The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror

by Stephen Jones

  To promote Under the Dome, King and film director David Cronenberg engaged in an on-stage discussion on November 19 at the Canon Theatre in Toronto, Canada.

  Meanwhile, Dean Koontz’s latest thriller, Relentless, was apparently a thinly veiled attack on crazed book reviewers, and the author’s Breathless involved the discovery of two exotic creatures in the Colorado mountains. Dead and Alive was the third volume in Dean Koontz’s Frankenstein series. It topped the mass-market book charts and Koontz had his co-authors’ names taken off reissues of the previous two books in the series.

  Known for her international best-seller The Time Traveler’s Wife, former graphic novelist Audrey Niffenegger’s follow-up, Her Fearful Symmetry, was a ghost story set in and around North London’s Highgate Cemetery (where the author was once a tour guide). It revolved around the ghost of a woman who died of cancer and the two identical “mirror” twins she bequeathed her flat to. The author reportedly received a $4.8 million advance for the book from her US publisher, Scribner.

  Terry Pratchett OBE was made a knight for his services to literature in the Queen’s New Year’s Honours list. “I am pleased that this has gone to a fantasy author,” said Sir Terry, “it’s not a genre that is usually in the frame for these kinds of things.”

  Virgin Books’ nascent line of horror trade paperbacks continued with Conrad Williams’ new post-apocalyptic novel One, along with reprints of Thieving Fear by Ramsey Campbell and Thomas Ligotti’s linked collection My Work is Not Yet Done, before the publisher abruptly announced that it was closing down the list.

  When a man received an e-mail from a stranger claiming to know what happened to his missing son, it led to a terrifying sequence of events in the aptly-titled Bad Things, the latest dark thriller from Michael Marshall (Smith). Brian Lumley’s Necroscope: The Lost Years: Harry and the Pirates collected six stories (three original) featuring Harry Keogh, who had the ability to converse with the dead. In America, the book was published as Necroscope: Harry and the Pirates and Other Tales from the Lost Years and contained just the three new stories. Both editions featured (different) covers by artist Bob Eggleton.

  A police officer investigated sightings of mysterious lights above a remote Texas town in David Morrell’s The Shimmer, and Charles de Lint’s The Mystery of Grace was a hot-rod romance set on Halloween night, when the barrier between worlds was thin and the dead could touch the living.

  A murder investigation led Aloysius Pendergast to a zombie cult in Cemetery Dance by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, while the dead were returning to life during a heatwave in Stockholm in Handling the Undead, a zombie novel from Let the Right One In author John Ajvide Lindqvist.

  A teenager became involved in a mystery surrounding an old mansion that was once connected to a prison for the insane in House of Reckoning by John Saul, and Ground Zero was the twelfth volume in the “Repairman Jack” series by F. Paul Wilson and concerned a secret cosmic war that led to the events of 9/11.

  Jaclyn the Ripper, Karl Alexander’s belated sequel to Time After Time, featured H.G. Wells and his time machine pursuing a sex-changed Jack the Ripper to Los Angeles in 2010.

  Delia’s Gift and Delia’s Heart were the latest Gothic novels published under the long-dead V.C. Andrews® byline.

  Meanwhile, Japanese horror writer Koji Suzuki teamed up with a paper manufacturer to have his latest novella published on . . . toilet paper. Drop was the tale of an evil spirit that inhabited a toilet bowl.

  A psychic found herself being tracked through the wilderness by something inhuman in Alice Henderson’s Voracious, and young boys mysteriously disappeared in contaminated woods in John Burnside’s The Glister.

  The Map of Moments by Christopher Golden and Tim Lebbon was the second volume in the “Hidden Cities” series and a sequel to Mind the Gap.

  An archaeologist inadvertently released the spirits of a band of sadistic thugs in Ghost Monster by Simon Clark, and Conrad Williams added the middle initial “A.” to his byline for Decay Inevitable, which boasted a cover by Dave McKean.

  A female writer was haunted by dreams of an ancient oak tree associated with local legends of supernatural magic in The Red Tree, a complex new novel by Caitlín R. Kiernan.

  Speak of the Devil was the fourth volume by Jenna Black about exorcist Morgan Kingsley, and freelance exorcist Felix Castor explored his bleak childhood in Thicker Than Water, the fourth in the series by Mike Carey. It was followed by The Naming of the Beasts.

