![]() ![]() ![]() It’s been likened to an English version of It, and Morris admitted in interviews a moment of despair when King’s blockbuster came out while he was writing Toady. Toady – a genre book by a first-time novelist – hit number 7 in the national bestseller list. As he shot into the pantheon of British horror authors, he was five years younger than Shaun Hutson, a full decade younger than Clive Barker, and fifteen or more younger than James Herbert and Ramsey Campbell. Some of this was because of Morris’s youth (for some reason my friends and I thought he was a teenager, but he was 26). Today, Mark Morris is a versatile writer with a back catalogue that shows he’s confident writing across genre boundaries, and indeed from the start his work, though unmistakably horror, always contained a seasoning of dark fantasy. ![]() Why this period? As I wrote here, it’s simply the time when I was into horror when I was growing up, and it coincided with both the peak, and the start of the end, of the 80s “horror boom”. Elsewhere in the Gyre I’ve looked extensively at the works in print and celluloid of Clive Barker. Will Errickson’s Too Much Horror Fiction is the Daddy, and of course Grady Hendrix’s essential Paperbacks from Hell is your print companion. There are, I know, loads of excellent websites covering this area. Welcome to the first in an occasional series of retrospective looks at 80s & early 90s horror. ![]()
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