Robert M. Price Born Today, 1954

Lovecraft scholar and editor Robert M. Price has contributed much to the study and appreciation of weird fiction both vintage and modern. With his fanzine in 1981, Crypt of Cthulhu, Price featured fiction from all the familiar names associated with the Lovecraftian circle, as well as nonfiction and reviews by himself and fellow writers. His background was in theology, so his approach to the Mythos was thorough and perceptive. Price kept Crypt going for 20 years, and you can get later issues from Necronomicon Press.

Dig these hand-drawn covers for Crypt! Really love the aesthetic, I daresay ol' HPL, amateur journalist that he was, would've too. You can find a lot of the articles included in these online, which I highly recommend reading, especially his early Stephen King reviews.

 

 

In the early-mid 1990s Price began editing Mythos anthologies for the RPG publisher Chaosium, and below are a few of the trade paperback anthologies, each which expanded on a particular entity or town in the Mythos. These titles  seemed ubiquitous while I was working in a chain bookstore then, but I never read any though. What am I missing?

 

 

 

Peter Haining Born Today, 1940

British author and editor Peter Haining, who died in 2007, put together dozens of anthologies that collected classic and obscure horror, occult, Gothic, and science fiction over several decades, as well as nonfiction works on our beloved genre. Virtually all of these books were published, for whatever reason, only in the UK. Some - if not most - of the US paperbacks:

 

One of Haining's nonfiction titles that made it 'cross the pond is Terror! A History of Horror Illustrations from the Pulp Magazines. Fortunately I found a copy when I was in high school. It really and truly fed my hungering heart of horror, and it's been an invaluable resource on my bookshelves for decades now! Which is just the way he would've wanted it, I'm sure.

Read more about Peter here, and see lots more of his UK covers here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You Should Play with Madness...

...and watch this pretty amazing 2008 documentary on H.P. Lovecraft, directed by Frank H. Woodward. It's an incredible labor of love, accomplished and thorough, with lots of interviews with horror fiction icons Ramsey Campbell and Peter Straub, as well as horror and dark fantasy giants like John Carpenter, Neil Gaiman, Stuart Gordon, and others (like S.T. Joshi, who wrote the essential - and expensive - biographies of Ech-Pi-El, H.P. Lovecraft: A Life [1996] and the two-volume I Am Providence [2010]). Features lots of great Cthulhu mythos art throughout as it covers not only Lovecraft's reclusive, epistolary life but also the creation and import of his singular and towering achievement in horror fiction, for which I know we are all eternally grateful.

I know it's been out a couple years, but I only got around to it last night - glad I finally did! It's one of the best genre writer docs I've ever seen (up there with Dreams with Sharp Teeth [2008], about the mighty Harlan Ellison). Definitely worth taking 90 minutes out of your day, if you want to know the truth... Oh, and have you guys seen the cover for the recent Penguin Classics Lovecraft trade paperback?! Too clever/cutesy by half, I think.

Faces of Fear: Encounters with the Creators of Modern Horror, edited by Douglas E. Winter (1985)

Perhaps the most prominent critic of horror fiction during its 1980s reign was Douglas E. Winter. When not lawyering in Washington DC, Winter was interviewing authors, reviewing their books, and even writing his own horror stories, also appearing at horror conventions on writers' panels and generally taking seriously a genre too often plagued by uncaring or condescending mainstream literary critics. He edited several major horror anthologies, but more importantly, he published nonfiction studies of the field, starting with the newsletter Shadowings: A Reader's Guide to Horror Fiction, before moving on to one of the earliest studies of Stephen King, the appropriately-titled The Art of Darkness (1982). Then, Faces of Fear: Encounters with the Creators of Modern Horror.

Winter handily defended horror fiction against those who saw it as disposable, tasteless, trite, misogynistic, irrelevant. True, lots of horror is exactly that, but Winter knew who had the goods and could deliver unique and powerful work: not only big and expected names like King and Straub and Matheson and Bloch, but also lesser-known writers like Michael McDowell and Dennis Etchison. He was also an early champion of Clive Barker (whose biography he wrote in 2001). And in Faces of Fear, Winter lets these writers, and more, do the talking. In his understated but thoughtful introduction, Winter notes that he avoided questions about various specific works in order to have a more general insight into the writers' private lives. Wisely, the interviewer Winter discreetly disappears so that virtually all we hear are the writers' words themselves.

