The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 22

by Stephen Jones

  A group of teenage film-makers in 1977 discovered that Willis H. O’Brien used an undead necromancer to help create a new form of animation in 1931 in David Herter’s October Dark from Earthling Publications. It was available in a 500-copy signed edition and a slipcased lettered edition of just fifteen copies ($300.00).

  From MonkeyBrain Books, Mysteries of the Diogenes Club collected five novellas (one original) by Kim Newman about the secretive intelligence and law enforcement agency originally created by Sherlock Holmes’ smarter brother, Mycroft.

  Although the eleventh volume of TTA Press’ “Crimewave” series of trade paperback anthologies was entitled Ghosts, there was not as much horror content as you would expect in the fourteen stories by Nina Allan, Christopher Fowler, Cody Goodfellow, Steve Rasnic Tem, Joel Lane and others.

  The same could not be said for The Harm by Gary McMahon, a slim little paperback published as part of the TTA Press Novella series, which dealt with the tricky topic of child abuse.

  Limited to 300 signed copies, In Concert from Centipede Press collected twenty-one collaborations (one original) by Steve Rasnic Tem and Melanie Tem. The book featured a wraparound cover by Salvador Dalí, endpapers by Max Ernst, and was illustrated with original wood engravings by Howie Michels and colour plates by Marc Chagall.

  Edited by Stephen Haffner, The Early Kuttner Volume One: Terror in the House was the first of two volumes from Haffner Press collecting the early short fiction of Henry Kuttner. It contained forty stories from 1936 to 1939 along with a Foreword by Richard Matheson and an Introduction by Garyn G. Roberts. There was also a limited slipcased edition for $150.00.

  From Romanian small press imprint Ex Occidente Press came Mark Samuels’ The Man Who Collected Machen & Other Stories, which was limited to 200 copies and contained eleven tales (eight original) and a reprint essay.

  D.P. Watt’s collection of nineteen stories, An Emporium of Automata, and Marvick Louis’ novel The Star Ushak were both limited to 150 hardcover copies apiece. Insole Colin’s Oblivion’s Poppy from the imprint’s Passport Levante line was available in a run of just 100 hand-numbered copies.

  Publisher Dan Ghetu announced that Ex Occidente Press was to close in April 2011, saying his work would be done by then. The imprint had recently suffered some criticism over shipping problems.

  In June, publisher Dave Barnett announced that he was closing Necro Publications, citing the downturn in the economy and health problems. Necro was a major promoter of Edward Lee’s work, amongst others.

  Never Again, from Gray Friar Press, was yet another sometimes questionable “charity anthology” with profits (after the publisher had recouped printing and distribution costs) being split between three human rights charities. Edited by Allyson Bird and Joel Lane, the book featured twenty-three stories (twelve reprints) supposedly protesting against racism and fascism, although these were not the only themes addressed by the authors represented. The reprint material by such writers as Lisa Tuttle, Joe R. Lansdale, Robert Shearman, Stephen Volk and Ramsey Campbell was notably superior to the original contributions.

  One Monster is Not Enough was a collection of eight novellas and novelettes by Paul Finch, available as a 100-copy signed hardcover from the same imprint.

  From Night Shade Books, The Loving Dead by Amelia Beamer was a comedy novel in which the zombie disease was sexually transmitted.

  Compiled by Jonathan Strahan and the late Charles N. Brown, Fritz Leiber: Selected Stories from the same imprint was a large retrospective volume of seventeen stories with an Introduction by Neil Gaiman, while Occultation collected nine stories (three original) by Laird Barron with an Introduction by Michael Shea.

  Edited with notes by Scott Connors and Ron Hilger, The Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith Volume 5: The Last Hieroglyph collected twenty-nine stories by the classic pulp author, including alternate and deleted material. Richard A. Lupoff contributed the Introduction to this final volume in the superior series.

  Probably the best zombie anthology in an overcrowded year was The Living Dead 2, editor John Joseph Adams’ substantial follow-up to his best-selling 2008 compilation The Living Dead, also published by Night Shade. This time, out of the forty-four featured stories, just over half were original, including those by Kelley Armstrong, Max Brooks, Cherie Priest, Simon R. Green, Robert Kirkman, David Wellington, and John Skipp and Cody Goodfellow, amongst others.

