A Feast in Exile was Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s latest novel of Saint-Germain, this time set in 15th-century India. Karen Taylor’s The Vampire Vivienne featured vampire Deidre Griffin and her ex-cop husband in the fifth in the ‘Vampire Legacy’ series, and P.D. Cacek’sNight Players was the second book featuring new vampire Allison Garrett.
Laws of the Blood: Companions was the third volume in Susan Sizemore’s paperback series. This time undead ‘Enforcer of Enforcers’ Istvan and his unwilling companion, Chicago homicide detective Selena Crawford, uncovered a more serious motive behind the murder of a vampire.
Mick Farren’s More Than Mortal was a follow-up to his novels The Time of Feasting and Darklost in the series of ‘Victor Renquist’ Lovecraftian/vampire thrillers.
Set in 1899 London, a doctor investigated a series of apparent vampire murders in Sam Siciliano’sDarkness. The London Vampire Panic was the sixth in the series by Michael Romkey, set in Victorian Europe, and P.N. Elrod’s Quincey Morris, Vampire was yet another sequel to Stoker’s Dracula.
Stephen Gresham’s In the Blood was a Southern Gothic about a cursed family of vampires. Clairvoyant cocktail waitress Sookie Stackhouse discovered that her new boyfriend was a bloodsucker suspected of murder in Charlaine Harris’s (aka Charlaine Harris Schulz) Southern Vampire Mystery Dead Until Dark.
Psychologist Meghann O’Neill encountered a vampire in Crimson Kiss by Trisha Baker, while James M. Thompson’s Night Blood featured a vampire doctor infected with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD).
A senior in high school who fell prey to the family curse of vampirism and a billionaire industrialist fighting his own battle with mortality confronted each other in Billie Sue Mosiman’sRed Moon Rising, packaged by Tekno Books.
A woman working in a health resort discovered that her employers were vampires in Tamara Thorne’s Candle Bay, and Australian author Stephen Dedman’s Shadows Bite was a martial-arts mystery set in Los Angeles involving vampires, demons and the Yakuza.
Bound in Blood was a gay erotic novel by David Thomas Lord about a nineteenth-century vampire in modern New York. Vampire Vow by Michael Schiefelbein was another gay vampire novel.
A book critic in Venice investigated vampires and werewolves in Shannon Drake’s Deep Midnight.
Alice Borchardt’s The Wolf King was the third volume in the historical werewolf series by Anne Rice’s sister, while a man in Saxon times became involved with a trio of shapechanging siblings in Susan Price’s The Wolf-Sisters.
Gillian Bradshaw’s medieval thriller The Wolf Hunt contained elements of lycanthropy and was based on ‘Lai de Bisclavret’ by Marie de France. Bitten was a debut novel by Kelly Armstrong, about the first female werewolf.
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In Sarah A. Hoyt’s debut novel, Ill Met by Moonlight, a young Will Shakespeare was drawn into a realm of elves and faeries in pursuit of his missing family. The book’s prologue and first two chapters were self-published as a chapbook sampler.
A vengeful spirit haunted a modern housing development in Wringland by newcomer Sally Spedding.The Music of Razors marked the debut horror novel of Cameron Rogers (aka Penguin Australia children’s editor Dmetri Kakmi). It was a coming-of-age story involving a fallen angel and the tools it fashioned from bones.
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In Jonathan Carroll’s The Wooden Sea, the seventeen-year-old self of middle-aged Chief of Police Frannie McCabe turned up and told him that he had lived his life all wrong, just before he got a glimpse of the day he was going to die.
Jeremy Dronfield’s The Alchemist’s Apprentice was about the eponymous bestselling novel written by Madagascar Rhodes, which nobody appears to remember having read.
Jay Russell’s offbeat detective Marty Burns returned in Greed & Stuff, a novel set in the Los Angeles TV industry and involving a classic noir film, The Devil on Sunday.
Steve Aylett’s comedic Only an Alligator was the first book set in the demonic city of Accomplice, situated one step to the left of reality.
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A new trade paperback edition of Bram Stoker’s Dracula from Random House included an introduction by Peter Straub, plus various review extracts and a reading guide.
The Library of Classic Horror was an instant-remainder hardcover featuring the complete novels Dracula, Frankenstein, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and The Island of Dr Moreau along with two other stories by Robert Louis Stevenson and six by Edgar Allan Poe.
