by Paul Kane
TIM LEBBON’s many novels include The Island, Bar None, the 30 Days of Night movie novelization, Hellboy: The Fire Wolves, and The Map of Moments (with Christopher Golden). He’s published on both sides of the Atlantic, and has won the British Fantasy Award (three times), the Bram Stoker Award, and a Scribe Award, among others. Several of his novels and novellas are currently in development as movies.
KELLEY ARMSTRONG is the author of the Women of the Otherworld paranormal suspense series—which includes Bitten, Stolen, Dime Store Magic, Industrial Magic, Haunted, Broken, No Humans Involved, Personal Demon, and Living with the Dead—the Darkest Powers YA urban fantasy trilogy, and the Nadia Stafford crime series. She grew up in Ontario, Canada, where she still lives with her family. A former computer programmer, she’s now escaped her corporate cubicle and hopes never to return. Her website is www.KelleyArmstrong.com.
RICHARD CHRISTIAN MATHESON is an acclaimed novelist, short story writer, and screenwriter/producer. He has written and cowritten feature film and television projects for Richard Donner, Ivan Reitman, Steven Spielberg, Bryan Singer, and many others. For TNT’s Nightmares & Dreamscapes miniseries, he wrote the critically hailed adaptation of Stephen King’s short story “Battleground,” starring William Hurt and directed by Brian Henson. As a prose writer, his critically lauded fiction has been published in major, award-winning anthologies, including multiple times in Best New Horror, Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror and Year’s Best Fantasy. Matheson’s stories are collected in Scars and Other Distinguishing Marks and Dystopia. His critically acclaimed 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 is considered an expert on the occult and worked with the UCLA’s parapsychology labs, investigating haunted houses and paranormal phenomenon. He also plays drums with Smash-Cut, a blues/rock/jazz band, which recently recorded a live album, Live at the Mint.
NANCY HOLDER has received four Bram Stokers from the Horror Writers Association and has been nominated for two more. She coedited Outsiders with Nancy Kilpatrick, and is the coauthor of the popular YA dark fantasy series Wicked. She wrote the YA horror novel Pretty Little Devils and many novels in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Highlander, and Smallville universes. A former HWA trustee, she is on the Clarion Foundation board for the Clarion program at the University of California, San Diego. She also teaches writing at UCSD and in the Stonecoast MFA program at the University of Southern Maine. She lives in San Diego with her daughter, Belle; their cats, David and Kitten Snow Vampire; and Panda Monium Holder, their Cardigan Welsh corgi.
SIMON CLARK, at the age of five, narrowly avoided drowning when he fell through ice on a lake. That brush with eternity might have colored 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 books include Blood Crazy, Darkness Demands, She Loves Monsters, and the award-winning The Night of the Triffids, which continues the adventures of Wyndham’s classic The Day of the Triffids. Simon’s latest novel is Ghost Monster, a ghoulish feast of the horrors that befall a community when they are possessed by the spirits of sadistic outlaws.
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 multimillionselling series for Vertigo/DC Comics, The Sandman, was described as “the greatest epic in the history of comic books” by the Los Angeles Times.
DAVE MCKEAN is an acclaimed illustrator, graphic designer, and filmmaker. He is a long-term collaborator of Neil Gaiman and has worked with him on many titles, including Mr. Punch, Signal to Noise, The Wolves in the Walls, and The Graveyard Book. He both wrote and drew the acclaimed Cages and has won many awards for his illustration, including a World Fantasy Award for The Sandman comic series. His short films include The Week Before and Neon, and he made his feature directorial debut with MirrorMask for the Jim Henson Company.
STEVE NILES is one of the writers responsible for bringing horror comics back to prominence. The success of his 30 Days of Night comic series led to a number one box-office smash with Spider-Man’s Sam Raimi producing, David Slade directing, and Niles cowriting the screenplay. He is currently working for the top American comic publishers—IDW, DC, Marvel, Image, and Dark Horse—and recent projects include Simon Dark with artist Scott Hampton and Batman: Gotham After Midnight with artist Kelley Jones. Niles has been nominated for multiple Eisner Comic Industry Awards and was the recipient of two Spike TV Scream Awards for Best Horror comic and Best Comic Adaptation. He (and coauthor Jeff Mariotte) also won a 2007 Scribe Award for the novel 30 Days of Night: Rumors of the Undead. At present he is writing a screenplay for legendary director John Carpenter and Dimension based on the comic The Upturned Stone, and his graphic novel Freaks of the Heartland is being developed for film by David Gordon Green. He resides in Los Angeles.
