Paperback Fanatic 24

Out now – just in time for Christmas!

Justin Marriott (ed) – Paperback Fanatic #24 (November 2012)

Fanatical thoughts: anguished wails from ye olde editor.

Fanatical mails: your thoughts on issue 23. Andy Boot, Clive Davis, Colin Clynes, Graham Andrew, James McRobert, Don von Doom, Ian Millsread, Jim Walker, Magnus Gatemark, James Doig, Johan Elzer, Stephen Sennitt, Stuart Williams, Andreas Decker, Nigel Taylor.

Australia’s master of erotic adventure: James Doig and Graeme Flanagan on the prolific sleaze author John Slater.

Col Cameron: original art from the Australian cover artist.

The Survivor: Johnny Mains interviews horror legend James Herbert.

The Obvious Enigma: Andy Boot on Jack Trevor Story.

Soul Cinema: Chris Poggiali provides this issues cover gallery.

Fit to be tied – King Kong: Graham Andrews gives a guided tour of skull island

Canadian Gothic: Graham Andrews on A. E. van Vogt

Top Tens from Stephen Sennitt, Sarah Morgan and James Doig

For subscription info & co., visit the superstore at Paperback Fanatic or email Justin: thepaperbackfanaticATsky.com
(replace AT with @, obviously)

Paul Kane & Marie O’Regan – Mammoth Book Of Body Horror

Paul Kane & Marie O’Regan – The Mammoth Book Of Body Horror  (Robinson, 2012)

Cover design: Carlos Castro

Stuart Gordon – Introduction

Mary Shelley – Transformation
Edgar Allan Poe – The Tell-Tale Heart
H. P. Lovecraft – Herbert West: Re-Animator
John W. Campbell – Who Goes There?
George Langelaan – The Fly
Richard Matheson – ‘Tis The Season To Be Jelly
Stephen King – Survivor Type
Clive Barker – The Body Politic
Robert Bloch – The Chaney Legacy
Ramsey Campbell – The Other Side
Brian Lumley – Fruiting Bodies
Nancy A. Collins – Freaktent
Richard Christian Matheson – Regions Of The Flesh
Michael Marshall Smith – Walking Wounded
Neil Gaiman – Changes
James Herbert – Others
Christopher Fowler – The Look
Alice Henderson – Residue
Graham Masterton – Dog Days
Gemma Files – Black Box
Simon Clark – The Soaring Dead
Barbie Wilde – Polyp
David Moody – Almost Forever
Axelle Carolyn – Butterfly
Conrad Williams – Sticky Eye

Back cover blurb:
25 horrific tales of TRANSFORMATION, MUTATION and CONTAGION

This truly disturbing collection of ‘body horror’ ranges from Mary Shelley’s revelatory ‘Transformation’ to H. P. Lovecraft’s ‘Herbert West: Re-Animator’, brought to a new audience by the success of Stuart Gordon’s film ‘Re-Animator’, to George Langelaan’s ‘The Fly’, filmed most recently by David Cronenberg, and a chilling story by Lovecraft’s disciple, Robert Bloch, best known as the author of Psycho.

The term ‘body horror’ has long been used to describe films such as The Thing, based on John W. Campbell’s ‘Who Goes There?’, which is reprinted here, and most recently District 9, but the subgenre did not begin with film.

Here you will find profoundly unsettling stories spanning the entire history of the subgenre by the very best writers of horror ….

Stephen Jones – Dancing With The Dark

Stephen Jones (ed.) – Dancing With The Dark: True Encounters With The Paranormal By Masters Of The Macabre (Vista, 1997)

