Famous Monsters

The Diogenes Club #(The Big Fish)

by Kim Newman

A collection of stories where a monster lurks on every corner, in every profession and in every race and class. The monsters are unimaginably strange and yet have their genesis in the very recognizable ills of contemporary society.

Genres: Horror, Short Stories, Collections

448 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

Note: This author also writes under the pseudonym of Jack Yeovil.
An expert on horror and sci-fi cinema (his books of film criticism include Nightmare Movies and Millennium Movies), Kim Newman's novels draw promiscuously on the tropes of horror, sci-fi and fantasy. He is complexly and irreverently referential; the Dracula sequence--Anno Dracula, The Bloody Red Baron and Dracula,Cha Cha Cha--not only portrays an alternate world in which the Count conquers Victorian Britain for a while, is the mastermind behind Germany's air aces in World War One and survives into a jetset 1950s of paparazzi and La Dolce Vita, but does so with endless throwaway references that range from Kipling to James Bond, from Edgar Allen Poe to Patricia Highsmith.
In horror novels such as Bad Dreams and Jago, reality turns out to be endlessly subverted by the powerfully malign. His pseudonymous novels, as Jack Yeovil, play elegant games with genre cliche--perhaps the best of these is the sword-and-sorcery novel Drachenfels which takes the prescribed formulae of the games company to whose bible it was written and make them over entirely into a Kim Newman novel.
Life's Lottery, his most mainstream novel, consists of multiple choice fragments which enable readers to choose the hero's fate and take him into horror, crime and sf storylines or into mundane reality.

Reviews

[Anthony Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Newman proves himself a master of short fiction with these fifteen tales of horror and suspense centred on a pulp-horror theme. They're all great but my three favourites were:
The titular story, 'Famous Monsters'; an interview with a martian left behind after the conclusion to Wells' War of the Worlds, who builds a Hollywood career as a b-movie player.
'Pitbull Brittan' a Bulldog Drummond-esque tale built on the absurd premises that everything printed in the Daily Mail is true. A moronic super-powered hooray henry battles evil socialists during the 1980s miner's strike.
The novella 'Out of the Night, When the Full Moon is Bright...' a 'Curse of the Werewolf'/'Mask of Zorro' mash-up set in 1990s Los Angeles.
All in all, a real delight from start to finish.

[JM · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved Alan Moore's "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" but I think it lost its focus in the later volumes, in part due to Alan Moore's penchant for high-concept narratives and exceedingly obscure references. I also, naturally, hated the movie version. But not because it was bad (it was). I hated it because it was hugely disappointing. I was sure it wasn't going to be that faithful to the comic version, but they could have done something far better than what we got.

Kim Newman is the kind of author who manages to make use of his encyclopedic knowledge of genre fiction, film and TV, to bridge the gap between what Moore did and what the movie version of Moore's work did, while managing to stay firmly in the side that doesn't suck.

I love his novels, but his short stories are also great fun. For an example, the titular story is told from the perspective of a b-movie actor from the first half of the 20th century. The twist? Instead of World Wars, this version of the Earth had War of the Worlds I and II with Mars, and the narrator is a California-born Martian who became an actor. His mother fled Mars between the two Wars and emigrated, you see.

You gotta love a guy who can come up with a premise like that, and then sticks the landing by writing a great story around it.

[Daniel Russell · Rating 2 out of 5]

Kim knows his films, there's no disputing that. It's fact.

Problem occurs when most of the stories are bogged down with movie lore, both real and fictional.

Still there's a few corkers in here.