At the World Horror Convention, Phoenix Arizona 1994
Picture by Beth Gwinn
GROWING
UP IN A WORLD OF GODS AND MONSTERS
by Stephen
Jones
“To a new world
of gods and monsters!”
—Doctor Pretorius, Bride of Frankenstein
“Kids
these days just don’t scare like they used to!”
—Mike, Monsters, Inc.
When I was growing up in Britain during the 1960s we didn’t have many monsters.
Obviously, I’m not talking about real-life monsters here – regrettably there are always those, such as infamous “Moors Murderers” Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, who were both jailed for life in 1966 for a string of child sex killings. No, what I’m referring to are those creatures of the night who have always stalked their way through the shadows of our imagination and haunted our deepest and darkest nightmares.
Of course, they
existed back then, but as a youngster growing up in post-war Britain not long
after the end
of food rationing and still surrounded by the physical evidence of the Blitz,
we were a nation which perhaps, for a while, was tired of monsters.
We had nothing like the Shock Theater – a package of classic Universal horror movies from the 1930s and ’40s that was released to American television in the autumn of 1957 and which, almost overnight, introduced a whole new generation to those films and their stars, such as Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi. In fact, most people in the United Kingdom didn’t even have televisions at that time!
Britain was a country looking towards a bright new future. For the most part, the old myths were forgotten, and marionette TV shows such as Space Patrol and fledgling Gerry Anderson productions like Supercar, Fireball XL5 and Stingray inspired young viewers such as myself to yearn for a world of flying cars, moving sidewalks and funny-looking robots.
I had been too young to stay up late and watch Nigel Kneale’s trio of Quatermass plays on the BBC, which after all were also science fiction, despite their monstrous alien menaces. I do remember watching such early 1960s series as Pathfinders to Venus and The Monsters, the latter about a journalist investigating a family of aquatic creatures living in the lakes of northern England. However, these were few and far between on our tiny black and white television.
Of course we had Hammer’s Technicolor horrors and American International Pictures’ series of Edgar Allan Poe adaptations in the cinemas which, despite regularly sustaining a critical drubbing in the national press, proved to be quite popular amongst the Teddy Boy and coffee bar generation. Unfortunately, these were usually saddled with an ‘X’ certificate by the British Board of Film Censors, which meant that you had to be at least sixteen years old to see them. In contrast, these types of films were considered drive-in family fare in America.
There were occasional exceptions to these rules: For example, Hammer’s 1962 version of The Phantom of the Opera was released under an ‘A’ certificate, which meant that you only had to be accompanied by an adult. But this was not a lot of use if your parents still considered you too young at nine years of age to watch Herbert Lom tear off his mask and reveal his acid-scarred features. In fact, the following year I was not allowed to accompany my school friends to a screening of Jason and the Argonauts, despite my best attempts to convince my parents that Ray Harryhausen’s spectacular stop-motion creatures were based on mythology and, as such, were of vital importance to my history studies. However, to be fair, the reason they would not let me go had more to do with the unsavoury area of town where the film was playing than any thought that I might become hysterical watching an army of fighting skeleton warriors created from the teeth of a slain Hydra.
Then I discovered that there was a way to see these hitherto banned images without actually having to go to the movies. While collecting second-hand comic books through London’s chain of Popular Book Centre exchanges, I chanced upon my first monster magazine.
In the late 1950s, riding upon the surprise success of the package of Shock Theater films to television, Californian fan and collector Forrest J Ackerman teamed up with canny publisher James Warren to produce a magazine called Famous Monsters of Filmland. It quickly became a seminal title, with such serious articles as Ackerman’s own ‘Monsters Are Good for You’, Robert Bloch’s ‘The Clown at Midnight’ and ‘Dante’s Inferno’ by a teenage Joe Dante competing side-by-side with jokey features like ‘Fang Mail’, ‘You Axed for It’ and the editor’s often truly terrible puns which accompanied the many mouth-watering still photographs.
While the films themselves may still have been firmly beyond my viewing experience for a few more years yet, I could suddenly keep up with the latest monster movie news and learn more about the classics. Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi and the Chaneys (Lon Sr. and Jr.) became gods to me; Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, John Carradine and Vincent Price were my new heroes. I may have been too young to see their films, but I knew their careers intimately, thanks to a bi-monthly magazine which mostly arrived in Britain as ballast on transatlantic ships and sold for half-a-crown.
But it was still not enough. I needed more to feed my monster fix, and there were plenty of other titles springing up which I found in corner newsagents or second-hand book stores: FM’s own companion titles Monster World and Spaceman competed for display space with Fantastic Monsters of the Films, Horror Monsters, Mad Monsters, Modern Monsters, Monster Mania, Shriek!, For Monsters Only and, perhaps the best and certainly most eclectic of them all, Bhob Stewart’s Castle of Frankenstein.
British publishers soon got in on the act with the one-shot Certificate X! and, later, such small press titles as Supernatural, Gothique and L’Incroyable Cinema, as a new generation of fans began to add their own voices to the growing body of horror film criticism. I would pore over each new issue as it came out, studying the photos and digesting each article in minute detail until the staples would eventually give way and the spine would fall apart with wear.
And with each new nugget of information safely stored away somewhere in my brain, I would learn a little more about the fascination of fear.
My first memory of actually being frightened by a story was a Sunday afternoon adaptation of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations on BBC television. The scenes of Miss Havisham’s ruined wedding feast were creepy enough, with a mouldering cake covered in cobwebs and rats, but when the escaped convict Magwitch leapt out from behind a gravestone it scared me out of my wits! I can also remember being glued to the TV in abject terror some years later while watching the movies The Uninvited and The Innocents. The scenes of a ghostly woman in white forming at the top of the stairs in the former, and the grey figure of Miss Jessel watching from amongst the reeds in the latter, held me literally spellbound when I was around eleven years old, and they have stayed with me ever since.
