The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 23 (Mammoth Books)

by Jones, Stephen

  Rowling also left her long-time literary agent, Christopher Little, and went to a new agency set up by Little’s business partner, Neil Blair.

  Arabat: Absolute Midnight was the third volume in the projected five-book fantasy series written and extensively illustrated by Clive Barker, which began in 2002.

  Miniaturised humans battled against giant-seeming insects in Micro, which Richard Preston completed from an unfinished draft by the late Michael Crichton.

  The Burning Soul by John Connolly was the tenth in the “Charlie Parker” series, while Samuel Johnson vs. the Devil: Hell’s Bells (aka The Infernals) from the same author was a sequel to his YA novel The Gates.

  Narrated by its murdered protagonist, Ghost Story was the thirteenth volume in Jim Butcher’s best-selling “Dresden Files” series.

  Dean Koontz’s horror novel 77 Shadow Street was about a cursed apartment building. Bantam supported the book’s release with an online “360-degree immersive experience”.

  The trade paperback of What the Night Knows, a supernatural serial killer novel from the busy Mr Koontz, also included a related novella originally published as an e-book, while Frankenstein: The Dead Town was the fifth and final book in the series from the same author.

  Richard Matheson’s latest novel, Other Kingdoms, was about witchcraft and magic in a rural English village, as told by an ageing horror writer.

  When a couple of ageing musicians discovered an abandoned baby girl in the woods, they set in motion a chain of horrific events in John Ajvide Lindqvist’s fourth novel, Little Star.

  Family Storms and Cloudburst were the first volumes in a new series by the still long-dead V. C. Andrews®.

  A couple buried in an avalanche emerged to discover a world apparently devoid of anyone but themselves in Graham Joyce’s The Silent Land. Stephen King described it as “Scary Twilight Zone stuff, but also a sensitive exploration of love’s redemptive power.”

  A man found that his life had been “modified” out of his control in Killer Move by Michael Marshall (Smith).

  Inspired by the Hammer Films tradition, Christopher Fowler’s Hell Train was set on a locomotive travelling through Eastern Europe during the First World War.

  As a companion to its series of new Sherlock Holmes adventures, Titan Books issued Kim Newman’s novel Professor Moriarty: The Hound of the D’Urbervilles, which continued the exploits of “the Napoleon of Crime” and his debauched henchman, Colonel Sebastian Moran.

  Meanwhile, John O’Connell’s novella The Baskerville Legacy focused on the relationship between Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and real-life journalist Bertram Fletcher Robinson, who some claim came up with the idea for The Hound of the Baskervilles.

  The Dark at the End was reportedly the final volume in F. Paul Wilson’s long-running “Repairman Jack” series, while Out of Oz marked the end of Gregory Maguire’s best-selling “Wicked” series (at least for now).

  In Adam Nevill’s The Ritual, a group of four campers encountered monsters both human and supernatural in an ancient Scandinavian forest.

  A former airline pilot searched for his missing girlfriend in a strange coastal village in Loss of Separation by Conrad Williams, and a man believed he had discovered a map to the city of his dreams in Nicholas Royle’s novel Regicide, an expanded version of the author’s story “Night Shift Sister”.

  The Shadow of the Soul was the second book in Sarah Pinborough’s “Dog-Faced Gods” series, as detective inspector Cassius “Cass” Jones continued his investigations into the sinister activities of the immortal “Network”.

  Ghost of a Smile was the second in Simon R. Green’s “Ghost Finders” series about agents working for the Carnacki Institute.

  A gate in an urban housing project led to a world of ghosts and monsters in Gary McMahon’s The Concrete Grove, the first volume in a new trilogy, while Dead Bad Things from the same author was about a reluctant psychic and included a bonus short story.

  The dead were restless in Graveminder, the first adult novel by best-selling YA author Melissa Marr, and a seventeen-year-old girl uncovered her family’s dark secrets in Essie Fox’s Victorian Gothic mystery The Somnambulist.

  Aloha from Hell: A Sandman Slim Novel was a sequel to Kill the Dead and Sandman Slim, as Richard Kadrey’s anti-hero took on an insane serial killer who was mounting a war against both Heaven and Hell.

  Joseph Nassise’s Eyes to See was the first in a trilogy about a man with the ability to see ghosts, and a survivor of a terrorist attack could hear the voices of who perished in Robert J. King’s Death’s Disciples.

