Jeff Rovin’s Vespers involved a police detective and a zoologist who discovered that millions of mutant killer bats had migrated to Manhattan. It was reportedly “soon to be a major motion picture”. In Dust by scientist Charles Pellegrino, a maverick palaeobiologist discovered that Mother Nature was attempting to wipe-out mankind through a series of natural plagues and disasters. Red Shadows by Yvonne Navarro was a sequel to the author’s Final Impact and set on a post-apocalyptic Earth that no longer rotated.

Frances Gordon’s Changeling was based on the Rumpelstiltskin fairy story, and The Pit and the Pendulum and Frankenstein were the latest erotic reworkings of horror classics in The Darker Passions series by Amarantha Knight (Nancy Kilpatrick).

Originally called Dracula Cha Cha Cha until the American publisher requested a change of title, Judgment of Tears: Anno Dracula 1959 was the third in Kim Newman’s acclaimed vampire series that mixed fact with fiction. Set in Rome on the eve of the wedding of Vlad, Count Dracula, to Moldavian princess Asa Vajda, the vampire elders of the Eternal City were falling victim to a murderer known as the Crimson Executioner.

The undead Saint-Germaine was involved in a plague in 14th century France in Blood Roses by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, and Sisters of the Night: The Angry Angel by the same author was the first in a packaged trilogy about Dracula’s vampire “brides”, illustrated by Christopher H. Bing. Vampyrrhic by Simon Clark concerned bloodsuckers nesting in a village in North Yorkshire, while a group of people inside a ring of standing stones were hurled back in time to a bloody past in the same author’s The Fall.