The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 10 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Stephen Jones

  Long before the arrival of the bus, a handsome limousine crawled past in the traffic, and glancing idly within, I observed Mr Chester Montfort d’M— smoothing the air with a languid gesture while in conversation with the two stout, bowler-hatted men on his either side. Soon, doubtless, he would begin his instructions in the whopbopaloobop.

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  XII.

  What is a pittance in a great city may be a modest fortune in a hamlet, and a returned prodigal might be welcomed far in excess of his true deserts. I entered New Covenant quietly, unobtrusively, with the humility of a new convert uncertain of his station, inwardly rejoicing to see all unchanged from the days of my youth. When I purchased a dignified but unshowy house on Scripture Street, I announced only that I had known the village in my childhood, had travelled far, and now in my retirement wished no more than to immerse myself in the life of the community, exercising my skills only inasmuch as they might be requested of an elderly invalid. How well the aged invalid had known the village, how far and to what end had he travelled, and the nature of his skills remained unspecified. Had I not attended daily services at the Temple, the rest of my days might have passed in pleasant anonymity and frequent perusals of a little book I had obtained at the terminus, for while my surname was so deeply of New Covenant that it could be read on a dozen headstones in the Temple graveyard, I had fled so early in life and so long ago that my individual identity had been entirely forgotten. New Covenant is curious - intensely curious - but it does not wish to pry. One fact and one only led to the metaphoric slaughter of the fatted calf and the prodigal’s elevation. On the day when, some five or six months after his installation on Scripture Street, the afflicted newcomer’s faithful Temple attendance was rewarded with an invitation to read the Lesson for the Day, Matthew 5: 43-48, seated amidst numerous offspring and offspring’s offspring in the barnie-pews for the first time since an unhappy tumble from a hayloft was Delbert Mudge.

  My old classmate had weathered into a white-haired, sturdy replica of his own grandfather, and although his hips still gave him considerable difficulty his mind had suffered no comparable stiffening. Delbert knew my name as well as his own, and though he could not connect it to the wizened old party counseling him from the lectern to embrace his enemies, the old party’s face and voice so clearly evoked the deceased lawyer who had been my father that he recognized me before I had spoken the whole of the initial verse. The grand design at work in the universe once again could be seen at its mysterious work: unknown to me, my entirely selfish efforts on behalf of Charlie-Charlie Rackett, my representation to his parole board and his subsequent hiring as my spy, had been noted by all of barnie-world. I, a child of Scripture Street, had become a hero to generations of barnies! After hugging me at the conclusion of the fateful service, Delbert Mudge implored my assistance in the resolution of a fiscal imbroglio which threatened his family’s cohesion. I of course assented, with the condition that my services should be free of charge. The Mudge imbroglio proved elementary, and soon I was performing similar services for other barnie clans. After listening to a half-dozen accounts of my miracles while setting broken barnie-bones, New Covenant’s physician visited my Scripture Street habitation under cover of night, was prescribed the solution to his uncomplicated problem, and sang my praises to his fellow townies. Within a year, by which time all New Covenant had become aware of my “tragedy” and consequent “reawakening”, I was managing the Temple’s funds as well as those of barn and town. Three years later, our Reverend having in his ninety-first year, as the Racketts and Mudges put it, “woke up dead”, I submitted by popular acclaim to appointment in his place.

  Daily, I assume the honored place assigned me. Ceremonious vestments assure that my patchwork scars remain unseen. The lucite box and its relics are interred deep within the sacred ground beneath the Temple where I must one day join my predecessors -some bony fragments of Graham Leeson reside there, too, mingled with Marguerite’s more numerous specks and nuggets. Eyepatch elegantly in place, I lean forward upon the Malacca cane and, while flourishing the stump of my right hand as if in demonstration, with my ruined tongue whisper what I know none shall understand, the homily beginning, It only ... To this I append in silent exhalation the two words concluding that little book brought to my attention by an agreeable murderer and purchased at the great grand station long ago, these:Ah, humanity!