  A woman could tell when men were about to die in Michael Koryta’s The Cypress House, while an ancient evil infected an island lighthouse and a big cat sanctuary in The Ridge, from the same author.

  Something huge and tentacled emerged Out of the Waters, the second in David Drake’s “Books of the Elements” quartet.

  People started turning into cannibalistic monsters in Vacation by Matthew Costello, and a woman’s New York apartment was infested with insects no one else could see in Ben H. Winters’ Bedbugs.

  Fired Up by Jayne Ann Krentz was the first book in the “Dreamlight” series and the seventh in the “Arcane Society” series.

  Diabolical was Hank Schwaeble’s sequel to Damnable, while I Don’t Want to Kill You was the third book in the humorous serial killer trilogy by Dan Wells about sociopath John Wayne Cleaver.

  Skinners: The Breaking and Skinners: Extinction Agenda were the fifth and sixth books, respectively, in the series about monster-hunters by Marcus Pelegrimas.

  Former Leisure executive editor Don D’Auria moved to small press/e-book imprint Samhain Publishing, where he launched a new horror line in October with no less than five books from Ramsey Campbell, including the new novel The Seven Days of Cain.

  Other titles from the same publisher included Angel Board by Kristopher Rufty, Borealis by Ronald Malfi, Wolf’s Edge by W. D. Gagliani, Forest of Shadows by Hunter Shea, Dead of Winter by Brian Moreland, Dark Inspirations by Russell James, Catching Hell by Greg F. Gifune, and The Lamplighters by Frazer Lee.

  Steve Hockensmith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dreadfully Ever After, illustrated by Patrick Arrasmith, was the third in the trilogy that started with Seth Grahame-Smith’s bestselling pastiche and continued with Hockensmith’s prequel.

  Derived from the same source material, Mr Darcy’s Bite was a werewolf novel by Mary Lydon Simonsen, Jane Goes Batty was the second book in Thomas Michael Ford’s series about a vampire Jane Austen in the present day, and Jane Austen: Blood Persuasion was the second in the humorous vampire series by Janet Mullany.

  And still the dross kept coming with such literary “mash-ups” as Alice in Zombieland “by” Lewis Carroll and Nickolas Cook, and The Twilight of Lake Woebegotten by “Harrison Geillor”.

  In Grave Expectations credited to Charles Dickens and Sherri Browning Erwin, young Pip was a werewolf and Miss Havisham a vampire, while A Vampire Christmas: Ebenezer Scrooge, Vampire Slayer by Sarah Gray (Colleen Faulkner) pretty much spoke for itself.

  Oscar Wilde teamed up with Arthur Conan Doyle and Bram Stoker to investigate some bizarre killings in Gyles Brandreth’s Oscar Wilde and the Vampire Murders, while The Damned Highway: Fear and Loathing in Arkham was a gonzo mash-up of H. P. Lovecraft and Hunter S. Thompson by Brian Keene and Nick Mamatas.

  Gregor Samsa transformed into a kitten instead of a cockroach in The Meowmorphosis by Franz Kafka (who should be spinning in his grave) and the pseudonymous “Coleridge Cook”.

  Maureen McGowan’s Sleeping Beauty: Vampire Slayer was a YA novel in the “Twisted Tales” series, but perhaps the year’s most interesting mash-up came from author Cecily von Ziegesar, who reworked her popular 2002 novel as Gossip Girl: Psycho Killer.

  Charlaine Harris’ eleventh “Sookie Stackhouse” novel, Dead Reckoning, involved the telepathic waitress in the firebombing of Merlotte’s bar and a plot by her lover Eric to destroy his new vampire master.

&n
bsp; In Hit List, the twentieth volume in Laurell K. Hamilton’s best-selling “Anita Blake” series, the vampire hunter found herself battling with the Mother of All Darkness once again for possession of her body.

  The titular lawman’s job was to control the blood-drinking “Sunless” who lived in ghetto areas of London in James Lovegrove’s Redlaw, and a woman investigated her uncle’s murder in Piper Maitland’s Acquainted with the Night.

  Although Trevor O. Munson’s Angel of Vengeance was the inspiration for the short-lived CBS-TV series Moonlight (2007– 08), featuring an undead private investigator, the novel had never been published before.

