Edited by Marvin Kaye, The Ultimate Halloween contained seventeen stories (five reprints) about the horror holiday by Esther Friesner, Ron Goulart and others. Isaac Asimov’s Halloween was edited by Gardner Dozois and Sheila Williams and reprinted ten stories from Asimov’s Science Fiction. Andy Duncan, Lawrence Watt-Evans, Howard Waldrop, Steven Utley and Ian R. MacLeod were amongst the authors included.
Winning Tales of the Supernatural edited by Joyce Booth O’Brien contained eleven ‘prize-winning’ stories, while Nor of Human edited by Geoffrey Maloney was an Australian anthology published by the Canberra SF Guild writers’ group.
Published in trade paperback by Polygon, Damage Land, an anthology of New Scottish Gothic Fiction edited and introduced by Alan Bissett, contained twenty stories (six reprints) and a bibliography.
The busy Martin H. Greenberg teamed up with John Heifers to edit the all-original Villains Victorious and The Mutant Files. The former contained fourteen stories of evil triumphant, the latter sixteen tales about the next step in human evolution. The contributors (many of whom were featured in both books) included Charles de Lint, Tanya Huff, Alan Dean Foster, Janet Berliner, David Bischoff, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Ed Gorman, Peter Crowther and Peter Tremayne (with a new Sherlock Holmes story).
Greenberg was joined by Brittany A. Koren for Single White Vampire Seeks Same, an anthology of twelve stories based on paranormal personal ads from such familiar names as Rusch, Crowther, Hoffman, de Lint and Huff (a ‘Henry Fitzroy’ vampire tale). With Jean Rabe, Greenberg also edited Historical Hauntings, featuring eighteen original stories by Andre Norton, Bruce Holland Rogers and others.
The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror: 12edited by Stephen Jones contained twenty-two stories and novellas, along with the usual comprehensive overview of the previous year in horror, a detailed necrology and a list of useful contact addresses for aspiring writers and horror fans. Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling’s The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: Fourteenth Annual Collection reprinted forty-four stories and nine poems, plus the annual summations by the two editors, Ed Bryant and Seth Johnson, obituaries by James Frenkel, and a list of so-called ‘Honorable Mentions’. The Datlow/Windling and Jones books overlapped with just four stories from Ramsey Campbell, Kathe Koja, Terry Lamsley and Paul McAuley.
After much ballyhoo in the small-press world and to the anger of many of its contributors, The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy: 2000, the first in a proposed new annual series announced by editor Steve Savile, was abruptly cancelled by print-on-demand publisher Cosmos Books.
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HarperCollins globally launched its e-book imprint PerfectBound in February with titles by Raymond E. Feist, Joyce Carol Oates and an omnibus of The Nightmare Room by R.L. Stine, containing six novels.
Following the May launch of AOL Time Warner’s digital imprint iPublish, The Authors’ Guild warned its 8,000 members that the new company’s publishing contract was ‘among the worst the Authors’ Guild has seen from a publisher of any size or reputation’. The Science Fiction Writers’ Association agreed, describing the publisher’s non-negotiable terms as ‘rights stealing’.
Ignoring the criticism, iPublish announced a new popularity contest in conjunction with the monthly publication of three works discovered through its website. However, in an unexpected move in December, AOL Time Warner pulled the plug, citing a slowdown in the overall economy as its reason for the decision. The company concluded that a separate electronic publishing division was not currently viable at that time. While iPublish titles remained available for the time being, electronic book sales were moved to other groups within Time Warner Trade Publishing.
In a landmark decision in June, the US Supreme Court ruled 7 - 2 on The New York Times v. Tasini case that publishers must obtain consent for the electronic reproduction of work originally created by freelancers for print. This resulted in thousands of articles being deleted from electronic databases and on the Internet.
After buying ‘exclusive electronic rights’ to around 100 backlist titles by authors such as Kurt Vonnegut, new e-book publisher RosettaBooks was sued by Random House, who claimed that their existing contracts with the authors giving them the right to publish the works in ‘book form’ included digital rights. In July, a federal judge in US District Court in Manhattan ruled against Random House’s request for a preliminary injunction, and the publisher subsequently appealed.
