Vampire A Go-Go by Victor Gischler was a comedic romp narrated by a ghost chained to a mysterious castle in Prague.
Credited to the Harvard Lampoon, Nightlight: A Parody was a spoof of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight, complete with romance, danger, insufficient parental guardianship, creepy stalker-like behaviour and a vampire prom.
At a July meeting of the British Society for the History of Science, Brian Regal of Kean University in Union, New Jersey, explained how Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species (1859) killed off the folklore of the werewolf. By spreading the idea of evolution, Regal hypothesized, the idea of a half-man, half-wolf no longer made any sense and, instead, reports of ape-men – such as the Yeti, Sasquatch and Bigfoot – began to spread in popular tales.
A new law-enforcement agency attempted to control a werewolf epidemic in Los Angeles in John Farris’ High Bloods.
An adolescent werewolf, trained to kill by the Church, was protected by a family unaware of her true nature in the historical novel Wolfbreed by S.A. Swann (S. Andrew Swann, aka “S.A. Swiniarski”).
Jacqueline Carey’s Santa Olivia was set in the near-future and involved a genetically engineered half-werewolf vigilante trapped between the US-Mexican border.
Undead on Arrival was the third book in L.A. Banks’ “Crimson Moon” series, about a werewolf Special Ops team. It was followed by Cursed to Death.
Werewolf radio talk show host Kitty Norville and her boyfriend Ben eloped to Las Vegas in Kitty and the Dead Man’s Hand, the fifth in the series by Carrie Vaughn. It was quickly followed by Kitty Raises Hell, in which a team of paranormal TV investigators helped Kitty with an invisible attacker, and Kitty’s House of Horrors, in which Kitty took part in a deadly reality TV show about the supernatural.
Kelley Armstrong’s Frostbitten was the tenth book in the “Women of the Otherworld” series, while the same author’s collection Men of the Otherworld contained four stories (one original and three first published online) about men from the werewolf Pack.
Bad Moon Rising was the twenty-sixth volume in the “Dark-Hunter” series by Sherrilyn Kenyon (aka “Kinley MacGregor”). Were-Hunter Fang Kattalakis (yes, that really is his name!) was forced to defend the woman he loved. The book was also released on a nine-CD audio set read by Holter Graham.
In July, Permuted Press, an independent print-on-demand publisher of apocalyptic zombie fiction, entered into a co-publishing deal with Pocket Books to reissue five of the imprint’s most popular titles, along with two new books. Permuted titles released in trade paperback under the deal included Day by Day Armageddon and Day by Day Armageddon: Beyond Exile, both by J.L. Bourne; Plague of the Dead by Z.A. Recht; Dying to Live: Life Sentence by Kim Paffenroth; Empire by David Dunwoody; Down the Road by Bowie Ibarra and Escape by James Melzer.
Meanwhile, excavation work on a new shopping mall uncovered a Nazi weapon that turned people into flesh-eating zombies in The Estuary by Derek Gunn, and The World is Dead was a new zombie anthology from Permuted Press, edited by Kim Paffenroth.
Abaddon Books’ “Tomes of the Dead” series of zombie novels continued with Way of the Barefoot Zombie by Jasper Bark, Tide of Souls by Simon Bestwick and Hungry Hearts by Gary McMahon.
Zombie PI Matt Richter confronted a city’s evil vampire lords in the revised and expanded version of Tim Waggoner’s 2004 horror spoof Nekropolis.
An American black-ops team hunted for a seven-year-old girl infected with a mysterious plague in Scott Sigler’s Contagious, a follow-up to the podcast author’s Infected, and a terrorist bio-weapon turned people into blood-seeking zombies in Jonathan Maberry’s Patient Zero.
Death Troopers by Joe Schreiber was the first horror novel in the Star Wars franchise and involved the survivors on an Imperial prison barge battling the reanimated dead. The hardcover included a colour poster on the reverse of the dustjacket.
A resurrected party girl and her two friends took a drive across country in Mark Henry’s Road Trip of the Living Dead, the second in the “Amanda Feral” series.
Guillermo del Toro bought the film rights to David Moody’s novel Hater, in which normally rational, self-controlled people suddenly changed into maddened killers. Originally published in 2006, it was reissued by Gollancz.
Credited to Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies was a high-concept literary mash-up that caught the imagination of publishers and the media.
Despite not being very good, the book was still a surprise hit for independent non-fiction publisher Quirk Books, quickly going through eight printings in the US in only a few months. It was even reissued in a faux leather-bound “deluxe heirloom edition” with colour illustrations by Robert Parada and added material.
