The Amazing Dreams of Andrew Latter by Harold Begbie was the latest volume in “The Ash-Tree Press Occult Detectives Library”, edited with an Introduction by Jack Adrian. It reprinted a series of six “dreamland” tales written in 1904 for the London Magazine and was also limited to 500 copies.
As usual edited and introduced by Jack Adrian, The Ash-Tree Press Annual Macabre 2002: Ghosts at “The Cornhill” reprinted fifteen stories from the Victorian periodical and was the first of two annual compilations highlighting the magazine’s supernatural content.
First published in 1935 and reprinted as an Ash-Tree trade paperback, Vampires Overhead by Alan Hyder was about an alien invasion of the Earth, with an Introduction by Jack Adrian. Gerald Biss’s 1919 werewolf novel The Door of the Unreal was reprinted with an Introduction by Stefan Dziemianowicz, while Divinations of the Deep collected five tales of cosmic horror by Matt Cardin.
Originally conceived as a 150-copy Christmas collection for members of The Ghost Story Society in 1994, Lady Stanhope’s Manuscript and Other Supernatural Tales was the first publication from Ash-Tree Press. Edited by Barbara Roden, it featured stories by Katherine Haynes, Christopher Roden, G. W. Howarth, Dale J. Nelson and Tina Rath. Reissued as part of the “Ash-Tree Press Occasional Booklet” series, it contained a new Preface to the second edition.
Published by Tartarus Press in an edition of 500 copies, James Methuen-Campbell’s biography Denton Welch: Writer & Artist was a study of the author (who died tragically in 1948), and included the first publication of three stories, a full bibliography and sixty-one illustrations, fifteen in full colour.
From the same imprint and limited to 350 copies, The Sacrifice and Other Stories by “Sarban” (John William Wall) contained four novella-length stories (two previously unpublished), while A Damask of the Dead collected the exotic and sensual poetry of John Gale, limited to 250 signed copies.
Stories from a Lost Anthology was the third collection by Welsh writer Rhys Hughes to be published by Tartarus, with an Introduction by Michael Moorcock. It was limited to 400 copies. Undesirable Guests and Other Stories was the first collection by William Charlton. Featuring fourteen tales of ghosts and unease, it was limited to 300 copies signed by the author.
Written With My Left Hand collected the stories of Nugent Barker, while William Sansom’s collection of twenty-five stories, Various Temptations, was introduced by Mark Valentine. Both were limited to 350 copies.
Limited to 400 copies, M.P. Shiel’s Prince Zaleski contained six stories featuring the Decadent psychic sleuth, three written in “collaboration” with poet and literary researcher John Gawsworth, one of which was unfinished. Brian Stableford provided the Introduction, along with notes by R.B. Russell.
Stableford also translated French Decadent Jean Lorrain’s collection Nightmares of an Ether-Drinker in a handsome edition from Tartarus, limited to 350 copies.
Edited by John Pelan and Steve Savile and published by Midnight House, the late Fritz Leiber’s Smoke Ghost & Other Apparitions contained eighteen classic or obscure stories and a previously unpublished novelette. Featuring an Introduction by Ramsey Campbell, it was limited to 450 numbered copies.
Day Dark, Night Bright was a new collection of science fiction stories by Leiber, including a “lost” novelette, with an Introduction by John Pelan. Pelan also introduced The Harlem Horror, a collection of fifteen classic stories by Sir Charles Birkin, limited to 450 copies.
Cited as one of the thirteen best novels of supernatural horror by the late Karl Edward Wagner, Fingers of Fear by J.U. Nicholson had been unavailable in hardcover for more than sixty years. Illustrated by Allen Koszowski, the 450-copy edition included a new Introduction and a bibliography of Nicolson’s books by editor Douglas A. Anderson.
The enigmatic R.R. Ryan was the only author with three entries on Wagner’s list of the thirty-nine best horror novels of all time. Echo of a Curse, edited with an Introduction and essay by D.H. Olson, was the first volume in Midnight House’s programme to reprint the best of Ryan’s novels.
Also from Midnight House, Feesters in the Lake and Other Stories was a collection of all the weird fiction tales by Bob Leman, with a Preface by Jim Rockhill.
From Bereshith Publishing, Family Tradition was another “hard-core horror” novel by Edward Lee and John Pelan, about eel-seeking city slickers.
Earthling publications produced Brian A. Hopkins’s novella El Dia De Los Muertos in an attractive hardcover edition limited to 500 numbered and signed editions and fifteen lettered copies. The story involved an archaeologist awakening the Aztec gods in an attempt to save his marriage by resurrecting his dead daughter.
