The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror

by Stephen Jones

  Published as a two-volume boxed set by the prestigious Library of America, American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps and American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940s to Now were two hefty volumes edited with introductions by Peter Straub. They featured eighty-five seminal stories; amongst the authors represented were Henry James, Charles Brockden Brown, Fitz-James O’Brien, Robert W. Chambers, H.P. Lovecraft, David H. Keller, Robert E. Howard, Robert Bloch, Fritz Leiber, Harlan Ellison, John Crowley, Joyce Carol Oates, Stephen King, T.E.D. Klein, Thomas Tessier, Thomas Ligotti, Poppy Z. Brite, M. Rickert, Kelly Link, Tim Powers, Gene Wolfe, Joe Hill and the editor himself.

  Stephen King and Lawrence Block were among those who contributed twenty essays to editor Michael Connelly’s Mystery Writers of America Presents: In the Shadow of the Master: Classic Tales by Edgar Allan Poe, which contained sixteen stories and poems by Poe, illustrated by Harry Clarke. A companion volume was Mystery Writers of America Presents: On a Raven’s Wing: New Tales in Honor of Edgar Allan Poe, edited by Stuart M. Kaminsky and featuring twenty stories by Mary Higgins Clark and others.

  Edited with an Introduction by John Skipp, Zombies: Encounters with the Hungry Dead contained thirty-two stories split into two sections, “Zombies of the Old School” and “Emancipation”. The book also included two Appendices exploring zombies in a historical perspective and in popular culture, and among those authors represented were Stephen King, Joe R. Lansdale, David J. Schow and Lisa Morton.

  Coincidently, all those authors were also featured – but with different stories – in The Dead That Walk: Zombie Stories edited with an Introduction by Stephen Jones. The book contained twenty-four tales of the walking dead (eleven original).

  Based on Clive Barker’s novella “The Hellbound Heart” (the inspiration for the Hellraiser films), Hellbound Hearts edited by Paul Kane and Marie O’Regan was an original anthology of twenty-one stories set in the same universe. Contributors included Peter Atkins, Sarah Pinborough, Mick Garris, Tim Lebbon, Kelley Armstrong, Richard Christian Matheson, Nancy Holder, Nancy Kilpatrick and others, including a comic strip by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean, and an illustrated story from Christopher Golden and Mike Mignola. There was a Foreword by Barker, an Introduction by Stephen Jones, and “Pinhead” actor Doug Bradley provided the Afterword.

  Editor Otto Penzler raided a lot of other anthologies for the seventy-eight stories, four poems and three non-fiction pieces found in The Vampire Archives, which came with a Foreword by Kim Newman, a Preface by Neil Gaiman and an extensive bibliography of vampire stories and novels compiled by Daniel Seitler.

  Dark Delicacies III: Haunted, edited by Del Howison and Jeff Gelb, featured nineteen original stories by David Morrell, Chuck Palahniuk, Mick Garris, Victor Salva, Richard Christian Matheson, John Connolly, Heather Graham, Simon Clark and others, along with a Foreword by actor Steven Weber.

  Edited with an Introduction by Rod Serling’s widow Carol, Twilight Zone: 19 Original Stories on the 50th Anniversary featured an eclectic line-up of contributors that included Whitley Strieber, Kelley Armstrong, R.L. Stine, Carole Nelson Douglas and Tad Williams.

  The Darker Sex: Tales of the Supernatural and Macabre by Victorian Women Writers contained eleven stories selected by always reliable editor Mike Ashley, including work from E. Nesbit, Emily Brontë and Elizabeth Gaskell.

  Edited by Trisha Telep, The Mammoth Book of Paranormal Romance contained twenty-four stories (one reprint) by Kelley Armstrong, Carrie Vaughn, Holly Lisle and others. From the same editor, Love Bites (aka The Mammoth Book of Vampire Romance 2) contained twenty-five vampire romance stories (two reprints) by Dawn Cook, Carole Nelson Douglas, Caitlin Kittredge and others.

  Mean Streets collected four urban dark fantasy novellas by Jim Butcher (“Dresden Files”), Simon R. Green (“Nightshade”), Kat Richardson (“Greywalker”) and Thomas Sniegoski (“Remy Chandler”).

