‘Then you should keep it a bit longer. Get your homework done. Because they’re all good. There are some real classics in there – ones you should definitely read.’
I chose Stephen King as a reference point here because, like so many people, I read him voraciously as a teenager. (And still do, of course.) Pet Sematary has always resonated with me as being a perfect horror novel, and the link to The Monkey’s Paw is an obvious one. But as it happens, the themes of both stories apply neatly to this book, in that they’re both about how refusing to accept horrible and traumatic events in the past can end up poisoning the present.
More importantly, there was much more of an emphasis on the short story collection Jenny lends Paul in earlier drafts, and so – with his permission – I credited the editor as being Ramsey Campbell, a living legend of the horror genre, as a nod of respect to him. For various reasons, and to my regret, that got lost in subsequent drafts. And so, for the record, let me state that while this short story collection does not exist in the real world, it was edited by Ramsey.
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