The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 18
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STEPHEN JONES lives in London, England. He is the winner of three World Fantasy Awards, four Horror Writers Association Bram Stoker Awards and three International Horror Guild Awards as well as being a seventeen-time recipient of the British Fantasy Award and a Hugo Award nominee. A former television producer/director and genre movie publicist and consultant (the first three Hellraiser movies, Night Life, Nightbreed, Split Second, Mind Ripper, Last Gasp etc.), he is the co-editor of Horror: 100 Best Books, Horror: Another 100 Best Books, The Best Horror from Fantasy Tales, Gaslight & Ghosts, Now We Are Sick, H. P. Lovecraft’s Book of Horror, The Anthology of Fantasy & the Supernatural, Secret City: Strange Tales of London, Great Ghost Stories, Tales to Freeze the Blood: More Great Ghost Stories and the Dark Terrors, Dark Voices and Fantasy Tales series. He has written Stardust: The Visual Companion, Creepshows: The Illustrated Stephen King Movie Guide, The Essential Monster Movie Guide, The Illustrated Vampire Movie Guide, The Illustrated Dinosaur Movie Guide, The Illustrated Frankenstein Movie Guide and The Illustrated Werewolf Movie Guide, and compiled The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror series, The Mammoth Book of Terror, The Mammoth Book of Vampires, The Mammoth Book of Zombies, The Mammoth Book of Werewolves, The Mammoth Book of Frankenstein, The Mammoth Book of Dracula, The Mammoth Book of Vampire Stories By Women, The Mammoth Book of New Terror, The Mammoth Book of Monsters, Shadows Over Innsmouth, Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth, Dark Detectives, Dancing with the Dark, Dark of the Night, White of the Moon, Keep Out the Night, By Moonlight Only, Don’t Turn Out the Light, H. P. Lovecraft’s Book of the Supernatural, Travellers in Darkness, Summer Chills, Exorcisms and Ecstasies by Karl Edward Wagner, The Vampire Stories of R. Chetwynd-Hayes, Phantoms and Fiends and Frights and Fancies by R. Chetwynd-Hayes, James Herbert: By Horror Haunted, The Complete Chronicles of Conan by Robert E. Howard, The Emperor of Dreams: The Lost Worlds of Clark Ashton Smith, Sea-Kings of Mars and Otherworldly Stories by Leigh Brackett, The Mark of the Beast and Other Fantastical Tales by Rudyard Kipling, Clive Barker’s A–Z of Horror, Clive Barker’s Shadows in Eden, Clive Barker’s The Nightbreed Chronicles and the Hellraiser Chronicles. He was a Guest of Honour at the 2002 World Fantasy Convention in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and the 2004 World Horror Convention in Phoenix, Arizona. You can visit his web site at www.herebedragons.co.uk/jones
Also available
The Mammoth Book of 20th Century Science Fiction
The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica
The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror
The Mammoth Book of Best New Manga
The Mammoth Book of Best New SF
The Mammoth Book of Celtic Myths and Legends
The Mammoth Book of Chess
The Mammoth Book of Comic Fantasy
The Mammoth Book of Comic Quotes
The Mammoth Book of CSI
The Mammoth Book of the Deep
The Mammoth Book of Dirty, Sick X-Rated & Politically Incorrect Jokes
The Mammoth Book of the Edge
The Mammoth Book of Egyptian Whodunnits
The Mammoth Book of Erotic Photography
The Mammoth Book of Erotic Women
The Mammoth Book of Extreme SF
The Mammoth Book of Famous Trials
The Mammoth Book of Great Detective Stones
The Mammoth Book of Great Inventions
The Mammoth Book of Haunted House Stones
The Mammoth Book of Historical Whodunnits
The Mammoth Book of Illustrated True Crime
The Mammoth Book of International Erotica
The Mammoth Book of IQ Puzzles
The Mammoth Book of Jokes
