The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 24

by Stephen Jones

  For anybody who didn’t remember TV’s Early Edition or the 2009 movie Knowing, Kiefer Sutherland’s autistic son (David Mazouz) helped strangers sort out their lives through his ability to see patterns in numbers in Fox’s thirteen-part touchy-feely Touch.

  The show surprisingly went to a second season as the father–son duo helped a mother (Maria Bello) track down her presumed-dead daughter and we learned more about the mysterious Aster Corporation.

  Meanwhile, following a fatal car crash, detective Michael Britten (Jason Isaacs) travelled between two alternate realities in the high-concept Awake. In one, his wife was alive, and in the other his son survived the accident, while he also had different therapists and different police partners in each world. NBC cancelled the show after just thirteen episodes.

  Iraq war veteran Walter Sherman (Geoff Stults) suffered a brain injury and mysteriously acquired the ability to find missing things in Fox’s The Finder, which also lasted just one season.

  The fifth and final season of NBC’s Chuck came to an end in January with guest appearances from Carrie-Anne Moss, Bo Derek and Linda Hamilton.

  CBS’s A Gifted Man, in which a successful surgeon (Patrick Wilson) received advice from his dead ex-wife (Jennifer Ehle), had nowhere to go and was cancelled after a single season as well.

  Leonard Nimoy voiced a Mr Spock action figure in an episode of CBS’s The Big Bang Theory, and the actor also returned as the scheming William Bell for the fourth season finale of Fox’s twenty-two-episode Fringe, as he tried to bring the two worlds together in a catastrophic event to create his own personal reality.

  As Fringe entered its fifth series, the show jumped forward in time to the dystopian world of 2036 run by the time-travelling Observers for a final fifteen-episode run.

  Based on the books by Douglas Adams, the gently amusing Dirk Gently returned for a second season of three one-hour episodes starring Stephen Mangan as the holistic detective and Darren Boyd as his despairing sidekick before the BBC announced that the show was being cancelled because of the government freeze on the licence-fee. Guest stars included Helen Baxendale and Bill Paterson.

  Doug Naylor’s comedy sci-fi show Red Dwarf was surprisingly resurrected by Dave after a three-year hiatus for a six-episode tenth season reuniting the original cast.

  Horror directors Adam Green and Joe Lynch starred alongside Dee Snider in Green’s macabre sitcom Holliston on the cable-based FEARnet, while the infantile Todd & the Book of Pure Evil returned to the same channel for a second series in March.

  Hunderby was a decidedly odd eight-part macabre comedy series from Sky starring and created by Julia Davis, while just like in Coneheads, ABC’s sitcom The Neighbours was about a family of aliens moving into suburbia.

  The third season of ITV’s Whitechapel saw Rupert Perry Jones and Phil Davis’s East End detectives uncover a lost Lon Chaney, Sr. film that reputedly drove its audiences mad while investigating murderers committed by a mythical bogey-man.

  In what really should have been a Hallowe’en show, the penultimate episode of the third season of ABC’s Castle had the eponymous author (Nathan Fillion) and Detective Kate Beckett (Stana Katic) investigating a murder that was apparently committed by a zombie.

  The fifth season of Murdoch Mysteries featured episodes in which the smug turn-of-the century Canadian detective (Yannick Bisson) investigated the apparent curse of an ancient Egyptian tomb and a man who claimed to have invented a time machine.

  Harold Perrineau voiced the “daywalker” vampire hunter in the animated Blade on G4, and Brent Spiner guest starred on a robot-themed episode of Fox’s The Simpsons.

  Although the 1999 series Eurotika! covered the subject matter in more depth, the BBC’s feature-length documentary Horror Europa was a bright and breezy stroll (literally) through nearly eighty-five years of European horror cinema thanks to the urbane charm of writer and presenter Mark Gattis, who interviewed cult directors Guillermo del Toro, Dario Argento, Jorge Grau, Harry Kümel and Narciso Ibáñez Serrador, amongst others.

  Hidden away late on Hallowe’en night, Channel 4’s hour-long documentary Frankenstein: A Modern Myth looked at the enduring influence of Mary Shelley’s novel, with emphasis on Danny Boyle’s recent stage play at the National Theatre and the various movie versions. Benedict Cumberbatch, Jonny Lee Miller and John Waters were among those interviewed.

  An entertaining Christopher Lee was the first subject of Sky’s hour-long series about British Legends of Stage and Screen. Other episodes of the show were devoted to the careers of Diana Rigg and Michael York.

