
"Owls Hoot in the Daytime" by Manly Wade Wellman. "A Garden of Blackred Roses" by Charles L. "Lindsay and the Red City Blues" by Joe Haldeman. "The Night Before Christmas" by Robert Bloch. "The Detective of Dreams" by Gene Wolfe. "The Bingo Master" by Joyce Carol Oates. "Where the Summer Ends" by Karl Edward Wagner. " Mark Ingestre: The Customer's Tale" by Robert Aickman. " The Crest of Thirty-six" by Davis Grubb. Predictably enough, some were able to respond with stories, some were not." 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. 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and partly by Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions in his aim to get new and established writers to submit previously unpublished stories without any editorial restrictions or narrow theme. The idea for an ambitious new collection of horror and supernatural stories was suggested to Kirby McCauley by British publisher Anthony Cheetham. Clark, Allen Koszowski, Alex McVey, Keith Minnion, Chad Savage, and Erik Wilson.
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. It was published in late 2007 as a limited edition of 300 copies and as a lettered edition of 26 copies. In 2006, Dark Forces: The 25th Anniversary Edition was announced by Lonely Road Books, and it sold out within days of being announced.
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. It was edited by New York City literary agent Kirby McCauley. 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.