RIP Bernard Taylor, Dead at 91

I have just learned from Valancourt Books that British horror author Bernard Taylor, author of vintage classics like Sweetheart, Sweetheart and The Reaping, has died at age 91. Apparently he died in December 2025, and the publisher only heard about it very recently from Taylor's agent. No other details are available.

Taylor's first novel was The Godsend in 1976, which I reviewed here. All of his paperbacks were adorned with covers that perfectly define the Paperbacks from Hell era, rife with creepy kids (and fetuses!), bloody typefaces, and comparisons to, as you can see above, the unholy trinity of bestselling horror novels The Exorcist, The Other, and Rosemary's Baby. 

As a writer, Taylor's prose style was smart and understated, with well-drawn modern characters slowly immersed into a world of unknown horrors... unknown till it is too late. Slow burns, they call 'em, but I prefer to use Peter Straub's own descriptor, a long fuse. In 2019 was honored to write the introduction—and choose the cover art!—for his 1980 novel The Reaping, as part of Valancourt's Paperbacks from Hell reprint line. 

Perhaps his most well-known novel is his second, the erotically haunting Sweetheart, Sweetheart, from 1977, which I enjoyed and reviewed here. Other novels and short stories followed, as well as various reprints both in the States and the UK. The later UK editions often had tremendously striking cover art by the incredible Steve Crisp. 

While I haven’t read all of his books, I do look forward to reading the ones I have in my collection. And I am certainly happy to have played a small part in getting his work reprinted and read again these many decades later. 

Bernard Taylor’s horrors were thoughtful, unhurried, yet still retained a pulpy sensibility, anchored by a good sense of locale and character, with suspense tightening the screws to the very end. I can’t be too sad about an author I liked who dies at the age of 91; we should all be so lucky to live such a long and creative life! 

See more of his mass market paperback covers here. 

RIP Thomas Tessier (1947 - 2026)

Another completely unexpected death of a major horror author: Thomas Tessier died at the age of 78 on March 26th. If you've been reading Too Much Horror Fiction for long, you'll know he's one of my favorites; I discovered him in 1989 or 1990 while working in a used bookstore and picked up Finishing Touches on a whim, thanks to its come-hither cover art. It was an honor to get that book and another favorite, Rapture, reprinted by Valancourt Books in their Paperbacks from Hell line. 

When I wrote the intro for FT, I was able to chat with Tessier over email, and I—and other fans, as I've learned on social media—found him personable, open, and fascinating (he was living in London in the Seventies and witnessed the birth of British punk rock first hand as a music magazine editor/writer).

In addition to his terrifying, malevolent novels, Tessier also penned some utterly brilliant and effective short stories, like "Evelyn Grace," "Addicted to Love," and "Blanca." Published in various horror anthologies throughout the late Eighties and into the Nineties and beyond, they've been gathered into a 2019 collection, World of Hurt. 

Pick up a Tessier book today, and become acquainted with one of horror's quietest, most seductive, most penetrating voices. Godspeed, Mr. Tessier, and thanks for all the terrors.  

RIP Dan Simmons (1948 - 2026)

Sad and to me, completely unexpected news: Dan Simmons, author of some of the most popular, award-winning, thought-provoking, mind-expanding, and iconic horror and science fiction of the last 40 years, has died at age 77. 

I first read him around 1990 or so, after hearing so much about his 1985 debut horror novel, Song of Kali. Boy, did that one do a number on me! In quick succession I read a bunch of his short stories (first in The Skin Trade, and later in Prayers to Broken Stones), then soon after that dove into Hyperion, thanks to my boss and a coworker, both big SF guys. Boy, did that one do a number on me! I'd never really read any true SF before, maybe a little of Bradbury's science fantasy, so being introduced to many of its subgenres and styles in one novel blew my brain out. It hit particularly hard because I had just read, or read sections of, The Canterbury Tales in my World Lit class at community college, so I grokked the narrative device immediately. 