  Final Curtain, a recently re-discovered pilot made in 1957 for a proposed anthology TV series by the legendary Edward D. Wood, Jr., was shown at Utah’s Slamdance Film Festival in January. This was reputedly the script that Bela Lugosi was reading just before he died.

  In October, BBC Radio attempted a half-hearted cross-station celebration of Gothic horror. On Radio 4 that included Classic Serial: The Gothic Imagination: Dracula, which was the convoluted title of Rebecca Lenkiewic’s new two-part adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel starring Nicky Henson as the Count and John Dougall as Dr Van Helsing. It was somewhat unimaginatively followed by Lucy Catherine’s two-part dramatisation of Classic Serial: The Gothic Imagination: Frankenstein featuring Jamie Parker as the titular scientist and Shaun Dooley as the Monster he created.

  Saturday Play: The Gothic Imagination: Bloody Poetry was Howard Brenton’s ninety-minute dramatisation of the evening on the shores of Lake Geneva when Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (Clare Corbett) first came up with the idea for Frankenstein.

  Over on BBC Radio 4 Extra the celebration continued with The Gothic Imagination, which featured three half-hour plays: “Looted” by Lucy Catherine, “The House on the Hill” by Nancy Harris and “The Winter House” starring Annette Crosbie.

  Also broadcast on Radio 4 as part of The Gothic Imagination, the half-hour Scream Queens featured Reece Shearsmith interviewing Barbara Shelley, Madeline Smith, Jane Merrow and other actresses about the changing role of women in horror films.

  Earlier in the year on the same radio station, a new strain of bird flu wiped out half the human population in John Dryden’s three-part Pandemic. The cast included Alison Steadman and Louise Jameson.

  Sebastian Baczkiewicz’s dark fantasy series Pilgrim returned for four new episodes with Paul Hilton as the 950-year-old William Palmer, cursed to live between the human and faerie worlds.

  Alastair Jessiman’s Glasgow psychic detective Thomas Soutar (Robert Laing) returned to investigate a woman’s obsession with her late father in Afternoon Drama: The Sensitive: Queen of the Dead.

  Matthew Beard starred in John Wyndham’s post-apocalyptic novel The Chrysalids, which was dramatised by Jane Rogers over two hour-long episodes at the end of July.

  Radio 4 also adapted Wilkie Collins’s 1878 Venice-set novel The Haunted Hotel into an hour-long drama, while Wilkie Collins was a five-part abridgement of Peter Ackroyd’s recent biography of the Victorian author of The Woman in White, read by actor Michael Pennington.

  As part of the station’s “More Than Words Festival”, The Hound of the Baskervilles was a comedic version of the story performed by the Peepolykus Theatre Company and featuring Javier Marzan as Holmes and John Nicholson as Watson.

  Hattie Naylor’s The Forgotten was a twist on the “Sleeping Beauty” story, set during the aftermath of an unnamed war, while Frances Byrnes’s Saturday Drama: Red Shoes White Snow was a two-part story also based on traditional fairy tales.

  15-Minute Drama: Modesty Blaise: A Taste for Death was a five-part adaptation of Peter O’Donnell’s novel with Daphne Alexander as the female super-spy, Carl Prekopp as her assistant Willie, and Alun Armstrong as Sir Gerald Tarrant, head of a British secret service agency.

  Narrated by Charles Dance and broadcast over Christmas, A Little Twist of Dahl featured five daily dollops of Dahl with “Taste”, “The Way Up to Heaven”, “The Hitchhiker”, “Edward the Conqueror” and “The Neck”
. Mark Heap, Kenneth Cranham, Celia Imrie and Jamie Glover were amongst the featured players.

  Presenter John Waite celebrated the centenary of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s character in the half-hour Radio 4 documentary Tarzan: Lord of the Jungle.

  Crime writers Frances Fyfield and Simon Brett investigated The Mystery of The Mystery of Edwin Drood with Charles Dickens expert Jenny Hartley and, in Was Dracula Irish?, novelist Patrick McCabe looked at the links between Dublin-born Bram Stoker’s creation and the Emerald Isle.

  Billy Boyd narrated the story of the first musical stage production in 1967 of J. R. R. Tolkien’s novel in The Hobbit, the Musical.

  Angela Carter’s 1984 novel Nights at the Circus was named the best of all past winners of the James Tait Black Prize, Britain’s oldest literary award, as a one-off honour to mark 250 years of English literature study at the University of Edinburgh.

  Claire Skinner was the voice of the author in the five-part Book of the Week: A Card from Angela Carter, in which theatre critic Susannah Clapp read from her portrait of her late friend. To mark the twentieth anniversary of her death, Clapp, Carmen Callil, Marina Warner and Christopher Frayling discussed the writer’s passion for audio adaptations of her work in Writing in Three Dimensions: Angela Carter’s Love Affair with Radio.