Barnes & Noble Digital debuted on September 11th with an original e-book by Dean Koontz, The Book of Counted Sorrows, but delayed the launch of its other titles until mid-October. Economic fallout from the 9/11 terrorist attacks may also have caused Random House to fold its AtRandom electronic imprint, launched in June 2000.
At the beginning of the year, editor Paula Guran announced that it had become obvious to her that the only way for her weekly electronic newsletter DarkEcho to evolve was ‘for it to head directly into extinction’, which it did. However, after publishing more than 300 issues since 1994, Guran did revive the title occasionally as a once-in-a-while informal newsletter.
Along with co-sponsoring a story contest, Leisure Books began sponsoring original fiction by new and established authors on Brett Savory’s quarterly webzine The Chiaroscuro.
Delirium Books’ website was removed by its host server in November after a complaint about the site’s graphic content. As a result, certain features such as the ‘Gross-Out Tournament’ were moved to another server.
The Spook was a fully downloadable electronic horror magazine in Adobe Acrobat (PDF) format launched in June by publisher/editor Anthony Sapienza. Featuring short fiction, celebrity profiles, reviews, cartoons and poetry, among the featured authors were Ramsey Campbell, Poppy Z. Brite, Dennis Etchison, Damon Knight, John Shirley, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Jonathan Carroll and Joyce Carol Oates. Features included interviews with Neil Gaiman, Jonathan Carroll, actress Linda Blair and artist Alan M. Clark, plus articles on Halloween’s Michael Meyers, the Zodiac Killer, the witchcraft of Shirley Jackson and the truth behind Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion. Ramsey Campbell’s opinion column (originally in Necrofile) began running from the second issue onwards. Because it was sponsored by advertisers, the full-colour monthly magazine was free to readers and received more than 4,000 hits in the first forty-eight hours.
Gothic.net underwent its annual make-over and the $15 subscription entitled readers to get the ‘premium’ short fiction, change the colour scheme, post comments and receive regular updates.
Among the authors whose stories were featured on Ellen Datlow’s Sci.Fiction on SciFi.Com in 2001 were Charles Beaumont, Terry Dowling, Ian R. MacLeod, James P. Blaylock, Geoffrey A. Landis, Lucius Shepard, Gerald Kersh, Glen Hirshberg, Richard Matheson, Pat Cadigan and many others.
After six issues as a print publication, Paul Lockey’s Unhinged, subtitled Disturbing Fiction for Discerning Adults, became a twice-yearly online magazine in May with articles, reviews and fiction by Sean Russell Friend, Mark Howard Jones, Michael Chant, T.M. Gray, Ray Clark and others.
Paul Fry’s Peep Show, published by Short, Scary Tales Publications, featured erotic horror fiction by David J. Schow and others, and more horror stories could be found on John Urbancik’s webzine Dark Fluidity.
The Zone SF, a non-fiction site, went live in mid-September with interviews with Dan Simmons and Simon Clark, and a list of the Top 10 Heavy Metal Albums with SF Themes.
Edited by Sara Creasy,aurealisXpress was a monthly science fiction and fantasy e-bulletin for subscribers to Australia’s twice-yearly Aurealis magazine. The electronic update was issued eleven times a year (except January), and you could subscribe to both magazines by visiting the website and printing off an application form.
Pam Keesey’s Monsterzine.com looked at monster movies and was linked to the related site, BioHorror.com, while Ghoul Britannia was a tribute site for Hammer Films and other Brit horror movies.
Douglas Glegg’s ‘The Infinite Road Diary’ debuted on the Cemetery Danc
e website. While the author travelled across America promoting his new hardcover novel The Infinite with bookshop signings, he updated his electronic diary every few days. Neil Gaiman’s electronic diary was also credited with boosting sales of his latest novel,American Gods.
