Haining ran through all the most obvious supernatural sub-genres: ghosts, ghouls, poltergeists, witches, warlocks, necromancers, werewolves, vampires, the walking dead. The era of the "Penny Blood" (the 1840s to the 1880s) brought forth The Penny Dreadful, or Strange, Horrid and Sensational Tales (1975), with quite a few strange, horrid and sensational titles such as "The Last Batch of Pies" (a tale of Sweeney Todd) and "The Arena of Blood". Gothic Tales of Terror (1972), in two hefty volumes, reprinted a treasure-chest of forgotten stories from roughly the Regency period to the Victorians. He explored, and plundered, sub-genre after sub-genre. He wasn't precious about publishers, either, and was just as happy turning out paperback originals for Sphere Books or Orbit as he was for the rather more upmarket hardback houses like Gollancz, Hodders or Sidgwick & Jackson.Ī gamekeeper who turned poacher, he began his career in local newspapers, moved to metropolitan trade journals, moved again to book publishing – where he talent-spotted Philip Pullman, and issued his first (now enormously rare) fantasy, The Haunted Storm (1972) – then exchanged an editorial director's safe seat for the perils of the freelance life, a move he never regretted. He did this by dint of sheer hard graft and the simple expedient of always having four or five volumes of stories on the boil for every one about to be issued. Peter Haining was probably the only writer ever to make a living out of editing anthologies, a means of employment that is, even today, notoriously ill-recompensed.
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