The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 2002, Volume 13

by Stephen Jones

  Vampire Mountain was the fourth volume in The Saga of Darren Shan and the first in a three-part sequence. The character returned in Trials of Death. Eponymous schoolboy author Shan is a pseudonym for Darren O’Shaughnessy.

  A young witch discovered that one of her classmates was a vampire in Amelia Atwater-Rhodes’s Shattered Mirror, while Witch Hill was a time-travel fantasy by Marcus Sedgwick. With the help of a strange sea captain, two children battled the Night Witches in Michael Molloy’s The Witch Trade.

  Cate Tiernan’s Sweep 1: Book of Shadows, 2: The Coven, 3: Blood Witch, 4: Dark Magick, 5: Awakening, 6: Spellbound and 7: The Calling were the initial volumes in a packaged series about a teenager who discovered she was a witch.

  Silver Raven Wolf’s Witches’ Night of Fear and Witches’ Key to Terror were the second and third volumes, respectively, in the Witches’ Chillers series of occult murder mysteries, from Llewellyn Publications.

  Isobel Bird’s Circle of Three series about a trio of modern-day teenage witches included 1: So Mote it Be, 2: Merry Meet, 3: Second Sight, 4: What the Cards Said, 5: In the Dreaming, 6: Ring of Light, 7: Blue Moon, 8: The Five Paths, 9: Through the Veil, 10: Making the Saint, 11: The House of Winter and 12: Written in the Stars.

  T*witches #1: The Power of Two by H.B. Gilmour and Randi Reisfeld was about twin sisters, separated at birth, who meet in a theme park and discover that they share strange powers. It was followed by 2: Building a Mystery and 3: Seeing is Deceiving from the same authors.

  Australian Kim Wilkins’s Bloodlace was the first volume in a new young-adult psychic detective series featuring Gina Champion, who investigated a mystery based on a past murder set in a seaside suburb of Sydney.

  Ninth Key and Darkest Hour by Jenny Carroll (aka Meggin Cabot) were two new titles in the ongoing series The Mediator, about a girl who talked to the dead.

  From Headline Australia, Shades 1: Shadow Dance, 2: Night Beast, 3: Ancient Light and 4: Black Sun Rising was a young-adult horror adventure series by Robert Hood, about a group of teenagers trapped in a ghostlike existence who battled an invasion by creatures from the shadows.

  Scholastic’s ‘Point Horror Unleashed’ continued with Celia Rees’s The Cunning Man, about the eponymous shipwrecker. Paul Stewart’s Fright Train involved a ride through Hell, and a young girl paid a high price for consulting The Bearwood Witch in Susan Price’s novel.

  Hair Raiser by Graham Masterton and Fly-Blown by Philip Wooderson, the latter about intelligent mutated blowflies, both appeared as ‘Mutant Point Horror’ titles.

  Decayed: 10 Years of Point Horror was an omnibus containing the novels Trick or Treat and April Fools by Richie Tankersley Cusick and Blood Sinister by Celia Rees.

  Bruce Colville’s The Monsters of Morley Manor was significantly revised and expanded from its 1996 serialization.

  Shadows & Moonshine was a new collection of thirteen stories by Joan Aiken, while Vivian Vande Velde’s Being Dead collected seven stories about ghosts and the undead.

  R.L. Stine’s The Haunting Hour featured ten stories, each illustrated by a different artist, including John Jude Palencar and Art Spiegelman. Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly edited Little Lit: Strange Stories for Strange Kids, a graphic anthology of sixteen stories by such authors as Jules Feiffer and Maurice Sendak.

  Brian Lumley’s The Whisperer and Other Voices collected eight reprint stories, plus the short Cthulhu Mythos novel ‘The Return of the Deep Ones’ and a new introduction by the author.

  Published in trade paperback by Serpent’s Tail, The Devil in Me was the latest collection from Christopher Fowler, containing twelve stories and a new foreword by the author. From the same imprint came a welcome reissue of Fowler’s 1998 collection Personal Demons in a matching edition.

  M. John Harrison’s Travel Arrangements collected fourteen stories, and Ed Gorman’s The Dark Fantastic collected seventeen stories with notes by the author and an introduction by Bentley Little.

  Faithless: Tales of Transgression collected twenty-one stories (one original) by Joyce Carol Oates. Meanwhile, the author’s psychological Gothic novella Beasts was published as a trade paperback by Carroll & Graf.

  HarperCollins produced a special sampler for the UK edition of Peter Straub’s collection Magic Terror containing the story ‘The Ghost Village’.

