The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 22

by Stephen Jones

  Edited by Selina Rosen for Yard Dog Press, A Bubba in Time Saves None! contained twenty-four humorous zombie stories.

  World Fantasy Award-winning Welsh imprint Sarob Press closed in 2007 when owner Robert Morgan moved to northern France. He started up again in 2010 with Seven Ghosts and One Other, the second collection of eight M.R. Jamesian stories by C.E. Ward, a follow-up to the author’s previous collection, Vengeful Ghosts. The hardcover was limited to 200 copies and included illustrations by Paul Lowe and an Afterword by the author.

  Edited by educators Todd James Pierce and Jarret Keene, Dead Neon: Tales of Near-Future Las Vegas from University of Nevada Press featured fourteen imaginative tales set in or around Sin City by K.W Jeter and others.

  Cutting Block Press from Texas published Volume 4 of Horror Library, a trade paperback anthology edited and introduced by R.J. Cavender and Boyd E. Harris containing twenty-eight stories by Nate Kenyon, Bentley Little, Hank Schwaeble, Jeff Strand, Tim Waggoner, Gerard Houarner and others.

  Robert M. Price edited and supplied the Introduction to The Yith Cycle for Chaosium, which included John Taine’s 1924 novel The Purple Sapphire and thirteen Lovecraftian stories about the Great Race and time travel.

  Sprawl from Twelfth Planet Press was an anthology edited by Alisa Krasnostein that featured eighteen original fantasy stories about an alternative suburban Australia by Sean Williams, Thoraiya Dyer, Angela Slatter, Anna Tambour, Cat Sparks and others.

  Also from Australia, Macabre: A Journey Through Australia’s Darkest Fears was an anthology edited by Angela Challis and Dr Marty Young from Brimstone Press. Split into three sections – “Classics (1836–1979)”, “Modern Masters (1980–2000)” and “The New Era (2000– )” – the book contained thirty-eight stories (fifteen original) by Guy Boothby, Terry Dowling, Robert Hood, Sean Williams, Stephen Dedman, Rick Kennett, Kyla Ward and others, along with an Introduction by Dr Young and a timeline of Australian horror fiction.

  Null Immortalis was the tenth and final volume in the Nemonymous series of original anthologies secretly edited by D.F. Lewis. As a result, the bylines of all twenty-six contributors – including Andrew Hook, Joel Lane, Gary Fry, Mike Chinn, Joseph S. Pulver Sr, Reggie Oliver, Mark Valentine and Steve Rasnic Tem – appeared for the first time in the same volume as their stories.

  Raw Terror: An Anthology of Horror Stories edited by Ian Hunter featured twelve original stories by Adam Nevill, Mike Chinn and others.

  Self-published by Kurt Mitchell, the six original stories in Scratched from Dreams: A Small Collection of Stories were illustrated by Randy Broecker, Gary Gianni, Tom Gianni, Scott Gustafson, Douglas Klauba and the author himself.

  Not content with publishing more genre titles in the year than most mass-market imprints, or launching a new line of illustrated books, Peter and Nicky Crowther’s PS Publishing also added a new poetry imprint to its burgeoning portfolio: Stanza Press was launched at the World Horror Convention 2010 with five handsome hardcover volumes.

  Edited by Jo Fletcher, Off the Coastal Path: Dark Poems of the Seaside contained thirty new and reprint poems by Clark Ashton Smith, Donald Sidney-Fryer, Ray Bradbury, Tanith Lee, H.P. Lovecraft, Neil Gaiman, Brian Lumley, Ursula K. Le Guin, Joel Lane, Weldon Kees, William Hope Hodgson, T.M. Wright, John Gordon and many others. The book was illustrated with six appropriately spooky full-colour paintings by Ben Baldwin.

  Compiled and with introductions by Stephen Jones, The Complete Poems from Weird Tales series comprised three slim volumes: Hallowe’en in the Suburb & Others by H.P. Lovecraft, The Singer in the Mist & Others by Robert E. Howard and Song of the Necromancer & Others by Clark Ashton Smith, with artwork by Virgil Finlay, Gary Gianni and Smith, respectively.

  Also from Stanza, Not Quite Atlantis: A Selection of Poems was a retrospective collection of thirty-six poems by Donald Sidney-Fryer, with a Foreword by the poet and art by Les Edwards.

  Edited with an Introduction by Al Sarrantonio, Halloween: New Poems was an attractive, oversized hardcover from Cemetery Dance Publications containing forty-one original poems by Steve Rasnic Tem, Elizabeth Massie, T.M. Wright, Melanie Tem, Tom Piccirilli, Joe R. Lansdale, Tom Disch, Peter Crowther and many others, including the editor. Keith Minnion supplied the illustrations.

