In the 1980s Charles L. Grant wrote three books set in the same fictional location. The first one dealt with vampires, the second with werewolves, and the third with mummies. All are tropes of horror fiction going back to the beginning of the genre, although stories featuring mummies are in much shorter supply than vampires or werewolves. These books were all published by the Donald. M. Grant, who published many horror writers in the 1980s and 1990s, ranging from Charles L. Grant (no relation, I think) to Stephen King, as well as a slew of other writers.
Charles L. Grant was a noted writer and editor from the 1970s through the 1990s (he died on September 15, 2006 at the all-too-young age of 64). My introduction to Grant’s fiction came in the form of Borderlands Press’s Little Books series — A Little Black Book of Quiet Horror (2019). For many years I’d owned the second edition on Dark Harvest’s Night Visions #2, which Grant edited (he also edited the long-running horror anthology, Shadows, but I never read any of those books). The Borderlands Press book opened my eyes to Grant’s own fiction. I then bought a copy of The Soft Whisper of the Dead (1982), the first book in his trilogy of books set in Oxnard Station. It dealt with vampires. This year I bought both The Dark Cry of the Moon (1985), set in the same location and centered around werewolves and The Long Night of the Grave (1986), the last of the trio, which incorporated mummies to that same location.
The publisher, Donald M. Grant, issued both trade and limited editions, and I went for the trade editions. According to online sources, Grant wrote several other novels, and his Shadows anthology appeared in multiple years, and yet I don’t have a single copy of those books. In the 1980s and 1990s I was more into science fiction. Now I’m more into the mystery genre, although I also try to pick up and read books published by various small press houses from the 1980s and early 1990s. There’s an overlap, somehow, and Grant slots right into that overlap. I wish I’d known more about him earlier, rather than twenty years after he died. But, that’s how it goes these days, as I start to discover fiction from a quarter century ago.