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  STEPHEN JONES & KIM NEWMAN

  Necrology: 1998

  The following writers, artists, performers and technicians who made significant contributions to the horror, science fiction and fantasy genres during their lifetimes (or left their mark on popular culture in other ways) died in 1998 . . .

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  AUTHORS/ARTISTS

  Prolific author Walter D. Edmonds, best remembered for his 1930s bestsellerDrums Along the Mohawk (filmed by John Ford in 1939) died on January 24th, aged 94.

  Cartoonist and dust jacket illustrator “Ionicus” (Joshua Charles Armitage) died on January 29th, aged 84. He trained at the Liverpool School of Art and, following service in the Royal Navy during World War II, began contributing cartoons to Punch magazine. He produced fifty-eight covers for the Penguin P.G. Wodehouse series, but it is his sixty-five dust jacket paintings for William Kimber’s ghost story collections and anthologies between 1974-88 - by R. Chetwynd-Hayes, James Turner, Denys Val Baker, Amy Myers and others - for which he will be remembered.

  Thriller writer Lawrence Sanders died on February 7th, aged 78. Best known for his novels The Anderson Tapes and The First Deadly Sin (filmed in 1972 and 1980, respectively), he also wrote such borderline-SF titles as The Tomorrow File and The Passion of Molly T, plus the fantasy Dark Summer under the pseudonym “Mark Upton”.

  Fantasy and science fiction writer (Patricia) Jo Clayton died of multiple myeloma on February 13th, two days before her 59th birthday. Despite being hospitalized for more than a year and a half and suffering from advanced bone cancer, she completed the second volume (Drum Calls) and part of the third book in her “Drums” trilogy, along with a number of short stories. Among her thirty-five published novels are Diadem from the Stars (1977), Moongather, Drinker of Souls, Skeen’s Leap, Shadowplay, Wild Magic, Dancer’s Rise, Fire in the Sky and Drum Warning.

  Games designer and fantasy novelist Sean A. Moore was killed in a single-car accident in the early evening hours of February 23rd. The creator of the bestselling computer game,Ultimate Wizard, he was 33 and had recently quit his job to become a full-time writer. His books included Conan the Hunter, Conan and the Shaman’s Curse, Conan and the Grim Gray God and the novelisation of the 1997 movieKull the Conqueror (he also worked uncredited on the script).

  Cuban-born cartoonist Antonio Prohias, who drew the “Spy vs. Spy” strip for Mad magazine from 1961 until he retired in 1991, died from cancer on February 24th in Florida. He was 77.

  Rockin’ Sidney Simien, who won a Grammy Award in 1985 for his zydeco hit “(Don’t Mess With) My Toot Toot”, died of lung cancer on February 25th, aged 59.

  Beat poet Jack Micheline, a close friend of Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso and Bob Kaufman, who published more than twenty books of poetry, died in San Francisco on February 27th, aged 68.

  Comics writer and editor Archie Goodwin (Archibald Goodwin) died on March 1st after a long battle with cancer. He was 60. In 1965 he entered the comics field as a writer and Editor-in-Chief of Warren Publication’s Creepy and Eerie titles. He later worked at both Marvel and DC Comics, and scripted such newspaper strips as Star Wars and Secret Agent X-9.

  43-year-old MS sufferer Robert James Leake, the seven-foot tall “professional monster” who appeared in numerous commercials and television shows as Dracula, the Frankenstein Monster and Darth Vader, died the same day, after entering hospital with a chest infection. He joined The Dracula Society in 1974 and held a variety of positions, including Honorary Secretary, archivist, media consultant and editor of the society’s newslett
er, Voices from the Vaults.

  Following treatment for a series of aneurysms, playwright and screenwriter Beverley Cross, who was married to actress Dame Maggie Smith, died on March 20th, aged 66. His credits include the Ray Harryhausen fantasy adventures Jason and the Argonauts, Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger and Clash of the Titans.

  Rozz Williams, the songwriter and musician who founded Gothic rock group Christian Death, hanged himself on April 1st at his home in West Hollywood. He was 34.

