The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 24

by Stephen Jones

  A series of bizarre suicides and an outbreak of gruesome murders by children were linked in Liz Jensen’s horror/SF novel The Uninvited, and a tattoo artist found himself involved in the hunt for a serial killer in Aric Davis’s A Good and Useful Hurt.

  A “Collector” of souls for Hell had to prove that a woman accused of torturing and killing her family was innocent in Chris F. Holm’s Dead Harvest.

  A San Francisco detective hunted a serial killer beneath the city in Scott Sigler’s Nocturnal, and a witch-turned-Boston cop used her magical heritage to investigate a series of ritual killings in The Thirteenth Sacrifice by Debbie Viguié.

  In Kate Griffin’s Stray Souls, the first novel in the Magicals Anonymous series, an apprentice shaman and her crew of magical misfits had to find London’s soul and save the city from supernatural creatures. Orbit published a chap-book excerpt from the book back-to-back with an extract from Francis Knight’s Fade to Black.

  A backwoods woman was believed to be a witch in The Cove by Ron Rash, and a young woman discovered that she was a “Necromancer” in Michelle Sagara’s Silence, the first volume in the Queen of the Dead series.

  Witchy historian Diana and her 1,500-year-old vampire husband Matthew travelled back in time to 16th-century England to search for an enchanted manuscript in Shadow of Night, Deborah Harkness’s sequel to her best-seller, A Discovery of Witches.

  A woman discovered that her house contained a dark history linked to a famous singer in The Ghost of Lily Painter by Caitlin Davies, and an American teenager discovered that his English public school was haunted by The White Devil in Justin Evans’s ghostly novel.

  Daniel Polansky’s Tomorrow the Killing was the second in the author’s Low Town series, Wayne Simmons’s Doll Parts was a sequel to Drop Dead Gorgeous, and Juggernaut by Adam Baker was a prequel to the author’s Outpost.

  Jason Hawes, Grant Wilson and Tim Waggoner collaborated on the novel Ghost Town, and Wayne Simmons had two new horror novels published, Parts and Fever.

  The Apocalypse Index was the fourth volume in Charles Stross’s humorous Laundry series about British spies battling Lovecraftian horrors, and Seth Grahame-Smith re-imagined the birth of Jesus as a fantasy adventure with Egyptian zombies and black magic sorcerers in Unholy Night.

  Orange Prize-winning historical novelist Helen Dunmore’s The Greatcoat, a ghost story set in early 1950s Yorkshire, was the first new book from Random House/Arrow’s Hammer imprint. It was followed by Jeanette Winterson novella The Daylight Gate, based on Lancashire’s seventeenth-century Pendle Hill witch trials, and Tim Lebbon’s novel Coldbrook.

  Kronos by Guy Adams was the second novelisation based on the 1974 Hammer movie Captain Kronos Vampire Hunter, featuring an introduction by creator Brian Clemens, and an updated version of the 1971 film Hands of the Ripper from the same author came with a foreword by Hammer expert Jonathan Rigby. Mark Morris pulled the same stunt with his contemporary version of the 1972 film Vampire Circus, while Shaun Hutson novelised Hammer’s obscure 1958 SF movie X the Unknown.

  Alan Goldsher’s My Favourite Fangs: The Story of the Von Trapp Family Vampires was a humorous mash-up of bloodsuckers with The Sound of Music.

  A vampire William Shakespeare was stranded on a mystical isle in Lori Handeland’s Zombie Island, the follow-up to Shakespeare Undead, and a vampire Jane Austen found her wedding plans disrupted by murder and the supernatural in Jane Vows Vengeance, the final volume in the trilogy by Michael Thomas Ford.

  Gena Showalter’s Alice in Zombieland was a YA mashup and the first in The White Rabbit Chronicles.

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  Deadlocked was the penultimate Sookie Stackhouse novel by Charlaine Harris, while US Marshall Anita Blake was on the trail of a fifteen-year-old girl abducted by vampires in Kiss the Dead, the twenty-first book in the series by Laurell K. Hamilton. Beauty, a deleted scene from Hamilton’s novel, was available as a bonus “eSpecial” and was added to the paperback edition.

  Twin sisters planned to escape the blood camps set up to feed hordes of vampires in The Farm by Emily McKay, and surviving humans battled virus-created vampires in a post-apocalyptic world in The Twelve, Justin Cronin’s sequel to his 2010 best-seller The Passage.

  John Redlaw travelled to America to investigate a series of attacks on vampire immigrants in Redlaw: Red Eye, the second in the series by James Lovegrove.

