Famous Wheatley fans?

gloomysundae · Post by **gloomysundae** » Sat 16 Dec, 2006 13:32:11

I saw this from the excellent horror novelist Christopher Fowler (Roofworld, Soho Black, Rune, Psychoville etc) and I was wondering if anybody knows of other famous Wheatley Fans?

What worries me is the fact that anyone interested in the genre now has to search hard for it. My father had a full set of Dennis WheatleyÂ’s witchcraft novels on the family bookshelf, and by the time I was twelve I had read them all. In the Politically Correct nineties such things are spuriously linked to non-existent cases of so-called Â‘Satanic child abuseÂ’ and are mostly unavailable. These were just stories, for GodÂ’s sake, and pretty hokey ones at that. ItÂ’s as if politicians are so unimaginative they can no longer differentiate between fact and fiction.

Christopher Fowler - The View from the Balcony, The Edge #4, 1996.

Complete article at:

http://www.theedge.abelgratis.co.uk/fea ... lcony1.htm

Jim · Post by **Jim** » Sun 17 Dec, 2006 15:13:50

Well, I don't know how many DW novels Winston Churchill read, but he certainly knew his work and respected his imagination.

gloomysundae · Post by **gloomysundae** » Wed 20 Dec, 2006 21:19:52

Yeah, that makes sense Jim. As a young man Churchill wrote a very good horror story/ conte cruel himself, Man Overboard, published in Harmsworth for December 1898.

If you have Adobe Acrobat, you can download it from:

http://www.horrormasters.com/Text/a1090.pdf

gloomysundae · Post by **gloomysundae** » Mon 2 Apr, 2007 22:18:44

Bernard's supernatural thrillers are represented by traditional horror values, where story rather than gore is important, and here childhood literary influences played a great part in his development as a writer.

"Dennis Wheatley was an enormous influence on me as a teenager. He wrote some very entertaining books."

And yet, he is now regarded as Enid Blyton of horror.

"You have to look at a book within its time slot and Wheatley wrote what was needed at the time. I#'m not saying that he was a great writer, but some of his books made exciting reading when I was young."

John Gilbert in conversation with Bernard Taylor, author of two of my favourite horror novels, Sweetheart, Sweetheart and The Moorstone Sickness (you may recall the over the top big screen adaptation of his Mother's Boys starring Jamie Lee Curtis), Fear magazine #25, January 1991.

Garry Holmes · Post by **Garry Holmes** » Mon 7 May, 2007 14:44:50

Christopher Fowler describes DW's books as 'pretty hokey'. Does that really qualify him as a fan?

Jim · Post by **Jim** » Tue 8 May, 2007 02:54:16

Mystery novelist/collector Martin Edwards does a pretty nice piece on the Crime Dossiers on his website. He calls them "an intriguing experiment in crime fiction which has been imitated and developed but not as yet surpassed."