Richard A. Lupoff’s Claremont Tales II from Gary Turner’s Golden Gryphon featured thirteen stories (one original) ranging from hard-boiled crime to Lovecraftian horror, along with a new Introduction by the author and illustrations by Nicholas Jainschigg.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s characters Sherlock Holmes and Professor Edward Challenger teamed-up in London to fight the minions of H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos in Ralph E. Vaughan’s novel Sherlock Holmes and The Terror Out of Time, published by Gryphon Books.
The Cannibal Within was a short novella by intellectual-history professor Mark L. Mirabello Ph.D, published by Mandrake at Oxford as a trade paperback.
From Delirium Books, Michael Laimo’s debut novel Atmosphere involved a police detective’s investigation into mysterious mutilations. It was available in a signed edition of 300 copies and was subsequently reprinted in mass-market paperback by Leisure.
Available in trade paperback, signed hardcover and a de luxe signed and numbered edition from Delirium, Guises collected ten stories (including three original novelettes) plus a volume of poetry by Charlee Jacob. Visions Through a Shattered Lens contained twenty stories (nine original) by Gerard Houarner and was available in a 300-copy signed hardcover edition.
Dark Demons: Tales of Obsession, Possession and Unnatural Desire by Kurt Newton collected sixteen stories with an Introduction by Michael Arnzen, while Maternal Instinct included a 40,000-word “hard-core horror” novella and four short stories by J. F. Gonzalez. Both were available in trade paperback and as 150-copy signed and numbered hardcover editions.
Also from Delirium, Dark Testament edited by Shane Ryan Staley featured twenty-one Biblical stories by Stanley C. Sargent, Don D’Ammassa, Charlee Jacob, Gerard Houarner, W. H. Pugmire, John B. Rosenman, Kurt Newton, Mark McLaughlin and others, along with artwork by Gak. It appeared in a hardcover edition of 200 copies signed by all the contributors. Publisher Staley also collected his own stories in I’ll Be Damned, with an Introduction by Brian Keene.
Unfortunately, Delirium’s future publishing schedule had to be cut back after a burst water pipe flooded its offices, damaging the imprint’s paperback inventory.
From Freak Press and edited by Kelly Laymon, Excitable Boys was a trade paperback anthology, inspired by the annual World Horror Convention “Gross-Out Contests”, which included such winners and runners-up as Rain Graves, Edward Lee, Brian Keene, Mark McLaughlin and Gavin Williams. It was illustrated by Gak.
Edited by Gerard Houarner and Gak, Dead Cats Bouncing from Necro Publications/Bedlam Press collected fifteen stories about deceased felines by Jack Ketchum, Edward Lee, Paul Di Filippo, Tom Piccirilli, Mick Farren, Yvonne Navarro, David Niall Wilson, John Skipp and others. It was published as a signed 400-copy trade paperback and a 100-copy hardcover.
Available as a 300-copy signed hardcover and a twenty-six-copy lettered and slip cased edition, Sex, Drugs & Power Tools was a collection of three “hard-core horror” novellas by Edward Lee (one original). Necro also reissued Lee’s 1992 novel Succubi in its first hardcover edition with restored text.
From Overlook Connection Press, Jack Ketchum’s 1995 novel Red involved an escalating dispute between a man and three troubled teenagers. It was available as a paperback, a signed slip case edition of 100 copies, and a twenty-six-copy lettered wood-cased leather-bound editi
on. The same publisher also reissued Ketchum’s 1989 novel The Girl Next Door, which retained a 1996 Introduction by Stephen King but dropped some other extraneous material.
James Van Pelt’s first short story collection, Strangers and Beggars, appeared in trade paperback from Fairwood Press. It contained seventeen stories (one original), loosely assembled under four categories.
Telos Publishing’s successful line of hardcover “Doctor Who Novellas” continued with Keith Topping’s Ghost Ship, in which the fourth Time Lord arrived on the Queen Mary in 1963 and struggled to save the passengers from the supernatural forces that haunted the luxury ocean liner. With a brief but informative Introduction by Hugh Lamb, the de luxe signed edition also included a full-colour frontispiece by Polish artist Dariusz Jasiczak.
In the same series, Foreign Devils by Andrew Cartmel involved the Doctor and William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki the Ghost Finder in a series of bizarre murders in Victorian London. The book also included a reprint of Hodgson’s 1910 story “The Whistling Room” and a historical Introduction by Mike Ashley.
