The Worst Week in Horror Fiction History

We've had bad times before. Awful, shocking news, such as when Richard Laymon died suddenly. We lost others like Charles L. Grant and Ray Bradbury in recent memory. The last two were not entirely unexpected. We saw the fall of Borders and the slow, ugly decline of Leisure Books. All of these things hurt us.

However, we recently had three losses in the field. Big names, influential individuals. Irreplaceable talents. All three of them were reasonably young.

Bam, bam, bam; like the cliche goes, bad news comes in threes. We learned that David B. Silva, of The Horror Show and Hellnotes fame, had died. I talked about him recently, so I will move on.

The second gut-punch was the death of James Herbert.

I had never met Mr. Herbert. He seemed to me to be a private sort of man. I knew his work though. Well. In the early months that I was a horror reader, I discovered books by James Herbert. The first I read was The Rats.

I cannot imagine reading The Rats in a more suitable place. I was living on a boat at the time. I would rise early, before dawn sometimes, and I would occasionally see cat-sized wharf rats scurrying about. The Rats is an effective horror story, and as I tried to sleep those nights I would imagine rat claws scraping aboard the boat.

Herbert's fiction was pulpish, especially early on in his career. Yet it was always well crafted, and it delivered the goods that horror readers craved. Many consider Richard Laymon to be the father of hardhitting, graphic horror, but Herbert was there first.

James Herbert got the reputation of being sort of a "Literary Nasty" writer. That's not so hard to believe when one considers The Fog, The Survivor, and of course his Rats trilogy. But his work showed great growth and maturity as the years went on. He dabbled in dark fantasy with the excellent novel, The Magic Cottage. His novel, Fluke, was damned near family-friendly, and the movie adapted from it definitely was. Much of his later fiction dealt with ghosts and there was more atmosphere and suspense than grue and gore.

As the quotes always said, James Herbert sold better than Stephen King in his native England. His work influenced a generation of genre writers, and a legion of readers had a shuddery blast while reading him.


We still hadn't recovered from those two blows when death claimed another genre legend: Rick Hautala.

Whenever I thought of Rick, for some reason that hologram from the cover of Night Stone came to mind. Night Stone was Rick's third book, and it was the one that put him on the map for a lot of readers. I hate to say it, but that silly hologram had something to do with it. It certainly caught my eye when it came out. But that hologram would have meant nothing and would be quickly forgotten had the writing in the novel not been first rate.

Rick's fiction was usually set in Maine and it detailed the terrain there. His stories always had such a strong sense of place in them. To me, he was as much a folklorist as he was a novelist. In that way his style and approach reminded me of Manly Wade Wellman. If you don't know who Wellman is, or haven't read him, shame on you. Especially if you call yourself a horror fiction fan.

Rick was prolific and like any good writer, his work improved as he honed his craft. I never had a bad time with one of his books. I've heard him called "The other horror writer from Maine", but he was in no way an imitator of King. Rick Hautala had his own unique voice.

I feel deprived hearing all of the stories from people who knew and cherished Rick Hautala. I met him once, at a Horrorfind convention. It was a brief meeting, but he was kind and clearly delighted to stop and talk to a fan. Which I definitely was, and I will always remain one.

I hope Death is satisfied and takes a long vacation. I'm still numb from all.