The Face That Must Die

I'm near finishing Dean Koontz's Watchers, as I continue in my somewhat dubious - and not attending school, unjustified - quest to educate myself about twentieth-century Weird fiction, but instead I put it down to read Ramsey Campbell's legendary 1979 tale of a psychotic killer, The Face That Must Die. The book lives up to its reputation of high literary innovation, as a satire of Thatcher-era English literary homophobia (Campbell cites Chandler and Whittington-Egan as two examples), and in fact transcends the common clichés of Weird or Horror fiction. I'm still only 48 pages into the novel, so I'll refrain from commenting, and conjecturing further about the storyline.

Go figure. I could probably write a complete (probably comprehensive third year) university-level English course entitled '20th-Century Weird Fiction' using my growing knowledge of the evolution of Weird and Horror fiction. It'd read something like this:

This course examines first the early twentieth-century ‘pulp’ literary tradition of Weird literature, as articulated by H.P. Lovecraft, as well as his contemporaries, and then focuses next on the thriller, horror and New Weird genres of today’s American and British ‘pulp’ literature.

Then again, I think I just have my head in the clouds these days.