Introduction

Only two topics can be of least interest to a serious and studious mind — sex and the dead.

— W. B. Yeats

Readers of fiction have long been drawn to a mix of the taboo topics sex and horror. Experienced vicariously from armchairs (or, more appropriately, beds), generations of readers and film lovers have found sex and horror a marriage made in Heaven… or perhaps Hell. In such literary classics as Dracula and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and box-office smashes like Psycho and Halloween, sex and horror have made for perfect, if strange, bedfellows.

Hot Blood is the first major anthology to ask the world's premier horror writers to share their secret sexual nightmares. The masters are here: Robert Bloch, Richard Matheson, Harlan Ellison, even a contribution from Theodore Sturgeon, whose 1979 story Vengeance Is. is a prophetic tale of perversion that hints of a disease similar to the modern plague of AIDS. In addition, Hot Blood features a collection of '80s visionaries, from Ramsey Campbell, Robert R. McCammon, F. Paul Wilson, and Graham Masterton, to sizzling new talents like David J. Schow, Skipp and Spector, and Rex Miller.

Sexual attraction is, perhaps, one of the most powerful and mysterious forces of nature, an element carefully interwoven between these pages. Those readers who happen to be in the market for a new lover are urged, upon completion of this book, to reevaluate qualities most often sought in the opposite sex and to consider adding «human» to the top of the list. In fact, these days, reading Hot Blood may be one of the few remaining forms of "safe sex" available. And isn't that a scary thought?

Загрузка...