Its success, predictably, led to other publishers jumping on the bandwagon of literary/horror pastiches such as Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters by Ben H. Winters and the inevitable Mr Darcy, Vampyre by Amanda Grange and Vampire Darcy’s Desire by Regina Jeffers.
Mr Darcy’s Diary by Amanda Grange was yet another “sequel” to Pride and Prejudice, in which Elizabeth discovered that her new husband was from a family of vampires. Jane Austen herself was a 200-year-old vampire working in a bookstore in upstate New York in Michael Thomas Ford’s Jane Bites Back.
Adam Roberts’ I Am Scrooge: A Zombie Story for Christmas was a pastiche of Charles Dickens’ seasonal classic, with nods to Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend, George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and even H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine.
Scraping the bottom of the coffin, Michael P. Spradin’s It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Zombies: A Book of Zombie Christmas Carols was illustrated by Jeff Weigel and came with an Introduction by Christopher Moore.
After vampires and zombies, it looked like fallen angels were set to become the next big publishing phenomenon: Covet by J.R. Ward (Jessica Bird) was the first in the “Fallen Angels” series and featured a carpenter-turned-angel attempting to avert the Apocalypse.
Lauren Kate’s Fallen stuck strictly to the “Twilight’’ formula, as its alienated reform school girl was torn between the love of two angels, while the heroine of Becca Fitzpatrick’s Hush, Hush unwittingly gave her heart to a classmate, another fallen angel.
In Nalini Singh’s Angels’ Blood, vampire hunter Elena Deveraux was hired by the Archangel Raphael to hunt down a renegade angel.
Laurie Sheck’s debut novel A Monster’s Notes purported to be notes and correspondence written by the Monster and others connected with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
Jasper Kent’s ambitious debut Twelve was a historical vampire novel set during Napoleon’s 1812 invasion of Russia.
A couple moved into an apparently haunted house that was once a home for unwed mothers in Christopher Ransom’s first novel, The Birthing House. To publicize the book in the UK, publisher Little, Brown launched a short horror story competition through Borders bookstores.
A police detective used her powers to summon a demon to catch a serial killer in Diana Rowland’s debut novel Mark of the Demon, and a New Orleans psychologist uncovered her own family’s secret past in Rhodi Haek’s first novel, A Twisted Ladder.
A failed playwright used a diminutive version of himself to carry out his suppressed desires in Jerry Stubblefield’s debut Homunculus, and although its genius creator was dead, an autonomous computer program lived on and began to take control of people’s lives in software designer Daniel Suarez’s first novel Daemon.
Nicole Peeler’s debut, Tempest Rising, involved a girl and her new vampire friend, and a female murderer discovered what lay beyond death in Australian writer Kaaron Warren’s supernatural serial killer novel, Slights.
Breathers: A Zombie’s Lament was a humorous first novel by S.G. Browne, about a reanimated corpse having trouble adjusting to its new existence.
A mad scientist journeyed to Hell and did a deal with Satan to reclaim his soul in computer games designer Jonathan L. Howard’s comic debut, Johannes Cabal the Necromancer.
Soulless was the first in a new series of supernatural Victorian comedies by Gail Carriger. When a woman was rudely attacked by a vampire that she was forced to kill, it brought her to the attention of the Bureau of Unnatural Registry and its werewolf leader.
During a long hot summer in Louisiana, a young girl encountered the ghost of a young local boy who disappeared in Shadowed Summer, a first novel by screenwriter Saundra Mitchell.
When her brother was stolen by Skerridge the Bogeyman on the orders of the mysterious Mr Strood, a young girl named Nin escaped to a fantasy world called the Drift in Caro King’s debut novel Seven Sorcerers.
A girl discovered that her late grandfather had pledged her soul to the Devil in return for a car in David Macinnis Gill’s YA debut, Soul Enchilada, while in Sarwat Chadda’s first book, Devil’s Kiss, a young girl was raised by her father to become the first demon-fighting Knights Templar.
Carrie Ryan’s YA zombie novel The Forest of Hands and Teeth was set in a future where a zombie plague had decimated civilization and the survivors lived in a fenced village surrounded by the “Unconsecrated”.
In Stacey Jay’s debut novel, You Are So Undead to Me, high school student Megan discovered that she was a zombie settler, destined to help the reanimated “unsettled” find their final rest.
Heather Davis’ first book, Never Cry Werewolf, was a YA romance in which a girl sent off to brat camp met a bad boy with a secret.
