An Appreciation of Kim Newman

(Written for the program booklet of the 2007 World Fantasy Convention, where Kim was a guest of honour.)

It wasn't twenty years ago to the day, but it was twenty years ago - early in the evening of Sunday, 30 August, 1987, to be precise - that I first met Kim Newman. I know this not because (like Kim) I'm gifted with a prodigious memory, or because I keep a meticulous diary, but because it was at the pre-Hugos party at the 45th World Science Fiction Convention in Brighton, England, and I still have the souvenir book. Now, I've already printed this story a couple of times already, but I think it bears repeating just one more time. Back in 1987, I'd had just a handful of short stories published. I'd never been to an SF convention before. I knew no-one, except by reputation. And my reputation was so exiguous that almost no-one knew me. But in the swirl of the party a dapper young gent eyed my name badge and introduced himself with the remark that he'd liked 'King of the Hill', one of the short stories I'd published in Interzone. In fact, he said, he liked it so much that he'd nominated it for the Hugo. It's possible, barely, that Kim was responding to the quality of my writing, but it's more likely that the story caught his attention because it was set on and around Cadbury Castle in Somerset, which is close to the village where he'd grown up. Even so, it was a tremendously kind and generous thing to say, and a great way to spark a friendship.

I already knew of Kim, of course. Like me, he'd had several stories published in Interzone (we'd both come to be labelled the Interzone generation, no bad thing), including 'Dreamers', 'Patricia's Profession', and 'The Next-But-One Man.' He'd also published, with Neil Gaiman, a compendium of eyeball-searing SF quotes, Ghastly Beyond Belief. And he was rapidly making a name for himself as a film critic, too. He had a column in London's alternative listing magazine, City Limits, where he was demonstrating not only his ability to explain entertainingly, accurately and concisely why good films were good, but also his ability to find something interesting in the worst kinds of films imaginable (and the ability to sit through them, too; his story 'Completist Heaven' is a useful and very funny insight into what a genre film critic's life is all about). On top of that, he'd already produced the first iteration of Nightmare Movies, which, after it had been rescued from the clutches of its bankrupt publisher and republished in an expanded and revised edition, would help to establish him as a horror movie maven. And he was almost certainly incubating if not actually writing his first published novel.

Now, I can't remember the *second* time I met Kim (I'm pretty sure it may have had something to do with Steve Jones, or maybe it was Jo Fletcher), but we soon became good friends. In the years since that first encounter at Brighton, before or after various conventions, we've driven from Los Angeles to San Francisco, from Texas to LA on the Dead Dianathon Tour, and kicked around Manhattan more than once. These trips were always enlivened by Kim's good humour, not to mention his theatrical dress sense. In London, most people spare Kim's impeccable Edwardian costume and Wild Bill Hickok hair not much more than a glance, but things can be different elsewhere. In a flea market in New York's Chinatown, one guy started following Kim around with a video camera. We were slung out of a bookshop in Westwood, LA, after a fan of Kim's appearances as resident film critic on breakfast TV spotted him and began to chat too enthusiastically for the liking of the shop's incredibly grumpy owner. And we discovered why it isn't a good idea to wear a Homburg in a car on Melrose of a Saturday morning. Along the line, we've also co-edited an anthology, In Dreams, and collaborated on two short stories (nag Ellen Datlow about the second). And by one of those symmetries too neat to fit into fiction, we were joint toastmasters at the Hugo Ceremony of the 63rd World SF Convention in Glasgow 2005, a performance that garnered us a Hugo nomination for best short dramatic fiction.

Can't say it hasn't been fun.

Kim has been a professional, full-time writer since leaving university; he's happy to admit that he's never had any other kind of job. I've learned a lot from him about the trade, especially about the value of dedication and hard work. It isn't enough to talk the talk; you have to walk the walk. If you want to be a writer, you have to sit down and write. And always, always meet your deadlines. Kim works hard, every day. And he also doesn't miss a deadline; as Neil Gaiman once remarked, he tends to finish a commissioned piece of work well ahead of the deadline, and then write something else before it's time to submit it. By application of hard work and natural-born talent, Kim has not only managed to run two careers as movie critic and fiction writer in parallel, he's so prolific a fiction writer that at one point he adopted a pseudonym, Jack Yeovil, to cover the work that didn't fit under the Newman byline. Jack Yeovil writes even faster than Kim Newman, but it's still all good. His Warhammer novels and story collections have never been out of print; as far as I'm concerned, they're the gold standard of how to write to spec and deliver something that crackles with wit and imagination. And under his own name, of course, he's been engaged in producing a solid canon of intricately connected novels and shorter fictions for far longer than I've known him. Not only do a good number of his own characters turn up in slightly different roles in different stories, but characters from movies, TV and classic horror fiction have guest appearances, too. From encyclopaedic knowledge of movies and popular culture, from history and the headlines, from tropes borrowed from noir, horror, fantasy, sf and much more, Kim has woven his own set of interlocking metafictional alternate universes whose structure is much like the cyberspace virtual reality of the City in his first novel, The Night Mayor.

Anyone who has visited Kim's flat will know just how uncannily it mirrors the inside of his head, packed as it is with meticulously organised collections of hardbacks, paperbacks, comic books, DVDs, movie memorabilia, toys, collectibles, posters, figurines, Aurora monsters, and models of just about every villain ever created by Marvel and DC. His work ethic means that he spends an awful lot of time in that spooky lair, doing his thing, creating universes out of cultural bricolage. Perhaps, sometimes, a little too much time. The neighbours are beginning to talk about strange incantatory mutterings late at night. Ectoplasmic manifestations of long-dead movie stars. Damp Jiffy bags in mail boxes that exhale a distinct scent of rotting marine life, with return addresses in a certain Massachusetts seaport; envelopes addressed to 221b Baker Street marked Return To Sender. So I'm as pleased as Mr Punch that you've managed to winkle him out of there and honour him this Halloween, in Saratoga Springs. It's the only kind of holiday he'll take, and it'll do him a power of good.

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