FOREWORD
STEVEN WEBER
WHEN I WAS asked to write the foreword for this collection of stories, it felt like the time a stranger had approached me, his eyes hollow, desperate, and darting, muttering about unseen threats to his health made by unnamed enemies and otherwise causing me much alarm (as I am a classic coward), whereupon he thrust an object in a plain brown wrapper into my hands for safekeeping and, as quickly as he had appeared, fled into the murky night.
That never really happened to me, but I was stuck for a grabby opening. It’s only a foreword, for chrissakes. All the good writing comes later.
Being a devotee of this genre is a lot like being a trafficker in porn (I imagine) in the days before its current ubiquity made it so commonplace that any eroticism has been mediocritized right out of it. And in spite of the recent glut of popular “torture-porn” films and their increasingly relentless sequels (I include any one of George Bush’s State of the Union addresses in that particular genre), the real foundation of the horror/sci-fi/fantasy oeuvre (I just used “genre” a moment ago and couldn’t risk the repetition) is more subtly invasive, its adherents less inclined to advertise their predilections so brazenly. Upon meeting a fellow connoisseur, there is a probing look into the eyes, an instant reading of the facial twitches, an understanding that we are … different. There’s even a hint of sadness in the knowledge that we are lovers of images and ideas that the majority of the world views as repugnant, which ironically makes us embrace our choices even tighter. To me, it’s this inherent push-me-pull-me nature of horror, science fiction, and fantasy literature and films that makes it so alluring, so forbidden. It’s less the slashing knife or the rent flesh or the many other cruel, otherworldly acts themselves. It’s the fact that they are the products of the same essential human recipe and therefore entirely possible. Because if it can be thought, no matter how insane or imaginitively deviant, it can be realized. That’s terrifying.
Horror walks hand in hand with beauty, terror with contentment; neither could exist without the other. We who indulge ourselves in this world know this and know also that our counterparts would never admit as much. So why not scare the living shit out of them? Serves ’em right. And did I mention this volume would make a great gift?