By then, horror had finally come to British television. A Christmas screening of the original 1933 King Kong had ushered in this new era in the mid-1960s and, slowly but surely, ‘X’ certificate films began to turn up regularly as part of late-night programming.
As much of a thrill as it was to finally see such hitherto inaccessible titles as the Universal classics of the 1930s and ’40s and the early Hammer films, by then we children had already been introduced to monsters on the small-screen by a kindly white-haired old man who travelled through time and space in a police telephone box.
Although such American series as One Step Beyond, The Twilight Zone, Thriller and The Outer Limits played on some regional television stations, and the occasional episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents would feature a macabre tale (invariably scripted by Robert Bloch or Henry Slesar), the turning point for British TV came in November 1963 when the BBC broadcast the very first episode of Doctor Who.
Although many of
the early episodes still adhered to the science fiction formula which television
in the United Kingdom had followed since Nigel Kneale’s teleplays were produced
in the early 1950s, as soon as the eponymous time-traveller and his companions
encountered the exterminating Daleks in the show’s second story arc, it captured
the nation’s imagination and, almost overnight, our perception of monsters began
to change.
With the Daleks returning for two further adventures the following year (one
of which featured a cameo by Count Dracula and the Frankenstein Monster on
tea-time
television!), and the introduction of such original otherworldly creatures
as the Menoptra (human-sized moths) and the Zarbi (giant ants), it quickly
became
obvious that monsters were here to stay.
More than a decade
before George Lucus supposedly created the concept of “merchandising” for Star Wars,
we were collecting Doctor Who annuals, toys, button badges, board games,
costumes, confectionery and comic books.
As Bob Dylan sang, the times they were a-changing. Beatlemania was in full
swing. America was becoming inexorably embroiled in the Vietnam conflict.
The first
U.S. astronaut walked in space. And I was growing up.
As for my cinematic heroes, well, Lon Chaney, Sr. and Bela Lugosi were long dead, while Boris Karloff had all but retired and was best known in Britain for advertising a brand of beer from his favourite pub. However, the rest of them were still going strong, only I was still not yet old enough to get into an ‘X’ film.
Then in 1965 my
local cinema showed a double feature of City Under the Sea (aka War-Gods of the Deep)
and The Face of Fu Manchu, starring
Vincent Price and Christopher Lee, respectively. Despite their minimal horror
content, both films were rated ‘U’, which meant that anyone could see them!
That same year I went to one of the first screenings of the movie version
of Dr. Who and the Daleks featuring Peter Cushing, who I subsequently
met along with his co-stars (both human and mechanical) at an in-store promotion
in London’s busy Oxford Street. By the time an even darker sequel was released
the following year, the floodgates had already begun to open.
Meanwhile in America, where the classic creatures had long been a part of
the nation’s consciousness, it seemed that you could buy almost anything
to do
with
monsters.
Probably the most popular tie-ins (on both sides of the Atlantic) were the Aurora plastic model kits, which you glued together and painted yourself. What dedicated monster fan in the 1960s didn’t have a shelf full of those detailed figures, carefully embellished with enamel paints and proudly displayed on their customised stands? Aurora even produced a range of hotrod Monstermobiles, including ‘Frankenstein’s Flivver’ and ‘Dracula’s Dragster’.
Also very popular (especially around Halloween time) were the heavy rubber masks created by Hollywood’s Don Post Studios, along with oil paints, life-size posters, iron-on transfers, button badges, laminated binders, mystery games, jigsaw puzzles, wallets, wall plaques, movie viewers, flicker books, stickers, bubble bath ‘Soakys’, record albums and numerous other items which are much sought-after (and expensive) collector’s items today.
Countless items were advertised in the back pages of Famous Monsters and other magazines (although many were sadly unavailable outside the United States), and it was not long before my small bedroom was a teenage boy’s approximation of Forry Ackerman’s famed “Ackermansion” collection – much to the consternation of my usually understanding parents and the admiration of my like-minded school friends.
I chewed my way through hard strips of bubble-gum that tasted like dentist’s mouth-wash just so I could collect and swap the trading cards that were packaged with them. From the gory excesses of Mars Attacks!, through colourful characters from The Outer Limits, to jokey sayings attributed to the Universal Monsters, I had them all. In America, General Mills, Inc. created such characters as Count Chocula and Franken Berry to coerce children into eating their way through more breakfast cereals.
In April 1966, Hammer Films was presented with the Queen’s Award to Industry for its export achievements. I am certain that I was not the only person who saw it as a validation of our genre.
Television series as varied and popular as Route 66, The Lucy Show, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., The Wild Wild West, Batman, F Troop, Get Smart, Gilligan’s Island and The Monkees included episodes featuring the classic monsters, and many old actors who thought their careers were all but over found a new lease of life as guest stars on the small screen. The Addams Family and The Munsters both ran for two seasons, while the daytime soap opera Dark Shadows lasted for an incredible 1,225 episodes.
For younger viewers, two of the movies’ best-known monsters were reinvented for a new generation in cartoon form on TV. Boy genius Buzz and his scientist father created a fifty-foot tall crime?fighting robot called Frankenstein Jr., while the mighty King Kong teamed up with another scientist and his two children to battle a villain called Dr. Who (who had no connection to the BBC character).
Most of these shows eventually made it across the Atlantic, although by then Britain had started to create its own home-grown horrors, from the outlandish exploits of The Avengers to such anthology series as Late Night Horror and Mystery and Imagination.