  Edited by Tim Pratt, Sympathy for the Devil contained thirty-five Satanic stories by Neil Gaiman, Robert Bloch, Kelly Link, John Collier, Holly Black, China Miéville, Theodore Sturgeon, Michael Chabon, Charles de Lint, Stephen King and others, along with an excerpt from Dante’s Inferno.

  Also published by Night Shade, editor Ellen Datlow’s Tails of Wonder and Imagination was an attractive reprint anthology of forty feline stories from Neil Gaiman, Michael Marshall Smith, Kelly Link, Tanith Lee, Reggie Oliver, Stephen King, Nicholas Royle, Susanna Clarke and many others.

  What I Didn’t See and Other Stories was a hardcover collection by Karen Joy Fowler from Small Beer Press. It contained twelve stories (one original). The same imprint introduced English readers to the work of celebrated French author Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud with the twenty-three reprint tales found in A Life on Paper: Stories. Brian Evenson supplied the Foreword.

  Unashamedly channelling the spirit of Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, William Ollie’s novel Sideshow from Joe Morey’s increasingly ambitious Dark Regions Press involved two thirteen-year-old boys and the secrets they discovered when Hannibal Cobb’s dark carnival came to their town.

  Jeffrey Thomas’ The Fall of Hades was the latest volume in the author’s ongoing “Hades” sequence, while Jim Gavin’s Hard Boiled Vampire Killers was about a pair of losers who hunted the undead on the mean streets of Atlanta. Brian Knight supplied the Introduction.

  Seventy-four years after he was lashed to a wooden cross and abandoned to God’s judgement by the inhabitants of a small Iowa backwoods community, the thing that used to be Reverend Joshua Miller still waited for release in Gord Rollo’s novel Valley of the Scarecrow.

  Written and illustrated by Gabrielle Faust, Regret was about a man who literally became his own inner demon and subsequently crossed paths with the other minions of Hell. John Palisano contributed the Introduction.

  When a young deputy sheriff moved from the big city to a small mountain community, he did not expect to encounter a man from the past and the monstrous god he worshipped in Lord of the Mountain by William Ollie.

  As always, Dark Regions Press continued to support short horror fiction with a raft of attractive collections.

  Jeffrey Thomas’ Nocturnal Emissions contained eight stories (three original) and thirteen poems, while Scottish writer Daniel McGachey’s Sherlock Holmes: The Impossible Cases presented four “recently discovered” stories featuring Holmes and Watson, along with various introductions and story notes.

  Going Back brought together eighteen reprint stories by Tony Richards, while Wine and Rank Poison was a collection of ten stories (seven original) and a novel excerpt by Allyson Bird, with an Introduction by Joe R. Lansdale.

  Rick Hautala supplied the Introduction to Harry Shannon’s bumper collection A Host of Shadows: A Short Story Collection, which featured twenty-five very recent tales (five original), along with story notes.

  Paul Melniczek had two new collections out under the imprint: A Haunted Halloween contained eleven stories (five original) and an Afterword by the publisher, while Monsters collected eight stories (six original).

  The fifth volume in Dark Regions’ “New Voices of Horror” series was Do-Overs and Detours, which collected fifteen stories (four original) by Steve Vernon with an Introduction by Richard Chizmar.

  Published two years after the original edition from Humdrumming Ltd, Beneath the Surface was a revised and expanded edition of Simon Strantzas’ debut collection that contained a different mix of fourteen stories (one original), along with a Foreword by Ma
tt Cardin and an Afterword by the author.

  Charnel Wine: Memento Mori Edition was a reprint of the 2004 collection by Richard Gavin, featuring twenty-three stories and vignettes (plus five more original to this edition) and a new Foreword by the author.

  The first volume in Dark Regions Press’ Novella series was Harry Shannon’s zombie story Pain, in which the remaining inhabitants of a small mountain town defended themselves against a virus-infected horde of the living dead.

  The Mad and the Macabre contained two serial-killer novellas by Jeff Strand and Michael McBride.

  Under Dark Regions Press’ Ghost House imprint, Quill & Candle collected seventeen original supernatural stories by Scott Thomas set in the New England of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, while the ubiquitous Tony Richards also had Our Lady of the Shadows, another collection, out under the Ghost House banner. The trade paperback contained twelve stories (four original). Both titles were illustrated by Erin Wells.

  Most Dark Regions/Ghost House titles were published as signed trade paperback editions.

  Written between 1964 and 1970, Rules of Duel from Telos Publishing was a previously unpublished “collaboration” between Graham Masterton and William S. Burroughs, with original Introductions by both writers. Telos also reissued Masterton’s 1977 novel The Djinn in a new edition, with an exclusive introduction by the author.

