The 2010 Black Quill Award Nominations: Best Dark Genre Book Of Non-Fiction

Horrors: Great Stories Of Fear And Their Creators

Author: Wood, Rocky
Artist: Glenn Chadbourne
Format: Trade Paperback
Type: Horror Non-Fiction
Page Count: 192pp.
Pub. Date: September 10, 2010
Publisher: McFarland

Nominated for the 2010 Black Quill Award for the Best Dark Genre Book Of Non-Fiction category

That notorious evening at Villa Diodati when Lord Byron challenged his contemporaries to write a ghost story, his summons brought forth a mad doctor intent on reanimation and a vampire drunk with bloodlust.

The night modern horror was born was notoriously dark and stormy, as were the lives of those who wrote the most fearsome — yet beloved — tales in literature, for those so gifted were also cursed.

Horrors, a graphic novel, reveals in gruesome detail how Mary Wollstonecraft, Bram Stoker, Edgar Allan Poe and other masters of the genre were haunted by their monstrous creations.

I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft (Vol. 1)

Author: Joshi, S. T.
Format: Hardcover (2 Vols.)
Type: Horror Non-Fiction
Page Count: 1200pp.
Pub. Date: August 20, 2010
Publisher: Hippocampus Press

I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft (Vol. 2)

Author: Joshi, S. T.
Format: Hardcover (2 Vols.)
Type: Horror Non-Fiction
Page Count: 1200pp.
Pub. Date: August 20, 2010
Publisher: Hippocampus Press

Nominated for the 2010 Black Quill Award for the Best Dark Genre Book Of Non-Fiction category

In 1996, S. T. Joshi’s H. P. Lovecraft: A Life was published to universal acclaim. Joyce Carol Oates called it the “definitive” biography, and it won the British Fantasy Award and the Horror Writers Association Award. But that 1996 edition was abridged from the manuscript that Joshi wrote in 1993-95; in all, more than 150,000 words were cut for space reasons.

Hippocampus Press is proud to present the complete, uncut edition of Joshi’s biography, I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft. In addition to restoring every word of Joshi’s original manuscript, the entire text has been thoroughly revised and updated in light of the new information on Lovecraft that has emerged since 1996. As such, this book can now truly be said to be the definitive biography of H. P. Lovecraft, written by the world’s leading authority on Lovecraft.

Readers will find countless details about Lovecraft’s life and work not included in the earlier edition, along with important updates on new publications by and about Lovecraft in the last 15 years and on Lovecraft’s increasing worldwide reputation. This book constitutes S. T. Joshi’s final word on Lovecraft the man, the writer, and the thinker.

I Am Providence will be published as a limited edition two-volume hardcover set, with Smythe-sewn signatures and illustrated dust wrappers. All Hippocampus Press limited editions are printed on 60# white offset paper, acid free and elemental chlorine free.

Night Of The Living Dead: Behind The Scenes Of The Most Terrifying Zombie Movie Ever

Author: Kane, Joe
Format: Trade Paperback
Type: Horror Non-Fiction
Page Count: 272pp.
Pub. Date: September 1, 2010
Publisher: Citadel

Nominated for the 2010 Black Quill Award for the Best Dark Genre Book Of Non-Fiction category

“They’re coming to get you, Barbara…”

These five words unleashed a terrifying movie classic on an unsuspecting public in 1968, stunning audiences with endless nightmares.

George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead raised the bar for onscreen violence. Moviegoers were bludgeoned with horrific scenes of zombies blood-feasting on human body parts. Nothing was taboo. A six-year-old child nibbling on her daddy’s arm! Plunging a garden tool into her mother’s heart!

More blood spewed onscreen than ever before! And yet, people returned for more — in hordes. The zombie movie phenomenon had officially been spawned.

This is the true story of the flesh-eating classic that started it all.

Special Features:

• Dozens of photos too shocking to be seen until now
• Stomach-churning details behind the groundbreaking FX
• Compelling, revealing interviews with cast and crew
• The legacy of Night of the Living Dead for today’s horror directors

The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror

Author: Ligotti, Thomas
Format: Hardcover
Type: Horror Non-Fiction
Page Count: 246pp.
Pub. Date: June 25, 2010
Publisher: Hippocampus Press

Nominated for the 2010 Black Quill Award for the Best Dark Genre Book Of Non-Fiction category

Should the human race voluntarily put an end to its existence? Do we even know what it means to be human? And what if we are nothing like we suppose ourselves to be?

