The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 19

by Stephen Jones

  Author J. K. Rowling hosted a public “Moonlight Reading” and signing session at one minute past midnight at London’s Natural History Museum for 1,700 fans chosen in an online draw. She signed 250 copies an hour, and the event was broadcast across the World Wide Web to millions.

  Anybody who might be concerned about the number of forests destroyed to produce the latest Harry Potter volume would have been pleased to learn that Bloomsbury’s UK edition was printed on part-recycled paper and paper from sustainable sources.

  However, it was revealed later in the year that the publisher spent so much on marketing and distribution costs for the seventh and final Potter book that, despite a thirty-six per cent rise in first-half revenues, pre-tax profits were only up seven per cent.

  Rowling and Warner Bros. sued a Michigan publisher over its plans to publish a book edition of the “Harry Potter Lexicon”, a fan website hosted by a middle-school librarian. Although Rowling gave it a fan site award in 2004, she claimed that plans to publish its content would interfere with her own intention to produce “a definitive Potter reference book”.

  Meanwhile, in June, a rare first edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, the first book in the series, sold at auction at Bonhams in London for £9,000, almost double the original estimate. However, just four months later, another copy sold at Christie’s for £19,700. Only around 500 copies were initially printed in 1997. A copy of the publisher’s proof was also sold at the Christie’s auction for £2,250.

  Rowling’s Potter-related collection of fairy stories, The Tales of Beedle the Bard, was only published in a leather-bound edition of seven copies, six of which were given to friends. The remaining copy was auctioned on 13 December at Sotheby’s with a starting price of £30,000. The hand-written and illustrated volume was purchased by Amazon.com for a record-breaking £1.95 million, and proceeds were donated to the Children’s Voice, the author’s charity for vulnerable children in Europe.

  After having controversially revealed to an audience of schoolchildren that Dumbledore was a closet gay character, in another interview Rowling explained that she couldn’t kill off Arthur Weasley because “he is the father everyone would wish for”, including herself.

  Discovered in 2006 among his papers in the University of Maine Library and published under his deceased “Richard Bachman” alias, Blaze was a revised 1973 trunk novel by Stephen King about a baby kidnapper guided by the voice of his dead partner. It also included a reprint short story, “Memory”, and a Foreword by King.

  The author donated all royalties and subsidiary income from the book to The Haven Foundation, an organization that helps freelance artists who are down on their luck.

  In June, Stephen King became the first non-Canadian to be presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Canadian Booksellers Association. Meanwhile, the author’s novella, “The Gingerbread Girl”, appeared in the July issue of Esquire magazine.

  On 12 December, Terry Pratchett revealed to the media that he was suffering from a rare form of early onset Alzheimer’s. The fifty-nine-year-old writer discovered he had the incurable degenerative brain disease after suffering a phantom “mini-stroke” earlier in the year. “I think there’s time for at least a few more books yet,” quipped Pratchett in an upbeat statement, adding: “I am not dead. I will, of course, be dead at some future point, as will everybody else.”

  Clive Barker’s latest novel, Mister B. Gone, was told in the form of an autobiographical memoir written by a demon.

  Ray Bradbury’s Now and Forever: Somewhere a Band is Playing & Leviathan ’99 contained an original short novella begun as a film treatment for Katherine Hepburn in the 1950s, about a young writer who stepped off a train into the too perfect Arizona village of Summerton, along with a prose version of a 1966 BBC radio play.

  Bradbury was briefly interviewed in the November issue of United Airlines’ in-flight magazine Hemispheres, where he admitted to “appreciating” Harry Potter, and the author received a special citation from the 2007 Pulitzer Prize committee for his “distinguished, prolific and deeply influential career as an unmatched author of science fiction and fantasy”.

  On 23 June, Dean Koontz became the first author to sign at London’s Waterstone’s Piccadilly branch from his home in California using LongPen technology. “I used to fight the label ‘horror writer’ ”, Koontz told a newspaper, “because I never considered myself one. I didn’t write about vampires.”

  “I used stuff from every genre,” continued the author, before going on to explain that his publisher had complained that his vocabulary was too large.

  Koontz’s avatar appeared in the online virtual world Second Life in March to promote his novel, The Good Guy, about a man mistaken for a hired killer. The author read from the book and mixed with (virtual) fans in the Bantam Dell Book Café.

