The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 20

by Stephen Jones (ed. )

  Based on the ever-more convoluted TV series, Lost: The Video Game might possibly have worked better in game format than it did on the small screen. Unfortunately, as played from the perspective of an amnesiac victim of the Oceanic plane crash, it was just as slow and frustrating at the show itself.

  Released just in time for the Christmas market, Tomb Raider: Underworld saw the return of heroine Lara Croft as she took her puzzle-solving skills to Mexico, Thailand and the Arctic. Although the Eidos video game did well in Europe, it flopped in the US with sales of just 1.5 million up to the end of the year.

  Sculpted by Bryan Moore for Arkham Studios, the twelve-inch “H. P. Lovecraft Bust” was finished in a bronze rub and was limited to just fifty signed and numbered pieces.

  A life-sized replica of “The Tingler” from William Castle’s 1959 movie came fully assembled and painted from Amok Time.

  From EMCE Toys/Fearwerx, the Night of the Living Dead eight-inch Mego-style action figures celebrated the 40th anniversary of George Romero’s seminal zombie movie. The line was launched with posable dolls of hero “Ben” and the graveyard “Zombie”.

  A deluxe action figure of “Bub” the zombie from Romero’s second sequel Day of the Dead came complete with a laboratory diorama and a bucket full of bloody bits.

  A twelve-inch statue of Vincent Price’s “Don Nicholas Medina” from Roger Corman’s The Pit and the Pendulum came with a battery-operated light-up cauldron and an additional poker from Amok Time. The same company’s deluxe boxed set of “Gort” and “Klaatu” limited edition collectible figures from the original The Day the Earth Stood Still featured two interchangeable heads for Klaatu – regular hairstyle and flat hair to use under his helmet!

  Mattel produced a Barbie doll that resembled Tippi Hedren being attacked by the feathered fiends from Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds.

  Britain’s Royal Mail issued a set of stamps commemorating Hammer Films and the Carry On series. Among the images featured were The Curse of Frankenstein, Dracula, The Mummy and Carry On Screaming.

  A first edition of The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien sold at a London auction house in March for £60,000 ($120,800) – double the estimate, and a world record for a signed edition of the book. Published in 1937 and illustrated by the author, only 1,500 copies were printed.

  In May, a copy of Beeton’s Christmas Annual for 1887, containing Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s first Sherlock Holmes story “A Study in Scarlet”, sold at auction for £18,600 ($35,500). It had been discovered in an Oxfam shop by two charity workers.

  At the end of the same month, an original poster for the 1933 King Kong sold at auction in Calabasas, California, for $345,000 (£180,000). Measuring almost seven-foot square, the poster was one of only three examples of the size known to exist.

  * * *

  The World Horror Convention was held in Salt Lake City, Utah, over 27–30 March. Guests included author Dennis Etchison, artist John Jude Palencar, academic Michael R. Collings, toastmaster Simon Clark (replacing Simon R. Green), serial killer specialist Dr. A. L. Carlisle, special guests Jeff Strand, Mort Castle and Larry Edwards (replacing Dave Dinsmore), and “Ghost of Honor” Edgar Allen [sic] Poe. Robert McCammon was announced as the winner of the WHC Grand Master Award.

  The 2007 HWA Bram Stoker Awards were announced at a Banquet on March 29 at World Horror. Sarah Langan’s The Missing won Novel, while the award for First Novel went to Joe Hill’s Heart-Shaped Box. The Long Fiction Award winner was “Afterward, There Will Be a Hallway” by Gary Braunbeck (from Five Strokes to Midnight), David Niall Wilson’s “The Gentle Brush of Wings” (from Defining Moments) won Short Fiction. The Collection award was a tie between Peter Straub’s 5 Stories and Michael A. Arnzen’s Proverbs for Monsters. Five Strokes to Midnight edited by Gary Braunbeck and Hank Schwaeble picked up the award for Anthology, while Nonfiction went to The Cryptopedia: A Dictionary of the Weird, Strange & Downright Bizarre by Jonathan Maberry and David F. Kramer. There was another tie in the Poetry category, between Linda Addison’s Being Full of Light, Insubstantial and Charlee Jacob and Marge Simon’s Vectors: A Week in the Death of a Planet. Life Achievement Awards were previously announced for John Carpenter and Robert Weinberg.

