The Best New Horror 7

by Stephen Jones

  Just over half of Jahnna N. Malcolm’s Zodiac series were fantasy, and these included Taurus: Black Out, Gemini: Mirror Image, Libra: Frozen in Time, Scorpio: Death Grip, Sagittarius: Strange Destiny, Aquarius: Second Sight and Pisces: Sixth Sense. “Maria Palmer” was the house name used by the authors of the Horrorscopes series, which consisted of Sagittarius: Missing (by Theresa Breslin), Capricorn: Capricorn’s Children (by J.H. Brennan), Aquarius: Trapped (by Alick Rowe), Pisces: Revenge (by Anthony Masters), Aries: Blood Storm (by Terrance Dicks), Taurus: Mirror Image (by Dave Morris), Gemini: Sliced Apart (by Ian Strachan), Cancer: Black Death (by J.H. Brennan), Leo: Blood Ties (by Paul Cornell) and Virgo: Snake Inside (by Lisa Tuttle).

  Taggard Point was a series of loosely connected novels by Mark Rivers that contained 1: Forever Home, 2: Shapes, 3: When the Dead Scream and 4: The Clown. Rodman Philbrick and Lynn Harnett’s The House on Cherry Street, a trilogy about a family who spent their summer in a haunted house, consisted of 1: The Haunting, 2: The Horror and 3: The Final Nightmare. Mystery Date was new supernatural romance trilogy by Cameron Dokey (aka Mary Cameron Dokey) featuring Love Me Love Me Not, Blue Moon and Heart’s Desire. In Zoe Daniels’s Year of the Cat trilogy, The Dream, The Hunt and The Amulet, a teenage girl dreamed about a legendary panther cult. Alan Lloyd’s “House of Horror” series continued with three new titles, L.J. Smith’s “Dark Visions” series about psychic teens saw two more volumes, The Possessed and The Passion, while Dark Moon 2: Dreams of Revenge, by Elizabeth Moore, was about a woman who wanted revenge on the descendants of the Salem witch trial judges. A young ballerina joined a Satanic dance troupe in Barbara Steiner’s The Dark Chronicles Book 1: The Dance, an artist was helped by an invisible presence in Book 2: The Gallery, and a dancer became involved in a piece about real vampires in Book 3: The Calling.

  In fact, vampires were just as popular with young adult horror readers as they were with their adult counterparts, as illustrated by Sweet Valley University Thriller Edition 3: Kiss of the Vampire by Francine Pascal, the humorous Teacher Vic is a Vampire...Retired by Jerry Piasecki, and such teen vampire romances as Companions of the Night by Vivian Vande Velde and Look For Me By Moonlight by Mary Downing Hahn. Vampires’ Love 1: Blood Curse and 2: Blood Spell, by Janice Harrell, were the first two volumes in a new series which was a follow-up to the author’s Vampire Twins books. Called to Darkness, by J.V. Lewton, was about a teenager whose girlfriend turned out to have vampiric tendencies, while Midnight Secrets: The Temptation, The Thrill and The Fury, all by Wolff Ryp, were the first three volumes in a new series involving a psychic teen and her vampiric mentor. In Tombstones: The Last Drop by John Peel, a town’s teens were being killed by vampires, and Tombstones: Dances With Werewolves also appeared from the same author. Judgement Night by Debra Doyle and James D. Macdonald was another werewolf novel, the third in their “Bad Blood” series.

  John Peel’s Maniac featured dream-stealing creatures that were killing students, and in Cat Scratch Fever, by Bruce Richards, a girl scratched by a cat took on the characteristics of the animal. The Silent Strength of Stones by Nina Kiriki Hoffman was an evocative dark fantasy about teenagers with special powers and a semi-sequel to her début novel The Thread That Binds the Bones. Gwyneth Jones published The Fear Man under her “Ann Halam” alias, while Vincent Courtney served up a Deadly Diet before visiting A Tale from the Crypt Carnival.

