The Mammoth Book of Body Horror
Page 52
BRIAN LUMLEY began writing relatively late in life, aged twenty-nine in 1967, and while still serving in the British Army with thirteen years to go to complete a full military career of twenty-two years. He produced his early work very much under the influence of the Weird Tales authors H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith, and his first stories and books were published by the then “dean of macabre publishers” August W. Derleth at the now legendary Arkham House, Sauk City, Wisconsin. Leaving the army in December 1980, Lumley began writing full time, and four years later completed his breakthrough novel, Necroscope®, featuring Harry Keogh, a psychically endowed hero for the Great Majority, the teeming dead, with whom he is able to communicate as easily as with the living. Necroscope has now grown to sixteen big volumes, published in fourteen countries and many millions of copies. In addition, Necroscope comic books, graphic novels, a role-playing game, quality figurines and, in Germany, a series of audio books have been created from the much-loved series. Moreover the original story has been optioned for movies four years running, a project that is still very much alive and kicking. Along with the Necroscope series, Lumley is also the author of more than forty other titles; he is the winner of a British Fantasy Award, of a Fear Magazine Award, of a Lovecraft Film Festival Association “Howie”, of the World Horror Convention’s Grand Master Award, and most recently he is the recipient of the Horror Writers’ Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award. For seven years, Lumley’s American wife, Barbara Ann, ran KeoghCon, an annual fan gathering dedicated to her husband’s work; alas, that little con has lately become too time-consuming. Lumley’s most recent book is a long novella from Subterranean Press featuring Harry Keogh and entitled, Necroscope: The Plague-Bearer. His work is being steadily reprinted in the USA and other countries, and his next book is a short futuristic vampire novel entitled The Fly-By-Nights.
NANCY A. COLLINS has authored more than twenty novels and numerous short stories, as well as serving as a comicbook writer for DC, Marvel and Dark Horse Comics. She is a recipient of the Horror Writers’ Association’s Stoker Award and the British Fantasy Society Award, and has been nominated for the Eisner, the John Campbell Memorial and the World Fantasy and International Horror Guild Awards. Best known for her ground-breaking vampire character Sonja Blue, her works include Sunglasses After Dark, several short story collections and the Vamps series for young adults. She was also the writer of the Swamp Thing comic-book series for DC’s Vertigo imprint for two years. She has just finished work on Left Hand Magic, the second book in the acclaimed new Golgotham urban fantasy series, the first being Right Hand Magic.
RICHARD CHRISTIAN MATHESON is an acclaimed novelist, short-story writer and screenwriter/producer. He is also the president of Matheson Entertainment, a production company he formed with his father, Richard Matheson, which is involved with multiple film and television projects. RC has written and co-written feature-film and television projects for Richard Donner, Ivan Reitman, Joel Silver, Steven Spielberg, Bryan Singer and many others. To date, he has written and sold fourteen original, spec feature scripts – which is considered a record. Matheson has had seven feature films produced, including the critically hailed paranoid satire, Three O’Clock High. He has written comedy and dramatic pilots for Showtime, Fox, NBC, ABC, TNT, HBO and CBS and served as head writer, executive story consultant and executive producer for twenty network comedy and dramatic series. Matheson wrote the screenplay for the critically lauded Sole Survivor, a four-hour mini-series based on Dean Koontz’s bestselling novel. He also wrote three scripts for Masters of Horror, two directed by Tobe Hooper. For TNT’s Nightmares and Dreamscapes mini-series, he wrote the critically hailed adaptation of Stephen King’s short story “Battleground”, starring William Hurt and directed by Brian Henson. The episode has won two Emmys. Matheson has recently created and written Majestic, a one-hour paranormal series for TNT, based on the work of Whitley Strieber, and is currently in development on Dragons, a six-hour mini-series with director Bryan Singer, which Matheson created. Matheson is considered a cutting-edge voice in surreal psychological horror fiction and master of the short story. His seventy-five critically lauded stories have been published in over a hundred major award-winning anthologies, including multiple times in Year’s Best Horror, Year’s Best Fantasy, Year’s Best New Horror, The Best Horror of the Year, Year’s Best Horror Stories, and Penthouse, Twilight Zone and Omni magazines. Thirty of Matheson’s stories are collected in SCARS and Other Distinguishing Marks. A second, hardcover collection of sixty stories, Dystopia, has received stellar reviews and been translated into other languages. His critically lauded debut novel, Created By, was Bantam’s hardcover lead, a Bram Stoker Award nominee for best first novel and a Book-of-the-Month Club lead selection. It has been translated into several languages. Matheson’s new novella, The Ritual of Illusion, was published in 20l1 by PS Publishing in Britain. A third collection of his acclaimed stories will be published in 2012 by Gauntlet.