A decade after Shock Theater first aired on American television, I finally inveigled my way into a cinema to see my first ‘X’ film on the big screen. Although I was still two years shy of my sixteenth birthday, with my parents’ blessing I somehow managed to get into a double-bill of Hammer’s Quatermass and the Pit (aka Five Million Years to Earth) and Circus of Fear (aka Psycho-Circus) starring Christopher Lee. After that, I never looked back, and over the next five years I travelled all over London to see the latest horror films as they opened or catch up with older titles on re-release double-bills. It was a golden age for movie-going, although some of the venues I found myself in – especially when tracking down a particularly obscure European double feature south of the Thames – often left a great deal to be desired.
By now, the classic monsters were being recycled for an even younger audience. Probably one of the most important and influential showcases for such seminal scaremongers was the Hanna?Barbera cartoon series Scooby Doo Where Are You!, which originally aired on CBS-TV in 1969. During each half-hour episode, the eponymous ghost?hunting dog and his teenage friends Shaggy, Freddie, Daphne and Velma encountered all kinds of supernatural manifestations, many of which turned out to be a cover for human criminals. The show was so successful that over the next three decades it spawned no less than twenty different series, along with the prerequisite amount of tie-in merchandise.
Boris Karloff died on February 2nd, 1969, at the grand old age of 81. Despite having only half a lung, a steel leg-brace and crippling arthritis which kept him to confined to a wheelchair, he kept working until the end. I learned about his death on my way home from school. Although I had never met him, I couldn’t help crying. It truly was the end of an era.
The bubble had to eventually burst, and by the end of the 1970s Hammer Films,
along with such rivals as Amicus Productions in Britain and American International
Pictures in the United States, were all gone. With the end of the old studio
system and the growth of the video industry, the cinema chains were closing
down and the buildings being turned into bingo halls. Except for the occasional
revival house, double-features were a thing of the past.
A new breed of independent film-maker began churning out horror movies aimed
specifically at a youth market inured to gratuitous sex and random violence
after the highs of the “Flower Power” era and the lows of the Vietnam war.
The best television had to offer was such short-lived, if undervalued, series
as
Rod Serling’s Night Gallery and Kolchak: The Night Stalker.
But for those of us who had grown up watching the classic movies on cut-down 200-feet reels of silent Super-8mm film, or setting the alarm clock to catch an obscure television screening in the twilight hours of the morning, the video boom of the 1980s was truly a revolution. Anybody could finally own a copy of a film – a concept previously unheard of, unless you were one of a select group of specialist celluloid collectors. Almost any title (no matter how obscure or terrible) found a new lease of life on video (and later DVD), and a whole generation of monster fans re-discovered the classics of the past in the comfort of their own homes. Although they are no longer amongst us, Lon Chaney, Jr., John Carradine, Vincent Price and Peter Cushing continue to stalk across our television screens, their dastardly deeds and heroic exploits electronically immortalised for ever.
In the early 1990s, a clever marketing consultant at Universal came up with a concept that horror fans had been dreaming about for years. With eight decades of monster movies to exploit, why not create a marketing tool to take advantage of these moribund money-spinners? The result was ‘Universal Studios Monsters’, an official branding with a logo featuring Frankenstein’s Monster, Count Dracula, The Bride of Frankenstein, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Wolf Man and The Mummy. The range of products put out under the new trademark encompassed books, puzzles, toys, fashion accessories and even pin-ball machines.
But it was not until 1997 that monsters went legit. No less an organisation than the United States Postal Service honoured the classic Universal Monsters in September of that year with a set of five 32 cent stamps depicting Boris Karloff as the Frankenstein Monster and The Mummy, Bela Lugosi as Dracula, Lon Chaney, Jr. as The Wolf Man, and Lon Chaney, Sr. as The Phantom of the Opera. With a new ‘Universal Studios Monsters’ trademark, there followed a deluge of T-shirts, postcards, fridge magnets, collector’s tins, squeezie keyrings, mouse pads, plush dolls, enamel badges, shot glasses, drinks cups, candy containers, chocolate cookies, string lights, and pen and pencil sets.
That same year (which marked the centenary of Bram Stoker’s Dracula) also saw horror postage stamp collections issued by Britain, Ireland and Canada, and two years later the U.K.’s Royal Mail produced a 44 pence Dalek stamp photographed by Lord Snowden for its Millennium series.
Also in 1997, Burger King offered Kids Club meals featuring give-away toys of the Frankenstein Monster, Dracula, the Wolf Man, the Creature, the Mummy and The Phantom of the Opera, while other fast-food chains have used everything from Scooby-Doo to the latest Disney blockbuster to convince consumers to eat burgers and fried chicken.
Sideshow Toys began issuing beautifully detailed action figures of the Universal Monsters (perhaps aimed at those who still remembered their Aurora model kits from the 1960s). These articulated sculptures were available in various sizes and variant editions, along with a line of Little Big Head collectibles that also included Classic Monster Wrestlers (‘Big Frankie’, ‘Mad Mummy’, ‘Freaky Phantom’, ‘Crazy Creature’ and ‘Dangerous Drac’), Monster Shredders and Glow-in-the-Dark permutations. A four-foot tall Little Big Head version of Karloff as the Frankenstein Monster, complete with daisy and limited to only 250 individually numbered fibreglass figures, sold for a cool $1,000 apiece.
From the same company came the Universal Studios Classic Monster Bobble Heads and The Munsters Bobble Heads, while there were any number of Dracula model kits and collectible figures authorised by the Lugosi Estate.
Along with a detailed figure of King Kong, McFarlane Toys’ ‘Movie Maniacs’ series featured collectibles of more modern movie monsters, while Mezco Toyz’s series of ‘Silent Screamers’ included such characters from classic silent films as Graf Orlok and Knock Renfield from Nosferatu, Dr. Caligari and Cesare from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Edison’s Frankenstein, the 1920 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and the Metropolis robot Maria, all with their own diorama bases.