  Puerto Rico-born science fiction illustrator Alex Schomburg died on April 7th, aged 92. His career spanned seven decades and included the covers of Hugo Gernsback’s science magazines in the 1920s, superhero titles from the Golden Age of comics, and pulp and digest SF magazine covers during the 1950s and 60s. Croma: The Art of Alex Schomburg was published in 1986, and he received a special Lifetime Achievement Award in SF Art at the 1989 World Science Fiction Convention.

  Comic strip artist Lee Elias died at a nursing home on April 8th, aged 77. From 1952-55 he collaborated with Jack Williamson on the daily newspaper strip Beyond Mars. He also worked on Terry and the Pirates for many years.

  Singer, photographer and vegetarian Linda McCartney died from breast cancer on April 17th, aged 56. Along with her husband Paul (whom she married in 1969) she was in the group Wings, and her photo of Clive Barker appeared on the dust jacket of Weaveworld.

  American Gothic novelist and essayist Wright Morris died on April 25th, aged 88.

  Carlos Castaneda, the author of a series of mystical novels about Yaqui Indian shaman Don Juan, died of liver cancer on April 27th. His age was uncertain, but he was somewhere between 68 and 74.

  Veteran short story author and screenwriter (Drexel) Jerome (Lewis) Bixby died on April 28th from a heart attack after complications following quadruple bypass surgery. He was 75. The author of more than a thousand short stories, Bixby’s first sale was to the pulp magazine Planet Stories in 1949, which he also edited from 1950-1 along with the first three issues of its companion title, Two Complete Science-Adventure Books. After working as an associate editor forGalaxy, Thrilling Wonder Stories and Startling Stories, he sold a number of screenplays to Hollywood, including It! The Terror from Beyond Space, The Lost Missile and Curse of the Faceless Man. His story “It’s a Good Life” was adapted for TV’s Twilight Zone and again for the 1983 movie, he wrote the original story for what later became Fantastic Voyage, and his Star Trek scripts include “Mirror Mirror” and “Day of the Dove”. Some of his best fiction is collected in Space by the Table and The Devil’s Scrapbook.

  Prolific children’s author Mabel Esther Allan died on May 14th, aged 83. Among her 180 books were the short ghost novel, A Chill in the Lane, The Haunted Valley and Other Poems andA Strange Enchantment.

  British author and actor Ivan Butler, the last surviving cast member of the first commercial London stage production of Dracula, died on May 17th, aged 89. In 1929, Butler played Lord Godalming and then understudied the part of Dracula in Hamilton Deane’s dramatization of Bram Stoker’s novel. He went on to play every male part in the play, including the Count, and produced Dracula on the stage many times. In the early 1950s he had several plays presented on television by the BBC and in later years he was the author of such books as The Horror Film, The Cinema of Roman Polanski and Cinema in Britain.

  Alan D. Williams, who edited half a dozen novels and the collection Different Seasons by Stephen King while at Viking Penguin, died of cancer the same day. He was 72.

  Novelist, playwright and screenwriter Wolf Mankowitz died in County Cork, Ireland, on May 20th from cancer, aged 73. His screenplays include Hammer’s The Two Faces of Dr Jekyll (aka House of Fright), The Day the Earth Caught Fire andCasino Royale. Among his books are the fantasies A Kid for Two Farthings and A Night With Casanova, the vampire novel The Devil in Texas (illustrated by Ralph Steadman), plus the biography The Extraordinary Mr Poe.

  British novelist and playwright Robert Muller died on May 27th, aged 72. In 1977 he created and scripted seven of the eight episodes of the BBC TV series Supernatural, two of which starred his wife Billie Whitelaw. A tie-in paperback was published by Fontana.

  Mary Elizabeth Grenander, a leading authority on Ambrose Bierce, died in her sleep on May 28th, aged 79. She edited and wrote the introduction for the 1995 book Poems of Ambrose Bierce.

  Book editor William Abrahams, who worked for Atlantic Monthly Press and later for Holt, Reinhart and Winston and Dutton, died on June 2nd, aged 79. His authors included Pauline Kael and Joyce Carol Oates, and he presided over the annual O. Henry short story awards for more than three decades.