  From the same imprint, Humpty’s Bones by Simon Clark contained the original title novella, along with a new short story.

  Edited by Ian Whates and Ian Watson for NewCon Press, Shoes, Ships & Cadavers: Tales from North Londonshire contained twelve multi-genre stories set in Northampton, with an Introduction by Alan Moore. There was a signed, limited edition of just fifty copies.

  Also edited by Whates under the same imprint, The Bitten Word was an anthology of seventeen vampire stories (one reprint) by Simon Clark, Kelley Armstrong, Sarah Singleton, Gary McMahon, Andrew Hook, Storm Constantine, John Kaiine, Chaz Brenchley, Nancy Kilpatrick, Freda Warrington, Tanith Lee, Jon Courtney Grimwood and Ian Watson, amongst others, including the editor. There was also a special signed hardcover edition limited to 150 numbered copies.

  Edited by Nancy Kilpatrick with a brief Foreword by Dacre Stoker, Evolve: Vampire Stories of the New Undead published by Edge Science Fiction and Fantasy was yet another vampire anthology. It contained twenty-three original stories and a poem by such Canadian authors as Kelley Armstrong, Tanya Huff, Gemma Files, Bev Vincent, Steve Vernon, Rio Youers, Rebecca Bradley and Claude Lalumière. Unfortunately, someone should have checked the editor’s historical Introduction a bit more carefully.

  The fourteenth volume in the long-running Tesseracts series from the same Canadian publisher was co-edited by John Robert Colombo and Brett Alexander Savory and featured twenty “strange Canadian stories” and several poems by David Nickle, Claude Lalumière, Sandra Kasturi, Robert J. Sawyer and others.

  From associated imprint Absolute XPress, Rigor Amortis was an anthology of thirty-four original zombie erotica tales and one poem edited by Jaym Gates and Erika Holt.

  A Book of Tongues from Canada’s ChiZine Publications was the first novel by Gemma Files and introduced “Hexslinger” Asher Rook, a former preacher-turned-magician who used his small black Bible to battle supernatural evil in the Wild West.

  The Thief of Broken Toys was a nicely produced novella by Tim Lebbon from ChiZine, about a man who was struggling to come to terms with a family tragedy. A signed, limited hardcover that was only available through pre-order included an additional story.

  Darkness: Two Decades of Modern Horror from San Francisco’s Tachyon Publications reprinted twenty-five stories from 1984–2005 by Stephen King, Clive Barker, Peter Straub, Neil Gaiman, Joyce Carol Oates, Lucius Shepard, Poppy Z. Brite, Edward Bryant, Elizabeth Hand and others, with a Foreword by Stefan Dziemianowicz and an Introduction by editor Ellen Datlow.

  The Best of Joe R. Lansdale from the same publisher contained sixteen stories with an autobiographical Introduction by the author.

  Published by Underland Press as a trade paperback omnibus, The Complete Drive-in contained all three of Joe R. Lansdale’s novels in the series, along with an Introduction by film director Don Coscarrelli and a selection of colour art by Nickita Knatz for a movie version that was never made.

  New British independent imprint Chômu Press launched its list with Quentin S. Crisp’s Remember You’re a One-Ball!, a macabre coming-of-age novel in which a teacher recalled the strange world of his childhood.

  The publisher followed it with Reggie Oliver’s debut novel, The Dracula Papers Part One: The Scholar’s Tale, about the early life of Transylvanian Prince Vladimir, and I Wonder What Human Flesh Tastes Like, Justin Isis’ debut collection of stories set in contemporary Japan, with an Introduction by Crisp.

  Connie Corcoran Wilson’s debut collection, Hellfire and Damnation, was inspired by Dante’s nine circles of Hell. The trade paperback from Sam’s Dot Publishing came with an Introduction by William F. Nolan, along with effusive cover quotes by Scott Edelman, Gary A. Braunbeck and Lisa Mannetti.

  A family was forced to weed a patch of land to prevent monsters growing in Dave Zeltserman’s The Caretaker of Lorne Field, from Overlook Press.

  Available as an attractive (if not particularly well-edited) hardcover from Obverse Books with an Introduction by Nicholas Royale and an Afterword by John L. Probert, the stories (one reprint) in Johnny Mains’ With Deepest Sympathy: Fourteen Tales of the Odd and Twisted would not have been out of place in the old The Pan Book of Horror Stories.

