Horrible Beginnings - Softcover

Martin H. Greenbergwas honored in 1995 by the Mystery Writers of America with the Ellery Queen Award for lifetime achievement in mystery editing. He is also the recipient of two Anthony awards. Mystery Scene magazine called him "the best mystery anthologist since Ellery Queen." He has compiled more than 1,000 anthologies andis the president of TEKNO books.He lives in Green Bay, Wisconsin.

To accompany Wondrous Beginnings and Magical Beginnings [both BKL Ja 1 & 15 03], collections of first-published stories by sf and fantasy writers, respectively, editors Silver and Greenberg present 17 horror-story debuts, usually introduced by their writers' reminiscences about them. This all makes pretty marvelous reading, beginning with the 16-year-old Robert Bloch's 1934 debut, which, since Bloch has passed on, another writer introduces. Next up, the long-deceased Henry Kuttner's entry, introduced by Frederik Pohl, is one of two H. P. Lovecraft pastiches--the other is Ramsey Campbell's "The Church in High Street"--which appear at the front of the book; at the back are Dracula pastiches by P. N. Elrod and Matthew J. Costello. If those and the others aren't as good as their authors' subsequent best, they're not bad, and best-in-the-book is the one by the brightest star, the hard-boiled Mother Goose caper "The Case of the Four and Twenty Blackbirds," by Neil Gaiman. If, like Kathe Koja's grim sf tale "Distances," the Gaiman isn't exactly horror, it is dark, darkly hilarious fantasy. No complaints. Ray Olson
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