Apparently the publisher, Bantam Books, dumped Dead Lines with little or no promotion. I had no idea at the time, but it was not a successful one. Their next book, Dead Lines, was just as good. It was a doozy, too, with a righteously cool poster tipped into the inside of the paperback cover.
I could be wrong, but I think it may have been their most successful book. The John Skipp and Craig Spector superteam was riding high after the 1987 publication of The Scream. And you know what? Thirty-five or so year later, I still do. I thought John and Craig were just about the coolest people I could imagine. I read fiction and features about Skipp and Spector in The Twilight Zone Magazine, Night Cry, and The Horror Show. They were weaned on midnight movies, Frank Zappa, William Burroughs, Hunter S. There was influence from classic horror, to be sure, but these were people who listened to punk and metal. Skipp and Spector’s characters were people I knew. The Light at the End was a radical departure from the horror fiction that came before it. For most people it all started with Skipp and Spector’s The Light at the End, a new kind of horror novel, and a vampire story for a hip young readership. Thanks to Stephen King, horror had been doing pretty big business, but by 1986 things were really getting wild. That era is still my favorite period of the horror genre. I first heard of and begin reading fiction from John Skipp and Craig Spector in the mid-1980s.
0 kommentar(er)