Published as a slightly updated trade paperback in Dover’s Thrift Editions series, A Bottomless Grave and Other Victorian Tales of Terror was a welcome reprint of editor Hugh Lamb’s superior 1977 anthology Victorian Nightmares, featuring twenty-one stories by Ambrose Bierce, Guy de Maupassant, Richard Marsh, Erckmann-Chatrian, Guy Boothby and others.
The Collected Ghost Stories of E.F. Benson was a new edition of the 1992 volume edited by Richard Dalby that contained fifty-four tales, an essay by the author, and an introduction by Joan Aiken.
From Dutch publisher Coppens & Frenks, The House on the Borderland was a limited edition of William Hope Hodgson’s 1908 novel, with a new introduction by Brian Stableford.
La Bas: A Journey Into the Self was a new translation of the 1891 literary black-magic novel by French ‘décadent’ writer Joris-Karl Huysmans, published by Dedalus with an introduction by Brendan King and an afterword and chronology by Robert Irwin. From the same imprint, Geoffrey Farrington’s The Revenants was a revised edition of the author’s 1983 vampire novel with a new introduction by Kim Newman.
Black Seas of Infinity: The Best of H.P. Lovecraftwas a collection of nineteen stories and three non-fiction pieces from the Science Fiction Book Club, edited by SFBC editor Andrew Wheeler.
Edited by S.T. Joshi, The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories was the second collection of H.P. Lovecraft’s fiction published as part of the prestigious Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics series. With David E. Schultz, Joshi also edited and annotated HPL’s The Shadow Out of Time, a trade paperback from Hippocampus Press that contained the restored text of the original manuscript (discovered in 1995), along with an early draft and notes.
The ubiquitous Mr Joshi also edited and introduced The Mark of the Beast and Other Horror Tales by Rudyard Kipling, a collection of seventeen stories from Dover, and The Three Impostors and Other Stories, the first volume of The Best Weird Tales of Arthur Machen from Chaosium. Along with three other classic stories, this trade paperback also included the complete text of Machen’s 1895 linked novel.
The Conan Chronicles Volume II: The Hour of the Dragon was the second omnibus volume in Gollancz’s Fantasy Master-works series collecting Robert E. Howard’s eight remaining Conan stories (including the title novel), edited with an afterword by Stephen Jones.
Richard Matheson’s The Incredible Shrinking Man was a reissue of the omnibus from Tor containing the eponymous short novel and nine classic short stories.
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R.L. Stine’s young-adult series The Nightmare Room continued with They Call Me Creature, The Howler, Shadow Girl and Camp Nowhere, some of which may have been written by George Sheanshang.
A famous YA horror writer apparently inspired a school-based mystery in The Mysterious Matter of I.M. Fine by Diane Stanley.
Murder victims were found mysteriously incinerated in Burning Bones by Christopher Golden and Rick Hautala, seventh in the ‘Jenna Blake’ young-adult mystery/horror series.
Golden’s own Prowlers, Prowlers: Laws of Nature and Prowlers: Predator and Prey launched a new series about a group of teenagers investigating reports of werewolves.
Tartabull’s Throw was a time-travel novel about werewolf detective Cyrus Nygerski and the third in the series by Henry Garfield after the adult books Moondog and Room 13.
Dr Franklin’s Island by Ann Halam (aka Gwyneth Jones) involved a group of teenage plane-crash survivors who were genetically altered into shapeshifters. A giant bat attacked researchers in the Amazon in Paul Zindel’s Night of the Bat.
In Pete Joh
nson’s The Frighteners a new girl in school was befriended by a strange boy whose drawings had the power to call up the eponymous supernatural creatures. Dark Things II: Journey Into Tomorrow by Joséph F. Brown once again featured Jarrod, who had the ability to make what he imagined real.
Musician Chris Wooding’s The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray was a gaslight romance set in Victorian London and inspired by Gormenghast and H.P. Lovecraft.
Margaret Mahy’s The Riddle of the Frozen Phantom was ‘A Vanessa Hamilton Book’. In Eva Ibbotson’s comedicDial-a-Ghost, the eponymous agency mixed up its hauntings, and a teenager believed that ghostly phenomena may have had something to do with the arrest of his father in Nick Manns’s Operating Codes.
A girl who didn’t realize she was dead looked after the children living in her house in The Ghost Sitter by Peni R. Griffin, while a young boy encountered a Civil War phantom inGhost Soldier by Elaine Alphin. My Brother’s Ghost was a novelette by Allan Ahlberg.
