Someone—probably editor and journalist Jo Fletcher—introduced me to a man wearing a white hat and a crisp black suit. He had a handlebar moustache and a pocket watch on an honest-to-goodness watch chain across his waistcoat. He was drinking a white wine spritzer and had total self-assurance. He was twenty-three, but came across somehow as much older. He looked like he should be carrying a swordstick, although, for reasons I was not to discover for some time, he wasn’t.

Kim and I were both young and we were both quite full of ourselves—in hindsight we were probably insufferable. We compared credentials: he’d just had a story accepted by Interzone (it was, if memory serves, “Patricia’s Profession”) and I’d just had a story rejected by Interzone and accepted by Imagine magazine. (And his story is in this collection, and is pretty damn good, and I just reread mine and decided not to include it in a collection of my short fiction because it was pretty terrible.) We were both young, although with me it showed, and with Kim it didn’t, and we were both hungry.

And then the conversation lurched around to books we were going to write. Kim started telling me about a book he had planned called The Set. It was going to be about giant badgers going around England eating people. And I told Kim that I thought I’d quite like to do a book of science fiction quotations.

“That sounds like a good idea,” said Kim. “You can do the books bit. I’ll write the film section.” Kim was a film reviewer and critic, writing for City Limits and the British Film Institute Journal. He’d already written a book called Nightmare Movies, which had yet to be published by a soon-to-be-bankrupt and rather dodgy publisher (and which would eventually be revised and updated and become the definitive reference work on post-Hammer horror).

That’s what I remember, anyway. That was how Kim entered my life. So we wrote an outline for our proposed book of quotations, and knowing Kim, and knowing me, he finished his half of the outline before I started to write mine. We sent the outline for Ghastly Beyond Belief out to a few publishers, and Arrow bought it, and my collaboration with Kim Newman had officially begun.

It lasted for about five years.

Kim was always the senior member of the partnership. He had a credit card and savoir faire. He had an electric typewriter. He was also the powerhouse—our work habits were very different: I have always tended to wait for deadlines, while Kim invariably does things way before deadlines, and then does something else in the time left over.

He got his half of the book finished a couple of months ahead of deadline. I got my half delivered the month after the deadline. It was pretty much the pattern of what was to come.

In the biographies at the beginning of Ghastly Beyond Belief, our editor, the lovely and talented Faith Brooker, described us both as “aspiring novelists.” I don’t think we were. We were young writers with the unshakable (and unshaken) confidence that amongst the things we’d probably wind up writing would be novels. But we were looking forward to writing everything.