Published in Greece by Jemma Press, Abraham Kawa’s inventive debut novel Screaming Silver: A Tale from Pandora’s Box involved paranormal investigator Pandora Ormond investigating a zombie uprising and a collection of macabre films that were not supposed to exist. The author gave each of the book’s thirty-one chapters the title of a horror movie.
From Dover, The Vampyre, the Werewolf and Other Gothic Tales of Horror, edited with an Introduction by Rochelle Kronzek, contained seven classic nineteenth-century stories by John Polidori, Edward Bulwer-Lytton and others.
The Strange Adventures of Mr Andrew Hawthorn & Other Stories collected eighteen often supernatural tales by John Buchan with an Introduction by Giles Foden.
Published as part of the Penguin Modern Classics series, Heroes in the Wind: From Kull to Conan: The Best of Robert E. Howard was selected by John Clute, who also supplied the Introduction.
As part of its new “The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes’’ series, Titan Books reprinted Manly Wade Wellman and Wade Wellman’s 1975 pastiche The War of the Worlds, marking the book’s first publication in the UK.
Some of Britain’s top children’s authors – including Philip Pullman, Anthony Horowitz, Quentin Blake and Anne Fine – protested in July at the government’s “preposterous” plan to make them pay a fee and register on a database designed to protect children from paedophiles before they could visit schools.
The Vetting and Barring Scheme, which also applied to clowns and other children’s entertainers, was set to go online in October and would list those adults approved to work with youngsters and those who were prohibited.
His Dark Materials author Pullman described the policy as “Corrosive and poisonous to every kind of healthy social interaction”, while former Children’s Laureate Fine declared, “I shall only continue to work in foreign schools, where sanity prevails.”
In January it was announced that Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book, which spent more than fifty-two consecutive weeks on the New York Times best-seller list, had won the 2009 John Newbery Medal. Presented by the Association for Library Service to Children (a division of the American Library Association), the award is the highest honour a children’s book can receive in America. Other awards were announced for Terry Pratchett and Margo Lanagan.
Anyone over fourteen who survived a sickness became a flesh-eating killers in The Enemy, the first book in a new post-apocalyptic series for children by scriptwriter/actor Charlie Higson.
An eleven-year-old boy decided to stop Satan from using the Large Hadron Collider to escape from Hell on Halloween in John Connolly’s The Gates.
Two children had the ability to see ghosts in The Devil’s Ladder by Graham Joyce, and a girl preferred her phantom friends to the living in Megan Crewe’s debut Give Up the Ghost.
A group of friends discovered their childhood offerings to a woodland myth had been rejected in The Pricker Boy by Reade Scott Whinnem.
A girl made friends with a ghost in Ruined by Paula Morris, while a young girl who could speak with the dead spent the night in a graveyard in Tombstone Tea by Joanne Dahme.
A girl suspected that her sister was possessed in Bad Girls Don’t Die by Katie Alender, while a teenager was possessed by a demon in Dale Peck’s Body Surfing.
The Well was a YA horror novel inspired by Shakespeare’s Hamlet, written by A.J. Whitten (Shirley and Amanda Jump).
Nancy Holder’s Possessions was the first in a new series set in a haunted boarding school, while Wicked: Resurrection was the fifth and final volume in the popular teen witches series by Holder and Debbie Vigulé.
The Disciples were being manipulated by beings older than time in Dark Calling, the ninth volume in the “Demonata” series by the “number one master of horror” Darren Shan (Darren O’Shaughnessy).
An apprentice to a monster-hunting doctor revealed his secrets in The Monstrumologist (aka The Monstrumologist: The Terror Beneath), the first in a new series by Rick Yancey, and a girl discovered that her missing best friend had secrets of her own in The Hollow, the first in a new series by Jessica Verday set in Sleepy Hollow.
A girl was forced to scream whenever somebody nearby was about to die in My Soul to Take, the first book in Rachel Vencent’s “Soul Screamers” series.
An American teen moved to a new school in Japan where a girl was recently murdered in The Waking: Dreams of the Dead, the first in a new trilogy by Thomas Randall (Christopher Golden).
A young boy plotted to escape from a Hellish underground prison in Alexander Gordon Smith’s Furnace: Lockdown, the first in a new YA series.
A love spell accidentally turned a high school class into zombies in The Zombie Queen of Newbury High by Amanda Ashby, and when most of their schoolmates were turned into the walking dead, pupils were told to pretend that nothing had happened in the humorous Never Slow Dance with a Zombie by E. Van Lowe.