Today I pulled down my Simmons mass markets, and I realized for all his prolific output, I kind of lost track of his work after the mid-1990s. But I have to say many if not most of his paperbacks have some of the greatest cover art of the entire Paperbacks from Hell era, and the books themselves are treasured personal physical mementos of those days long gone. Dig:

RIP Chelsea Quinn Yarbro (1942 - 2025)

Prolific, long-time author Chelsea Quinn Yarbro has died at age 82. Known for her historical horror novels about the vampire Count Saint-Germain, Yarbro also wrote excellent short stories and horror movie novelizations. Here is my (unfortunately incomplete) collection of her mass market paperbacks.

Interview with The Book Graveyard

Don't miss this recording of my live chat with The Book Graveyard! A great time was had by all. Below is a pic of all the horror paperbacks I mentioned. Lots of good stuff, especially for anyone new to this blog or Paperbacks from Hell—enjoy!

Live Chat with Me on Saturday, July 5th!

Hey all, here's something you might dig: this Saturday, July 5, at 7pm EST, I will be doing a live chat/interview with The Book Graveyard, a supercool book blog/YouTube page that features vintage paperbacks of various genres. You'll be able to ask questions as Nick and I talk about horror fiction, this blog, book collecting, and obviously Paperbacks from Hell, but also anything else that comes up. Please join us if you can! 

Too Much Horror Fiction Updates...

Hola amigos, long time since I rapped at ya! Got some horror (all good) news you can use...

I've written two introductions for two new horror anthologies: one was published at the end of 2024, The Rack: Stories Inspired by Vintage Horror Paperbacks, edited by Stoker Award-winning author Tom Deady, from Greymore Publishing; order here. Also, the brand-new Claw Machine, compiled by an old East Coast pal of mine who now also resides in Portland. You can order it from Little Key Press here. Both feature horror/science fiction/speculative lit stories that I think will appeal to TMHF and Paperbacks from Hell fans. It was definitely an honor to have been asked to write for these books!

And yet another intro I wrote is for a vintage paperback novel that will be reprinted by Fathom Press later this summer. Like Valancourt, they are putting back into print paperback horror under their Savage Harvest line. This one is Bad Ronald, the 1973 book by giant SF scribe Jack Vance, the basis for the infamous TV movie of yore (which I still have not seen!). The fresh new cover art, by Steve Andrade, is pretty spectacular (he's done all of the Savage Harvest reprints, I believe, and they are nothing short of wonderful). You can preorder it here. 

Last but certainly not least: Grady Hendrix and I, along with Valancourt Books, have decided to wrap up the Paperbacks from Hell reprint series with three more titles, thus ending the line with an even two dozen works. But the titles have not been finalized yet! We're discussing a few books, but as you know, tracking down publication rights, and then convincing people to have their books republished, is tricky business; the stars have to align just so. 

The moving parts are: books we all three like; the book is entirely out of print (no ebook/audiobook either); the original paperback is somewhat rare/expensive in the secondhand market; the author/estate is willing to have the book reprinted; and the promise of potential sales. As the years have gone on, checking off all those boxes is incredibly difficult. We've reached complete dead ends on several titles we've wanted. So we've all agreed, unfortunately, the end is here. I'll say we are looking at some "classicks" that a lot of people want to get their grubby mitts on, but that's all I will say for now. 

Alas, we cannot reprint several notorious works that people have been asking about over the years: Eat Them Alive, The Voice of the Clown, and The Little People. For various and sundry reasons, the rights to these three remain completely unavailable to us. Frustrating and disappointing, I know, but I think the other titles were hoping to reprint will be quite well received! I will announce as soon as we've decided and gotten the rights signed off on.

Okay, back to reading, and hopefully getting some reviews back up on here...

RIP Peter Straub (1943 - 2022)

Sad news today: Locus magazine has reported that Peter Straub has died at age 79 after a long illness. A giant of modern horror since the late Seventies, with major bestselling works like Ghost Story, Floating Dragon, Koko, and, with Stephen King, The Talisman, to his credit, Straub was a writer of uncommon power and literary skill. In novels, short stories, and novellas alike, he was able to explore depths of emotional terror and physical violence in a way that made them immediate, visceral, sublime. Characters in Straub's works arrive full-blooded, while plot and themes reverberate with the echoes of past horror classics; his prose crackles with vitality as almost effortlessly he depicts a contemporary world suffused with our past and collective guilt, often garbed in the supernatural but just about as often unadorned with genre trappings.

