The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 17

by Stephen Jones

  Hal Duncan’s first novel, Vellum: The Book of All Hours, was set in the near-future and dealt with the forthcoming End of Days and the final battle between Heaven and Hell.

  Children were being murdered to create magic potions in Richard Kunzmann’s debut thriller Bloody Harvest, and something evil was protecting the new kid in town in Cruel Winter by Anthony Izzo.

  In Justine Wilson’s first novel, Blood Angel, a rock singer spread evil in his wake, while a female realtor protected three bachelors from a sexy shape-shifting demon in Lexi Davis’ Pretty Evil.

  A witch fell in love with her enemy, an evil warlock, in Charmed & Dangerous by Candace Havens, and M. A. C. Petty’s debut novel Thin Line Between was set in a haunted museum. It was the first book in the “Wandjina Quartet”.

  Although not published as genre fiction, Bret Easton Ellis wrote an alternative version of himself into Lunar Park, as the protagonist who got a second chance at life that still went horribly wrong.

  A psychic woman possibly killed with her touch in Russell Hoban’s Come Dance with Me, a psychic tried to prevent the death of his daughter in Anthony Doerr’s About Grace, and a female detective teamed up with her psychic partner to track down a serial killer in Last Girl Dancing by Holly Lisle.

  A. N. Wilson’s A Jealous Ghost had an American graduate student in England reliving the events of Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw, while Kornwolf by Tristan Egolf was about an teenage Amish werewolf.

  John Crowley’s Lord Byron’s Novel: The Evening Land was about a lost Gothic manuscript supposedly written by the notorious poet, with notes by his daughter Ada.

  Loveraft: Tales was a classy hardcover collection of twenty-two classic tales by H. P. Lovecraft, edited by Peter Straub for the prestigious Library of America imprint. Shadows of Death reprinted sixteen stories and four fragments by Lovecraft, along with an Introduction by Harlan Ellison.

  Count Magnus and Other Ghost Stories collected fifteen stories and two essays by M. R. James, and The Terror and Other Tales was the third volume of “The Best Weird Tales of Arthur Machen”, containing thirteen stories and an essay on occultism. Both volumes were edited with Introductions by S. T. Joshi.

  Issued as part of the “Lovecraft’s Library” series from Hippocampus Press, M. P. Shiel’s The House of Sounds collected seven stories and the 1901 novel The Purple Cloud, with another Introduction by Joshi.

  Leonard Cline’s 1927 Gothic novel The Dark Chamber was reissued by Cold Spring Press with an Introduction by Douglas A. Anderson and an Afterword by the author. From the same imprint, Anderson also edited and introduced Adrift on the Haunted Seas: The Best Short Stories of William Hope Hodgson, which collected seventeen stories and four poems.

  From Red Jacket Press, Roads was a boxed facsimile reproduction of the 1948 Arkham House edition of Seabury Quinn’s short Christmas novella, with illustrations by Virgil Finlay.

  Edited with an Afterword by Stephen Jones, Sea-Kings of Mars and Otherworldly Stories from Gollancz’s “Fantasy Masterworks” series collected twelve classic fantasy and science fiction stories by Leigh Brackett (including a collaboration with Ray Bradbury), along with an Introduction by the author. Dan Simmons’ classic 1985 novel Song of Kali was also reissued in the same series.

  In March, Sotheby’s in London sold ailing film director George Pan Cosmatos’ collection of English and America literature, including Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (£2,400), William Beckford’s An Arabian Adventure (aka Vathek, £660), Mary W. Shelley’s Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus (£66,000), John W. Polidori’s The Vampyre: A Tale (£1,440), Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White (£6,600), Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four (£3,360), Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (£1,680), H. S. [sic] Wells’ The Time Machine (£2,040) and The War of the Worlds (£1,020), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (£9,600), Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (£3,600), John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids (£1,020) and Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange (£1,680). Condition varied, and not all were first editions.

  In early June, the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre opened its Charlie and the Chocolate Factory gates in the late author’s home village of Great Missenden, in Buckinghamshire. The museum included an archive of Dahl’s work, interactive exhibits and a reading centre.

  Lord Loss and Demon Thief were the first and second volumes in “The Demonata” young adult series by the very popular “Darren Shan” (Darren O’Shaughnessy).

  The first three titles in a new series by R. L. Stine, Fear Street Nights: Moonlight Secrets, Midnight Games and Darkest Dawn were set in a bar called “Nights”.

  Raven’s Gate was the first volume in Anthony Horowitz’s “The Gatekeepers” series.

  The Hollow: Horseman and The Hollow: Drowned, by Christopher Golden and Ford Lytle Gilmore, were the first two volumes in a new series about a group of teenagers who unknowingly set in motion a curse in the town of Sleepy Hollow.