SARAH LANGAN’s first novel, The Keeper (HarperCollins, 2006), was a New York Times Editor’s Pick. Her second novel, The Missing (HarperCollins, 2007), won the Bram Stoker Award for outstanding novel, was a Publishers Weekly favorite book of the year, and an IHG outstanding novel nominee. The New York Times Book Review recently compared her to Mary Shelley, extolling Langan’s “mournful endof-the-world narrative,” and her “vision of a society perishing from within, exhausted by its own excesses.” She has published a dozen short stories, several essays, and her third novel, Audrey’s Door, about a woman who moves into a haunted apartment building on the Upper West Side, is due out from HarperCollins in October 2009. Her website is www.sarahlangan.com.
NICHOLAS VINCE was born in Germany in 1958 and lives in South London. He met Clive Barker while he was at Mountview Academy of Theatre Arts and was later cast as the Chattering Cenobite in the first two Hellraiser movies, and Kinksi in Nightbreed. For Marvel he wrote stories for the Hellraiser and Nightbreed comics plus the series Warheads and Mortigan Goth. He modeled for the art of John Bolton and for Dave McKean in Cages. He served as chairman of the Comics Creators Guild. His interview series “The Luggage in the Crypt” appeared in the magazine Skeleton Crew and his short stories in Fear. Most of the details of his biography on www.wikipedia.org are fantasy created by his nephew. His first name is definitely not Sean.
YVONNE NAVARRO lives in southern Arizona, where by day she works as an operations officer on historic Fort Huachuca. By night she chops her time into little pieces, dividing it among her huge adopted Great Danes, Goblin and the Ghost; her husband, author Weston Ochse; her dad; her writing; and two people-loving parakeets, Edwina Allan Poe and BirdZilla. She’s written seven solo novels and a number of film tie-ins, including the novelization of Ultraviolet, Elektra, Hellboy, and seven novels in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer universe. Her work has won the HWA’s Bram Stoker, plus a number of other writing awards. She’s currently hammering on a novel called Highborn. Visit her at www.yvonnenavarro.com or http://yvonnenavarro.livejournal.com/.
MARK MORRIS became a full-time writer in 1988 on the Enterprise Allowance Scheme, and a year later saw the release of his first novel, Toady. He has since published a further fifteen novels, among which are Stitch, The Immaculate, The Secret of Anatomy, Fiddleback, The Deluge, four books in the popular Doctor Who range and one for the spinoff Torchwood, a novel entitled Bay of the Dead. His short stories, novellas, articles, and reviews have appeared in a wide variety of anthologies and magazines, and he is editor of the highly acclaimed Cinema Macabre, a book of fifty horror-movie essays by genre luminaries, for which he won the 2007 British Fantasy Award. Forthcoming work includes a novella entitled It Sustains for Earthling P
ublications and a new short story collection, Long Shadows, Nightmare Light.
BARBIE WILDE is best known for her portrayal of the Female Cenobite in Clive Barker’s classic horror movie Hellbound: Hellraiser II. She has also performed cabaret in Bangkok; appeared as a robotic dancer in the Bollywood blockbuster Janbazz, and was a vicious mugger in Death Wish 3. In the early 1980s, Barbie performed at the top venues of New York, London, and Amsterdam with the mime/dance/music group, SHOCK; supporting such artists as Gary Numan, Ultravox, Depeche Mode, and Adam & the Ants. As a television presenter/ writer, Barbie hosted The American Hot 100 for Skytrax TV; The Morning Show and Supersonic for Music Box; The Small Screen for ITV; Hold Tight for Granada; The Gig for LWT; and Sprockets for Sky. After completing her first novel, The Venus Complex, about the making of a serial killer, Barbie is currently working on an erotic vampire novel called Valeska.
JEFFREY J. MARIOTTE is the award-winning author of more than thirty novels, including the border horror trilogy Missing White Girl, River Runs Red, and Cold Black Hearts, The Slab, the Witch Season teen horror quartet, and others. He also writes comic books and graphic novels. Some of his work includes the graphic novel Zombie Cop and the bestselling comic book Presidential Material: Barack Obama. His long-running horror/Western series Desperadoes was named the Best Western Comic Book of 2007 by True West magazine. He’s a co-owner of specialty bookstore Mysterious Galaxy in San Diego, and lives in southeastern Arizona on the Flying M Ranch. For more information, please visit www.jeffmariotte.com.
