Fortunately, if you can get over that particular trauma, the contents of these well-stuffed 447 pages are, if anything, up there with the absurdly prolific author’s best work.

Culled from a variety of sources (Fantasy Tales, Interzone, Dark Voices, the late, most definitely not lamented Fear) these pieces showcase what their author does best - and to some extent worst. They are undoubtedly clever, chock-full of unnerving wit and forehead-slapping invention which can, if left unchecked, boil over into clever-clever. That Newman sees and acknowledges the fact saves his bacon. (His little addendum to each story is charming.)

Much of this is wrapped-up in his beloved alternative histories. The trademark what if? What if... Zorro were a werewolf and that famous cut had nothing to do with a sword? What if ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle had broken down on the way to the party that left a woman dead and his career in tatters? What if Citizen Kane was less fantasy, and, for that matter, so was Hill House?

(Actually, in the case of Arbuckle, the answer seems to be a hardcore rewiring of Hollywood history and a Newman rewrite of Gone With The Wind to die for.)

Newman’s never been one to flimflam on his satire, but the Temps tale ‘Pitbull Brittan’ takes it excitingly, dangerously close to the wire. (He calls it ‘an obvious, indeed vicious, left-wing attack’.) The tale of the eponymous Bulldog-Drummond-on-steroids, Brittan is a patriot, a Falklands vet and, quite literally, a prick. Starting from the point of assuming everything the Daily Mail wrote about the Miner’s Strike was the literal truth, it’s a violent, obscene, ludicrous and hysterical historical romp, especially when Pitbull and his is pals fetch up in a northern pit village staffed by cartoon Lefties, international terrorists, and their evil, scheming hunchback leader, Scraggle.

Recently Newman’s been evolving his own novels into filmscripts, and it can be no accident that films and film-making turn up again and again in these tales. ‘Where The Bodies Are Buried’ and its sequel are about the influences of a highly successful horror franchise on it’s inspiration and its creator; and the powerful werewolf story ‘Out Of The Night’, ‘When The Full Moon Is Bright...’ has a black British writer in a Zonked-out Los Angeles to adapt his successful novel from the UK to the festering American city. Newman’s mysterious media mogul and uber-nasty Derek Leech (his best novel, The Quorum) pops in for an occasional cameo.

In a book this size there are inevitably lesser works - the cheap joke (mind, it’s a damn good cheap joke) of ‘Ratting’; the nondescript ‘Three On A Match’; the laboured smart idea of ‘The Pale Spirit People’ - but on the whole they are the shorter ones anyway. Famous Monsters is packed with more than enough ideas for a half-dozen substantial novels; a real lip-smacking four-courser of a book from a real smart-arse talent.