X-Plus Toys of Japan offered resin statues and vinyl figures in various sizes and poses of classic Ray Harryhausen creations from films such as The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, 20 Million Miles to Earth and Jason and the Argonauts. There was also a series of limited edition four-inch chess pieces and twelve-inch cold cast statues of various mythological creatures from these and other Harryhausen movies.
A Halloween treat for little girls with a twisted sense of humour was the Barbie and Ken as The Munsters gift set. The dolls were surprisingly faithful recreations of Lily and Herman from the cult 1960s TV show. If that wasn’t dark enough, there was always Mezco’s series of nine-inch Living Dead Dolls complete with their own death certificates!
These days you can buy anything with monsters on it, from retro lunch boxes to Christmas tree ornaments, hand-crafted resin model kits to illustrated wall clocks.
But monster merchandise is not just limited to movies. Fans of H.P. Lovecraft can get themselves cute and cuddly Cthulhu plush dolls with poseable wire wings and floppy tentacles, while Bad Boy Designs introduced its Cthulhu Beer Glasses with four designs – Innsmouth Golden Lager, Ithaqua Ice, Wizard Whateley’s Dunwich Ale and Witch House Dark (“It’s the beer you’ve been dreaming of”).
In celebration of the 70th Anniversary of three of Universal Studio’s most famous monsters, in October 2001 Madame Tussaud’s New York unveiled life-like wax figures of Count Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster and The Mummy to pay tribute to legendary horror stars Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff.
Nowadays, things have certainly changed from when I was a boy. Over the past decade in Britain, Halloween has finally usurped Guy Fawkes’ Night as our traditional autumn celebration. Influenced by films and TV, children now “trick or treat” instead of begging for “a penny for the guy”.
Monsters permeate our lives. Fast-food restaurants give them away as promotions. TV cartoons aimed at pre-schoolers regularly feature vampires and zombies, witches and ghosts. The toys and collectibles are everywhere. There are horror-themed bars and restaurants all over the world, and monsters are used to advertise everything from cars and sunglasses to food and alcohol.
There are countless
websites devoted to all manner of movie monsters. Electronic role-playing
games draw on the works of authors such as H.P. Lovecraft and Clive
Barker, or are based on the latest hit movies and TV shows. The Pokémon collecting
craze from Japan involved trading cards that pictured hundreds of cartoon
“pocket monsters”. In music, everyone from Michael Jackson to the
Backstreet
Boys have used classic monster motifs in their videos.
On television, the vampire-themed Buffy and Angel are huge
hits, Charmed and Sabrina feature cute witches, and The
X Files lasted nearly a decade. New shows such as The Chronicle, FreakyLinks, Strange Frequency, Urban Gothic, Wolf
Lake and others are always finding their way on to the schedules.
Daytime soap operas such as Port Charles and Passions have
also got in on the act and regularly feature vampires and zombies.
Godzilla was
revived as an overblown CGI lizard, and The Mummy has
been given a new lease of life (death?) in a series of big budget action-adventure
movies. Even Disney recently had a box office hit with a computer-generated
film about loveable creatures invading children’s nightmares.
For the older generation, movies such as Scooby-Doo and Resident
Evil remind them of their lost childhood, being based on a thirty-three
year old cartoon series and a popular video game, respectively. Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings are
phenomenal successes, with the result that fantasy has now overtaken romance
as the leading fiction genre.
Look around. Monsters are everywhere. Frankenstein’s creation and Count Dracula are as recognisable throughout the world as those other icons of popular culture: Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Elvis Presley and Mickey Mouse. And the Wolf Man, Mummy and Creature are not far behind. As a child growing up during the 1960s, I could not possibly have imagined that my favourite genre would one day saturate our day-to-day existence.
However, I am not so sure that this is necessarily a good thing. Back then, in those days before video and DVD, multiple satellite television and the Internet, I could pretty much recall all the movies I watched and all the books I read. I could give you dates, and names, and details. Today there is far too much monster material being released every week for any sane person to keep track of it all.
As the old Chinese proverb says: “Be careful what you wish for”. For monster fans, that has never been more true.
Over
the years I have been fortunate enough to meet (and in some cases know) many
of my heroes, such as Christopher
Lee, Peter Cushing, Vincent
Price,
Ray
Harryhausen, Robert Bloch, Richard Matheson, Ray Bradbury, Forrest J
Ackerman, Terence Fisher and others.
I have grown up surrounded by their words and images. There are many
thousands, probably millions, who have done the same. Stephen King, Clive
Barker,
John Landis, Steven Spielberg, Joe Dante and numerous others have cited Famous
Monsters of Filmland as a primary influence, along with the same
films, books and comics I was also avidly consuming as a teenager.
For the new generation of writers, artists and film-makers, the touchstones remain the same. Only today there is so much more to discover, and the opportunities are there to do so.
If
we are shaped by our environment, then I am a product of Mary Shelley’s misunderstood
Monster and Boris Karloff’s sympathetic interpretation;
of Bram Stoker’s bloodthirsty
Count and Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee’s very different embodiments of
evil; of Edgar Allan Poe’s fear of death and Vincent Price and Roger Corman’s
descents
into the maelstrom; of H.P. Lovecraft’s cosmic terrors, Robert E. Howard’s
ancient gods and Clark Ashton Smith’s exotic other worlds; of Willis O'Brien’s
magnificent
ape and Fritz Lang’s soulless simulacrum; of Ray Bradbury’s small town miracles
and Clive Barker’s urban marvels.
The list of influences is endless, as it is for anyone who lives and works
in our genre. All that matters is that we go out there and find them. These
days
they are all around us. While I can still recall what it felt like to be
that little boy who was too young to get into horror movies in the 1960s,
I can also
rejoice in the fact that we live in a world today that enthusiastically embraces
those gods and monsters which shaped the adult I have become. Long may it
continue
to be so.
For Mum and Dad, with love and thanks.
