James Jenkins: The Valancourt Book of World Horror Stories. Volume 1

But even if not much foreign horror has made its way into U.S. bookshops, it’s a big deal in its home countries. Did you know that in the tiny principality of Andorra, nestled in the Pyrenees between France and Spain, there is an annual government-­sponsored competition open to all the country’s residents, with the writer of the best horror story earning 600 euros? Or that Bulgaria and Denmark have active horror writers’ associations? (In Denmark there’s so much horror fiction being published that they even give out annual awards for the best; one of the winners is featured in this book.) In tiny Iceland, and in the Spanish region of Galicia, publishers have launched versions of the seminal Weird Tales magazine in their local languages. In Catalonia, one small publisher annually chooses four prominent Cata­lan authors to lock up in a reputedly haunted castle for a weekend to write horror tales, then publishes the results in a yearly volume. In recent years, horror anthologies have even begun to crop up in languages most people have never heard of, like Western Frisian and Corsican. [11] We are presently working on a companion volume to the present one, to include a selection of horror stories from minority and endangered languages. The closer you look, the more you find that horror fiction really is everywhere.

So why isn’t more of it being made available to English-­speaking readers?

Well, it’s pretty simple really. For starters, most horror these days is published – both here and abroad – by small presses. Small American and British presses probably don’t have someone on staff who can read and evaluate the quality of Romanian, or Swedish, or Afrikaans horror stories, while conversely the small Romanian, Swedish, and Afrikaans publishers might not have the financial wherewithal to commission English translations of their books and send them out to potential U.S. or U.K. publishers. So in many cases the material remains appreciated only by the comparatively small audience able to read it.

The idea of compiling a volume of world horror fiction is one we’ve been kicking around for a while, but although the idea seemed a good one, it immediately gave rise to all kinds of questions and problems. Should the book focus on classic stories from the 19th and 20th centuries, present-­day writing, or a combination of the two? If we were to exclude American and British work, what about other English-­language stories (e.g., from Australia, New Zealand, or India)? Would we collect previously translated material or concentrate on stories that had never before appeared in English? And if the latter, how were we to find them?

Ultimately we decided to feature contemporary writing in this first volume and save older and classic material for a potential future project. We also chose to focus primarily on non-­English-­language fiction, and specifically on material that had never before been translated. Recognizing, however, that many countries – some of them significantly under­represented in American publishing – use English widely (for example the Philippines, featured in this volume), we ended up excluding only English-­language contributions from the U.S., U.K., Canada, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. On the other hand, authors from those countries writing in another language were eligible for inclusion (such as Spanish-­language writers from Puerto Rico, Francophone writers from Quebec, or an author writing in Irish or another indigenous language).

We posted a call for submissions on our website and social media accounts in early 2019, inviting submissions for this volume. Stories written in one of the fifteen or so languages we were able to read could be sent in their original language; others had to be accompanied by some sort of synopsis or rough translation to give us an idea of what the story was about and whether it seemed like the sort of thing we might like to commission a professional translation of. Though the call for submissions did not result in a large number of entries, it did bring in several very high-­quality tales, including two ultimately chosen for this volume, by Attila Veres (Hungary) and Marko Hautala (Finland).

The process of finding the rest of the stories mostly involved a great deal of research. In a few cases our jobs were made easier by foreign editors who had compiled anthologies of the best horror stories from their countries. But when all else failed, we went to Google and ran searches like ‘ mejores escritores de terror mexicanos ’ and ‘ skräckberättelser på svenska ’, and spent months poring over books, articles, websites, reviews, etc., to learn who were the preeminent horror writers in those different countries and languages. Then we sought out those authors’ works – sometimes with a fair amount of difficulty – and spent countless hours reading through them to find the very best ones. In the end, we read more than 200 stories from around 40 countries, originally written in around 20 different languages, narrowing it down to the ones we thought were the best and most interesting for this book.

A book like this one has obvious limitations. First, in terms of space: with nearly 200 countries in the world and some 7,000 living languages, there is no way to include a comprehensive selection of all the world’s horror fiction in just one volume. And then of course there’s the matter of language: having decided to focus primarily on stories that haven’t previously appeared in English, we were limited to stories in languages we could understand (though fortunately some of these, like French and Spanish, have a broad international reach) or ones that were submitted to us with accompanying translations. To the reader who is disappointed her favorite country – China, Russia, Turkey, or wherever it may be – was not included, we can only say that this is the first in a projected series of similar volumes and we hope that the success of this book will lead to an even wider geographical selection of submissions for future books.

In terms of the stories we did choose, we aimed for as diverse a group of entries as possible, both in terms of geographical diversity (North, Central, and South America, the Caribbean, Europe, Africa, and Asia are all represented in the book), a wide range of themes and content, and a diverse lineup of authors that ensured a high rate of inclusion of women writers, authors of color, and LGBT-interest material. We also made a specific effort to seek out contributions from countries whose literatures are less well known to American readers, like Ecuador, Senegal, and Martinique. Finally, we aimed to find stories that used horror in interesting and novel ways, such as Flavius Ardelean’s ‘Down, in Their World’, in which the author incorporates age-­old superstitions from his native Transylvania, or Bathie Ngoye Thiam’s ‘The House of Leuk Dawour’, which updates oral Senegalese folklore traditions into a modern-­day horror tale, or Flore Hazoumé’s ‘Menopause’, which manages to be both an unsettling horror story and a clever piece of social commentary on women’s roles in Ivory Coast society. The resulting selection of stories is an eclectic mix that we hope horror readers will enjoy as much as we did.

There’s an oft-­cited statistic that only 3% of the books published in the U.S. are translated works. As you’re about to see from the following stories, the reason for this is not a lack of high-­quality foreign language material. The primary reason is almost certainly cost: professional translation services are extremely expensive and cost-­prohibitive for all but the largest publishers. For that reason, we translated all but three of the stories in this volume in-­house, in consultation with the authors, for whose edits and suggestions we’re very grateful. We welcome comments and feedback from readers about the translations or the book as a whole. Let us know which stories you liked best, which of these authors you’d love to read more from, and what you’d like to see in a potential second volume.