Progress So Far

Here's the shelf right now.  The most recent one is Del James' The Language of Fear.  I picked it up in a thrift store after actually gasping.  Lost Souls was the first book from the line I'd read.  There's stories about both that I'll save until I actually get around to doing a blog post on them.

Drawing Blood is part of the line, but if you look carefully, you can see it lacks the Abyss mark.  That's because it, and Lost Souls, stayed in print after the imprint shut down.  This Drawing Blood is a later printing and a place holder until I can get an Abyss edition..

I am obsessed.

I am obsessed.

In the mid to late nineties, Bantam/Doubleday/Dell Publishing had an imprint of cutting edge Horror fiction, curated under the skillful eye of editor Jeanne Cavelos called Abyss.  

Through this line, I was introduced to the works of Poppy Z. Brite, Kathe Koja, Tanith Lee, and many others.

 Mostly paperback originals, they were visally distinctive for their covers (Too Much Horror Fiction does a fine blogpost on their covers here) and the logo on their spine, which today I use as a guide when I'm scanning shelves looking for them.

And look for them I do.  Several moves and incidents involving basements, leaks, and badly designed storage spaces have pretty much destroyed my collection of these awesome books.

But in the words of the Rock in San Andreas "We rebuild."*

I've started finding the odd paperback around, a Melanie Tem here, a Brian Hodge there.  The line sadly came to an end in the late nineties... making lemonade, however, that means there's a finite number of books to find.  About fifty.

I'm currently trying to make THE LIST of them, on google docs spreadsheet, so I can have a check list of the titles but also sort it by author, publication date, and because I'm crazy, ISBN number.   The nice thing about using google docs is there's a mobile ap for the spreadsheet, so it's always as close as my phone.  When THE LIST is done, I'll post a link to it.

I'll try and provide current availability to the titles- some, like Poppy Z. Brite's have stayed in print, while others, like Brian Hodge, are bringing them back into print via e-publishing.  Specialty presses like Valancourt Books are bring titles back into print editions as well as e-books, Michael McDowell's Toplin being a good example.

So, one way or another, I'm going to be able to work my way through the Abyss.


*Yes, he actually said this.  And when we watched San Andreas, I anticipated the line, because it's that kind of movie.