  The second of Dorchester Publishing’s hardcover Leisure titles, The Museum of Horrors was presented by The Horror Writers Association. Although perhaps not up to the quality of some of editor Dennis Etchison’s previous compilations, it was still one of the best anthologies of the year. Even though most of the eighteen original stories did not appear to fit into the loose ‘theme’ of the book, and a few were surprisingly similar to each other, it still boasted some memorable contributions from Joyce Carol Oates, Ramsey Campbell, Peter Atkins, Tom Piccirilli, Joel Lane, Conrad Williams, Charles L. Grant, Lisa Morton, S.P. Somtow and a stunning but annoyingly incomplete tale by Peter Straub. It was all the more a shame that such a fine volume and its editor became embroiled in a totally unnecessary controversy publicized through the HWA itself.

  Although subtitled Extreme Visions of Speculative Fiction, editor Al Sarrantonio’s massive new anthology Redshift actually contained some excellent dark fantasy stories amongst its thirty all-new contributions by Dan Simmons, Ursula K. Le Guin, Michael Moorcock, Thomas M. Disch, Stephen Baxter, David Morrell, Elizabeth Hand, Michael Marshall Smith, Gene Wolfe and the editor himself (who was also responsible for yet another self-congratulatory introduction).

  Edited by P.N. Elrod (and probably an uncredited Martin H. Greenberg), Dracula in London contained sixteen stories about the vampire count living in some very peculiar interpretations of the city by Tanya Huff, Fred Saberhagen, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Nancy Kilpatrick and others, including a collaboration between the editor and actor Nigel Bennett.

  Vampires: Encounters with the Undead was a huge, 600-page hardcover from Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, edited and with commentary by the erudite David J. Skal. Along with classic short stories by J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Bram Stoker, M.R. James, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Bloch, Fritz Leiber, Richard Matheson, David J. Schow, Kim Newman, Caitlín R. Kiernan and others, this value-for-money volume also contained articles, essays and extracts, all profusely illustrated with film stills and artwork.

  Lords of Night: Tales of Vampire Love contained three romance novellas by Janice Bennett, Sara Blayne and Monique Ellis.

  Hammer horror star Ingrid Pitt graced the cover and contributed the introduction and an original story to The Mammoth Book of Vampire Stories By Women, an anthology of thirty-three stories (fourteen original) and one poem edited by Stephen Jones with illustrations by Randy Broecker. Other contributors included Anne Rice, Poppy Z. Brite, Tanith Lee, Lisa Tuttle, Connie Willis and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro.

  Mike Ashley’s excellent The Mammoth Book of Fantasy reprinted twenty-three classic tales by Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Fritz Leiber, Tanith Lee, Harlan Ellison, A. Merritt and many others.

  Published in hardcover by The British Library, Meddling with Ghosts: Stories in the Tradition of M.R. James was a handsome reprint anthology selected and introduced by Ramsey Campbell. Among the sixteen authors included were J. Sheridan Le Fanu, F. Marion Crawford, Sabine Baring-Gould, Fritz Leiber, L.T.C. Rolt, A.N.L. Munby, T.E.D. Klein, Sheila Hodgson, Terry Lamsley and Campbell himself. Rosemary Pardoe also contributed a useful guide to writers who followed in James’s literary footsteps.

  Edited by Don Hutchinson, Wild Things Live There: The Best of Northern Frights reprinted sixteen stories from the Canadian anthology series by Nancy Kilpatrick, Nalo Hopkins and others.

  Into the Mummy’s Tomb, edited with a long introduction by John Richard Stephens, contained fifteen reprint stories, two excerpts and an abridgement by such authors as Louisa May Alcott, Tennessee Williams, H.P. Lovecraft, Agatha Christie, Mark Twain, Sir H. Rider Haggard, Edgar Allan Poe, Ray Bradbury, Rudyard Kipling, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Elizabeth Pet
ers, Sax Rohmer, Anne Rice and Bram Stoker.

  Edited by Marvin Kaye, The Ultimate Halloween contained seventeen stories (five reprints) about the horror holiday by Esther Friesner, Ron Goulart and others. Isaac Asimov’s Halloween was edited by Gardner Dozois and Sheila Williams and reprinted ten stories from Asimov’s Science Fiction. Andy Duncan, Lawrence Watt-Evans, Howard Waldrop, Steven Utley and Ian R. MacLeod were amongst the authors included.

  Winning Tales of the Supernatural edited by Joyce Booth O’Brien contained eleven ‘prize-winning’ stories, while Nor of Human edited by Geoffrey Maloney was an Australian anthology published by the Canberra SF Guild writers’ group.

