IOCUS: A Retrospective

Paul F. Olson

Where does a writer of horror fiction go to market his work when he has penned the finest short fiction of his career? For two decades now the answer has been clear. He turns to Iocus.

This fine magazine celebrates its twentieth anniversary on April 1, 1987, with a special “look back” issue, and The Horror Show is pleased to add its own voice to the choruses of praise that surround the occasion.

Although Iocus did not appear until April of 1967, its roots can be traced quite a bit farther back, to the beaches of Southern California, 1964, when two avid fantasy/horror fans named Bart Mason and David McCray met. They became fast friends and vowed to someday begin a “little magazine of fiction and reviews.” Vietnam intervened, ultimately claiming the life of Mason, but McCray never forgot that vow or the drive he and his friend had shared. When he completed college (for the record, David McCray was almost legally blind and therefore exempt from military duty), he set to work on the dream project and a few years later Iocus was born.

The first issue was regrettably uneven. Able to pay writers only a bare 1/4 cent per word, he attracted the genre’s lower echelon, publishing tales by such now-forgotten names as Janey Huxtable, Calvin Finch, and D.S. Stockman. There were high points, however. A tribute by McCray to his late friend was both touching and chilling, one of the more memorable pieces in the history of the genre. And in the back of the issue, right before the classifieds, was a short space/horror piece called “Star Demon” by a then relatively new writer named Leigh Nichols. That story is forgotten, but today the writer is a regular on the bestseller lists. All in all, not a great premiere effort but a promising one.

“I remember feeling a little disappointed when I saw my first copy,” Nichols said. “I’d been hoping for better. But there was something there … a feeling … a suggestion of power, I guess. I think I knew then that Iocus would be going places.”

One of the things the magazine had going for it in those early days was a regular publishing schedule. Unlike so many of his contemporaries, McCray sensed that it was “publish or perish,” and he had Iocus on a tight bimonthly schedule. That made the financing difficult and the workload often horrendous, but the consistent schedule helped to build distribution. By issue five the magazine was appearing on a surprising number of newsstands around the country and in the larger metropolitan areas of Canada.

Word of Iocus was getting out. The magazine was becoming a known quantity, well-respected at the same time.

“I remember when I first discovered Iocus,” Joe R. Lansdale said recently. “I was sixteen and there it was next to the Playboys and all the sleaze magazines. You know, stuff like Cavalier and Boobs and Butts and such. I checked that baby out pronto (the Iocus, not the Boobs and Butts), and that sucker done some preachifying on me. I think I read it cover-to-cover three times, maybe four. It blew my young head in the trees.”

Lansdale wasn’t alone. Subscriptions began to trickle in, and after a while the trickle became a near flood. McCray admitted to a friend years later that one gentleman in Alabama even sent in $500, saying he hoped it would cover the price of a lifetime subscription. With the support, McCray was soon able to raise his payments to 3 cents per word — quite respectable for its time, but a far cry from the 25-35 cents-per-word the magazine pays today.

“I remember the thrall that caused around the house,” says Richard Christian Matheson. “Rates went up and the quality with it. Life itself seemed to alter.”

Nichols agrees. “That power I’d first sensed was beginning to show itself. It was sort of exciting to watch the magazine’s potential being fulfilled.”

In 1974, David McCray was diagnosed as having cancer, forcing him to do what he’d toyed with doing all along but had always coyly resisted … his illness made it necessary to bring on an assistant. He chose southwest Arizona screenwriter Cotton Peterson for the slot. Peterson had published two well-received tales in Iocus and a portion of a screenplay-in-progress that, at least momentarily, had caused quite a stir in Hollywood for its graphic use of black humor. The two turned out to be a perfect match, “Working,” as McCray said at the time, “like a single machine with two driving engines.”

“They published a story called ‘Wormheart’,” Lansdale recalls. “Man, what a story! That rascal was nastier than pig feet. Real power. I still remember two scenes out of that tale as if I read it yesterday. One was where they had this great blender-murder, and the other was all these worms (the kind you fish for perch with) wriggling around in this spoiled heart on a drainboard. That dude was so intense it made my BVDs wilt. And the thing is, you couldn’t tell who’d bought the little gem, McCray or Peterson, their tastes were that close.”

For the next eighteen months, McCray’s health worsened, and with each issue more and more editorial control reverted to Peterson. Though not commonly known, it was Peterson, during this period, who took Iocus from bimonthly to monthly, and who purchased stories from Nichols (who had become something of a regular), Lansdale, Daniel Hammond, Richard Christian Matheson, and Anne Fletcher.