  Marina Warner also marked the bi-centenary of the first edition of the Grimm brothers’ Children’s and Household Tales with the ten-part Grimm Thoughts on Radio 4.

  In Happy Day: The Children of the Stones, writer and comedian Stewart Lee looked back at the spooky 1977 children’s TV series The Children of the Stones, with contributions from series creator Jeremy Burnham, surviving cast members and fans.

  Academic Hugh Haughton drew upon a 1919 essay by Sigmund Freud to explore the concept of The Uncanny, with help from novelist A. S. Byatt, writer and actor Mark Gattis, psychotherapist and essayist Adam Phillips, architect and critic Anthony Vidler, and composer Tarik O’Regan.

  For an episode of Radio 4’s Off the Page in July, writer and critic Kim Newman, clinical psychologist Linda Blair (no, not that one . . .) and writer Ian Marchant discussed the fascination of “The Dark Side” with host Dominic Arkwright.

  BBC Radio 4 Extra’s short series The Female Ghost featured half-hour dramatisations of “The Cold Embrace” by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, “Man-Size in Marble” by E. Nesbit and “Afterward” by Edith Wharton. The station also broadcast a half-hour dramatisation of Braddon’s titular 1860 story towards the end of the year.

  Ghost Stories of E. Nesbit featured readings of “The Shadow”, “John Charrington’s Wedding”, “The Violet Car”, “Man-Size in Marble” and “The Ebony Frame”, while Toby Jones, Richard E. Grant, Kenneth Cranham, Anthony Head and Julian Wadham read “Seaton’s Aunt”, “All Hallows”, “Crewe”, “A Recluse” and “The Almond Tree”, respectively, for Ghost Stories of Walter de la Mare.

  In June, The Late Alfred Hitchcock Presents . . . featured fifteen-minute adaptations of A. M. Burrage’s “The Waxwork”, Saki’s “Srendl Vashtar”, Margaret St. Clair’s “The Perfectionist”, Arthur Williams’s “Being a Murderer Myself” and Jerome K. Jerome’s “The Dancing Partner”.

  The half-hour anthology series Weird Tales featured Melissa Murray’s “Out of the Depths” and “Connected”, Chris Harrald’s “The Loop”, Ed Hime’s “Bleeder”, Lynn Fergusson’s “The Fly” and “Split the Atom”, Richard Vincent’s “The House of Pale Avenue”, Christopher William Hill’s “Original Features” and “The Burial of Tom Nobody”, Amanda Whittington’s “Louisa’s” and Lizzie Nunnery’s “Night Terrors”.

  Over Hallowe’en on Radio 4 Extra, A Short History of Vampires included readings of Bram Stoker’s “Dracula’s Guest”, Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s “Hero Dust”, Tanith Lee’s “Israbel” and Tanya Huff’s “Quid Pro Quo”.

  Sylvester McCoy’s Time Lord joined up with a Nazi scientist sidekick (Elizabeth Klein) from an alternate future in Jonathan Clements’s four-part serial Doctor Who – Survival of the Fittest, and the duo battled shark-like alien invaders in Steve Lyons’s four-part Doctor Who – The Architects of History.

  Paul McGann’s “forgotten” Doctor was the star of the two-part audio serials Doctor Who – Orbis, Doctor Who – The Beasts of Orlok, Doctor Who – The Scapegoat and Doctor Who – The Cannibalists. The strong supporting cast included Sheridan Smith, Phil Davis, Phil Jupitas, Miriam Margolyes and Samantha Bond.

  Meanwhile, former Doctor Tom Baker read David Fisher’s seven-part Doctor Who and the Creature from the Pit, and the late Elisabeth Sladen narrated The Sarah Jane Adventures: The Thirteenth Stone, an hour-long adventure about her character’s alien son Luke being menaced by the spirit of an evil king trapped inside a standing stone.

  Nicholas Courtney starred in a new four-part series of The Scarifyers, and the late actor also turned up in a re-run of the 1980s John Wyndham adaptation “Survival” on Fear on 4, introduced by Edward de Souza.

  Blake’s 7: The Early Years: Eye of the Machine, Point of No Return, Blood and Earth, Flag and Flame, The Dust Run, The Trial, When Villa Met Gan and Liberator were all half-hour dramas based on the cult 1970s TV series. Benedict Cumberbatch, Stephen Lord, Carrie Dobro, Jan Chappell, Colin Salmon and Geoffrey Palmer were all featured.

  A psychiatrist received a frantic telephone call from a patient who claimed to have been buried alive in Carey Harrison’s half-hour drama A Call from the Dead.

