Dark Forces (book)
Dark Forces: New Stories of Suspense and Supernatural Horror is an anthology of 23 original horror stories, first published by The Viking Press in 1980 and as a paperback by Bantam Books in 1981. It was edited by New York City literary agent Kirby McCauley. Dark Forces won the World Fantasy award for best anthology/collection in 1981 and is celebrated in an essay by Christopher Golden in Horror: Another 100 Best Books, edited by Stephen Jones and Kim Newman.
In 2006, Dark Forces: The 25th Anniversary Edition was announced by Lonely Road Books, and it sold out within days of being announced. It was finally published in late 2007 as a limited edition of 300 copies and as a lettered edition of 26 copies. It featured the same stories, but it also included signatures from the editor and all of the artists, a new interview of Kirby McCauley conducted by Kealan Patrick Burke, a new cover by Bernie Wrightson, and over twenty-four new color and black and white inner illustrations by Jill Bauman, Glenn Chadbourne, Alan M. Clark, Allen Koszowski, Alex McVey, Keith Minnion, Chad Savage, and Erik Wilson.
The idea for an ambitious new collection of horror and supernatural stories was suggested to Kirby McCauley by British publisher Anthony Cheetham. As he started planning it, McCauley was partly inspired by the editorial work of August Derleth in his search for top-quality horror fiction, and partly by Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions in his aim to get new and established writers to submit previously unpublished stories without any editorial demands or narrow theme.
McCauley writes in his original introduction, "I set out to offer as many of the subjects and moods and general directions the fantastic tale has tended traditionally to take as I could, but hopefully in imaginative, fresh ways." About his method of finding material, he writes: "I approached by letter or telephone nearly every writer living who had tried his or her hand at this type of story and whose writing I like personally. Predictably enough, some were able to respond with stories, some were not."
Source : www.wikipedia.org