  A year after they went missing on an uninhabited Pacific island, the survivors attempted to get their story straight in Primal by Robin Baker.

  Quincey Morris and his white witch partner Libby Chastain attempted to avert a magical apocalypse in Evil Ways, the second book in the “Quincy Morris Supernatural Investigator” series by Justin Gustainis.

  John Shirley’s Bleak History was a Lovecraftian-inspired novel about a former army ranger who had a connection with the “Hidden” world of the supernatural.

  Released from a military prison, Jake Hatcher found himself confronting a race of supernatural women and a New York serial killer in Damnable by Hank Schwaeble.

  A sequel to The Secret War, The Hoard of Mhorrer by M.F.W. Curren involved a group of nineteenth-century soldier-monks dispatched to Egypt to find and destroy a great evil before it could fall into the hands of agents of Hell.

  The Book of Illumination: A Novel from the Ghost Files by Mary Ann Winkowski and Maureen Foley was the first in a new series about a woman who could see ghosts.

  Phantom cop Kevin Fahey had to correct his own mistakes in Desolate Angel, the first in a new mystery series by Chaz McGee.

  Ghouls Just Want to Have Fun was the third book in Victoria Laurie’s “Ghost Hunter” mystery series about psychic sleuth M.J. Holiday who, this time, was participating in a new reality TV show.

  The restoration of an old Victorian house led to a century-old mystery involving two ghosts in P.J. Alderman’s Haunting Jordan.

  A woman renovating a cursed Florida mansion discovered dozens of walled-up bodies, a ghost and a killer with the ability to transcend time in Unhallowed Ground by the prolific Heather Graham [Pozzessere]. From the same author, The Death Dealer was a sequel to The Dead Room, about ghosts helping a detective and a social worker track a Poe-inspired serial killer.

  When a woman moved into a too-good-to-be-true Manhattan apartment in Sarah Langan’s near-future haunted house novel, Audrey’s Door, she uncovered the horrific history of the place she now called home.

  Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger was a 1940s ghost story with an unreliable narrator set in a crumbling English country pile that echoed with the sound of pattering footsteps. A psychic psychology professor investigated a haunted house in The Unseen by Alexandra Sokoloff.

  Joe Schreiber’s No Doors, No Windows involved a forgotten manuscript and an old house with a secret history, while in His Father’s Son by Bentley Little a son investigated his father’s sudden madness.

  As if just books themselves were no longer worth the cover price, J.C. Hutchins and Jordan Weisman’s Personal Effects: Dark Arts – a novel about a suspected murderer who claimed to be possessed by a Russian demon – came with all sorts of paraphernalia, which included notes and business cards containing real phone numbers and Internet addresses.

  When a video game producer escaped a werewolf attack, he learned about the eponymous group of supernatural hunters in Skinners Book 1: Blood Blade by Marcus Pelegrimas. It was followed by Book 2: Howling Legion.

  Monster Hunter International was the first in a new series by Larry Correia about an accountant-turned-hunter of supernatural creatures.

  James Morrow’s Shambling Towards Hiroshima was set during World War II and involved a plot to scare the Japanese into surrender by putting a “B” movie actor into a rubber giant monster suit before a breed of real fire-breathing mutant lizards were unleashed as the ultimate weapon.

  History seemed to be repeating itself on the site of a historic mas
sacre in Jeff Mariotte’s Black Hearts.

  J. Robert King’s Angel of Death was about the hunt for a serial killer in Chicago. The book also included an interview with the author.

  Following on from Dark Rain, Tony Richards’ Night of Demons was the second novel set in the magical village of Raine’s Landing, where a psychotic serial killer breached the magical safeguards and preyed upon the descendants of the Salem witches.

  Michael McBride’s Spectral Crossings was about a new housing development being built on land surrounding a cursed marsh.

  When her father, who just happened to be Death himself, was kidnapped, Calliope Reaper-Jones had to save the family business in Death’s Daughter by Buffy the Vampire Slayer actress Amber Benson.

  Kate Mosse’s “illustrated novella” The Winter Ghosts was set in a mysterious French village in the late 1920s, and a group of Scottish teenagers undergoing grief counselling was more than a match for monsters that had escaped from Hell in Christopher Brookmyre’s Pandaemonium.

