The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 24

by Stephen Jones

  Second Thoughts: Tales of Horror and Suspense from Spinetinglers Publishing collected seventeen stories by British writer Richard Moule.

  Available from Curiosity Quills Press, The Green-Eyed Monster by Mike Robinson was about a literary rivalry that resulted in death and something worse, while a fallen angel used his network of advertising agencies to do Satan’s work in Dina Rae’s novel Halo of the Damned from Eternal Press.

  Edited by Paul Genesse, The Crimson Pact Vol. 3 and Vol. 4 were the latest two volumes in the anthology series available from Alliteration Ink, who also published Dangers Untold edited by Jennifer Brozek and “presented” by The Horror Society.

  Dark Tales of Lost Civilizations, edited and introduced by Eric J. Guignard for Florida’s Dark Moon Books imprint, featured twenty-five new stories about lost lands and ancient cities.

  William Patrick Maynard’s The Destiny of Fu Manchu from Black Coat Press was based on the character created by Sax Rohmer.

  From Ramble House/Dancing Tuatara Press, The Unholy Goddess and Other Stories was the third volume in the Collected Weird Tales of “shudder pulp” author Wyatt Blassingame. The Devil’s Nightclub from the same publisher contained eight stories by fellow pulp author Nat Schachner, House of the Restless Dead & Other Stories featured nine previously uncollected pulp stories by Hugh B. Cave, and Hands Out of Hell collected eight weird menace pulp stories by John H. Know.

  The Strange Thirteen was a reprint of Richard Gamon’s 1925 collection of thirteen stories set in India, and D. H. Olsen contributed an introduction to H. B. Gregory’s 1940 novel Dark Sanctuary, which also included an interview with the author. All the books included introductions by imprint editor John Pelan.

  Midnight and Moonshine from Australia’s Ticonderoga Publications collected thirteen stories (one reprint) by Lisa L. Harnett and Angela Slatter, with an introduction by Kim Wilkins. A 100-copy hardcover edition was signed by all the contributors and cover artist Kathleen Jennings.

  From the same publisher, Bread and Circuses collected fifteen tales (four previously unpublished) by Felicity Dowker, with an introduction by Trent Jamieson.

  Liz Grzyb teamed up with Amanda Pillar to edit and introduce Damnation and Dames, which contained sixteen tales of a paranormal noir by Jay Caselberg, Robert Hood and the Hannett and Slatter team, while Pillar was also the solo editor of Blood Stones, an anthology of seventeen stories about unusual creatures with an introduction by Seanan McGuire.

  Also for Ticonderoga, The Year’s Best Australian Fantasy & Horror 2011 edited by Grzyb and Talie Helene contained thirty-two stories by Lucy Sussex (twice), Terry Dowling, Angela Slatter, Stephen Deadman, Lisa L. Harnett and Margaret Mahy, amongst others, along with a look at the year in review by the editors, a recommended reading list, and a list of Australian and New Zealand fantasy and horror awards.

  No longer co-editor of Dark Discoveries, Jason V. Brock launched his own on-demand paperback magazine with S. T. Joshi as Managing Editor. The colourful and busy premiere edition of [Nameless]: A Biannual Journal of the Macabre, Esoteric and Intellectual . . . featured six stories by Gene O’Neill and others, various articles (including tributes to Ray Bradbury), interviews with artists Demetrios Vakras and Lee-Anne Raymond, and various reviews.

  A stage comedian discovered that there was more to his uncle’s childhood tales of magic than he could have realised in Ramsey Campbell’s latest novel from PS Publishing, The Kind Folk.

  A previously unpublished version of Basil Copper’s 1976 Gothic mystery The Curse of the Fleers came with the author’s original working notes, an introduction by Stephen Jones and cover art by Stephen E. Fabian.

  When a woman attempted to transport her murdered friend’s ashes to the destination of her dreams, she soon found herself in danger from various factions, including an all-too-real legendary killer, in Joe R. Lansdale’s Edge of Dark Water.

  As usual, PS also issued a number of short story collections, including Trapped in the Saturday Matinee by Joe R. Lansdale, Born with Teeth by Conrad Williams, Leave Your Sleep by R. B. Russell, Where Furnaces Burn by Joel Lane, The Pottawatomie Giant and Other Stories by Andy Duncan, Angels and You Dogs: Stories by Kathleen Ann Goonan, and Nothing As It Seems by Tim Lebbon. All included new and reprinted material, and were available in signed and numbered editions of between 100 and 200 copies each.

  Commissioned by editor Peter Crowther for the Humber Mouth Literature Festival 2012, Four for Fear contained a quartet of spooky stories by Ramsey Campbell, Christopher Fowler, Alison Littlewood and Nicholas Royle. The slim hardcover was limited to 200 copies and signed by all the contributors.

