The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 16

by Stephen Jones

  Novels based on the “Clan” role-playing game included Dark Ages: Toreador by Janet Trautvetter, Dark Ages: Gangrel by Tim Waggoner, Dark Ages: Tremere by Sarah Roark, Dark Ages: Venture by Matthew McFarland and Dark Ages: Tzimisce by Myranda Kalis, the thirteenth and final volume in the series.

  White Wolf brought an end to the “World of Darkness” in a series of books called the “Time of Judgment”. The first volume, Vampire: Gehenna: The Final Night by Ari Marmell, sold out its entire print-run of 10,000 copies before publication. It was followed by Werewolf: The Last Battle by Bill Bridges and Mage: Judgment Day by Bruce Baugh.

  From UK specialist press Telos Publishing, Keith Topping’s idiosyncratic A Vault of Horror was a hefty paperback subtitled A Book of 80 Great* (*and not so great) British Horror Movies from 1956–1974. Profusely illustrated with black and white stills and a nice colour poster section, the volume broke each title down into handy bite-sized chunks of information.

  Beasts in the Cellar: The Exploitation Film Career of Tony Tenser by John Hamilton looked at the man who ran Tigon Films and produced such movies as Repulsion, Witchfinder General and Naked as Nature Intended.

  From Dark Horse Books, Hellboy: The Art of the Movie contained the final shooting script of the movie plus concept artwork and behind-the-scenes shots from the film, with an Introduction by director Guillermo del Toro.

  Titan Books published an expanded edition of Hellraiser star Doug Bradley’s 1996 volume as Behind the Mask of the Horror Actor with an improved cover design and the original Foreword by Clive Barker.

  As Timeless As Infinity: The Complete Twilight Zone Scripts of Rod Serling, Volume One collected nine television scripts, two in alternate versions. Published by Gauntlet Press in an edition of 750 copies signed by Carol Serling, the hardcover included commentary by editor Tony Albarella, appreciations by Richard Matheson and Rockne S. O’Bannon, and cover art by Harry O. Morris.

  Edited and written by Stefano Piselli and Riccardo Morrocchi, the Italian published La Dolce Paura (Sweet Fear) was subtitled 1960s Sexy Horror in Italian Movies & Popular Publications and featured artwork from movie posters and book and magazine covers.

  Stephen King’s 1999 book The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon was adapted into a children’s pop-up book by Peter Abrahams with artwork by Alan Dingman. It had a first printing of 250,000 copies from Simon & Schuster/Little Simon, backed by a $250,000 marketing campaign.

  Featuring many classic cartoons and commentary by the artist, The Best of Gahan Wilson was edited by Cathy and Arnie Fenner for Underwood Books. From the same publisher and editors, the annual Spectrum 11: The Best in Contemporary Fantasy Art featured more than 400 colour works from 2003 by over 250 artists, including John Jude Palencar, Donato Giancola, John Berkey, Phil Hale, Todd Schorr, Jim Burns, William Stout, Rick Berry and many others, along with a profile of 2004 Grand Master Award recipient Michael Whelan.

  Published by Shocklines Press, As Dead as Leaves: The Art of Caniglia showcased the work of the talented young artist with a Foreword by George Pratt, an Introduction by the illustrator and remarks by Phil Hale. It was available as a trade paperback plus a limited hardcover edition with an added art print.

  The Paint in My Blood: Illustration and Fine Art by Alan M. Clark was a full-colour compendium of the artist’s work (including collaborations with other illustrators), commentary by Clark and an afterword-of-sorts by Jack Hunter Daves. The book was available from IFD Publishing as a large-size paperback, a 500-copy limited edition hardcover, and in a twenty-six copy lettered state that came in a metal traycase and included a matted sketch ($175.00). Both of the limited editions also contained a CD-R in which the artist demonstrated painting techniques and animations of several of the paintings in the book.

  Published by Last Gasp Press, Dreamland: The Art of Todd Schorr featured the artist’s surreal pop culture paintings with text by Paul Di Filippo.

  Darrell C. Richardson’s Those Macabre Pulps from Adventure House looked at twenty-five titles published between 1910 and 1970, with full-colour cover reproductions and listings of stories by author.

  Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean’s 1997 book The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish was reissued in a larger deluxe edition with a new cover, two additional pages of art, a new Afterword by the author and a limited edition enhanced CD of Gaiman reading the story.