  As usual, the Leisure paperback imprint kept the flag flying for midlist horror: a Scottish manor house was haunted by an ancient evil in Black Cathedral, the latest volume in the “Department 18” series by L.H. Maynard and M.P.N. Sims, and spiderlike creatures invaded London in Sarah Pinborough’s Feeding Ground, the sequel to Breeding Ground.

  Blind Panic was the conclusion of Graham Masterton’s “Manitou” saga, as people across America were struck suddenly and totally blind.

  The cast and crew of a desert island reality TV show were being killed off in Brian Keene’s Castaways, while a group of teenagers took refuge in a house of horrors in Urban Gothic from the same author.

  When a small-town evangelist climbed out of his coffin, he brought a demon horde with him in Jake’s Wake by John Skipp and Cody Goodfellow, based on Skipp’s as-yet-unproduced directorial debut.

  A survivor of a mass murder returned to the town of Cedar Hill in Gary A. Braunbeck’s Far Dark Fields, and the inhabitants of an isolated rural town tortured and sacrificed anyone unlucky enough to stumble into their traps in Depraved by Bryan Smith.

  When a family moved to a small town in Quebec, the young daughter soon started having premonitions of blood and death in Nate Kenyon’s The Bone Factory, and a small Tennessee town was taken over by a soul-sucking Lamia in Bryan Smith’s Soultaker.

  While Ray Garton’s werewolf novel Bestial was a sequel to the author’s Ravenous, W.D. Gagliani’s werewolf novel Wolf’s Gambit was a sequel to Wolf’s Trap.

  Edward Lee’s The Golem featured an army of creatures formed from riverbed clay that brought terror to the Maryland coast.

  The late Richard Laymon’s 1987 novel Tread Softly was reissued by Leisure under the title Dark Mountain, while Graham Masterton’s The Painted Man was reprinted as Death Mask and Edward Lee’s Gast appeared as The Black Train.

  Other reprints included John Everson’s Sacrifice and The 13th, Cover by Jack Ketchum (Dallas Mayr), Pressure by Jeff Strand, Crimson by Gord Rollo, and Ghost Monster by Simon Clark.

  In conjunction with Canada’s Rue Morgue magazine and the Chiaroscuro website, Leisure Books launched a “Fresh Blood” contest to find a previously unpublished horror author to add to the list in 2011.

  Prodigious paranormal romance publisher Harlequin Books caused controversy in America after it announced that it was creating a new imprint, DellArte Press, that would publish books rejected from the company’s other imprints in return for a fee.

  The vanity press was immediately condemned by writers’ groups, including the Romance Writers of America, the Mystery Writers of America and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, who responded by banning any of Harlequin’s books from award eligibility and its authors using their credits for the company to qualify for membership.

  A man was haunted by the ghost of his first love in Lisa Child’s paranormal romance Immortal Bride, and a woman who could see dead people was a suspect in her ex-husband’s death in Cara Lockwood’s Every Demon Has His Day.

  Satan opened a music store across the street from clairvoyant Nicki Styx’s vintage clothing store in You’re the One That I Haunt, the third book in the series by Terri Garey. In the next volume, Silent Night Haunted Night, three demons decided to teach Nicki a lesson at Christmas.

  While continuing to deal with the usual vampires, werewolves and ghosts, the fourth volume in Patricia Briggs’ “Mercy Thompson” series, Bone Crossed, featured the usually tough heroine dealing with the emotional trauma of being drugged and raped before killing her attacker. From the same author, Hunting Ground was the second volume in the spin-off werewolf series, in which a meeting of the werewolf clans was attacked by vampires using magic.

  Plagued by ghosts and nightmares, psychic PI Harper Blaine was sent by the Seattle vampires to London in Vanished, the fourth in Kat Richardson’s “Greywalker” series.

  Meanwhile, Seattle cop Joanne Walker had to use her shamanic powers to deal with ghosts, zombies and even the Wild Hunt at Halloween in Walking Dead, the fourth in the “Walker Papers” series by C.E. Murphy.

  While on a business trip to Chicago, Pepper Martin encountered more ghosts in the paranormal mystery Night of the Loving Dead, the fifth in the series by Casey Daniels (Connie Laux).

  In the seventh volume of Kim Harrison’s series, White Witch, Black Curse, investigator Rachel Morgan and her vampire and pixie partners faced a rogue banshee along with some personal problems.

  Dracula the Un-Dead was billed as “The Official Sequel” because its co-author, Canadian-born Dacre Stoker, was the great grand-nephew of Bram Stoker and the novel was “endorsed by the Stoker family”.