Originally published in Gods and Monsters, the souvenir book of the 28th World
Fantasy Convention in Minneapolis, Minnesota, at which Stephen Jones was one
of the Guests of Honor. Copyright © Stephen Jones 2002. All rights reserved.
October 2007
by Neil Gaiman
I met him at the 1983 British Fantasy Convention, which means that I’ve known Steve Jones for almost a quarter of a century.
And in all that time, after working with him, drinking with him, watching him, I’ve come to the conclusion that there are only two things to know about Steve Jones worth knowing.
Firstly, he loves the genre. He doesn’t just like it, or enjoy it, or make his living from it, he loves it. And the genre in Steve’s case is the whole thing, science fiction and fantasy and horror, the territory of the imagination, but in particular the indigo and the violet and the ultra-violet edges of the spectrum of the fantastic. He likes it dark, and he likes it darker. You can call the thing Steve loves horror or dark fantasy or what you will, but it’s the stuff that Lovecraft wrote and that Ramsey Campbell writes, the stuff in which Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee lurked and strode and menaced and starred. You’ll know it if you see it. Steve Jones cares about it. He wants it to be good. He knows that it matters, knows that it’s important and he wants it to be done well.
Neil Gaiman and Steve at FantasyCon 2006 Photo (c) Peter Colborn
And the other thing I’ve learned, and it’s part of the first thing, is that he doesn’t suffer fools gladly. Steve Jones loves the genre and he wants his love to be well treated, and if he thinks you don’t know what you’re talking about, if he doesn’t think you care, if he doesn’t think your work is good enough, he’ll let you know.
“That story,” Steve will say, cheerfully, lulling you into a false sense of security. “That was rubbish.”
Steve is the master of the cheerful and well-timed, “Of course you think that. You’re an idiot.”
Ah, you think, walking away from the argument with a small rain cloud over your head, ego smarting, what a sharp-tongued and grumpy bastard that man is.
And you’re wrong. He’s not.
It’s just that if you want his good opinion, you simply have to earn it. It doesn’t come free.
Because when he think you’re good enough, if he thinks something you did worked, he’ll tell you. And the fact that he’ll also tell you when he thinks it’s not good enough makes Steve Jones’s praise, when you get it, a thing of real value. If Steve likes it . . . you think, and then you beam. Well, I do. You would too, if you knew Steve.
Neil Gaiman, Clive Barker and Steve at FantasyCon 2006 Photo (c) Peter Coleborn
And all of this is because he loves the genre. He understands it, he cares about it, he cares about the people who built it and he cares about the thing that they built. Steve doesn’t want you to treat his love cavalierly or badly. It’s not that he demands the same amount of appreciation or knowledge from you that he has, but he thinks that your opinion should at least be informed. He likes an argument as long as you’re arguing with a point of view and from the facts. If you don’t, then he’ll grin like a fox eating shit from a barbed wire brush and tell you that you’re an idiot. And he’ll mean it.
And, oddly, for someone who is quick to dismiss people as idiots (“I just call them as I see them,” he will tell you if challenged, with that Scorpio grin) Steve is also remarkably ready to change his mind. You rise or fall in his estimation according to the quality of the work you do, of what you give back to the genre. (Also on whether or not you remember to stand your round.)
I’ve worked with Steve, on and off, for pretty much all of the quarter of a century. I’ve written stories for him. He’s a good editor. He knows what he wants, and asks for it specifically. He’s been doing best of the year anthologies for a long time, without burning out, and he’s been finding new talent and rediscovering older talent all that time.
Steve wears many hats. I’ve encountered Steve Jones commercial director (“Can I have the five-drop difference?” the plant would plead, and only a heart of stone would ignore it. Listen, it was the “A Mars a Day Helps You Work Rest And Play” of its era.), as well as Steve the unit publicist, the book editor, the magazine editor, the author, the anthologist, the convention organiser, the genre historian, and I’ve probably left off a dozen Steve Jones identities here, and I’ve watched him excel in all these capacities. I miss the fact that Steve Jones, artist, doesn’t draw any longer (he has a pointillist, Virgil Finlayesque line, and he says he doesn’t draw because it takes too long, because he’s not a real artist, because other people do it better. And he’s wrong, but it’s not an argument I’ll ever win).
The Boys Are Back in Town: Neil and Steve (early '90s)
I’ve co-written a screenplay with Steve, and been interviewed by him for books. I’ve written factual stuff for him and fictional stuff for him. He’s a perfectionist who still understands deadlines, he’s a professional who demands a great deal from everyone and gives the same amount of professionalism in return. In twenty-five years I’ve never known him to miss a deadline. (The same can no longer be said of me.)
And while we’re on the subject, Steve has given much back to the object of his love. He’s been there at the beginning of the careers of dozens of us, encouraging, chivvying, pushing work our way, helping things along. I’ve seen him revive the careers of writers who were stars long ago but were now all-but forgotten. There are people who would never have met without Steve, and work, real work, important work that would never have been done if he hadn’t been in the background, nudging it along, demanding the best from the people he was working with. I’ve seen him do important stuff, quietly, for writers and artists who were sick or couldn’t work or needed help, the stuff he’d be embarrassed if I mentioned here, because it’s what you do if you can, but so many of us don’t.
Buy him a drink. Buy a round. Talk to him. Steve knows more about the genre, about the heart and the pulse of it than pretty much any other person, and he loves it more deeply and more passionately than any of us.
He really does.
That’s why he called you an idiot.
—Neil Gaiman
Copyright © Neil Gaiman 2007. Originally published in FantasyCon 2007 Souvenir Book edited by Peter Coleborn. All rights reserved.
October 2007
by Christopher Fowler
Working in SF, fantasy and horror sometimes feels like living in a ghetto.