  New York bookseller and publisher Jack Biblo died on June 5th, aged 92. With his business partner Jack Tannen he started Canaveral Press in the 1960s. Under the editorship of Richard A. Lupoff, Canaveral reprinted a number of Edgar Rice Burroughs books which had gone into public domain, eventually becoming the sole authorized hardcover publisher of Burroughs, along with titles by Lupoff, L. Sprague de Camp and E.E. Smith.

  French novelist Thomas Narcejac died in Paris on June 9th, aged 89. He collaborated with Pierre Boileau on more than forty thrillers, including Les Louves, Les Yeux Sans Visage and Body Parts, which were all filmed.

  Bestselling thriller writer (Ralph) Hammond Innes died June 10th, aged 84. He first novel, The Doppelgänger (1936), was an occult thriller, and his ghost story “South Sea Bubble” (from the Christmas 1973 Punch) has been anthologized often. He left behind an unexpected collection of rare stamps worth up to £11,000 as part of his £6.8 million estate.

  Romantic bestseller Dame Catherine Cookson (Catherine Ann McMullen) died on June 11th, aged 91. She made her writing debut at the age of 44, producing an average of two books a year. Her children’s fantasy Mrs. Flannagan’s Trumpet was published in 1976. She was awarded an OBE in 1985, and made a Dame in 1993.

  Ann Elizabeth Dobbs, the only grandchild ofDracula author Bram Stoker and the last surviving link with his wife Florence, died at her home on June 15th, aged 81. She reportedly found her grandfather’s novel too scary to read!

  Playwright, screenwriter and lyricist Edward Eliscu died on June 18th, aged 96. He wrote the words to “Flying Down to Rio” and was blacklisted in the 1950s for his outspoken political views.

  Michael D. Weaver, whose novels includeMercedes Night and the Norse werewolf trilogy, Wolf-Dreams (1987),Nightreaver and Bloodfang, died on July 5th when he drowned in three feet of water. He was 36.

  Writer, editor and fan Robert A.W. (“Doc”) Lowndes died on July 14th of renal cancer. He was 81. A founder member of New York’s Futurians SF club in 1938, he began writing his own stories in the 1940s, often in collaboration with other authors. His novels include The Mystery of the Third Mine (1953), Believer’s World and The Puzzle Planet, and a collection of his columns appeared under the title Three Faces of Science Fiction in 1973. Although Lowndes was editor of the Avalon Books hardcover science fiction line from 1955-70 and compiled The Best of James Blish in 1979, he is best remembered as a magazine editor, beginning with Future Fiction and Science Fiction Quarterly (both 1941-43), followed by Dynamic Science Fiction (1952-54) and Science Fiction Stories/The Original Science Fiction Stories (1954-60). During the 1960s he worked for Health Knowledge Inc., editing a series of digest magazines that included The Magazine of Horror (1963-71), Startling Mystery Stories (1966-71), Famous Science Fiction (1966-69) and Bizarre Fantasy Tales (1970-71). It was during this period that he published the young Stephen King’s first two professional tales in 1967 and 1969 issues of Startling Mystery Stories.

  Children’s illustrator Lillian Hoban, who began her career in the 1960s illustrating the Frances books written by her husband Russell Hoban, died of a heart attack on July 17th, aged 73.

  Screenwriter John Hopkins, who co-wrote the Bond film Thunderball and scripted Murder by Decree, died on July 23rd, aged 67.

  French author, translator and editor Alain Doremieux died in his sleep on July 26th, aged 64. A former editor of the French
editions of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (aka Ficcion) and Galaxy, between 1991-96 he edited nine volumes of the horror anthology series Territoires de I’lnquietude, and in 1993 he was responsible for Steve Rasnic Tem’s only collection to date,Ombres sur la Route.

  Science fiction cover artist Paul Lehr died on July 27th, aged 67, six weeks after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He received the Merit Award from the Society of Illustrators in 1980 and served as a judge for the L. Ron Hubbard Illustrators of Future contest since its inception.