IT ALL STARTED WITH a voice in the night …
The question, of course, is always, “Why do a fungus anthology?” And the shortest answer is probably that nobody had ever done one, at least not that we were aware of. There’s a small but persistent fungal thread that runs, mycelium-like, through the history of weird fiction. It’s a thread that’s firmly rooted in the decaying hulks and weed-choked seas of William Hope Hodgson’s nautical horror stories, especially “The Voice in the Night,” which may be the tale of fungal terror. It has produced a rich crop of fruiting bodies through the years, from authors like Lovecraft, Bradbury, King, and Lumley, as well as the writers whose work appears in this anthology.
We found early on that we shared a fascination with fungi in general, and weird fungal fiction in particular, when discussing an unusual 1963 Japanese film adaptation of “The Voice in the Night” from Godzilla director Ishiro Honda, best known as Matango, but also called variously Attack of the Mushroom People and Fungus of Terror. One of us was terrified by the film, the other delighted, and we figured that was an appropriate combination for assembling an anthology of fungal stories.
More closely related to animals than plants, but fundamentally different from both, the members of the kingdom fungi are a diverse and mysterious lot. While putting together this anthology we ran into several fungal stories including: a recently discovered fungus in the Amazon rainforest that can break down the common plastic polyurethane, a study detailing how the evolution of a fungus known as “white rot” may have ended a 60-million-year-long period responsible for coal deposition, and a company in New England that is creating biodegradable packaging material out of mushrooms. In short, our fungal friends can be the source of many wonders … or terrors, as evidenced by the sight of “zombified” ants under the thrall of a strange parasite.
With so many possibilities to draw from, we knew that we needed something more robust than just a series of pastiches. We wanted to go beyond body horror and Hodgson-esque mushroom people to explore the range of possibilities offered by fungal fiction. Our authors have flung their spores far and wide, and within these pages you’ll find all kinds of fungus, playing all kinds of roles, in all kinds of stories running the gamut from horror to dark fantasy. The result is an anthology with mushroom submarines, fungal invasions, mind-altering mushrooms, alien fungi — and yes, some mushroom monsters.