  Most of the contributions to Back from the Dead: The Legacy of The Pan Book of Horror Stories also lived up to the quality of the anthology’s inspiration. The first title from independent imprint Noose & Gibbet Publishing, the hardcover featured five reprints and sixteen new stories by such original contributors to the Pan series as Christopher Fowler, Tony Richards, John Burke, Basil Copper, David A. Riley, John Ware, Nicholas Royle, Harry E. Turner and Conrad Hill, along with a Foreword by Shaun Hutson, an historical essay by David A. Sutton and an extremely candid profile of Pan Book of Horror founder Herbert van Thal by editor Johnny Mains.

  Edited with a brief Introduction by Mark Harding, Music For Another World: Strange Fiction on the Theme of Music from Scotland’s Mutation Press contained nineteen original stories by Cyril Simsa, Andrew Hook, Neil Williamson and others.

  Small press publishers Pendragon Press, Screaming Dreams and Atomic Fez teamed up to produce a special CD-ROM sampler/beermat for FantasyCon 2010 which featured excerpts and covers from a number of imprints’ titles.

  Paul Finch’s Christmas novella Sparrowhawk from Pendragon Press was subtitled A Victorian Ghost Story and set during the coldest winter in living memory to grip London. Terry Grimwood’s novella The Places Between, also from Pendragon, was about one woman’s journey of self-discovery, while Feral Companions from the same imprint contained two novellas, one apiece by Simon Maginn and Gary Fry. The hardcover was limited to 300 copies, with the first 100 numbered and signed by the authors.

  Paul Kane’s novel The Gemini Factor, from Screaming Dreams, was a supernatural whodunit about a serial killer that only murdered twins and took their body parts. The trade paperback came with an Introduction by Peter Atkins and cover quotes from Peter James, Clive Barker, Kelley Armstrong and Peter Straub.

  Against the Darkness collected the first eleven cases (six original) of John Llewellyn Probert’s paranormal investigators Mr Massene Henderson and Miss Samantha Jephcott, and Songs from Spider Street collected twenty-five new and reprint stories by Mark Howard Jones and came with cover quotes from both Ray Bradbury and D.F. Lewis.

  Also from Screaming Dreams, Yuppieville was a slim horror novella by Tony Richards about a new Nevada community where those who didn’t fit in were forced to leave . . . permanently.

  Set after “The Terror” had changed animals into the dominant species on the planet overnight, The Terror and the Tortoiseshell was the fir
st “Benji Spriteman Mystery” by John Travis, a hardboiled crime mystery featuring a six-foot tall, suit-wearing cat detective. It was issued by Canada’s Atomic Fez Publishing as a jacketless hardcover and e-book.

  Described by its author as “the maddest thing I’ve ever written”, Rhys Hughes’ comic novel Twisthorn Bellow involved the explosive golem of the title attempting to prevent the French from taking over the afterlife. It was published in trade paperback and e-book by Atomic Fez and came with a cover quote by Mike Mignola.

  Wicked Delights: A Selection of Stories from the same imprint collected eighteen stories (seven original) by the busy John Llewellyn Probert, who also contributed an Introduction and story notes. James Cooper’s The Beautful Red contained twelve stories (five original), along with a Foreword by Christopher Fowler.

  Edited by Jeff Connor and published by graphics imprint IDW, Classics Mutilated: CTRL-ALT-LIT contained thirteen original literary “mash-ups” featuring Cthulhu, Billy the Kid, Frankenstein, Edgar Allan Poe, Dr Moreau, Sid Vicious and many others in stories by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Marc Laidlaw, Mark Morris, Nancy Collins, Thomas Tessier, Rio Youers and others. Mike Dubisch supplied the illustrations.

  Joe R. Lansdale’s contribution to the anthology, the Mark Twain and H.P. Lovecraft-inspired novella “Dread Island”, was issued in a series of four different limited editions – as a 500-copy trade paperback, available at conventions; a 400-copy signed hardcover, and a 100-copy signed and numbered leatherbound edition offered exclusively through the publisher’s website. A fourth, “retailer only” edition, was also available to certain key accounts.

  From Prime Books, Zombies: The Recent Dead edited by Paula Guran contained twenty-two reprint stories from the 21st century and an Introduction by David J. Schow, while Ekaterina Sedia edited Running with the Pack, an anthology of twenty-two werewolf stories (nine reprints) from the same imprint.