British Invasion
edited by Christopher Golden, Tim Lebbon, and James A. Moore
Featuring an Introduction by Stephen Volk and an Afterword by Kim Newman.
They've invaded before, sending their best and brightest to transform popular music for all time. This time, they're leaving the music behind and focusing on words. The British Invasion has begun again, in a collection of twenty-one unforgettable stories of horror and the dark fantastic.
From the birthplace of horror fiction, the land where writers first dreamed up the icons that shaped the field we know today -- Frankenstein's monster, Count Dracula, the vile Mr. Hyde and more. You think you know desperation? Discover a literary tradition born from centuries of violence, pain, and suffering, distilled through the veneer of civility, and twisted by the reign of tyrants and kings.
You think you know fear?
From creeping dread to hideous humor, from quiet terror to brutal horror, from mad speculation to unspeakable truth, the twenty one tales here represent the best that the U.K. has to offer. The rising stars and the masters of British horror have joined together.
The British Invasion has begun.
The British may not have invented the modern horror story, as the editors of this all-original anthology claim, but the 21 stories they've selected prove that contemporary U.K. writers are infiltrating American publishing markets with some of the most provocative horror fiction written today. Refreshingly devoid of genre clichés, these subtle tales offer ambiguously supernatural horrors from the dramas and traumas of everyday life. Nicholas Royle, in The Goldfinch, gives chronic illness an unsettling spin by objectifying a man's cancer as a relentless shadowy stalker. Mark Morris's Puppies for Sale presents a nuclear family's gradual implosion as a consequence of a malignant supernatural influence that may be a complete figment of the distraught father's mind. In Conrad Williams's Slitten Gorge, the disconnect between the unpolluted natural world and the protagonist's industrially despoiled environment achieves an aura of otherworldly horror. The book's title notwithstanding, there's nothing peculiarly British about these stories, but their authors are exceptionally articulate in the universal language of horror. (Mar.)
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Everyone older than 40 remembers the 1960s British Invasion of young bands that forever changed American rock ’n’ roll. But few besides horror buffs may be aware of a similar phenomenon that has been transformative for horror fiction since the days of Mary Shelley. In honor of this still very active literary influence, the editors of this compelling anthology solicited 21 original stories from some of the leading British horror authors. Particularly noteworthy contributors include Ramsey Campbell, Mark Chadbourn, Kealan Patrick Burke, and Peter Crowther. A hospitalized child trapped in a coma caused by an abusive father receives some unlikely assistance from an old woman with the power to infiltrate his bewildered mind. A recently deceased hangman entering the land of the dead confronts the evildoers he dispatched into the afterlife. Assigned to investigate missing children cases, a police officer encounters a bizarre sacrificial ritual in an abandoned English estate. Such inventive themes and chillingly suspenseful story lines are common on the front lines of this invasion whose “victims” have long actually welcomed it. --Carl Hays
