Aftershock & Others
19 Oddities
Chapter One
1990
Another award- losing year: Soft and Others, my first short fiction collection, lost the Bram Stoker Award to Richard Matheson's Collected Stories. No gripes from me. He's the greatest. A fair number of my stories never would have been written if my teenage mind hadn't been warped by his Shock collections.
I can't complain about 1990. I started off writing the Midnight Mass novella for Robert McCammon's Under the Fang. This was the first of three "theme" anthologies contracted by the Horror Writers of America to put itself on firmer financial footing. Rick McCammon, Ramsey Campbell, and I were chosen as editors. Rick took the fi rst, a collection of vampire stories with the premise that the vampires have taken over—now what?
I knocked out Mass over four weekends while working on Reprisal. As I was finishing it Kristine Kathryn Rusch called, asking if I had anything for the Pulp house novella series she was editing. Since her print run would be less than a thousand, I asked Rick if he had any objection to Pulp house ... read full excerpt from: Aftershock & Others ebook
