Spook City [hc]

Liverpool has long been known as a city of dreamers. But not all those dreams are as beautiful as a Beatles melody or as funny as a Paul O'Grady punchline. Here are the darker dreams of the Merseyside imagination, the macabre imaginings of Liverpool's Princes of Nightmare. Along with an introduction by native son Doug Bradley - world-famous as Pinhead, the iconic demon of the Hellraiser movies - this book collects together the Liverpool-based fictions of Ramsey Campbell, Clive Barker, and Peter Atkins, three of horror literature's most celebrated talents.

From Publishers Weekly

In this anthology featuring Liverpudlian horror writers' stories of their hometown, first-time editor Mackenzie attempts to draw deeply from a shallow well, with uneven and frustrating results. Clive Barker's three stories include The Forbidden, about the unnerving relationship between residents of a tenement housing project and a local urban legend. Ramsey Campbell contributes five stories and one autobiographical essay; perhaps the best is The Man in the Underpass, which depicts the heart-wrenching results of a neglected child's sexual curiosity. Peter Atkins's four stories, however, lack the ambition and nuance of the rest. Liverpool is rarely used as more than a backdrop, and does not serve to unify the collection. Most of these stories are reprints that PS readers will have seen elsewhere, leaving this unsatisfying effort without a market. (Sept.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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