The Best New Horror 2 Read Online Free

Stand
as “Most Collectable Book of the Year”.
    1990 was another boom year for horror, but it could be the last for some time. The danger is that the much-vaunted recession in the publishing industry, coupled with continued pronouncements of a bottoming-out of the horror genre, could soon become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
    1991 is the year when many publishers will begin cutting back on horror. Although the “name” authors will presumably survive, we could see a virtual disappearance of the mid-list (where most horror is published), resulting in fewer first novels appearing, contracts being cancelled, and the anthology experiencing yet another slump.
    The genre is likely to fare no better in movies. All the major studios now realise they must cut back on the immense budgets of the past few years, and as few horror films are top earners, such effects-laden projects will be the first to go, once again becoming the province of the low-budget independent.
    But it’s not all doom and gloom. Horror fiction continues to thrive in the short form, with a wealth of new talent (particularly women writers) attracted to the field. There are still numerous outlets for new work, from newsstand magazines to the burgeoning small press.
Best New Horror
will be here with a representative sampling of many of the best practitioners working today.
    THE EDITORS
APRIL, 1991

K. W. JETER
The First Time
    K. W. J ETER has been described by Ramsey Campbell as “one of the most versatile and uncompromising writers of imaginative fiction.”
    He considers himself “a Los Angeles kid” and lives and works in California. His controversial debut novel,
Dr Adder
, is generally considered to be the prototype for the “cyberpunk” movement in science fiction, and his mentor Philip K. Dick called it “. . . a stunning novel that destroys once and for all your conception of the limitations of science fiction.”
    His other genre-spanning books include
Farewell Horizontal, Infernal Devices, In the Land of the Dead, Dark Seeker, Mantis, Soul Eater, The Night Man
and
Madlands
. He has also scripted
Mister E
, a four-part graphic novel for DC Comics.
    “The First Time” is only Jeter’s second short story; it is a deeply disturbing view of coming of age, based on an article he read in
The Wall Street Journal
about US kids getting into trouble in Mexican border towns and some teenage memories of visits to Tijuana. It’s not for the squeamish.

     
     
    H IS FATHER AND HIS UNCLE DECIDED it was about time. Time for him to come along. They went down there on a regular basis, with their buddies, all of them laughing and drinking beer right in the car, having a good time even before they got there. When they left the house, laying a patch of rubber out by the curb, he’d lie on his bed upstairs and think about them—at least for a little while, till he fell asleep—think about the car heading out on the long straight road, where there was nothing on either side except the bare rock and dirt and the dried brown scrubby brush. With a cloud of dust rolling up behind them, his uncle Tommy could just floor it, one-handing the steering wheel, with nothing to do but keep it on the dotted line all the way down there. He lay with the side of his face pressed into the pillow, and thought of them driving, making good time, hour after hour, tossing the empties out the window, laughing and talking about mysterious things, things you only had to say the name of and everybody knew what you were talking about, without another word being said. Even with all the windows rolled down, the car would smell like beer and sweat, six guys together, one of them right off his shift at the place where they made the cinder blocks, the fine gray dust on his hands and matted in the dark black hair of his forearms. Driving and laughing all the way, until the bright lights came into view—he didn’t know what happened after that. He closed his eyes and didn’t see anything.
    And