  In Incarnation, the second book in the historical vampire history series by the pseudonymous Emma Cornwall, Lucy Weston set out to discover why Bram Stoker lied about her in Dracula.

  Daughter of Light was the second book in the Kindred vampire series, following Daughter of Darkness. It was credited to the long-dead V. C. Andrews®.

  Red White and Blood by Christopher Farnsworth was the third in The President’s Vampire series, and former cop Laura Caxton concluded her war with ancient vampire Justinia Malvern in 32 Fangs, the fifth and final book in David Wellington’s series that began with 13 Bullets in 2006.

  Jeanne C. Stein’s Haunted was the eighth in the series about vampire Anna Strong, while Undead and Unstable was the eleventh volume in Mary-Janice Davidson’s humorous Betsy the Vampire Queen series and the third in a trilogy.

  Set during the French Revolution, Commedia della Morte was the twenty-fourth volume in Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s series about vampire Count Saint-Germain.

  Titan Books continued its reprint series of Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula alternate history series with The Bloody Red Baron and Dracula Cha Cha Cha. Both attractive trade paperbacks contained exclusive bonus material, including new novellas in both.

  Need was an erotic gay vampire novel by Todd Gregory.

  Anne Rice turned to the werewolf genre with markedly less success than she enjoyed with vampires thirty-six years earlier. Based on a forty-page TV treatment, The Wolf Gift involved the transformation of a young newspaper reporter into a lycanthrope.

  The Craving was Jason Starr’s humorous follow-up to The Pack, featuring former family-man turned werewolf Simon Burns, while Gregory Lamberson’s The Frenzy War was the second book in the Frenzy Wolves Cycle following The Frenzy Way.

  The Germans used “corpse gas” to create an army of zombies during the First World War in Joseph Nassise’s By the Blood of Heroes, the first in the Great Undead War alternate history series.

  Kevin J. Anderson’s humorous Death Warmed Over was the first in a series about zombie PI Dan “Shamble” Chambeaux, and Plague Town was the first volume in Dana Fredsti’s Ashley Parker series.

  Deck Z: The Titanic by Chris Pauls and Matt Solomon featured zombies on the famous sinking liner, a struggling actor woke up as a zombie in Husk by Corey Redekop, and a young man was being groomed to lead the human survivors in the post-apocalyptic zombie novel This Dark Earth by John Hornor Jacobs.

  Created by Stephen Jones, Zombie Apocalypse! Fight-back was the second volume in the “mosaic novel” series, with contributions by Peter Atkins, Anne Billson, Jo Fletcher, Christopher Fowler, Brian Hodge, Reggie Oliver, Sarah Pinborough, Robert Shearman, Michael Marshall Smith, Lisa Tuttle and others, including an original comic strip by Neil Gaiman and Les Edwards that was adapted into a short animated film available online.

  Variations on the zombie apocalypse continued in Devil’s Wake by Steven Barnes and Tananarive Due, while Madeleine Roux’s latest heroine was stuck in Seattle following the zombie apocalypse in Sadie Walker is Stranded, a companion volume to the author’s Allison Hewitt is Trapped.

  K. Bennett’s The Year of Eating Dangerously was the second legal thriller featuring Mallory Caine, Zombie at Law. It was followed by I Ate the Sheriff, which also featured a werewolf fighting a difficult child custody battle.

  Even White Trash Zombies Get the Blues was the second in Diana Rowland’s series about zombie Angel Crawford.

  Day by Day Armageddon: Shattered Hourglass was the third book in J. L. Bourne’s zombie series, Survivors was the third volume in Z. A. Recht’s The Morningstar Strain series, and Siege was the third in Rhiann
on Frater’s originally selfpublished As the World Dies trilogy.

  Autumn: Aftermath was the fifth and final volume in David Moody’s zombie series, as an army of corpses attacked the human survivors taking refuge in a fortified castle, and Blackout was the final volume in the nearfuture Newsflesh trilogy by Mira Grant (Seanan McGuire), set decades after the zombie apocalypse changed the world.

  I Saw Zombies Eating Santa Claus was a humorous novella by S. G. Browne set in the same world as Breathers.

  A gay actor came back as a cannibal zombie in Corey Redekop’s literary comedy Husk, while Eat Your Heart Out was a lesbian zombie novella by Dayna Ingram.

  A man searched for a possible cure to a zombie plague in a US split into two hemispheres of the living and the dead in The Return Man, a first novel by V. M. Zito that was originally serialised on the Internet.