  Created “in recognition of the legacy of Shirley Jackson’s writing” with permission of the author’s estate, and introduced without much fanfare, the inaugural Shirley Jackson Awards were announced by Jonathan Lethem on July 20 at Readercon in Burlington, Massachusetts. Voted upon by a jury of writers, editors, critics and academics, with input from an “Advisory Board” (including Ann VanderMeer, S. T. Joshi, Mike O’Driscoll and Ellen Datlow), the winners were Elizabeth Hand’s Generation Loss for Novel, Lucius Shepard’s “Vacancy” (from Subterranean #7, guest-edited by Ellen Datlow) for Novella and Glen Hirshberg’s “The Janus Tree” and Nathan Ballingrud’s “The Monsters of Heaven” (both from Ellen Datlow’s anthology Inferno) for Novelette and Short Story, respectively. Laird Barron’s The Imago Sequence and Other Stories won for Collection, while Datlow’s Inferno was the inevitable winner of Anthology award.

  The 2008 British Fantasy Awards were announced at a banquet at FantasyCon in Nottingham on September 20. The August Derleth Award for Best Novel went to Ramsey Campbell’s The Grin of the Dark, and Best Novella was Conrad Williams’ The Scalding Rooms, both from PS Publishing. Joel Lane’s “My Stone Desire” (from Black Static #1) won Best Short Fiction, Christopher Fowler’s Old Devil Moon won Best Collection, and The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror Volume Eighteen was voted Best Anthology.

  Peter Crowther’s PS Publishing won the Best Small Press award, Vincent Chong was voted Best Artist, and Best Non-Fiction was awarded to Peter Tennant for his reviews on the Whispers of Wickedness website. The Karl Edward Wagner Award for Special Achievement went to Ray Harryhausen, and Scott Lynch received The Sydney J. Bounds Best Newcomer Award.

  Having dropped its presentation ceremony at the World Fantasy Convention, the winners of The International Horror Guild Awards for outstanding achievement in the horror and dark fantasy field were revealed online on Halloween.

  Chosen from a list of nominees derived from recommendations made by the public and a panel of judges, Dan Simmons’ The Terror won for Novel, Lucius Shepard’s Softspoken won Long Fiction, Lisa Tuttle’s “Closet Dreams” (from PostScripts #10) won for Mid-Length Fiction, and Nancy Etchemendy’s “Honey in the Wound” (from The Restless Dead) won for Short Fiction. Shepard’s Dagger Key and Other Stories picked up the Collection award, while Non-Fiction went to Mario Bava: All the Colors of Dark by Tim Lucus. Ellen Datlow’s Inferno was the winner in the Anthology category, Peter Crowther and Nick Gevers’ PostScripts won for Periodical, and Thomas Ligotti’s The Nightmare Factory collected the award for Illustrated Narrative. The Art award went to Elizabeth McGrath for “The Incurable Disorder” (Billy Shire Fine Arts, December 2007).

  Peter Straub had previously been revealed as the recipient of the IHG’s annual Living Legend Award, and it was announced that 2008 would be the last year that the awards would be presented.

  The World Fantasy Awards were presented on the Sunday afternoon banquet at The 2008 World Fantasy Convention, held over October 30 – November 2 in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.

  Guy Gavriel Kay’s Ysabel won the Novel award, Elizabeth Hand’s Illyria picked up Novella, and the Short Fiction award went to Theodora Goss’ “Singing of Mount Abora” (from Logorrhea). It was a hat-trick for Ellen Datlow’s Inferno in the Anthology category, scriptwriter Robert Shearman’s debut book Tiny Deaths won for Collection, and Edward Miller (Les Edwards) won for Artist. The Special Award – Professional went to Peter Crowther for PS Publishing, and Midori Snyder and Terri Windling won the Special Award – Non-Professional for their Endicott Studios Website. Life Achievement awards went to Patricia A. McKillip and artists Leo and Diane Dillon.

  Twenty years is a long time in publishing. In horror publishing it is a very long time.

  Very few horror anthology series have succee
ded in reaching a two-decade milestone – especially with the same editor at the helm.

  In the 1920s and ’30s Christine Campbell Thomson edited eleven volumes and one omnibus edition of her Not at Night series, mostly drawn from the pages of Weird Tales.