  In S. M. Stirling’s The Council of Shadows, a follow-up to A Taint in the Blood, reluctant “Shadowspawn” Adrian Brézé embraced his dark heritage to save his kidnapped lover.

  Jacqueline Lepora’s Immortal with a Kiss was a sequel to Descent Into Dust and again featured vampire-hunter Emma Andrews, while Vampire Federation: The Cross was the second book in the mystery series by Scott G. Mariani (Sean McCabe).

  The Moonlight Brigade by Sarah Jane Stratford was the second in the “Millennial” series about vampires fighting the Nazis in World War II.

  Following on from The Strain and The Fall, The Night Eternal was the final volume in the vampire virus trilogy by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan.

  Set in nineteenth century Russia, The Third Section was the third book in Jasper Kent’s historical “Danilov Quintet”.

  Hateful Heart was the fourth volume in Sam Stone’s “Vampire Gene” series and involved time-travelling vampires and the last remnants of the Knights Templar.

  Memories We Fear was the fourth in the “Vampire Memories” series by Barb Hendee, and Crossroads was the seventh book by Jeanne C. Stein to feature vampire Anna Strong.

  Set in seventeenth century Bohemia, An Embarrassment of Riches was the twenty-third novel in Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s “Count Saint-Germain” historical vampire series.

  Stay-at-home father Simon experienced some disturbing physical changes when he met a group of playground dads in Jason Starr’s The Pack, and the last known lycanthrope tried to evade capture from vampire monster hunters sanctioned by the Vatican in Glenn Duncan’s The Last Werewolf.

  Wolf Tales 12 was the final volume in the erotic shape-shifter series by Kate Douglas.

  2011 was definitely the year of the zombie. Film director Tobe Hooper collaborated with Alan Goldsher on the zombie horror novel Midnight Movie, which was based around a supposedly “lost” movie made by Hooper.

  Acknowledgeing its debt to George Romero’s 1968 movie Night of the Living Dead, Daryl Gregory’s Raising Stony Mayhall detailed the life of the eponymous zombie narrator in an alternate world where the walking dead regained rational thought.

  Set in the aftermath of the zombie apocalypse, the titular bookseller’s blog formed the basis of Allison Hewitt is Trapped by Madeleine Roux, while Colson Whitehead’s satirical novel Zone One looked at the repercussions of a zombie plague in a near-future New York.

  Scavengers by Christopher Fulbright and Angeline Hawkes was a zombie novel from Elder Signs Press.

  Steven Saknussemm’s debut novel The Zombie Autopsies was presented in the form of a series of scientific journals and other research documents, while Ray Wallace’s Escape from Zombie City had the format of a choose-your-own adventure.

  A woman realised that she had become a zombie in Sophie Littlefield’s Aftertime, while a girl found she had the power to create zombies in Unforsaken, a YA novel from the same author.

  K. Bennett’s Pay Me in Flesh was the first in the “Mallory Caine, Zombie at Law” series. No, really.

  Dead of Night was a zombie novel by Jonathan Maberry, while Dust & Decay was a sequel to the author’s post-apocalyptic zombie novel Rot & Ruin.

  Having been forced to kill his sister in Feed, future blogger Shaun Mason tried to discover who deliberately infected her with the zombie virus in Deadline, the second book in the “Newsflesh” trilogy by Mira Grant (Seanan McGuire).

  A girl was the only survivor in her town of the “Feeding Plague” in Frail by Joan Frances Turner (Hilary Hall), the sequel to the post-apocalyptic Dust.

  Originally published online for free in 2003 and in the UK in 2005, David Moody’s zombie novels Autumn: The City, Autumn: Purification and Autumn: Disintegration finally received their first American print editions from St. Martin’s Griffin. From the same author, Them or Us was the final book in the “Hater” trilogy.

  Flip This Zombie and Eat Slay Love were the second and third books in Jesse Petersen’s humorous “Living with the Dead” series which began with Married with Zombies.

  Xombies: Apocalypso was the third book in the series by Walter Greatshell, as was James Knapp’s Element Zero in the SF/zombie series which began with State of Decay.

  Featuring zombie detective Matt Richter, Dark War was the third in the “Nekropolis” series by Tim Waggoner.

  Abaddon Books’ Tomes of the Dead series continued with Chuck Wendig’s Double Dead and Tony Venables debut novel Viking Dead.