  Edited by P.N. Elrod, Strange Brew contained nine original stories by some of the biggest names in “urban fantasy”. The theme was potions, and plenty of witches, werewolves, zombies and vampires turned up in the stories by Charlaine Harris, Jim Butcher, Caitlin Kittredge, Patricia Briggs and others, including the editor.

  Strip Mauled, edited by Esther Friesner, brought together twenty urban werewolf stories by Jody Lynn Nye, K.D. Wentworth and others.

  Edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Kerrie Hughes, Zombie Raccoons & Killer Bunnies was one of DAW Books’ monthly paperback anthologies, containing sixteen new stories about killer critters by Jody Lynn Nye, Tim Waggoner, Carrie Vaughn, Richard Lee Byers, Nina Kiriki Hoffman and less well-known names.

  Bitten was an anthology of fifteen erotic ghost stories (five reprints) edited by Susie Bright, while Holiday with a Vampire III collected three vampire romance novellas set at Christmas by Linda Winstead Jones, Lisa Childs and Bonnie Vanak.

  After St Martin’s Press ceased publication of the annual The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror after twenty-one years, Ellen Datlow’s re-boot of her half of the long-running series, The Best Horror of the Year Volume One, appeared from Night Shade Books. It featured twenty-one stories, the editor’s summation of the year and the usual list of so-called “Honorable Mentions”.

  The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror celebrated its twentieth anniversary with the same number of stories and novellas, along with a summary of the preceding year and in-depth Necrology. For the first time in a long while, the UK and US editions had very different covers. There were no stories that appeared in both volumes, and Steve Duffy was the only author represented in each.

  Throughout 2009, Google continued to make revisions to its highly controversial Books Settlement, following concerns from the US Department of Justice and foreign governments over the company’s apparent attempts to create a digital monopoly of copyrighted works.

  In December, a Paris court found Google guilty of copyright violation and ordered the company to pay £300,000 in interest and damages and cease reproducing any copyrighted material from French publishers unless it had made an individual deal to do so.

  That same month Ursula K. Le Guin resigned from the Authors Guild after thirty-seven years, in protest against the organization’s acceptance of the Google Books Settlement.

  In July, Barnes & Noble launched its online e-book store with 700,000 titles, including more than half-a-million out-of-copyright works available free from Google. The e-books were accessible via a number of formats for every type of electronic reader.

  In August, Wikipedia announced that it would finally introduce editorial controls to prevent people maliciously changing entries provided by the online encyclopaedia. In future, experienced editors would check revisions to improve accuracy.

  Stephen King’s original novella, “UR”, was only available on Amazon’s Kindle, and the e-book reading device was itself an integral part of the story. Just three weeks after it was released, downloads had reached five figures.

  In an attempt to compete with the Kindle, Sony launched its own electronic reader, the Reader Daily Edition. Using a seven-inch touch screen, users could store up to 1,000 books chosen from a digital bookstore containing more than a million titles.

  Meanwhile, Google launched the Google Book Reader, a free service allowing people to read 1.5 million out-of-copyright novels on their smart phones.

  In September, it was announced that the Kindle version of Dan Brown’s latest blockbuster, The Lost Symbol, was outselling the hardcover edition on Amazon and selling more than ten times the number of any other e-book.

  The Texas-based online magazine Lone Star Stories, which had published six issues a year since 2004, ceased publication.

  Sci Fi Wire, the Syfy channel’s online news division, abruptly cancelled all its columns as a result of research showing that “the medium had evolved”. Among those affected were John Clute, Michael Cassutt and Will McCarthy.

  Actor Jon Heder imagined that he might have turned into a zombie in the Sony C
rackle web series Woke Up Dead, which also featured comedian Wayne Knight.

  Virgin’s first web TV series, Dr Hoo, starred Ian Hart as a mentally ill man who lived in a shed and might have been the saviour of the galaxy. It ran for ten two-minute webisodes.

  For fans of the Showtime Network’s favourite serial killer, Dexter: Early Cuts was a twelve-part animated prequel to the TV series available on the Internet. The webisodes filled in the gaps in the characters, early years and were narrated by star Michael C. Hall. New Dexter games and e-cards could also be found online.

  Computer effects artist George Taylor’s short live-action musical film, Fishmen, was based on H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” and featured the song “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Fish-Men”, originally recorded for the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society’s Christmas album, A Very Scary Solstice.