With the BBC withdrawing its licence to publish Doctor Who volumes, David J. Howe and Stephen James Walker’s Telos Publishing expanded on its range of titles to include books on cult TV shows and a new horror/dark fantasy line. As part of the latter, a special twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Graham Masterton’s The Manitou featured a new Introduction by the author and for the first time reinstated the book’s original two-chapter ending. There was also a limited hardcover edition of 100 copies, signed by Masterton and including colour pre-production art from the 1978 film adaptation.
Also from Telos, Paul Finch’s Cape Wrath was an original trade paperback novel in which the disturbed spirit of a Viking berserker brought death and madness to the Scottish island community of Craeghatir.
Mariah of the Spirits and Other Southern Ghost Stories contained thirteen tales by Sherry Austin, published by Overmountain Press.
Excelsior Entertainment’s Eden Studios imprint published The Book of More Flesh, editor James Lowder’s follow-up anthology to The Book of All Flesh, inspired by the zombie survival role-playing game All Flesh Must Be Eaten. It contained twenty-three original stories by Scott Edelman, Paul Finch, Scott Nicholson, Mark McLaughlin, Tom Piccirilli, Don D’Ammassa, Darrell Schweitzer and others.
Beautifully produced in hardcover by Sean Wallace’s Prime Books imprint, Jeff VanderMeer’s City of Saints and Madmen contained four previously published novellas about the author’s mysterious city of Ambergris, along with various notes, glossaries and stories, plus a fun Introduction by Michael Moorcock.
VanderMeer and Forrest Aguirre teamed up to edit Leviathan 3: Libri quosdam ad sciéntiam, álios ad insaniam deduxére, a hefty trade paperback anthology of twenty-seven mostly original horror stories from Ministry of Whimsy/Prime Books. The contributors included Michael Moorcock, Brian Stableford, Theophile Gautier, Carol Emshwiller and no less than six stories by the overrated Zoran Živković.
Jack Fisher’s Flesh & Blood Press from New Jersey issued Forrest Aguirre’s The Butterfly Artist, containing ten stories (four reprints); John Urbancik’s Shadows Legends & Secrets, collecting eight stories (two reprints); Paul Melniczek’s A Halloween Harvest, containing three stories, and William P. Simmons’s Becoming October, also featuring three stories (one reprint) plus an Introduction by T.M. Wright.
From the same imprint, Dark Voices: A Collection of Poetry from the Writers of Wicked Verse contained twenty-three poems by Charlee Jacob and others, edited by Jack Fisher and Nancy Bennett.
Produced by Durtro as a digipak, the text to Thomas Ligotti’s In a Foreign Town, In a Foreign Land was bound in as a fifty-nine-page booklet with a compact disk by Current 93, to be played at dusk at low volume while reading the text.
Ligotti’s My Work is Not Yet Done: Three Tales of Corporate Horror was published by David Wynn’s Mythos Books in a hardcover edition of 1,000 copies. Illustrated by Harry O. Morris, it included the reprint stories “My Work is Not Yet Done” and “I Have a Special Plan for This World” along with the original novella “The Nighmare Network”.
Also from Mythos, Stanley C. Sargent’s The Taint of Lovecraft was an illustrated collection of nine stories (one original), nine poems (eight reprint) and two revised articles, edited by Robert M. Price with an Introduction by Richard Lupoff and interior illustrations by Allen Koszowski.
From Rainfall Books, Nocturnal Products contained thirteen stories by German author Eddie M. Angerhuber, edited by John B. Ford with an Introduction by Thomas Ligotti. Paul Kane’s collection Touching the Flame contained eighteen short horror stories and an Introduction by Simon Clark, from the same publisher.
Available as handsome trade paperbacks from Joe Morey’s Dark Regions Press in California, Ken Wiseman’s reprint collection Fourteen Fantasies from a Shop Called Imagination contained exactly what the title promised, while Tangled Webs and Other Imaginary Weaving collected fifteen fantasy stories (ten reprints) by Laura J. Underwood with an Introduction by Selina Rosen. Crawling Between Heaven and Earth contained eleven stories (seven reprints) by Sarah A. Hoyt, and Mary Soon Lee’s Ebb Tides and Other Tales featured twenty tales (sixteen reprints) and an Introduction by the author.
Following her tribute to Jack Finney’s pod people in 2000, editor Suzanne Donahue’s Succubus Press published the softcover themed anthologies What Walks Alone: A Creative Tribute to Shirley Jackson’s Novel “The Haunting of Hill House” and Red Jack. The former featured eight original stories, a listing of Shirley Jackson’s other work, plus short essays by Michael Marshall Smith, P.D. Cacek, Christopher Fowler, Jack Ketchum, Ramsey Campbell and others. The latter was an original collection of ten stories about Jack the Ripper from Steve Lockley and Jeffrey Thomas, among others. Each volume also included a story by the editor/publisher.
