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

by Jones, Stephen

  From the same imprint, Rocky Wood’s A Literary Stephen King Companion was a handy guide to the best-selling author’s fiction and films, including entries about the characters and settings.

  In Becoming Ray Bradbury from the University of Illinois Press, Jonathan R. Eller took a look at the author’s early life through to 1953. The biographical study also included sixteen pages of photos.

  Edited with an Introduction by Phil and Sarah Stokes, Clive Barker: The Painter, the Creature, and the Father of Lies: 30 Years of Non-Fiction Writings from Earthling Publications collected Barker’s articles, introductions, reviews and artwork, along with a new Foreword by the author. As well as a trade hardcover, it was also available in a signed, slipcased leather-bound edition of 250 copies ($125.00), and a twenty-six copy traycased lettered edition containing an original sketch by Barker ($750.00).

  Published by the Stokes themselves, Beneath the Surface of Clive Barker’s Abarat Volume 1 was a handsome, full-colour illustrated guide to the book series that included a glossary and an interview with the author.

  “It’s easy to be smart, later” was one of the many epithetical sayings quoted in bugf#ck: The Useless Wit & Wisdom of Harlan Ellison®, a delightful pocket-sized hardcover from Edgeworks Abbey/Spectrum Fantastic Arts, edited by Arnie Fenner.

  Nested Scrolls: A Writer’s Life was a typically idiosyncratic memoir by “transrealism” writer/software designer Rudy Rucker. Along with the trade edition, it was also available from PS Publishing in 100 signed and slipcased copies that came with a CD-Rom containing thirteen sets of book-writing notes in a one million-word file entitled Twenty Years of Writing.

  From Tartarus Press, Time, A Falconer: A Study of Sarban was Mark Valentine’s biography of the writer (a pseudonym for career diplomat John William Wall), limited to 400 copies.

  Lest You Should Suffer Nightmares: A Biography of Herbert van Thal was an expanded version of Johnny Mains’ Afterword to his 2010 anthology Back From the Dead. The slim hardcover also included a selection of letter reproductions, a van Thal checklist, an article reprinted from SFX, and reminiscences by various contributors to the Pan Book of Horror Stories series, including Conrad Hill, David A. Riley, David Case and John Burke. It was published by Screaming Dreams in an edition of just 100 copies signed by the author and Les Edwards, who did the stunning cover portrait.

  Massimo Berruti’s Dim-Remembered Stories: A Critical Study of R. H. Barlow from Hippocampus Press looked at the career of the troubled young man who became H. P. Lovecraft’s literary executor, with a Foreword by S. T. Joshi.

  With David E. Schultz, Joshi also edited An Epicure in the Terrible: A Centennial Anthology of Essays in Honor of H. P. Lovecraft for the same PoD imprint. Some of the thirteen essays had been updated.

  Also from Hippocampus, A Monster of Voices: Speaking for H. P. Lovecraft collected thirteen essays and a poem by Robert H. Waugh.

  Edited by S. T. Joshi, Encyclopedia of the Vampire: The Living Dead in Myth, Legend, and Popular Culture from Greenwood/ABC-CLIO contained numerous critical essays on authors, characters and vampires in literature and the media by Stefan Dziemianowicz, Paula Guran, Melissa Mia Hall, Stephen Jones, John Langan, Barbara Roden, Christopher Roden, Brian Stableford, Bev Vincent and many others, as well as a general bibliography.

  Joshi also supplied the Foreword for Scarecrow Press’ 21st-Century Gothic: Great Gothic Novels Since 2000 edited by English professor Danel Olson. The book contained fifty-three essays by, amongst others, Steve Rasnic Tem, Nancy A. Collins, Adam L. G. Nevill, Don D’Ammassa, Lisa Tuttle, Robert Hood, Darrell Schweitzer, Nicholas Royle, Lucy Taylor, Graham Joyce and Reggie Oliver, along with extensive appendices.

  Zombies! An Illustrated History of the Undead was put together by former Rue Morgue editor Jovanka Vuckovic and covered the walking dead (“undead” refers to vampires) in films and fiction.

  The Sookie Stackhouse Companion included a new novella by Charlaine Harris, various lists, synopses and trivia, and an exclusive interview with True Blood creator Alan Ball, while Vampire Academy: The Ultimate Guide was an in-depth look at the YA series by Michelle Rowen and Richelle Mead.

  Edited by Jamey Heit, Vader, Voldemort and Other Villains: Essays on Evil in Popular Culture was published by McFarland & Co.

