The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 24

by Stephen Jones

  Night & Demons collected twenty-eight horror stories by David Drake along with extensive story notes.

  21st Century Dead: A Zombie Anthology edited and introduced by Christopher Golden contained nineteen original stories about the walking dead from Mark Morris, Orson Scott Card, Amber Benson, Simon R. Green, Brian Keene, Rio Youers and others.

  Edited by Sam Weller and Mort Castle, Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury contained twenty-six stories by Margaret Atwood, Neil Gaiman, Harlan Ellison, Joe Hill and others, along with a foreword by Bradbury himself.

  V-Wars was a shared-world anthology in which a plague had turned humans into vampires. Edited by Jonathan Maberry, contributors included Nancy Holder, James A. Moore and Scott Nicholson. Dacre Stoker supplied the introduction.

  Edited by Marie O’Regan, The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories by Women contained carefully chosen reprints by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman, Alison Littlewood, Mary Cholmondeley, Cynthia Asquith, Amelia B. Edwards, Elizabeth Gaskell and Edith Wharton, along with sixteen new stories by Sarah Pinborough, Kelley Armstrong, Elizabeth Massie, Lisa Tuttle, Nancy Holder, Marion Arnott, Nancy Kilpatrick and Muriel Gray, amongst others.

  O’Regan also teamed up with her husband, Paul Kane, to co-edit The Mammoth Book of Body Horror, which featured twenty-five “stories of transformation, mutation and contagion” along with an introduction by Re-Animator director Stuart Gordon. Once again, the best thing about the book was the terrific reprints by Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, John W. Campbell, George Langelaan, Richard Matheson, Stephen King, Clive Barker, Robert Bloch, Ramsey Campbell, Brian Lumley, Nancy A. Collins, Richard Christian Matheson, Michael Marshall Smith, Neil Gaiman, James Herbert and Christopher Fowler. Grouped at the end of the book were also eight original tales by Graham Masterton, Gemma Files, Simon Clark, Conrad Williams and others.

  Magic: An Anthology of the Esoteric and Arcane edited by Jonathan Oliver featured fifteen stories by Audrey Niffenegger, Will Hill, Steve Rasnic Tem and Melanie Tem, Thana Niveau, Alison Littlewood, Christopher Fowler, Storm Constantine, Gemma Files, Robert Shearman and others, and boasted a terrific cover illustration by Nicolas Delort, which was re-used nicely throughout the text.

  Edited by John Skipp, Psychos: Serial Killers, Depraved Madmen, and the Criminally Insane contained thirty-eight stories (eighteen original) by Ray Bradbury, Neil Gaiman, Kathe Koja and others, along with two non-fiction articles.

  Blood Lite III: Aftertaste edited by Kevin J. Anderson contained thirty humorous horror stories presented by the Horror Writers Association.

  Westward Weird edited by the late Martin H. Greenberg and Kerrie Hughes contained thirteen weird Western stories, while The Big Book of Ghost Stories was a big reprint anthology compiled by Otto Penzler, featuring seventy-nine tales by Ramsey Campbell, M. R. James, August Derleth and others.

  Edited by Ellen Datlow, Best Horror of the Year Volume Four from Night Shade Books contained eighteen stories along with a summation of the year by the editor.

  The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror Volume 23 edited by Stephen Jones featured twenty-six stories (two by Ramsey Campbell), along with an overview of 2011 and a Necrology by the editor and Kim Newman.

  The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2012 edited by Paula Guran included thirty-three stories.

  There were no crossover tales between the Datlow and Jones volumes, although Alison Littlewood did appear in both with different stories. Guran and Datlow also had no stories in common, although both did feature work by Stephen King, Margo Lanagan and Glen Hirshberg. Guran and Jones shared the same story by Joan Aiken and included different tales by Joe R. Lansdale.

  In January, Apple released the iBooks Author app, which allowed desperate would-be authors to automatically format their novels, including adding photographs and film footage! As if that wasn’t bad enough, “books” created with the app could only be sold through Apple’s own iBook-store or iTunes sites.

  That same month, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million and Canada’s Chapters Indigo announced that they would not stock Amazon Publishing titles (including those from the SF imprint 47North) because of the company’s restrictive e-book policies.

  J. K. Rowling’s long-awaited Pottermore website was launched on March 27th, selling the first Harry Potter e-books. The site took £1 million in its first three days and trebled that total during the first month.