  Published in trade paperback by Polygon, Damage Land, an anthology of New Scottish Gothic Fiction edited and introduced by Alan Bissett, contained twenty stories (six reprints) and a bibliography.

  The busy Martin H. Greenberg teamed up with John Helfers to edit the all-original Villains Victorious and The Mutant Files. The former contained fourteen stories of evil triumphant, the latter sixteen tales about the next step in human evolution. The contributors (many of whom were featured in both books) included Charles de Lint, Tanya Huff, Alan Dean Foster, Janet Berliner, David Bischoff, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Ed Gorman, Peter Crowther and Peter Tremayne (with a new Sherlock Holmes story).

  Greenberg was joined by Brittany A. Koren for Single White Vampire Seeks Same, an anthology of twelve stories based on paranormal personal ads from such familiar names as Rusch, Crowther, Hoffman, de Lint and Huff (a ‘Henry Fitzroy’ vampire tale). With Jean Rabe, Greenberg also edited Historical Hauntings, featuring eighteen original stories by Andre Norton, Bruce Holland Rogers and others.

  The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror: 12 edited by Stephen Jones contained twenty-two stories and novellas, along with the usual comprehensive overview of the previous year in horror, a detailed necrology and a list of useful contact addresses for aspiring writers and horror fans. Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling’s The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: Fourteenth Annual Collection reprinted forty-four stories and nine poems, plus the annual summations by the two editors, Ed Bryant and Seth Johnson, obituaries by James Frenkel, and a list of so-called ‘Honorable Mentions’. The Datlow/Windling and Jones books overlapped with just four stories from Ramsey Campbell, Kathe Koja, Terry Lamsley and Paul McAuley.

  After much ballyhoo in the small-press world and to the anger of many of its contributors, The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy: 2000, the first in a proposed new annual series announced by editor Steve Savile, was abruptly cancelled by print-on-demand publisher Cosmos Books.

  HarperCollins globally launched its e-book imprint PerfectBound in February with titles by Raymond E. Feist, Joyce Carol Oates and an omnibus of The Nightmare Room by R.L. Stine, containing six novels.

  Following the May launch of AOL Time Warner’s digital imprint iPublish, The Authors’ Guild warned its 8,000 members that the new company’s publishing contract was ‘among the worst the Authors’ Guild has seen from a publisher of any size or reputation’. The Science Fiction Writers’ Association agreed, describing the publisher’s non-negotiable terms as ‘rights stealing’.

  Ignoring the criticism, iPublish announced a new popularity contest in conjunction with the monthly publication of three works discovered through its website. However, in an unexpected move in December, AOL Time Warner pulled the plug, citing a slowdown in the overall economy as its reason for the decision. The company concluded that a separate electronic publishing division was not currently viable at that time. While iPublish titles remained available for the time being, electronic book sales were moved to other groups within Time Warner Trade Publishing.

  In a landmark decision in June, the US Supreme Court ruled 7 – 2 on The New York Times v. Tasini case that publishers must obtain consent for the electronic reproduction of work originally created by freelancers for print. This resulted in thousands of articles being deleted from electronic databases and on the Internet.

  After buying ‘exclusive electronic rights’ to around 100 backlist titles by authors such as Kurt Vonnegut, new e-book publisher RosettaBooks was sued by Random House, who claimed that their existing contracts with the authors giving them the right to publish the works in ‘book form’ included digital rights. In July, a federal judge in US District Court in Manhattan ruled against Random House’s request for a preliminary injunction, and the publisher subsequently appealed.

  Barnes & Noble Digital debuted on September 11th with an original e-book by Dean Koontz, The Book of Counted Sorrows, but delayed the launch of its other titles until mid-October. Economic fallout from the 9/11 terrorist attacks may also have caused Random House to fold its AtRandom electronic imprint, launched in June 2000.

  At the beginning of the year, editor Paula Guran announced that it had become obvious to her that the only way for her weekly electronic newsletter DarkEcho to evolve was ‘for it to head directly into extinction’, which it did. However, after publishing more than 300 issues since 1994, Guran did revive the title occasionally as a once-in-a-while informal newsletter.

  Along with co-sponsoring a story contest, Leisure Books began sponsoring original fiction by new and established authors on Brett Savory’s quarterly webzine The Chiaroscuro.

  Delirium Books’ website was removed by its host server in November after a complaint about the site’s graphic content. As a result, certain features such as the ‘Gross-Out Tournament’ were moved to another server.