  Artist Gris Grimley adapted four stories by Edgar Allan Poe for the young adult Tales of Mystery and Madness.

  From Titan Books, Modesty Blaise: The Gabriel Set-Up, Mister Sun and The Black Pearl by Peter O’Donnell and Jim Holdaway were three welcome oversized softcovers reprinting the black and white newspaper strips from the London Evening Standard of the mid-1960s. Beautifully reproduced in full-colour hardcover format, Dan Dare Pilot of the Future: Voyage to Venus Parts 1 and 2 reprinted Frank Hampson’s 1950–51 strip from Eagle comic and associated material in two volumes. Far less impressive was Amazona, a collection of inferior pin-up paintings by Chris Achilléos and the first in a proposed new series of hardcover art books from Titan.

  Published by Paper Tiger, The Deceiving Eye showcased the stunning comics, film poster and book cover art of Richard Hescox, with text by Randy M. Dannenfelser.

  Produced by the redoubtable team of writer Les Daniels and designer Chip Kidd for publisher Harry N. Abrams, The Golden Age of DC Comics: 365 Days was a hefty, if eccentric, trip down memory lane for comics fans.

  Revenue at Marvel increased 73 per cent to $155.5 million across the entire company, mostly thanks to tie-in toy sales linked to Spider-Man 2. Meanwhile, Marvel Comics created Marvel Press, to expand the Marvel Universe into prose books aimed at both young adult and older readers.

  Lovecraft was an original hardcover graphic novel from DC Comics/Vertigo, written by screenwriter Hans Rodionoff with Keith Griffen and painted by Argentinian artist Enriqué Breccia. This heavily fictionalized life of Howard Philips Lovecraft was introduced by film director John Carpenter.

  DC’s Elric: The Making of a Sorcerer was a four-issue prestige format miniseries in which writer Michael Moorcock and artist Walter Simonson revealed the origin of the albino warrior.

  George Romero returned to the world of his zombie films in the six-part story arc “The Death of Death!” in DC’s Toe Tags, which debuted at Halloween. Illustrated by Tommy Castillo and Rodney Ramos, with cover art by Bernie Wrightson, the political satire was set in a world of the living dead.

  Christopher Golden’s Justice League of America: Exterminators and Mark Schultz’s Justice League of America: The Flash: Stop Motion were both based on the DC series, while Kevin J. Anderson combined comics and pulps in DC’s JSA Strange Adventures, a six-issue miniseries featuring the Golden Age Justice Society of America, illustrated by Barry Kitson and Gary Erskine.

  B.P.R.D.: Plague of Frogs was a Hellboy spin-off written by Mike Mignola and illustrated by Guy Davis for Dark Horse Comics that continued the exploits of the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense (sic).

  The Song of Red Sonja and Other Stories, The Shadow in the Tomb and The Curse of the Golden Skull were the fourth, fifth and sixth volumes, respectively, in Dark Horse Books’ beautifully re-mastered series The Chronicles of Conan, written with always fascinating new Afterwords by Roy Thomas and illustrated by Barry Windsor-Smith, John Buscema, Neal Adams and others. The three volumes included adaptations of Robert E. Howard’s short novel “Red Nails”, a posthumous collaboration with Lin Carter, an original plot by Mike Resnick, and Norvell W. Page’s originally non-Conan novel Flame Winds.

  The revised and expanded Second Edition of Eureka Productions’ Graphic Classics Volume One: Edgar Allan Poe dropped work by Clive Barker and Gahan Wilson and added more than eighty new pages of art. Graphic Classics Volume Nine: Robert Louis Stevenson featured twenty-one graphic adaptations, including “The Bottle Imp” and “Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde”, while Graphic Classics Volume Ten: Horror Classics contained twelve adaptations of stories by H.P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe, Clark A
shton Smith and others.

  The Inklings – J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis and Charles Williams – confronted Aleister Crowley in Micah Harris’ graphic novel Heaven’s War, illustrated by Michael Gaydos from Image Comics.

  Writer Kris Oprisko and artist Gabriel Hernandez adapted Clive Barker’s 1992 young adult novel about Mr Hood’s mysterious Holiday House in Clive Barker’s The Thief of Always, a limited series from IDW Publishing.

