However one payday saw me stumbling out of there clutching a bag containing two collections of short stories – Dennis Etchison’s The Dark Country and Charles L Grant’s Tales From the Nightside. A work colleague, Gary Vernon, introduced me to a small shop on The Wicker called The Sheffield Space Centre that stocked so much desirable merchandise as to reduce me to a permanent state of poverty. So I continued searching.Īnd then in the autumn of 1987 I started working in Sheffield – at that time one of the largest cities in the UK.

Remember, this was a time before the internet so the only place where second-hand books were sold locally was our church jumble-sale (but those I had seen for sale consisted mostly of Mills & Boon titles, Catherine Cookson, and the occasional Agatha Christie). I wanted to find other books by these writers, but most of them seemed out of print. These anthologies all featured stories by writers like Robert Arthur, Daphne du Maurier, Richard Matheson, Patricia Highsmith, Robert Bloch, Theodore Sturgeon, Roald Dahl and Ray Bradbury. Our local library stocked several of the Alfred Hitchcock anthologies that were published in the 1960s and 70s, bearing titles such as The Best of Fiends, Ghostly Gallery, Happiness is a Warm Corpse and Tales to Take Your Breath Away. If this was typical of most branches of WH Smith’s – certainly the only book retailer in any of our surrounding towns – then one might have been forgiven for thinking that horror was perhaps not as expansive as it once was earlier in the decade.

Over the years I collected them all, and read them diligently. Occasionally there would be titles by John Saul. I was always drawn to the HORROR section (for such a thing existed back then, believe it or not) and the books that comprised it were largely written by Stephen King or James Herbert or Guy N Smith or Shaun Hutson or Graham Masterton. Our nearest WH Smith’s was in Worksop, a half-hour bus-journey away which we took every week. Growing up, as I did, in a mining village in northern England, bookshops were a little hard to come by.

Shadows 2 by Charles L. Grant