William Sloane (1906-1974) was born in Plymouth, Massachusetts.
After graduating from Princeton University in 1929 he enjoyed
modest success writing supernatural and fantasy dramas. By the end
of the 1930s he had published his only two novels, To Walk the
Night (1937) and The Edge of Running Water (1939). During the 1950s
he edited two science-fiction anthologies, Space, Space, Space-
Stories About the Time When Men Will Be Adventuring to the Stars
(1953) and Stories for Tomorrow (1954). Sloane taught at the Bread
Loaf Writers' Conference for more than twenty-five years and was
responsible for inviting many notable writers, including John
Williams and John Ciardi, to join the faculty. In 1983 a collection
of his Bread Loaf lectures was published as The Craft of Writing.
For much of his career Sloane held numerous editorial positions,
including a stint at his own publishing house, and from 1955 until
his death he was the managing director of Rutgers University
Press.
Stephen King is the author of more than fifty novels, hundreds of
stories, and several works of nonfiction, including On Writing- A
Memoir of the Craft. Among his most recent books are The Bazaar of
Bad Dreams, a collection of stories and novellas, and Finders
Keepers, the second book in a trilogy of novels featuring retired
homicide detective Bill Hodges. Much of his fiction has been
adapted for film and television, including Carrie, based on his
first published novel, Misery, Under the Dome, and The Shawshank
Redemption.
“‘To Walk the Night’ and ‘The Edge of Running Water’ are elegant
and serenely paced, and they’re light on both the overt shocks of a
King story and the overheated proses of a weird tale by Poe or
Lovecraft; Sloane’s manner is patient, gentlemanly. What terrifies
us, finally, in both these books is the vastness of our ignorance
of the universe.” —Terry Rafferty, The New York Times Book
Review
"Poised between the terrors of the old world and the quantum
scientific leaps of the new, both novels are modern Promethean
legends...Sloane pulls out all the stops to spin a diverting yarn,
incorporating aspects of mystery, fantasy, science fiction, noir
and horror, and yet his clear-eyed style is more immediate and far
less mannered than the purple prose of that high priest of cosmic
horror, H.P. Lovecraft.” —The Seattle Times
"The Sloane book is distinguished not only by the admiring
introduction from Stephen King, but by the second novel in the
book, The Edge of Running Water. Edge is one of the great American
horror novels, mysteriously overlooked and still extremely
effective in its blend of witty, realist dialogue and overwhelming
cosmic horror....Sloane’s measured prose and gift for describing
nature and the supernatural make The Edge of Running Water a work
of realism in conflict with awe….I can’t overrate Sloane’s work in
the pantheon of American horror.” —Naben Ruthnum, National
Post
"As the editor of two SF anthologies and director of Rutgers
University Press, Sloane would easily have made a name for himself
in the speculative fiction world even if he had not written these
two tremendous novels. Reprinted for the first time in years, 'To
Walk the Night' and 'The Edge of Running Water' blend SF and horror
in a manner wholly unheard of when they were originally published
in the 1930s….Sloane’s eerie, exquisitely descriptive prose is
influenced by Gothic literature as well as contemporary scientific
theory….These all-but-forgotten texts make excellent reading for
any fan of classic SF or eldritch horror.” —Publishers Weekly,
starred review
“The reader intuits what is happening all along, but the
presentiment won't prepare for how and when the key moments happen,
even though the most horrible event is told to you in the first few
pages…There is something Lovecraftian in the overall aspect and
motif of To Walk the Night, but as great as Lovecraft was, he never
managed this sort of emotion and loss, combined with tension.”
—Mikal Gilmore
“The reissue of these two remarkable novels is long overdue. . . .
I can think of no other novels exactly like these two, either in
style or substance. My only regret is that William Sloane did not
continue. . . . Yet we must be grateful for what we have, which is
a splendid rediscovery. These two novels are best read after dark,
I think, possibly on an autumn night with a strong wind blowing the
leaves around outside.” —Stephen King
“With its witty dialogue, burnished glimpses of affluence and art,
and eerily poignant ending, To Walk the Night reads remarkably
like a contemporary thriller… Like Shirley Jackson, Sloane
masterfully describes the paranoia and close-mindedness of an
isolated rural community when outsiders take up residence… After
reading both of these elegant, disquieting novels, one can marvel
that they escaped mainstream attention for so long and rejoice that
they’re back in print.”—Elizabeth Hand, Washington Post
“Remarkable novels…unabashedly literary.”—Jonathan Sturgeon,
Flavorwire
“Age dulls our capacity for wonder . . . and we are still deeply
grateful to any artist who can revive it within us. I love To Walk
the Night for the glimmering it gave me of this universe as older
and stranger and more terrible than I can imagine, the vertiginous
sense of the world turning under my feet and the awful abyss
falling away overhead. And I love The Edge of Running Water because
this book made me genuinely afraid not of death, but of the dead, a
far more primal and magical fear. And because when I first read,
after dark in an isolated cabin, Sloane’s description of the noise
the unseen machine produces, it gave me an authentic case of the
willies.” —Tim Kreider, Baltimore City Paper
Praise for To Walk the Night:
"To Walk the Night is not, as its title might seem to suggest, a
mere ghsot story. Its central idea is at once less usual and more
horrible, but what that central idea is the reader must be allowed
to find out for himself. The atmosphere of tense, apparently
unreasonable dread and fear has been well worked up, and the climax
skillfully developed....Though the story might be truthfully
described as an extremely tall yarn, the reader, breathlessly
turning the pages, forgets his twentieth-cenutry incredulity until
the tale is finished." --L. M. Field, The New York Times
"An absorbing and impenetrable problem, a group of finely developed
characters, and a terrifying solution that fights its way up to the
surface and makes you believe it." --N. L. Rothman, Saturday Review
of Literature
"Worthy of prompt attention by all and sundry; two strange deaths,
a most exciting batch of superscience, and a fantastic solution
that should knock you cold." --Will Cuppy, New York
Herald-Tribune
"A supernatural story that is neither sensational nor lurid, of an
intelligence that borrowed human form and brought tragedy in its
wake during two years on earth." --Kirkus Reviews
"This is a novel that has to be experienced, not described....this
novel is still as believable now as i must have been back in the
1930s. It is a story that H. P. Lovecraft could have written."
--Robert Weinberg
Praise for The Edge of Running Water:
"Want to learn how to write a horror novel? Then read this
book...It is told by a master writer, who didn't need tricks or
distractions to fool his readers." --Robert Weinberg
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