I read the first mass market paperback edition right after it came out. I am the proud owner of several editions of this book, including the fine slipcased 20th anniversary edition published by Cemetery Dance in 2012. Although it’s a book I expect the millennial generation would find ludicrous simply because the Internet makes the concept hard to swallow, as a product of its time, I think it’s a masterpiece. I loved his second novel The Mailman even more than The Revelation. That book won the Bram Stoker award for first novel.

Maybe because I felt the New York publishing establishment had validated what I had been thinking all along - this guy is good and deserves a bigger audience. Martin’s press, I felt giddy for some reason. When his first novel, The Revelation, came out in 1990 from St. He was prolific and, for my mileage, consistently good I looked forward to every story. Back then, it was hard to find a small press horror magazine that didn’t contain a Bentley Little story. His tales appeared The Horror Show, Eldritch Tales, Cavalier, Space & Time, Grue, Thin Ice, Cemetery Dance, After Hours and more. That entailed ordering sample copies from any magazine that looked promising and had an address listed in the Writer’s Market. I was a teenage author myself at the time, trying to break into the more prestigious small press magazines.

The first Bentley Little story I read was “Skin” in the Winter 1988 issue of The Horror Show. For the past decade or more, his novels were the only straight horror titles you could find on a paperback rack in the grocery store. Up until 2012, Signet published a new horror novel by Bentley Little in mass market paperback every year. Indeed, while the careers of the many perfectly good horror scribes ended up in a ditch by the mid-1990s, Little’s popularity carried him through. Bentley Little is an American author of horror fiction and, in my opinion, the last great horror author to emerge from the 1980’s horror boom.

The Store by Bentley Little