find anything, but every once in a while you unearth a rare gem. So as we’ve put these volumes together, we’ve investigated whether, say, satirical novelist Michael Frayn, ‘Angry Young Men’ author John Braine, or Booker Prize winner David Storey had ever written a horror story. (They hadn’t.) But, to our surprise, Isabel Colegate, an acclaimed author of literary and historical fiction, Christopher Priest, a modern sci-fi great, and Nevil Shute, a bestselling author of adventure novels, all had; and what’s more, their stories were terrific – and totally unknown. The resulting volumes have turned out to be weird and wonderful collections where readers can wander the forgotten alleys and byways of English-­language horror fiction and might stumble upon an 1801 Gothic poem by Matthew Gregory Lewis alongside a Victorian ghost story by Florence Marryat or a weird 2009 story by Michael Blumlein, a master of contemporary speculative fiction. Although it may sound improbable, the format seems to work, at least if we’re to judge from the reviews and reader comments we’ve seen.

Over the course of the series, one or two readers have been astute enough to discern that we have an ulterior motive in putting out these anthologies. Yes, they make for great seasonal reading in their own right, but they double as an introduction to our large catalogue of some 500 titles. A reader who enjoyed our Paperbacks from Hell reprints and purchased this volume to see what new treats PFH authors Garrett Boatman and Elizabeth Engstrom had in store for them, but who would normally pass over our reissues of an older work by a writer like Michael Arlen or John Metcalfe, may decide to give the latter a second look after reading their stories here. And those who fancy themselves connoisseurs of literary horror and who would ordinarily turn their noses up at anything so plebeian as to have a ‘Paperbacks from Hell’ tag on the cover may find themselves reconsidering their preconceived notions about those authors after reading some of their tales included in this book.

The volumes in this series tend to reflect to a certain degree what we’re working on at the moment, and this fourth volume is no exception. In 2019 and 2020 we’ve debuted three new series: Paperbacks from Hell (reprints of ’70s and ’80s horror fiction), Monster, She Wrote (neglected works by women horror writers) and Valancourt International (translated speculative fiction from around the world), and all three of these are represented in the present book. Elizabeth Engstrom and Lisa Tuttle are featured in both Paperbacks from Hell and Monster, She Wrote, and both have stories in this book; Engstrom’s story is brand new, as is the contribution by her fellow PFH author Garrett Boatman. Meanwhile, our first two international authors, Hubert Lampo and Felix Timmermans, both from Belgium, each have a story included here, both of them translated into English for the first time.

Also to be found in this volume are original contributions by Stephen Gregory, Steve Rasnic Tem, and John Peyton Cooke, whose story we think is the most unforgettable in the book – though we’ll let you be the ultimate judge of that. And of course, it wouldn’t be a Valancourt Book of Horror Stories if it didn’t include a selection of rare tales from the 19th and 20th centuries, so we’re pleased to offer seldom-seen stories by Eliza Lynn Linton, Michael Arlen, John Keir Cross, John Metcalfe, Simon Raven, Robert M. Coates, and Francis King as well.

We took a hiatus from the series in 2019 because we felt there wasn’t enough good material out there (one of the pitfalls of publishing mostly dead authors: their stories are a non-­renewable resource), but the additions of Engstrom, Tuttle, Cooke, Boatman, Lampo, and Timmermans to our catalogue made a Volume Four possible, and we venture to think that even if the composition of this volume, with its greater emphasis on new material, makes it a little different from previous books, it should nonetheless appeal to those who have enjoyed the first three entries, as well as those who are new to the series.

As in the other volumes, you’ll notice that each story is prefaced with some information about the author and his or her other works, and in some cases with what you might call ‘the story behind the story’, which often adds an additional layer of interest to the tales. Every one of the books in the Valancourt catalogue has an interesting story behind it, and we hope you’ll take some time to poke around on our website and investigate some of the fascinating texts we’re rediscovered and republished. Horror fiction may be our emphasis (and yours), but we think if you take a moment to scroll through our offerings of literary fiction, LGBT-interest titles, or 18th- and 19th-century classics, you’ll find some unexpected surprises that will catch your interest.

Whether you discover a new favorite author in these pages or encounter a new story by an old favorite, we hope you’ll have as much fun reading these stories as we did.

James D. Jenkins & Ryan Cagle

Valancourt Books

August 2020