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

Solange Rodríguez Pappewas born in Guayaquil, Ecuador in 1976. With seven volumes of fiction to her credit, she explores the genres of weird and fantastic fiction, horror, and science fiction. She has won the Joaquín Gallegos Lara Prize for best story collection in 2010 (for Balas perdidas [ Lost Bullets ]) and 2019 ( La primera vez que vi un fantasma [ The First Time I Saw a Ghost ]). She has worked as a Professor of Literary Arts and a coordinator of creative writing workshops since 2005. In 2014 she earned her MA with a study on Latin American apocalyptic literature and the possible destruction of her city. Her predictions are starting to come true.

Elisenda Solsona(Olesa de Montserrat, 1984) is a writer and secondary school teacher. She has a degree in Humanities and Audiovisual Communication and a master’s in Film Writing. She has published the collection of flash fiction, Cirurgies [ Surgeries ] (Voliana Editions, 2016) and a volume of short stories, Satèl·lits [ Satellites ] (Editorial Males Herbes, 2019). The latter book was a substantial success in Catalonia and won the Premi Imperdible for best Catalan book in the realm of fantastic literature.

Frithjof Spalderwas born in 1933, the son of a well-­known Norwegian composer of the same name. He is the author of a collection of macabre tales, Jernjomfruen [ The Iron Maiden ] (1971) and a novel, Dødningerittet (1976) and has also translated books from English to Norwegian and worked as an animator. He is a trained designer and illustrator in black & white, watercolor, airbrush, and acrylic. He lives in Oslo.

Martin Steynfell in love with words when he discovered Stephen King, and it wasn’t long before he took up a pencil and wrote a horror story of his own. Serial killers would later seduce him into crime and, armed with degrees in Psychology and Criminology, he’s been writing police procedurals and psychological thrillers set in Cape Town, South Africa, the first published in 2014. But the short story still holds a special place in his heart and every year a few appear in local magazines. Whenever he can get away with it, he slips a bit of horror in as well.

Yvette Tanis one of the Philippines’ most celebrated horror writers. Works in the genre include two collections, one in English and the other in Tagalog, and a full-­length film. She’s written for TV, magazines, and the web, and is currently agriculture editor of one of the Philippines’ leading newspapers. She’s commonly asked how horror is related to agriculture, and her answer is that they both involve keeping the apocalypse at bay.

Bathie Ngoye Thiamwas born and raised in Baol (Senegal). He has lived for many years in Europe but remains attached to his country of birth. An architect by training, he expresses himself more through painting, writing, and on stage as an actor or storyteller. He has published two novels, a volume of plays, and a collection of fantastic tales based in part on Senegalese folklore.

Tanya Tynjälawas born in 1963 in Callao, Peru. She is the author of five books in the genres of fantasy and science fiction and is also a freelance journalist and a teacher of French and Spanish. Her short stories have been widely anthologized internationally, including in Argentina, Spain, Bulgaria, and Finland, among other places. She lives in Finland.

Attila Veres(b. 1985) is a Hungarian writer of horror and weird fiction. His first novel Odakint sötétebb [ Darker Outside ] (2017) was a surprise success in his native country, and was followed by the story collection Éjféli iskolák [ Midnight Schools ] (2018). His fiction appears regularly in Black Aether , a magazine dedicated to Hungarian cosmic horror, as well as in literary maga­zines. As a screenwriter he has written several short and feature length films all over Europe, and he won the Best Tele­vision Screenplay award at the 2020 Hungarian Film Awards for the TV feature Lives Recurring. He is originally from Nyíregyháza but currently lives in Budapest. ‘The Time Remaining’ is his first English publication.

VALANCOURT BOOKS

Richmond, Virginia

MMXX

The Valancourt Book of World Horror Stories, Volume One

First published December 2020

All stories copyright by their respective authors.

This compilation copyright © 2020 by Valancourt Books, LLC.

All translations copyright © 2020 by Valancourt Books, LLC, except ‘The Time Remaining’ © 2020 by Luca Karafiáth, ‘Pale Toes’ © 2020 by Sanna Terho, and ‘Mechanisms’ © 2020 by Mara Faye Lethem. The Acknowledgments pages on pp. 17-18 constitute an extension of this copyright page.

All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the copying, scanning, uploading, and/or electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitutes unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher.

Published by Valancourt Books, Richmond, Virginia

http://www.valancourtbooks.com

Set in Bembo Book MT

Robert-­Henk Zuidinga (ed.), Uit den boze: Oorspronkelijke griezelverhalen (Amsterdam: Sijthoff, 1984), p. 7. The translation is ours.

André Bjerke (ed)., Drømmen, draugen og dauingen: grøssere og selsomme historier i norsk prosa (Oslo: Den norske Bokklubben, 1978), p. 5. The translation is ours.

Mariana Enríquez, ‘Creating a New Tradition of Latin American Horror’, https://lithub.com/creating-­a-­new-­tradition-­of-­latin-­american-­horror/, Oct. 31, 2018 (accessed April 17, 2020).

See, e.g., Daniel Hall, French and German Gothic Fiction in the Late Eighteenth Century (Bern: Peter Lang, 2005).

See Riccardo Reim (ed.), Da uno spiraglio: Racconti neri e fantastici dell’Otto­cento italiano , (Roma: Newton Compton, 1992).

See the collections of rare 19th-­century Swedish horror fiction published by Aleph, e.g., Nattens paradis: Svenska sällsamheter , ed. Rickard Berg­horn (Stockaryd: Aleph, 2017).

See, e.g., Miriam López Santos, La novela gótica en España ( 1788-­1833 ), (Vigo: Editorial Academia del Hispanismo, 2010).

Probably more fairly termed ‘weird’ than outright ‘horror’, Argentine writers such as Jorge Luis Borges, Silvina Ocampo, and Julio Cortázar might be cited here, along with contemporary writer Mariana Enríquez, whose fine collection Things We Lost in the Fire (2016) was a rare international horror title to see wide release in English.

For example, Lafcadio Hearn’s Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things (1904), Edogawa Rampa’s Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination (1954) or Koji Suzuki’s Ring (1991) and its sequels.

Such a book is yet to be written; however, Jess Nevins’s recent scholarship, published in Horror Needs No Passport: 20th Century Horror Literature Outside the U.S. and U.K. (self-­published, 2018) and Horror Fiction in the 20th Century (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Praeger, 2020), is probably the best place to start.