The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 10 - [Anthology]
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The Horror Writers Association Newsletterfinally found its direction under editor Meg Turville-Heitz, appearing on schedule and with each issue packed with news, controversy and a lively letters column.
Issue 16 was the final edition of Aaron Sterns’ Severed Head: The Journal of the Australian Horror Writers, as AHW president Bryce Stevens decided to close down the organisation in February because of lack of finances.
The Governing Body of Britain’s The Vampyre Society agreed unanimously to wind down the Society in 1998. The action was taken following the resignation of six committee members in April. Meanwhile, The Vampire Guild continued to publish Crimson, which included an interview with Stephen Laws and an article on Mexico’s mythical Chupacabra.
Issue 8 of That’s Clive!, the magazine of the official German Clive Barker fanclub, included interviews with Barker (who also contributed several pieces of artwork) and Peter Atkins, articles about Stephen Jones and the H.R. Giger museum, plus related news and reviews. An irregularly-published news magazine about Stephen King and his work, editor George Beahm’s Phantasmagoria changed its format with the eighth issue to a larger, more-easily readable layout, with extra photos and content.
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George Beahm also published the non-fiction study Stephen King from A to Z: An Encyclopedia of His Life and Work, with an introduction by Michael R. Collings and illustrated with photos, movie stills and artwork. Stephen King: America’s Best-Loved Bogeyman was yet another biography of the author by Beahm, with an introduction by Stephen J. Spignesi plus sixteen pages of photos.
Spignesi’s own The Lost Work of Stephen King: A Guide to Unpublished Manuscripts, Story Fragments, Alternative Versions, and Oddities included more scrapings from the bottom of the barrel, published by Carol Publishing/Birch Lane Press. Part of the Chelsea House Modern Critical Views series, Stephen King edited by Harold Bloom collected fifteen essays about the author and his work by Clive Barker, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro and others, along with a bibliography.
Published by Borgo Press,Scaring Us to Death: The Impact of Stephen King on Popular Culture was a significantly expanded and updated second edition of a 1987 book by Michael R. Collings. Also from Borgo, Tony Magistrale substantially revised and updated his 1991 Starmount book The Shining Reader as Discovering Stephen King’s The Shining.
Discovering Dean Koontz edited by Bill Munster was Borgo’s revised edition of the 1988 volume Sudden Fear, collecting ten critical essays by Richard Laymon, Elizabeth Massie and others, with an introduction by Tim Powers and an afterword by Joe R. Lansdale.
Joy Dickinson’s travel guideHaunted City: An Unauthorized Guide to the Magical, Magnificent New Orleans of Anne Rice was published in a revised and updated edition. Manly Wade Wellman: The Gentleman from Chapel Hill: A Working Bibliography was the third updated edition of the booklet from Galactic Central Publications edited by Phil Stephensen-Payne and Gordon Benson, Jr.
Joan Kane Nichols’ Mary Shelley: Frankenstein’s Creator: First Science Fiction Writer was a young adult biography, while Betty T. Bennett’s Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley: An Introduction was aimed at older readers who wanted to discover more about the woman who wrote Frankenstein.
A series of critical essays about the author of “The Yellow Wallpaper” were collected in A Very Different Story: Studies on the Fiction of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, edited by Val Gough and Jill Rudd for Liverpool University Press.
California’s Night Shade Books published The Necronomicon Files: The Truth Behind The Legend edited by Daniel M. Harms and John Wisdom Gonce III, which collected essays about the history and rumours surrounding H.P. Lovecraft’s fictional book of magic. Along the same lines, Armitage House offered Fred L. Pelton’s A Guide to the Cthulhu Cult, supposedly written in 1946 by a delusional paranoid. A revised and expanded second edition of Encyclopedia Cthulhiana by Daniel Harms was a reference guide to H.P. Lovecraft’s Mythos from Chaosium.
Published by Deadline Press, A Writer’s Tale was an autobiographical volume in which Richard Laymon talked about his experiences writing and publishing within the horror genre.
