He was born in London and raised in Aller, Somerset. He studied English at the University of Sussex.
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Newman's first two books, both non-fiction, were published in 1985, and go some way to demonstrating his range. Ghastly Beyond Belief: The Science Fiction and Fantasy Book of Quotations, co-written with his friend Neil Gaiman, is a light-hearted tribute to entertainingly bad prose in fantastic fiction. Nightmare Movies: A critical history of the horror film, 1968-88 is a serious history of horror films.
Nightmare Movies was followed by Wild West Movies: Or How the West Was Found, Won, Lost, Lied About, Filmed and Forgotten (1990) and Millennium Movies: End of the World Cinema (1999). Newman's non-fiction also includes the BFI Companion to Horror (1996) and Horror: 100 Best Books (co-editor, 1988), which won a Bram Stoker Award for Best Non Fiction.
Newman's first published novel was The Night Mayor (1989), set in a virtual reality based on old black-and-white detective movies. In the same year, as "Jack Yeovil", he began contributing to a series of novels published by Games Workshop, set in one of their role-playing game settings.
Newman's most famous novel is Anno-Dracula, published in 1992. The novel is set in 1888, during Jack the Ripper's killing spree — but a different 1888 to the one we know, in which Dracula succeeded in becoming the ruler of England. In the novel, fictional characters — not only from Dracula, but also from other works of Victorian era fiction — appear alongside historical persons. Anno-Dracula was followed by a series of novels and shorter works in the same setting (although not the same time period — as of 2003, the series has reached the 1980s). Some of the short stories are available online: see below.
Other novels include Life's Lottery (1999), in which the protagonist's life story is determined by the reader's choices, The Quorum (1994), Jago (1991), and Bad Dreams (1990).
Newman is also a prolific writer of short stories. His short story collections include The Original Dr. Shade, and Other Stories (1994), Famous Monsters (1995), Seven Stars (2000), Where the Bodies are Buried (2000), and Unforgivable Stories (2000). There is also Back in the USSA (1997), a collection of stories co-written with Eugene Byrne, set in an alternate history where the United States had a communist revolution in the early twentieth century and Russia didn't.
The short story "Famous Monsters", in which a Martian gets a job in Hollywood, was included on an information package sent to Mars by a US-Russian probe in 1994.
Non-fiction
Fiction
Related topics
External links