  A young boy believed that the classic old monsters still had the ability to frighten in Steve Niles’ one-shot from IDW, The Very Big Monster Show, illustrated by Butch Adams. From the same publisher, Niles also adapted George A. Romero’s zombie film Dawn of the Dead with painted art by Chee, while Ian Edgington adapted Richard Matheson’s Hell House as a bi-monthly black and white title, with art by Simon Fraser. Artist Scott Hampton’s Spookhouse: Book Two included adaptations of work by Clive Barker, Robert E. Howard and others in full colour, also from IDW.

  Based on the board game from Human Head Studios, Dracula’s Revenge #1 from IDW Publishing was written by Matt Forbeck with art from Szymon Kudranski.

  Scripted by Max Allan Collins and illustrated by Gabriel Rodriguez, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation: Serial was a graphic novel collection of the first five issues of the IDW comic based on the popular CBS-TV series. It concerned a copycat serial killer in Las Vegas who thought he was Jack the Ripper.

  1950s TV horror host Zacherley launched his own comic book from Chanting Monks Press with Zacherley’s Midnite Terrors, featuring a cover painting by Basil Gogos. The second issue was also available in a limited edition of 250 copies signed in silver by cover artist William Stout.

  From the same imprint, Road Kills featured a cover by Bernie Wrightson and included three original stories by Hart D. Fisher, Christa Faust and Joseph M. Monks and was produced exclusively for the International Festival of Fantasy & Terror in Mexico City. Joe Martino’s Ripperman was about a mysterious stranger and a series of child killings, while the second issue of Agony in Black featured work by Wayne Allen Sallee, amongst others.

  From ibooks/Milk & Cookies Press, Gonna Role the Bones was a graphic adaptation of Fritz Leiber’s a ward-winning story, written by Sarah L. Thomson and illustrated by David Wiesner.

  Mister Negativity and Other Tales of Supernatural Law was the latest graphic collection from Batton Lash, which parodied everything from Harry Potter to Stephen King.

  The American summer box office once again broke records with ticket sales hitting $3.9 billion, narrowly beating the record $3.8 billion of 2003. However, the 2004 total was boosted by inflation, as audience numbers dropped slightly from the previous year.

  Sequels again proved to be the key to success, with Shrek 2, Spider-Man 2 and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban all breaking the $200 million barrier. The Incredibles and The Day After Tomorrow rounded out the top five films of the year.

  With an opening weekend of over $100 million and an eventual take of more than $440 million, DreamWorks’ fairy tale Shrek 2 reunited the original voice cast and became the top grossing animated movie ever.

  Sam Raimi’s superior Spider-Man 2 had a record-breaking opening day gross of $40.5 million, as Tobey Maguire’s angst-ridden web-spinner was pitched against Alfred Molina’s grasping Dr Octopus.

  Alfonso Cuaron’s Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban enjoyed an opening weekend take of $93.69 million, beating both the previous films in the series. In the UK the movie took more than £5 million in 535 venues, breaking the record for biggest opening day and best single day take. The darkest entry in the series to date, it featured Michael Gambon (replacing the late Richard Harris) as Dumbledore, and David Thewlis as a werewolf.

  A group of superheroes were called out of retirement to save the world in Brad Bird’s animated The Incredibles, the biggest hit yet for Pixar Animation Studios/Disney, while Roland Emmerich’s spectacular The Day After Tomorrow saw the northern hemisphere plunged into a new Ice Age because of a shift in the Earth’s climate due to global warming.

  They all featured in the UK top ten movies as well, along with the disappointing Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed, as Britons spent a record £839 million on cinema tickets.

  Meanwhile, the British film industry was thrown into turmoil in February when a sudden change in the tax law by the Inland Revenue, closing a tax loophole used to fund movies, resulted in the cancellation or restructuring of up to an estimated forty films.

  Seven months later a new tax deal was announced by the Treasury, which would cover a higher percentage of increased production costs. Another change would be that the money would be paid directly to the film makers, rather than a third party investor. Unfortunately it was too little, too late, and the number of films produced in the UK plummeted by 40 per cent in 2004.

  Also in September, a partnership headed by the Japanese Sony group bought Hollywood studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in a deal estimated to be worth $4.8 billion (£2.7 billion). Time Warner withdrew a competitive bid at the last minute. Included in the deal was MGM’s library of more than 4,000 films.

  2004 got off to a good start, with the previous year’s The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King going on to take more than $300 million at the American box office and passing the £50 million mark in Britain.

