Where the Nightmare Ends

Edited by and with an AFTERWORD from Ramsey Campbell
COVER ART  Vince Haig

Robin Wood was and remains one of the greatest writers about film. He had an abiding interest in horror as an expression of radicalism. In 1979 he and his partner Richard Lippe curated a programme of sixty horror films at the Toronto International Film Festival, and they provided an accompanying monograph, American Nightmare: Essays on the Horror Film. In his novel Where the Nightmare Ends Wood made his own contribution to the genre. “Normality is threatened by the monster” was his famous formulation for the field. It’s designed to raise questions, and so is this novel, where an assorted group of folk as flawed as us are trapped on an island where a search for perfection has created something monstrous. How do we define normality and the monstrous? Wood suggests many answers as he leads us through psychological unease to suspense and dread and ultimately outright horror, not soon forgotten. No admirer of his work, and no horror aficionado, should miss his novel.

AUTHOR BIO

Robert Paul Wood, known as Robin Wood, was an English film critic and educator who lived in Canada for much of his life. He wrote books on the works of Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, Claude Chabrol, Satyajit Ray, Ingmar Bergman, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Arthur Penn, as well as several eclectic collections of criticism (Personal Views: Exploration in Film, Sexual Politics and Narrative Film: Hollywood and Beyond, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan… and Beyond) and monographs on Rio Bravo and The Wings of the Dove. His novel Trammel Up the Consequence was published posthumously in 2011. He was a long-time member—and co-founder, along with other colleagues at Toronto’s York University—of the editorial collective which publishes CineAction!, a film theory magazine. He was Professor Emeritus at York University, Toronto, and the recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. He died in 2009.

Hardcover