HUGH (CHARLES) LAMB (b. 1946) was born in Sutton, Surrey. A journalist by profession, Lamb is one of Britain’s most diligent and accomplished anthologists of ghost and horror fiction, unearthing obscure tales by Victorian and Edwardian writers. His first anthology, A Tide of Terror (1972), was compiled to show that the same stories need not be reprinted endlessly. His collections have often included original fiction by some of the genre’s leading contemporary writers, and he has also edited volumes by individual neglected authors (Erckmann-Chatrian, E. Nesbit, Jerome K. Jerome and Bernard Capes). Lamb discovered a lost M.R. James story for his 1975 anthology The Thrill of Horror, and his numerous other books include Victorian Tales of Terror, Star Book of Horror volumes 1 and 2, Terror by Gaslight, The Taste of Fear, Cold Fear, Forgotten Tales of Terror, The Man Wolf and Other Horrors, New Tales of Terror, Stories in the Dark, and the recent Gaslit Nightmares and Gaslit Nightmares 2.
DAVID LANGFORD (b. 1953) was born in Newport, Gwent, South Wales. He graduated from Oxford University and between 1975-1980 worked as a weapons physicist at the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment in Aldermaston. Since then he has been a freelance writer, critic, and software consultant, dividing his creative endeavours between books and SF fandom. His novels include The Leaky Establishment (based on his experiences at Aldermaston), The Space Eater, and Earthdoom (co-written with John Grant). Langford published a collection of pastiche stories in The Dragonhiker’s Guide to Battlefield Covenant at Dune’s Edge: Odyssey Two, and he also writes futurological nonfiction studies such as War in 2080 and, in collaboration with Brian Stableford, The Third Millennium. He has won the Hugo Award numerous times.
JOE R. LANSDALE (b. 1951) was born in Gladewater, Texas, and now lives in Nacogdoches. He has been writing since he was nine, but only started taking it seriously around the age of twenty-five, when he admits to once getting one thousand rejection slips for three months’ work! Nowadays he is no less prolific but much more successful, with articles and short stories appearing in a wide variety of magazines and anthologies. His first novel, Act of Love (1981), was a psychosexual thriller that revealed the influence of his self-confessed “role models”: Matheson, Nolan, King, Bloch and McCammon. Since then his books have included The Magic Wagon, Dead in the West, The Nightrunners, Cold in July, The Drive-In (A B Movie with Blood and Popcorn, Made in Texas), The Drive-In 2 (Not Just One of Them Sequels), Savage Season, and Batman: Captured by the Engines. His short fiction has been collected in By Bizarre Hands, Night Visions 8 and Stories By Mama Lansdale’s Youngest Boy, and he has edited the anthologies The New Frontier, Razored Saddles (with Pat LoBrutto) and Dark At Heart (with Karen Lansdale). Lansdale won the Bram Stoker Award for his short story “Night They Missed the Horror Show” in 1989, and for the novella “On the Far Side of the Cadilac Desert With Dead Folks” in 1990.
STEPHEN LAWS (b. 1952) lives in Newcastle upon Tyne, and works as a Committee Administrator in local government. He has been writing since he was eight, and while at school became a great fan of Hammer Films and actor Peter Cushing. During this time he became “Playground Storyteller”, giving blow-by-blow renditions of the plots from the horror films he’d sneaked underage into cinemas to see. Bitten by the storytelling bug, he was writing television plays at age 27 and his short stories of the supernatural were published locally and on radio. After winning a fiction competition in 1981, Laws decided to attempt his first novel. The result was Ghost Train, published in 1985 to enthusiastic reviews and with a publicity campaign which was banned from railway stations around the country by British Rail, who were concerned that it might alarm their passengers. This initial success has led to further novels such as Spectre, The Wyrm, The Frighteners, Darkfall, Macabre and Daemonic.
SAMANTHA LEE (b. 1940) was born in Londonderry, Northern Ireland, but currently spends her time commuting between London and her home in Aberdeen, Scotland. Her short stories have appeared in a number of anthologies and magazines, including The Pan Book of Horror Stories, Spectre, Nightmare, The Fontana Book of Monsters and Fantasy Tales. She has also had several tales broadcast on London’s Capital Radio, and her original screenplay, The Gingerbread House, was optioned by Orion Pictures. Lee’s novels include “The Lightbringer Trilogy” (The Quest for the Sword of Infinity, The Land Where Serpents Rule and The Path Through the Circle of Time), Childe Rolande, and a retelling of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, to which she added a number of gruesome murders for the juvenile readers to enjoy! Her latest work is a “lifestyle” book, Fit to be 50.
