a few others. It never happened. None of these twenty-and thirtysomethings who had plotted Regicide and Koontzicide while the well-padded target at the podium dispensed urbane twaddle about Emerson and All Things Glittering and Gleaming (or whatever it was; he was having an Emersonian moment) into the microphone ever got near any best-seller list, and over the next decade a lot of them faded from view.
Which helped prove my point of view. The process has nothing to do with best-seller lists, but time has a tendency generally to support the proposition that very good work survives, while work that is not very good does not. Who now reads, to pick three of the best of the pack, Ken Eulo, Robert Marasco, or Frank deFelita, all of whom once had great success with books that now seem more than a bit, well, gestural?
What I had not anticipated, though, was that over the next ten to fifteen years there would appear a number of writers of fantasy, science fiction, and horror—among them, Kelly Link, M. Rickert, Graham Joyce, Elizabeth Hand—who had far more in common with one another and perpetual wild cards like John Crowley and Jonathan Carroll than they did with those writers who were supposed to epitomize their fields. They were literary writers and genre writers at the same time. When Bradford Morrow invited me to guest-edit Conjunctions 39: The New Wave Fabulists (2002), I accepted on the spot, thinking that his much-respected, smart, and intrepid journal would provide the perfect showcase for these writers, most or all of whom would be unknown to its regular subscribers. The benefits of such an encounter should, I thought, flow both ways. And so, as far as I can determine, it proved: the issue was widely reviewed, much praised, and it went into three or four printings. It also inspired a couple of other anthologies edited by people who understood exactly what we were trying to do.
Poe’s Children very much continues on from The New Wave Fabulists, and this time I am free to include work by breathtaking “literary” writers, who in this newly liberated atmosphere have no problem embracing their inner Poe, or to put it another way, no problem making use of the strengths and insights made available to them from their own personal engagements with horror and sf. (For reasons having to do with length, along with many other people I wanted to include, Michael Chabon and Jonathan Lethem are not represented in this volume, but they fall into the same category.) This crossover is entirely welcome, I think, as it erases boundaries and blurs distinctions that sometimes seem designed mostly to keep everyone in their proper place.
In November 2003, when Stephen King was awarded the National Book Award’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, he went out of his way to invite the resplendent audience before him to read the latest fiction by a number of his writer friends. He went on to praise the books. Not long afterward, the distinguished novelist who had just won the NBA for Best Novel, and whom until that moment I had admired, included in her acceptance speech the remark that she did not think those present needed to be given a reading list. At that moment, Stephen King and I had the same thought: you’re wrong, lady, you could really use that reading list.
The beautiful, disturbing, fearless stories in Poe’s Children make up a kind of reading list for anyone who wants to experience what I think is the most interesting development in our literature during the last two decades. It has been taking place in small presses, genre journals, and year’s best compilations, and it has been gathering steam as it goes. You have to be open-eyed and flexible as to category to get what is going on, but some vital individual breakthroughs are in the wind. We are all fortunate, readers and writers alike, to participate in a moment of such amplitude, luxury, and promise.
Peter Straub
New York City
The Bees
Dan Chaon
Gene’s son Frankie wakes up screaming. It has become frequent, two or three times a week, at random times: midnight—3 A.M.—five in the morning. Here is a high, empty wail that severs Gene from his unconsciousness like sharp teeth. It is the worst sound that Gene can imagine, the sound of a young child dying violently—falling from a building, or caught in some machinery that is tearing an arm off, or being mauled by a predatory animal. No matter how