Editor�s Note

My grandmother was a voracious reader. When she wasn�t puttering around her garden or taking care of the innumerable foundling dogs that she�d adopted, she could be found on her bed with her bifocals perched at the end of her nose, poring over the newspaper or one of the many magazines she was a fan of.

While she loved to read, her choices were anything but highbrow. She was a particular aficionado of the lurid pulp magazines that featured horrifying crime stories. With titles like True Detective, True Crime Monthly and Murder Most Foul, the pages of those magazines were full of ghastly, mostly true stories of renegade biker gangs terrorising college co-eds, grisly crimes of passion and the latest serial killer�s reign of terror.

Every issue was fully illustrated with gory black-and-white crime-scene photos. The pictures are what I most remember most about those magazines. The images on the cover were scary enough to ensure that I never opened the pages to see what horrors waited inside.

My parents wondered aloud many times how my grandmother, a widow who lived alone in an isolated house outside of town, could read those stories and still manage to sleep at night. Maybe she just liked being scared, or maybe she simply never considered that anything like what was reported in those stories could ever happen to her.

I was recently reminded of my grandmother and her appetite for true-life terror as I perused my DVD collection. It was a typical evening � I was home alone with my dogs and trying to decide whether I wanted to pass the time with Silence of the Lambs, Helter Skelter, Zodiac, Seven, Red Dragon, Psycho or Sweeney Todd. Or maybe I was more in the mood for a TV series, something like Millennium or Dexter. It turns out that there are a lot of serial killers on my shelves.

I realised that evening that the medium might have changed from pulp paper to optical disc, but all that really separates me from my grandmother is 25 years, a flowered housecoat and an ill-fitting set of dentures.

Like my grandmother, I�m not losing any sleep, and I�m really not concerned what people may think of my taste for terror. I guess it couldn�t hurt to invest in a few comedies, though � something like Cannibal! The Musical, maybe.

Sean Vale
Editor
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