
This anthology contains: Blue Rose by Peter Straub The Monster by Joe Haldeman Lacunae by Karl Edward Wagner Pale Trembling Youth by W.H. Pugmire and Jessica Amanda Salmonson Muzak for Torso Murders by Marc Laidlaw Goodbye, Dark Love by Roberta Lannes Out There by Charles L. Grant Little Cruelties by Steve Rasnic Tem The Man with the Hoe by George Clayton Johnson They're Coming for You by Les Daniels Vampire by Richard Christian Matheson Lapses by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro The Final Stone by William F. Nolan Irrelativity by Nicholas Royle The Hands by Ramsey Campbell The Bell by Ray Russell Lost Souls by Clive Barker Reaper by Robert Bloch The Transfer by Edward Bryant Pain by Whitley Strieber
Authors

Wilum lived in Seattle, WA and wrote Cthulhu Mythos fiction full-time. He was the self-proclaimed "Queen of Eldritch Horror," and had been writing Lovecraftian weird fiction since the early 1970s. Writing weird fiction was his life, but congestive heart failure slowed his writing. He considered his finest books to be Some Unknown Gulf of Night (Arcane Wisdom Press 2011), Uncommon Places (Hippocampus Press 2012) and The Tangled Muse (Centipede Press 2011).


American writer best known for his novels The Wolfen,The Hunger and Warday and for Communion, a non-fiction description of his experiences with apparent alien contact. He has recently made significant advances in understanding this phenomenon, and has published his new discoveries in Solving the Communion Enigma. Strieber also co-authored The Coming Global Superstorm with Art Bell, which inspired the blockbuster film about sudden climate change, The Day After Tomorrow. His book The Afterlife Revolution written with his deceased wife Anne, is a record of what is considered to be one of the most powerful instances of afterlife communication ever recorded.



A professional writer for more than forty years, Yarbro has sold over eighty books, more than seventy works of short fiction, and more than three dozen essays, introductions, and reviews. She also composes serious music. Her first professional writing - in 1961-1962 - was as a playwright for a now long-defunct children's theater company. By the mid-60s she had switched to writing stories and hasn't stopped yet. After leaving college in 1963 and until she became a full-time writer in 1970, she worked as a demographic cartographer, and still often drafts maps for her books, and occasionally for the books of other writers. She has a large reference library with books on a wide range of subjects, everything from food and fashion to weapons and trade routes to religion and law. She is constantly adding to it as part of her on-going fascination with history and culture; she reads incessantly, searching for interesting people and places that might provide fodder for stories. In 1997 the Transylvanian Society of Dracula bestowed a literary knighthood on Yarbro, and in 2003 the World Horror Association presented her with a Grand Master award. In 2006 the International Horror Guild enrolled her among their Living Legends, the first woman to be so honored; the Horror Writers Association gave her a Life Achievement Award in 2009. In 2014 she won a Life Achievement Award from the World Fantasy Convention. A skeptical occultist for forty years, she has studied everything from alchemy to zoomancy, and in the late 1970s worked occasionally as a professional tarot card reader and palmist at the Magic Cellar in San Francisco. She has two domestic accomplishments: she is a good cook and an experienced seamstress. The rest is catch-as-catch-can. Divorced, she lives in the San Francisco Bay Area - with two cats: the irrepressible Butterscotch and Crumpet, the Gang of Two. When not busy writing, she enjoys the symphony or opera. Her Saint-Germain series is now the longest vampire series ever. The books range widely over time and place, and were not published in historical order. They are numbered in published order. Known pseudonyms include Vanessa Pryor, Quinn Fawcett, T.C.F. Hopkins, Trystam Kith, Camille Gabor.
Roberta Lannes (born December 1948) is an American writer of literary, mystery and horror fiction as well as articles, essays, reviews and poetry. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roberta...

Clive Barker was born in Liverpool, England, the son of Joan Rubie (née Revill), a painter and school welfare officer, and Leonard Barker, a personnel director for an industrial relations firm. Educated at Dovedale Primary School and Quarry Bank High School, he studied English and Philosophy at Liverpool University and his picture now hangs in the entrance hallway to the Philosophy Department. It was in Liverpool in 1975 that he met his first partner, John Gregson, with whom he lived until 1986. Barker's second long-term relationship, with photographer David Armstrong, ended in 2009. In 2003, Clive Barker received The Davidson/Valentini Award at the 15th GLAAD Media Awards. This award is presented "to an openly lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender individual who has made a significant difference in promoting equal rights for any of those communities". While Barker is critical of organized religion, he has stated that he is a believer in both God and the afterlife, and that the Bible influences his work. Fans have noticed of late that Barker's voice has become gravelly and coarse. He says in a December 2008 online interview that this is due to polyps in his throat which were so severe that a doctor told him he was taking in ten percent of the air he was supposed to have been getting. He has had two surgeries to remove them and believes his resultant voice is an improvement over how it was prior to the surgeries. He said he did not have cancer and has given up cigars. On August 27, 2010, Barker underwent surgery yet again to remove new polyp growths from his throat. In early February 2012 Barker fell into a coma after a dentist visit led to blood poisoning. Barker remained in a coma for eleven days but eventually came out of it. Fans were notified on his Twitter page about some of the experience and that Barker was recovering after the ordeal, but left with many strange visions. Barker is one of the leading authors of contemporary horror/fantasy, writing in the horror genre early in his career, mostly in the form of short stories (collected in Books of Blood 1 – 6), and the Faustian novel The Damnation Game (1985). Later he moved towards modern-day fantasy and urban fantasy with horror elements in Weaveworld (1987), The Great and Secret Show (1989), the world-spanning Imajica (1991) and Sacrament (1996), bringing in the deeper, richer concepts of reality, the nature of the mind and dreams, and the power of words and memories. Barker has a keen interest in movie production, although his films have received mixed receptions. He wrote the screenplays for Underworld (aka Transmutations – 1985) and Rawhead Rex (1986), both directed by George Pavlou. Displeased by how his material was handled, he moved to directing with Hellraiser (1987), based on his novella The Hellbound Heart. His early movies, the shorts The Forbidden and Salome, are experimental art movies with surrealist elements, which have been re-released together to moderate critical acclaim. After his film Nightbreed (Cabal), which was widely considered to be a flop, Barker returned to write and direct Lord of Illusions. Barker was an executive producer of the film Gods and Monsters, which received major critical acclaim. Barker is a prolific visual artist working in a variety of media, often illustrating his own books. His paintings have been seen first on the covers of his official fan club magazine, Dread, published by Fantaco in the early Nineties, as well on the covers of the collections of his plays, Incarnations (1995) and Forms of Heaven (1996), as well as on the second printing of the original UK publications of his Books of Blood series. A longtime comics fan, Barker achieved his dream of publishing his own superhero books when Marvel Comics launched the Razorline imprint in 1993. Based on detailed premises, titles and lead characters he created specifically for this, the four interrelated titles—set outside the Marvel universe—were Ectokid,

