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Copyright © 2001 by Terminus Publishing Co., Inc.; all rights reserved; reproduction prohibited without prior permission.
Published by Wildside Press LLC.
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THE EYRIE, by the Editors
NECon Memories
We write this immediately after our (or precisely, Darrell’s, speaking in the editorial plural) return from one of Horrordom’s most pleasant annual events, the Northeast Regional Fantasy Convention, a.k.a. NECon (pronounced “nee-con”) or even Camp NECon. It is held every July at Roger Williams College in Bristol, Rhode Island. It has been only half-jokingly described as “summer camp for horror writers.” There is even a camp t-shirt.
NECon is friendly, open to all, but it also has the aspect of a family reunion. We have been attending NECons for twenty years and see many of the same people each time. Chairman Dan Booth, son of founder Bob Booth, was practically a toddler when these conventions began. Now he’s running things. Some of the other long-time attendees, luminaries in the field, include Peter Straub, Dallas Mawr (a.k.a. Jack Ketchum), Les Daniels, Ginjer Buchanan, Rich Hautala, Roman Ranieri, Jill Bauman, and many more.
Sure there are panels, and good ones too. We were on one called “Back in Black: Horror is Back and Boy is It Pissed,” which was all about the cautious revival of horror publishing in the conventional, New York publishing world. A new boom is about two years away, cautious optimists tell us. Indeed, this was the sort of panel which would enable any professional to convince his tax accountant to let him write the whole weekend off as “business.” Here we had the inside scoop from editors of Tor, Ace, and Leisure. Also yours truly, who spoke about magazines, and also put in a word for the horror small press — Cemetery Dance, Design Image, Subterranean Books, etc. etc. — which sometimes in this field seem larger and more important than the “big” publishers. There was some disagreement about which is the tail and which is the dog.
Roman Ranieri interviewed the two guests of honor, novelists Tim Powers and Elizabeth Massie. (We interviewed Powers on our own, later. You will be seeing the results in these pages.) There were other panels. Artist guest-of-honor gave a slide presentation. Saturday night included the traditional art show and artists’ reception with its traditionally scrumptious desserts. The dealer’s room was open most of the day. Offered were both new and used books and magazines, everything from the latest specialty-press stuff to pulp Astoundings in, well, astoundingly good (mint) condition. We will confess to having hustled the occasional copy of Weird Tales, Schweitzer’s book, or Tibetan Olympic Corpse-Wrestling Team t-shirt.
Sounds like any other convention, right? Well, no. The most bizarre thing about NECon, to most convention-goers when they hear about it, is that it (almost) keeps daylight hours. The convention is on a college campus. Everyone takes their meals together in the cafeteria, not counting the hot-dog roast on the dormitory quadrangle Thursday night and the barbeque Sunday afternoon. This helps give NECon its extraordinary sense of community, but it also means you get up at 8:30 AM for breakfast. All that campus food also leads to the joke that no one loses weight at a NECon. We’re not so sure about that, though. NECon is one of the most physically demanding conventions for people who come a long way. (We drive about 7 hours to get there.) You walk a great deal across the campus. You inevitably miss sleep and then have to stay awake on the drive back. We end up shambling back into our lair late Sunday night to rest our tired, shoggothian carcass.
But what fun we’ve had in the meantime! The real core of any NECon, you see, are such things as the ghost-story telling-cum-reading sessions over the weenie roast, the Hawaiian shirt contest in the student lounge Friday night (after the mass-autographing, that item the one dim echo of the fact that NECon spun off a Providence World Fantasy Convention), and the extraordinary “talent show” presented by the superb team of comedy hosts, Douglas Winter and Craig Shaw Gardner. I don’t think anyone will forget some of this year’s acts, which included writer-critic Phil Nutman in drag and blackface, impersonating Shirley Bassey, lip-synching to the James Bond theme “Diamonds Are Forever” (the best NECon impersonation since Chet Williamson was psychically possessed by the spirit of Anthony Newly some years back) and guest of honor Elizabeth Massie and her sister in costume doing a musical number as “The NECon Whores.” They even gave us their refrigerator magnet, which reads, “We’re cheap. We’re easy. You’ll be out in fifteen minutes.” All in fun, mind you. The URL on the magnet is fictitious. Maybe you’d better not tell your tax accountant about this … or the roast of Peter Straub which followed, complete with a very funny and convincing Steven Spruil impersonating Vice President Dick Cheney, and an almost as convincing Dr. F. Paul Wilson (who really is an M.D.) reviving “Cheney” when he had a (not entirely convincing) heart attack. Doug Winter did a hilarious, dead-on parody of the style of a certain TV interviewer. And there were Valuable Prizes, as always, another NECon tradition. We still treasure the mechanical tarantula we won in a NECon game-show many years ago.
Now that is what a convention is all about. Laughter, good fellowship, and, oh, yes, a bit of business here and there. There’s no doubt that NECon is a good place to network.
We should only hope that family reunions could ever be that good. It occurs to us now that all NECon needs is a theme song … and we mischievously suggest the following, to a tune most Baby Boomers will recognize:
Now it’s time to say goodbye
to our NECon family …
N and E, C, O, N,
fun for you and me!
Till next year …
lots of fear …
We’ll let somebody else finish that.
* * * *
The Most Popular Story in issue #324 was “Wallpaper World” by Phyllis and Alex Eisenstein. Runner up is Tanith Lee’s “La Vampiresse.” Third place went to Thomas Ligotti’s “My Case for Retributive Action,” which one reader in a complimentary fashion described as reading like a cross between James Thurber and H.P. Lovecraft. (“The Secret Crypt of Walter Mitty”?) In any case, the issue was received more enthusiastically than most. there were a lot of first-place votes, and even a few “three-way tie” votes (not entirely for the same stories!)
Let us hear from you again!
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Editorial Book Reviews.
We picked up a lot of interesting books at NECon (and a few more came in the mail). Here are some highlights:
Bran Mak Morn: The Last King by Robert E. Howard. Wandering Star, 2001. 332 pages. Illustrated by Gary Gianni. Trade hardcover, $60.00. This is the latest in the Wandering Star Robert E. Howard Library of Classics, as edited by Rusty Burke, with whom we had an exchange of opinions in last issue’s letter column. We cannot deny that Mr. Burke is editing the Robert E. Howard fan’s dream — at least the wealthy fan’s dream — edition of Howard, with carefully restored and authenticated texts, all manner of secondary apparatus including hitherto unpublished fragments, letters, and a poem. This volume collects all of Howard’s Pictish stories, and replaces Worms of the Earth and/or Bran Mak Morn, which came out decades ago. Deriving his conceptions from Arthur Machen and other sources (some of the historical ones now discredited), Howard saw the Picts as a dark, dwarfish race ultimately displaced by the Celts and then the Romans in Britain. As always his sympathies were with the underdog and the barbarian. His stories about the Picts range from early, amateurish work (“The Lost Race,”) to what may be his very best story, “Worms of the Earth.” The artwork by Gary Gianni is just stunning, as is the design of the book. If there were any justice in the world this would be immediately recognized as fully the equal of the much-reprinted N.C. Wyeth classic editions of Treasure Island, et al. Our only quibble is that some of the type in the appendices is too small for our tired eyes to read easily. A slightly bolder typeface would be in order. But still, make no mistake about it, this is one of the truly great editions to come out of the specialty presses.
The Wooden Sea by Jonathan Carroll. Tor, 2001, 302 pp. Hardcover. $23.95. This bizarre, occasionally bewildering novel