  In April, the US Department of Justice filed an antitrust lawsuit against Apple and publishers Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin and Simon & Schuster, alleging they colluded in fixing the price of e-books by adopting a similar type of business model. Hachette, HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster agreed to settle, and were forced to cancel any contracts with retailers using restrictive practices (such as Amazon) and forbidden to use the agency model contract for two years. The other three publishers decided to fight the charges in court, although Penguin subsequently agreed to settle so as not to affect its proposed merger with Random House.

  The following month, Britain’s biggest book-selling chain, Waterstones, surprised the industry by announcing that it was linking up with Internet retailer Amazon to sell Kindle e-readers through its 294 high street stores.

  In August, Amazon UK announced that, for the first time ever, its digital book sales had outstripped traditional print sales in Britain. Just two years after the downloadable format was first launched in the UK, 114 Kindle editions were being sold for every 100 hardcover and paperback printings.

  A US study found that the number of Americans who owned an e-reader or tablet computer was up from 18% in 2011 to 33% a year later. However, although 89% of regular readers (aged 16+) read at least one print book in the preceding twelve months, only 30% read at least one e-book. Despite that, print sales in the US declined by 9% in 2012.

  Best-selling American author Terry Goodkind controversially took his revenge on a fan who had openly pirated his latest fantasy novel by posting the offender’s photo and details on Facebook after attempts to privately contact the individual had been ignored. The pirated web pages were quickly removed.

  The French-owned Byook app for iPhones and iPads was launched with a version of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1892 Sherlock Holmes mystery “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” that was visually and aurally “enhanced” with blood and screams.

  Available as an e-book from BBR, Simon Clark’s debut collection was reissued as Blood and Grit 21 to celebrate its original publication twenty-one years earlier. The new edition included an original Skinner Lane story, a new introduction by Andrew Darlington and an illustrated afterword by the author.

  In October, editor John Joseph Adams and Creeping Hemlock Press launched Nightmare Magazine, a new monthly online and e-book periodical featuring original and previously published fiction. A companion title to Lightspeed: Science Fiction & Fantasy, stories from both electronic magazines were featured in a chapbook sampler containing work by Jonathan Maberry, Laird Barron, Sarah Langan and others.

  Alan Baxter’s novella The Darkest Shade of Grey appeared as a web serial on the electronic journal The Red Penny Papers.

  With traditional print books in America facing growing competition from e-books, it was reported that 45% of all print books published in the US in 2011 were self-published (a total of almost 150,000 titles).

  Improved technology and falling costs meant that 2012 saw an explosion in print-on-demand (PoD) books in the horror genre. Although this allowed many older titles to come back into print, it also resulted in anybody being able to publish their own “book” (often under spurious imprint names) – whether or not they had any actual talent.

  Perhaps the most high-profile of the PoD imprints was executive editor Don D’Auria’s Samhain Publishing, which issued numerous titles throughout the year, including Brian Moreland’s Dead of Winter, House of Sighs and The Fallen Boys by Aaron Dries, Hedge End by Peter Mark May, Evil Eternal and Swamp Monster M
assacre by Hunter Shea, The Nightcrawler by Mick Ridgewell, Sacrifice by Russell James, Malevolent by David Searls, Daughter of Evil by Nile J. Limbaugh, Amongst the Dead by David Bernstein, A View from the Lake by Greg F. Gifune, A Dark Autumn by Kristopher Bufty, Jin Village by Vincent Stoia, Video Night by Adam Cesare, Night-Where by John Everson, Donor by Elena Hearty, Sorrows and House of Skin by Jonathan Janz and Bloodthirst in Babylon by David Searls.

  Nightmare City and the third Department 18 book, The Eighth Witch, both by Maynard Sims (who seem to have now become a single entity), were both available from the same imprint.

  David A. Sutton’s Shadow Publishing issued a new edition of the veteran author/editor’s 1975 anthology The Satyr’s Head: Tales of Terror, which featured ten stories by Ramsey Campbell, Brian Lumley, David Campton, Eddy C. Bertin and others, along with a new introduction.

  To launch his Writers from the Shadows series, Sutton also selected and introduced The Female of the Species and Other Terror Tales, the first volume of stories by Richard Davis (1935–2005). This welcome collection of twelve tales additionally included a 1969 interview with the author, the complete text of a 1971 speech about horror fiction, and a bibliography of Davis’s books and stories.

  Shadow Publishing also issued the latest collection from Johnny Mains, Frightfully Cosy and Mild Stories for Nervous Types, which contained twelve stories (five reprints), an introduction by Stephen Volk and a foreword and story notes by the author.