  In July, Radio 4 Extra’s Book at Beachtime featured a five-part reading by Hattie Morahan of Sadie Jones’s supernatural novel The Uninvited Guests, set in Edwardian England.

  Never the Bride was a three-part dramatisation of Paul Magrs’s Gothic novel, while Garry Kilworth’s seasonal story A Ghost for Christmas was broadcast on Radio 4 Extra over the holiday season in two episodes.

  BBC Radio 3 commemorated the 100th anniversary of the Irish author’s death with the five-part The Essay: Bram Stoker, in which a handful of essayists – Dr Catherine Wynne, novelist Colm Tóibin, Christopher Frayling, Professor Roger Luckhurst and Dr Janath Killeen – looked at different aspects of Stoker’s life and work.

  In the half-hour Five Meet to Make Up Myths, Gyles Brandreth explored the connections between Victorian authors J. M. Barrie, Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker and Oscar Wilde, who all knew each other.

  The soundscape for Lizzie Mickery’s Hallowe’en ghost drama The Wire: Adventures of the Soul on Radio 3 featured recordings of original electronic voice phenomenon (EVP).

  Also broadcast on the same station during Hallowe’en week, Drama on 3: The Midnight Cry of the Deathbird by poet Amanda Dalton re-imagined F. W. Murnau’s silent Nosferatu for radio in poetry, prose, song, monologue and dialogue, with Malcolm Raeburn as the vampire Count Orlok.

  Pseudopod, the free-to-download horror fiction podcast, continued to offer weekly readings of new or classic horror fiction by such contemporary authors as Michael Marshall Smith, Mark Valentine, Jay Lake, David J. Schow, Mort Castle, Brian Hodge and Lynda E. Rucker, along with offerings from older names such as M. R. James, Guy De Maupassant, E. F. Benson and J. Sheridan Le Fanu.

  The audio CD Timepieces: Stories by the Stop-Watch Gang featured fiction by narrator Richard Baldwin, Tony Pi, Brad Carson, Stephen Kotowych, Costi Gurgu, Ian Donald Keeling, Mike Rimar and Suzanne Church.

  Over April and May, writer/director Dan Bianchi’s RadioTheatre! presented five stories by H. P. Lovecraft in repertory at New York’s The Kraine Theater. “The Curse of Yig”, “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”, “The Lurking Fear”, “The Hound” and “The Rats in the Walls” were each performed with award-winning aural design and an orchestral score.

  After repeatedly missing its opening dates, receiving a savaging by the critics, and having a fifth performer – actress T. V. Carpio, who replaced Natalie Mendoza as the evil “Arachne” – suffering an on-stage injury, Julie Taymor was finally removed from her position in March as director of the $60 million Broadway musical Spider-Man: Turn Off t
he Dark. A new team was brought in to help re-stage the show.

  A stripped-down version of William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist opened at Los Angeles’ Geffen Playhouse starring Emily Yetter as the demon-possessed Regan MacNeil. Brooke Shields played her movie-star mother, while Richard Chamberlain was veteran exorcist Father Merrin.

  After running for just five performances on Broadway in 1988, a new version of the musical adaptation of Stephen King’s Carrie premiered off-Broadway on March 1st. Starring Marin Mazzie and Molly Ranson, with music and lyrics by Michael Gore and Dean Pitchford, the $1.5 million revival closed after just eighty performances – two weeks earlier than scheduled – as a result of poor ticket sales and mostly negative reviews.

  Written by King, with songs by John Mellencamp, the two-act musical Ghost Brothers of Darkland County premiered in April at Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre to generally lukewarm reviews.

  Another revival was Jonathan Kent’s 1930s-set version of Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd at London’s Adelphi Theatre. Michael Ball stepped out of his comfort zone in the role as the titular murderer, and he was ably supported by Imelda Staunton as a creepy Mrs Lovett.

  Also re-set in the 1930s was Simon McBurney’s production of The Master and Margarita, staged at London’s Barbican Theatre. Based on the cult novel by Mikhail Bulgakov, Paul Rhys played the novelist trapped in an insane asylum, Sinéad Matthews was his devoted lover, and Angus Wright turned up as Koroviev, the Devil’s associate.

  Also updated was a revival of Thomas Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy at London’s Hoxton Hall. First performed in 1606, the gruesome Jacobean morality tale starred Jaime Winstone and was re-set in 1915.

  London’s wet summer didn’t dampen the enthusiasm for Rupert Goold and Michael Fentiman’s spectacular production of C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, presented in a waterproof tent in Kensington Gardens from May to September.