I met Christopher Golden on the convention circuit back in the go-go 1990s. I was so impressed by our 5-minute-in-the-aisle conversation that, after the con, I wandered over to my local bookstore (you could still do that back in those days) and grabbed a copy of a book of his called Of Saints And Shadows. It was a vampire novel, long before everyone and his institutionalized grandmother starting writing about them.

I took it with me on a camping trip and it proceeded to scare the crap out of me. It was well-written, very scary, had great dialogue and Golden kept the story moving and kept raising the stakes until the breathless end. I was impressed and even more, I was hooked, but never again would I take a horror novel on a camping trip.

Since then, Golden has written quite a number of terrific novels and lots of comic books as well (Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Dr. Fate and Baltimore: The Plague Ships).

Now he's got a new book out - the first in a series - called The Secret Journeys of Jack London: Book One: The Wild. Golden co-wrote it with Tim Lebbon and there are illustrations by Greg Ruth. You can read an interview with the guys at Golden's website.

Here's the squib from HarperCollins: "The world knows Jack London as a writer who lived his own thrilling, real life adventures. But there are parts of his life that have remained hidden for many years - things so horrifying even he couldn't set them down in writing. These are the secret journeys of Jack London."

This is 17-year-old Jack London, long before he wrote The Call Of The Wild, adventuring in the Yukon in a world of gold prospecting, hunting, kidnapping, slavery, murder and, my favorite part, supernatural beasts.

20th Century Fox has already snagged the movie rights so the least you could do is snag the book.

I've got my order in.

[Artwork: Cover to The Secret Journeys Of Jack London, on sale now]