The Mammoth Book of King Arthur
The Mammoth Book of Lesbian Erotica
The Mammoth Book of Modern Ghost Stones
The Mammoth Book of Mountain Disasters
The Mammoth Book of New Terror
The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures
The Mammoth Book of On the Road
The Mammoth Book of Perfect Crimes and Impossible Mysteries
The Mammoth Book of Pirates
The Mammoth Book of Polar Journeys
The Mammoth Book of Roaring Twenties Whodunnits
The Mammoth Book of Roman Whodunnits
The Mammoth Book of Secret Code Puzzles
The Mammoth Book of Seriously Comic Fantasy
The Mammoth Book of Sex, Drugs & Rock 'n' Roll
The Mammoth Book of Sorcerers' Tales
The Mammoth Book of Sudoku
The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disasters
The Mammoth Book of SAS & Special Forces
The Mammoth Book of Short Erotic Novels
The Mammoth Book of Special Ops
The Mammoth Book of Sudoku
The Mammoth Book of Travel in Dangerous Places
The Mammoth Book of True Crime
The Mammoth Book of True War Stones
The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes
The Mammoth Book of Vampires
The Mammoth Book of Vintage Whodunnits
The Mammoth Book of Wild Journeys
The Mammoth Book of Women Who Kill
The Mammoth Book of the World’s Funniest Cartoons
The Mammoth Book of the World’s Greatest Chess Games
Constable & Robinson Ltd
3 The Lanchesters
162 Fulham Palace Road
London W6 9ER
www.constablerobinson.com
First published in the UK by Robinson, an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd 2007
Collection and editorial material copyright © Stephen Jones 2007
All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library.
ISBN-13: 978-1-84529-481-6
eBook ISBN: 978-1-78033-277-2
Printed and bound in the EU
13579 10 8642
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Horror in 2006
Summer
AL SARRANTONIO
Digging Deep
RAMSEY CAMPBELL
The Night Watch
JOHN GORDON
The Luxury of Harm
CHRISTOPHER FOWLER
Sentinels
MARK SAMUELS
The Saffron Gatherers
ELIZABETH HAND
What Nature Abhors
MARK MORRIS
The Last Reel
LYNDA E. RUCKER
The American Dead
JAY LAKE
Between the Cold Moon and the Earth
PETER ATKINS
Sob in the Silence
GENE WOLFE
Continuity Error
NICHOLAS ROYLE
Dr Prida’s Dream-Plagued Patient
MICHAEL BISHOP
The Ones We Leave Behind
MARK CHADBOURN
Mine
JOEL LANE
Obsequy
DAVID J. SCHOW
Thrown
DON TUMASONIS
Houses Under the Sea
CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN
They
DAVID MORRELL
The Clockwork Horror
F. GWYNPLAINE MacINTYRE
Making Cabinets
RICHARD CHRISTIAN MATHESON
Pol Pot’s Beautiful Daughter (Fantasy)
GEOFF RYMAN
Devil’s Smile
GLEN HIRSHBERG
The Man Who Got Off the Ghost Train
KIM NEWMAN
Necrology: 2006
STEPHEN JONES & KIM NEWMAN
Useful Addresses
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank David Barraclough, Kim Newman, Michael Marshall Smith, Sara and Randy Broecker, Val and Les Edwards, Max Burnell, Rodger Turner and Wayne MacLaurin (www.sfsite.com), Gordon Van Gelder, Peter Crowther, Mandy Slater, Pamela Brooks, Hugh Lamb, Claudia Dyer, Tim Lucas, Brian Mooney, Violet Jones, Amanda Foubister, Christopher Wicking and, especially, Pete Duncan and Dorothy Lumley for all their help and support. Special thanks are also due to Locus, Variety, Ansible and all the other sources that were used for reference in the Introduction and the Necrology.
INTRODUCTION: HORROR IN 2006 copyright © Stephen Jones 2007.
SUMMER copyright © Al Sarrantonio 2006. Originally published in Retro Pulp Tales. Reprinted by permission of the author.
DIGGING DEEP copyright © Ramsey Campbell 2006. Originally published in Phobic: Modern Horror Stories. Reprinted by permission of the author.
THE NIGHT WATCH copyright © John Gordon 2006. Originally published in Left in the Dark: The Supernatural Tales of John Gordon. Reprinted by permission of the author.