  Australia’s P’rea Press collected more than seventy of Richard L. Tierney’s poems in the hardcover Savage Menace and Other Poems of Horror, with a Preface by S.T. Joshi. Arranged and edited by Charles (“Danny”) Lovecraft and covering a span of nearly fifty years, more than a third of the poems were previously unpublished.

  From the same imprint, Leigh Blackmore’s Spores from Sharnoth and Other Madness was a revised and expanded chapbook of a 2008 collection of mostly Lovecraft-inspired verse. Limited to just fifty signed and numbered copies, S.T. Joshi once again supplied the Foreword.

  Published as a trade paperback by Anomalous Press, Diary of a Gentleman Diabolist collected seventy-eight quite short prose poems by Robin Spriggs, with an Introduction by publisher J.P. Fortner.

  Available from Yard Dog Press, Robin Wayne Bailey’s Zombies in Oz and Other Undead Musings collected sixteen zombie poems that were mostly parodies of more famous works.

  Nicholas Royle’s chapbook imprint Nightjar Press continued with Mark Valentine’s literary tale of creeping unease, A Revelation of Cormorants, along with Joel Lane’s Black Country, Alison Moore’s When the Door Closed, It Was Dark, and The Beautiful Room by R.B. Russell. Print runs ranged from 200 to 300 signed copies of each booklet.

  Produced for the World Horror Convention in Brighton to publicise Scott Edelman’s collection What Will Come After: The Complete Zombie Stories, PS Publishing’s thin chapbook No More Mr Nice Guy contained an additional short-short zombie story by the author.

  The Render of the Veils was another chapbook sampler from PS, designed to promote the imprint’s forthcoming revised edition of Ramsey Campbell’s Lovecraftian collection The Inhabitant of the Lake & Less Welcome Tenants. Besides the title story, the booklet featured a new Introduction by the author and an illustration by Randy Broecker.

  The Red House was a coming-of-age haunted house novella by David J. Thacker, published by Pendragon Press.

  Published by Gothic Press, Monsters and Victims was an unpleasant serial killer novella written from two different points of view by Charlie Bondhus. From the same imprint, Akin to Poetry: Observations on Some Strange Tales of Robert Aickman was a chapbook containing eight revised essays about the author by Philip Challinor, along with a Bibliography of the works discussed.

  Published by Tartarus Press for the Halifax Ghost Story Festival, held over Halloween, The Inner Room was a handsome chapbook limited to just 200 copies that reprinted Robert Aickman’s titular “strange story” from the imprint’s reissue of the author’s 1968 collection Sub Rosa. The booklet also included a brief biography of Aickman by R.B. Russell and a Bibliography of the author’s work.

  Peter Atkins and Glen Hirshberg’s The Rolling Darkness Review 2010: Curtain Call played two dates in Canada and another pair in Hollywood at the end of October. The musical/literary show featured the final performances of two ageing thespians and, as usual, Earthling Publications produced the attractive tie-in chapbook, which also included a story by James K. Moran.

  The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction embraced its new bi-monthly schedule with six substantive volumes packed with new fiction, reviews and columns. Some of the contributors included Dean Whitlock (the cleverly titled “Nanosferatu”), John Langan, Albert E. Cowdrey, Elizabeth Bourne, Aaron Schutz (“Dr Death vs. the Vampire”), Ian R. MacLeod, Fred Chappell, Richard Matheson (a nice new Twilight Zone-type story), Michael Swanwick, David Gerrold, Terry Bisson, Bruce Sterling, Alan Dean Foster and John Kessel.

  John Eggeling, Rick Norwood, Bud Webster, David Langford, the late F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre and Paul Di Filippo all contributed to F&SF’s “Curiosities” column, which continued to look at obscure or ignored books.

  Britain’s best magaz
ine of horror, Andy Cox’s Black Static, produced six full-colour issues featuring fiction by Simon Kurt Unsworth, Lynda E. Rucker, Suzanne Palmer, John Shirley, Nicholas Royle, Steve Rasnic Tem, Joel Lane, Simon Clark, Lavie Tidhar, Paul Meloy and Sarah Pinborough, and Norman Prentiss, along with interviews with Alexandra Sokoloff, Sarah Pinborough, John Connolly, Adam Nevill and Stephen Jones, and the usual columns from Peter Tennant, Christopher Fowler, Stephen Volk and Mike O’Driscoll. Although Tony Lee’s excellent DVD reviews sometimes threatened to overwhelm the other contents, Black Static remained the UK’s leading all-round title dedicated to the genre.

  The magazine’s companion title, Interzone, also turned out six full-colour issues featuring stories by Jay Lake, Lavie Tidhar, Steve Rasnic Tem and Nina Allan, and interviews with Gene Wolfe, Connie Willis, Jeff VanderMeer and Jason Sanford, who had a special issue devoted to his work.

