Black Gate

I’m still making my way through a collection of vintage paperbacks I bought a few weeks ago, which included several delightful finds, including Bruce Fergusson’s The Mace of Souls and John Deakins’s Barrow. But it was neither of those that caused me to pull the trigger on the online auction. It was the 1989 Ballantine paperback of Robert R. McCammon’s fifth novel, Mystery Walk.

I read McCammon’s 1991 novel Boy’s Life (which Bob Byrne reviewed for us here), and I loved it. It won both the Bram Stoker and World Fantasy Awards, and deservedly so. But I never went back and read any of McCammon’s earlier horror novels, including The Night Boat (1980), They Thirst (1981), or the Stoker and World Fantasy Award nominee Swan Song (1987). Or Mystery Walk, the first of McCammon’s novels to be published in hardcover.

Yeah, I know. That was an oversight. I’m trying to rectify it now. And in particular, I’m enjoying tracking down the 80s paperback editions, with their delightfully macabre covers. They’re not expensive, or particularly hard to find, and they also pack a fine dose of 80s nostalgia, especially for anyone who used to hang around the horror section at the supermarket rack.

Mystery Walk was published by Ballantine Books in October 1989. It is 419 pages, priced at $4.95. The cover is by J. Thiessen. It has been reprinted multiple times, most recently in trade paperback by Pocket Books in 2010. It is still in print.

Howard Andrew Jones was the first to pique my interest in M. John Harrison, in his very first blog post for Black Gate back in 2007. Matthew David Surridge significantly heightened that interest with his thoughtful 2013 post To Unbuild the Unreal City: M. John Harrison’s Viriconium:

Viriconium is a city of the distant future, surrounded by the polluted wastelands left by previous civilisations. It is fundamentally decadent, filled with killers, artists, street gangs, and peculiar customs. It is divided into different neighbourhoods along class lines. And it is frequently under threat, though what precise consequences these threats can bring is often nebulous. The first book, The Pastel City, is clearly the most conventional. At first blush, it strongly resembles the pulp work of Michael Moorcock; the better points of the Hawkmoon books, for example, though Pastel City is much better written.

But it was Fletcher Vredenburgh, with this 4-part examination of the Viriconium books, that really sent me chasing after Harrison’s novels.

…

Read More Read More