H. P. (HOWARD PHILLIPS) LOVECRAFT (1890-1937) is probably the most important and influential author of supernatural fiction in the twentieth century. A lifelong resident of Providence, Rhode Island, he remained a studious antiquarian and virtual recluse until his untimely death. Poor health as a young boy led him to read voluminously, and the stories of Poe, Dunsany and Machen inspired his own writing career. Although he was never prolific, Lovecraft’s fiction, poems and essays received popular acclaim in the amateur press and through such pulp magazines as Weird Tales and Astounding Stories. In 1939, August Derleth and Donald Wandrei established their own imprint, Arkham House, to publish a posthumous collection, The Outsider and Others, and eventually bring all Lovecraft’s work back into print. Many of his tales are set in the fear-haunted towns of an imaginary area of Massachusetts or in the cosmic vistas that exist beyond space and time, and a number of loosely-connected stories have become identified as “The Cthulhu Mythos”. During the decades since his death, H.P. Lovecraft has become acknowledged as a master of modern horror and a mainstream American writer second only to Poe, while his relatively small body of work has influenced countless imitators and formed the basis of a worldwide industry of books, games and movies based on his concepts.
BRIAN LUMLEY (b. 1937) was born in Horden, on England’s northeast coast just nine months after the death of H.P. Lovecraft. He claims that’s just a coincidence. He joined the Army when he was twenty-one and was stationed in Germany and Cyprus, where he fell under Lovecraft’s spell. He decided to try his own hand at writing horror tales, initially updating the Cthulhu Mythos, starting with his first sale, “The Cyprus Shell” (1968). Arkham House published two collections of short stories, The Caller of the Black (1971) and The Horror at Oakdene (1977), and the novel Beneath the Moors (1974). He has continued Lovecraft’s themes in two series of books: The Burrowers Beneath, The Transition of Titus Crow, Spawn of the Winds, The Clock of Dreams, In the Moons of Borea, Elysia, The Compleat Crow, and the “Dreamland” trilogy: Hero of Dreams, Ship of Dreams and Mad Moon of Dreams. Lumley’s other novels include Khai of Ancient Khem, Psychomech, Psychosphere, Psychamok, The House of Doors, Demogorgan, the bestselling “Necroscope” series (Necroscope, Wamphyri!, The Source, Deadspeak, Deadspawn), and the follow-up series beginning with Blood Brothers. His “Tales of the Primal Land” have been collected in Iced on Aran and Other Dreamquests, Tarra Khash: Hrossok! and Sorcery in Shad, while his more recent short fiction can be found in The House of Cthulhu and Fruiting Bodies and Other Fungi (which includes the 1989 British Fantasy Award-winning title story).
GRAHAM MASTERTON (b. 1946) was born in Edinburgh, exactly nine months after V.E. Day: “I was a typical, miserable 1950s British schoolboy (grey flannel shorts, short-back-and-sides) but I was interested in fantasy and horror from an early age, writing my first full-length horror novel at the age of fourteen. It was about a vampire who fed on himself.” Trained as a newspaper reporter, Masterton moved on to edit Mayfair in the days of the mini-skirt, where his experience with tongue-in-cheek dialogue formed the basis of his first published book, Your Erotic Fantasies. Appointed to the executive editorship of Penthouse, he wrote more how-to sex books, such as How To Drive Your Man Wild in Bed (all of which are still selling phenomenally). His first horror novel was The Manitou (filmed in 1978), since when he has turned out a number of novels, including Charnel House, Tengu, Mirror, Feast, Night Warriors, Death Dream, Death Trance, The Djinn, Ritual, Walkers, Night Plague
, The Burning, Black Angel, The Hymn and Master of Lies, amongst others. Masterton also writes historical sagas (Solitaire, Maiden Voyage, Lords of the Air) and in 1989 he edited Scare Care, an anthology of horror stories to benefit abused and needy children.
