Locus magazine called Dark Forces 'the most important horror collection of the year' and I certainly wouldn’t disagree with that. Richard & Richard Christian Matheson - Where There's a Will Manly Wade Wellman - Owls Hoot in the Daytime Haldeman - Lindsay and the Red City BluesĬharles L. Robert Bloch - The Night Before Christmas

Karl Edward Wagner - Where The Summer Ends Robert Aickman - Mark Ingestre: The Customer's Tale “I set out to offer as many of the subjects and moods and general directions the fantastic tale has tended traditionally to take as I could, but hopefully in imaginative, fresh ways.”

A look at the table of contents shows a wide range of terrific writers, some just coming into their own at the time, some who wouldn’t have been considered horror but all of them producing fantastic work. He also “deliberately sought variety, stories ranging wide across the horizon of fantasy fiction” because, he felt, “nothing seems…more boring than an anhtology in one key, having similar backdrops or styles, or which are all variations on a narrow theme.”įrom one of his more successful clients, Stephen King, he pursued The Mist, which would close the anthology and also took the “opportunity to meet Isaac Bashevis Singer”, the Polish-born Jewish writer who won the Nobel Prize in 1978. McCauley “approached by letter or telephone near every writer living who had tried his or her hand at this type of story and whose writing” he liked. Cheetham immediately grasped the concept and agreed to publish the book. Ellison’s groundbreaking 1967 anthology chose stories that were rooted in science fiction but willingly went off at tangents to “break new ground, say and do things in new and varied and daring ways”. After some indecision as to whether he was the right man, he decided “to assemble anthology with the same scope and dynamism of Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions, but in the supernatural horror field”. McCauley writes in his introduction that Cheetham “liked my only other anthology of original stories, Frights, and seemed to feel I was the person to do a more ambitious similar volume for him”. He suggested McCauley, then an agent with an impressive stable of clients, edit “a anthology of new stories of horror and the supernatural” which he would publish. It all started when Kirby McCauley went to dinner with Anthony Cheetham, the publisher of Futura Publications Ltd in England. On 18th September 1980, Macdonald Futura published Dark Forces as a hardback in the UK, a horror anthology that turned out to ground-breaking in a variety of ways, not least for helping open the door to the horror boom that followed in the decade.

Dark forces stephen king