Cover by Splash: Photography by Simon Marsden

Stephen Jones – Introduction: Dancing with the Dark

Joan Aiken – My Feeling about Ghosts
Sarah Ash – Timeswitch
Mike Ashley – The Rustle in the Grass
Peter Atkins – Take Care of Grandma
Clive Barker – Life After Death
Stephen Baxter – The Cartographer
Robert Bloch – Not Quite So Pragmatic .
Ramsey Campbell – The Nearest to a Ghost
Hugh B. Cave – Haitian Mystères
R. Chetwynd-Hayes – One-Way Trip
A. E. Coppard – The Shock of the Macabre
Basil Copper – The Haunted Hotel
Peter Crowther – Safe Arrival
Jack Dann – A Gift of Eagles
Charles de Lint – The House on Spadina
Terry Dowling – Sharing with Strangers
Lionel Fanthorpe – Hands on the Wheel
Esther M. Friesner – That Old School Spirit
Gregory Frost – Twice Encountered
Neil Gaiman – The Flints of Memory Lane
Stephen Gallagher – In There
Ray Garton – Haunted in the Head
John Gordon – The House on the Brink
Ed Gorman – Riding the Nightwinds
Elizabeth Goudge – ESP
Simon R. Green – Death is a Lady
Peter Haining – The Smoke Ghost
Joe Haldeman – Never Say Die
James Herbert – Not Very Psychic
Brian Hodge – Confessions of a Born-Again Heathen
Nancy Holder – To Pine with Fear and Sorrow
M. R. James – A Ghostly Cry
Peter James – One Extra for Dinner
Mike Jefferies – A Face in the Crowd
Nancy Kilpatrick – Raggedy Ann
Stephen King – Uncle Clayton
Hugh Lamb – Go On, Open Your Eyes…
Terry Lamsley – Moving Houses
John Landis – Inspiration
Stephen Laws – Norfolk Nightmare
Samantha Lee – Not Funny
Barry B. Longyear – The Gray Ghost
H. P. Lovecraft – Witch House
Brian Lumley – The Challenge
Arthur Machen – World of the Senses
Graham Masterton – My Grandfather’s House
Richard Matheson – More Than We Appear To Be
Richard Christian Matheson – Visit to a Psychic Surgeon
Paul J. McAuley – The Fall of the Wires
Anne McCaffrey – Unto the Third Generation
Thomas F. Monteleone – Talkin’ Them Marble Orchard Blues
Mark Morris – A Shadow of Tomorrow
Yvonne Navarro – The House on Chadwell Drive
William F. Nolan – The Floating Table and the Jumping Violet
Edgar Allan Poe – Mesmeric Revelation
Vincent Price – In the Clouds
Alan Rodgers – Clinic-Modern
Nicholas Royle – Magical Thinking
Jay Russell – De Cold, Cold Décolletage
Adam Simon – The Darkness Between the Frames
Guy N. Smith – The Mist People
Michael Marshall Smith – Mr Cat
S. P. Somtow – In the Realm of the Spirits
Brian Stableford – Chacun sa Goule
Laurence Staig – The Spirit of M. R. James
Peter Tremayne – The Family Curse
H. R. Wakefield – The Red Lodge
Lawrence Watt-Evans – My Haunted Home
Cherry Wilder – The Ghost Hunters
Chet Williamson – A Place Where a Head Would Rest
Paul F. Wilson – The Glowing Hand
Douglas E. Winter – Finding My Religion
Gene Wolfe – Kid Sister

A Spectral vision …. The sound of phantom footsteps … An experiment in astral projection ….. A childhood premonition of disaster …. Possession by a voodoo god ….
An Ouija board that predicted death … A body kept alive by force of will ….. A cursed family name …

Such tales as these are more usually associated with horror books and movies. However, these anecdotes are absolutely true! They are ,just a sample of the real-life experiences recounted by some of the world’s most famous frighteners, from such bestselling authors as Stephen King and James Herbert, to actor Vincent Price and director John Landis.

Collected together for the very first time, many or the most successful and well-known exponents, along with rising stars of the horror field, relate their fascinating encounters with the supernatural, revealing how such unique experiences have affected their lives and influenced their works.

Even for the experts, when it comes to Unexplained phenomena, fact can be much more frightening than fiction …

See also Dancing With the Dark thread on Vault Of Evil

Thanks to Nightreader!

Peter Haining – The Mammoth Book of True Hauntings

Peter Haining – The Mammoth Book of True Hauntings (Robinson, 2008)

photo Tony O’Reilly/ Fortean Picture Library: Cover design: JoeRoberts.co.uk

Foreword: I Am A Researcher Of The Supernatural

A Century Of Hauntings: A Chronology from 1900-2000
The Ghost Hunters: Fifty Authentic Supernatural Experiences
Phantoms In The Sky: Ghostly Pilots, Aircraft And Haunted Airfields
Encounters With The Unknown: Eyewitness Stories By Journalists
Haunted Stars: Show Business And The Supernatural
Supernatural Tales: True Ghost Stories By Famous Authors
Phantom Lovers: Sexual Encounters With Ghosts
What Are Ghosts? The Theories Of The Experts
The A-Z Of Ghosts: Phantoms Of The World

Bibliography
Research Organisations
Acknowledgements

Back cover blurb:

Surprisingly, the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have turned out to be the most extraordinary periods in the history of supernatural encounters – with more mysterious accounts of ghosts being reported from all over the world than during any previous era.