  Disney’s Enter if You Dare!: Scary Tales from the Haunted Mansion by Nicholas Stephens featured six young adult stories illustrated by Sergio Martinez. Bernard Custodio illustrated the ten tales in Scary Stories for Stormy Nights by R.C. Welch, while Darkness Creeping II featured eight stories by Neal Schusterman, illustrated by Barbara Kiwak. The delightfully titled Rats in the Attic and Other Stories to Make Your Skin Crawl collected twenty tales by G.E. Stanley, and another eighteen stories appeared in Stanley’s collection Happy Deathday.

  From Scholastic’s hugely successful Point Horror imprint came 13 Again, an impressive YA horror anthology edited by A. Finnis and boasting fine contributions from Laurence Staig, Garry Kilworth, Lisa Tuttle, Colin Greenland, John Gordon, Stan Nicholls and Graham Masterton, amongst others.

  Editors Martin H. Greenberg, Jill M. Morgan and Robert Weinberg came up with the entertaining idea of getting established writers and their offspring to collaborate on horror stories for Great Writers & Kids Write Spooky Stories. Contributors included Anne McCaffrey, Ramsey Campbell, Peter Straub, Joe R. Lansdale, Steve Rasnic Tem, Jane Yolen and their various children, gruesomely illustrated by Gahan Wilson. Greenberg also teamed up with Jane Yolen to edit The Haunted House, an anthology of seven original stories aimed at very young children, and Yolen was one of the authors of thirteen scary stories collected in Bruce Coville’s Book of Nightmares. Spooky Stories for a Dark and Stormy Night edited by Alice Low featured nineteen stories with colour illustrations by Gahan Wilson, and editor Josepha Sherman’s Orphans of the Night contained eleven stories and two poems about some lesser-known supernatural creatures.

  Priscilla Galloway edited Truly Grim Tales. Still More Bone-Chilling Tales of Fright was an anonymously edited anthology of seven stories, with illustrations by Eric Angeloch, and Horror Stories, edited by Susan Price, contained twenty-four terror tales by Poe, Dickens, Blackwood, Stephen King and others. Dread and Delight: A Century of Children’s Ghost Stories, edited by Philippa Pearce, was a bumper anthology of forty stories, some original, from Oxford University Press. Dark House, edited by Gary Crew, was an Australian anthology of horror stories for children, and Crew’s own short stories The Bent-Back Bridge and The Barn were also published as slim volumes.

  So-called “mainstream” publishing embraced the genre with The Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein by Theodore Roszak, another reworking of Mary Shelley’s classic – this time from the point of view of Victor Frankenstein’s adopted sister. Frankenstein’s Bride, by Hilary Bailey, told what might have happened if Victor had let the monster’s mate survive, Christopher Bram’s Father of Frankenstein was a fictional biography of gay movie director James Whale (Frankenstein [1931] and Bride of Frankenstein [1935]), while The Secret Laboratory Journals of Dr. Victor Frankenstein by Jeremy Kay was a novel in the form of a facsimile journal complete with annotations and illustrations.

  Andrei Codrescu’s The Blood Countess dealt with the fictional male ancestor of Countess Elizabeth Bathory, who bathed in the blood of virgins to retain her youth. In Stephen Marlowe’s The Lighthouse at the End of the World, a semi-fictional Edgar Allan Poe teamed up with his detective creation August Dupin. In Zombie, Joyce Carol Oates strayed into American Psycho territory with the story of a serial killer who was obsessed with creating a zombie in suitably gruesome fashion.

  Jack Cady’s powerful The Off Season was set in the coastal town of Point Vestal, where ghosts walked among the living and time operated differently for everyone. The House of Balthus, by David Brooks, was a ghost story set in a strange boarding house, while Passive Intruder, by Michael Upchurch, detailed a haunted honeymoon.