  Probably the biggest disappointment of the year was Stephen Sommers’ much hyped Van Helsing, in which Hugh Jackman’s bland monster hunter encountered Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster, a CGI wolfman and Kate Beckinsale’s swashbuckling princess in basically a rip-off of Hammer’s Captain Kronos Vampire Hunter (1972). Van Helsing: The London Assignment was an animated prequel for children, with Jackman voicing the titular monster hunter, while The Adventures of Young Van Helsing: Quest for the Lost Scepter was an unconnected live action cash-in, also aimed at younger viewers.

  Wesley Snipes’ undead vampire slayer teamed up with two new helpers to destroy a reincarnated Dracula (Dominic Purcell) in David S. Goyer’s flashy Blade Trinity, based on the Marvel Comics character.

  Thomas Janes played another Marvel hero in Jonathan Hen-sleigh’s The Punisher, as the eponymous vigilante took revenge on John Travolta’s crime boss. Even the 1989 adaptation with Dolph Lundgren was an improvement over the new version.

  Halle Berry was as embarrassed as the audience about her title role in the pretentiously-named Pitof’s Catwoman, loosely inspired by the DC Comics character.

  Based on Mike Mignola’s Dark Horse comic, Guillermo del Toro’s enjoyable Hellboy pitted Ron Perlman’s horned hero against a resurrected Rasputin who wanted to create a new Third Reich using Lovecraftian monsters from another dimension.

  Kerry Conran’s pulpy Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow was unfairly overlooked despite its all-star cast, stunning CGI effects and knowing nods to 1930s genre classics.

  The curse of The Exorcist struck again: Despite opening at #1, Exorcist: The Beginning barely managed to scrape past $30 million at the box office. Following John Frankenheimer’s death, Paul Schrader was brought in as a replacement, but the $35 million film was then re-shot from scratch by Renny Harlin and original star Liam Neeson was replaced by Stellan Skarsgård. Original director William Friedkin described the new prequel, set in Africa in the late 1940s, as “pointless”.

  Although it died at the box office, the remake of Dawn of the Dead took twice as much money when subsequently released as an unrated DVD. Meanwhile, Edgar Wright’s low brow and low budget “Rom-ZomCom” (romantic zombie comedy) Shaun of the Dead became something of a cult hit on both sides of the Atlantic without taking much money.

  Milla Jovovich returned to zap more flesh-eating zombies in a ravaged Raccoon City in Alexander Witt’s witless sequel Resident Evil: Apocalypse, based on the computer game.

  Despite featuring Lance Henriksen, Paul W.S. Anderson’s long-awaited Alien vs. Predator proved to be the worst of both series.

  Following the sleeper success of Pitch Black, Vin Diesel was back as the titular anti-hero in David Twohy’s ov
erblown The Chronicles of Riddick, and future cop Will Smith hunted down a deadly droid in Alex Proyas’ I, Robot, “suggested by Isaac Asimov’s book” (sic).

  Julianne Moore seemed to be the only person who remembered her missing 9-year-old son as Joseph Ruben’s The Forgotten strayed into X Files territory, while Greg Kinnear, Rebecca Romjin-Stamos and, especially, Robert De Niro were obviously slumming in Nick Hamm’s box-office dud Godsend, about evil cloning experiments.

  After opening at #1 in the US, M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village proved to be a twist too far when it dropped sixty-eight per-cent in its second week.

  In Dwight H. Little’s belated follow-up Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid, a group of pharmaceutical researchers were squeezed out of the Borneo jungle by giant CGI serpents.

  Despite the presence of Johnny Depp as a successful author accused of plagarism by a scary John Turturro, David Koepp’s adaptation of Stephen King’s Secret Window was not a hit. Unfortunately, the year’s other King adaptation, Mick Garris’ Riding the Bullet, fared even worse at the box office in a limited release.

  Ashton Kutcher travelled back and forth in time in New Line’s The Butterfly Effect, which was considered a box-office flop, despite opening at #1 in the US. The film’s title was inspired by a story from Ray Bradbury, who publicly complained that film-maker Michael Moore “stole” his title for the award-winning anti-George Bush documentary Fahrenheit 9/11, a surprise box-office hit during the summer.

  Don Mancini’s self-referential Seed of Chucky, the fifth entry in the patchy series, had killer dolls Chucky and Tiffany (voiced by Brad Dourif and Jennifer Tilly) revived from the dead and menacing actress Jennifer Tilly while she was filming a Chucky movie! John Walters had a fun cameo.