While not as prolific as King, Straub was writing award-winning fiction well into the 21st century. I myself have read only a portion of his catalog, but what I have read, I have enjoyed almost more than any other horror writer. We have a lost a true master of horror, and if by any chance you have not read him, I urge you to avail yourself of his books at once!

2021: The Year in Review

Alas: 2021 was another year in which I've had more luck buying horror paperbacks than I have had in reading them. You've probably noticed the dearth of reviews on the blog. This year I started to read so many but gave up on them in a flash, realizing I'm having the same reaction to them as editors/critics like Karl Edward Wagner, Dennis Etchison, and Charles L. Grant had back in the day: the books I was reading were tired, dumb, lazily written, and/or noticeably cribbed from more popular works. Even titles I've searched for for years and had high hopes for, like Florence Stevenson's A Feast of Eggshells, left me disappointed in the first handful of chapters. As Diamond David Lee Roth once put it, "I got no time to mess around," so I've been feeling less guilty about books going back on the shelf unread. Have I lost my touch for plucking and rescuing forgotten titles out of obscurity?!

 

 

The last novel I read, The Devil's Advocate, a 1990 Pocket Book from Andrew Neiderman, was disgracefully, shamefully dumb. A pale, 90-pound weakling of a book. A spineless, enervated ripoff of Ira Levin and John Grisham. No idea why the spine has the word "horror" on it. At one point the main character says, "Bob, I have come to the conclusion that John Milton is an evil man with supernatural powers. Probably he's not a man, or, what I mean is, he's more than a man. He's most probably Satan himself." This might be the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard anyone say in "horror novel," and you know that's saying a lot. 

But all that aside, I'm thrilled with the books I've been purchasing online lately (visits to brick-and-mortar stores are few and far between these days). I am a collector building a library, and in my possession I have books that are proving harder and harder to find at affordable prices. This isn't a brag; it's my growing awareness that these books are truly the ephemera of the past and I'm doing a part in keeping it alive and archived. This year I've leaned into that more.

Valancourt Books continues to publish sought-after horror fiction from the Paperbacks from Hell era; this year we reprinted Hugh Zachary's 1974 eco-erotic-horror novel Gwen, in Green. We have another title in the chamber for the PfH series: Les Whitten's Progeny of the Adder. This 1965 horror/mystery novel was a precursor to TV's "The Night Stalker" as well as, indirectly, 'Salem's Lot. Not part of the series but still highly anticipated, Valancourt will be offering Carnosaur by "Harry Adam Knight" (pseudonym of Australian pulp author John Brosnan) and In a Lonely Place by Karl Edward Wagner.

The former is a 1984 "animal attack" thriller that presages Jurassic Park by several years, while the latter is one of the rarest of vintage horror paperbacks, containing some of Wagner's best work, like "Sticks" and "Where the Summer Ends." I'll be doing intros for Adder and Carnosaur, so that's something for me to look forward to.

My wife and I made a trip to France back in September, first time for me. It was of course wonderful (and very safe, we got tested twice while there and had the results emailed to us in 15 minutes). I found one terrific English-language bookstore in Paris, and while they didn't have a horror section per se, there was at least one tiny treasure tucked away in the vast paperbacks shelves: a signed US copy of Slither!

The biggest news was of course the death of Anne Rice. While I haven't read one of her books in 30 years, the ones I did read—that is, the original trilogy of The Vampire Chronicles—were very important to me way back when (I went to one of her book signings in Philly in 1991 or 1992, sad to say no pictures were taken though). Her contributions to horror and Gothic literature are immeasurable. I've since added first-editions paperbacks of The Witching Hour and The Mummy to my shelves; perhaps 2022 is the year I will finally read them!

We also lost beloved artist Rowena Morrill, whose illustration adorns this wonderful, if scuffed, Dracula Book of Great Vampire Stories. I got this guy in the mail about a day before she died.

Below are many of my acquisitions from this year. I don't think I paid more than $15 for any one. This year I finally finished cataloguing all of my horror paperbacks; I'm at around 1,100 or so mass-markets alone. Here's to a brighter 2022 everyone!