Dead Travel Fast

The Diogenes Club #(Angel Down, Sussex)

by Kim Newman

From Riju 'Unique' is perhaps a cliche nowadays, but that is the only way to describe Kim Newman, as he stands like a Gulliver among the contemporary liliputs. His work can not be pigeon-holed, as it is truly cross-genre and multi-disciplinarian. But the simplest way to describe his short stories are to call them hugely satisfying. It is quite surprising to find spine-chilling horror so seamlessly mixed with humour & style. This first American collection of Newman's short stories should herald a Newmania which would do a world of good to the current state of fantasy and horror.

Genres: Horror, Fantasy

321 pages, Paperback

First published July 25, 2005

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

[Riju Ganguly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Whenever you think of Kim Newman, the famous film critic and author of "Anno Dracula", certain images crop up in mind: the grime & soot of Victorian London, hippies & skinheads clashing against the backdrop of psychedelic 70-s, a thinly veiled take on the cloak & dagger business of secret service, vampires, strange people doing stranger things, etc. etc. This book was the first collection of his short stories to be published in the USA. Perhaps it was this special occasion that had led to selection of a bunch of stories that showcase the talents of this remarkable author in ALL those areas mentioned above. The contents are:

1) A Drug on the Market: what would have happened if the stuff invented by Dr. Jekyll had become marketed as a drug?
2) Tomorrow Town: Richard Jepperson & Vanessa (of Diogenes Club) investigate murders in a futuristic sci-fi community.
3) The Original Dr Shade: it is so easy to fall prey to one's own weaknesses!
4) Famous Monsters: life of a Martian working in the Hollywood ion the aftermath of war between the planets.
5) Organ Donors: Sally Rhodes, that feisty investigator who should have appeared in many more stories, destroys one of the great schemes of Derek Leech.
6) Going to Series: a scary look at reality television, even before the emergence of "Big Brother".
7) Angel Down Sussex: a thrilling Diogenes Club adventure involving Edwin Winthrop, Catriona Kaye, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Alister Crowley, UFO-s and "men wearing all black".
8) Dead Travel Fast: this story may be located in Stoker's universe, or it may be in the alternate universe created by Kim Newman, but the Count is at his sadistic best in this short vicious tale.
9) Amerikanski Dead at the Moscow Morgue: a zombi story or post-modernist take on Communism? You judge.
10) The Big Fish: another thrill-ride involving characters from Diogenes Club, but only nominally, with the Old Ones being 'taken on' by the hard-boiled unnamed detective (obviously modeled on Philip Marlowe).

Alas, you would not be able to read this collection easily as it has gone out of print. But stories no. 2,5,7,10 are available in Diogenes Club collections. However stories no. 1,3,4,6,8, and 10 deserve to be brought out soon, since these are not exactly thematic, but nevertheless great short stories.

[Orrin Grey · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was able to get through most of the stories in Dead Travel Fast before it had to go back to the library.

I've read several good short stories by Kim Newman in several anthologies recently, but his collections have proven surprisingly difficult to track down. Most of the stories in Dead Travel Fast were not quite as good as some of the stuff I've encountered in the anthologies, but they were still good reads. Longish and leisurely short stories, the lot of them. Favorites include "A Drug on the Market," "The Original Dr. Shade," and "Amerikanski Dead at the Moscow Morgue."

Dead Travel Fast gets bonus points for being from Dinoship, Inc.