EDGAR ALLAN POE (1809-1849) has been described as “the father of modern horror” (and of scientific and detective fiction as well). He was born in Boston to parents who were itinerant actors, but the death of his mother and the desertion of his father resulted in Poe, aged three, being made the ward of Virginia merchant John Allan, who later disowned him. Expelled from the University of Virginia for not paying his gambling debts and dismissed from the West Point military academy for deliberate neglect of duty, Poe finally embarked on a literary career. In 1836 he married his 13-year-old cousin Virginia Clemm, who burst a blood vessel in 1842 and remained a virtual invalid until her death from tuberculosis five years later. Poe suffered from bouts of depression and madness and in 1848 he attempted suicide. In September 1849, on his way to visit his new fiancen Richmond, he vanished for three days, and inexplicably turned up in a delirious condition in Baltimore, where he died a few days later. Poe published a volume of poetry, Tamerlane and Other Poems, in 1827 but it wasn’t until he wrote “The Raven” (1845) that he became known as “Mr. Poe the poet”. His first short story, “Metzengerstein”, appeared in 1832, and although his tales of madness and premature burial were admired, they never gained him wealth or recognition until after his death. His best stories include “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), “William Wilson” (1839), “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), “The Pit and the Pendulum” (1842), “The Black Cat” (1843), “The Gold Bug” (1843), “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843), “The Premature Burial” (1844) and “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” (1845). Poe’s only novel, The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym (1837), was left unfinished. Much of his work has been adapted for films, television and radio — often with little regard to Poe’s original concepts.
TERRY PRATCHETT (b. 1948) was born in Beaconsfield, England, and moved to Winscombe in the early 1970s. He worked as a journalist before becoming Press Officer for the Central Electricity Board Western Region, with special responsibility for nuclear power. In 1987 he gave the CEGB three months’ notice and became a full-time writer. Pratchett’s early books include the children’s novel The Carpet People (1970) and two science fiction adventures, The Dark Side of the Sun (1976) and Strata (1981). However it was in 1983 that he scored an unexpected success with his first “Discworld” novel, The Colour of Magic, quickly establishing himself as Britain’s most popular and successful author of humorous fantasy. He has continued the series with such bestselling titles as The Light Fantastic, Equal Rites, Mort, Sourcery, Wyrd Sisters, Pyramids (winner of the 1990 BSFA Award), Guards! Guards!, Moving Pictures, Reaper Man, Small Gods, and Witches Abroad. Pratchett’s other books include the three-volume children’s series Truckers (adapted for TV in 1992), Diggers and Wings, The Unadulterated Cat, Eric, and the horror spoof Good Omens (written with Neil Gaiman).
GEOFF RYMAN (b. 1951) was born in Canada and has lived in London since the early 1970s. He worked at a number of jobs while establishing himself as a full-time writer, and his first story was published in 1976. A successful playwright whose work includes an adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, Ryman’s first novel, The Warrior Who Carried Life, was published in 1985. Subsequent books include The Unconquered Country (winner of the 1985 World Fantasy Award for Best Novella), The Child Garden (winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award and The John W. Campbell Memorial Award, plus the British Science Fiction Award for the source story, “Love Sickness”) and a fictionalized fantasy of Hollywood, “Was …”
JESSICA AMANDA SALMONSON (b. 1950) lives in Seattle, Washington, where she writes and edits books and watches a lot of samurai movies. In 1980 she won the World Fantasy Award for her anthology Amazons!, and followed it with Amazons II, two volumes of Tales By Moonlight, and What Did Miss Darrington See? An Anthology of Feminist Supernatural Fiction. An expert on supernatural fiction from the last century, Salmonson’s own writing reflects her love of Japanese culture and high fantasy, with such novels as Tomoe Gozen, The Golden Naginata, Ou Lu Khen and the Beautiful Madwoman and The Swordswoman, plus the nonfiction study The Encyclopedia of Amazons: Women Warriors from Antiquity to the Modern Era. She has also written a contemporary horror novel, Anthony Shriek, and her short fiction can be found in the collections A Silver Thread of Madness and John Collier and Fredric Brown Went Quarrelling Through My Head.