  From the same publisher, Seduced by Twilight: The Allure and Contradictory Messages of the Popular Saga was a look at Stephenie Meyer’s anaemic YA series by Natalie Wilson. Theorizing Twilight: Critical Essays on What’s at Stake in a Post-Vampire World, also edited by Wilson with Maggie Parke, explored the influence of Meyer’s books and films on popular culture in fifteen essays.

  Stephenie Meyer’s The Twilight Saga: The Official Illustrated Guide was aimed at the young adult market and included illustrations by various artists along with an extensive interview with the author.

  Cory Doctorow, Jules Feiffer, Stephen King and Tabitha King were among the fourteen authors who contributed stories to The Chronicles of Harris Burdick, based around the illustrations of Chris Van Allsburg. Lemony Snicket supplied the Introduction.

  Written by Adam-Troy Castro, V is for Vampire: An Illustrated Alphabet of the Undead was embellished with two-colour illustrations by Johnny Atomic. The same team was also responsible for Z is for Zombie.

  Edited by Arnie Fenner and Cathy Fenner, Spectrum 18: The Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art from Underwood Books collected work from more than 300 artists, including Grand Master Award recipient Ralph McQuarrie.

  Chamber of Chills Volume One was the first in the sumptuous “Harvey Horrors Collected Works” series from PS Artbooks. Collecting seven full-colour reprints of the 1950s pre-Code horror comic, with a gonzo Foreword by Joe Hill and an informative article by Peter Normanton on the career of artist Al Avison, the book came in three states: a bookshop edition, a slipcased edition with a print signed by Hill, and a twenty-six copy deluxe lettered traycased edition (£249.99) that included a print signed by both Hill and artist Glenn Chadbourne.

  It was followed by Witches Tales Volume One, with an Introduction by Ramsey Campbell and art print by Bryan Talbot, and Tomb of Terror Volume One with an Introduction by Stephen Jones and art print by Randy Broecker.

  As if that wasn’t enough, PS Artbooks also launched a series of glorious full-colour reprints of such ACG (American Comics Group) titles as Adventures Into the Unknown, with an Introduction by Barry Forshaw, and Forbidden Worlds, with an Introduction by Stan Nicholls. Artists Glenn Chadbourne and Edward Miller, respectively, contributed a “re-imagined” covers to each volume.

  DC Comics: The Art of Modern Mythmaking from Taschen Books celebrated the comics publisher’s seventy-fifth anniversary and featured more than 2,000 images over more than 700 pages.

  After almost a decade, Steve Niles’ 30 Days of Night became a regular monthly comic from IDW.

  Joe R. Lansdale scripted the four-part 30 Days of Night:Night, Again and a four-part contemporary version of H. P. Lovecraft’s The Dunwich Horror, while the writer teamed up with his son John L. Lansdale for the three-part Robert Bloch’s That Hellbound Train, all from IDW.

  Clive Barker and Christopher Monfette went back to the beginning for their new Hellraiser comic from BOOM! Studios, while Dark Shadows from Dynamite did the same for the 1960s TV series.

  It Came from Beneath the Sea . . . Again from Bluewater was a sequel to the 1955 Ray Harryhausen movie, and BOOM!’s Planet of the Apes picked up from where the last film in the original series, Battle for the Planet of the Apes, left off.

  Let Me In was a prequel series to the Hammer version of John Ajvide Lindqvist’s vampire novel, while The Thing: The Northman Nightmare was a prequel to the recent movie prequel, both from Dark Horse. The Strain from the same publisher was adapted from the trilogy of novels by Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan.

  John Saul Presents The Blackstone Chronicles from Bluewater was based on the author’s serialised novel, and The Martian Chronicles and Something Wicked This Way Comes were graphic ada
ptations of Ray Bradbury’s books by Dennis Calero and Ron Wimberly, respectively, with new Introductions by the author.

  Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter: Circus of the Damned Book 1: The Charmer and Book 2: The Ingenue each collected five issues of the Marvel comic book based on the novel by Laurell K. Hamilton, adapted by Jess Ruffner and illustrated by Ron Lim.

  Illustrated by Alberto Dose, Killing the Cobra: Chinatown Trollop was a vampire mystery from IDW, based on the “PI Felix Gomez” series by Mario Acevedo, who contributed a new story to the graphic novel.

  For all those who wanted their walking dead in four colours, they could choose from Daybreak, Battle for the Planet of the Living Dead, Fail of the Dead, iZombie: Dead to the World, Marvel Zombies Supreme, Night of the Living Dead: Death Valley, Zombie Chuck and many other zombie comics titles too numerous to mention.

