David Britton

For the basketball player, see David Britton (basketball).

David Britton is a British author, artist, and publisher. In the 1970s he founded Weird Fantasy and Crucified Toad, a series of small press magazines of the speculative fiction and horror genres. In 1976 Britton co-founded (with Michael Butterworth) the controversial publishing house Savoy Books.

Biography

Britton is the creator and script writer of the Lord Horror and Meng and Ecker comics published by Savoy. These characters also appear in a trio of novels written by Britton: Lord Horror (1990), Motherfuckers: The Auschwitz of Oz (1996), and Baptised in the Blood of Millions (2001). The first book, Lord Horror, (co-authored with Michael Butterworth) is the last book to date to be banned in the United Kingdom.

"Lord Horror," Britton has said, "was so unique and radical, I expected to go to prison for it. I always thought that if you wrote a truly dangerous book -- something dangerous would happen to you. Which is one reason there are so few really dangerous books around. Publishers play at promoting dangerous books, whether they're Serpent's Tail or Penguin. All you get is a book vetted by committee, never anything radically imaginative or offensive that will take your fucking head off. Ironically, I think it would do other authors a power of good if they had to account for their books by going to prison -- there are far too many bad books being published!"

Keith Seward has produced a book looking at the Lord Horror stories called Horror Panegyric which features excerpts as well as a prologue examining the tales.^[1]

References

1. ^ Horror Panegyric

External links

• BBC Article on the Obscene Publications Act of 1857 Notes that David Britton's Lord Horror was the last novel to be banned under the act.
• "If Hitler had won World War Two…" by Michael Moorcock Declares that Britton's Lord Horror series is the only "alternate history" to confront "Nazism with appropriate originality and passion."

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Name	Britton, David
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