  Susan Dennard’s first book, Something Strange and Deadly, was a YA steampunk zombie novel set in the 1800s, while Cannibal Reign was a post-apocalypse horror novel by debuting author Thomas Kolonair.

  Stephen McGeagh’s debut urban horror novel Habit from Salt Publishing came with a glowing cover blurb from Ramsey Campbell.

  A young woman found herself caught up in an escalating war between the angels and the Fallen in Lou Morgan’s debut novel Blood and Feathers, the first in a series.

  Alison Littlewood’s first novel, A Cold Season, followed the classic Faustian bargain format, a couple tracked supernatural creatures in Lee Collins’s The Dead of Winter, and A. G. Howard’s debut Splintered was a dark Gothic retelling of Alice in Wonderland.

  A young girl feared that she would succumb to the supernatural homicidal madness that affected random female teens in her hometown in Mary Atwell’s YA debut novel Wild Girls.

  A vampire fan was ready to become the real thing in Helen Keeble’s humorous YA debut, Fang Girl, a werewolf enforcer fell in love with a wild woman who had lost her powers to shift in Rhiannon Held’s debut Silver, and a boy believed he was transforming into a worm-like creature in Mary G. Thompson’s debut YA novel Wuftoom.

  Curious Warnings: The Great Ghost Stories of M. R. James was a 150th Anniversary Edition edited by Stephen Jones and illustrated by Les Edwards. The handsome leather-bound hardcover from Jo Fletcher Books included all James’s supernatural stories, along with the children’s novel The Five Jars, a number of articles by the author, the most definitive versions to date of various story fragments, and an extensive illustrated afterword by the editor.

  M. R. James’s Collected Ghost Stories from Oxford University Press contained thirty-three stories (three more than in the original 1931 edition) along with an introduction and story notes by editor Darryl Jones.

  Constable & Robinson published a numbered and slipcased facsimile edition of Bram Stoker’s Dracula to commemorate the hundred-year anniversary of the author’s death. The book contained a new introduction by author Colm Tóibín (which was more concerned with Stoker’s life than the novel’s place in horror history), and as an added bonus there was a colour reproduction of the original 1897 hand-written contract between Stoker and his publisher.

  Yet another new edition of Dracula from Harper Design was illustrated by Becky Cloonan.

  With historical introductions by Stephen Jones, The Lost Novels of Bram Stoker was an omnibus of the author’s not-very-lost novels The Jewel of Seven Stars, The Lady of the Shroud and The Lair of the White Worm.

  The Great God Pan/Xelucha was an omnibus of the two short novels by Arthur Machen and M. P. Sheil, respectively, from Creation Oneiros. Illustrated by Austin Osman Spare, the book came with three different introductions plus a foreword by H. P. Lovecraft.

  From the same imprint, Skullcrusher: Selected Weird Fiction Volume One collected eleven stories by Robert E. Howard along with an introduction by editor James Havoc, a foreword by D. M. Mitchell and a memoriam by Love-craft.

  Barnes & Noble reissued Stephen King’s Three Novels: Carrie, Salem’s Lot, The Shining in an attractive leather-bound, silver-edged edition.

  In a poll to celebrate World Book Day on March 1st, Roald Dahl was chosen as Ireland’s favourite children’s author of all time.

  A Monster Calls, written by Patrick Ness from an idea by the late Siobhan Dowd, won the CILIP Carnegie Medal for “the most outstanding book for children” in the UK in June, while Jim Kay’s illustrations for the book received the CILIP Kate Greenaway Medal for illustration. It marked the first time since the Greenaway award was founded in 1956 that both prizes went to the same title.

  The following month, best-selling YA author G. P. Taylor called for a ratings system for children’s books, as he believed that they had gone “too far” towards disturbing horror. The Anglican vicar and author of the Vampyre Labyrinth trilogy admitted that he felt the same about his own work and would rather go back to writing books like Shadowmancer.

  Scholastic reissued a number of Goosebumps books by R. L. Stine to celebrate the series’ twentieth anniversary.

  Stuck on a remote island for the summer, a man was haunted by a foreboding black mansion in The Turning by Francine Prose.

  Following a near-death experience, a teen believed that she had brought something dark back with her in Graham McNamee’s Beyond, while a girl apparently received messages from her dead twin brother in The Vanishing Game by Kate Kae Myers.

  Everybody could now see ghosts in Daniel Waters’s Break My Heart 1,000 Times.

  A girl was repeatedly brought back from the dead as part of a secret drug experiment in Cat Patrick’s Revived, and a boy discovered that magic really worked in Jeff Strand’s humorous A Bad Day for Voodoo.

