Comprehensive information and links about Kim Newman

Kim Newman (born July 31, 1959Kim Newman is an English journalist, film critic, and fiction writer. Recurring interests visible in his work include film history and horror fiction — both of which he attributes to seeing Tod Browning's at the age of eleven — and alternate versions of history. He has won the Bram Stoker Award and the International Horror Guild Award, and has been nominated for the World Fantasy Award.

He was born in London and raised in Aller, Somerset. He was educated at Dr. Morgan's Grammar School in Bridgwater, and set his experimental semi-autobiographical novel (1999) in a fictionalised version of the town called Sedgwater. He studied English at the University of Sussex.

Non-fiction

Newman's first two books, both non-fiction, were published in 1985, and go some way to demonstrating his range. , co-written with his friend Neil Gaiman, is a light-hearted tribute to entertainingly bad prose in fantastic fiction. (1989), set in a virtual reality based on old black-and-white detective movies. In the same year, as "Jack Yeovil", he began contributing to a series of novels published by Games Workshop, set in the world of their , published in 1992. The novel is set in 1888, during Jack the Ripper's killing spree — but a different 1888 to the one we know, in which Dracula succeeded in becoming the ruler of England. In the novel, fictional characters — not only from , but also from other works of Victorian era fiction — appear alongside historical persons. One major character, the vampire Genevieve Dieudonné, had previously appeared (in a different setting) in his 'Jack Yeovil' Warhammer novels.

was followed by a series of novels and shorter works in the same setting (although not the same time period — as of 2003, the series has reached the 1980s). Some of the short stories are available online: see below.

Other novels include (1990).

Newman is also a prolific writer of short stories. His short story collections include (1997), a collection of stories co-written with Eugene Byrne, set in an alternate history where the United States had a communist revolution in the early twentieth century and Russia didn't.

Many of his stories feature agents of the Diogenes Club, the gentlemen's club created by Arthur Conan Doyle for the Sherlock Holmes mysteries, in particular 'The Adventure of the Greek Interpretor'. In Newman's stories, it is a cover for a top-secret establishmment of the British government, described as "an institution that quietly existed to cope with matters beyond the purview of regular police and intelligence services". One particular sequence focuses on the adventures during the 1970s of psychic investigator Richard Jeperson; the stories homage various aspects of '70s British culture through adventures reminiscent of '70s television series such as . (A version of the Diogenes Club also appears in the Anno-Dracula series, complete with alternative version of Jeperson; and the Diogenes Club series sometimes conversely includes alternative versions of characters who first appeared in the Anno-Dracula series.)

The short story "Famous Monsters", in which a Martian gets a job in Hollywood, was included on an information package sent to Mars by a US-Russian probe in 1994.

He has written a which was published by Telos in 2001.

A recurring feature of Newman's fiction is his fondness for reinterpreting historical figures (particularly from the entertainment industry) and other authors' characters in new settings, either realistic alternate-history or outright fantasy. Some of these characters (e.g. Dracula) are easily recognised. Many more, particularly minor characters, are deliberately obscured and may be considered Easter eggs for perceptive readers.

(A-D alternate history: the SAS raid on the terrorist-held Iranian embassy in April 1980, with vampires) (how shifting continuities in comics universes affect the people in them, from their point of view) (Diogenes Club agents investigate a murder in a community created in imitation of the gleaming future depicted in 1960s scifi) (with Eugene Byrne; alternate history: Constantine loses the Battle of Milvian Bridge; without him, Christianity and the Roman Empire collapse)