We end up apologising for where we live. When something originates on our turf it is never considered mainstream, and if it becomes popular its roots are ignored. Yet, as I pen this, seven of the top ten Hollywood movies fall into those three categories.
This paradox goes some way toward explaining that although FantasyCon’s 2007 guest Stephen Jones is a publishing legend, he has never become a common household name. Instead of apologising for his passion and turning his back on it whenever his books prove popular (and popular they most certainly are) Steve seizes the moment to remind the world exactly where his roots lie. It takes guts to do that, and forges as many enemies as friends.
Steve (2007)
Photo (c) Peter Coleborn
If you want to know about the phenomenal number of books Steve has created or the awards he has been given, you can find out about them easily enough. I’d rather recall some personal experiences.
The first time I met Steve, at my very first BFS convention, I thought someone must have ordered a mini-cab. He called across the room and acted as if he’d known me for years, like cabbies do.
Up until then, everyone I had talked to in the world of SF, fantasy and horror had been very non-committal, apologetic and guarded in their opinions. Steve was the opposite. I met him at the convention because it’s hard not to; he’s always there and you can always hear him. He has an edge of metal in his voice and a ball of fire in his belly, and he will argue with you until your tongue dries up and your eyes fall out. We had our first argument within minutes of meeting, about Stephen King.
At last, I thought, someone who is not simply prepared to nod along and be nice. What is the point of attending the BFS if everyone does that? But Steve didn’t do it merely to be argumentative. He’s forgotten more than I could ever know, and he doesn’t forget anything. If you pick a literary fight with him, and sometimes it’s hard not to, you’d better know what the hell you’re talking about, because he will always know the author under discussion (probably personally), will have read all of his work and will have formed a number of distinct opinions. That day, he wiped the floor with me. I hadn’t felt this bad since I’d stayed in a Bristol hotel with Jewish friends and had accidentally wandered into a Nazi fancy dress party.
So after the first meeting, my opinion of Steve was; friendly, argumentative and informed, prepared to take a contrary position if it furthers thought on the subject. Not nice, which is a good thing.
The second time I met Steve, I decided he had anger management issues.
At this meeting, a BFS night in the kind of “atmospheric” ie. scuzzy and completely charmless pub the BFS favours, Steve railed against someone whom I quite liked. He told me, in no particular order, that this writer was dim, talentless, a liar, a thief and a fraud. He also told the writer exactly what he thought. After swallowing my shock, I discovered that Steve was right, and had voiced feelings that no-one else had been prepared to articulate in order to protect his authors.
But he also praised a writer neither I, nor anyone else in the room, had ever heard of, and promised to send me his book. I imagined he talked to Harlan Ellison and Ray Bradbury the same way he talked to me (possibly a tad less rudely). Even better, he always had books coming out of his pockets or in a crumpled plastic Sainsbury’s bag. I’ve never seen him without a book on him – you can trust someone like that.
By the time of our third meeting, in another glamorous BFS pub (imagine warm beer being served in a derelict Post Office) I had heard what other people thought of Steve. A tiny handful regarded him with inarticulate rage. Some thought of him as a force of nature, like a bad storm. And many quietly considered him the last of the genius mavericks. I watched him hurling insults, buying drinks, shouting down detractors, encouraging debate – and carefully listening. (I later found out he remembered everything and everyone). He had no sense of hierarchy or deference, could be harsh about the nervous new kids who were anxious to see themselves in print, and also very encouraging, if they were prepared to listen back. That seemed to strike the right balance – you don’t get better if you don’t know what’s wrong.
At our fourth meeting, stuck to the bar in what appeared to be an abandoned inoculation centre but was in fact another BFS pub, Steve accepted a story from me, and I finally found myself in an anthology so balanced and intelligently planned that it could be read from cover to cover (this is a rarity). His editing skills were obvious; he was clearly acting as a magnet, drawing out fresh talent, but also pushing more experienced writers who were growing too comfortable.
At a meeting for lovers of vampire fiction, Steve picked a spectacular fight with a female reader in a fraught Q&A. She had fallen back on a classic American Republican line of defence; “We won’t buy you if you don’t say what we want to hear”. Steve was right to question her lazy assumptions, but even so I found myself arguing back. Everyone in the room started taking sides. For a while it seemed that no matter who won, we were going to get our heads kicked in. Steve clearly enjoyed the row, and afterwards we drank together while the injured party glared ineffectually at us. I began to think of him as someone who was prepared to thrash a still pond with a stick, stirring everything up until some brightly coloured fish came to the surface. I had certainly never met anyone like him.
The Dracula Society Debacle: Steve and Chris (top); Tina Rath, Sydney J.
Bounds, Brian Stableford and Kim Newman (front row).
Photo (c) Mandy Slater
Whenever we met after that he would first of all attract my attention by the endearing habit of shouting “Oi, Fowler!”, then insult me or blame me for some minor transgression I had committed. With my film background I was used to dealing with pretentious, arrogant, self-appointed “creatives” who were often nothing of the kind. Steve was completely the opposite; behind the jokey rant and patter of pub conversation, he was turning wheels and continuing with the creation of a distinctive genre talent-base – mixing business and art to the benefit of both.
It’s a testament to what he has created that you can sense his hand hovering over so much brilliant writing. I quickly learned to recognise his own house style, and could see he was forcing us to be better than we could ever have been without him.
I had worked with a film company called Palace Pictures who wanted to make popular intelligent films, and made Angela Carter’s The Company of Wolves – an art film if ever there was one – a hit by getting it into the 2,000-seat Odeon Leicester Square. By creating a supply, they actually created demand. That’s what Steve does. If he wasn’t around, many of us would have found a smaller audience. Without him many lines of supply would simply not exist, the demand would not be encouraged, and the art of storytelling would suffer immeasurably.