NANCY KILPATRICK is an award-winning author who has published seventeen novels, around two hundred short stories, one nonfiction book and has edited nine anthologies. She writes mainly horror, dark fantasy, mystery, and erotica and has been working on two new novels over the last year. Her most recent short fiction has appeared in Blood Lite (Pocket Books); Bits of the Dead (Coscom Entertainment); The Living Dead (Night Shade Books); and Traps (DarkHart Press). Look for upcoming stories in Darkness on the Edge (PS Publishing); The Moonstone Book of Zombies; The Moonstone Book of Vampires; Monsters Noir; and Don Juan. She has just finished coediting with David Morrell Tesseracts 13, an all horror/dark fantasy anthology. She is about to edit her tenth anthology, this one all-vampire and as yet untitled. You can check out Nancy’s latest at her website: www.nancykilpatrick.com.
GARY A. BRAUNBECK is the author of the acclaimed Cedar Hill cycle, which includes the novels In Silent Graves, Keepers, Mr. Hands, Prodigal Blues, Coffin County, and the forthcoming Far Dark Fields. A majority of the Cedar Hill short stories have been collected in Graveyard People, Home Before Dark, and the forthcoming The Carnival Within, all from Earthling Publications, as well as Destinations Unknown and Things Left Behind. His work has received five Bram Stoker Awards, three Shocklines “Shocker” Awards, an International Horror Guild Award, a Dark Scribe Magazine Black Quill Award, and a World Fantasy Award nomination. He lives in fear of his five lovable cats, who will not hesitate to draw blood if he fails to feed them on schedule. For more information about Gary and his work, please visit his website: www.garybraunbeck.com.
LUCY A. SNYDER is the author of Sparks and Shadows, Installing Linux on a Dead Badger, and the upcoming Del Rey novel Spellbent. Her writing has appeared in Strange Horizons, Farthing, Masques V, Doctor Who Short Trips: Destination Prague, Chiaroscuro, GUD, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. You can also find her interview with Clive Barker in Writers’ Workshop of Horror from Woodland Press. She currently lives in Worthington, Ohio, with her husband and occasional coauthor Gary A. Braunbeck. Learn more about her and her books at www.lucysnyder.com.
CHAZ BRENCHLEY has been making a living as a writer since he was eighteen. He is the author of nine thrillers, most recently Shelter, and two major fantasy series: The Books of Outremer, based on the world of the Crusades, and Selling Water by the River, set in an alternate Ottoman Istanbul. A winner of the British Fantasy Award, he has also published three books for children and more than five hundred short stories in various genres. His time as Crimewriter-in-Residence at the St Peter’s Riverside Sculpture Project in Sunderland resulted in the collection Blood Waters. He is a prizewinning ex-poet and has recently been writer in residence at the University of Northumbria, as well as tutoring their MA in Creative Writing. Several of his books have attracted movie and TV interest. He was Northern Writer of the Year 2000, and lives in Newcastle upon Tyne with two squabbling cats and a famous teddy bear.
DOUG BRADLEY is probably most famous for his role as Hellraiser’s Pinhead. As well as the Hellraiser series, Doug has starred in Clive Barker’s Nightbreed, alongside his friend Robert Englund (Freddy from A Nightmare on Elm Street) in The Killer Tongue, and in two award-winning short horror films On Edge and Red Lines. Other film and TV appearances include Inspector Morse and the movies The Prophecy: Uprising and Pumpkinhead: Ashes to Ashes. Doug’s theater work includes his one-man show An Evening With Death. He also showed us his literary skills in the insightful and entertaining book Behind the Mask of the Horror Actor. Doug is currently a member of Renegade Arts, which has launched the Doug Bradley’s Spine Chillers series: he performed and directed the award-winning audio/visual presentation of H. P. Lovecraft’s The Outsider in 2008 and is currently working on a similar adaptation of Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart, as well as a series of horror audiobooks.