In this challenging philosophical work, celebrated supernatural writer Thomas Ligotti broaches these and other issues in an unflinching and penetrating manner that brings to mind some of his own imperishable horror fiction. For Ligotti, there is no refuge from our existence as conscious beings who must suppress their awareness of what horrors life holds in store for them.

Yet try as we may, our consciousness may at any time rise up against our defenses against it, whispering to us things we would rather not hear: Religion is a transparent fantasy, optimism an exercise in delusional wish-fulfillment, and even the quest for pleasure an ultimately doomed enterprise.

Drawing upon the work of such pessimistic philosophers as Arthur Schopenhauer and Peter Wessel Zapffe, as well as the findings of various fields of study such as neuroscience, moral philosophy, Terror Management Psychology, the sociology of self-deception, and the theory of uncanny experience, Ligotti presents a compelling contrivance of horror for the consideration of his reader.

Perhaps most provocatively, Ligotti sees in the literature of supernatural fiction a confirmation of the cheerless vision he is propounding, dovetailing into his book the overarching theme that, having been ousted by evolution from the natural world, the human race has been effectively translated to a supernatural order of being.

In this state of existence, we are denied slumber in nature’s arms and must exist in a waking nightmare in which we are taunted by hints of our true nature.

Written with the pungency and panache we expect from a master of English prose, The Conspiracy against the Human Race is a hypnotic guide to the darker regions of one of the most interesting minds of our time.

Another Summary:
“The Conspiracy against the Human Race sets out what is perhaps the most sustained challenge yet to the intellectual blackmail that would oblige us to be eternally grateful for a ‘gift’ we never invited.”
–From the Foreword by Ray Brassier

“The Conspiracy against the Human Race is renowned horror writer Thomas Ligotti’s first work of nonfiction. Through impressively wide-ranging discussions of and reflections on literary and philosophical works of a pessimistic bent, he shows that the greatest horrors are not the products of our imagination. The worst and most plentiful horrors are instead to be found in reality. Mr. Ligotti’s calm, but often bloodcurdling turns of phrase, evoke the dreadfulness of the human condition. Those who cannot bear the truth will pretend this is another work of fiction, but in doing so they perpetuate the conspiracy of the book’s title.”
–David Benatar,author of Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence; Department of Philosophy, University of Cape Town, South Africa

Thomas Ligotti is one of the foremost authors of supernatural horror literature. In this genre, he has been classed with Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft. His works include Songs of a Dead Dreamer, Grimscribe, My Work Is Not Yet Done, and Teatro Grottesco. Ligotti lives in Florida.

Ray Brassier is a member of the philosophy faculty at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon. He is the author of Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (Palgrave Macmillan 2007).

Thrillers: 100 Must Reads

Editors: Morrell, David and Hank Wagner
Format: Hardcover
Type: Horror Non-Fiction
Page Count: 378pp.
Pub. Date: July 5, 2010
Publisher: Oceanview Publishing

Nominated for the 2010 Black Quill Award for the Best Dark Genre Book Of Non-Fiction category

The most riveting reads in history meet today’s biggest thriller writers in Thrillers: 100 Must-Reads.

Edited by David Morrell and Hank Wagner, Thrillers: 100 Must-Reads examines 100 seminal works of suspense through essays contributed by such esteemed modern thriller writers as: David Baldacci, Steve Berry, Sandra Brown, Lee Child, Jeffery Deaver, Tess Gerritsen, Heather Graham, John Lescroart, Gayle Lynds, Katherine Neville, Michael Palmer, James Rollins, R. L. Stine, and many more.

Thrillers: 100 Must-Reads features 100 works — from Beowulf to The Bourne Identity, Dracula to Deliverance, Heart of Darkness to The Hunt for Red October — deemed must-reads by the International Thriller Writers organization.

Much more than an anthology, Thrillers: 100 Must-Reads goes deep inside the most notable thrillers published over the centuries. Through lively, spirited, and thoughtful essays that examine each work’s significance, impact, and influence, Thrillers: 100 Must-Reads provides both historical and personal perspective on those spellbinding works that have kept readers on the edge of their seats for centuries.