Something More than Night

Anno Dracula author Kim Newman reimagines the lives of Raymond Chandler and Boris Karloff with his signature wit in this gripping and horrifying tale of late 1930s Hollywood

Hollywood, the late 1930s.

Raymond Chandler writes detective stories for pulp magazines, and drinks more than he should. Boris Karloff plays monsters in the movies, and is a genial, cricket-playing member of the British filmland colony on the shores of the Pacific.

Both understand that these streets are dark with something more than night. Together, these English public school men in exile investigate mysterious matters in a town run by human and inhuman monsters.

Under Home House, the mock gothic mock mansion of a film mogul, is a mad science dungeon just like in the movies – where an experiment has gone dangerously wrong, or even more dangerously right. Fiery death spills onto Sunset Boulevard.

Joh Devlin, an investigator for the District Attorney's office who scores high on insubordination, and Laurel Ives, a woman with as many lives as a cat and names to match, barely escape Home House.

Fired by the DA, Devlin enlists Ray and Billy – Raymond Chandler and William Pratt (Boris Karloff) – to work the case, which threatens to expose Hollywood's most horrific secrets.

These people will find out more than they should about the way this town works. And about each other.

And, oh yes, monsters aren't just for the movies



Kim Newman is a popular and respected author and movie critic, known for his acclaimed alternate-history series, Anno Dracula. He writes regularly for Empire magazine and contributes to The Guardian, The Times, Time Out and others. He makes frequent appearances on radio and TV, and is the chief writer of the BBC TV series Mark Kermode's Secrets of Cinema. He has won the Bram Stoker, International Horror Guild, British Fantasy and British Science Fiction Awards and been nominated for the Hugo, World Fantasy, and James Herbert Awards. He lives in London.