Retro horror

The Light at the End by Craig Skipp & John Spector

Let’s be honest. With a few exceptions (Koontz, King & Wright) the horror genre in the 80s sucked big time. (I tried to come up with a description slightly more literary but this one just seemed to fit.) One of those other exceptions was the works of John Skipp & Craig Spector. This pair was involved with the creation of the “splatterpunk” movement and back in 2000 Stealth Press started to reissue their books in a series of well-designed hardcovers. The first three titles were released along with one new solo novel by Craig Spector. I’ve finally gotten around to reading the first in the seres, The Light at the End. A wonderful spin on the Vampire legend mostly centered around the subway tunnels in New York City. This work however is definitely a child of the eighties. “Data pagers” cost $150 each, one character replayed a memory in “the Betamax of his mind,” and then a bunch of characters went off to play D&D. (To which Lisa reminded me that her husband still does that on a weekly basis.) If you can get around these little quirks, Skipp & Spectors’ novels show that there was still life in the horror genre in the late eighties. Unfortunately, that life remained dim for another 10+ years.

Note: It looks like Stealth Press seems to have stopped publishing. While looking up the links for this post I found that their site hasn’t been updated since the end of 2001. I e-mailed them to ask about the status of the company but yet to receive any sort of reply.