  The two issues of Richard Chizmar’s Cemetery Dance featured fiction by Al Sarrantonio, Thomas Tessier, Elizabeth Massie, Simon Clark, Peter Crowther, David B. Silva, Bentley Little (who was the subject of a special issue), Stephen King (an excerpt from Blockade Billy), Douglas Clegg, Simon Strantzas and Shaun Jeffrey, amongst others, along with the usual columns from Bev Vincent, Ed Gorman, Rick Hautala, Thomas F. Monteleone, Michael Marano, Don D’Auria, Ellen Datlow, Robert Morrish, Mark Sieber, Brian James Freeman, Scott Allie and Wayne Edwards. Interviewees included Sarrantonio, Crowther, Little, Freeman, Ronald Kelly, Ken Eulo, Steve Vernon and games producer Paul Mackman.

  Weird Tales also only managed two themed issues in 2010, one of those being a “Steampunk Spectacular” and the other devoted to “Uncanny Beauty”. Authors included Jay Lake, Catherynne M. Valente and Ian R. MacLeod, while there were interviews with Jesse Bullington and Cherie Priest, an article about pulp illustrator Margaret Brundage, and some truly terrible poetry.

  Having taken over Realms of Fantasy from Sovereign Media in 2009 and published six issues since, new publisher Warren Lapine sent out an open letter in May asking readers to support the title by renewing subscriptions. However, in October Lapine announced that he was closing the magazine, along with another title, Dreams of Decadence, due to the “terrible economic climate”. A month later, small press imprint Damnation Books purchased Realms of Fantasy, retaining the editorial staff.

  The March issue of Something Wicked included fiction, reviews and a column by John Connolly. Two months later, editor Joe Vaz announced that he was putting the South African publication on hiatus for the rest of the year while he re-evaluated “the feasibility of the magazine and how to take it into the future”.

  Canada’s excellent Rue Morgue put out eleven full-colour issues during the year, including its 100th edition in May. Along with all the usual reviews, news and features, there were interviews with R.L. Stine, Philip Nutman, Ray Russell of Tartarus Press, Joe Morey of Dark Regions Press, Peter Crowther of PS Publishing, Bill Warren, Marcus Hearn, Carol Serling, the late Paul Naschy, Christopher Lee, George A. Romero, Joe Dante, Roger Corman, Ted V. Mikels, Frank Darabont and Guillermo del Toro, amongst many others.

  Following a Chapter-11 bankruptcy, a warehouse fire and its acquisition by a series of new owners, the veteran horror film magazine Fangoria apparently began the year with some financial and management problems that led to the temporary closure of its website. Meanwhile, in his editorial in Shock Cinema #38, Steven Puchalski claimed that he was owed nearly $1,000 in unpaid fees.

  That same issue of Shock Cinema included interviews with director Gordon Hessler and actors Ed Lauter and Jim Kelly.

  In July, new publisher Phil Kim re-launched Famous Monsters of Filmland with issue #251, featuring four variant covers by Basil Gogos, Richard Corben, William Stout and an exclusive 2010 FM convention cover by Vince Evans. The following issue also featured variant covers of The Walking Dead (in black and white or colour) and Island of Lost Souls. In December it was announced that the magazine would move up from quarterly publication to bi-monthly, and that the title’s late founder, Forrest J Ackerman, would be added to the masthead as the new honorary editor-in-chief.

  Meanwhile, in August a group of UK horror fans launched Shock Horror, a bi-monthly independent magazine devoted to all forms of horror entertainment and culture. The first three issues included features on Vincent Price, Christopher Lee and Rob Zombie.

  Video WatcHDog: The Perfectionist’s Guide to Fantastic Video began the year by thankfully returning to a bi-monthly schedule and featuring Kim Newman’s incisive and entertaining appraisals of the first two seasons of The Avengers on DVD and Dean Martin’s series of “Matt Helm” sci-spy films. Although the twentieth anniversary issue featured yet another monstrous thirty-four page reappraisal of the career of Hispanic hack director Jess Franco by obsessive editor Tim Lucas, and another issue was mostly given over to the subject of Italian sound dubbing, there were also much more interesting (and relative) pieces on the Universal Cult Horror Collection (again by Newman), Planet of the Apes, the Karloff & Lugosi Horror Classics collection, D. DeAngelo’s discredited Creature from the Black Lagoon book (by David J. Schow) and Lex Barker’s Tarzan films.