In Northern Dreamers: Interviews with Famous Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror Writers, editor Edo van Belkon interviewed twenty-two fellow Canadian authors, including Nancy Baker, Charles de Lint, Candas Jane Dorsey, Phyllis Gotlieb, Tanya Huff, Nancy Kilpatrick and Robert Charles Wilson.
Reflections on Dracula: Ten Essays by Elizabeth Miller appeared from Transylvania Press, Piercing the Darkness: Undercover with Vampires in America Today was a revealing look at contemporary underground vampire culture by Katherine Rams-land, and The Vampire: A Casebook was an academic study of the legends, edited by Alan Dundes.
From Scarecrow Press, Vampire Readings: An Annotated Bibliography by Patricia Altner covered almost 800 items and was indexed by author and title, while The Vampire Gallery: A Who’s Who of the Undead was a guide to bloodsuckers from the past two centuries by the often unreliable Gordon J. Melton.
St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost, and Gothic Writersedited by David Pringle looked at more than 440 fiction authors, arranged alphabetically with an emphasis on the 20th century. Mike Ashley and Brian Stableford were contributing editors, and there was an introduction by Dennis Etchison.
In Screams of Reason: Mad Science and Modern Culture, David J. Skal explored the concept of the mad scientist in literature and the media, while Marina Warner’s No Go the Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling and Making Mock was a critical look at figures of terror from fairy tales to horror fiction.
Edited by Clive Bloom, Gothic Horror: A Reader’s Guide from Poe to King and Beyond contained more than thirty excerpts and essays on horror by Poe, Freud, Barker and others, including a chronology of “Significant Horror and Ghost Tales” and a selected bibliography. Susan Jennifer Navarette looked at 19th century literature and society in The Shape of Fear: Horror and the Fin de Siecle Culture of Decadence.
Waterstone’s Guide to Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror turned out to be an idiosyncratic reference work edited by staff members Paul Wake, Steve Andrews and Ariel for the British bookstore chain. Despite such contributors as Stephen Baxter, Ramsey Campbell, John Clute, Neil Gaiman and Anne McCaffrey, and the inclusion of an interview with Michael Marshall Smith, the book contained some curious omissions.
A decade after the original volume appeared, Carroll & Graf reprinted a revised and updated edition of the Bram Stoker Award-winning Horror: 100 Best Books edited by Stephen Jones and Kim Newman.
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Part of Visible Ink Press’ seemingly never-ending series of movie reference guides,Videohound’s Horror Show: 999 Hair-Raising, Hellish and Humorous Movies by Mike Mayo included an alphabetical listing of reviews and special “Hound Salutes”. The Sci-Fi Channel Encyclopedia of TV Science Fiction was a guide to various series from the past five decades by Roger Fulton and John Betancourt.
The Avengers: The Making of the Movie by Dave Rogers was certainly more interesting than the film it was promoting, as was The Official Godzilla Compendium: A 40-Year Retrospective by J.D. Lees and Marc Cerasini, which appeared in time to tie-in with the big-budget remake.
“They’re Here . . .” Invasion of the Body Snatchers: A Tribute contained essays about the classic 1956 SF movie by Stephen King, Tom Piccirilli and others with an introduction by Dean Koontz. It was edited by the film’s star, Kevin McCarthy, and Ed Gorman.
The Making of The X-Files was an illustrated look at the creation of the feature film by Jody Duncan, while I Want to Believe: The Official Guide to The X-Files was the third in a series of illustrated episode guides by Andy Meisler.
Christopher Golden and Nancy Holder’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Watcher’s Guide, the official companion to the hit show, was a confusingly-designed look at the first two seasons, complete with background information and an exclusive interview with creator Joss Whedon. However, Buffy X-Posed by Ted Edwards was an unauthorised biography of actress Sarah Michelle Gellar that also included an episode gu
ide plus black-and-white-photos.
All I Need to Know About Filmmaking I Learned from The Toxic Avenger by Lloyd Kaufman and James Gunn was the former’s autobiography and charted the history of his Troma distributing company. At the other end of the spectrum, James Whale: A New World of Gods and Monsters by James Curtis was a biography of the famed Hollywood director.