MICHAEL MARSHALL SMITH is a novelist and screenwriter. Under this name he has published over seventy short stories and three novels – Only Forward, Spares and One of Us – winning the Philip K. Dick award, the International Horror Guild award, the August Derleth award and the Prix Bob Morane in France; he has won the British Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction four times, more than any other author. Writing as Michael Marshall, he has published five internationally bestselling thrillers, including The Straw Men, The Intruders and Bad Things. 2009 saw the publication of The Servants, under the name M. M. Smith. He is currently involved in screenwriting projects, including a television pilot and an animated movie for children. His most recent Michael Marshall novel, Killer Move, was published in 2011. He lives in north London with his wife, son, and two cats. Visit his website at www.michaelmarshallsmith.com
NEIL GAIMAN has written highly acclaimed books for both adults and children and has won many major awards, including the Hugo, Nebula and Newbery. His novels include Neverwhere, Stardust, American Gods, Coraline, Anansi Boys and, most recently, The Graveyard Book. His collections include Smoke and Mirrors and Fragile Things. Neverwhere was turned into a BBC TV series, while both Stardust and Coraline have been adapted to the big screen. His multimillion-selling series Sandman was described as “the greatest epic in the history of comic books” by the LA Times.
JAMES HERBERT is Britain’s No. 1 bestselling writer of chiller fiction, and one of our greatest popular novelists, whose books have been translated into more than thirty-five languages, including Russian and Chinese, and have sold more than fifty million copies worldwide. It was with the publication of his first ground-breaking novel, The Rats, in 1974 that he first came to the public attention and he has gone on to write more than twenty more, including The Fog, The Survivor, Fluke, The Spear, Lair, The Dark, The Jonah, Shrine, Domain, Moon, The Magic Cottage, Sepulchre, Creed, Portent, ’48, Others, Once, Nobody True and The Secret of Crickley Hall (which has recently been optioned by the BBC). The City graphic novel, illustrated by Ian Miller, continued The Rats sequence set against a post-holocaust background, while James Herbert’s Dark Places: Locations and Legends is a collaboration with photographer Paul Barkshire. His next novel is Ash, the third book in a trilogy featuring psychic investigator David Ash, which began with Haunted and continued with The Ghosts of Sleath. The Rats (a.k.a. Deadly Eyes), The Survivor, Fluke and Haunted have all been turned into movies, the latter starring Aidan Quinn, Kate Beckinsale and Sir John Gielgud. At 2010’s World Horror Convention – at which James was a Special Guest – he was given the Grand Master Award for his achievements in the field.
CHRISTOPHER FOWLER was born in Greenwich, London. He is the award-winning author of thirty novels and twelve short-story collections, and creator of the popular Bryant & May mysteries. He worked in the film industry and fulfilled several schoolboy fantasies, releasing a terrible Christmas pop single, becoming a male model, posing as the villain in a Batman comic, appearing in the Pan Books of Horror and standi
ng in for James Bond. He has written for the BBC, has a weekly column in the Independent on Sunday, is the crime reviewer for the Financial Times and has written for many others. He lives in King’s Cross, London. His latest books are the Hammer-homage novel Hell Train, the box-set of twenty-five new short horror stories Red Gloves, and the novel The Memory of Blood. You can find his sites at www.christopherfowler.co.uk and www.peculiarcrimesunit.com
ALICE HENDERSON is a writer of both fiction and videogame material. Her horror novel Voracious pits a lone hiker against a shapeshifting creature. Her work has appeared in Dark Horse’s Creepy comic. She has written Buffy the Vampire Slayer novels, and while working at LucasArts wrote video-game material for several Star Wars titles. She holds a master’s degree in folklore and mythology and her graduate research focused on monsters such as Bigfoot and El Chupacabra. Her novel Portal Through Time won the Scribe Award for Best Novel. Please visit her at www.alicehenderson.com.
GRAHAM MASTERTON made his horror debut in 1975 with The Manitou, the story of a 300-year-old Native American shaman who is reborn in the present day to take his revenge on the white man. A huge bestseller, it was made into a classic movie starring Tony Curtis. Since then, Graham has written over a hundred novels – horror, thrillers, short stories, historical romances and sex-instruction books such as How To Drive Your Man Wild In Bed. Before he took up writing novels he was editor of Penthouse magazine. It was there that he met his late wife Wiescka, who became his agent and sold The Manitou in her native Poland even before the collapse of Communism – the first Western horror novel to be published in Poland since the war. Apart from five Manitou novels, Graham has also published the Rook series, about a remedial-English teacher who recruits his slacker class to fight ill-intentioned ghosts and demons; the Night Warriors series, about ordinary people who battle against apocalyptic terrors in their dreams; as well as many other supernatural thrillers, including Family Portrait, The Pariah and Mirror, which were all published simultaneously as part of the new book imprint by Hammer Films. Graham Masterton was born in Edinburgh in 1946, the grandson of John Masterton, the chief inspector of mines for Scotland, and Thomas Thorne Baker, the scientist who was the first man to send photographs by wireless. He was expelled from school at the age of seventeen and became a trainee newspaper reporter, joining the new men’s magazine Mayfair as deputy editor at the age of twenty-one, and taking over Penthouse when he was twenty-four. He wrote his first novel in 1967, a highly experimental thriller entitled Rules of Duel, with the encouragement and input of the late William Burroughs, author of The Naked Lunch, whom he befriended when Burroughs lived in London. This was recently published for the first time by Telos Books. Graham and Wiescka Masterton lived in Ireland from 1999 to 2003, and he is currently working on a sequel to A Terrible Beauty, a supernatural crime thriller set in Cork, as well as a new Rook novel and many other projects.