About the Editors
PAUL KANE has been writing professionally for twelve years. His genre journalism has appeared in such magazines as The Dark Side, Fangoria, SFX, and Rue Morgue, and his first nonfiction book was the critically acclaimed The Hellraiser Films and Their Legacy. His short stories have appeared in many magazines and anthologies on both sides of the Atlantic (as well as being broadcast on BBC Radio 2), and have been collected in Alone (In the Dark), Touching the Flame, FunnyBones, and Peripheral Visions. His novella Signs of Life reached the shortlist of the British Fantasy Awards 2006 and his others include The Lazarus Condition and RED. His first mass-market novel was Arrowhead, a postapocalyptic reworking of the Robin Hood myth published by Abaddon, and a sequel has recently been released called Broken Arrow. In his capacity as Special Publications Editor of the British Fantasy Society he worked with authors like Brian Aldiss, Ramsey Campbell, Robert Silverberg and many more. In 2008 his zombie story “Dead Time” was turned into an episode of the Lionsgate/NBC TV series Fear Itself, adapted by Steve Niles and directed by Darren Lynn Bousman (SAW II–IV). Paul’s website can be found at www.shadow-writer.co.uk. He currently lives in Derbyshire, UK, with his wife—the author Marie O’Regan—his family, and a black cat called Mina.
MARIE O’REGAN is a British Fantasy Award–nominated writer of horror and dark fantasy, based in the Midlands, UK, where she lives with her husband—author Paul Kane—her children, and the creature of the night known as Mina, the family cat. Her fiction has been published in the UK, United States, Germany, and Italy, and she has had reviews, interviews, and articles published in many magazines both in the UK, United States, and Canada—her essay on The Changeling was published in the award-winning Cinema Macabre from PS Publishing. Her first collection, Mirror Mere, was released in 2006 by Rainfall Books in the UK, and she served as chairperson of the British Fantasy Society for four years (2004–2008), during which time she coedited several publications, including British Fantasy Society: A Celebration, as well as a number of FantasyCon convention souvenir booklets. She has also edited the BFS flagship magazine, Dark Horizons, and their newsletter Prism. In 2008 Marie co-chaired what is widely regarded as one of the most successful FantasyCons in recent years. To find out more, visit www.marieoregan.net.
Special Bonus Material
Wordsworth Graphic Short Story Script
Neil Gaiman
Wordsworth.
Short story by Neil Gaiman, for Dave McKean
‘Words are but pictures, true or false designed,
To draw the lines and features of the mind.’
BUTLER—Upon the Abuse of Human Learning.
(OK: THE TEXT ON THIS PAGE I IMAGINE AS BEING LAID OVER AN ALMOST ARBITRARY PANEL GRID. IN THE PANELS ARE REALLY NASTY THINGS. REALLLLLLY NASTY THINGS MADE OF PLASTICENE AND HOOKS AND K.Y. GEL TO MAKE IT GLISTEN AND DRIPPY WAX BITS AND RUSTY METAL SLIVERS STICKING OUT AND LEATHERY BITS AND STUFF YOU’D FREAK OUT IF YOU TOUCHED IT WHEN YOU WEREN’T EXPECTING TO . . . POSSIBLY A GLASS EYE COVERED IN A THICK TRANSLUCENT MEMBRANE . . . THAT KIND OF STUFF. DO IT IN 3D – JUST GIVING ENOUGH ILLUSION OF PANEL BORDERS TO GIVE THE IMPRESSION THAT WE’RE SEEING LOTS OF STUFF, THAT THIS STUFF GOES ON FOREVER, THAT IT COULD BE BITS OF THE PEOPLE, OR IT COULD BE A WALL, AN INFINITE WALL . . . )
Examine please the writhing tapestries of choice violence implicit in every scratching and syllable. Smell the beast-blood trickling into each wound, spelling out new ways to violate sweet innocence.
Hooks rend. New blasphemies configurate upon the inside of my eyelids: tales worked in blood and bone and flesh and semen, traced in spittle; a dash of bile here, a slice of kidney there.
Gather round damned children, and together we shall lament and celebrate the configuration that made us what we are, today and forever.
So: do you writhe and shiver in the pangs of darling agonies undreamable, wriggling and gasping and giggling, anticipating the tumescent thrill of another’s damnation?
Good.
Then I’ll begin . . .
PAGE 2
OK – FORMAL STORYTELLING FOR THE NEXT FEW PAGES. (INCIDENTALLY, I HAVEN’T BOTHERED TO SET TIME OR PLACE ON THIS, BUT I ASSUME IT’S LONDON, PROBABLY 1950S, ALTHOUGH IT COULD BE SET TODAY AS EASILY.)