Trident: Introduction
The Lairs of the Hidden Gods series of horror anthologies was one of the very first projects Kurodahan worked on, along with Rampo's The Black Lizard. Each of the four volumes had about twelve stories, which meant I had to interact with almost fifty Japanese horror authors and an equal number of translators.
Without question, Asamatsu-san was the most important, at least from my POV. He was the overall editor of the Japanese originals and was primarily a horror author. He knew almost everybody in the field, including authors, editors, publishers, and artists, and was happy to let me in on all the gossip. I don't think it would have been possible to complete those four books without his assistance.
In the process, though, he mentioned that Japan did not have a weird/horror magazine anymore, although years earlier there had been several, notably 幻想文学 (Gensō bungaku), which could be translated as fantastic or weird literature. It primarily ran stories translated from other languages.
We joined up with editor Makihara-san and discussed the possibilities, eventually launching a Japanese language magazine with a combination of translated and home-grown stories and articles. We settled on the name Night Land.
The magazine was professionally printed with runs of 2,000 copies per issue. It was well received by horror fans, and started off well. In spite of our best efforts, though, we were unable to build up much of a subscriber base, and the 60% discount rate for national distribution was too steep. I pulled the plug after losing quite a bit to publish seven issues.
The covers for issues five through eight were done as a single work, although issue eight was never published. All the artwork was by Daniele Serra, of course.
Aftet the announcement that Night Land was ending, we were contacted by a Japanese publisher, Atelier Third. They wanted to launch their own magazine—Night Land Quarterly—as the successor. We were delighted to pass the torch, and made arrangements to put them in contact with our logo designer, have them ship copies of their magazine to our subscribers (at our cost, of course), etc. NLQ, with almost 40 issues released, is still being published.
