Last Updated on November 11, 2025 by Angel Melanson
We’re a week out from launching our campaign in support of First in Fright: The FANGORIA Compendium, and I’ve spent more or less every minute of the past seven days wigging out (complimentary) at the vast show of support the Fango community has offered us. We’ve had, to date, over 2300 people stand up and say, “We believe in what you’re doing.” That’s somehow both humbling and inspiring at once. We’re currently the 22nd most-backed nonfiction book in Kickstarter history – that’s after one week, folks! You’re maniacs! (Again, complimentary.)
If any of this is news to you, I’m happy to give a little background on who I am, and what the campaign is all about. I’m Meredith, the Senior Editor here at Fango, and the author of First in Fright: The FANGORIA Compendium. I’ve been around since we relaunched the magazine in 2018, gratefully working under our Editor-in-Chief Phil Nobile Jr. and with our Creative Director Jason Kauzlarich to bring you the best horror magazine in the world four times a year. I’ve loved this publication all my life, and I’ve said since junior high that all I ever wanted to do was work for FANGORIA one day. That I’m now tapped to write the history of the magazine is beyond a dream come true, because I never allowed myself to dream quite that big.
But I’m not doing it alone. We’ve got a huge team of some of the best contributors working in horror to help me out – past and present editors of Fango (Phil, Tony Timpone, Mike Gingold, Chris Alexander); filmmakers, stars, composers, and effects artists who have made their names in this genre (John Carpenter, Clive Barker, Jeffrey Reddick, Barbara Crampton, Tom Savini and many, MANY more); and some of my favorite writers and scholars working today, bylines you likely recognize from the magazine and website (BJ Colangelo, Richard Newby, Brian W. Collins, Eric Vespe and others).
And, I think, the biggest and most important part of this campaign is that backers are helping us build a robust digital archive of the magazine’s entire original run – indexed, searchable, downloadable. It’s great that you can pre-order our book, and I hope you will, but what this campaign is really about is calling on our community to help us develop a crucial resource in horror scholarship, something we simply couldn’t do on our own. One of the reasons I best love working at FANGORIA is that it’s the rare company that still values the written word, the printed word, the generated-by-human-beings word. I’m the daughter of a career newspaperman turned librarian – my passion for journalism, for publishing, for preserving archival records, is in my blood, and what the success of this campaign is showing me is that it’s in the blood of our readers, too. That’s an incredibly cool thing to have in common with you.
So, this is a long-winded way of saying thank you for proving what we’ve long known: we have the best readers in the biz. We couldn’t do any of this without you. We’re so grateful for every pre-order. Your faith in us, and each and every contribution, helps us produce the absolute best book and build the most thorough digital archive we possibly can.
If you want to join our elite team of horror conservationists, we’d love to have you. And if money’s tight – believe me, I get it, this isn’t a great time for buying stuff – please know that a simple share does more to support our efforts than you could possibly imagine. Spread the word with your own little community, and thank you again for being a part of ours.