AL SARRANTONIO (b. 1952) was born in Queens, New York, and currently lives in Putnam Valley, N.Y. with his wife and two sons. His stories have been published in such magazines and anthologies as Heavy Metal, Twilight Zone, Analog, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Shadows, Whispers, Great Ghost Stories and The Year’s Best Horror Stories. Sarrantino has had regular book review columns in Night Cry and Mystery Scene, and his horror novels include The Boy with Penny Eyes, Totentanz, Campbell Wood, The Worms, Moonbane, October, House Haunted and Skeletons.
DAVID J. SCHOW (b. 1955) was born in Marburg, West Germany, and lived in Middlesex, England, until 1957 when he moved to the United States. In 1985 he won Twilight Zone magazine’s Dimension Award for his short story, “Coming Soon to a Theatre Near You”. Based on a reader poll, the prize was only given once as, shortly after the ceremony, the organizer was sacked! However, Schow’s stories continued to appear in a wide variety of magazines and anthologies — he is a regular contributor to the various “Year’s Best” volumes — and in 1987 he won the World Fantasy Award for his tale, “Red Light”. He is the author of a number of novelizations under the pseudonym “Stephen Grave”, co-writer of the nonfiction study The Outer Limits: The Official Companion, and editor of Silver Scream. One of the leaders of the so-called “Splatterpunk” movement in horror fiction, Schow’s novels include The Kill Riff and The Shaft and his short fiction has been collected in Seeing Red, Lost Angels, Black Leather Required and Look Out He’s Got a Knife. Schow has written teleplays and scripts for Freddy’s Nightmares, The Outer Limits, Leatherface The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III, Critters 3 and 4, and The Crow. His latest projects include a book and CD-ROM update of his guide to The Outer Limits (about which he knows more than any ten people, living or dead), more screenplays, and an almost-finished-no-really-any-day-now new novel.
DAN SIMMONS (b. 1948) was born in Peoria, Illinois. A teacher for eighteen years, he lives with his wife and daughter in Colorado. He began writing his first short fiction at the age of nine and in 1982 he won the Rod Serling Memorial Award for his story “The River Styx Runs Upstream”. Simmons’ first novel, Song of Kali, won the 1986 World Fantasy Award for Best Novel and was described by Harlan Ellison as “one of the most brilliant first novels I’ve read.” His subsequent books include Phases of Gravity, Carrion Comfort (winner of the 1990 Bram Stoker Award), Hyperion (winner of the 1990 Hugo Award), The Fall of Hyperion, Summer of Night, The Hollow Man and Children of the Night. Simmons’ short fiction has appeared in such magazines as Omni and Asimov’s, one-third of Night Visions 5 (UK: Dark Visions), and the collection Prayers to Broken Stones. His story Entropy’s Bed at Midnight appeared as a separate volume, and Going After the Rubber Chicken is a selection of guest of honour speeches.
JOHN SKIPP (b. 1957) is one of a new breed of writers working at the cutting-edge of horror. He was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin (the beer capital of the U.S.) and has lived in a variety of locations: Arlington, Va; Buenos Aires, Argentina; York, Pa; and New York City. He was forced to leave Buenos Aires at the age of thirteen when President Ongania was deposed, and grew up with a healthy disrespect for authority and a need to rock “n” roll. Skipp started writing horror stories at the age of ten and had his first success in 1986 with The Light at the End, like most of his work, co-written with Craig Spector. Since then they have published such novels as The Cleanup, The Scream, Dead Lines, The Bridge, Animals, the novelization of Fright Night, and edited the zombie anthologies Book of the Dead and Book of the Dead 2: Still Dead. Skipp & Spector have also been involved with the movies, working on the scripts for Nightmare on Elm Street The Dream Child and Class of 1999, or appea
ring in Clive Barker’s Nightbreed and the colour remake of Night of the Living Dead. Skipp’s ambition is to be the Woody Allen of horror: “To wit: To write, direct, produce, score and star in films where I play this nebbish who gets horribly murdered, then wanders around whining about how death is even worse than he thought it would be, and he still doesn’t understand what it all means.”