  Co-written by American scriptwriter Ian Holt (Dr Chopper) and reportedly based on characters and plot threads deleted from the original book, the sequel was set twenty-five years after the events of that story and revolved around a troubled theatrical production of Dracula at the Lyceum and the murder of Jonathan Harker.

  The first in a proposed trilogy, Dracula the Un-Dead was sold in thirty-seven countries for more than $2 million before publication, and a movie adaptation was in pre-production.

  Mexican film director Guillermo Del Toro teamed up with thriller novelist Chuck Hogan to write The Strain, the first volume in a trilogy about a vampire plague that was unleashed on New York. Apparently, Del Toro originally conceived the idea as a TV series for the Fox Network, who turned it down.

  In David Wellington’s 23 Hours: A Vengeful Vampire Tale, police investigator Laura Caxton found herself locked in a Pennsylvania correctional facility and being hunted by the oldest living vampire.

  Russian investigator Anton Gorodetsky travelled to Scotland to investigate an apparent vampire murder in Last Watch, the fourth in Sergei Lukyanenko’s series that began with Night Watch.

  A tabloid reporter discovered that a playboy tycoon was secretly a vampire hunter in The Vampire Affair by Livia Reasoner, and a doctor was forced to help a wounded vampire in Love Without Blood by Raz Steel.

  Amnesiac Lilith escaped from a clandestine CIA project to breed vampires in Maggie Shayne’s Bloodline, while Thirsty was a Christian vampire novel by Tracey Bateman, about an alcoholic woman stalked by a vampire.

  An Iraq War veteran found himself battling a plague of drug-created vampires in contemporary London in Thomas Emson’s Skarlet, the first volume in the “Vampire Babylon” series.

  The first volume in Alex Bledsoe’s “Rudolfo Zginski” series, Blood Groove, was set in the American South of the 1970s, where the teenage vampires of Memphis found themselves forming an uneasy alliance with a centuries-old Nosferatu to track down a street drug that could destroy them all.

  A couple in the middle of a bad break-up discovered a vampire baby in Bite Marks, the first in the “Vampire Testament” series by new author Terence Taylor.

  Set during World War II, powerful ancient vampires battled Nazis in The Midnight Guardian, the first in the “Millennial” series by new author Sarah Jane Stratford.
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  The first book in “The Supernatural Battle for WWII” trilogy, Bloody Good by Georgia Evans (Rosemary Laurey), involved vampire Nazi invaders and heroic Devonshire pixies. It was followed by Bloody Awful and Bloody Right.

  Covering all the bases, Nina Bangs’ Eternal Craving was the first in the “Gods of the Night” series and managed to combine vampires with the Mayan prediction of the end of the world in 2012. From the same author, My Wicked Vampire was the fourth in the “Castle of Dark Dreams” series, set in an erotic theme park.

  Psychometric investigator Simon Canderous from the Department of Extraordinary Affairs discovered that something had sucked a boat full of lawyers dry in Anton Strout’s Deader Still, a sequel to Dead to Me.

  Undead and Unwelcome was the eighth volume in MaryJanice Davidson’s humorous “Betsy the Vampire Queen” series, also involving the Wyndham werewolves.

  With almost 600,000 copies in print, Charlaine Harris’ Dead and Gone, the ninth Southern Vampire mystery about telepathic barmaid Sookie Stackhouse, went straight to the top of the New York Times and Publishers Weekly best-seller charts in May. When her shape-changing sister-in-law was found crucified, Sookie discovered that someone was out to eliminate creatures of mixed blood.

  The twelfth book in P.N. Elrod’s series, The Vampire Files: Dark Road Rising, saw Jack Fleming teaming up with a vampire mobster to save his own life.

  The Thirteenth was the twelfth and reportedly final volume in L.A. Banks’ “Vampire Huntress Legends” series. The book included a reading group guide and an eight-page colour comics section.

  Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake, vampire hunter, was still going strong in Skin Trade, the seventeenth book in the ludicrously best-selling series. This time the sex-obsessed heroine was on the trail of a serial-killer vampire in Las Vegas.

  Burning Shadows was the twenty-second volume in Chelsea Quinn Yarbros’ long-running series about the vampire Saint-Germain, who this time helped defend an isolated Roman monastery against invading Huns.