A girl’s dreams seemed to hold the answer to her parents’ disappearance in Joséph Bruchac’s Skeleton Man, and a young girl attempted to help her missing friend in Jonathan Stroud’sThe Leap.
Vampire Mountain was the fourth volume in The Saga of Darren Shan and the first in a three-part sequence. The character returned in Trials of Death. Eponymous schoolboy author Shan is a pseudonym for Darren O’Shaughnessy.
A young witch discovered that one of her classmates was a vampire in Amelia Atwater-Rhodes’s Shattered Mirror, while Witch Hill was a time-travel fantasy by Marcus Sedgwick. With the help of a strange sea captain, two children battled the Night Witches in Michael Molloy’s The Witch Trade.
Cate Tiernan’s Sweep 1: Book of Shadows, 2: The Coven, 3: Blood Witch, 4: Dark Magick, 5: Awakening, 6: Spellbound and 7: The Calling were the initial volumes in a packaged series about a teenager who discovered she was a witch.
Silver Raven Wolf’s Witches’ Night of Fear and Witches’ Key to Terror were the second and third volumes, respectively, in the Witches’ Chillers series of occult murder mysteries, from Llewellyn Publications.
Isobel Bird’s Circle of Three series about a trio of modern-day teenage witches included 1: So Mote it Be, 2: Merry Meet, 3: Second Sight, 4: What the Cards Said, 5: In the Dreaming, 6: Ring of Light, 7: Blue Moon, 8: The Five Paths, 9: Through the Veil, 10: Making the Saint, 11: The House of Winter and 12: Written in the Stars.
T*witches #1: The Power of Two by H.B. Gilmour and Randi Reisfeld was about twin sisters, separated at birth, who meet in a theme park and discover that they share strange powers. It was followed by 2: Building a Mystery and 3: Seeing is Deceiving from the same authors.
Australian Kim Wilkins’sBloodlace was the first volume in a new young-adult psychic detective series featuring Gina Champion, who investigated a mystery based on a past murder set in a seaside suburb of Sydney.
Ninth Key and Darkest Hour by Jenny Carroll (aka Meggin Cabot) were two new titles in the ongoing series The Mediator, about a girl who talked to the dead.
From Headline Australia,Shades 1: Shadow Dance, 2: Night Beast, 3: Ancient Light and 4: Black Sun Rising was a young-adult horror adventure series by Robert Hood, about a group of teenagers trapped in a ghostlike existence who battled an invasion by creatures from the shadows.
Scholastic’s ‘Point Horror Unleashed’ continued with Celia Rees’s The Cunning Man, about the eponymous shipwrecker. Paul Stewart’s Fright Train involved a ride through Hell, and a young girl paid a high price for consulting The Bearwood Witch in Susan Price’s novel.
Hair Raiser by Graham Masterton andFly-Blown by Philip Wooderson, the latter about intelligent mutated blowflies, both appeared as ‘Mutant Point Horror’ titles.
Decayed: 10 Years of Point Horror was an omnibus containing the novels Trick or Treat and April Fools by Richie Tankersley Cusick and Blood Sinister by Celia Rees.
Bruce Colville’s The Monsters of Morley Manor was significantly revised and expanded from its 1996 serialization.
Shadows & Moonshine was a new collection of thirteen stories by Joan Aiken, while Vivian Vande Velde’s Being Dead collected seven stories about ghosts and the undead.
R.L. Stine’s The Haunting Hour featured ten stories, each illustrated by a different artist, including John Jude Palencar and Art Spiegelman. Spiegelman and Franqoise Mouly edited Little Lit: Strange Stories for Strange Kids, a graphic anthology of sixteen stories by such authors as Jules Feiffer and Maurice Sendak.
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Brian Lumley’s The Whisperer and Other Voices collected eight reprint stories, plus the short Cthulhu Mythos novel ‘The Return of the Deep Ones’ and a new introduction by the author.
Published in trade paperback by Serpent’s Tail, The Devil in Me was the latest collection from Christopher Fowler, containing twelve stories and a new foreword by the author. From the same imprint came a welcome reissue of Fowler’s 1998 collection Personal Demons in a matching edition.
M. John Harrison’s Travel Arrangements collected fourteen stories, and Ed Gorman’s The Dark Fantastic collected seventeen stories with notes by the author and an introduction by Bentley Little.
