Stephen King: The Futura UK Paperbacks

In the mid-1980s and early 1990s about half of Stephen King's books were published in England under the Futura imprint (the others were published by New English Library (home of the redoubtable Guy N. Smith's Crabs series!). The covers, most differing wildly from the American counterparts, ain't too shabby—except that one for The Dead Zone; that's the lamest ever. Oh, and I don't remember any bats in the moonlight in Different Seasons.

Sweet Halloween Swag!

And straight from the publisher! An editor from Penguin Books contacted me a couple weeks ago saying how much he enjoyed this blog and would I be interested in their new horror offerings for the Halloween season? Would I?! These three trade paperbacks—The Case Against Satan by Ray Russell, Perchance to Dream by Charles Beaumont, and Songs of a Dead Dreamer & Grimscribe by Thomas Ligotti— have each been given beautiful new covers that I believe accurately reflect the fictions therein. Thoughtful intros/afterwords are provided by folks like Ray Bradbury, Laird Barron, Jeff Vandermeer, and even William Shatner. These are welcome and affordable editions (the original Ligotti paperbacks from the 1990s are ridiculously expensive today) that will look terrific on your bookshelves. Get ready for some midnight reading...

Throwback Thursday Yog-Sothothery

(An Amazon review I wrote back at the turn of the century...)

Finally, Howard Phillips Lovecraft seems to be getting some due from the mainstream literary world. First it was that long Joyce Carol Oates essay from 1996 in the New York Review of Books, than it was the "Annotated Lovecraft" updates from Ballantine/Del Rey a couple years later, and now Penguin Classics has seen fit to bestow the American reading public with The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories. Wow, I can't imagine what readers of Virginia Woolf, John Steinbeck, and T.S. Eliot will do when confronted with the likes of Yog Sothoth, the Goat with a Thousand Young, The Great Old Ones and that nasty ol' Cthulhu....

Seriously: this stuff is incomparable. Lovecraft's creation of the Cthulhu Mythos (or "Yog-Sothothory" as he referred to it in a charming light-hearted moment) heralded a new age in supernatural fiction. So vivid, so cosmic, so vast and imaginative, it is the equal of Middle Earth, of Oz or Wonderland. HPL's view of humanity and the cosmos is deeply, dark, nihilistic, and he used symbolic structures of his neuroses—political, sexual, racial, dietary—to portray that view.

As for the stories themselves, the cornerstones are "The Call of Cthulhu" (1926) and "The Colour Out of Space" (1927); they will still be read a hundred years hence for their controlled atmosphere of cosmic dread and awe. His skill at evoking a slowly dawning sense of terror is unparalleled in these tales. "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" (1931)—not too shabbily adapted in a 2002 film as Dagon—and "The Whisperer in Darkness" (1934) are later stories that are a bit wordy but still powerful, unsettling, and unforgettable. Man's place in the cosmos is revealed as paltry and inconsequential; his physical being rendered as mutated and degraded. Space and time become meaningless. The climactic chills will remain with you for ages.

Others in this collection include "Rats in the Walls," "The Outsider" and "The Hound." The latter two reveal his penchant for evoking Poe all too derivatively (although the erstwhile Poppy Z. Brite wrote a reverent Goth-punk update of "The Hound," "And His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood"); "Rats" is one of his major early works, the artist coming into his own.

Lovecraft forced horror and supernatural fiction out of its old world infancy of vampires, ghosts, and devils and into the adult, modern world of a cold, uncaring, nearly malicious universe that we can scarcely comprehend. While Lovecraft's prose at times leaves much to be desired, the power of his imaginings is unique and convincing. This collection belongs on the bookshelf of serious readers everywhere. S.T. Joshi is a marvelous editor and biographer of Lovecraft, and his efforts should not go unheeded. Kudos to Penguin for finally adding H.P. Lovecraft to their catalog of Twentieth Century Classics.

From the Angry Seas

You Know I'll Always Be Your Slave Till I'm Buried in My Grave

Clive Barker: The Art of Horror

The one and only Clive Barker was born October 5, 1952 in Liverpool. Here's a fantastic video biography from about 1990 or so, judging by his spiky mullet—probably my favorite Barker era, between The Great and Secret Show and Imajica. And remember these comics?! Those were the days!

And the Dawn Don't Rescue Me

Vampire chronicler Anne Rice was born in New Orleans on this date in 1941. Above is a 1985 reprint of the original 1976 Interview with the Vampire (see earlier paperbacks, with stunning covers, here and here). Below are the later 1980s paperbacks, as she continued the tales of her undead brood and became a mega-bestselling author. I kinda like that they don't look like genre novels, featuring only big bold lettering.

These next three are the UK paperbacks, published by Futura throughout the '80s and early '90s.The cover for this reprint of Interview is the same art as the original 1977 edition.

 

I loved these books when I read them in the late 1980s. Rich, epic, decadent, thought-provoking and a whole lot of fun, I enjoyed them so much and recall them so fondly I'm rather reluctant to reread them today...

The author in 1979

Do You Think That You Could Make It with Frankenstein?

Jack Finney Born on this Date, 1911

Milwaukee-born author Jack Finney published the iconic science fiction/horror/thriller novel The Body Snatchers in 1955. It's become one of the seminal genre texts of the 20th century (and beyond, one presumes), along with the likes of I Am Legend and Stepford Wives: works that have permeated mass cultural consciousness, concepts—here, "pod people"—known to people who haven't even read the source material. There have been plenty of paperback editions over the decades, most including the prefix "Invasion of" after the 1956 film adaptation was released. A sampling:

Fiend Club