About

Schow (b. 1955) is an American author of horror novels, short stories, and screenplays. E would prefer not to be remembered solely for writing the screenplay for The Crow, assembling the exhaustive Outer Limits Companion, or coining the term "splatterpunk" (although he is perversely proud of getting that word into the Oxford English Dictionary). His short stories have been regularly selected for over 25 volumes of "Year’s Best" anthologies across three decades and have won the World Fantasy Award and the ultra-rare Dimension Award from Twilight Zone magazine.

1955) is an American author of horror novels, short stories, and screenplays. He would prefer not to be remembered solely for writing the screenplay for The Crow, assembling the exhaustive Outer Limits Companion, or coining the term "splatterpunk" (although he is perversely proud of getting that word into the Oxford English Dictionary).

A low-level drug runner named Cruz finds himself exiled from sunny Miami to frigid Chicago He holes up in a decrepit rooming-house, the Kenilworth Arms, in the dead of winter here he meets Jonathan, a yuppie struggling to get over a failed romance, and Jamaica, a prostitute on the payroll of the drug kingpin Bauhaus.

When Cruz and Jamaica are forced to drop two kilos of cocaine down a ventilation shaft in the rooming-house to escape a police raid, strange things begin to happen Schow's The Shaft features a unique mingling of supernatural horror with the very real dangers involved in drug-running, creating a uniquely compelling atmosphere mid the inexplicable terrors of a building that seems weirdly animate and of some loathsome monstrosity lurking in the bottom of the ventilation shaft, the pursuit of Cruz, Jonathan, and Jamaica by Bauhaus and his minions seems by turns insignificant and chillingly immediate.

Aul Wilson, new artwork by David Ho, a new afterword by Schow, and the original short story, as well as images of old editions of the book aul Wilson, and David Ho Long unavailable, and regarded as one of the finest horror novels ever written, this definitive edition, beautifully.

Edition Details

• The author’s preferred text.
• Limited to 300 copies, each signed by artist David Ho, F. Paul Wilson, and David J. Schow.
• New introduction by F. Paul Wilson.
• New afterword by David J. Schow.
• The complete original short story, on which the novel is based.
• Double-page spread interior illustrations.
• Striking full-color, wraparound dustjacket printed on Mohawk Carnival stock.
• Four color sleeve.
• Two-color printed endpapers.
• Full cloth cover with image inset on front board.
• Ribbon marker, head and tail bands, full Dutch cloth binding.

External Links

• The Shaft. Centipede Press page for The Shaft
• David J. Schow (ISFDB). ISFDB entry for David J. Schow