Steve also acts as a bridge; between publishers and the unpublished, between writing of the past and ideas of the future, between pre-war pulp and post-war modernism, between mainstream and experimentation, between writer and reader. This last point is probably the most important. Anthony Gormley says there are three elements in successful art, the sculpture, the space and the public. Steve never forgets that it is not enough to write; you must find and attract the reader – which is why his books are so popular.
So while the self-centred “creatives” stay in their invisible coteries congratulating each other and just talking about it – Steve remains the
genuine article, out there in the real world, working at the source. I
imagine it’s often a thankless task, but this year it’s our chance to turn
our debt to him into an honour and a big fat rousing thank you.
—Christopher Fowler
Copyright © Christopher Fowler 2007. Originally published in FantasyCon 2007 Souvenir Book edited by Peter Coleborn. All rights reserved.
WHAT PRICE INTEGRITY?
by Stephen Jones
As some attendees of The World Horror Convention may know, a few years ago
I was ripped off by a British small press publisher for several thousand
pounds. This particular individual decided to slightly change the name
of his Limited publishing company which – according to the literary agents,
lawyers and small claims courts I spoke with – effectively meant that under
British company law he could simply ignore any contracts he entered into
with authors and editors under the previous company’s name.
As a consequence
of this minor modification, he simply did not pay the advance due on
an anthology of mine he had already published and ceased supplying
royalty statements on all the other titles issued by the imprint (even
though these volumes were still being openly distributed on both sides
of the Atlantic through dealers and genre bookstores). My attempts
to get any kind of recompense through Companies House and the county
court not only failed, but I ended up having to pay his costs – despite
the fact that he owed me money! So much for the British legal system.
However, because I was the editor, I decided to honor the contracts with the
various authors who had contributed to the anthology and pay their fees out
of my own pocket. Just because I had been duped, I did not see why the writers
should suffer along with me. As it turned out, the individual concerned thereafter
quickly left the country (no doubt before his other creditors caught up with
him) and, to add insult to injury, he sold off most of his stock of books –
including the titles he had never paid me for – to a British book dealer at
a bargain price. To be fair, that dealer (an old friend) has attempted to make
some reparation to me – despite the fact that he has absolutely no legal obligation
to do so.
The whole sorry affair got me thinking. Each year I write an “opinion piece”
at the end of my annual survey in The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror looking
at the state of the genre. Over the past few years, I had noticed that problems
with publishers had been increasing as new technologies were steadily introduced.
It seemed like as good a time as any to give a warning to new and upcoming
writers as well as making a plea to some editors and imprints for more “Integrity
in Publishing”.
Consequently, I wrote a personal analysis and, as usual, sent it off to my
publisher when I delivered the rest of the book. Around the same time, I became
aware of various controversies on the Internet and in magazines surrounding
such small press publishers as Imaginary Worlds and Chaosium. Suddenly my “editorial”
was now even more relevant than when I had originally written it. I felt proud
that this year’s book would once again be addressing a genuine concern in the
horror publishing field. But my feeling of elation did not last for long.
Two months later, I received a letter from my editor stating that they were
“reluctant” to set the pages of my editorial comments “in their current form”.
As this had never happened before – and we had run opinion pieces in previous
volumes about the threat of electronic publishing, the merit of so-called “Extreme
Horror”, the use of block voting in awards and other potentially controversial
topics without any comment – I have to admit that I was a bit taken aback.
I immediately e-mailed my editor and asked her to tell me specifically what
she objected to in the text. I would then take a look and see what I could
do to address her concerns.
I never received a reply. However, I next heard from my agent, who informed
me that my editor was “not in a mood to be mollified”. Things had apparently
got out of control without me realizing it! As a result, I ended up exchanging
faxes and phone calls with my agent to see what I could do to save the situation.
I was told that my editor had “taken a far deeper upset about the material”
than we had originally thought, and that I “may need to rebuild” my relationship
with her. This was all the more baffling to me as I had still not been told
what was objectionable about the piece.
In the end I was given no choice. My publisher would cut the offending pages
entirely. We could either have a rather abrupt ending to the Introduction or
else I would have to come up with a new closing. So much for my plea for “integrity”.
Reluctantly, I chose to write a new “end thought” for the book.
Yet once again this got me thinking. Obviously there was something in my piece
which had struck a nerve with my publisher. And for any writer, that is exactly
the kind of response you are always hoping to achieve with this kind of critical
essay. Perhaps I had something worthwhile to say after all . . .?
So I’ve decided to let you be the judge. Here is my original opinion piece,
updated but otherwise much the same as it was submitted with the twelfth volume
of The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Whether you agree with my opinions
or not, I hope that it will at least provoke some kind of a reaction; and if
just one up-and-coming author can benefit from my experience, or if an editor
or publisher out there stops and thinks a little more about how they treat
their writers, then at least I will feel that I have achieved something.
Integrity.
It is not a word you hear much these days. Yet it has always been the
cornerstone to how I have tried to live my life and my career.
Regrettably, I learned very early on that there were plenty of other people
out there – even in the science fiction, fantasy and horror genres – who had
far fewer scruples than I did.
No sooner had I started out in this field in the early 1970s than the editor
of a very attractive American small press magazine – nowadays known for his
annual showcase of fantasy artwork – not only refused to pay me (and others)
for the work of ours he had published, but would not even send us copies of
the magazine, thereby forcing us to purchase our own labor. Then there was
the well-known specialist dealer from America who enthusiastically took 100
copies of the first issue of a small press magazine I co-edited and never bothered
to pay for them, thereby jeopardizing the future of that fledgling title. Or
the book publisher who took out a number of advertisements in a film magazine
I published and then made no attempt to pay for them.