JOHN SLADEK (b. 1937) was born in Iowa and lived in London for many years. He was educated at the University of Minnesota where he studied mechanical engineering and English Literature. Since then he has worked as a technical writer, barman, draughtsman and railroadman. His first published story was “The Poets of Milgrave, Iowa” in New Worlds (1966) and he started writing science fiction with “The Happy Breed” in Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions anthology the following year. Sladek’s first novel, The Reproductive System (US: Mechasm), was published to enormous critical acclaim in 1968, and his blend of black comedy and SF has been likened to Kurt Vonnegut at his best. The author’s other books include The Muller-Fokker Effect, The Steam-Driven Boy, Keep the Giraffe Burning, Roderick, Roderick At Random, Tick-Tok, Alien Accounts, The Lunatics of Terra and Bugs. His detective novel Black Aura contains borderline SF elements, and he has collaborated with Thomas M. Disch on the Gothic novel The House That Fear Built (1966, as “Cassandra Knye”) and the thriller Black Alice (1968).
GUY N. SMITH (b. 1939) is the versatile and incredibly prolific author of more than sixty horror novels. He was born in Tamworth, Staffordshire, and currently resides in Shropshire with his wife Jean, where he works as a farmer, bookseller and writer of ecological/countryside books (with such titles as The Rough Shooter’s Handbook, Practical Country Living and Moles and Their Control). He began writing when he was twelve and his first short stories were published in The London Mystery Magazine (1972). Smith entered the horror genre in 1974 with Werewolf by Moonlight, and the following year he gave up his job in banking to become a full-time writer. Among his many books are The Sucking Pit, The Slime Beast, Night of the Crabs (and its six sequels), the four-volume Sabat series, The Lurkers, The Festering, The Knighton Vampires, Satan’s Spawn and novelizations of The Ghoul, Song of the South, Sleeping Beauty and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
CRAIG SPECTOR (b. 1958) was born in the Confederate capital, Richmond, Virginia. Spector tells us, “Tom Robbins once described Richmond as a town “settled by a race of thin bony-faced psychopaths”, who would “sell you anything they had, which was nothing, and kill you over anything they didn’t understand, which was everything.” Of course, he was referring to South Richmond, and I was in the West End, but there you are. Narrowly escaping a promising career of juvenile delinquency in Virginia Beach by being force-marched to Pennsylvania at the tender age of fifteen, where I shortly thereafter met John Skipp and began the series of creative mutations that led me to where I am today. Used to consider myself a cartoonist, until art school beat it out of me. Hands-down winner of Most Surprising Mutation award.” Like Stan Laurel and Lou Costello, Spector is condemned by alphabetical order in reference books to have most of his works listed under his partner’s name. For details, see under John Skipp.
BRIAN STABLEFORD (b. 1948) author, editor, critic and academic, was born in Shipley, Yorkshire. In 1969 he graduated from the University of York with first class honours in Biology and went on to complete postgraduate research in Biology and Sociology (a thesis on The Sociology of Science Fiction was presented in 1978). Now a full-time writer, Stableford is the author of more than thirty novels, including The Last Days of the Edge of the World, The Walking Shadow, The Gates of Eden, Journey to the Centre, Invaders from the Centre, The Centre Cannot Hold, The Empire of Fear, The Werewolves of London, The Angel of Pain and Young Blood, while some of his short stories were recently collected in Sexual Chemistry: Sardonic Tales of the Genetic Revolution. As “Brian Craig” he also has written a number of gaming novels for the Warhammer and Dark Future series. He won the European SF Award in 1984 for The Science of Science Fiction (written in collaboration with Peter Nicholls and David Langford) and is the author of The Way to Write Science Fiction (1989). Stableford has also edited a number of anthologies for the literary imprint Dedalus, including The Dedalus Book of Decadence (Moral Ruins), Tales of the Wandering Jew, The Dedalus Book of British Fantasy: The 19th Century, The Second Dedalus Book of Decadence (The Black Feast) and The Dedalus Book of Femmes Fatales.
TIM STOUT (b. 1946) is a legal journalist who lives in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, with his wife, son and daughter. His early work in the horror field included contributions to John Carpenter’s fanzine Fantastic Films Illustrated, and editing the only two issues of the British film magazine Supernatural (1969). Becoming a writer of short stories, he published two collections — Hollow Laughter and The Doomsdeath Chronicles — before turning to novels with The Raging, the tale of a haunted Celtic statue. He admits to a preference for the restraints and polished style of such old masters as Stoker, Conan Doyle, Wells, Machen, and his all-time favourite author, H. Rider Haggard.