McFarland’s expensive reference works included Of Gods and Monsters: A Critical Guide to Universal Studio’s Science Fiction, Horror and Mystery Films 1929-1939 by John T. Soister,Italian Horror Films of the 1960s: A Critical Catalogue of 62 Chillers, an A-Z guide by Lawrence McCallum, and Tom Weaver’s Science Fiction and Fantasy Film Flashbacks: Conversations with 24 Actors, Writers, Producers and Directors from the Golden Age, which included interviews with John Badham, Edward Dmytryk and Debra Paget.
From the same publisher came John Kenneth Muir’s Wes Craven: The Art of Horror, while Brian J. Robb’sScreams & Nightmares: The Films of Wes Craven appeared from Titan Books.
Batman: Animated by Paul Dini and Chip Kidd was a beautifully produced, full-colour look at the stylised TV cartoon series based on the classic DC Comics character.
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Also superbly designed by Chip Kidd, Superman: The Complete History: The Life and Times of the Man of Steel was impeccably researched by Les Daniels.
From Collectors Press, Pulp Culture: The Art of Fiction Magazines was a marvellously illustrated history of pulp magazines edited by the knowledgeable Frank M. Robinson and Lawrence Davidson and featuring full-colour reproductions of more than 400 mint-condition covers. It was also available as a limited edition hardcover.
William Gibson contributed the introduction to The Art of the X-Files edited by Marvin Heiferman and Carole Kismaric. The Haunted Tea Cozy was Edward Gorey’s very strange reworking of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.
Published by Morpheus International, Barlowe’s Inferno contained various personal views of Hell by artist Wayne Barlowe, with an introduction by Tanith Lee, and The Fantastic Art of Beksinski collected the paintings of Polish artist Zdzislaw Beksinski. Also from Morpheus, H.R. Giger’s Retrospective: 1964-1984 was a translation of a 1984 German edition, covering two decades of the artist’s work.
For Underwood Books, Arnie Fenner and Cathy Fenner edited Icon: A Retrospective Collection by the Grand Master of Fantastic Art, the single largest collection of Frank Frazetta’s work ever published. It also included text by Rick Berry, James Bama and William Stout, along with an illustrated biography. Besides the trade edition, it was published in a deluxe slipcased edition of 1,200 copies containing an extra sixteen pages of art, and as a $300 leatherbound traycased edition of 100 copies which included an unpublished Frazetta drawing. Also from Underwood and edited by the Fenners, Spectrum 5: The Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art included more than 300 pieces of art from over 180 artists, selected by a jury system. The only hardcover edition appeared from the Science Fiction Book Club.
From Mythos Books came The Lovecraft Tarot, a handsome-looking set of seventy-eight illustrated cards by David Wynn and illustrator D.L. Hutchinson, accompanied by a ten-page booklet. A $200 CD-ROM compilation of the complete archives of Heavy Metal magazine was withdrawn from sale when a number of contributors complained that they had not been notified about the project nor offered any compensation for the re-use of their work.
Night of the Living Dead co-author John A. Russo and composer/computer artist Vlad Licina launched Midnight Comics in November. The imprint kicked off with Children of the Dead, a three-issue mini-series by Steven Hughes, Phil Nutman and John Russo, based on a proposed film written by Russo, that examined the lives of a “special” group of youngsters born during the zombie plague. A special CD soundtrack was composed and recorded for the series by Vlad and The Dark Theater.
Winter’s Edge II, a special from DC Comics/Vertigo, featured a new story about Death written by Neil Gaiman and illustrated by Jeffrey Jones, plus stories by other hands featuring the Golden Age Sandman Wesley Dodds, John Constantine, Tim Hunter and several more characters. Meanwhile, artist Yoshitaka Amano produced a new Sandman poster as part of the tenth anniversary of Gaiman’s character.
Dark Horse comics launched a new series based on the popular TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer, written by Andi Watson and illustrated by Joe Bennett. As a special promotion, a five-page colour Buffy strip scripted by Christopher Golden appeared exclusively in the 21-27 November issue of TV Guide. Along with its ongoing regular series, Dark Horse also published a three-issue Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Origin mini-series, based on Joss Whedon’s 1992 movie, from the creative team of Dan Brereton, Golden and Bennett.
