The Painted Bride

Stephen Gallagher's newest novel The Painted Bride has recently been published, and thanks to Amazon I have now added it to my bookshelves, ensuring that my collection of Gallagher novels is once again complete (for more on this see my Nightmare with Angel post).

As with all of Gallagher's writing, The Painted Bride is a compelling read. He's one of very few authors whose books I would describe as ‘unputdownable’. I started reading the book on the way home from work (unusually I happened to be catching the bus on the day it arrived in the mail), and I finished it at home later that evening. I never intended to get through it that quickly - it simply would not let me go.

The Painted Bride is not just a great read; it's also a beautifully presented book. It's a hardcover from Subterranean Press, limited to just 750 copies, all individually hand-numbered and signed by Gallagher, bound with textured cloth endpapers and wrapped in a suitably moody painted dustjacket by Edward Miller.

What's particularly significant for me about this book is that I've been waiting for it for nearly a decade. I used to be the customer orders manager for the Whitcoulls bookstore chain some years ago and I had access to a very useful electronic database called Bookfind which had rather thorough data on all published and upcoming books. Naturally I would regularly check up on forthcoming titles by my favourite authors. The Painted Bride would keep coming up under a search of Stephen Gallagher's works, with an ever further delayed release date.

To finally own a copy of this book after years of thwarted anticipation is the very definition of satisfaction for this fan of Gallagher's writing.

Nightmare, With Angel

I collect books by British thriller writer Stephen Gallagher. He has an extraordinarily compelling prose style and his novels are simply gripping. I own a complete collection of his books and buy each new title soon after it comes out.

Stephen Gallagher was once an author whose works could commonly be found in bookstores, but like other horror/thriller authors, he has somwhat fallen out of fashion with mainstream book publishers over the last decade, apparently due to the declining popularity of this particular genre of novels. These days Gallagher's books are published in relatively small quantities as signed, limited edition hardbacks.

Several years ago I was sorting out my overladen bookshelves and discovered to my annoyance that I was missing one of the books from my Gallagher collection, a 1992 novel called Nightmare, With Angel. I used to own this book. I remember buying it in paperback in 1993, so I suspect that I either loaned it to someone and it was never returned, or it got misplaced during several changes of residence in the mid-1990s.

No matter, I thought; I'd just pick up a replacement copy the next time I saw it in a bookstore. Of course I could have purchased one from Amazon or Ebay, but I didn't want to go to this expense for something I should be able to find relatively easily and cheaply in person. Or so I thought.

I browse new and secondhand bookshops fairly frequently, so over the last four or five years I've been looking for this Stephen Gallagher book I must have made hundreds of visits to various bookshops, always glancing over the 'G' section of the fiction range, and checking out the horror/thriller titles, if the shop happened to have a separate section. But I simply couldn't find the book anywhere. I'm not just talking about Auckland either; in that time I've been into bookshops in Wellington, Christchurch, Brisbane, Sydney, London, Blackpool, even the world-famous bookshop town Hay-on-Wye. I've seen various other Gallagher novels on the shelves - Oktober, Follower, Valley of Lights, Rain and Down River all crop up with depressing frequency, but no Nightmare, With Angel.

There was a moment early this year when I thought my quest was at an end. I visited a secondhand bookshop in Kaikoura which had a copy of the book in paperback but - cruel fate - it was in such shockingly poor condition (the bottom half of the back cover and last few pages had been torn off) that I simply couldn't bring myself to buy it. So the hunt went on.

Finally, last weekend my luck changed. Rochelle persuaded me to get up early on Saturday morning to go with her to the Variety Club book sale, a massive collection of secondhand books held each year at the Alexandra Park raceway in Epsom. I trawled through the sale, picking up a few books that interested me and was just about to finish looking when I glanced below one of the tables to one of the overflow boxes and there it was - a copy of Nightmare, With Angel, and a first edition hardback, no less. Honestly, after years of searching, time stood still for me for a moment. I simply couldn't believe my eyes. The book was in excellent condition, and what's more, when I took it up to the counter it cost me a grand total of 50 cents which hardly seemed right after all the years I’d been looking for this elusive novel.

My Stephen Gallagher collection is complete once more and my next challenge will be to kick the long ingrained habit of looking under 'G' in bookshops!