  In September, DC Comics completely rebooted its most popular titles, including Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman, restarting the numbering with issue #1. It was hoped that the younger, more human characters would appeal to a greater number of casual readers.

  In March, a near-mint copy of Marvel’s Amazing Fantasy #15 – featuring the first appearance of Spider-Man in 1962 – sold for a record $1.1 million (£680,000) in an online auction.

  The following month, a 9.6 copy of Marvel’s X-Men #1 sold for $200,000 (£123,184) in a private sale conducted by Metropolis Comics/ComicConnect.com. The transaction set a new price record for 1963 debut issue.

  A year-and-a-half after a previous edition of Action Comics #1 (June 1938) – which featured the first appearance of Superman – sold at auction for a reported $1.5 million (£950,000), another copy went under the hammer in November and broke that record, selling for $2.2 million (£1.4 million). The issue, which belonged to Hollywood actor Nicolas Cage, had been stolen in a 2000 burglary from a storage locker and was only recovered in April. The name of the buyer of the “mint” condition comic was not revealed.

  The year’s clutch of movie tie-in editions included Conan by Michael A. Stackpole, Transformers: Dark of the Moon by Peter David and Cowboys and Aliens by Joan D. Vinge.

  Sarah Blakley-Cartwright wrote the young adult tie-in to Red Riding Hood, which came with an Introduction from the film’s director, Catherine Hardwicke. The book was published without the final chapter, which only became available after the release of the movie.

  Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark: Blackwood’s Guide to Dangerous Fairies, credited to Guillermo del Toro and Christopher Golden, was an epistolary prequel to the movie, set 100 years earlier. Troy Nixey supplied the illustrations.

  Conan the Barbarian was a collection of six of Robert E. Howard’s original stories with a tie-in cover to the disappointing movie, while Susan Hill’s slim 1983 novel The Woman in Black was reissued in a tie-in edition to the forthcoming Hammer production.

  The revived Hammer Films announced that it had done a deal with Random House UK to publish novelisations and new books based on the classic films under the Arrow Books imprint.

  The first two titles to be released were Francis Cottam’s novelisation of the Hilary Swank thriller The Resident and a re-issue of The Witches (aka The Devil’s Own) by “Peter Curtis” (Nora Lofts). Cyril Frankel, director of the 1966 movie version, contributed a new Foreword to the latter.

  The series properly kicked off later in the year with Guy Adams’ novelisation of Kronos (with a Foreword by writer/ director Brian Clemens), Shaun Hutson’s Twins of Evil (with a Foreword by director John Hough) and K. A. John’s Wake Wood.

  More mystifying were re-issues of Graham Masterton’s The Pariah, Family Portrait and Mirror, also published under the Hammer banner.

  Enjoying its first US publication from DreamHaven Books, Creature from the Black Lagoon was an official hardcover reprint of the super-rare 1954 British movie tie-in by “Vargo Statten” (John Russell Fearn) which came with a new Introduction by David J. Schow, and Afterword about the author by Philip Harbottle, a selection of uncommon production and behind-the-scenes stills, and a cover painting by Bob Eggleton. The 250-copy Limited Edition was signed by actress Julie Adams and stuntman/swimmer Ricou Browning.

  TV show tie-ins included Warehouse 13: A Touch of Fever by Greg Cox, and Supernatural: One Year Gone by Rebecca Dessertine and Supernatural: Night Terror by John Passarella. The Walking Dead: Rise of the Governor was credited to the comic series creator Robert Kirkman and Jay Bonansinga.

  The Coming of the Terraphiles was a Doctor Who tie-in by none other than Michael Moorcock, while Paul Finch authored Doctor Who: Hunter’s Moon.

  To tie-in to the spin-off series, Sarah Pinborough wrote Torchwood: Long Time Dead, while Torchwood: The Man Who Sold the World was by Guy Adams.

  Tim Waggoner teamed up with Jason Hawes and Grant Wilson, the stars of the Syfy reality TV show Ghost Hunters, for the novel Ghost Trackers.

  Mark Morris’ Dead Island and B. K. Evenson’s Dead Space: Martyr were both based on the video games. The tie-in to the post-apocalyptic Rage was written by Matthew Costello, who also contributed to the development of the video game it was based upon.

  Arkham Horror: Dance of the Damned was the first volume in Alan Bligh’s “Lord of Nightmares” trilogy, a gaming tie-in inspired by the work of H. P. Lovecraft. From the same author, Arkham Horror: Ghouls of the Miskatonic was the first book in the “Dark Waters” series.

