Kim James Newman (born 31 July 1959) is an English journalist, film critic, and fiction writer. He focuses on film history and horror fiction both of which he attributes to seeing Tod Browning's Dracula at the age of eleven and alternative history. He has won the Bram Stoker Award, the International Horror Guild Award, and the BSFA award.

Early life

Kim Newman was born 31 July 1959 in Brixton, London, the son of Bryan Michael Newman and Julia Christen Newman, both potters. His sister, Sasha, was born in 1961, and their mother died in 2003. Newman attended primary school in Brixton and then, in 1966, the family moved to Aller, Somerset and Newman attended Huish Episcopi Primary School in Langport. He was then educated at Dr. Morgan's Grammar School for Boys in Bridgwater, and acted in school plays and with the Bridgwater Youth Theatre. In 1980, he graduated from the University of Sussex with a degree in English.

Non-fiction

Newman began his career writing for the magazines City Limits and Knave. His first two books were the non-fiction Ghastly Beyond Belief: The Science Fiction and Fantasy Book of Quotations (1985), co-written with his friend Neil Gaiman, a light-hearted tribute to entertainingly bad prose in fantastic fiction and Nightmare Movies: A Critical History of the Horror Film, 1968–88 (1988) is a serious history of horror films. An expanded edition, an update of his overview of post-1968 genre cinema, was published in 2011. 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).

Newman and Stephen Jones jointly edited Horror: 100 Best Books, the 1988 horror volume in Xanadu's 100 Best series and Horror: Another 100 Best Books, a 2005 sequel from Carroll & Graf, U.S. publisher of the series. The books comprise 100 essays by 100 horror writers about 100 horror books and both won the annual Bram Stoker Award for Best Non-Fiction.

Newman is a contributing editor to the UK film magazine Empire, as well as writing the monthly segment, "Kim Newman's Video Dungeon", in which he gives often scathing reviews of recently released straight-to-video horror films. He contributes to Rotten Tomatoes, Venue, Video Watchdog ('The Perfectionist's Guide to Fantastic Video') and Sight and Sound. Newman is the author of the Doctor Who entry in the British Film Institute's book series on TV Classics. In 2018, Newman became the chief writer on the BBC Four documentary series Mark Kermode's Secrets of Cinema.

Newman participated in the 2012 Sight & Sound critics' poll, where he listed his ten favorite films, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Apocalypse Now, A Canterbury Tale, Céline and Julie Go Boating, Citizen Kane, Duck Amuck, Let's Scare Jessica to Death, Mulholland Drive, Notorious, and To Have and Have Not.

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, using the pen name Jack Yeovil, he began contributing to a series of novels published by Games Workshop, set in the world of their Warhammer and Dark Future wargaming and role-playing games. Games Workshop's fiction imprint Black Flame returned the Dark Future books to print in 2006, publishing Demon Download, Krokodil Tears, Comeback Tour and the expanded, 250-page version of the short story "Route 666".

Anno Dracula was published in 1992. The novel is set in 1888, during Jack the Ripper's killing spree—but a different 1888, in which Dracula became the ruler of England. Anno Dracula was followed by the Anno Dracula series of novels and shorter works, that followed the same alternative history. The fourth novel in the series was published in 2013 as Johnny Alucard.

Other novels include Life's Lottery (1999), in which the protagonist's life story is determined by the reader's choices (an adult version of the Choose Your Own Adventure series of children's books), The Quorum (1994), Jago (1991) and Bad Dreams (1990).

Newman wrote a Doctor Who novella, Time and Relative in 2001.

Novels

• The Night Mayor (1989)

• Bad Dreams (1990)

• Jago (1991)

• Bloody Students (1991)

• The Quorum (1994)

• Life's Lottery (1999)

Anno Dracula series

• Anno Dracula (1992)

• The Bloody Red Baron (1995)

• Dracula Cha Cha Cha (also published as Judgment of Tears: Anno Dracula 1959) (1998)

• Johnny Alucard (2013)

• One Thousand Monsters (2017)

• Anno Dracula 1999: Daikaiju (2019)

• Time and Relative (2001)

• Moriarty: The Hound of the D'Urbervilles (Titan Books, 2011; )

• An English Ghost Story (2014)

• The Secrets of Drearcliffe Grange School (2015)

• Angels of Music (2016)

• The Haunting of Drearcliff Grange School (2018)

• Daikaiju (2019)

• Something More Than Night (2021)

• Model Actress Whatever (2026)

Collections

• In Dreams (1992, with Paul J. McAuley)

• The Original Dr. Shade, and Other Stories (1994)

• Famous Monsters (1995)

• Back in the USSA (1997) (with Eugene Byrne)

• Seven Stars (2000)

• Where the Bodies are Buried (2000)

• Unforgivable Stories (2000)

• The Vaccinator / Andy Warhol's Dracula (2000, with Michael Marshall Smith)

• Der Fluch der Sieben Sterne (Seven Stars, published in Germany, 2004)

• Dead Travel Fast (2005)

Diogenes Club series

• The Man from the Diogenes Club (2006)

• The Secret Files of the Diogenes Club (2007)

• Mysteries of the Diogenes Club (2010)

• Anno Dracula 1899 and Other Stories (2017)

Comics

• Anno Dracula – 1895: Seven Days in Mayhem (Titan Comics, 2017, five issues) with artist Paul McCaffrey.

As Jack Yeovil

Warhammer setting

• Drachenfels (1989)

• Bloody Students (1991)

• Beasts in Velvet (1991)

• Genevieve Undead (1993, three novellas published as a single book)

• Silver Nails (2002, short stories)

• The Vampire Genevieve (2005, compilation of the above four books)

Dark Future setting

• Demon Download (1990)

• Krokodil Tears (1991)

• Comeback Tour (The Sky Belongs to the Stars) (1991)

• Route 666 (1994)

• Orgy of the Blood Parasites (1994)

• "The Big Fish" in Shadows over Innsmouth (1994)

• Comeback Tour (2007)

Non-Fiction

• Nightmare Movies: Wide Screen Horror Since 1968 (1984)

• Ghastly Beyond Belief: The Science Fiction and Fantasy Book of Quotations (1985) (with Neil Gaiman)

• Horror: 100 Best Books (1988) (with Stephen Jones)

• Nightmare Movies: A Critical History of the Horror Film, 1968–1988 (1988)

• The BFI Companion to Horror (1996)

• Millennium Movies aka Apocalypse Movies: End of the World Cinema (1999)

• Cat People (1999)

• Science Fiction / Horror: A Sight and Sound Reader (2002)

• Horror: Another 100 Best Books (2005) (with Stephen Jones)

• BFI TV Classics: Doctor Who (2005)

• Nightmare Movies: Horror on Screen Since the 1960s (2011)

• Horror!: The Definitive Companion to the Most Terrifying Movies Ever Made (2013) (with James Marriott)

• Quatermass and the Pit (2014)

Awards

Newman has been nominated for the Rondo Hatton Classic Horror Award six times and for the World Fantasy Award seven times.

Explanatory notes

References

Citations

General and cited references

• Clute, John and John Grant (1997). The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. New York: St. Martin's Press. .

External links

• – official site

• – Newman's film related writings archive (ongoing project)

• Original publication date unknown.

• Kim Newman at Rotten Tomatoes