  The author’s second novel of 2007, The Darkest Evening of the Year, was a thriller with supernatural elements, about a woman who aided dogs that have been abused.

  Something monstrous was killing the crews of two ships frozen into the Arctic ice in Dan Simmons’ chilling historical novel The Terror, based around the doomed Franklin expedition of 1845.

  Set in eighteenth-century New York, Robert McCammon’s historical serial killer novel, The Queen of Bedlam, was a sequel to Speaks the Nightbird and once again featured hero Matthew Corbett.

  Frank Balenger had to hunt for a puzzling 100-year-old time capsule in David Morrell’s Scavanger, a follow-up to the author’s Bram Stoker Award-winning novel Creepers, and a fourteen-year-old girl raped by her stepfather was being stalked by him from beyond the grave in John Farris’ You Don’t Scare Me. Unusually, the final chapter was written in screenplay format.

  The unsolved murder of a Seattle mother and son and the disappearances of a former cop’s wife and a ten-year-old girl were revealed to be related in The Intruders, the latest urban thriller from Michael Marshall (Smith).

  Meanwhile, a rookie female detective was lured into a cat-and-mouse game with a psychopathic killer driven by delusions of superhuman supremacy in Paul McAuley’s Players. The author’s second novel of the year, Cowboy Angels, involved an idealistic serial killer using covert American technology to go on a murder spree through various alternate realities.

  Christopher Golden’s The Borderkind was the second volume in the “Veil” series, and Homeplace was a haunted house novel by Beth (Elizabeth) Massie.

  “Deliverance Consultant for the Diocese of Hereford” Merrily Watkins investigated the mysteries behind the renovation of a medieval mansion on the Welsh Border, and discovered murder and hidden secrets in Phil Rickman’s The Fabric of Sin, which included references to M. R. James and the Knights Templar.

  Unbroken was written by Rick Hautala under the pseudonym “A. J. Matthews”, while supernatural police procedural Nowhere was the work of Matt Costello writing as “Shane Christopher”.

  A former Catholic psychologist ended up summoning Satan in Jeff Rovin’s Conversations with the Devil, while a woman believed she was carrying the Devil’s child in Andrew Neiderman’s Unholy Birth. A priest attempted to exorcise troubled teenagers at a boarding school in John Saul’s The Devil’s Labyrinth.

  Sarah Langan followed her acclaimed debut novel, The Keeper, with the sequel, The Missing (aka Virus), about a contagious plague in a remote and affluent Maine community that turned its victims into inhuman creatures.

  Echoing a nineteenth-century outbreak, men started murdering their families in Bentley Little’s The Vanishing, while a curse returned every seven years in Blood Brothers by Nora Roberts.

  John Aubrey Anderson’s interracial horror novel Abiding Darkness was set in 1945 Mississippi and was the first volume in the “Black and White Chronicles”. Dead Man’s Song was the sequel to Jonathan Maberry’s Bram Stoker Award-winning debut Ghost Road Blues, once again set in the haunted town of Pine Deep, and Not Flesh Nor Feathers was a Southern Gothic by Cherie Priest in which the city of Chattanooga was inva
ded by the walking dead.

  Matthew Smith’s Tomes of the Dead: The Words and Their Roaring was the second historical zombie novel in the shared-world series from Abaddon Books.

  Set in 1808, Chris Roberson’s Set the Seas on Fire was about a shipwrecked crew stranded on an island with an ancient, Lovecraftian evil. A group of disparate characters in the Appalachian Mountains were attacked by leathery-winged vampire creatures in They Hunger by Scott Nicholson, Bigfoot was out for revenge in Matthew Scott Hanson’s The Shadowkiller, and people were transformed into flesh-eating monsters by alien spores in R. Patrick Gates’ ’Vaders.

  A sheriff’s lieutenant investigated the kidnap of a girl and the murder of her family in Jeffrey J. Mariotte’s supernatural thriller Missing White Girl. The survivor of a car crash was pursued by an unknown killer in Tom Piccirilli’s The Midnight Road, and a psychopathic killer menaced trapped hospital workers in Joe Schreiber’s Eat the Dark.

  African voodoo came to an English town in Unmarked Graves, the latest gore-fest from Shaun Hutson.

  A woman discovered that her son may have inherited her psychic abilities in Eye of the Beholder by Shari Shattuck, and a five-year-old boy was helped by demons to get revenge in Mary Ann Mitchell’s The Witch.