  A hip-hop rock legend found himself on a train travelling with the newly dead in Sean Wright’s Dark Tales of Time and Space, a novel aimed at older teenagers and published by Crowswing Books in a 1,000-copy paperback edition, a 470-copy hardcover and a 30-copy slipcased edition.

  A boy searched for his missing brother in The Devil’s Footprints by E. E. Richardson, and the spirit of a murdered teenager discovered that her killer was about to strike again in The Innocent’s Story by Nicky Singer.

  Incubus was written by Keith Brooke and published under the pseudonym “Nick Gifford”. A Native American legend became real in Joseph Bruchac’s Whisper in the Dark, and a strange maze led to a different reality in William Sleator’s The Last Universe.

  Red is for Remembrance was the third volume in Laurie Faria Stolarz’s series about a Wiccan teenager who dreamed about murders that had yet to happen.

  Witch Season: Winter was the fourth and final volume in the series by Jeff Mariotte, while The Witch of Clatteringshaws was the eleventh volume in the “Wolves of Willoughby Chase” series by the late Joan Aiken. The volume included story notes by the author’s daughter, Lizza Aiken.

  The Seer: Last Dance and The Seer: Witch Bell, both by Linda Joy Singleton (aka “L. J. Singleton”), were the second and third books in the mystery series about psychic teenager Sabine.

  Cate Tiernan’s Balefire: A Circle of Ashes was the second book in a series about teenage twins with supernatural powers, and Midnighters 2: Touching Darkness was the second volume in Scott Westerfeld’s series about a young girl discovering her paranormal powers, who was hunted by the creatures of the dark and the light.

  Tales from the Dark Side: Blood on Snow was the first in a new series of ghostly novels aimed at teenagers by Tim Bowler, illustrated by Jason Cockcroft. A boy’s grandmother trapped ghosts by feeding them in A Gathering of Shades by David Stahler, Jr.

  Meg Cabot continued her series about a girl who could talk to the dead in The Mediator 6: Twilight, and a boy attracted the attention of a long-dead girl in an abandoned house in A. M. Jenkins’ Beating Heart.

  A boy was the only person who could see the ghost of a young girl in Laura Whitcomb’s debut, A Certain Slant of Light, while Eileen Rosenbloom’s first novel, Stuck Down, chronicled the exploits of a dead teenager.

  Stephanie Meyer’s first book was the YA vampire novel Twilight, Bloodline by Kate Cary was a semi-sequel to Dracula, and Kissing Coffins by Ellen Schreiber was the sequel to Vampire Kisses.

  High School Bites was the first in the “Lucy Chronicles” by Liza Conrad, while a group of women accidentally infected with a parasite were turned into vampires in Scott Westerfeld’s Peeps.

  Vampire Plagues: Paris, Vampire Plagues: Mexico and Vampire Plagues: Epidemic were the latest volumes in the Scholastic series by the pseudonymous “Sebastian Rook”.

  Got Fangs? and Circus of the Damned by Katie Maxwell (aka “Katie MacAlister”) were YA romances aimed at teenage girls, in which psychic adolescent Francesca found herself the object of an amorous vampire’s affections
and accidentally raised a Viking ghost.

  Vampirates: Demons of the Ocean featured two shipwrecked twins involved with a ghostly galleon crewed by vampires in the first of Justin Somper’s six-book series.

  James McCann’s Rancour was about a werewolf who hunted vampires, and a werewolf’s teenage offspring moved to Maine to be with him in Henry Garfield’s My Father the Werewolf. Stephen Cole’s The Wereling: Prey was the second volume in the werewolf trilogy about two teens trying to escape a family of lycanthropes.

  By These Ten Bones by Clare B. Dunkle was a young adult werewolf novel set in medieval Scotland, while Edo van Belkom’s Lone Wolf was a sequel to Wolf Pack and involved four teenage werewolves.

  Wicked Odd: Still More Stories to Chill the Heart was the fourth volume in Steve Burt’s self-published series of young adult horror collections.

  Invasion of the Road Weenies and Other Warped and Creepy Tales collected thirty-five original stories by David Lubar, and Bonechillers: 13 Twisted Tales of Terror was a young adult collection from D. W. Cropper.

  Adventure Classics: Edgar Allan Poe Collection featured nine stories and four poems and came with a snap-together model of a pendulum, while Tales of Terror collected six illustrated stories by Poe, along with an Introduction by Michael McCurdy and a CD.

