werewolf story, and The Long Night of the Grave
(1986), which features a mummy.
Grant moved away from Oxrun Station for
most of his subsequent novels and stories. Night
Songs(1984) is set on an island that is beleaguered
by supernatural forces from the ocean. The Tea
Party(1985) is set in a somewhat similar town and
contains some insidiously creepy passages involv-
ing a series of stone walls that are not always in the
same place. The Orchard(1986) is one of Oxrun
Station’s bad places, and things get worse when its
power begins to extend outside the immediate
vicinity. There is a serial killer in The Pet(1986),
but Grant takes the overdone idea and adds a new
dimension to it, proving that there are even worse
things in the world than a homicidal maniac.
Grant’s list of pseudonyms was growing. As Li-
onel Fenn he wrote four lightly humorous fan-
tasies, three of them in the White Duck series. As
Geoffrey Marsh he created the Lionel Blackthorne
series, four novels featuring a not entirely serious
two-fisted hero whose job is to track down magical
artifacts and wrest them away from a variety of
foes, human and otherwise. The final book in the
series, The Fangs of the Hooded Demon(1988), is
particularly good. The horror boom had already
begun to fade by the late 1980s, but Grant had no
difficulty attracting readers and continued to avoid
the excesses of some of his contemporaries. For
Fear of the Night(1987), for example, was an ex-
tremely effective traditional ghost story, and Dial-
ing the Wind(1989), an Oxrun Station novel, does
an excellent job of describing the mystery of how
some unusual music controls the secret of several
lives. Grant’s weakest novel, In a Dark Dream
(1989), is still noticeably more polished than those
of most of his fellow horror writers.
Grant opened the 1990s with a pair of solid
new titles, Something Stirs (1991) and Stunts
(1991), but it was obvious that the collapse of the
horror market was affecting even the most talented
writers in the field. Grant began writing horror sto-
ries for young adults, starting with Fire Mask
(1991), which avoided the usual tendency to write
down to a supposedly less sophisticated audience
that mars most young adult fiction. Grant contin-
ued in this vein as Simon Lake, as well as writing
two unusually good tie-in novels to the X-Files
television program, Goblins(1994) and Whirlwind
(1995). He revived the Lionel Fenn name to write
humorous novels of the fantastic featuring Kent
Montana, of which The Mark of the Moderately Vi-
cious Vampire(1992) and 666: The Neighbor of the
Beast(1992) are the two most entertaining. Jackals
(1994) is somewhat disappointing, but The Black
Carousel(1995), another Oxrun Station novel,
represents Grant at the top of his form.
Grant’s most recent novels of the supernatural
have been marketed and packaged differently and
have been grouped into two separate series. Sym-
phony(1997), In the Mood(1998), Chariot(1998),
and Riders in the Sky(1999) make up the Millen-
nium Quartet. The apocalypse is about to come
upon the world, and the forces of good and evil are
recruiting allies for the battle to come. The series is
Grant’s most ambitious and in some ways most in-
teresting project. A second series is in the tradition
of the psychic detective story. The Black Oak mys-
teries include Genesis(1998), The Hush of Dark
Wings (1999), Winter Knight (1999), Hunting
Ground(2000), and When the Cold Wind Blows
(2001). The protagonists battle ghosts, vampires,
and werewolves, but Grant always provides an
original twist, avoiding the clichés of each of the
classic horror monsters.
His short fiction is of consistently high quality,
although he has won only one award, the World
Fantasy Award for “Confess the Seasons” (1983).
He also won the World Fantasy Award for editing
the Shadows series of original horror anthologies.
Grant also edited four anthologies with the shared
setting of Greystone Bay and several other collec-
tions of short horror fiction, all of which are highly
regarded. Without much of the fanfare that sur-
rounds many big-name authors, Grant has become
and remains one of the most significant modern
horror writers.“Graves”Joe Haldeman(1992)
The science fiction writer Joe Haldeman drew
upon his own experiences during the war in Viet-
nam for a rare excursion into the world of the su-
pernatural in this short but effective story, which
won the World Fantasy Award as well as the Neb-
ula Award presented by the Science Fiction and“Graves” 141