Charles Lewis Grant was a novelist and short story writer specializing in what he called "dark fantasy" and "quiet horror." He also wrote under the pseudonyms of Geoffrey Marsh, Lionel Fenn, Simon Lake, Felicia Andrews, and Deborah Lewis. Grant won a World Fantasy Award for his novella collection Nightmare Seasons, a Nebula Award in 1976 for his short story "A Crowd of Shadows", and another Nebula Award in 1978 for his novella "A Glow of Candles, a Unicorn's Eye," the latter telling of an actor's dilemma in a post-literate future. Grant also edited the award winning Shadows anthology, running eleven volumes from 1978-1991. Contributors include Stephen King, Ramsey Campbell, R.A. Lafferty, Avram Davidson, and Steve Rasnic and Melanie Tem. Grant was a former Executive Secretary and Eastern Regional Director of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America and president of the Horror Writers Association.


William F. Nolan is best known as the co-author (with George Clayton Johnson) of Logan's Run—a science fiction novel that went on to become a movie, a television series and is about to become a movie again—and as single author of its sequels. His short stories have been selected for scores of anthologies and textbooks and he is twice winner of the Edgar Allan Poe Special Award from the Mystery Writers of America. Nolan was born in 1928 in Kansas City Missouri. He attended the Kansas City Art Institute and worked as an artist for Hallmark Cards. He moved to California in the late 1940s and studied at San Diego State College. He began concentrating on writing rather than art and, in 1952, was introduced by fellow Missouri native (and established writer) Ray Bradbury to another young up-and-coming author, Charles Beaumont. Moving to the Los Angeles area in 1953, Nolan became along with Bradbury, Beaumont, and Richard Matheson part of the "inner core" of the soon-to-be highly influential "Southern California Group" of writers. By 1956 Nolan was a full-time writer. Since 1951 he has sold more than 1500 stories, articles, books, and other works. Although Nolan wrote roughly 2000 pieces, to include biographies, short stories, poetry, and novels, Logan’s Run retains its hold on the public consciousness as a political fable and dystopian warning. As Nolan has stated: “That I am known at all is still astonishing to me... " He passed away at the age of 93 due to complications from an infection.

Peter Straub was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the son of Gordon Anthony Straub and Elvena (Nilsestuen) Straub. Straub read voraciously from an early age, but his literary interests did not please his parents; his father hoped that he would grow up to be a professional athlete, while his mother wanted him to be a Lutheran minister. He attended Milwaukee Country Day School on a scholarship, and, during his time there, began writing. Straub earned an honors BA in English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1965, and an MA at Columbia University a year later. He briefly taught English at Milwaukee Country Day, then moved to Dublin, Ireland, in 1969 to work on a PhD, and to start writing professionally After mixed success with two attempts at literary mainstream novels in the mid-1970s ("Marriages" and "Under Venus"), Straub dabbled in the supernatural for the first time with "Julia" (1975). He then wrote "If You Could See Me Now" (1977), and came to widespread public attention with his fifth novel, "Ghost Story" (1979), which was a critical success and was later adapted into a 1981 film. Several horror novels followed, with growing success, including "The Talisman" and "Black House", two fantasy-horror collaborations with Straub's long-time friend and fellow author Stephen King. In addition to his many novels, he published several works of poetry during his lifetime. In 1966, Straub married Susan Bitker.They had two children; their daughter, Emma Straub, is also a novelist. The family lived in Dublin from 1969 to 1972, in London from 1972 to 1979, and in the New York City area from 1979 onwards. Straub died on September 4, 2022, aged 79, from complications of a broken hip. At the time of his death, he and his wife lived in Brooklyn (New York City).
Nicholas Royle is the author of seven novels, two novellas and a short story collection. He has edited sixteen anthologies of short stories. A senior lecturer in creative writing at the Manchester Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University, he also runs Nightjar Press, publishing original short stories as signed, limited-edition chapbooks. He works as a fiction reviewer for The Independent and the Warwick Review and as an editor for Salt Publishing. From : http://www.nicholasroyle.com/biograph...