Angel Body and Other Magic for the Soul edited by Chris Reed and David Memmott was issue #24 of Sheffield’s Back Brain Recluse and #26 in Oregon’s Wordcraft Speculative Writers Series. The illustrated trade paperback anthology contained twenty-five stories and poems (seven reprints) from, among others, Don Webb, Andrew Darlington, Thomas Wiloch, Scott Edelman, Steve Sneyd, Denise Dumars and Bruce Boston.
From Hippocampus Press, Lovecraft’s Library: A Catalogue, Revised and Enlarged by S.T. Joshi provided comprehensive information on nearly 1,000 books owned by Lovecraft.
Edited by Joshi, Douglas A. Anderson and David E. Schultz, Eyes of the God: The Weird Fiction and Poetry of R.H. Barlow showcased the work of Lovecraft’s friend and original literary executor (1918–51).
Joshi and Schultz also teamed up to edit and introduce The Last Oblivion: Best Fantastic Poems of Clark Ashton Smith. The first major selection of Smith’s poetry in over thirty years, it included more than two dozen unpublished or uncollected works. As a bonus, the book contained a glossary, bibliography, indexes and two colour paintings by Smith. Also edited by Joshi for Hippocampus, The Black Diamonds was the first publication of a 90,000-word novel written by the fourteen-year-old Smith in 1907.
From Chaosium, The Book of Eibon edited by Robert M. Price was based around Clark Ashton Smith’s ancient tome, with additional contributions by Lin Carter, Joseph S. Pulver, Richard L. Tierney, Michael Cisco and others.
Also edited with an Introduction by Price, the second revised and expanded edition of Necronomicon: Selected Stories and Essays Concerning the Blasphemous Tome of the Mad Arab featured work by Manly Wade Wellman, Frederik Pohl, Robert A.W. Lowndes, Richard L. Tierney, Robert Silverberg, John Brunner, Fred Chappell, L. Sprague de Camp, Frank Belknap Long, Lin Carter and H.P. Lovecraft himself.
Meisha Merlin Publishing’s The Gossamer Eye collected new and reprint poetry and fiction by Mark McLaughlin, Rain Graves and David Niall Wilson, edited by Stephen Pagel. Lee Killough’s Wilding Nights appeared from the same publisher and featured werewolf homicide detective Alison Goodnight.
From Savoy Books, The Killer was a new, definitive printing of Colin Wi
lson’s 1970 serial-killer novel, which included an original Introduction by the author and dust-jacket art by Francis Bacon.
Published by Australia’s MirrorDanse Books and edited by Bill Congreve, Passing Strange was subtitled “A New Anthology of Australian Speculative Fiction” and contained thirteen original stories by such members of the Infinitas Bookshop Writers’ Group as Robert Hood, Kyla Ward and the editor himself. From the same imprint, Robert Hood’s Immaterial featured fifteen ghost stories (two original) and an interview with the author.
Agog! Fantastic Fiction was a new anthology published by Australia’s University of Wollongong and contained twenty-nine “Tales of Fantasy, Imagination and Wonder” (one reprint) by Leigh Blackmore, Terry Dowling, Stephen Dedman, Damien Broderick, Rick Kennett, Kyla Wood, Robert Hood and others, along with an Introduction by Sean Williams.
Attractively produced by Bob and Nancy Garcia’s American Fantasy Press, A Walking Tour of the Shambles: Little Walks for Sightseers, Number 16 was a chapbook novella by Neil Gaiman and Gene Wolfe (or Wolfe and Gaiman, depending on which variant cover-colour edition you purchased), published to tie in with the authors’ Guest of Honour stints at the Chicago World Horror Convention. Boasting a colour cover by Gahan Wilson and interior illustrations by Randy Broecker and Earl Geier, the macabrely funny booklet was a guide to a mythical area of old Chicago that had survived the Great Fire of 1871.
The enigmatic Sidecar Preservation Society continued its series of handsomely produced chapbooks with Red Harvest, a collection of the late Karl Edward Wagner’s poems and songs from his “Kane” stories, edited by Scott F. Wyatt and introduced and illustrated by Stephen Jones. Hain’s Island was a science fiction story by Ramsey Campbell with cover artwork by Rodger Gerberding. Both booklets were limited to just 200 copies, a number of which were bound in hardcover.
From the same imprint and limited to 150 copies, Tales of the Backveld contained two stories from 1926 by Francis H. Sibson, with a fascinating Introduction by D.H. Olson. Recall Dark Memories contained twenty-eight poems (five original) by W. Paul Ganley with an Introduction by Brian Lumley.
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