GEMMA FILES is the author of A Book of Tongues: Volume One of the Hexslinger Series (CZP), which won a double DarkScribe Magazine Small Press Chill Black Quill Award (in both the Editor’s Choice and Readers’ Choice categories), and was also nominated for a Best Achievement in a First Novel Bram Stoker Award. Her second novel, A Rope of Thorns, was released in 2011. Learn more about her at musicatmidnight-gfiles.blogspot.com.
SIMON CLARK, at the age of five, narrowly avoided drowning when he fell through ice on a lake. That brush with eternity might have coloured his view of life ever since. Certainly, his award-winning fiction is brushed with darkness. He lives in Doncaster, England, with his family – well away from deep water. His many books include Nailed by the Heart, Blood Crazy, Vampyrrhic, Darkness Demands, She Loves Monsters and the award-winning The Night of the Triffids, which continues the adventures of John Wyndham’s classic The Day of the Triffids. Simon’s most recent books include Ghost Monster, about a ghoulish feast of horrors that befalls a community when they are possessed by the spirits of sadistic outlaws, Humpty’s Bones and a collection of short stories entitled The Gravedigger’s Tale: Fables of Fear.
BARBIE WILDE is best known as the Female Cenobite in Clive Barker’s classic cult horror movie Hellbound: Hellraiser II. She has performed in cabaret in Bangkok, robotically danced in the Bollywood blockbuster Janbazz, played a vicious mugger in Death Wish III, appeared as a drummer for an electronica band in the so-called “Holy Grail of unfinished and unreleased 80s horror”: Grizzly II: The Predator (a.k.a. Grizzly II: The Concert), which starred a then unknown George Clooney, and was a founder member of the mime/dance/music group SHOCK, which supported such artists as Gary Numan, Ultravox, Depeche Mode and Adam & the Ants. Barbie presented and wrote eight different music and film review TV programmes in the UK in the 1980s and 1990s. In 2009, Barbie contributed a well-received short story, entitled “Sister Cilice”, to the Hellbound Hearts anthology, edited by Paul Kane and Marie O’Regan. In 2008–10, Barbie co-wrote the book for a musical called Sailor with composer-lyricist-writer Georg Kajanus and screenwriter-playwright Roberto Trippini. Containing a unique perspective on life, violence, vengeance and love, Sailor has been conceived as both a stage and film musical drama. Barbie is now working on her second book, an erotic vampire novel called Valeska, after completing her first novel, The Venus Complex, a fictionalized journal of a serial killer.
DAVID MOODY was born in 1970 and grew up in Birmingham on a diet of trashy horror and pulp science fiction. He worked as a bank manager before giving up the day job to write about the end of the world for a living. He has written a number of horror novels, including Autumn, which spawned a series of sequels and a movie starring Dexter Fletcher and David Carradine, and Hater, film rights to which were bought by Guillermo del Toro (Hellboy, Pan’s Labyrinth) and Mark Johnson (producer of the Chronicles of Narnia films). Moody lives outside Birmingham with his wife and a houseful of daughters and stepdaughters, which may explain his preoccupation with Armageddon. Visit Moody at www.djmoody.co.uk.
AXELLE CAROLYN is a former Fangoria reporter and has had a dozen short stories published in high-profile anthologies and magazines in the past couple of years. She is also the author of an award-winning non-fiction book, It Lives Again! Horror Movies in the New Millennium (Telos Publishing). In parallel to her writing work, Axelle has pursued a successful career in front of and behind the camera. Her acting credits include Neil Marshall’s Centurion (2010), and she is soon to direct her first feature, The Haunted, which she also scripted.
CONRAD WILLIAMS is the author of seven novels, four novellas and around a hundred short stories, some of which are collected in Use Once then Destroy and, forthcoming, Open Heart Surgery. He has won the International Horror Guild Award, the Littlewood Arc Prize, and is a three-time recipient of the British Fantasy Award. His latest novel is Loss of Separation.