A teenage girl was romantically involved with two zombie boyfriends in Daniel Walters’ Kiss of Life, the second volume in the humorous “Generation Dead” series.
When a fifth-grader was accidentally doused with an experimental serum he became one of the walking dead in David Lubar’s comedic My Rotten Life: Nathan Abercrombie Accidental Zombie.
Teenage vampire Cassandra Gray fed on tears in Patrick Jones’ The Tear Collector, a teen vampire had problems adjusting to her human boyfriend becoming her stepbrother in Bite Me! by Melissa Francis and another teen vampire started turning human again in Francesca Lia Block’s novella Pretty Dead.
A vampire had to prove she did not kill her high school’s football star in Never Bite a Boy on the First Date by Tamara Summers. A member of a vampire support group, which fed on guinea pigs, was murdered in Catherine Jinks’ comedy The Reformed Vampire Support Group.
Night Life and After Dark were the second and third volumes in Nancy A. Collins’ “Vamps” series about the privileged teen vampires who studied at Bathory Academy.
The Vampire is Just Not That Into You was a humorous guide to dating the undead, supposedly written by bloodsucker “Vlad Mezrich”.
The Spook’s sacrifice (aka The Last Apprentice: Clash of the Demons) was the sixth book in Joseph Delaney’s series about an apprentice ghost hunter, illustrated by Patrick Arrasmith, while The Spook’s Tale (aka The Last Apprentice: The Spook’s Tale and Other Horrors) contained three stories about other characters in the series, plus a gallery of villains illustrated by Arrasmith.
The Battle of the Red Hot Pepper Weenies and Other Warped and Creepy Tales collected thirty-five YA horror stories (all but four
original) by David Lubar.
The Silver Kiss by Annette Curtis Klause included the 1990 vampire novel of the title plus two connected stories (one original), along with a new Introduction by the author.
Half-Minute Horrors edited by Susan Rich contained fifty-four short-short horror stories (one reprint) and five poems by, amongst others, Lemony Snicket, Margaret Atwood, R.L. Stine, Holly Black and Neil Gaiman.
Edited by Trisha Telep, The Eternal Kiss was an anthology of thirteen young adult vampire stories by Kelly Armstrong, Holly Black, Cassandra Clare and others.
Stephen King Goes to the Movies collected five stories adapted into movies (with varying results). The author contributed new introductions to each.
We’ll Always Have Paris was an original collection of twenty-one stories and a poem by Ray Bradbury. A Touch of Dead: Sookie Stackhouse: The Complete Stories collected five reprint stories by Charlaine Harris with an Introduction by the author.
As part of the University of Texas Press’ “Southwest Writers Collection” series, Sanctified and Chicken-Fried: The Portable Lansdale collected nine stories (one original) and two novel extracts by Joe R. Lansdale, with a Foreword by Bill Crider.
Aftershock & Others collected sixteen stories by F. Paul Wilson in the order they were written, along with notes and an Afterword by the author.
Available from Big Finish Productions in both trade paperback and a 150-copy leather-bound hardcover edition, Robert Shearman’s Love Songs for the Shy and Cynical collected eighteen often surreal and quirky stories about different types of love by the World Fantasy Award-winning author and playwright, plus a hidden story. Steven Hall supplied the Introduction.
Celebrating the double century since his birth, Poe: 19 New Tales of Suspense, Dark Fantasy and Horror Inspired by Edgar Allan Poe edited by Ellen Datlow contained an eclectic selection of nineteen original stories loosely inspired by the works of Poe. The impressive line-up of contributors, including Kim Newman, Laird Barron, Glen Hirshberg, Barbara Roden, M. Rickert, Pat Cadigan, Nicholas Royle, David Prill, Lucius Shepard and Suzy McKee Charnas, also provided Afterwords to their contributions discussing how they were inspired by Poe’s original works. Lovecraft Unbound: Twenty Stories, also edited and introduced by Datlow, suffered from the same problems as the Poe volume, insofar as most of its contributors appeared to do all they could to distance their work from the anthology’s inspiration – in this case, H.P. Lovecraft. Although there is nothing wrong with redefining the boundaries of the genre, these twenty stories (four reprints) by Joel Lane, Holly Phillips, William Browning Spencer, Marc Laidlaw, Simon Kurt Unsworth, Michael Shea, Gemma Files, Laird Barron and Nick Mamatas, amongst others, were rarely satisfying as Lovecraftian fiction.
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