  Advances in new printing technology meant that more print-on-demand (PoD) titles were being published than regular books. It appeared that the inmates had finally taken over the asylum.

  From editor Charles Black’s PoD imprint, Mortbury Press, The Fourth Black Book of Horror and The Fifth Black Book of Horror were an improvement over earlier volumes. These unashamed pastiches of The Pan Book of Horror Stories featured some old-fashioned grue from Craig Herbertson, Paul Finch, Joel Lane, David A. Sutton, Gary McMahon, Reggie Oliver, Ian C. Strachan, Gary Fry, Rosalie Parker, David A. Riley and others, with one story by John Llewellyn Probert even referencing specific stories from the Pan series.

  Published by Hippocampus Press and inspired by Frank Belknap Long’s The Hounds of Tindalos, The Hound Hunters: A Southwestern Supernatural Thriller was the third novel in Adam Niswander’s “The Shaman Cycle”, which mixed Lovecraftian mythology with Native American culture. The book was originally announced in 1995 as coming from Integra Press and it was followed by The War of the Whisperers, the fourth in the series.

  Seven Deadly Pleasures contained seven stories (four original) by schoolteacher Michael Aronovitz, while Blood Will Have Its Season collected forty-one – frankly, incomprehensible – stories and poems by Joseph S. Pulver, Sr (thirty original). Both books included slightly hyperbolic Forewords by S.T. Joshi.

  Classics & Contemporaries collected thirty-six essays about the horror genre by Joshi.

  The Outer Gate: The Collected Poems of Nora May French gathered together the verse of the Californian poet, a friend of George Sterling, who committed suicide in 1907 at the age of twenty-six. Edited by Donald Sidney-Fryer and Alan Gullette, it featured an impressive biographical Introduction by Sidney-Fryer and copious notes and tributes.

  Also from Hippocampus, Dan Clore’s Weird Words: A Lovecraftian Lexicon was exactly what the title said it was, and extremely useful if you wanted to look up the meaning of “eldritch”. The Unknown Lovecraft collected thirteen essays by Kenneth W. Faig, Jr, while the third paperback edition of The Lovecraft Annual, edited by S.T. Joshi, included a number of articles about the author by Will Murray, Leigh Blackmore and others, along with some minor Lovecraft verse not included in The Ancient Track (2001).

  Fred Chappell’s 1968 Lovecraftian novel Dagon was reissued in a PoD edition by Boson Books, while Weird Inhabitants of Sesqua Valley from Terradan Works collected ten Lovecraftian stories (five original) by W.H. Pugmire with an Introduction by Jeffrey Thomas.

  From Gray Friar Press with an Introduction by Gary McMahon, Pictures of the Dark was an overview collection of Simon Bestwick’s more disturbing tales, the earliest dating back to 1997. Of the twenty-three stories included in the on-demand trade paperback, eleven were original.

  John L. Probert’s third collection, The Catacombs of Fear, once again owed its inspiration to the anthology films of Amicus and featured five original stories linked by a framework narrative involving a new priest.

  Groaning Shadows from Gray Friar Press contained four long novellas by Paul Finch, while Stephen Volk’s novella Vardøger from the same publisher was inspired by Norwegian mythology and involved a man suspected of a murder committed by his doppelgänger.

  Visions from Mythos Books was a hardcover collection of twelve fantasy and horror stories (four original, featuring psychic detective Abraham ben Zaccheus) by Richard A. Lupoff, with an Introduction by Peter S. Beagle.

  From Apex Publications, Gene O’Neill’s Taste of Tenderloin was a collection of eight stories (three original) set in a run-down area of San Francisco, with an Afterword by the author and an Introduction by his son, Gavin.

  Zombies demanded their own political representation in B.J. Burrow’s humorous novel The Changed, also available from Apex.

  Edited with an Introduction by Mike Allen, Clockwork Phoenix 2: More Tales of Beauty and Strangeness from Norilana Books contained fifteen new stories by Tanith Lee, Steve Rasnic Tem, Forrest Aguirre and others.

  Hopeful Monsters was a self-published debut collection under the Bleed Red Books imprint that contained seventeen stories (one reprint) by graphic artist Jenny Ashford that definitely deserved a wider audience than the PoD market.