  Nightmare Movies: Horror on Screen Since the 1960s was a welcome reissue of Kim Newman’s encyclopaedic 1988 volume, totally re-written, revised and updated.

  Covering much of the same ground, Jason Zinoman’s Shock Value looked at the genre filmmakers of the 1960s and 1970s.

  Bob McCabe’s Harry Potter: Page to Screen weighed in at a hefty 540 pages.

  The first volume in the “Deep Focus” series of film criticism books from Counterpoints/Soft Skull Press was They Live, a look at the 1988 John Carpenter film by Jonathan Lethem.

  Triumph of the Walking Dead: Robert Kirkman’s Zombie Epic on Page and Screen was an unauthorised guide to the comic book and TV series, edited with an Introduction by James Lowder. The book included fifteen essays by Lisa Morton, Kim Paffenroth and Jay Bonansinga, amongst others, along with a Foreword by Joe R. Lansdale.

  Supernatural: Bobby Singer’s Guide to Hunting was a tie-in to the TV series by David Reed.

  The Gothic Imagination: Conversations on Fantasy, Horror, and Science Fiction in the Media featured interviews between John C. Tibbetts and such writers as Stephen King, Ray Bradbury, Gahan Wilson, Robert Bloch, Ramsey Campbell, Brian Aldiss and others.

  Attendance figures at the US box-office hit a sixteen-year-low in 2011, with a drop of approximately 3.6 per cent on revenues from the previous year. The reason for this could be that films are available on an increasing number of platforms, which no longer means that you have to go to your neighbourhood movie theatre to see them.

  History also has a tendency to repeat itself, so it was no surprise that the 3-D “revolution” in films and TV looked ready to stall in 2011 – just like it had done previously in the 1930s, 1950s and 1980s. At the cinema, audiences proved reluctant to pay extra just for the (often shoddy) 3-D experience, while 3-D television sets were still prohibitively expensive for most people, not helped by a lack of product to show on them.

  Still, that didn’t stop Warner Bros. from releasing the eighth movie in the Harry Potter series in 3-D, the first to be shown in the process. Despite the final film in the franchise being something of a disappointment after the solid storytelling of the previous entries, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 smashed all records before it, clocking up the highest-grossing opening weekend ever ($168.55 million) in July, beating The Dark Knight, Spider-Man 3, The Twilight Saga: New Moon and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest. The film went on to pass the $200 million point in just five days, and achieved a world-wide take of $900 million ten days after that.

  In the UK, the film broke box-office records by taking £23 million over its openin
g weekend, beating the previous entry’s £18.32 million, and the eight Harry Potter movies are now officially the highest-grossing film franchise ever.

  “Inspired” by Tim Powers’ superior novel, Rob Marshall’s 3-D Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, the entertaining fourth instalment in the Disney franchise, involved zombified sailors and murderous mermaids as Johnny Depp’s increasingly silly pirate Jack Sparrow joined Ian McShane’s sorcerous Blackbeard and his duplicitous daughter (Penélope Cruz) in a race to find the fabled Fountain of Youth.

  Matt Damon’s New York politician was warned by Terence Stamp’s mysterious man in black that his life was destined along a different path in The Adjustment Bureau, based on a story by Philip K. Dick.

  Dick could just as well have been the inspiration for Neil Burger’s Limitless, in which Robert De Niro’s ruthless businessman wanted the secret of the “smart pill” that allowed Bradley Cooper’s struggling novelist to access the unused areas of his brain.

  Jake Gyllenhaal found himself living two separate lives in Duncan Jones’ Source Code, which bore more than a passing resemblance to Deja Vu (2006), while Justin Timberlake was living on borrowed time in the near-futuristic In Time. The latter movie was briefly the subject of a lawsuit by Harlan Ellison, who claimed that the film infringed upon his story “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman”.

  Gwyneth Paltrow was the first victim of a viral epidemic in Stephen Soderbergh’s Contagion, an all-star version of the kind of disaster films regularly churned out by the Syfy channel. Made for a fraction of that film’s budget, Perfect Sense featured Eva Green and Ewan McGregor’s characters falling in love as a world-wide epidemic robbed people of their sensory perceptions.

  2011 was certainly the year for alien invasions at the cinema. Based on a comic book, Jon Favreau’s $163 million Cowboys & Aliens was executive produced by Steven Spielberg but it failed to deliver the thrills, despite teaming Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford against alien invaders in the Wild West.