The party was long and loud and the partygoers (old hippies to a man) were playing old hippy music.

We started talking about hippies, lying in the darkness. And we began to rant about commune life and going to San Francisco and putting flour in our hair. It was a kind of free-form improvised stand-up routine, only we were lying on the floor.

The next day we wrote down what we could remember of the rant, added a plot of sorts, called it “Peace and Love and All That Stuff” and sent it off to a magazine, and became the Peace and Love Corporation.

Clive Barker was fascinated by the Peace and Love Corporation. At one point he announced that he was going to write a story called “Threshold,” in which Kim, Stefan and I would be creatures from a far-future world beyond the boundaries of pleasure and pain, come to the here and now to hunt down a fugitive. When he finally wrote it it was called The Hellbound Heart, and was later filmed as Hellraiser. Which may mean that Kim Newman was the original inspiration for Pinhead. They are, after all, both snappy dressers.

Gradually Kim and I became successful. It was a slow, odd process. We’d paid our dues, I suppose, and it was our time. Kim wrote novels under his own name, and, emulating the American pulp writers he admires, he would write cheerfully subversive novels and short stories under his Jack Yeovil pseudonym, in a week or less.

We stopped collaborating. The markets that we’d been writing for had dried up, or died, and we were both too busy—Kim wrote more novels and short stories, reviewed movies on breakfast television, and became a star, and I was off mostly writing comic books. The eighties were over, and the Peace and Love Corporation bank account was formally closed.

It’s a time I still don’t feel I have a handle on: one cannot exactly peer through rose-colored spectacles at those lost halcyon days of the mideighties. There is little nostalgia for that era, except in the most general terms, remembering the hustling, the fun of a time when we had little more than confidence, hubris, and the terrifying certainty that we were destined for interesting things to keep us going.

Over ten years later Kim is still an advocate of cultural fusion and unself-conscious postmodernism—the references and correlations and nods between high and low culture in the stories in this book, and in the rest of Kim’s oeuvre, aren’t there to impress; they’re there because that’s how Kim is and what he’s made of. He knows, as it were, his shit. His stories are a wild ride that will take you places you’ve never been. Sit back and enjoy yourself. It is to be assumed that you will miss some of the jokes, some of the references, some of the fleeting images in the collage of movie stills and videos and old books, of half-forgotten actors and almost wholly forgotten TV serials. Don’t worry about it.