It would be nice to think that this kind of selfish and avaricious behavior
was confined to the past, but unfortunately that is not so. Only a few years
ago I discovered through friends that a publisher I had worked for, and who
I liked and respected a great deal, was attempting to sell off all the working
notes and correspondence to a very successful book I had edited for them –
including the private addresses of a number of prestigious contributors – without
any recourse to me. When I objected to their actions (mostly on behalf of those
contributors), they simply did not understand why I was upset and it took the
threat of legal action to make them return the material that was rightfully
mine in the first place.
More recently, another small press imprint, which I helped to set up and edited
a number of titles for, published an anthology of mine and then refused to
pay the advance agreed in the contract. Even though I had already paid the
contributors out of my own pocket – their agreements were with me, after all
– this publisher changed the name of his company without revealing his debts,
ripped off a few more people and then left the country owing unpaid royalties
and unreturned artwork rather than face up to his legal and moral responsibilities.
And, before he fled, he sold off his stock at a knock-down price to a book
dealer rather than offer it to the authors he had cheated.
And it is not just small presses which behave in this manner. Some years ago
myself and another writer had to use the weight of The Society of Authors and
the threat of a law suit to regain the rights to a book which a publisher refused
to pay royalties on. More recently, another publisher I have done a great deal
of work for attempted to arbitrarily (but without malice) insert a clause into
their contract that would give them all electronic rights to the fiction without
ever having to pay for them, while another insisted that we simply steal the
titles of other authors’ books for a number of volumes in their reprint series.
Then there are the foreign publishers who print the books but refuse to send
you any copies, the American book chain who reprint your work in their own
editions but fail to include them in the royalty statements, or even the British
publishers who will sell your work on to other imprints but never pay you a
penny for those editions. I admit that individually, some of these complaints
are rather minor, but taken together they add up to a depressing catalogue
of greed and incompetence that need never to have occurred in the first place.
I have been working in this field professionally for more than fifteen years
and I have a very good literary agent, yet I am still forced to fight against
every injustice and sleight. It not only costs me precious time and energy,
but often a great deal of money attempting to obtain these fundamental rights
for both myself and the writers who I work with.
Unfortunately, not all those writers are quite so honorable either. Early in
my editing career I was accused (unjustly, in my opinion) of not using enough
female authors in my anthologies. To redress this perceived imbalance, a few
years ago I came up with the concept of a vampire anthology written entirely
by women. After the book was completed, and while I was preparing the manuscript
for delivery, I received a submission from a new woman writer that I thought
was so exceptional – especially for a first-time story – that I decided to
squeeze it into the book at the last minute and pay the advance out of my small
editorial fee (something I’ve done far too many times in the past).
As I pride myself as an editor who tries to encourage new talent in the genre,
I subsequently reprinted the same story in my annual Best New Horror anthology,
as did Ellen Datlow in her own “Year’s Best” volume.
Only last year I learned that this new female writer was, in fact, a man. To
make matters worse, he was a close friend of mine whose work I had published
on many occasions. He had set up a complicated smokescreen of fake addresses
and contact details simply so that he could deceive his way into the book.
When I discovered this fakery, I was extremely upset. By his greedy and thoughtless
actions he had irreparably compromised my anthology. I felt betrayed. He could
not understand why I was so angry. I asked for a series of undertakings that
would go some way towards reparation. He became belligerent and, despite repeated
promises, has never supplied any of the documentation I requested. As a result,
it will be a long time before I ever work with this individual again.
Amongst those authors who will also not be seeing their stories in my books
anytime soon is a well-known writer of “extreme horror” who accused me of inadvertently
revealing his whereabouts to a fundamentalist church that was stalking him.
As a result, he would leave obscene messages on my answering machine, despite
my apology and the promise to change the offending story notes in subsequent
printings (which I did). Then there was the writer who phoned me up and told
me I was a crook for not paying the advance on a story of his I had used in
an anthology.
Another of the things I pride myself on is the fact that I pay my advances
on time, or even earlier when I can or if financial hardship is involved. In
this case the contract stipulated that payment was upon publication. The author
had received his contributor’s copies a couple of months before the official
publication date and had swiftly come to the conclusion that I was trying to
rip him off. A simple inquiry would have sufficed, rather than the vitriol
that poured down the transatlantic phone line before I hung up on him.
Integrity. No, not a word you hear much in this business. But despite the preceding
list of abuses and errors, by far the majority of people my occupation brings
me into contact with are honest and reliable. It would be difficult for me
to continue if they were not. And I hope that the fact that I work repeatedly
with many of the same authors – and many of the biggest names in the genre
– means that they at least trust me enough to keep coming back.
It is hard enough to produce an anthology: to read all the submissions and
edit the stories; to draw up the contracts and make sure everyone is paid as
quickly as possible; to fight over the quality of the covers or the often ludicrous
changes made to the text; to send out copies of each and every edition to contributors,
and to ensure that they receive a fair royalty so that everyone can feel that
they are sharing in the success of a project.
It seems to me that, all too often, these basic considerations are being ignored
or forgotten in the rush by some unscrupulous publishers and editors who are
more interested in getting the product out there instead of caring about how
that product – and the people who created it – are treated. And with the growing
number of new formats and outlets for fiction these days, the problem will
surely only grow worse.
The fantasy genre is a relatively small field. Everyone knows everybody else,
either through correspondence or direct contact. And if someone is intent on
making money or personal gain at the expense of others, then that information
travels fast.
So before anyone thinks about setting up their own publishing imprint or editing
their own anthology, all I ask is that they first reflect upon whether their
business practices and aspirations are totally ethical. That they make sure
that before undertaking any new project, they have the financial backing and
the infrastructure in place to deliver exactly what they promise.
In short, that they treat the people they work with in exactly the same manner
that they would wish to be treated themselves. If everybody did that, then
this genre – and life in general – would only be all the better for it.
Copyright © Stephen Jones 2004. Originally published in World Horror
Convention 2004 souvenir book. All rights reserved.