  In Joe R. Lansdale’s often hilarious follow-up to Mucho Mojo, The Two-Bear Mambo, mis-matched amateur sleuths Hap Collins and Leonard Pine became involved with bigotry and voodoo in the American south. William Browning Spencer’s Zod Wallop, an imaginative follow-up to his previous novel, Résumé With Monsters, was about the writer of a bizarre children’s story and a lunatic fan who believed in a different reality. One of the quirkiest débuts of 1995 was David Prill’s The Unnatural, a darkly comic novel in which embalming the dead had become an alternative America’s biggest spectator sport akin to baseball.

  Alan Judd’s The Devil’s Own Work featured a literary pact with the Devil; City of Dreadful Night, by Lee Siegal, was a novel about horror fiction, based on macabre stories from India, and in Practical Magic, by Alice Hoffman, three generations of witches attempted to destroy the spirit of a family member’s ex-lover.

  Along with an afterword by the author, Dean Koontz’s Strange Highways collected twelv
e short stories, some dating back nearly three decades, plus two short novel-length tales in the American edition and just one in the British. Robert Bloch: Appreciations of the Master was an impressive hardcover collection of twenty stories by the late writer, with thirty tributes from Stephen King, Peter Straub, Harlan Ellison, Ray Bradbury, Brian Lumley, Ramsey Campbell and Christopher Lee, amongst others, edited by Richard Matheson and Ricia Mainhardt.

  Burning Your Boats: Collected Short Stories, by Angela Carter, was a welcome omnibus of the late author’s previous four collections plus other stories, with an introduction by Salman Rushdie. Kate Wilhelm’s A Flush of Shadows collected together five novellas (two original) featuring murder and arson investigators Constance Leidl and Charlie Meiklejohn. Although three of these stories were originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction or Omni, the fantastic element was light. The Panic Hand, by Jonathan Carroll, collected nineteen stories, including several that had originally appeared in a 1989 German edition along with one original. The Second Wish and Other Exhalations contained thirteen stories by Brian Lumley, each introduced by the author, and Famous Monsters was the second bumper collection of Kim Newman’s iconoclastic short fiction, which featured fifteen stories, including an original about Hollywood, and a personal foreword by Paul J. McAuley.

  Frights of Fear contained fourteen tales by Graham Masterton, the same number collected by Christopher Fowler in Flesh Wounds. Mark Morris’s Close to the Bone boasted eleven stories and an introduction by Ramsey Campbell, and Shudders and Shivers was an original collection of linked ghost stories by R. Chetwynd-Hayes. Strangers in the Night collected together three supernatural love stories by Anne Stuart, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro and Maggie Shayne, Moonchasers and Other Stories was an eclectic collection of stories by Ed Gorman with an introduction by Dean Koontz, and sometime Guns ’N’ Roses lyricist Del James made his book début with the collection The Language of Fear. Gary Bowen’s Winter of the Soul: Gay Vampire Fiction collected together three gay vampire stories, and Bowen also published his first novel, Diary of a Vampire, about a gay bloodsucker.

  Although Britain’s Pan Books decided to drop The Pan Book of Horror Stories after a record-breaking thirty-five years, it was quickly picked-up by Victor Gollancz, who successfully continued the series under the title Dark Terrors edited by Stephen Jones and David Sutton.

  Peter Straub’s Ghosts, edited by the titular author, was up to the usual standard of horror anthologies presented by The Horror Writers Association, with stand-out stories by Norman Partridge, Chet Williamson, Tyson Blue and Thomas F. Monteleone.

  Proving that the words “flogging” and “dead horse” still went together, editor Paul M. Sammon collected another mix of reprint and new material in Splatterpunks II: Over the Edge from Tor Books (who should have known better). The volume featured some fine stories from Kathe Koja, Karl Edward Wagner, Roberta Lannes, Clive Barker, Nancy Holder, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Elizabeth Massie, Steve Rasnic Tem, Poppy Z. Brite and others, but editor Sammon had to stretch to include most of them under the moribund movement of his title.