  From the early 1970s onwards, The Fontana Book of Great Horror Stories clocked up an impressive seventeen volumes (the first four edited by Christine Bernard and the remainder by the redoubtable Mary Danby), while The Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories did actually make it to volume #20 (the first eight edited by Robert Aickman before R. Chetwynd-Hayes took over for the rest of the run).

  From the same publisher, but aimed at a younger readership, Danby succeeded Bernard again after two volumes to edit the remaining thirteen editions of The Armada Ghost Book, while Chetwynd-Hayes only managed six volumes of The Armada Monster Book.

  The late Charles L. Grant produced eleven volumes of new stories in his acclaimed Shadows series, plus The Best of Shadows in 1988.

  When it comes to “Year’s Best” compilations, the seminal Year’s Best Horror Stories made it to twenty-two volumes from DAW Books. Richard Davis edited the first three, Gerald W. Page handled the next four, and the matchless Karl Edward Wagner made the remainder his own.

  The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror ran it a close second, with twenty-one volumes. Ellen Datlow compiled the horror content for all of them, while Terri Windling was responsible for the fantasy material up to when Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant took over from the seventeenth annual collection up until it was abruptly cancelled in early 2009.

  Perhaps the most successful anthology series (in terms of durability, if not quality) was the venerable Pan Book of Horror Stories, which ran for thirty editions from 1959 until 1989. Herbert van Thal was credited as the editor for the first twenty-five volumes until, following his death in 1983, Clarence Paget replaced him for the final five.

  When Ramsey Campbell and I first started editing the Best New Horror series back in 1990 the world was a very different place. In our genre we were coming to the end of the unprecedented 1980s boom in horror fiction and the traumatic events of 9/11 – and the ways in which it changed our world forever – were still more than a never-imagined decade away.

  Personal computers were just becoming established work tools, but there was no public Internet. E-mail did not exist, and neither did DVDs, print-on-demand publishing or electronic readers.

  Since then, we have weathered a couple of recessions and economic recoveries, learned to listen to buzz words such as “global warming”, and not to trust others like “war on terror”.

  In short, the world today is a very different place to what it was two decades ago. Yet here I am, still reading hundreds of short stories every year and being given the wonderful opportunity to present you with a selection of those that I consider to be amongst the best examples published during that particular period.

  As history has illustrated, there are never any guarantees as to how long a horror anthology series will last. But as we celebrate this particular landmark, I would like to thank all the authors, editors, publishers and – especially – readers who have helped us to get this far.

  Horror fiction – most importantly, good horror fiction – will always be with us. New writers are constantly being discovered and published, while established names continue to push the boundaries and hone their craft.

  With your continued support, I hope that we shall be around to showcase their talents in these pages for many years to come.

  The Editor

  May 2009

  PETER CROWTHER

  * * *

  Front-Page McGuffin and

  The Greatest Story Never Told

  MORE THAN ANY other comparison, Peter Crowther can best be described as the contemporary August Derleth. A multiple award-winning editor, novelist and now – with the highly respected PS imprint – publisher, Crowther has edited twenty anthologies (plus more than eighteen volumes of the acclaimed PostScripts) and is the author of more than 120 stories and novellas.

  He has also written the novel Escardy Gap (with James Lovegrove) and recently started work on the fourth volume of his Forever Twilight SF/horror cycle. His work has been adapted for television in both the UK and the US.

  Crowther lives on the Yorkshire coast of England with his wife, Nicky, and an unfeasibly large collection of books, magazines, comics, DVDs and CDs . . .

  As he recalls: “When I was working on Narrow Houses, my first anthology, and the two subsequent volumes (Touch Wood and Blue Motel), all of them on the theme of superstition, I desperately wanted to try my hand at a superstition story myself . . .

  “Heck, I had plenty of ideas – I had suggested most of them in the anthology’s commissioning letter. But, in the end, the idea I did decide to work on turned into Escardy Gap, and time just kind of ran away from me.

  “By the time Gap was done, I’d forgotten all about it. Many years later, having created my New York watering hole The Land at the End of the Working Day, I had an idea about a guy who had died but was stuck on Earth . . . desperate to see his departed wife again. And I figured the reason he’d become that way was because the surfeit of talismanic gestures and portents that he had employed while looking after his sick wife. But, despite his ministrations, she had died anyway . . . while, somehow, his karma or id or whatever had been destabilized.