  The Spook was a fully downloadable electronic horror magazine in Adobe Acrobat (PDF) format launched in June by publisher/editor Anthony Sapienza. Featuring short fiction, celebrity profiles, reviews, cartoons and poetry, among the featured authors were Ramsey Campbell, Poppy Z. Brite, Dennis Etchison, Damon Knight, John Shirley, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Jonathan Carroll and Joyce Carol Oates. Features included interviews with Neil Gaiman, Jonathan Carroll, actress Linda Blair and artist Alan M. Clark, plus articles on Halloween’s Michael Meyers, the Zodiac Killer, the witchcraft of Shirley Jackson and the truth behind Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion. Ramsey Campbell’s opinion column (originally in Necrofile) began running from the second issue onwards. Because it was sponsored by advertisers, the full-colour monthly magazine was free to readers and received more than 4,000 hits in the first forty-eight hours.

  Gothic.net underwent its annual make-over and the $15 subscription entitled readers to get the ‘premium’ short fiction, change the colour scheme, post comments and receive regular updates.

  Among the authors whose stories were featured on Ellen Datlow’s Sci.Fiction on SciFi.Com in 2001 were Charles Beaumont, Terry Dowling, Ian R. MacLeod, James P. Blaylock, Geoffrey A. Landis, Lucius Shepard, Gerald Kersh, Glen Hirshberg, Richard Matheson, Pat Cadigan and many others.

  After six issues as a print publication, Paul Lockey’s Unhinged, subtitled Disturbing Fiction for Discerning Adults, became a twice-yearly online magazine in May with articles, reviews and fiction by Sean Russell Friend, Mark Howard Jones, Michael Chant, T.M. Gray, Ray Clark and others.

  Paul Fry’s Peep Show, published by Short, Scary Tales Publications, featured erotic horror fiction by David J. Schow and others, and more horror stories could be found on John Urbancik’s webzine Dark Fluidity.

  The Zone SF, a non-fiction site, went live in mid-September with interviews with Dan Simmons and Simon Clark, and a list of the Top 10 Heavy Metal Albums with SF Themes.

  Edited by Sara Creasy, aurealisXpress was a monthly science fiction and fantasy e-bulletin for subscribers to Australia’s twice-yearly Aurealis magazine. The electronic update was issued eleven times a year (except January), and you could subscribe to both magazines by visiting the website and printing off an application form.

  Pam Keesey’s Monsterzine.com looked at monster movies and was linked to the related site, BioHorror.com, while Ghoul Britannia was a tribute site for Hammer Films and other Brit horror movies.

  Douglas Glegg’s ‘The Infinite Road Diary’ debuted
on the Cemetery Dance website. While the author travelled across America promoting his new hardcover novel The Infinite with bookshop signings, he updated his electronic diary every few days. Neil Gaiman’s electronic diary was also credited with boosting sales of his latest novel, American Gods.

  Stealth Press marked Halloween on its website with a free downloadable PDF e-anthology, All Hallows-e: Halloween Tales from Seven Masters of Terror, compiled by Paula Guran. It featured reprints by such Stealth authors as Ray Bradbury, F. Paul Wilson, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, John Shirley, William F. Nolan, Al Sarrantonio and Peter Straub.

  Stealth’s e-freebie page also featured a downloadable e-chapbook of Nolan’s 1967 Playboy short story ‘The Party’, from his new collection Dark Universe, and a sample from Wilson’s novel An Enemy of the State, featuring a new introduction by the author along with the prologue and five chapters.

  A follow-up to the previous year’s impressive electronic anthology, Brainbox II: Son of Brainbox, edited with an introduction by Steve Eller, featured contributions from eighteen writers, including Brett A. Savory, Charlee Jacob, Brian A. Hopkins and Mort Castle. Another CD-ROM anthology was Lone Wolf Publications’ Extremes 3: Terror on the High Seas, edited by Brian A. Hopkins and illustrated by Thomas Arensberg.

  The UK print-on-demand publisher House of Stratus, which reissued much of Brian Aldiss’s backlist along with many other titles, ceased trading in June and apparently went into administration in September. Booksellers had apparently complained of late deliveries and poor billing.

  After the cancellation of Enigmatic Tales, editors L.H. Maynard and M.P.N. Sims pretty much recreated their magazine as the first two volumes of the trade paperback anthology series Darkness Rising Volume One: Night’s Soft Pains and Volume Two: Hideous Dreams, from Cosmos Books, an on-demand imprint of Wildside Press. Along with obscure reprints by Howard Jones and Huan Mee introduced by Hugh Lamb, the books included original stories, with notable work from Lynda E. Rucker and Donald Murphy.