His most recent book-length horror is A Winter
Haunting(2002), the direct sequel to Summer of
Night,whose characters Simmons had occasionally
used in other works already. One of the survivors
of that earlier book has grown up, becomes a pro-
fessional writer, and returns to his hometown after
a series of personal and emotional crises, where he
is confronted by apparitions of people from his
past. Although quieter than the author’s previous
novels, it is very effectively creepy.
His short fiction is almost always rewarding.
Prayers from Broken Stoneswon the Bram Stoker
Award for a single-author collection, and “This
Year’s Class Picture” (1992) and “Dying in
Bangkok” (1995) also won Stokers. Other stories
of note include “The River Styx Runs Upstream”
(1982), “Entropy’s Bed at Midnight” (1993), and
“Sleeping with the Teeth Women” (1993). Sim-
mons is undeniably one of the major voices in sci-
ence fiction and might claim the same position in
horror fiction if he writes in the field more fre-
quently than he has in recent years.
“Skeleton”Ray Bradbury (1945)
Mr. Harris is a hypochondriac frustrated by his
doctor’s refusal to take his complaints seriously,
particularly his most recent one, that his bones
are aching unnaturally. When the doctor dis-
misses him with a lecture, he turns to Mr. Muni-
gant, a self-professed bone specialist although not
a doctor, a man who seems much more sympa-
thetic to his new client’s complaints. Munigant
sends him home with some literature that Harris
studies, apparently realizing for the first time the
complexity of his bone structure and considerably
distressed with the emotional implications of the
fact that he is walking around with a genuine
skeleton inside him, a knowledge he had pos-
sessed all his life without ever actually consider-
ing it and that now strikes him as vulgar at best,
horrible at worst.
The more Harris thinks about it, the more he
becomes convinced that his skeleton is alien and
an intruder rather than a part of him. He begins to
believe that he and his skeleton are locked in a
battle for control of his body, and when he begins
to lose weight, he interprets that as a plot by his
enemy to slough off its fleshy envelope. The tur-
moil grows steadily until, desperate, Harris finally
appeals to Mr. Munigant again. Munigant visits
him at home, and we learn the truth about him.
He is not a human being at all but a creature who
can literally consume the bones of a living crea-
ture, leaving the flesh and organs untouched. Mr.
Harris is finally free, and his wife arrives home to
find him still living but now an oversized jellyfish
unable to move. Although the body of the story
prepares the reader for an eventual crisis, it is only
in the final scene that one realizes that Harris’s
problems are not just psychological.Skipp, John(1957– ) and
Craig Spector(1958– )
The writing team of John Skipp and Craig Spector
remained together for less than 10 years and pro-
duced only seven novels, one of them a movie
novelization, but their impact was so significant
that their joint byline became synonymous with
the splatterpunk school of horror writing, charac-
terized by extremely shocking, explicit violence.
Unlike most of their imitators, however, they un-
derstood that descriptions of death and mutilation
could not sustain a book-length work and that it
was necessary to create a plausible setting with
sympathetic characters so that the explosions of
visceral horror meant something to the reader
other than just random images of blood and gore.
Although both writers published a handful of
short stories alone, some as early as 1982, they
were still virtually unknown when they were
tapped to novelize Fright Night(1985), an above-
average vampire movie in which a teenager discov-
ers that his new neighbor is an undead creature
but, predictably, cannot convince any adult that he
is telling the truth. Their first original novel fol-
lowed the next year. The Light at the End(1986) is
set in New York City, or more properly beneath it,
as a creature that is a kind of physical personifica-
tion of the evil that accumulates in urban land-
scapes haunts the subways and sewer system,
claiming several victims and destroying them in
horrible ways. The graphic death scenes were an
instant source of controversy, masking the fact that
the story is in many ways quite subtle and complex.324 “Skeleton”