Bagged a rather cool book yesterday -Clive Barker's A-Z of Horror (compiled by Stephen Jones)- As per an alphabetical index (A for American Psycho, B for Beelzebub...) it randomly picks on various horror personalities and sub-genres and provides artcicles on each topic with decent amounts of interesting anecdotes and lots of quotes. Am a third into the book now and generally like it a good deal...some really super stuff like F for Flesh which deals with the work of H.R. Giger and gives you a lot of insight into his stuff from the man himself and how much work he puts into his movie projects only to be often disappointed with how it is presented in the final result.
Barker's involvement in this book apart from selecting the topics appears restricted to writing the foreword and providing a few quotes fo each article...which is good because the foreword kinda sucks and his opinion bytes in most of the articles so far are generally humdrum. He also does illustrations at the start each topic, sometimes quite nice. Stephen Jones does a smashing good job of putting together the information into well-written pieces, kudos to him. This book is not as spectacularly insightful on the whole as Stephen King's Danse Macabre but is quite lovely on its own.
Also it's a full-glossy paperback with LOTS of stills of movies, posters, illustrations...and for the perv's out there, pics of Ed Gein's house and such like