  A Pulitzer Prize-winning author discovered that fallen angels were creating trouble in Jack Cavanaugh’s Christian supernatural thriller A Hideous Beauty, the first volume in the “Kingdom Wars” series.

  The inhabitants of a small rural town started dying mysteriously with the arrival of a strange little man in Something Bad by Richard Satterlie, and nineteenth-century murderers were accidentally revived by a history student in Gossamer Hall by Erin Samiloglu.

  Howard Mittelmark’s Age of Consent was about a house with a dark history, while a spiritualist was hired banish evil spirits in Angelica by Arthur Phillips.

  An archaeologist and a ghost investigated a Manhattan burial ground in The Dead Room, and a dead detective was summoned by a Ouija board to investigate an unsolved fifteen-year-old serial killing case in The Seance, both by Heather Graham.

  PI Harper Blaine, who has the ability to see the paranormal, became involved in a university research group’s attempts to create an artificial “ghost” in Kat Richardson’s Poltergeist, the sequel to Greywalker.

  Sarah Pinborough’s The Taken involved the vengeance-seeking ghost of a little girl. The author was joined under the Leisure Books banner by a number of fellow British writers:

  In Tim Lebbon’s The Everlasting, a man received a letter thirty years after his grandfather killed himself, which lead to a mysterious set of books that would allow him to resurrect a vengeful ghost.

  Something nasty lived in the water of a flooded England in Mark Morris’ The Deluge, a big cat was loose on the Norfolk moors in Stephen Laws’ Ferocity, a woman was invited to a terrifying party in Demon Eyes by L. H. and M. P. N. Sims, and a man was under attack by his doppelgängers in This Rage of Echoes by Simon Clark.

  Not to be outdone, Leisure’s roster of American authors included Al Sarrantonio, whose Halloweenland grew from his novella “The Baby”, which was also included in the book, along with notes by the author.

  House Infernal was the third volume in Edward Lee’s “City Infernal Saga”, and a teenager inherited a farmhouse with a mysterious history in Dead Souls by Michael Laimo.

  High school girls summoned dark forces in Deborah LeBlanc’s Morbid Curiosity, a vampire scientist created an addictive drug in Jemiah Jefferson’s A Drop of Scarlet, and Bryan Smith’s The Freak-show was about a travelling carnival.

  Set in the mid-1980s, Timmy Graco and his pals discovered a flesh-eating creature living in their local graveyard in Ghoul by Brian Keene. Meanwhile a group escaping from zombies took to the ocean in Dead Sea, from the same author.

  Gary A. Braunbeck’s Mr Hands was expanded from the novella of the same name and also contained the award-winning story “Kiss of the Mudman”. A creature fed on its victims’ fear in Mary SanGiovanni’s debut novel The Hollower, while another small town was beset by evil forces in Thomas Tessier’s Wicked Things.

  Also from Leisure, The Beast House was a 1986 reprint from the late Richard Laymon. Ray Garton’s Night Life was a vampire novel from 2005, Edgewise was another reprint by Graham Masterton, and the publisher also reissued the “definitive” edition of Jack Ketchum’s Offspring.

  A woman helped ghosts solve their problems in Dead Girls Are Easy by Terri Garey, a man whose fiancée committed suicide found he’d bought a haunted house in Jude Deveraux’s paranormal romance Someone to Love, and What’s a Ghoul to Do? was the first volume in Victoria Laurie’s “Ghost Hunter” mystery series about supernatural sleuth M. J. Holliday.

  A ghost asked Jade Nethercott to protect his lover from his murderer in Jocelyn Kelley’s paranormal romance Lost in Shadow, and a young woman learned dark magic to avenge her boyfriend’s death in Natasha Rhodes’ Dante’s Girl, the first in the “Kayla Steele” series.

  Joanna Archer pretended to be her dead sister to uncover a supernatural conspiracy in Las Vegas in The Scent of Shadows, the first volume in Vicki Pettersson’s “Sign of the Zodiac” series. It was followed by The Taste of Night, in which Joanna attempted to prevent her own father destroying Las Vegas by plague.

  A woman tried to escape the supernatural by moving to a small Texas town in Catherine Spangler’s Touched by Darkness, the first in the “Sentinel” series. It was followed by Touched by Fire.