  Edited by Ted Thompson and Eli Horowitz, and featuring eleven stories (three reprints) by Neil Gaiman, Kelly Link and others, Noisy Outlaws, Unfriendly Blobs, and Some Other Things That Aren’t as Scary, Maybe . . . Depending on How You Feel About Lost Lands, Stray Cellphones, Creatures from the Sky, Parents Who Disappear in Peru, a Man Named Lars Farf, and One Other Story We Couldn’t Quite Finish, So Maybe You Could Help Us Out was certainly the longest-titled anthology of the year. Published by McSweeny’s Books with an Introduction by Lemony Snicket, proceeds from the book went to 826NYC, a non-profit tutoring centre in New York.

  Looking for Jake, the first short story collection from Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning author China Miéville, contained fourteen stories (three original, plus a new graphic tale illustrated by Liam Sharp). Regrettably, the book lacked an Introduction or any story notes by the author.

  From Dinoship, Dead Travel Fast collected ten previously published short stories and novellas by Kim Newman with new afterwords by the author, and Chuck Palahniuk’s Haunted collected a number of linked stories based around a group of writers trapped inside an old movie palace.

  Brian Lumley’s The House of Cthulhu: Tales of the Primal Land, Volume I, was a reprint collection of ten previously published Lovecraftian stories with a new cover painting by Bob Eggleton.

  Hotel Midnight: A Collection of Short Stories from Robert Hale contained twelve stories (nine reprints) by Simon Clark, along with an Introduction by the author.

  From Thunder’s Mouth Press, The Emperor of Gondwanaland and Other Stories collected eighteen reprint tales by Paul Di Filippo, including collaborations with Don Webb and Barry Malzberg, while Different Kinds of Dead and Other Tales contained fifteen stories by Ed Gorman.

  Named after the eponymous California bookstore, Dark Delicacies co-edited by Del Howison and Jeff Gelb certainly attracted the Big Names. Out of the nineteen original tales, the best work came from such old hands as Ray Bradbury, Ramsey Campbell, Gahan Wilson and, especially, Clive Barker. Other authors represented included Whitley Strieber, F. Paul Wilson, Roberta Lannes, Brian Lumley, John Farris, William F. Nolan, David J. Schow and the late Richard Laymon, while Richard Matheson contributed a very brief Foreword. Unfortunately, despite this stellar line-up, the anthology did not turn out to be “the most significant horror anthology in the past twenty-five years”, as Gelb claimed in his overly enthusiastic Introduction.

  Co-edited by Nancy Holder and Nancy Kilpatrick, Outsiders: 22 All New Stories from the Edge was a mostly-original anthology (one reprint) struggling to find a unifying theme. That didn’t stop it from containing some fine work, with an impressive line-up of names that included Neil Gaiman, Steve Rasnic Tem, Tanith Lee, David J. Schow, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Jack Ketchum, Elizabeth Massie, Kathe Koja, John Shirley, Poppy Z. Brite, Brian Hodge and Joe R. Lansdale, amongst many others.

  Lost on the Darkside: Voices from the Edge of Horror was the third in editor John Pelan’s series of original paperback anthologies from Roc. It contained fifteen modern horror stories by such authors as Tony Richards, Maria Alexander, Ramsey Campbell, David B. Silva, Mark Samuels, Michael Reaves, Jeffrey Thomas, Jessica Amanda Salmonson, Joseph Nassie, David Niall Wilson, Gerard Houarner and the editor himself.

  Edited by Martin H. Greenberg, All Hell Breaking Loose contained sixteen satanic stories from such authors as P.N. Elrod, Tom Piccirilli and Dean Wesley Smith, with an Introduction by John Heifers. In the Shadow of Evil co-edited by Greenberg and Helfers featured fourteen stories in which Good was defeated by Evil, from Tanya Huff, Gregory Benford and others

  From Oxford University Press, Late Victorian Gothic Tales collected twelve stories with an extensive Introduction and notes by editor Roger Luckhurst. Edited by Gary Lachman, The Dedalus Occult Reader: The Garden of Hermetic Dreams collected nineteen stories and novel excerpts.

  What Dreams May Come contained three supernatural romance stories by Sherrilyn Kenyon, Robin Owens and Rebecca York, while Hot Spell conjured up four supernatural romance stories featuring vampires, demons and other creatures by Emma Holly, Lora Leigh, Meljean Brook and Shiloh Walker. Sex and the Single Witch was another supernatural romance anthology containing work by Theresa Alan, Carly Alexander and Holly Chamberlin.

  Edited by Greg Wharton, The Big Book of Erotic Ghost Stories contained twenty stories (seven reprints). Blood Surrender was an anthology of sixteen erotic horror stories (three reprints) from Nancy Kilpatrick, Maria Alexander and others, edited by Cecilia Tan.

