No, they were not, as they’d have been the first to tell you. Though all three of them were writing books in the same time period, the cults around all three of them didn’t start to solidify until the mainstream paperback horror crash of the early 90’s. That’s when Leisure Books became the “last man standing” in the New York horror paperback scene. And most of the rest of the action went underground, into the small press arena.

[NOTE:At this point, I was out of the game, in career-crash hibernation from horror publishing. So I’d look to Brian Keene and other keen observers of that period for more authoritative histories of the mid-to-late 90’s.]

Nope. I know it’s a popular misconception, but it’s a misconception nonetheless. Fact is, Craig and I were completely unaware of Clive while writing The Light at the End, and didn’t actually even hear of him until midway into The Cleanup, when Stephen King announced him as “the future of horror.”

Of course, I immediately needed to check him out, by grabbing the British versions of the first three Books of Blood, with Clive’s original art on the covers. And, of course, I was completely blown away by the audacity and brilliance of his visions, the playful dance of his language, and just the whole fucking thing.

Then we met him, and got along famously, mutually reveling in the fact that we were blowing in doors. But by then, we’d known Dave Schow and Joe Lansdale. And I can tell you for a fact, they were doing wild shit we admired before they had any idea who Clive was, either.

So, no. It’s a nice story. But it has no basis in fact.

I would say no. I mean, Live Girls was a pretty kickass novel. But it wasn’t about breaking new ground in the way the rest of us seemed hellbent on doing. 

In that sense, it was far more in line with the kind of horny hardcore horror pulp that Richard Laymon was doing. Which is, I think, one of the reasons why Dick Laymon got semi-lumped in with the splatterpunks as well. (It didn’t help de-confuse things that Laymon’s “Mess Hall” wound up in the first Book of the Dead.)

By Crucifax Autumn, Ray got a lot more ambitious and deep. So one can arguably make the case. But I would suggest that he rode the wave more than pioneered it. 

That said, I think that – at least stylistically – Ray Garton was a much bigger influence on extreme horror than Skipp & Spector, or Schow, or Barker. And that Lansdale’s voice had more of an influence as well.

Now this is interesting. Because RC actually toured with Schow, Skipp, and Spector on the college circuit at the end, and was often included in articles about the scene. He was super-smart. He was super-cool. He was undeniably cutting edge, and we were all very excited by each other’s works.

But stylistically, he was almost the polar opposite of the maximalist wildass shit we were doing. His stuff was micro-surgically minimalist, specializing in short-shorts that often barely cracked 1,000 words. And where we made things explicit, he worked almost exclusively with veiled but ruthless implication. Not a lot of visible blood on his literary screen. And very few monsters that weren’t 100% human.

Again, this is where the practical, precision-based value of funny words like splatterpunk starts to completely go off the rails. Past a certain point, it can mean almost anything. Which is admittedly where all the confusion comes in.

I mean, Paul Sammon certainly thought so when he put out Splatterpunks II. And I kind of agreed. They all certainly started breaking in at about the same time – toward the end of the splatterpunk era – with very distinct and wildly disparate voices, each entirely their own. From a groundbreaking standpoint, I would put them in the “spontaneous eruption of the arts” category as well. Which absolutely counts for a lot.

That said, Kathe Koja’s brilliant work was even less bloody than RC Matheson’s. But her first novel, The Cipher, was more authentically “punk” in sensibility than the rest of us dudes combined. Likewise with Poppy Z. Brite’s debut Lost Souls, which to my mind is the first great “goth” horror novel (in, say, the spirit of The Cure or Siouxsie and the Banshees). Both phenomenal writers with phenomenal voices. But were they splatterpunk? Not really. They were something else that remained unnamed.

When Nancy Collins rolled in with Sunglasses After Dark, and her punk vampire heroine Sonya Blue, that was an easy call. It if wasn’t splatterpunk proper, it was definitely surfing the wave. And Beth Massie – who broke in with shockingly hardcore stories like “Hooked on Buzzer” and “Abed” (in our Book of the Dead follow-up, Still Dead) – was definitively paving the way for the upcoming wave of “extreme”. She is, for my money, still the hardest-punching woman in horror I know.

[NOTE: I know that Poppy is now Billy Martin, and therefore a he, which I think is a beautiful thing. But I list him under this section because – back in the day, when all of  this happened – there was no one more feminine-presenting than Poppy Z. And that was who I knew.]