THE LUXURY OF HARM copyright © Christopher Fowler 2006. Originally published in The British Fantasy Society: A Celebration. Reprinted by permission of the author.
SENTINELS copyright © Mark Samuels 2006. Originally published in Alone on the Darkside: Echoes from the Shadows of Horror. Reprinted by permission of the author.
THE SAFFRON GATHERERS copyright © Elizabeth Hand 2006. Originally published in Saffron & Brimstone: Strange Stories. Reprinted by permission of the author.
WHAT NATURE ABHORS copyright © Mark Morris 2006. Originally published in Night Visions 12. Reprinted by permission of the author.
THE LAST REEL copyright © Lynda E. Rucker 2006. Originally published in Supernatural Tales 10, 2006. Reprinted by permission of the author.
THE AMERICAN DEAD copyright © Joseph E. Lake, Jr. 2006. Originally published in Interzone, Issue #203, April 2006. Reprinted by permission of the author.
BETWEEN THE COLD MOON AND THE EARTH copyright © Peter Atkins 2006. Originally published in At the Sign of the Snowman’s Skull. Reprinted by permission of the author.
SOB IN THE SILENCE copyright © Gene Wolfe 2006. Originally published in Strange Birds. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agent, Virginia Kidd Agency, Inc.
CONTINUITY ERROR copyright © Nicholas Royle 2006. Originally published in London: City of Disappearances. Reprinted by permission of the author.
DR PRIDA’S DREAM-PLAGUED PATIENT copyright © Michael Bishop 2006. Originally published in Aberrant Dreams #7, Spring 2006. Reprinted by permission of the author.
THE ONES WE LEAVE BEHIND copyright © Mark Chadbourn 2006. Originally published in Dark Horizons, Issue No.48, Spring 2006. Reprinted by permission of the author.
MINE copyright © Joel Lane 2006. Originally published in The Lost District and Other Stories. Reprinted by permission of the author.
OBSEQUY copyright © David J. Schow 2006. Originally published in Subterranean, Issue #3. Reprinted by permission of the author.
THROWN copyright © Don Tumasonis 2006. Originally published in New Genre, Issue Four, Winter 2006. Reprinted by permission of the author.
HOUSES UNDER THE SEA copyright © Caitlín R. Kiernan 2006. Originally published in Thrillers 2. Reprinted by permission of the author.
THEY copyright © David Morrell 2006. Originally published on Amazon Shorts, September 2006. Reprinted by permission of the author.
THE CLOCKWORK HORROR copyright © F. Gwynplaine Maclntyre. Originally published in Evermore. Reprinted by permission of the author.
MAKING CABINETS copyright © Richard Christian Matheson. Originally published in Masques V. Reprinted by permission of the author.
POL POT’S BEAUTIFUL DAUGHTER (FANTASY) copyright © Geoff Ryman 2006. Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction No.655, October/November 2006. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agent.
DEVIL’S SMILE copyright © Glen Hirshberg 2006. Originally published in American Morons. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agent, Anderson Grinberg Literary Management, Inc.
THE MAN WHO GOT OFF THE GHOST TRAIN copyright © Kim Newman 2006. Originally published in The Man from the Diogenes Club. Reprinted by permission of the author.
NECROLOGY: 2006 copyright © Stephen Jones and Kim Newman 2007.
USEFUL ADDRESSES copyright © Stephen Jones 2007.
Congratulations to
Paul and Marie
on the occasion of their wedding.
INTRODUCTION
Horror in 2006
IN FEBRUARY 2006, French conglomerate Lagardere bought the Time Warner Book Group for $537.5 million and became the third largest book publisher in the world (after Pearson and McGraw Hill). Lagardere is the parent company of publisher Hachette Livre, which already owned Orion/Gollancz and Hodder Headline in the UK. The acquisition meant that they also took control of the Warner Books, Warner Aspect, Little Brown and Mysterious Press imprints in the US, and Orbit and Atom in the UK. The various imprints were subsequently renamed Hachette Book Group USA and Little Brown Book Group.
