Too Much Horror Fiction: peter haining

Saturday, April 2, 2022

Where Nightmares Are: Peter Haining Born This Date, 1940

Anthologist and horror historian Peter Haining was born on April 2, 1940, in Middlesex, England. His books number into the hundreds, and his anthologies boast some of the most bizarre art of the late Sixties and Seventies, often by recognizable genre artists such as Bruce Pennington and John Holmes. Favoring "the subtle and the classic over the shocking and the graphic," he collected tales not often found in other horror anthologies and sought to broaden the scope and appeal supernatural fiction. Other books were about fictional British icons like Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, Dr. Who, and James Bond. Prolific almost beyond measure, he produced works into the 21st century, and died unexpectedly of a heart attack in 2007. See more covers here.

Tuesday, April 2, 2013

Peter Haining Born Today, 1940

British author and editor Peter Haining, who died in 2007, put together dozens of anthologies that collected classic and obscure horror, occult, Gothic, and science fiction over several decades, as well as nonfiction works on our beloved genre. Virtually all of these books were published, for whatever reason, only in the UK. Some - if not most - of the US paperbacks:

One of Haining's nonfiction titles that made it 'cross the pond is Terror! A History of Horror Illustrations from the Pulp Magazines. Fortunately I found a copy when I was in high school. It really and truly fed my hungering heart of horror, and it's been an invaluable resource on my bookshelves for decades now! Which is just the way he would've wanted it, I'm sure.

Read more about Peter here, and see lots more of his UK covers here.