  Produced by Star Publishing in conjunction with three Canadian university bookstores, Campus Chills, edited by Mark Leslie, was a welcome attempt to produce an original on-demand anthology for students at Halloween. It contained thirteen stories by Kelley Armstrong, Sèphera Girón, Michael Kelly, Nancy Kilpatrick, Douglas Smith, Edo van Belkom, Steve Vernon and others, along with an Introduction by Robert J. Sawyer and notes on the authors.

  From Shroud Publishing, Mama Fish by Rio Youers was a novella set in the 1980s, about an oddball kid at school.

  The Terror of Fu Manchu from Black Coat Press was an authorized first novel by William Patrick Maynard, based on the series created by Sax Rohmer.

  From New Jersey’s Newmedia Publishing, Predatoress by “Emma Gábor” was a first-person PoD novel in which the author/narrator claimed to be a reluctant member of the undead who vampirized her three best friends so she would have somebody to hunt with. There was no explanation as to why the book was laid out in chunks of text, but at least it was promoted with its own “Blood” red wine.

  Subtitled A Vampire Satire, and with chapters titled after different vampire movies, Liquid Diet was the first solo novel from Michael McCarty. Available in trade paperback from DemonicClown Books/KHP Industries, it featured an Introduction by Michael Romkey and an Afterword by C. Dean Anderson.

  Editor and author Jeffrey Thomas’ Necropolitan Press resumed publication after eight years with Paul G. Tremblay’s slipstream novella The Harlequin & the Train, which was published as a 400-copy trade paperback. Readers were encouraged to use a yellow highlighter to colour certain text.

  Something from the black depths stalked eight survivors drifting on a life raft in the middle of the ocean in Scottish author Carole Johnstone’s debut novella Frenzy, from Canadian PoD and e-book imprint Eternal Press.

  Malpractice: An Anthology of Bedside Terror, edited with an Introduction by Nathaniel Lambert, was the first print anthology from Necrotic Tissue/Stygian Publications. The thirty-one original stories (almost half just 100 words in length) were set in and around the mysterious Bloom Memorial Hospital.

  Robin Hood & Friar Tuck Zombie Killers: A Canterbury Tale was written in rhyming couplets and iambic pentameters by Paul A. Freeman. Involving the legendary outlaws’ battle against a zombie plague brought back from the Great Crusade in the Holy Land, the epic narrative poem was published by Canada’s Coscom Entertainment as a PoD chapbook.

  The two attractive PoD issues of Talebones: Science Fiction & Dark Fantasy featured fiction and verse from Scott Edelman, Carrie Vaughn, Cat Rambo, Don D’Ammassa, Darrell Schwitzer and others, along with a reprint interview with Roger Zelazny by the late Ken Rand. Patrick Swenson announced in his editorial that #39 was the final issue, as he wanted to concentrate on his own writing and Fairwood Press.

  Originally published online as a PDF magazine for its first six issues, R. Scott McCoy’s Necrotic Tissue: The Horror Writers’ Magazin
e from Stygian Publications moved to a print-on-demand format in 2009. Although the design still left much to be desired, the first three perfect-bound issues included plenty of fiction from new authors, along with an interview with Joe R. Lansdale.

  PS Publishing was possibly the busiest independent publisher of the year, releasing a raft of books covering the entire spectrum of fantastic literature.

  Edited by Angus Mackenzie with an Introduction by Hellraiser actor Doug Bradley, Spook City collected four stories by Peter Atkins (one original), three by Clive Barker and five by Ramsey Campbell (plus a harrowing new memoir about his mother). All the contributors were sons of Liverpool, which is where the stories were set. The 200-copy slipcased edition was signed by all the contributors and featured alternative cover artwork by Barker.

  Containing thirty-two marvellous stories, The Very Best of Gene Wolfe: A Definitive Retrospective of his Finest Short Fiction was limited to 100 slipcased hardcovers signed by the author and Kim Stanley Robinson, who contributed the Introduction, and 300 unjacketed hardcovers just signed by Wolfe. The book also boasted a superb wraparound cover design by J.K. Potter.

  Vaitor Plus was a new collection of eight recently published pieces of fiction by Lucius Shepard, including the full text of the title novel for the first time, and The Black Heart collected fourteen stories (two original) by Patrick O’Leary, along with Introductions by James Morrow and the author.