Also from Dark Horse came The Curse of Dracula, a three-part series in which veterans Marv Wolfman and Gene Colan (reunited from Marvel’s Tomb of Dracula two decades earlier) teamed up for a contemporary version of Stoker’s story. The same publisher also revived its licence for The Terminator, written by Alan Grant and illustrated by Steve Pugh.
Image’s new Cliffhanger imprint added Crimson to the lineup, which was artist Humberto Ramos’ unique look at vampires, and Britain’s Games Workshop launched a series of black and white Warhammer comics set in the popular fantasy gaming world.
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At the 70th Academy Awards presentation in Los Angeles, James Cameron’s overblownTitanic (which features a supernatural coda) tied with the Oscar record set by Ben-Hur (1959), picking up mostly technical awards for Visual Effects, Sound Effects Editing, Sound, Original Score, Film Editing, Costume Design, Cinematography, Art Direction, Director and Best Picture. Rick Baker and David LeRoy collected the Make-up award for their work on Men in Black.
To celebrate a century of American films, in 1998 the American Film Institute created a highly controversial list of the 100 Best American Movies, based on the recommendations of a 1,500 member panel, including President Bill Clinton.Citizen Kane was voted the top film, but the list was so skewed towards contemporary titles that Steven Spielberg was the most chosen director and nothing by Buster Keaton, Greta Garbo or Fred Astaire was even listed. Only nineteen of the final 100 were genre titles: 6: The Wizard of Oz; 11: It’s a Wonderful Life; 12: Sunset Boulevard; 15: Star Wars; 18: Psycho; 22:2001: A Space Odyssey; 25: E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial; 26: Dr. Strangelove; 43: King Kong (1933); 46: A Clockwork Orange; 48: Jaws; 49: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs; 58: Fantasia; 60: Raiders of the Lost Ark; 61: Vertigo; 64: Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 65: The Silence of the Lambs; 67: The Manchurian Candidate, and 87:Frankenstein (1931).
Starring Vince Vaughn as the nutty Norman Bates and Anne Heche as his shower victim, director Gus Van Sant’s superfluous colour remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho was quickly forgotten. However, ten years after the murder by strangulation of actress Myra Davis (the voice of Norman Bates’s mother and Janet Leigh’s body double in the Hitchcock original), Los Angeles detectives used DNA evidence to charge a 31-year-old man with her death and with another, similar killing.
Jamie Lee Curtis returned as Laurie Strode, once again menaced by Michael Myers’ homicidal Shape inHalloween H20, based on a treatment by Kevin Williamson. The title actually celebrated the series’ twentieth anniversary and had nothing to do with water. Meanwhile, police in Riverside, California, reported that a 15-year-old boy claimed that the character of Myers from the latest sequel directed him to stab and strangle a 62-year-old woman who was babysitting other children in his home. The boy, who was found with the knife believed to have been used in the attack, was arrested and placed in a facility for psychiatric observation.
Survivor Jennifer Love Hewitt and her friends found themselves on a vacation from Hell as they were stalked by the hook-handed killer of the derivative sequel I Still Know What You Did Last Summer. Disturbing Behaviour should have been called The Stepford Kids as bad teenagers were turned into “A” students by an experimental psychiatric facility, and more stupid teens were bumped off by an unseen serial killer in Urban Legend. Scott Reynolds’ The U
gly was a gruesome serial-killer story set in New Zealand, while Neil Jordan’s The Butcher Boy was based on the novel by Patrick McCabe.
Scriptwriter Kevin Williamson once again plundered the past and rehashed some old movie plots for Robert Rodriguez’s The Faculty, in which a group of teen students discovered that their teachers were really body-stealing aliens.
The most successful film of the year was Armageddon, starring Bruce Willis, Ben Affleck and Steve Buscemi. Despite being overlong and filled with clichés, Michael Bay’s big-budget disaster movie worked, thanks to memorable characters, strong performances and superb special effects as a team of oilworkers were sent into space to destroy a huge asteroid that was on a collision course with Earth. Mimi Leder’s Deep Impact covered similar ground, as a comet hit the Earth, causing a giant tidal wave which decimated the American east coast and thankfully drowned star Tea Leoni.