Everybody's got some kind of good insight into the writing of horror, as well as the struggle of simply living the writer's life. Some authors discuss their writing habits, or whether or not they're scared by what they write, or if, indeed, they even like being referred to as a horror writer. Things start, appropriately enough, with Robert Bloch (author of Psycho!!!) and his days of correspondence with Lovecraft himself. Detailing his decades of cranking out horror and suspense fiction, he does lament the tendency towards graphic violence in the 1980s, wondering, "What's going to come out of those people who think Night of the Living Dead isn't enough?" (Of course, this was just before the splatterpunks, but I'm sure Bloch couldn't imagine what the kids today are getting up to now with their bizarro fiction.) Then Richard Matheson tries to demythologize the modern reverence towards "The Twilight Zone"; admirable, sure, but definitely unsuccessful. To him, at the time, it was simply a decent writing job.

1990 Tor Books reprint

Just about all of them reveal that people think they must be somehow warped or disturbed to write horror. After detailing his harrowing experience of nearly being a target of Charles Whitman, Whitley Strieber comes off as a complete crank; I'm surprised his author photo shows him wearing a jaunty fedora and not a tinfoil hat or a crown of oranges. Ramsey Campbell's mother descended into mental illness. Otherwise, these guys are as normal as you or me... take that for what it's worth!

Ramsey Campbell

Charles L. Grant's interview takes place in Manhattan's Playboy Club (how's that for dating this book?!); James Herbert talks lovingly about his poverty-stricken upbringing and then jet-setting lifestyle as an ad agency exec before he decided to write novels for a living. The only woman interviewed is not Anne Rice - these interviews were done well before Rice had published her second vampire novel - but the mysterious V.C. Andrews. Um, not my thing whatsoever.

James Herbert

T.E.D. Klein

T.E.D. Klein, Dennis Etchison, and Clive Barker have terrifically good things to say about genre writing and the world's perception of it, why pop culture is often savvier about our lives than more so-called respectable pursuits, about horror and why audiences crave it (Klein doesn't even really like the genre, and resigned his post as Twilight Zone magazine editor around this time). Major-leaguers Peter Straub and Stephen King finish up the book with a real flourish in a dual interview. King of course talks of his hatred of being a brand-name, even back then, and reminisces about his days as a college "revolutionary" in the late '60s when he realized he actually did like middle-class life. But I'd say my favorite piece here is about the late Michael McDowell, who unequivocally states his love of being a paperback original writer and how he came to disdain the arid and judgmental nature of the academic literary world. An utterly refreshing attitude!

Michael McDowell

There is plenty more in Faces of Fear for the real fan of '80s horror fiction: it's a way to see how horror had changed since the pulp era, how it thrived in the paperback boom, and how it even grew up, a little. It's hard to believe the book is a quarter of a century old, but many of the writers are still in print; the ones who aren't are, if this blog and its readers are any evidence, still read and remembered and rediscovered anew.

Douglas Winter

All These Monster Kids' Books

Halloween has almost arrived. Since this awesome holiday is (usually) about kids, I wanted to share some great books I - and plenty of other folks - loved to read and reread as a child. These are the books that made me the diehard Halloween and horror fan I am today.

Norman Bridwell, most famous for creating Clifford the Big Red Dog, had several books of charmingly-drawn monsters. Monster Holidays (1974) and How to Care for Your Monster (1970) were the best. I mean, the monsters are adorable. Look at Dracula waving, for Chrissakes! Who would not want to open their door on Halloween night and find those folks outside?!

Another fantastically well-illustrated monster book was Movie Monsters (1975). This makeup how-to by Alan Ormsby, who had starred as the most obnoxious theater troupe leader ever in Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things (1973).

Bunnicula (1979)! A classic tale of a vampire rabbit. Lots of sequels apparently.

All I remember about The Mystery in Dracula's Castle (1975) is that I read it over and over and over. Don't even know if I ever saw the Disney TV movie.

Books like these, found in the kids' non-fiction section of the library, were a treasure trove of horror movie history. In the days before VCRs, much less DVDs and the internet, the only way a kid could see a lot of these movies was to read these books and imagine them in his head...The distinctive orange-spined Crestwood Series has sent many a 30-something dude scouring the net for hours trying to figure out what the heck they were called.

I don't draw like I used to as a kid, but I fondly recall these two how-to books, by illustrator stalwarts Lee J. Ames and Ed Emberley, were staples for the after-school and Saturday hours.

Hope everyone's Halloween is a delight... even if this crazy lady doesn't want you to celebrate it!