  Karōshi Books was a new imprint from Mains and others dedicated to bringing out work by new and unpublished authors. Its debut publication was Glory and Splendour, which contained eight weird stories by Alex Miles and a foreword by Michel Parry.

  For Noose & Gibbet/Airgedlámh Publications, Johnny Mains edited and introduced Party Pieces: The Horror Fiction of Mary Danby, which included thirty-one stories (one original) for adults and children, along with an interview with the famed British anthologist of the 1970s and 1980s.

  As usual published in trade paperback by editor Charles Black under his Mortbury Press imprint, The Ninth Black Book of Horror contained sixteen original stories in the style of The Pan Book of Horror Stories by John Llewellyn Probert, Simon Bestwick, Gary Fry, Anna Taborska, Paul Finch, Thana Niveau, Marion Pitman, David A. Riley and others.

  Donald Sidney-Fryer’s The Atlantis Fragments: The Existing Chronicle: A Vision of the Final Days from Hippocampus Press was more accurately titled The Atlantis Fragments: The Novel on the cover. From the same author and PoD imprint, The Golden State Phantasticks: The California Romantics and Related Subjects included essays on Clark Ashton Smith, George Sterling, Ambrose Bierce, F. Marion Crawford, Robert E. Howard and Nora May French.

  Hippocampus also issued two collections by Richard A. Lupoff, which were also available in hardcover from Mythos Books: Dreams contained fifteen stories (one original) with an introduction by Cody Goodfellow, while Visions featured thirteen stories (five original) with an introduction by Peter S. Beagle. Both books contained not-always-accurate story notes by the author.

  Portraits of Ruin collected thirty-nine stories (nine reprints) by Joseph S. Pulver, Sr. with an introduction by Matt Cardin, while At Fear’s Altar was a collection of thirteen stories (six reprints) by Canadian author Richard Gavin.

  W. H. Pugmire’s Uncommon Places: A Collection of Exquisites included twenty-two stories (eleven original), and Intimations of Unreality: Weird Fiction and Poetry contained all Alan Gullette’s Cthulhu Mythos stories, together with two original novellas, an extensive sampling of the author’s poetry, an introduction by Robert M. Price and interior art by Denis Tiani.

  Also from Hippocampus, Forever Azathoth: Parodies and Pastiches was a revised edition of Peter Cannon’s Love-craftian-lite tales with an extra story added, while The Nemesis of Night, was the fifth novel in the Lovecraftian Shaman Cycle by the late Adam Niswander.

  For Miskatonic River Press, Joseph S. Pulver, Sr. edited and introduced A Season in Carcosa, an anthology of twenty-one stories inspired by Robert W. Chambers’s The King in Yellow that featured Joel Lane, Simon Strantzas, Don Webb, Gary McMahon, Richard Gavin, Gemma Files, Richard A. Lupoff, Michael Kelly, John Langan, Allyson Bird and others, including the editor.

  From the same publisher, The Strange Dark One: Tales of Nyarlathotep collected eight Lovecraftian stories by W. H. Pugmire, including the title novelette.

  Two of the year’s best anthologies – PoD or not – were Terror Tales of East Anglia and Terror Tales of the Cots-wolds, both edited by Paul Finch for Gray Friar Press. A follow-up to the editor’s previous Terror Tales of the Lake District, the two volumes contained thirteen and fourteen stories, respectively, interspersed with “real” supernatural tales from their particular areas. The impressive line-up of writers for both books included Roger Johnson, Simon Bestwick, Steve Duffy, Mark Valentine, Johnny Mains, Alison Littlewood, Reggie Oliver, Gary McMahon, Simon Clark, Thana Niveau, Steve Lockley, Joel Lane, Ramsey Campbell, Simon Kurt Unsworth, John Llewellyn Probert and the editor and publisher.

  From the same imprint, Enemies at the Door collected twelve short stories and novellas (three original) by the busy Paul Finch, but in far too small type.

  The Gray Friar imprint also launched its New Blood series with Stephen Bacon’s Peel Back the Sky, containing twenty-one stories (six original) along with an introduction by Nicholas Royle and story notes by the author. The second title in the series, From Hell to Eternity, was the impressive debut collection by Thana Niveau. It contained sixteen stories (half original), along with story notes by the author and a glowing introduction from Ramsey Campbell.

  Produced as a charity anthology to raise funds for the Baltimore Poe House and Museum, which had its funding cut by the city, The Spirit of Poe from Literary Landmark Publishing contained forty-seven stories and poems, two by Poe himself, along with a foreword by Barbara Cantalupo, editor of The Edgar Allan Poe Review.

