Introduction
Creepy-crawlies, ghosts and goblins, things that go bump in the night or slither in the shadows … Monsters have always been a big part of my life. I don’t get scared. I don’t have nightmares. But I do find a shudder delightful.
As a kid I was enthralled with monster movies. This was before such modern technological miracles such as Netflix, or before that DVDs, or before that VHS cassettes. When a monster movie was on, you had to watch it then and there.
In the small Wisconsin town where I spent my childhood, we could pick up the Milwaukee TV stations, but our house also had a high TV antenna with a rotor that could turn it to different angles. If I got it set just right, which often took a lot of fiddling, I could tune in to the weaker Chicago stations. And those were the ones that ran Creature Features late Friday night and Sci-Fi Cinema on Saturday afternoon.
I didn’t differentiate between alien monsters that came out of the sands of Mars, or werewolves, mummies, and vampires. The nuances between the science fiction and horror genres were unimportant to me. Monsters were monsters. And special effects didn’t matter either, because my flexible young imagination got just as excited by the most absurd-looking rubber monster as if I had seen a real monster.
I owned and assembled all the plastic Aurora monster model kits, the ones with separate glow-in-the-dark components. I saved my allowance, and any time my dad would take me to the hobby shop in Racine, Wisconsin, I spent my money to get whichever one was next on the list. The Phantom of the Opera, the Hunchback of Notre Dame, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, the Mummy, King Kong, Godzilla, the Wolf Man. My bedroom was filled with them.
I know my dad was a little baffled by my obsession with monsters. He wanted to throw a baseball back and forth in the front yard. (I was terrible at it, not only being a scrawny, uncoordinated kid, but also one with thick bifocals, so that the ball’s position jumped whenever I looked up and saw through a different part of the lens.) He set up a slot car racetrack in our basement, and we would race the little humming cars around and around. It was fun enough, I suppose, but I didn’t get the point, any more than my dad understood why I was so upset when he made me go outside and play one Saturday afternoon, even though it made me miss Attack of the Giant Leeches.
My absolute favorite magazine was Famous Monsters of Filmland. I never got to subscribe, but I would sometimes get hand-me-down copies, or find a new issue on a newsstand. I made lists of all the movies I hadn’t seen, important highlights of the careers of Ray Harryhausen or Lon Chaney, Jr. I read the commentary by “Uncle Forry” (Forrest J. Ackerman, who was like a cool, surrogate uncle to me). In fact, many years later, I was not only delighted when our paths crossed and I had breakfast with him in the Green Room of a science fiction convention, I was absolutely starstruck. At the time, I’d had many bestselling novels and had the opportunity to meet rock stars, famous directors, well-known politicians, TV and movie stars. I don’t think I’ve ever been so much of a fanboy as when I got to chat with Uncle Forry himself.
To me, horror and dark fantasy wasn’t just about monsters. As I grew older, I loved the works of Ray Bradbury, especially Something Wicked This Way Comes. I watched reruns of The Twilight Zone every afternoon, soaking up that eerie, twisted sensibility, realizing that sometimes the monsters are in your own mind, sometimes your assumptions are more frightening than any real enemy. So, I began to write those kinds of stories as well.
I also believe that intensity is best tempered with a sigh of relief, and so I wrote many horror stories where the reader would laugh rather than scream. I edited three Blood Lite anthologies that mixed humor and horror, and then launched an entire series of adventures featuring one of my most popular characters, Dan Shamble, Zombie P.I.
In these stories you might fidget nervously or swallow in a dry throat, or you might jump at a sudden surprise, or you might snicker out loud. In all cases, I hope you will be entertained.
—Kevin J. Anderson, Colorado Springs, July 2018