  Once again edited with an introduction by S. T. Joshi, Black Wings II: New Tales of Lovecraftian Horror contained eighteen original stories, often loosely inspired Lovecraft’s work, by Tom Fletcher, Caitlín R. Kiernan, John Langan, Don Webb, Nicholas Royle, Steve Rasnic Tem, Chet Williamson and others.

  Edited by Marie O’Regan and Paul Kane, A Carnivàle of Horror brought together sixteen stories (four original) about circuses by Ray Bradbury, Joe Hill, Muriel Gray and others.

  Flying Fish by Randall Silvis was a novella from PS about an island woman who may have been more than 200 years old.

  Volume 28/29 of PostScripts was also, somewhat confusingly, Exotic Gothic 4 edited as usual by Danel Olson. Along with a footnotes-filled Preface by the editor, the hardcover anthology featured twenty-five stories (one reprint) from Margo Lanagan, Reggie Oliver, Simon Kurt Unsworth, Robert Hood, Steve Rasnic Tem, Terry Dowling, Paul Finch, Anna Taborska, Scott Thomas and Stephen Volk, amongst others.

  Produced as a collaboration between PS Publishing and Cemetery Dance Publications, Stephen Jones’s anthology A Book of Horrors was available as both a limited edition, signed by the editor and artist Les Edwards, and a deluxe edition signed by all the contributors (including Stephen King and John Ajvide Lindqvist) for £595/$999.

  From PS Publishing’s Stanza Press imprint came The Foliate Head, a collection of thirty-six poems by Marly Youmans with illustrations by Clive Hicks-Jenkins, along with a reprint of Brian Lumley’s 1982 poetry collection Ghoul Warning and Other Omens, illustrated by Dave Carson and with a 1999 afterword by Dave Sutton.

  PS also launched a new mass-market paperback imprint, Drugstore Indian Press, with new editions of Ramsey Campbell’s The Darkest Part of the Woods, The Overnight, Secret Story and Told by the Dead.

  From Cemetery Dance Publications, Brian James Freeman and Bev Vincent’s revised and updated The Illustrated Stephen King Trivia Book: Revised & Updated Second Edition was illustrated by Glen Chadbourne and included more than 100 additional questions.

  The search for a missing child led to a man claiming to be a mythological monster in Lee Thomas’s Torn, which was available in a 750-copy signed edition.

  A couple took a trip up the Amazon in 1906 in the novella Amazonas by the late Alan Peter Ryan. It was available from CD in a signed edition of 1,000 copies. Peter Straub’s 1990 novella The Buffalo Hunter was reissued by CD as a regular hardcover value priced at $19.99 and in a signed, limited edition.

  The Woman contained the 2010 horror novel by Jack Ketchum along with a new sequel novella. It was also available in a traycased, signed and lettered edition of fifty-two copies ($175).

  The 20th Anniversary edition of Bentley Little’s The Mailman was available in a 1,000-copy signed edition and a traycased lettered edition ($400), while The Circle from the same author was a short novel in which the residents of William Tell Circle started doing unimaginable things to each other.

  Edited by Joe R. Lansdale, The Horror Hall of Fame: The Stoker Winners from Cemetery Dance Publications collected thirteen award-winning stories by Robert Bloch, Harlan Ellison and others. Illustrated by Glenn Chadbourne, it was also available in a signed, limited edition.

  Professional problem-solver Matthew Corbett ended up aiding his arch-enemy Professor Fell in discovering the identity of a traitor on a Caribbean island in The Providence Rider by Robert
McCammon, from Subterranean Press. McCammon’s 1980 novel Bethany’s Sin was reprinted in a signed edition of 750 copies and a twenty-six copy lettered edition ($250).

  Ad Eternum was a novella in Elizabeth Bear’s New Amsterdam series, set in an alternate 1960s America that included vampires, werewolves and detective sorcerers.

  The Woman Who Married a Cloud: The Collected Short Stories of Jonathan Carroll contained thirty-eight tales, the earliest dating from 1982, while Bentley Little’s Indignities of the Flesh collected ten stories (one original) with story notes by the author.

  Mira Grant’s When Will You Rise: Stories to End the World contained a novella in the author’s Newsflesh series with an unrelated story, both previously published as e-books.

  Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart: 25 Tales of Weird Romance collected stories that originally appeared on Caitlín R. Kiernan’s subscription website Sirenia Digest between 2007 and 2009, along with a new introduction by the author and an afterword by Sonya Taaffe.