  Chiral Mad: Anthology of Psychological Horror was yet another charitable anthology, this time with profits going to Down syndrome charities. Edited by Michael Bailey for Written Backwards, it featured twenty-eight stories (five reprints) by, amongst others, Gord Rollo, Andrew Hook, Gary McMahon, Monica J. O’Rourke, Gary A. Braunbeck, Gene O’Neill, Jeff Strand and Jack Ketchum.

  Edited by Jan Edwards and Jenny Barber, The Alchemy Press Book of Ancient Wonders contained fourteen stories (two reprints) about magical monuments by Adrian Tchaikovsky, Peter Crowther, Adrian Cole, William Meikle and others, along with an introduction from Kari Sperring. For the same imprint, Mike Chinn edited The Alchemy Press Book of Pulp Heroes, which featured seventeen stories (two reprints) about heroes and heroines from, amongst others, Mike Resnick, Adrian Cole, Joel Lane, Peter Crowther and Peter Atkins.

  Available from Nodens Books, Above Ker-Is and Other Stories was a welcome collection of ten tales by Evangeline Walton (1907–96), edited with an introduction and fascinating story notes by Douglas A. Anderson. Four of the stories were previously unpublished.

  What Monsters Do was a slim PoD collection of seven stories (one reprint) by former Hellraiser actor and comics writer Nicholas Vince, available from Bibliofear.

  Michael V. Gleich’s Jawbone from Damnation Books was based on Native American folklore, about a Mohave demon who fell from the stars.

  Night Terrors II: An Anthology of Horror from Blood Bound Books was edited by Theresa Dillon and Marc Cicca-rone and featured twenty-eight original stories by David Bischoff, Jason V. Brock and others. K. Trap Jones’s The Sinner from the same imprint involved a farmer isolated in a cave and his encounters with the Seven Deadly Sins and their attendant demons.

  “Produced, directed and edited” by Eric Miller for Big Time Books, the unwieldy-titled Hell Comes to Hollywood: An Anthology of Short Horror Fiction Set in Tinseltown Written by Hollywood Genre Professionals featured twenty stories by authors you’d probably never heard of, with a brief foreword by SPFX make-up artist Roy Knyrim.

  For the on-demand Science
Fiction Trails imprint, David B. Riley edited and introduced Low Noon: Tales of Horror & Dark Fantasy from the Weird Weird West and Gunslin-gers & Ghost Stories. Containing twelve and eleven stories, respectively, the two anthologies featured fiction by Don D’Ammassa, C. J. Killmer, cover artist Laura Givens and others, including the editor himself.

  Edited by Julie Ann Dawson for Bards and Sages Publishing, Return of the Dead Men (and Women) Walking contained fifteen stories about the various undead, while editor Lorraine Horrell’s Sowing the Seeds of Horror from Static Movement contained twenty-one tales about bad things growing.

  Valentines for the Dead from Shadowfall Publications featured thirteen stories by writer and poet Corrine De Winter and came with no less than three introductions, by Thomas F. Monteleone, James Sclavunos and the author herself.

  Billie Sue Mosiman’s novella Mourning Mansion from DM Publishing involved an investigation into a number of missing boys and was loosely based on a series of true crimes that occurred along the Gulf Coast in the mid-1980s.

  From Books of the Dead Press, Best New Werewolf Tales Vol. 1 edited by Carolina Smart featured twenty previously unpublished stories and a comic strip by, amongst others, Michael Laimo, William Meikle, David Niall Wilson, Nina Kiriki Hoffman and Anna Taborska.

  At the Gates of Madness collected eighteen stories by Canadian Shaun Meeks, while These Old Tales: The Complete Collection from Distressed Press contained short stories, flash fiction and poetry by Kenneth W. Cain. Both authors also supplied an “Afterward” [sic] to their books.

  Two men’s fates were bound by an ancient entity that thrived on suffering in Ennis Drake’s novella 28 Teeth of Rage, while ghosts still haunted the location of a vanished town in S. P. Miskowski’s Delphine Dodd, both from Omnium Gatherum.

  From the same California imprint, Hunter’s Moon: Visceral Tales of Terror collected nineteen stories (twelve reprints) by R. Scott McCoy. Kate Jonez and S. S. Michael edited Detritus, featuring fifteen original stories about collecting by Kealan Patrick Burke and others and, with L. S. Murphy, Jonez also edited Fortune: Lost and Found, containing twelve stories (three reprints) about money and wealth.