  SFX’s bumper 132-page “Special Horror Edition” in February came in an illustrated card envelope with two free horror lapel badges, three pub-themed movie beermats and a double-sided John Carpenter poster. The magazine itself included articles on The Pan Book of Horror Stories and the history of horror comics, recommendations of obscure films and books by some well-known names, interviews with Joe Hill, Rick Baker and Breck Eisner, plus a new short story by Simon Clark. Unfortunately, after the outcry the previous year over the lack of women represented in the British Fantasy Society’s collection of author interviews, it was pointed out to the publishers of SFX that, despite it being published in “Women in Horror Recognition Month” (whatever that was!), there were almost no women represented in the magazine. Once again the story was picked up by the Guardian online and various blogging sites.

  On a more positive note, Terry Pratchett guest-edited the July edition of SFX, and the magazine celebrated its 200th issue in October.

  Not to be outdone, the November issue of Total Film included a feature on Hammer Films, an interview with John Carpenter, and “The Definitive 25 Greatest Horror Movies Ever Made” (The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was #1).

  The May issue of Book and Magazine Collector included an article by Richard Dalby on collecting werewolf books. Just in time for Halloween, the October edition featured Dalby’s guide to the top twenty-five occult and psychic detectives (with some mouth-watering first edition covers), along with Andrew Thomas’ look at ghost-hunter books and a lengthy profile of author Thomas M. Disch by Graham Andrews. Unfortunately, after twenty-six years, the magazine closed down at Christmas with issue #328.

  Meanwhile, Publishers Weekly and its associated website were saved from closure when they were purchased by a company headed by the title’s former publisher, George Slowik.

  As part of its series of The Greatest Films of All Time supplements, the Guardian newspaper published Sci-Fi & Fantasy in October. A panel of UK experts (including Anne Billson, Philip French and Mark Kermode) came up with a list of twenty-five titles that included Pan’s Labyrinth (24), Edward Scissorhands (21), King Kong (10), The Wizard of Oz (5) and Alien (4). The top three titles were Blade Runner (3), Metropolis (2) and 2001: A Space Odyssey.

  Stephen King’s list of “The Best TV of 2010” in Entertainment Weekly included The Walking Dead (2), The Event (4), Dexter (6) and SpongeBob SquarePants (8). He also devoted entries in his “The Pop of King” column to the Most Obnoxious TV Commercial Ever and the decline of singer/songwriter Harry Nilsson, while in July the magazine celebrated its twentieth anniversary with “The Wit and Wisdom of Stephen King”, a highlight of the author’s columns since 2003.

  Ably edited by Liza Groen Trombi after the unexpected death of founder Charles N. Brown in 2009, Locus included interviews with John Crowley, Charles Coleman Finlay, Samuel R. Delany and Barry
M. Malzberg. The September issue was a “Steampunk” special, and the magazine also featured roundtable discussions on “Poe & the Fantastic” with Peter Straub, Ellen Datlow, Gary K. Wolfe and Brian Evenson, and a fascinating discussion about “Pulp Fiction” between Robert Silverberg, Richard A. Lupoff and Frank M. Robinson.

  The first issue of Michael Kelly’s annual paperback magazine Shadows & Tall Trees from Canada’s Undertow Publications contained stories by Joel Lane, Adam Golaski, Sandra Kasturi, Simon Strantzas, Geordie Williams Flantz and Nicholas Royle, along with book and film reviews by the editor.

  David Longhorn published two attractive editions of Supernatural Tales with fiction by Michael Kelly, Richard Gavin, Michael Chislett and others, along with short articles on “neglected authors” Ambrose Bierce and Sir Charles Birkin and the usual book reviews by divers hands.

  R. Scott McCoy’s Stygian Publications put out four perfect-bound print editions of Necrotic Tissue: The Horror Writers’ Magazine. The quarterly PoD title included fiction by Jeff Strand and David Dunwoody, and an interview with Joe R. Lansdale. The Halloween edition included advice on being a writer by Graham Masterton, Brian Keene, Sarah Pinborough, Ellen Datlow, Nate Kenyon, Kim Newman, Peter Straub, Paul Kane, T.M. Wright and others.

  The four issues of Adam Bradley’s Morpheus Tales featured fiction by Ray Garton, Joseph D’Lacey, Andrew Hook and others, along with some excellent interior illustrations by Mark Anthony Crittenden and Douglas Draper, Jr.

  Ireland’s Albedo One produced its usual two issues under a raft of editors. The large-format magazine included stories by Bruce McAllister, Mike Resnick and Uncle River, interviews with Resnick and James Gunn, and the ever-popular book reviews.

  The three issues of Hildy Silverman’s Space and Time: The Magazine of Fantasy, Horror, and Science Fiction featured fiction and poetry by Josepha Sherman, F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre, Darrell Schweitzer, Richard Harland and Bruce Boston, along with an interview with Frederick Pohl.