  Cara and her friends had to fight an elemental threat that wanted to cleanse the planet of all life in The Shimmers in the Night, the second volume in Lydia Millet’s The Dissenters trilogy.

  Dark Eden: Eve of Destruction was the second book in the series by Patrick Carman, and Jeyn Roberts’s post-apocalyptic novel Rage Within was a sequel to Dark Inside.

  Such Wicked Intent by Kenneth Oppel was the second in The Apprenticeship of Victor Frankenstein series, a prequel to Mary Shelley’s novel. As Dead As It Gets was the third in Katie Alender’s Bad Girls Don’t Die series.

  Another Jekyll, Another Hyde was the third in the series by Daniel and Dina Nayeri about pupils at an upscale New York school, while James Reese’s The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll & Mademoiselle Odile was a prequel to Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel, about the orphaned daughter of a witch.

  Masque of the Red Death was a post-apocalyptic “re-imagining” of Edgar Allan Poe’s story by Bethany Griffin.

  The Saga of Larten Crepsey: Brothers to the Death was the fourth title in the prequel series to the Cirque du Freak books by best-selling author Darren Shan (Darren O’Shaughnessy). Shan was also the author of the illustrated novellas Zom-B and Zom-B Underground, the first two volumes in a new series.

  The Spook’s Blood (aka The Last Apprentice: Lure of the Dead) was the tenth volume in The Wardstone Chronicles by Joseph Delaney, illustrated by Patrick Arrasmith. It was followed by Spook’s: Slither’s Tale, which included an interview with the author.

  For younger children, Tales from Lovecraft Middle School #1: Professor Gargoyle was written by Charles Gilman and illustrated by Eugene Smith.

  Sara was a gay-themed YA horror novel by Greg Herren, from Bold Strokes Books.

  An adopted girl travelled to London to discover the fate of her sister in The Vampire of Highgate by Asa Bailey.

  The Slayer Chronicles: Second Chance was the second volume in a parallel series to Heather Brewer’s The Chronicles of Vladimir Tod, told from the viewpoint of vampire slayer Joss Macmillan.

  Richelle Mead’s The Golden Lily was the second in the Bloodlines series, a spin-off from the author’s Vampire Academy series, and K. J. Wignall’s Alchemy was the second book in the Mercian trilogy.

  Department 19: The Rising was the second book in the vampire series by Will Hill, while Suck It Up and Die was Brian Meehl’s seq
uel to Suck It Up.

  Nick Lake’s Blood Ninja III: Betrayal of the Living was the final book in the trilogy about sixteenth-century Japanese vampire ninjas.

  Balthazar was the fifth volume in the Evernight vampire school series by Claudia Gray (Amy Vincent), and Mari Mancusi’s Soul Bound and Blood Forever were the seventh and eighth books, respectively, in the Blood Coven Vampire series.

  Hidden was the tenth title in P. C. Cast and Kristin Cast’s House of Night YA vampire series, while Black Dawn and Bitter Blood by Rachel Caine (Roxanne Longstreet Conrad) were the twelfth and thirteenth volumes, respectively, in The Morganville Vampires series.

  A girl investigated the death of her best friend, who was killed by a white werewolf, in Hemlock, the first volume in a trilogy by Kathleen Peacock, and Taken by Storm was the third book in Jennifer Lynn Barnes’s Raised by Wolves series.

  A suicidal teenager and five others took refuge from zombies in a local high school in Courtney Summers’s This is Not a Test, and a group of school kids on a field trip in the mountains came across zombies in Gravediggers: Mountain of Bones, the first in a series by Christopher Krovatin. Sean Beaudoin’s The Infects was also about a group of teens battling zombies.

  Ilsa J. Bick’s Shadows was the sequel to the author’s post-apocalyptic Ashes, while Flesh & Bone was the third in Jonathan Maberry’s post-apocalyptic YA zombie series that began with Rot & Ruin.

  The Sacrifice was the fourth book in Charlie Higson’s The Enemy zombie series.

  Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling edited After: Nineteen Stories of Apocalypse and Dystopia for Disney’s YA Hyperion imprint. Among the authors included were Carol Emshwiller, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Garth Nix and Jane Yolen.

  Translated by Marlaine Delargy, Let the Old Dreams Die and Other Stories was the first English-language edition of a 2006 collection by John Ajvide Lindqvist. It included eleven stories (including a sequel-of-sorts to Let the Right One In and a novella follow-up to Handling the Dead), along with the author’s foreword to the original Swedish edition and a new afterword.