RICHARD CHRISTIAN MATHESON (b. 1953) is the son of acclaimed fantasist Richard Matheson. Born in Santa Monica, California, he left high school to work as an advertising copywriter. He also wrote material for stand-up comedians, played the drums, taught creative writing, freelanced as a reviewer for innumerable magazines and worked as a researcher/investigator at the Parapsychology Labs at UCLA. At the age of seventeen he sold his first short story to a hardcover anthology and four years later he became the youngest TV writer ever employed by Universal Studios. Matheson has written more than 300 shows as diverse as Knightrider, The Incredible Hulk, Three’s Company and Tales from the Crypt. He served as story editor on The A-Team, Hardcastle and McCormick, Quincy and Hunter, and wrote and produced the CBS-TV series Stir Crazy. Matheson has also scripted several Hollywood movies (including the comedy-thriller Loose Cannons with his father), and he is co-writer and co-executive producer on the werewolf movie, Full Eclipse. His often short, but very sharp fiction has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies and was collected in Scars and Other Distinguishing Marks, while his first novel, Created By, is of course about the entertainment industry.
ROBERT R. McCAMMON (b. 1952) was born in Birmingham, Alabama, where he still lives with his wife Sally. He was only 26 years old when his first novel, Baal (1978), was published. Since then, he has followed it with a string of commercially successful books, including Bethany’s Sin, The Night Boat, They Thirst, Mystery Walk, Usher’s Passing, Swan Song, Stinger and The Wolf’s Hour. More recently, he’s moved away from the horror genre with the novels Mine, Boy’s Life and Gone South. His short fiction has been collected in Blue World and Other Stories, and he edited the first Horror Writers of America anthology, Under the Fang. McCammon is a multiple winner of the Bram Stoker Award in both the novel and short story categories.
MICHAEL McDOWELL (b. 1950) was born in Alabama and currently lives in Los Angeles. His is the author of more than thirty books, either published under his own name or four different pseudonyms. His first horror novel, The Amulet, appeared in 1979, and it was followed by Cold Moon Over Babylon, The Elementals and the six-volume Blackwater saga. Other books under his own byline include the historical melodramas Katie and Gilded Needles, the macabre/surreal Toplin (illustrated by Harry O. Morris), and the Jack and Susan series of romantic adventures. He has written more than a dozen half-hour scripts for such anthology TV shows as Tales from the Darkside, and his movie screenplays include High Spirits, the box-office hit Beetle Juice and Stephen King’s Thinner. His hobbies include collecting American sheet music, 18th and 19th Century death memorabilia, the documentation of American crime, and photographs of corpses, criminals and atrocities.
THOMAS F. MONTELEONE (b. 1946) was born in Baltimore, Maryland, and has been a professional writer and editor since 1972. His short stories and articles have appeared in more than a hundred anthologies and magazines. Monteleone’s recent novels include Night Train, Lyrica, The Magnificent Gallery, The Crooked House, Fantasma, the Dragonstar trilogy (with David Bischoff), The Apocalypse Man and The Blood of the Lamb. Two of his stage plays have been produced professionally, and he has written several screenplays for television — one of which, Mister Magister, won the Gabriel Award and the Bronze Award from the International Film and Television Festival of New York. In 1990 he began editing the acclaimed Borderlands series of anthologies, taking its name for his own small press specializing in limited hardcover editions of the work of such authors as Joe R. Lansdale and Harlan Ellison, and the Horror Writers of America anthology Under the Fang.
MICHAEL MOORCOCK (b. 1939) was born in London and is one of Britain’s most popular and prolific authors. He became involved with science fiction and fantasy at an early age, editing Tarzan Adventures when he was seventeen, and was the guiding hand behind the British SF magazine New Worlds from 1964. A major influence in the growing development of “New Wave” fiction throughout the 1960s, Moorcock’s enormous output includes more than sixty novels, innumerable short stories, a rock album, numerous individual rock songs, and the screenplay for The Land That Time Forgot (1974). Best known for his heroic fantasy series using the notion of a multiverse, his series characters include Elric of Melnibone, Corum, Dorian Hawkmoon, Count Brass, Jerry Cornelius and the Eternal Champion. His recent books include the latest instalment in the Eternal Champion saga, The Dragon in the Sword; The Fortress of the Pearl and The Revenge of the Rose (8th and 9th respectively in the Elric series); the collection Casablanca; the nonfiction study Wizardry and Wild Romance and the partly autobiographical Mother London. A multiple winner of the British Fantasy Award for his novels and short fiction, Moorcock has also won the Nebula Award (for Behold the Man), the Guardian Fiction Award (The Condition of Muzak) and the World Fantasy Award (Gloriana).