  Also from Subterranean, No Sharks in the Med and Other Stories: The Best Macabre Stories of Brian Lumley contained twelve reprint tales and a new introduction by the author in a limited edition of 1,500 copies and a traycased, leatherbound edition of twenty-six ($250) signed by Lumley and artist Bob Eggleton.

  The Janus Tree and Other Stories collected eleven stories by Glen Hirshberg in a 750-copy signed and limited edition, and Thomas Ligotti’s 1994 collection Noctuary was reissued as a signed, leatherbound edition limited to 250 copies.

  Available in a 500-copy signed edition and twenty-six lettered copies, Shadows West was a collection of three unproduced “weird Western” screenplays by Lansdale and his brother John R. Lansdale, while Subterranean’s deluxe anniversary edition of Lansdale’s 1981 novel Act of Love added a new novelette, an interview with the author, and illustrations by Glenn Chadbourne. A 200-copy signed, leatherbound edition was also available for $100.

  Set between Wizard and Glass and Wolves of the Calla, The Dark Tower: The Wind Through the Keyhole was the eighth volume in Stephen King’s long-running epic fantasy series from Donald M. Grant books. It was published in a 5,000-copy slipcased edition signed by artist Jae Lee ($75.00) and an 800-copy deluxe cased edition signed by both author and artist ($350).

  Two young mothers infected with vampirism found themselves on the run from the mysterious Whistler and his companion in Glen Hirshberg’s Motherless Child from Earthling Publications.

  An oversized deluxe 25th Anniversary Edition of Clive Barker’s Weaveworld was also available from Earthling in a very limited print run, illustrated with thirty new illustrations by Richard Kirk.

  After a publishing hiatus following the tragic death of its co-founder, the Fedogan & Bremer imprint was back with a new anthology, Worlds of Cthulhu, edited with an introduction by Robert M. Price. Containing eleven original prequels and sequels to H. P. Lovecraft’s work by Richard A. Lupoff, Darrell Schweitzer, Will Murray, Adrian Cole and Gary Myers, amongst others, the hardcover boasted dust-jacket art by Gahan Wilson and interior illustrations by Tim Kirk.

  Best known for its series of chapbooks, Spectral Press also started publishing hardcover titles, beginning with The Respectable Face of Tyranny, the first in the Spectral Visions series containing two novellas and an afterword by Gary Fry.

  The Nine Deaths of Dr. Valentine from the same imprint was a fun tribute by John Llewellyn Probert to Vincent Price and his Dr. Phibes films, while The 13 Ghosts of Christmas edited by Simon Marshall-Jones contained thirteen stories (one reprint) by Jan Edwards, William Meikle, Thana Niveau, Paul Finch, Gary McMahon and others, along with an introduction by Johnny Mains and a preview of Stephen Volk’s Peter Cushing-inspired novella Whitstable. All Spectral Press books were limited to 100 numbered copies.

  William Meikle’s novella Professor Challenger: The Island of Terror was available from Dark Regions Press in a signed, leatherbound and slipcased edition of just thirteen copies for $99.00.

  Dark Regions also launched its Black Labyrinth imprint in June with The Walls of the Castle by Tom Piccirilli, the first of ten psychological horror novels and novellas illustrated by Argentinean artist Santiago Caruso. The Black Labyrinth titles were available in a variety of signed and numbered editions, including an oversized and traycased “ultra-deluxe edition” limited to just thirteen copies.

  Published in a numbered edition of just 150 hardcover copies under the Enigmatic Press imprint, A Haunting of Ghosts: A Collection of Ghost Stories collected six original tales written over a two-month period in 2012 by (L. H.) Maynard (and M. P. N.) Sims with photographs by Emily Rose Sims.

  Amongst a raft of titles put out by Centipede Press were Where the Summer Ends and Walk on the Wild Side, two volumes of thirty-five stories comprising The Best Horror Stories of Karl Edward Wagner edited by Stephen Jones.

  A city became the hunting ground for humanoid creatures with claws and completely white eyes in Paul Kane’s short apocalyptic novel, Lunar, from Bad Moon Books. Ramsey Campbell contributed the introduction.

  After an anthrax attack wiped out half the population of Atlanta, the spirits of the dead started to possess the living in Will McIntosh’s novel Hitchers from Night Shade Books.

  In an alternate Naples where magic worked through holy music, a secret society planned to raise the Devil himself in The Black Opera: A Novel of Opera, Volcanoes and the Mind of God by Mary Gentle.

  Inspired by the works of Arthur Machen, The Croning was the first full-length novel from Laird Barron and was about the strange things that exist on the periphery of our existence.

  In Mark Teppo’s Earth Thirst, the first volume in the Arcadian Conflict series, vampires fought back against humans who were destroying the planet, and a man returned to face his childhood nightmares on Catalina Island in Terminal Island by Walter Greatshell.

