James Herbert & Basil Copper (& Iain Banks)

It's not been a good month for the world of storytelling. James Herbert died on 20 March, followed by Basil Copper on 3 April. In between, the terrible news about Iain Banks. All of these writers made an indelible impression on me over the years. I discovered Herbert in the 1980s, when I read The Magic Cottage. Recently I returned to the JH canon and read Once, the first of his books I'd read in many a year. Likewise, I first read Basil Copper in the mid 80s, as part of my then largely Lovecraft-influenced reading. The Great White Space and Into the Silence are two of the very best novels in the Cthulhu tradition, while Necropolis is a corking piece of Victorian Gothic. I also had the pleasure of meeting Basil several times in London: he was a gent of the old school, modest, warm and funny. I had long planned to interview him about his Lovecraft-inspired work, but the chance never arose, sadly.