  Published by the Science Fiction Book Club, The Fair Folk was an original hardcover anthology edited by Marvin Kaye that featured six new novellas about elves, not all of them benevolent, by Tanith Lee, Megan Lindholm, Jane Yolen and Midori Snyder, Patricia McKillip and Kim Newman (featuring Charles Beauregard of the Diogenes Club).

  Transgressions edited by Ed McBain contained ten novellas by leading crime writers, including a ghost story by Stephen King inspired by the events of 9/11. Other contributors included John Farris, Walter Mosley, Joyce Carol Oates and McBain himself.

  As always ably edited by Ellen Datlow, Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: Eighteenth Annual Collection from St. Martin’s Griffin contained forty-four stories, plus seven summations of the year and the usual list of “Honorable Mentions”.

  The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror Volume Sixteen collected twenty-one stories and novellas (including two by Neil Gaiman), along with an extensive overview of the year in horror by editor Stephen Jones, a detailed “Necrology” by Jones and Kim Newman, and a listing of “Useful Addresses”.

  The two anthologies overlapped with just two stories, by Stephen Gallagher and Tina Rath.

  Editor Ellen Datlow’s weekly Sci Fiction posted excellent stories online throughout the year by Steve Rasnic Tem, Pat Cadigan (a vampire story), John Sladek, Kim Newman (a Richard Jeperson novella), Fritz Leiber, Gahan Wilson, Tom Reamy and others. However, in November, parent company SciFi.com announced that after more than five years it would be discontinuing the prestigious site at the end of the year, despite the webzine winning Datlow the 2005 Hugo Award for Best Editor.

  February marked editor Judi Rohrig’s two-year anniversary as editor and publisher of the informative weekly electronic newsletter Hellnotes.

  Issue #609 of Amazing Stories was made available as an exclusive download from Paizo.com. It featured fiction by Ben Bova, Robert Sheckley, George Zebrowski and Sarah A. Hoyt, plus articles on the movie Constantine, Clive Barker’s Renaissance Man project, and the film of Ray Bradbury’s A Sound of Thunder. Downloads were free to subscribers.

  The Australian webzine Horrorscope began including reviews of magazines from around the world, includi
ng Weird Tales, Book of Dark Wisdom and Crimewave, while also running interviews with Australian authors such as Kaaron Warren, Paul Haines and Brett McBean.

  Shadow Box was described as a “fusion of flash fiction and dark art lashed together with multimedia nastiness”. The e-anthology edited by Shane Jiraiya Cummings and Angela Challis was the first release from Australia’s Brimstone Press and contained seventy mostly original stories, with profits going to charity and supporting The Australian Horror Writers Association.

  Darkness Rising 2005 was a hardcover print-on-demand anthology edited by L. H. Maynard and M. P. N. Sims for Prime Books. The attractive-looking hardcover featured twenty original stories by Steve Duffy, William P. Simmons, Cyril Simsa, Mark McLaughlin, Peter Tennant, Scott Emerson Bull and Paul Finch, amongst others.

  Also from Prime, In the Palace of Repose was a stunning debut collection of nine stories (seven original) by Canadian writer Holly Phillips, with an Introduction by Sean Stewart.

  The Empty House and Other Ghost Stories was a print-on-demand edition of Algernon Blackwood’s 1906 collection from Wildside Press/Prime Classics Library. The Bowmen and Other Legends of the War reprinted Arthur Machen’s 1915 collection of five stories, and The Room in the Dragon Volant was a reprint on the 1872 novel by J. Sheridan Le Fanu.

  Wildside Press also continued its series of facsimile pulp magazine reprints with the September 1st, 1919 issue of The Thrill Book and the first issue of Sinister Stories, dated February 1940.

  From the same imprint, Dark Duets: Musical Mayhem, contained fifteen fictional collaborations (eight original) between Michael McCarty and Mark McLaughlin, P. D. Cacek, Charlee Jacob and others. Bentley Little supplied the Introduction.

  Fewer stories and a larger typeface would have benefited Poe’s Progeny, edited by Gary Fry and subtitled An Anthology of Contemporary Stories Inspired by Classic Dark Fiction. Available from Gray Friar Press with an Introduction by Michael Marshall Smith and an evocative cover illustration by Robert Sammelin, the book contained thirty stories connected to writers or sometimes spurious “themes” (“genre character”, “the movies”, “modern master”) by Mike O’Driscoll, Mark Morris, Tim Lebbon, Joel Lane, Chico Kidd (a Luís da Silva adventure), Nicholas Royle, Stephen Volk, Adam L. G. Nevill, Simon Clark, Donald R. Burleson, Ramsey Campbell and others, including the editor.