With the second story, “Old Friends,” Grant evoked the idea of a darkness so ancient it has forgotten its identity–and I was hooked. I chose his 1981 Arkham House collection, Tales from the Nightside. When Grant died in 2006, though, I decided to take another look at his fiction. I read a few of his stories here and there, but while I had several of his novels in my possession, I never read any of them. When I was a kid, I didn’t care much for it: in comparison to Stephen King’s colloquial abundance, or Peter Straub’s studied mannerism, Grant’s work struck me as thin. It’s his fiction, though, that I want to address here, briefly. Of course, he was also well-known for his editing work on the Shadows series of anthologies. Grant was a writer I was very much aware of as a kid: he was part of that group of horror writers who came to prominence in the early-to-mid-seventies and was at the forefront of the horror boom in the eighties. At some point, I hope to write a longish essay about Charles L.
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