The Original Dr. Shade and Other Stories

by Kim Newman

Genres: Horror, Science Fiction, Collections, Fiction, Fantasy

351 pages, Paperback

First published May 2, 1994

About the author

Note: This author also writes under the pseudonym of Jack Yeovil.
An expert on horror and sci-fi cinema (his books of film criticism include Nightmare Movies and Millennium Movies), Kim Newman's novels draw promiscuously on the tropes of horror, sci-fi and fantasy. He is complexly and irreverently referential; the Dracula sequence--Anno Dracula, The Bloody Red Baron and Dracula,Cha Cha Cha--not only portrays an alternate world in which the Count conquers Victorian Britain for a while, is the mastermind behind Germany's air aces in World War One and survives into a jetset 1950s of paparazzi and La Dolce Vita, but does so with endless throwaway references that range from Kipling to James Bond, from Edgar Allen Poe to Patricia Highsmith.
In horror novels such as Bad Dreams and Jago, reality turns out to be endlessly subverted by the powerfully malign. His pseudonymous novels, as Jack Yeovil, play elegant games with genre cliche--perhaps the best of these is the sword-and-sorcery novel Drachenfels which takes the prescribed formulae of the games company to whose bible it was written and make them over entirely into a Kim Newman novel.
Life's Lottery, his most mainstream novel, consists of multiple choice fragments which enable readers to choose the hero's fate and take him into horror, crime and sf storylines or into mundane reality.

Reviews

[Anthony Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fifteen of Kim Newman's earliest stories dating from 1984 to 1992 when he was in the process of establishing a signature style combining classic storytelling craftsmanship with what would later become known as geek-culture. Standouts in this collection include:
'The Original Dr Shade' - a deceptively disturbing tale which blends a satirical take on newspaper comic strips with resurgent anti-Semitism in early 1990s Britain.
'D&D' - 'Nam era grunts are cast into a deadly serious war with hobbits in an RPG-esque subterranean world, think Full Metal Jacket meets Tolkien.
'The McCarthy Witch Hunt' - the reds-under-the-bed scare of the 1950s is reimagined as a literal hunt for real life witches, and one of those called to testify before the House Committee on Un-Christian Activities is named Samantha and has a decidedly twitchy nose.

This edition also benefits from author's notes on each story and an introduction by Neil Gaiman, who relates a pertinent anecdote on the inspiration for Fiddler's Green in The Sandman.

[MH · Rating 4 out of 5]

Newman writes in the afterword to one of these early stories that it "dates from a period before I got interested in plot. And character, come to that." That's unfortunately true for a lot of the late 80s, cyberpunk-adjacent stories in this collection, but when he spends time on plot and character these can be great - his dark "The McCarthy Witch Trials" works really well, the Sally Rhodes stories are a lot of fun, and the title story is an absolute world-beater, a genuinely upsetting piece that's sadly as timely in modern America as it was in Thatcher's Britain.

[Egghead · Rating 5 out of 5]

dark conspiracies!
aliens! ghosts! terrible jobs!
all in one fab tome!

[Pól · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like all short story collections, there's hit and miss, but when this one hits, it's bloody cracking. The title story ties in nicely with the author's Diogenes Club material, and gives our first glimpse of the sinister mystery man in the dark goggles and the even more sinister Derek Leech.