  “Like all of the Working Day stories – there are four of them, plus umpteen one-, two- and several-page outlines – it pretty much wrote itself, with me just hanging on there for dear life and hitting the keypad every now and again. It features one of my favourite characters – I’ll let you figure out which one it is.”

  IT’S NOT ALWAYS AS EASY as you’d think to tell dead folks from those that are still alive, and certainly not by where you happen to find them. Or where they happen to find you.

  Take now, for instance.

  And here.

  It’s a Tuesday in The Land at the End of the Working Day, a Tuesday Happy Hour, that no-man’s land between afternoon and evening, when the drinks are half the regular price and the conversation is slow. But then the people who come in to the Working Day specifically for Happy Hour, no matter what day of the week it is, don’t come in to talk.

  The conversationalists of Manhattan (of whom there are many) don’t bother with the hard-to-find watering holes tucked into the street corners and tenement walk-downs; they concentrate instead on the gaudily-coloured window-painted bars on the main drags, the bars with the striped awnings and the piped music spilling out past the muscled doormen with their emotionless stares, out onto sidewalks littered with people looking in and wondering if – wishing, maybe – they could be a part of that scene.

  There is no scene in The Land at the End of the Working Day. Not as such, anyways.

  And there is no piped music here. Only the soft strains of one of Jack Fedogan’s jazz CDs wafting in and out of hearing the way trains and car-horns Doppler in and out of existence as first they approach you and then they pass you by, going on someplace else.

  Tuesday, a little after 6:00 pm, and Oliver Nelson’s “Stolen Moments” is lazily washing around Jack Fedogan’s bar, Freddie Hubbard’s lilting trumpet solo making conversation unnecessary even if it were desired. Just a lot of introspective folks nursing Manhattans and Screwdrivers and Harvey Wallbangers and Sours, sitting staring into the mirror behind the bar, occasionally chomping on an olive or pulling on a cigarette, nervously flicking ash into a tray even before it’s formed, sometimes going with the music by tapping a foot on the bar-rail or a hand on the bar itself, thinking of the day that’s done or maybe the day that’s still to come. Another one in an endless parade of days stretching out through the weeks and the months, the seasons and the years.

  They look into that mirror like it’s the font of all knowledge. Like the silvered glass is going to tell them what’s wrong and how to put it right.

  Every few minutes, one or another of the guys shucks the
shirt-ends free of his jacket sleeves, picks lint-balls from his pants and pulls them up at the knees to keep the creases fresh, occasionally waving to the ever-watchful Jack to pour another whatever, some of these guys lost – or appearing to be lost – in the headlines of the Times or USA Today, but mostly the headlines on the sports pages.

  The women in the booths along the back wall cross their legs first one way and then the other, sometimes checking in their purses for something though these checks always end without their pulling anything out. And then they just sit, staring into space or maybe glancing across at the bar while they light another cigarette, wafting the match out and tossing it in the tray in a kind of subconscious synchronized motion with the music.

  For those who don’t know it, The Land at the End of the Working Day is a walk-down bar in the greatest city in the world, New York City.

  It’s a Tuesday and Tuesdays here are quiet.

  Most everyone here tonight knows everyone else. Not by name, nor by job nor by relations nor even by what they each like or what they don’t like. They know each other by the lines on their faces and the depth of their sighs. These are the irregular regulars or maybe the regular irregulars, exchanging nods and pinched smiles like they were passing out on the street. They know what they’re here for and it isn’t company.

  They’re here to drink.

  They’re here to forget.

  And a few are here to remember.

  But there’s also a nucleus of regular regulars, folks who do know each other’s name. Usually, these guys – they’re mostly guys – sit together at one or another end of the bar, clustered around the soda and beer taps and always within reaching distance of one of Jack’s bowls of pretzels and nuts. But not in the great misnomer that is Happy Hour.

  There’s nothing particularly happy about Happy Hour.

  Come 7:00, 7:30 pm at the outside, the place will start filling up. Folks will come in as couples, some married and some not but all of them comfortable with each other’s company. And, generally speaking, all of them comfortable with life itself. They’ll come in before going to a show or before going for a meal. Some of them will even come in to make a night of it, to get lost in conversation. And laughter and talk will fight for position with Jack Fedogan’s CDs and the result will be a curious but entirely right amalgam of energy and sound and excitement.