  Edited by Ross E. Lockhart for Night Shade, The Book of Cthulhu II was a follow-up to the acclaimed anthology based on the concepts of H. P. Lovecraft and included twenty-four stories (four original) by Neil Gaiman, Kim Newman, Caitlín R. Kiernan and others.

  Other Worlds Than These: Stories of Parallel Worlds edited with an introduction by John Joseph Adams was a hefty anthology of thirty mostly recent reprints along with a foreword by Lev Grossman and a further reading list compiled by Ross E. Lockhart.

  Available in a printing of 300 copies, Black Horse and Other Strange Stories from Tartarus Press was the debut collection of American author Jason A. Wyckoff. Unfortunately, the sixteen original stories read more like pastiches of other, better works.

  One of the best debut collections of the year was poet Helen Marshall’s first prose book, Hair Side, Flesh Side, from Canadian imprint ChiZine Publications. Containing sixteen original stories based around different parts of the human anatomy, the book came with a glowing introduction by Robert Shearman and illustrations by Chris Roberts.

  From the same publisher, Remember Why You Fear Me: The Best Dark Fiction of Robert Shearman included twenty-one superior stories (seven original), along with an introduction by Stephen Jones, while Ian Rogers’s debut collection Every House is Haunted contained twenty-two stories (seven original) and an introduction by Paul Tremblay.

  The first book in the How to End Human Suffering series, Ninja Versus Pirate Featuring Zombies was a humorous novel by James Marshall, a psychic threat from the Cold War resurfaced in David Nickle’s Rasputin’s Bastards, and A Tree of Bones was the third in Gemma Files’s weird Western Hexslinger series.

  All ChiZine titles were also available in signed, limited hardcover editions through pre-order.

  From Prime Books, Witches: Wicked, Wild & Wonderful edited by Paula Guran featured twenty-three stories (two original) by Neil Gaiman, Kelly Link, Ursula K. Le Guin, Tanith Lee, Jane Yolan, Madeleine L’Engle and others. Obsession: Tales of Irresistible Desire from the same editor featured nineteen stories by authors including Elizabeth Hand, Joe R. Lansdale, Fritz Leiber, Storm Constantine, Pat Cadigan and Lawrence Block.
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  Along with three other anthologies for Prime, the busy Guran also edited Extreme Zombies, which included twenty-five tales of the walking dead by Nancy A. Collins, Edward Lee, Brian Keene, George R. R. Martin, Joe R. Lansdale and others, and Ghosts: Recent Hauntings, a compilation of thirty stories (one original) by, amongst others, Peter Straub, Tim Powers, Caitlín R. Kiernan and Karen Joy Fowler.

  Future Lovecraft edited by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Paula R. Stiles featured twenty-eight SF stories (three reprints) and ten poems (one reprint) inspired by HPL’s work, from authors including Don Webb and Nick Mamatas.

  Edited by Russian-born author Ekaterina Sedia, Circus: Fantasy Under the Big Top included twenty stories by Peter Straub, Howard Waldrop, Holly Black and others, while Bloody Fabulous: Stories of Fantasy and Fashion, from the same editor, featured fourteen tales (seven original) of sartorial suspense from authors including Kelly Link and Holly Black.

  Also from Prime, At the Edge of Waking was the second collection from Canadian author Holly Phillips, containing eleven stories (one original) with an introduction by Peter S. Beagle, while Elizabeth Bear’s collection Shoggoths in Bloom included twenty stories from the past six years (one previously unpublished) and an introduction by Scott Lynch.

  From Small Beer Press, Errantry: Strange Stories collected ten reprint tales published over the same period by Elizabeth Hand.

  David Britton’s latest Lord Horror novel, La Squab: The Black Rose of Auschwitz, came in a stunningly designed (by John Coulthart) hardcover from Savoy, profusely illustrated by Kris Guidio and with a CD reading by veteran British actress Fenella Fielding.

  The publisher also issued a companion disc, The Savoy Sessions, on which the husky-voiced Fielding gave her own unique interpretations of sixteen songs.

  Yet another tribute to The Pan Book of Horror Stories series, The Screaming Book of Horror was a hardcover edited with an introduction by Johnny Mains for Screaming Dreams. It contained twenty-one stories by John Llewellyn Probert, Alison Littlewood, Bernard Taylor, Anna Taborska, Paul Finch, Rhys Hughes, Alison More, Reginald (Reggie) Oliver, David A. Riley, Steve Rasnic Tem, Christopher Fowler, Charlie Higson and others, including posthumous contributions from John Brunner and John Burke, and a story by the editor.