I came out of work today and checked in to see the afternoon's news, and I was greeted by a kick in my stomach. I read that David B. Silva had died.
You know what the saddest thing about it is? I bet a lot of so-called horror fiction fans today do not even know who Dave Silva is. And that, my friends, is the real tragedy.
Oldsters like myself cherish the memory of Dave's 1980's magazine, The Horror Show. It was the coolest magazine of its day, and also a contender for the coolest mag of all time. The Horror Show ran fiction and nonfiction, and Dave's mantra in it was "Better Weird Than Plastic". Weird the magazine definitely was. No one in their right mind would have called it plastic.
The Horror Show often had theme issues. I remember one devoted to Dean Koontz. Another to Robert McCammon. One was for J.K. Potter. One of my favorites was the Skipp and Spector issue. God, those were fun, exciting times.
Later superstars of the horror genre like Brian Hodge, Poppy Z. Brite, and Bentley Little had some of their early work in The Horror Show. Along with, of course, some of the best established writers of the time.
I used to buy The Horror Show from the B. Dalton bookstore in the mall near where I used to live. I loved that store, but it closed down about the time The Horror Show stopped publishing.
In the 90's, David B. Silva created Hellnotes, which at the time was a revolutionary weekly horror electronic newsletter. I believe that it was the first of its kind. I wasn't online for a long while, but I subscribed to the hardcopy version. I still have a lot of the issues up in my attic, boxed up. I need to break that stuff out one of these days.
There was a weekly contest in Hellnotes, and I won it a bunch of times. So much so that Dave knew me well. Very cool books were given away to those who answered the trivia questions correctly. It got to the point where I almost felt bad about entering.
Most important of all, David B. Silva was a writer. He wrote quite a few good novels, but his greatest strength in my opinion was in the short form. I remember when his story, Dry Whiskey, ran in Cemetery Dance Magazine. I thought it was amazing, and I wrote a letter to Dave telling him so. In longhand, sent by snail mail. It seems like a lifetime ago.
You won't go wrong with anything Silva wrote, but I highly recommend a theme collection that was published by Dark Regions called The Shadows of Kingston Mills. If you like Twilight Zone-type fiction, this is a book for you.
I'm not going to stand here and make the claim that Dave Silva and I were good friends, but we corresponded quite a bit. It started with Dry Whiskey, and went on for a long time. Dave was always friendly, helpful, and extremely informative about the genre.
David B. Silva was a private kind of person. He kept out of the limelight, and you didn't see him getting into idiotic dust-ups on the internet. He was too smart and too good for that.
The genre would not be what it is today without the massive influence that Dave Silva had upon it. It would be immeasurably poorer.
Written by Mark Sieber
You know what the saddest thing about it is? I bet a lot of so-called horror fiction fans today do not even know who Dave Silva is. And that, my friends, is the real tragedy.
Oldsters like myself cherish the memory of Dave's 1980's magazine, The Horror Show. It was the coolest magazine of its day, and also a contender for the coolest mag of all time. The Horror Show ran fiction and nonfiction, and Dave's mantra in it was "Better Weird Than Plastic". Weird the magazine definitely was. No one in their right mind would have called it plastic.The Horror Show often had theme issues. I remember one devoted to Dean Koontz. Another to Robert McCammon. One was for J.K. Potter. One of my favorites was the Skipp and Spector issue. God, those were fun, exciting times.
Later superstars of the horror genre like Brian Hodge, Poppy Z. Brite, and Bentley Little had some of their early work in The Horror Show. Along with, of course, some of the best established writers of the time.
I used to buy The Horror Show from the B. Dalton bookstore in the mall near where I used to live. I loved that store, but it closed down about the time The Horror Show stopped publishing.
In the 90's, David B. Silva created Hellnotes, which at the time was a revolutionary weekly horror electronic newsletter. I believe that it was the first of its kind. I wasn't online for a long while, but I subscribed to the hardcopy version. I still have a lot of the issues up in my attic, boxed up. I need to break that stuff out one of these days.
There was a weekly contest in Hellnotes, and I won it a bunch of times. So much so that Dave knew me well. Very cool books were given away to those who answered the trivia questions correctly. It got to the point where I almost felt bad about entering.
Most important of all, David B. Silva was a writer. He wrote quite a few good novels, but his greatest strength in my opinion was in the short form. I remember when his story, Dry Whiskey, ran in Cemetery Dance Magazine. I thought it was amazing, and I wrote a letter to Dave telling him so. In longhand, sent by snail mail. It seems like a lifetime ago.
You won't go wrong with anything Silva wrote, but I highly recommend a theme collection that was published by Dark Regions called The Shadows of Kingston Mills. If you like Twilight Zone-type fiction, this is a book for you.
I'm not going to stand here and make the claim that Dave Silva and I were good friends, but we corresponded quite a bit. It started with Dry Whiskey, and went on for a long time. Dave was always friendly, helpful, and extremely informative about the genre.
David B. Silva was a private kind of person. He kept out of the limelight, and you didn't see him getting into idiotic dust-ups on the internet. He was too smart and too good for that.
The genre would not be what it is today without the massive influence that Dave Silva had upon it. It would be immeasurably poorer.
Written by Mark Sieber
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