Following the death of their founder in 2005, Byron Preiss Visual Publications and iBooks, Inc. voluntarily filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy and closed down all operations at the end of February. It was announced that the companies did not have sufficient resources to continue operations. They were subsequently put up for public auction, with the back catalogue, copyrights and author agreements included amongst the assets. The companies were acquired by J. Boylston & Company, who placed an initial bid of $125,000 and planned to continue publishing titles under the Byron Preiss imprints.
American Marketing Services, which owned Publishers Group West, declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy on December 26th with debts of $200 million. AMS was the largest book distributor in America, with more than 150 clients including Carroll & Graf, Dark Horse Comics, McSweeney’s, RE/Search, Thunder’s Mouth Press and Underwood Books.
HMV acquired Britain’s Ottakar’s bookshop chain for £62.9 million, and pulped several million pounds of stock in the process. The 141 stores were subsequently rebranded as Waterstone’s.
Mr Alton Verm of Conroe, Texas, was outraged when he saw the book his fifteen-year-old daughter brought home from the local high school. “It’s just all kinds of filth,” Verm complained. “I want to get the book taken out of the class.” To that end, he filed a “Request for Reconsideration of Instructional Materials” with the Conroe Independent School District. The book he so vehemently objected to was Ray Bradbury’s classic Fahrenheit 451, which is all about a near-future society where books are banned. Of course, Verm didn’t know that – he admitted that he hadn’t actually read it.
In September, the Rt Reverend David Gillett, the Bishop of Bolton, accused retailers of creating a “climate of fear” by selling traditional Halloween merchandise. Writing to Britain’s five biggest supermarket chains, he urged them to rethink the way they marketed the pagan holiday: “I share the view of many Christians that large retailers are increasingly keen to commercialise Halloween celebrations in a way that pressurises parents to purchase goods that promote the dark, negative side of Halloween and could encourage anti-social behaviour,” he said. “I am worried that Halloween has the potential to trivialise the realities of evil in the world and that occult practices should not be condoned, even if they are only being presented in a caricatured, light-hearted form.”
It was estimated that Britain now spends $120 million on Halloween. Analysts say that the UK is fast catching up with America, where it costs the average family around $120.00 to buy Halloween accessories, in an industry that is worth nearly $9 billion a year.
Although some critics decried the growing “Americanisation” of Halloween, in the UK it is the third most profitable event for retailers after Christmas and Easter, with the seven days before October 31st now the second busiest shopping week of the year.
In June, author J. K. Rowling was voted Britain’s greatest living writer in an online survey for The Book Magazine. She received almost three times as many votes as the second-placed author, Terry Pratchett. Also down the list were Phillip Pullman (#6), Iain Banks (#14), Alasdair Gray (#19), Neil Gaiman (joint #21), J.G. Ballard (joint #28), Peter Ackroyd (joint #28), Diana Wynne Jones (#36) and Michael Moorcock (#44).
By the end of 2006, Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Deadly Hallows was already topping the Amazon best-seller list, despite not being published for another six months. Not content with that, the “adult edition” of Rowling’s latest magical opus was firmly established in the #2 slot. However, that did not stop shares in Rowling’s British publisher, Bloomsbury, crashing after a shock profits warning that wiped £73 million off the company’s value. Bloomsbury blamed poor retail sales during the run-up to Christmas.
According to the American Library Association, Rowling’s Harry Potter series topped the list of the “most-challenged” books in the 21st century with the highest number of written complaints to US schools and libraries asking for them to be removed. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck only made #4 on that particular Top 10 of shame.
J. K. Rowling teamed up with fellow authors Stephen King and John Irving over August 1st and 2nd at New York City’s Radio City Music Hall for a benefit appearance in aid of The Haven Foundation and Doctors Without Borders. The trio read from their work and answered questions in front of the 6,000-strong audiences.
In Stephen King’s novel Cell, which the author dedicated to Richard Matheson and George Romero, people using their cell phones were turned into rampaging zombies by a mysterious electronic virus known as the Pulse. With 1.8 million copies in circulation in America, Scribner promoted the book with downloadable ringtones featuring King’s voice and a mass text-messaging campaign. The first two chapters were excerpted in the January 27th issue of Entertainment Weekly, and when the book was released in the UK in February, The Times newspaper included an extract from the novel in the format of a newsprint supplement.