With McCray’s death on January 11, 1976, Peterson hired two new assistants, Jeffrey Kane and Linda Fonzworth, the former known for his astute, often bitingly sarcastic movie reviews, the latter for the sense of vision she brought (and still brings) to the magazine’s art. If Peterson made Iocus a truly professional magazine, Fonzworth made it look like one. It is her style we see today on the newsstands. The years since 1976 have truly been the magazine’s glory years.

“Even I didn’t foresee this,” Nichols says. “Who would imagine a genre magazine — a horror magazine, for godsakes — paying a quarter-a-word and looking better than all its mainstream competitors?”

For that matter, one could ask, who could foresee a horror magazine that would attract nearly every major star in the field, not just once but many times? Who could foresee a horror magazine that would win major awards both inside and out of the field, including the coveted Black Fear award five years running? Who could foresee a horror magazine with a subscription base of over 19,000 and a circulation that has reached 56,000 with few signs of slowing down?

Today, from their offices in the Midwest, Peterson, Fonzworth and a dedicated staff of seven are continually striving to make Iocus even better, searching out new talent, going hard after the few “names” they haven’t published yet, experimenting with the very definitions of the words “horror” and “horror magazine.”

“I’m amazed and humbled,” says Peterson. “In putting together this retrospective for the anniversary, I can see just how far we’ve come. It’s intimidating thinking that we still want to go forward. But when you’re on top of the field — any field — you can’t just rest on your laurels; you have to keep pushing.”

Richard Christian Matheson laughs when he hears that, and says, “I don’t have any doubts. There aren’t any limits to what Iocus can do. It’s like a Beatles reunion you can subscribe to.”

Iocus.

A magazine that makes all of us look good. Read and respected everywhere.

It began as a conversation between friends. Most likely it will never end.

A special thank you to everyone involved with Iocus, especially to its founders, Bart Mason and David McCray. Wherever they are, a very happy twentieth birthday!

Iocus Sidebar

Joe R. Lansdale is not only one of Iocus’ biggest fans, he is also a historian of the magazine. He remembers an early feature where McCray ran periodic reader polls, and has generously offered to comb his collection of back issues to provide us with his personal top ten tales.

He says: “Maybe you won’t agree. Maybe some of you liked the artsy-craftsy stuff, the psychological tales, the subtle, creeping stories. Too bad. These are the fun ones, where you don’t know whether to scream or laugh, you know? For me, Iocus is always fun — first, last and in between.”

10. RABBITS FROM HELL (Richard Dale). This guy discovers that man-sized bunnies from hell have come up out of a hole in his front yard. Not all that scary, but nutty fun.

9. IT WORE YOU (Keith Jordan). A fella worships Aztec gods and ends up wearing a pretty girl’s skin (thus the title). As warped as Reagan’s budget — well, maybe not that warped. Nastiest humor this side of Robert Bloch. I’ve never seen anything else by Jordan, so may have been a penname, or just a one-shot.

8. NAIL IN THE HEAD (Richard Dale again). A fanatical preacher kills “sinners.” Dale mostly pops up in small magazines these days. Old reprints, since he died a drunk in Dallas in 1983.

7. WORMHEART (Daniel Hammond). Mentioned before; enough said. So nasty I’d rather not talk about it, anyway.

6. COUNT ME DEAD (Janey Huxtable). Most of her stories were as memorable as a McDonald’s lunch, but this one was on the money. It’s a Lovecraftian thing, with some of the ideas from Frank Belknap Long’s “Hounds of Tindalos.” Warped numbers and demented geometric patterns invade our time and wreak havoc on reality.

5. CANDLE WAX (Richard Christian Matheson). Another good one. Guy buys a candle made of wax and rendered fat from a dead murderer. At home he fires the baby up, gets a whiff, and … well, let your imagination fill in the rest. Real creepy stuff.

4. MONSTER RAT (Daniel Hammond). Old-fashioned monster story that works. A kid mixes some stuff with his home chemistry set, but when it starts eating the test tube he flushes the whole mess. A rat gets ahold of it, eats it, and gets real big and ill-tempered, with a hankering for hot intestines.

3. EAT AND LIKE IT (Anne Fletcher). There’s this goop from another world, see, and you’ve just got to eat it. Once you do, it makes you do ugly things. Spooky. Meat cleaver scene is tops.

2. BALL SWEAT (Fletcher again). Another wild tale that sounds like it’s about a locker room problem but is really an ace of a story about (and somehow she made this work) a possessed basketball. Gets high marks on illustration, too. Can’t make out the artist’s name, but the big basketball with the teeth and the creepy eyes is a chiller.

1. STAR DEMON (Leigh Nichols). I don’t care what anyone says, I liked this story. Hey, I still remember it. The part where the demon clamps onto the guy’s head reminds me of a perverse Pooh story, where the bear gets his fat head inside the honey jar.