  * * *

  There was a touch of Bradbury about Erin Morgenstern’s debut novel The Night Circus, which concerned a pair of rival 19th century illusionists and a mysterious circus where magic really worked.

  In Deborah Harkness’ debut A Discovery of Witches, the first in a planned trilogy, a woman with powers she had long denied teamed up with a 1,500-year-old vampire to solve a series of mysteries.

  In The Taker by former CIA intelligence analyst Alma Katsu, an ER doctor encountered a mysterious woman who claimed to be 200 years old.

  Saw screenwriters Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan teamed up with Stephen Romano for their debut novel, Black Light, about a private investigator/exorcist who found himself working on a case that might finally solve the mystery of what destroyed his family.

  An ex-soldier and narcotics dealer hunted a serial child-killer through the ugly alleys of Low Town in Daniel Polansky’s first novel, The Straight Razor Cure.

  When a First World War veteran inherited his family’s old Georgian plantation, he encountered an evil that had been patiently waiting for his return in poet and playwright Christopher Buehlman’s debut, Those Across the River.

  Two sisters sent to stay with their elderly aunt uncovered an evil that had lain hidden for years in Lindsey Barraclough’s Long Lankin, which was inspired by an old English folk ballad.

  In Outpost by former gravedigger and film projectionist Adam Baker, the skeleton crew on a derelict refinery platform in the Arctic Ocean discovered that the outside world had been devastated by a global pandemic.

  After eating a teenager’s brain, a zombie decided to rescue the boy’s girlfriend in Warm Bodies, a first novel by Isaac Marion, and a college professor was transformed into an intelligent zombie in Scott Kenemore’s debut, Zombie, Ohio.

  Beloved of the Fallen was a romantic angel thriller that marked the novel debut of “Savannah Kline” (Kelly Dunn).

  A forensic psychologist was obsessed by the legend of Elizabeth Bathory in Holly Luhning’s Quiver, while a college freshman found herself in a battle between vampires and werewolves in Jennifer Knight’s debut Blood on the Moon.

  Will Hill’s debut, Department 19, was a young adult first novel about a secret government organization descended from Van Helsing that hunted vampires, and a fragile teenager began to remember why her friends died after experimenting with an Ouija board in Michelle Hodkin’s YA debut, The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer.

  Chuck Palahniuk’s blackly comic Damned was about a spoiled teenager trapped in Hell with people she wouldn’t be seen dead with.

  An African-American professor set out to find the lost world described in Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket” in Mat Johnson’s novel Pym.

  An Uncertain Place, the seventh crime novel in the series featuring Commissaire Adamsberg by Fred Vargas (medieval archaeologist Frédérique Audoin-Rouzeau), took the French polic
e chief and his colleague Danglard from a collection of severed feet outside London’s Highgate Cemetery to the hunt for a possible vampire in Serbia.

  Steve Mosby’s Black Flowers was another crime-crossover, which began when a little girl mysteriously appeared on a seaside promenade with a disturbing story to tell.

  Anthony Horowitz’s “missing story” pastiche, The House of Silk, found Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson investigating the disappearance of four Constable paintings along with the establishment of the title. It was the first spin-off book to be officially endorsed by the estate of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

  New Random House imprint Vintage Classics, dedicated to publishing classic science fiction and horror novels, was launched in April with a series of anaglyphic 3-D covers and red-and-blue glasses included in each volume.

  The initial five titles were Planet of the Apes by Pierre Boulle, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Jules Verne, The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle and The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Tales by H. P. Lovecraft.

  Edited with an Introduction and notes by S. T. Joshi, The White People and Other Weird Stories collected eleven stories by Arthur Machen, along with a Foreword by film director Guillermo del Toro.

  Steampunk: Poe was a young adult collection of seven stories and six poems by Edgar Allan Poe, illustrated in steampunk-style by Zdenko Basic and Manuel Sumberac.

  Tales of Mystery and Imagination from Barnes & Noble included twenty-nine stories by Poe, along with colour plates by Harry Clarke and an Introduction by Neil Gaiman, while the author’s The Raven and Other Poems was a companion volume collecting fifty-seven poems with the original colour illustrations by Edmund Dulac. An attractive illustrated tie-in book bag was also available.

  Unfortunately, in February it was announced that the city of Baltimore was cutting its funding to the Edgar Allan Poe House and Museum, and that the popular tourist attraction would have to become self-sustaining or it would close.