This giant survey from the acclaimed investigator, the late Peter Haining, years in the making and now posthumously published for the first time, documents the full spectrum of credible hauntings during the last hundred years or so. It encompasses over 100 first-hand accounts of poltergeists and phantoms, ghostly pilots and haunted airfields, seduction spirits and sexual encounters with ghostly entities – and much more. Also included are the notes of famous ghost hunters such as Hans Holzer, Harry Price, and Susy Smith; and some fascinating analysis by notable experts on what ghosts really are.

How appropriate that, as we approach November 19th and the first anniversary of his untimely death, the legendary Peter Haining should return from the grave with a collection of True Hauntings.

Experts will doubtless be mortified that Peter has exhumed several of these ‘true’ accounts from such reliable resources as The News Of The World and The Sunday People, but he’s also ransacked his library to good effect for accounts from (perhaps!) more credible authorities, several old Vault friends among them: Dennis Wheatley (on the true life incident at boarding school which inspired his big seller, The Haunting Of Toby Jugg), Arthur Machen (versus a Poltergeist infestation), Barbara Cartland, James Herbert, Robert Thurston Hopkins, Fred Archer, Elliott O’Donnell, Peter Underwood and medium to the stars Doris Stokes.

Predictably, the NOTW is the source for much of the Phantom Lovers: Sexual Encounters With Ghosts section which reads for the most part like a series of plot-outlines for Benny Hill sketches as the country’s struggling pubs are besieged by randy Royalists, Peeping Toms, Phantom Bottom-pinchers – the whole gamut of sex pests from beyond the grave. Typical of these “Grinning Ghouls”, the spectre in the changing room of The Disco Bar, Newcastle who so put the willies up go-go dancer Maggie in 1974, and an incorrigible old rascal who conducted his reign of terror in The Knights Lodge Inn near Corby during the ‘eighties. “I’ve seen him and he’s a big robust chap – a cavalier who carries an ostrich feather. He uses the feather to lift the ladies’ skirts and tickle them – he must have been a real Casanova when he was alive” deadpans a handy ‘Psychic Investigator’, Jean Cooksley. The vast majority of these encounters feature male spooks mithering Miss GB contestants and dolly birds, although The Sun (who else?) can provide a “scantily clad” (what else?) female phantom who steals the discarded clothing of courting couples should they frolic in her Hertfordshire field.

Spectre smitten, pop chanteuse Lynsey De Paul: Her Eurovision Song Contest hopes hit “Rock Bottom” in spooky circumstances!

As those of us who’ve been terrified out of our wits by The Weekend Book of Ghosts & Horror will know to our cost, saccharine-coated songstress Linsey de Paul is arguably the most haunted women in the history of pop and here we learn of another chilling episode in her troubled career – the case of the haunted headphones that so disrupted the fabled Rock Bottom sessions. Another haunted celebrity is William Shatner – and not just by his inspired incursion into the music world, The Transformed Man. Here he recalls his brush with death on a motorcycling tour where it could well have been all up for him had it not been for the intervention of a phantom biker.

I’ve only had the book a day and, doubtless, will have some more woeful comment to make as I progress, but it’s proving a most diverting read. One to file alongside his outrageous but scandalously entertaining ‘non-fiction’ accounts of The Legend & Bizarre Crimes of Spring-Heeled Jack and The Mystery & Horrible Murders of Sweeney Todd!

Stephen Jones – Best New Horror 11

Stephen Jones (ed.) – Best New Horror 11 (Robinson, 2000)

cover: Julek Heller

Stephen Jones – Introduction: Horror in 1999

Steve Rasnic Tem – Halloween Street
James Herbert – Others
T.E.D. Klein – Growing Things
David J. Schow – Unhasped
Gemma Files – The Emperor’s Old Bones
Ramsey Campbell – The Entertainment
Neil Gaiman – Harlequin Valentine
Terry Lamsley – The Stunted House
Kim Newman – Just Like Eddy
Caitlin R. Kiernan – The Long Hall on the Top Floor
Thomas Tessier – Lulu
Graham Masterton – The Ballyhooly Boy
Michael Marshall Smith – Welcome
Michael Marano – Burden
Paul J. McAuley – Naming the Dead
F. Paul Wilson – Aftershock
Gene Wolfe – A Fish Story
David Case – Jimmy
Tim Lebbon – White
Peter Straub – Pork Pie Hat
Steve Rasnic Tem – Tricks & Treats: One Night on Halloween Street

Stephen Jones & Kim Newman – Necrology: 1999

Thanks to Alan Frackelton for providing the contents and cover scan!