There is another positive side to this helter-skelter proliferation. Readers' tastes mature, become sophisticated. Writers grow up. There will be the inevitable attrition: the kid who isn't all that upset when his mom dumps his comics collection after he gets married; the garage-band star who puts up his K-Mart keyboard at a garage sale. Sturgeon said: 90 % ker-flush. The other 10 % is in there for the kill. That's why the horror field is growing stronger and getting better, despite all the crap it takes and the crap it cranks out.

What bothers me more about the horror genre just now is a frenetic trend toward fragmentation. It's almost as if the genre seems poised on the brink of a Beirut-style civil war — tolerate no disbelievers, accept no compromises, take no prisoners. Most obvious has been the sniping over the past decade between advocates of "quiet horror" and of (presumably) "loud horror." To an extent this is all merely a continuation of the earlier quarrel between fans of traditional horror and those of contemporary horror. It's all getting to be a bit strident, and the pursuit of excellence is too often abandoned in favor of pointless extremism. Because a story is dead boring dull, it is not necessarily literary horror. Writing about a Roto-Rooter rapist does not necessarily push back the frontiers of horror's future.

Well, each to his own tastes, and I have no problem with magazines and anthologies that are restricted to one given approach to what is actually a highly diversified genre. These basically are further examples of the theme anthologies so popular today: collections devoted to haunted houses, dead rock stars, holiday seasons, zombies, or — if you will — dark fantasy or splatter punk.

I do, however, have misgivings concerning a present trend to limit anthologies to special groups of writers. Recently we have seen a good number of by-invitation-only anthologies as well as collections restricted to women writers only or to British writers only. Something doesn't feel right here.