  Editor Jeff Gelb’s Fear Itself was supposed to be a collection of horror writers’ own secret terrors, although the uneven contents didn’t always reflect that concept. 1995 also saw the release of the fifth and sixth volumes in Gelb and Michael Garrett’s apparently inexhaustible “Hot Blood” series of so-called “erotic” horror anthologies: Seeds of Fear (with an introduction by scream queen Brinke Stevens) and Stranger By Night contained stories by Ramsey Campbell, Brian Lumley, Christa Faust, Graham Masterton, Yvonne Navarro, Lucy Taylor, Brian Hodge, J.N. Williamson, J.L. Comeau, Wayne Allen Sallee and others.

  Gardner Dozois edited Killing Me Softly, an anthology of fifteen “Erotic Tales of Unearthly Love” by Pat Cadigan, Ursula K. Le Guin, Tanith Lee, Nancy Collins, Robert Silverberg and Michael Bishop, amongst others, and Dozois also co-edited Isaac Asimov’s Ghosts with Sheila Williams, which contained twelve stories originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine, including fine work by Kim Antieau, Jack Dann and Cherry Wilder. Ghost Movies: Famous Supernatural Films, edited by Peter Haining, collected twelve stories and extracts which formed the basis for some well-known movies. Shivers for Christmas, edited by Richard Dalby, featured stories by Stephen Gallagher, Joan Aiken and Terry Pratchett, amongst others.

  Doubles, Dummies and Dolls, edited by Leonard Wolf contained twenty-one “Terror Tales of Replication” by Poe, Saki, E.T.A. Hoffman, Bloch, Campbell, Henry James, E. Nesbit, Joyce Carol Oates and others; Joan C. Kessler edited Demons of the Night: Tales of the Fantastic, Madness, and the Supernatural from Nineteenth-Century France, which collected thirteen stories by such authors as Balzac, Guy de Maupassant and Théophile Gautier, and Angels of Darkness was a collection of forty-eight stories about troubled and troubling women, edited by the always dependable Marvin Kaye, although it was only available from the Science Fiction Book Club.

  I, Vampire: Interviews with the Undead, edited by Jean Stine and Forrest J Ackerman, presented twelve stories from the vampire’s point of view, and Peter Haining collected together stories by Stephen King, Bela Lugosi, Val Lewton, Anne Rice, Woody Allen, Basil Copper and many others for his bumper volume The Vampire Omnibus. Editor Pam Keesey’s Dark Angels contained eleven lesbian vampire stories, while Love Bites edited by Amarantha Knight (aka Nancy Kilpatrick), was yet another collection of new and reprint “erotic” vampire stories from, amongst others, Kathryn Ptacek, Ron Dee (who was seriously injured in a car crash in December, sustaining brain damage), Lois Tilton, Nancy A. Collins and the editor.

  Almost as prolific as his undead subjects, the indefatigable Martin H. Greenberg teamed up with Barbara Hambly to edit Sisters of the Night, fourteen stories about female vampires. In the “it probably seemed like a good idea at the time” category, Greenberg and an uncredited Ed Gorman edited Celebrity Vampires, nineteen new stories about the famous and the undead, ranging from Marilyn Monroe and Elvis to Scott Fitzgerald and The Marx Brothers. He also edited another variation on the theme with Vampire Detectives, featuring nineteen tales of supernatural sleuths by William F. Nolan, Tanya Huff, Peter Crowther, Max Allan Collins, Edward D. Hoch, Richard Laymon and Nancy Holder, and teamed up with Esther M. Friesner for Blood Muse: Timeless Tales of Vampires in the Arts, featuring thirty-two original stories.