PETER NICHOLLS (b. 1939) was born in Australia and he currently lives in Melbourne after living in London for nearly two decades. His adult life has oscillated cunningly between academic work (lecturing in English Literature at several Universities, the first administrator of the Science Fiction Foundation, 1971-77), media work (award-winning television documentary scripts, studied film writing in Hollywood), and freelance writing and editing. He edited Foundation: The Review of Science Fiction from 1974-78, and his books as editor or part-author include Science Fiction at Large (aka Explorations of the Marvellous), The Science in Science Fiction and The Science Fiction Encyclopedia (recently updated); he is also the author of Fantastic Cinema. Nicholls was a regular reviewer of science fiction, fantasy and horror, in books and films, for BBC radio for several years.
WILLIAM F. (FRANCIS) NOLAN (b. 1928) was born in Kansas City and moved to California when he was nineteen. The author of more than fifty-five books and over 100 short stories, he has been a commercial artist, racing car driver, publisher of the Ray Bradbury Review, managing editor of Gamma and a friend of Steve McQueen. Nolan’s first SF story, “The Joy of Living”, appeared in If (1954), and his books include Logan’s Run (co-written with George Clayton Johnson) and its two sequels, Space for Hire, Helltracks, The Demon Within, and such collections as Impact 20, Alien Horizons, Wonderworlds, Things Beyond Midnight and Nightshapes. He is the author of How to Write Horror Fiction for Writer’s Digest, and has edited the anthologies The Work of Charles Beaumont, Urban Horrors and The Bradbury Chronicles: Stories in Honor of Ray Bradbury (the last two in collaboration with Martin H. Greenberg). He has twice won the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Allan Poe Award, and his biographies include McQueen, Dashiell Hammett and racing speed king Barney Oldfield. Nolan has written more than forty scripts for both the cinema and television, including Logan’s Run, Burnt Offerings, Trilogy of Terror, The Norliss Tapes and Bridge Across Time (aka Terror at London Bridge or The Arizona Ripper). His short fiction has also been adapted for the horror comic William F. Nolan’s Beyond Midnight.
GERALD W. PAGE (b.1939) was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, but has lived most of his life in Atlanta, Georgia. He has been interested in fantastic fiction for as long as he can remember and sold his first story to John W. Campbell’s Analog in 1963. He continued to turn out the occasional SF and horror story for a variety of magazines while being employed for several years as a programming editor in TV Guide’s Atlanta office and teaching a course in Modern Science Fiction at the Atlanta College of Art. In 1970 Page became editor of Witchcraft & Sorcery (a short-lived magazine that had started life as Coven 13), and went on to edit the original Arkham House anthology Nameless Places (1975) and volumes IV-VII of DAW Books’ The Year’s Best Horror Stories Series.
MICHEL PARRY (b. 1947) was born in Brussels, Belgium, of a Welsh father. His first published writings were contributions to magazines such as Castle of Frankenstein and Famous Monsters of Filmland in the early 1960s. In 1969
he produced his own short surreal film, Hex, and his script for The Uncanny was filmed in 1977 with an all-star cast. A prolific anthologist, his numerous books include six volumes of The Mayflower Book of Black Magic (1974-77), the four-volume Reign of Terror (1976-78), Rivals of Dracula, Rivals of Frankenstein, Rivals of King Kong, Christopher Lee’s “X” Certificate, Christopher Lee’s Omnibus of Evil, Savage Heroes, Strange Ecstasies, Dream Trips, Spaced Out, Jack the Knife, and two books of sex and horror stories, The Devil’s Kisses and More Devil’s Kisses, edited under the pseudonym “Linda Lovecraft”. Parry has also written the novelization of Hammer’s Countess Dracula, several western novels under the pen name of Steve Lee, and a nonfiction book about mercenaries, Fire Power. His most recent scripts include a short fantasy, The Zip, and a supernatural adventure set in Mexico, Falco. He is currently revising his screenplay based on the horror classic, Sweeney Todd.
DAVID PIRIE (b. 1946) was born and grew up in Scotland. He began his writing career as a film critic for the London listings magazine Time Out and he is the author of several critical studies like A Heritage of Horror (about British Gothic cinema), The Vampire Cinema and Anatomy of the Movies (about Hollywood finance). He began writing screenplays in 1984 with the prize-winning BBC-TV film Rainy Day Women starring Charles Dance and Lindsay Duncan. His subsequent scripts have included an adaptation of his own novel, Mystery Story, for Barry Hanson, Total Eclipse of the Heart for David Puttnam and Warner Bros., Love-Act for producer Michael White and MGM, Treasure for HBO, Wild Things for BBC-TV’s Screen Two series and the serial Ashenden.
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