Faithless: Tales of Transgression collected twenty-one stories (one original) by Joyce Carol Oates. Meanwhile, the author’s psychological Gothic novella Beasts was published as a trade paperback by Carroll & Graf.
HarperCollins produced a special sampler for the UK edition of Peter Straub’s collection Magic Terror containing the story ‘The Ghost Village’.
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The second of Dorchester Publishing’s hardcover Leisure titles, The Museum of Horrors was presented by The Horror Writers Association. Although perhaps not up to the quality of some of editor Dennis Etchison’s previous compilations, it was still one of the best anthologies of the year. Even though most of the eighteen original stories did not appear to fit into the loose ‘theme’ of the book, and a few were surprisingly similar to each other, it still boasted some memorable contributions from Joyce Carol Oates, Ramsey Campbell, Peter Atkins, Tom Piccirilli, Joel Lane, Conrad Williams, Charles L. Grant, Lisa Morton, S.P. Somtow and a stunning but annoyingly incomplete tale by Peter Straub. It was all the more a shame that such a fine volume and its editor became embroiled in a totally unnecessary controversy publicized through the HWA itself.
Although subtitled Extreme Visions of Speculative Fiction, editor Al Sarrantonio’s massive new anthology Redshift actually contained some excellent dark fantasy stories amongst its thirty all-new contributions by Dan Simmons, Ursula K. Le Guin, Michael Moorcock, Thomas M. Disch, Stephen Baxter, David Morrell, Elizabeth Hand, Michael Marshall Smith, Gene Wolfe and the editor himself (who was also responsible for yet another self-congratulatory introduction).
Edited by P.N. Elrod (and probably an uncredited Martin H. Greenberg), Dracula in London contained sixteen stories about the vampire count living in some very peculiar interpretations of the city by Tanya Huff, Fred Saberhagen, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Nancy Kilpatrick and others, including a collaboration between the editor and actor Nigel Bennett.
Vampires: Encounters with the Undead was a huge, 600-page hardcover from Black Dog &c Leventhal Publishers, edited and with commentary by the erudite David J. Skal. Along with classic short stories by J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Bram Stoker, M.R. James, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Bloch, Fritz Leiber, Richard Matheson, David J. Schow, Kim Newman, Caitlin R. Kiernan and others, this value-for-money volume also contained articles, essays and extracts, all profusely illustrated with film stills and artwork.
Lords of Night: Tales of Vampire Love contained three romance novellas by Janice Bennett, Sara Blayne and Monique Ellis.
Hammer horror star Ingrid Pitt graced the cover and contributed the introduction and an original story toThe Mammoth Book of Vampire Stories By Women, an anthology of thirty-three stories (fourteen original) and one poem edited by Stephen Jones with illustrations by Randy Broecker. Other contributors included Anne Rice, Poppy Z. Brite, Tanith Lee, Lisa Tuttle, Connie Willis a
nd Chelsea Quinn Yarbro.
Mike Ashley’s excellent The Mammoth Book of Fantasy reprinted twenty-three classic tales by Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Fritz Leiber, Tanith Lee, Harlan Ellison, A. Merritt and many others.
Published in hardcover by The British Library, Meddling with Ghosts: Stories in the Tradition of M.R. James was a handsome reprint anthology selected and introduced by Ramsey Campbell. Among the sixteen authors included were J. Sheridan Le Fanu, F. Marion Crawford, Sabine Baring-Gould, Fritz Leiber, L.T.C. Rolt, A.N.L. Munby, T.E.D. Klein, Sheila Hodgson, Terry Lamsley and Campbell himself. Rosemary Pardoe also contributed a useful guide to writers who followed in James’s literary footsteps.
Edited by Don Hutchinson, Wild Things Live There: The Best of Northern Frights reprinted sixteen stories from the Canadian anthology series by Nancy Kilpatrick, Nalo Hopkins and others.
Into the Mummy’s Tomb, edited with a long introduction by John Richard Stephens, contained fifteen reprint stories, two excerpts and an abridgement by such authors as Louisa May Alcott, Tennessee Williams, H.P. Lovecraft, Agatha Christie, Mark Twain, Sir H. Rider Haggard, Edgar Allan Poe, Ray Bradbury, Rudyard Kipling, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Elizabeth Peters, Sax Rohmer, Anne Rice and Bram Stoker.
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