The horror section now appears to comprise of the following:
A handful of Stephen King books (none of the “classics” either),
3 Dean Koontz books,
A metric ton of teen vampire books by several authors I’ve never heard of. All the covers have photos of young ladies (presumably the protagonists) on them and are all recommended by other authors of the same sort of rubbish.
The the heck is going on? No Ramsey Campbell, no Cliver Barker(!), no Graham Masterton or any other “proper” horror authors but plenty of this sort of rubbish that should be refiled in the teen literature section.
It’s bad enough half the sci fi shelves are fulled with franchised tat like Star Wars, BSG, Dr Who, Warhammer and Trek but Waterstones seem to have signed some sort of deal with Orbit books as the shelves are now packed with tens of unknown authors who can’t write for toffee at the expense of well established quality authors.
In amongst the Star Wars tie in merchandising it might be a sodding good idea to stock a copy of Jack Vance’s Tales of Dying Earth if you have a large display of hardback copies of the tribute to Jack Vance’s Tales of Dying Earth. It’s not rocket science (although they could probably order you a copy of a book about rocket science if the Bang Goes the Theory! tie in book from BBC Worldwide doesn’t cover it) is it?
And don’t get me started on our local library, which seems to want to enter some sort of competition with Blockbusters in the DVD rental area…
I shall take a deep breath and go for a lie down.