PETER STRAUB (b. 1943) is regarded along with his friend Stephen King and Dean Koontz as one of America’s most popular horror novelists. Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, he taught at a private Milwaukee school for boys, where he wrote poetry published in a number of British and American literary journals (eventually collected together in Leeson Park and Belsize Square in 1983). He began his first novel, Marriages (1973), while working on his doctorate at University College, Dublin, and he followed it with a string of popular bestsellers that include Julia (filmed in 1976 as Full Circle, aka The Haunting of Julia, starring Mia Farrow), If You Could See Me Now, Ghost Story (disappointingly filmed with an all-star cast in 1981), Shadow Land, Floating Dragon, Wild Animals (containing Julia, If You Could See Me Now and the non-genre novel Under Venus), Koko (winner of the 1989 World Fantasy Award), Mystery, and the short novel, Mrs. God. In 1977 Straub collaborated with Stephen King on The Talisman, which combined a fantasy quest with elements of both authors’ horror fiction, and his short stories has been collected in Houses Without Doors (1990).
MILTON SUBOTSKY (1921-1991) was born in New York City and, despite majoring in chemical engineering, he started writing, editing and directing educational, documentary and industrial films at the age of seventeen. After World War II he wrote scripts for such TV shows as Lights Out, Danger, Suspense, The Clock and Mr. I Magination. He teamed up with financier Max J. Rosenberg to make the feature musical Rock, Rock, Rock (1956), for which Subotsky wrote nine songs, including a No. 1 hit. They moved to England in 1959 to produce City of the Dead (aka Horror Hotel), a low-budget horror thriller starring Christopher Lee. The successful 1964 production, Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors, led to the formation of Amicus Productions. Second only to Hammer Films during the 1960s and ’70s, Amicus produced a string of horror and science fiction films, many scripted by Subotsky: Dr. Who and the Daleks, The Skull, Torture Garden, Scream and Scream Again, The House That Dripped Blood, Tales from the Crypt and The Land That Time Forgot, amongst numerous others. During the late ’70s and 1980s he produced The Uncanny, Dominique, The Monster Club and the TV mini-series of Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles. He was also credited on a number of movie adaptations of Stephen King stories, but he was never able to get the funding to re-launch Amicus. An avid reader, Subotsky co-edited an anthology of science fiction stories and wrote the TV series and book The Golden Treasury of Classic Fairy Tales.
JACK SULLIVAN (b. 1946) lives in New York and is a teacher and lecturer on the ghost story, English and humanities. His short story, “The Initiation”, was published in Ramsey Campbell’s anthology New Terrors (1980). Sullivan is the author of Elegant Nightmares: The English Ghost Story from Le Fanu to Blackwood (which develops Robert Aickman’s insight that the ghost story is akin to poetry) and a book on music criticism, Words on Music. As an editor, he is responsible for Lost Souls: A Collection of English Ghost Stories and The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural. His reviews app
ear regularly in The New York Times Book Review and Washington Post Book World, amongst other publications.
STEVE RASNIC TEM (b. 1950) was born in Pennington Gap, Virginia, in the heart of the Appalachian Mountains. He received his Masters in Creative Writing at Colorado State University and currently lives with his wife, the writer Melanie Tem, in a supposedly haunted Victorian house in Denver. Tem has sold hundreds of poems and short stories to such magazines and anthologies as Fantasy Tales, Weirdbook, Whispers, Twilight Zone, New Terrors 1, Shadows, Cutting Edge, Halloween Horrors I and II, Tales By Moonlight I and II, Tropical Chills, The Fantastic Robin Hood, Tales of the Wandering Jew, Dark at Heart, PsychoPaths 2, The Ultimate Frankenstein, The Ultimate Dracula, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror and Best New Horror, amongst many others. He won the 1988 British Fantasy Award for his story “Leaks”, and his short fiction has been collected in the chapbooks Fairytales, Celestrial Inventory, Absences: Charlie Goode’s Ghosts, and the collection Ombres surla route, published in France by Denoel. Tem’s first novel, Excavation, appeared in 1987.
THOMAS TESSIER (b. 1947) was born in Connecticut, where he currently lives. Educated at University College, Dublin, he spent several years in London, where he was a regular contributor to Vogue and involved in the publishing imprint Millington. The author of three volumes of poetry and a trio of plays that were professionally staged, his books include The Fates (1978), The Nightwalker, Shockwaves, Phantom (nominated for the 1982 World Fantasy Award for Best Novel), Finishing Touches, Rapture, Secret Strangers, and Fog Heart.
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