THE WORLD FANTASY AWARDS: Vol. II
By
Fourteen winners and runners-up honored at the Second World Fantasy Convention in 1976, along with works by illustrators tapped for distinction (Frank Frazetta, Roger Dean, Stephen Fabian) and a solid essay-introduction by Fritz Leiber. The winner is Harlan Ellison's ""Whimper of Whipped Dogs,"" a gastly tour de force of depression--about a woman choreographer in Manhattan who witnesses a dancelike murder in her apartment-house courtyard, then one night finds herself the random victim, and saves her body by surrendering her soul to a nameless Blood god. Stephen King's ""prequel"" to Salem's Lot, ""Jerusalem's Lot,"" is here too--an epistolary tale about a house of family horrors in 1850 New England, more Lovecraftian than the novel. Ray Bradbury's amusing ""The October Game"" is a twitchy little Hallowe'en chiller, very funny in its punch line. And Leiber himself has two winners: ""Smoke Giant,"" a classic Forties tale about a moronically devilish ghost made of smoke and factory soot; and ""Belsen Express,"" about a self-concerned suburbanite who finds himself on a train bound for Belsen's furnaces. A solid selection of old and not-soold fantasy/horror standouts.