I’ve partied with these guys, worked on projects with them, laughed, and been privileged to know them both. Smoking a joint with John Skipp was even more of a thrill for me. The fondest dream of many people would be to get high with John Lennon. John and Craig have both been very cool with me. They say you shouldn’t meet your heroes, but I’ve had pretty good luck in that regard. I later met both John Skipp and Craig Spector. It was like the breakup of a favorite rock band, and these guys were rock stars to horror fans like me. They had had a meteoric rise to fame and I guess personal shit came between them. Skipp and Spector called it quits a few years after that. I read Dead Lines, loved it, and anxiously awaited another book from John Skipp and Craig Spector. I saw Dead Lines on the shelf, and I reached for it like a drowning man grabbing a life preserver. It came out and one day on my weekly visit to the WaldenBooks in the mall across the street from my house, I made a beeline to the horror section. 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)
