"Thomas F. Monteleone - Tales of Terror and Madness" - читать интересную книгу автора (Monteleone Thomas F)

"invitation-only," which means you'll always find plenty of new writers
right alongside some of the most familiar and popular "names" in the
business.

Okay, onward: we'd been planning to get back to the editing business for
a while now, and when we announced we were reading for From the
Borderlands, we didn't realize what that would really mean.

For one thing, we'd been told there was a whole new generation of
readers out there who'd been chewing through Goosebumps when last we
published an anthology, and we'd be as foreign and unknown to them as
The Alan Parsons Project. We honestly wondered what kind of response
we'd get to our initial calls for submissions.

What kind indeed ...

The last time we were reading, we may have received a handful of stories
in digital format (i.e. on a floppy disk), but none by e-mail. However,
earlier this year, within a week of our first announcement, we received
more than two hundred stories to the borderlandspress.com e-mailbox.
Now, that was impressive on one level, but disappointing on another-one,
we were surprised how many people wanted to be part of this project, but
two, we were fairly certain all those stories hadn't been written
especially for Borderlands in just a week's time.

We were right.

A large majority of the earliest stories we received

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proved to be inferior work that had been making the rounds, or worse,
had been retired to a sub-directory for
stories-rejected-by-just-about-everybody. Many of these submissions were
from writers who most likely had never read any previous Borderlands
anthologies, or hadn't bothered to read the guidelines closely enough to
discern what we were not looking for. It's mind-numbing to see so many
writers stuck in such a creative rut that they can think of nothing more
challenging than another serial killer, or (even worse) a low-life who
goes around hurting people just so the writer can describe all the
victims' gaping wounds.

We also received far too many stories that were obvious rejects from
other "theme" anthologies looking for material around the same time as
we. Hence the preponderance of stories where cockroaches made odd and
sometimes totally nonsensical appearances. But our personal favorites
were all the stories featuring that ethereal libation, absinthe-these
tales usually followed a relentless plot that went something like this: