Borderlands Anthology Series-Edited by Thomas Monteleone

[Ascrobius]

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I was looking through a pretty massive pile of paperbacks over the weekend, wanting to pick out some short stories to read from my collection, and a couple of things came to mind. The first is the anthology series Borderlands, obviously mentioned above. At the time of release (the early 1990s), I was really looking for something different in terms of dark fiction at the time, and of course I was not alone. At the time, there seemed to be a wall that was hit in terms of horror fiction, and I think many readers were looking for something different than the boilerplate world of horror fiction with many of the usual suspects churning out novels but with many people wanting something different.

This, in some ways, is reflected in Dell releasing the line of Abyss paperbacks that introduced the greater world to people like Dennis Etchison, Poppy Z Brite, Nancy Holder, Kathe Koja, Mark Morris, Brian Hodge, Melanie Tem, so on and so forth. And to be honest, among that line-up of lesser known authors, many produced some really great works, and I did find what I was looking for in terms of works that were more psychological, and sometimes surreal (Kathe Koja's The Cypher comes to mind). I would recommend to anyone that didn't live through that era to perhaps pursue some of these writers and stories, as there are quite a few worth reading if anyone was interested.

Anyway, the Borderlands series was released around this same time and there are some rather stunning short stories to be found in those collections, and again, I would recommend them as a worthy addition to any collection of short stories. I say this because I have a vivid recollection of reading through them back when they were introduced. And of course because I read many of them during the Summer I was glad that I pulled them out for this Summer, about 30 years later, and was reminded of just how unique some of the better shorts were in the series. Check them out if you are interested at all. This did represent a shift in terms of moving away from a more traditional model of horror, not that there is anything wrong with that, but people were looking for something different I think. Also, this idea of the anthology of short stories as a primary publishing format by a major publishing house was also significant, although that was more Borderlands than Dell Abyss, which was more of a novel format but did include a bunch of collections of short form works.


And speaking of a paradigm shift, it was not long thereafter that I discovered The Nightmare Factory, which seemed like perfect timing for me, all things considered. And then things all went sideways from there, in the best possible way, of course.