  The Dream-Hunter and Upon the Midnight Clear by Sherrilyn Kenyon (aka “Kinley MacGregor”) were the first two volumes in a spin-off paranormal romance series set in the “Dark-Hunters” world. The author’s initial series continued with Devil May Care, which was also released as an unabridged nine CD audio book read by Holter Graham.

  Karen Marie Moning’s Bloodfever was the second book in the “Fever” paranormal suspense series featuring MacKayla Lane, who was searching for an ancient book of black magic while trying to escape from an inhumane enemy seeking revenge.

  Tombs of Endearment by Casey Daniels (Connie Lux) was the third volume in the “Pepper Martin” mystery series, about a cemetery tour guide who can talk with ghosts, while Demons Are Forever by Julie Kenner was the third book in the “Confessions of a Demon-Hunting Soccer Mom” series.

  Christine Feehan’s Deadly Game was the fifth volume in the “GhostWalkers” paranormal romance series about genetically-modified soldiers. Safe Harbor was the latest volume in the same author’s “Drake Sisters” series, while Dark Celebration and Dark Possession were the latest titles in the busy Feehan’s “Carpathian” series.

  Servant: The Awakening by L. L. Foster (Lori Foster) was the first in a series about demon-slayer Gabrielle Cody, Jackie Kessler’s The Road to Hell was the second book in a trilogy about a succubus transformed into a human, and The Nightwalkers: Elijah was the third in the series by Jacquelyn Frank.

  A new recruit joined the Otherworld Crime Unit in Vivi Anna’s Blood Secrets, while Eileen Wilks’ Blood Lines and Night Season were the third and fourth entries in the series about special FBI agent Lily Yu.

  A woman inadvertently conjured up a demon in Night Mischief, a paranormal romance by Nina Bruhns in the “Dark Enchantments” series, while Lisa Cach’s A Babe in Ghostland involved a woman with psychic powers renovating a haunted house and fending off the advances of an over-amorous ghost.

  Yolanda Celbridge’s Sindi in Silk was an erotic post-Apocalyptic vampire version of Cinderella, and The Master of Seacliff was a gay Gothic pastiche by Max Pierce.

  Borne in the Blood by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro was the twentieth novel in the long-running series about the undead Count Saint-Germain. The book was set in 1817 Switzerland, and involved the scientific experiments of the Graf von Ravensberg, who used blood to determine a man’s nature.

  Laurell K. Hamilton’s The Harlequin, the fifteenth title in her “Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter” series, debuted at number two on the Publishers Weekly fiction bestseller list in June
with 250,000 copies in print.

  In All Together Dead, the seventh “Sookie Stackhouse” novel from Charlaine Harris, the telepathic waitress attended a vampire convention and once again became involved in a murder mystery. From the same author, Ice Cold Grave was the third book in the “Harper Connelly” paranormal mystery series, in which the “dead-dowser” found herself on the trail of a small town serial killer.

  Professional wizard Harry Dresden had to clear his vampire half-brother Thomas of a series of murders in the ninth volume in Jim Butcher’s “The Dresden Files”, White Night. This book plus the previous title, Proven Guilty, were collected in the Science Fiction Book Club omnibus Wizard Under Fire.

  Cristopher Moore’s humorous novel You Suck: A Love Story was a sequel to the author’s popular Bloodsucking Fiends: A Love Story and once again featured fledgling vampires Tommy and Jody and the evil ancient vampire encased in bronze in their apartment.

  Valerie Stivers’ Blood is the New Black was another humorous vampire novel, set in a fashion magazine publishing company run by bloodsuckers. In M. Christian’s comic horror novel The Very Bloody Marys, undead gay cop Valentino found himself tracking the eponymous gang of Vespa-riding vampires through San Francisco.

  Following Monster Planet, the third volume in his zombie trilogy, David Wellington tackled vampires with his thriller 13 Bullets, the first in a new three-book series set in a world where the undead had been hunted to near-extinction. It was followed by 99 Coffins.

  Movie stuntwoman Dawn Madison investigated the mysterious disappearance of her estranged PI father and discovered an underground society of supernatural creatures in Vampire Babylon: Night Rising, the first in Chris Marie Green’s Hollywood vampire trilogy.

  Lara Adrian’s Kiss of Midnight, Kiss of Crimson and Midnight Awakening were the first three books in the “Breed” series, in which psychic Elise Chase hunted vampires.