  The triumvirate editing team of Robert Weinberg, Stefan Dziemianowicz and the ubiquitous Greenberg produced Between Time and Terror, seventeen stories of science and horror, plus 100 Vicious Little Vampire Stories and 100 Wicked Little Witch Stories which were, as the titles suggested, value-for-money volumes from Barnes & Noble Books. Edward E. Kramer, Nancy A. Collins and Greenberg teamed up to edit Dark Love, a Big Name anthology that appeared to be nominally about lust and obsession. Featuring twenty-two stories and an introduction by T.E.D. Klein, Stephen King contributed a bizarre tale of a mad maître d’, while a story by the late Karl Edward Wagner was little short of pornographic.

  Wendy Webb, Richard Gilliam, Kramer and Greenberg co-edited More Phobias, twenty-seven original horror stories about fear and aversion. Carol Serling and Greenberg edited Adventures in the Twilight Zone, the third in a series inspired by the TV show, featuring twenty-three original stories and a reprint from creator Rod Serling. Desire Burn: Women’s Stories from the Dark Side of Passion was edited by Janet Berliner, Uwe Luserke and Greenberg and contained twenty-two erotic horror stories from all-female contributors including Poppy Z. Brite, Nancy Holder and Lisa Mason, while Berliner and Greenberg teamed up with magician David Copperfield for the high-profile anthology David Copperfield’s Tales of the Impossible, which included eighteen stories of magic by Copperfield, Ray Bradbury, S.P. Somtow, F. Paul Wilson and Joyce Carol Oates, with a preface by Dean Koontz.

  Night Screams, edited by Ed Gorman and Greenberg, collected twenty-two stories, including reprints by cover names Clive Barker, David Morrell and Ray Bradbury, and the same team compiled Werewolves (although Greenberg was the only edito
r credited), which collected twenty-three original stories about lycanthropes. Tomorrow Bites, edited by Greg Cox and T.K.F. Weisskopf, collected eleven science fiction stories about werewolves, including James Blish’s classic novella, “There Shall Be No Darkness”.

  Edward E. Kramer teamed up with Peter Crowther to edit the bizarrely-designed Tombs, a theme anthology-of-sorts from White Wolf Publishing, which featured an eclectic mix of twenty-two fantasy, horror and science fiction stories from writers on both sides of the Atlantic, along with a very strange introduction by Forrest J Ackerman.

  Kramer also joined Nancy A. Collins as co-editor of Forbidden Acts, an anthology of twenty-one stories about taboo behaviour that included fiction by Alan Moore, Steve Rasnic Tem, Rex Miller, John Shirley, Douglas Clegg, Karl Edward Wagner and Howard Kaylan, with an introduction by Joe Bob Briggs.

  The Mammoth Book of Victorian and Edwardian Ghost Stories certainly lived up to its appellation, with forty-two supernatural tales and one poem reprinted from 1839–1910 by editor Richard Dalby. The Haunted Hour, edited by Cynthia Manson and Constance Scarborough, reprinted twenty horror stories from Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine and Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine by such authors as Richard Matheson, Ray Bradbury, Robert Bloch and M.R. James, and the bumper Barnes & Noble volume Best of Weird Tales, edited by John Betancourt, reprinted twenty-seven stories from the latest (1988-1994) incarnation of the perennial pulp publication.

  Canada’s annual horror anthology series Northern Frights, edited by Don Hutchison, reached its third volume with eighteen stories by Rick Hautala, Tanya Huff, Nancy Baker, Nancy Kilpatrick, Edo van Belkom and others, while editor Paul Collins’s Strange Fruit, subtitled “Tales of the Unexpected”, was described as “a smorgasbord of horrors from Australia’s best writers” and featured contributions by Cherry Wilder, Robert Hood and Lucy Sussex.

  As always, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: Eighth Annual Collection, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, was an indispensable volume featuring fifty short stories and four poems, while The Best New Horror Volume Six, edited by Stephen Jones, contained twenty-one stories and novellas plus a poem.