Stealth Press marked Halloween on its website with a free downloadable PDF e-anthology, All Hallows-e: Halloween Tales from Seven Masters of Terror, compiled by Paula Guran. It featured reprints by such Stealth authors as Ray Bradbury, F. Paul Wilson, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, John Shirley, William F. Nolan, Al Sarrantonio and Peter Straub.
Stealth’s e-freebie page also featured a downloadable e-chapbook of Nolan’s 1967 Playboy short story ‘The Party’, from his new collection Dark Universe, and a sample from Wilson’s novel An Enemy of the State, featuring a new introduction by the author along with the prologue and five chapters.
A follow-up to the previous year’s impressive electronic anthology, Brainbox II: Son of Brainbox, edited with an introduction by Steve Eller, featured contributions from eighteen writers, including Brett A. Savory, Charlee Jacob, Brian A. Hopkins and Mort Castle. Another CD-ROM anthology was Lone Wolf Publications’ Extremes 3: Terror on the High Seas, edited by Brian A. Hopkins and illustrated by Thomas Arensberg.
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The UK print-on-demand publisher House of Stratus, which reissued much of Brian Aldiss’s backlist along with many other titles, ceased trading in June and apparently went into administration in September. Booksellers had apparently complained of late deliveries and poor billing.
After the cancellation ofEnigmatic Tales, editors L.H. Maynard and M.P.N. Sims pretty much recreated their magazine as the first two volumes of the trade paperback anthology series Darkness Rising Volume One: Night’s Soft Pains and Volume Two: Hideous Dreams, from Cosmos Books, an on-demand imprint of Wildside Press. Along with obscure reprints by Howard Jones and Huan Mee introduced by Hugh Lamb, the books included original stories, with notable work from Lynda E. Rucker and Donald Murphy.
Also from Cosmos, Similar Monsters was a decade-spanning collection of fifteen stories (five original) and an afterword by Steve Savile, while City of Saints and Madmen: The Book of Ambergris collected four novellas by Jeff VanderMeer with an introduction by Michael Moorcock.
Dan Clore’s The Unspeakable and Others was a collection of forty-seven Lovecraftian tales and non-fiction pieces, with an introduction by S.T. Joshi. Stephen Mark Rainey’sBalak from Wildside Press was a Lovecraftian novel involving a woman searching for her missing child.
Fluid Mosaic collected thirteen horror stories (one original) by Michael Arnzen. Gemini Rising, Downward to Darkness and Worse Things Waiting were substantially revised versions of Brian McNaughton’s novels Satan’s Love Child (1977),Satan’s Mistress (1978) and Satan’s Seductress (1979), while McNaughton’s Nasty Stories and Even More Nasty Stories collected twenty-five stories (eight original) and twenty-one stories (two original), respectively.
Strange Pleasures was an anthology of fourteen stories edited by Cosmos Books’ Sean Wallace and featuring contributions by Keith Brooke, Adrian Cole, Barrington Bayley, Maynard and Sims, John Grant and others.
Wallace also announced a new imprint, Prime Books, which would include a number of titles originally announced by Imaginary Worlds. These included books by Tim Lebbon, Jeff VanderMeer, Brett Savory and Michael Laimo. Subsequently, Jeff VanderMeer’s Ministry of Whimsy Press became a print-on-demand imprint of Prime.
Edo van Belkom’s Teeth from Meisha Merlin was an erotic police procedural about vagina dentata, introduced by Richard Laymon. From the same publisher, Lee Killough’s Blood Games was the third in the series featuring vampire detective Garreth Mikaelian.
David Nordhaus’s online imprint DarkTales launched the collections Dial Your Dreams & Other Nightmares by Robert Weinberg, Cold Comfort by Nancy Kilpatrick and the eroticSix-Inch Spikes by Edo van Belkom at the Seattle World Horror Convention. Later in the year, the publisher released the novels Soul Temple by Steven Lee Climer, A Flock of Crows is Called a Murder by James Viscosi, and the second volume in the Asylum anthology series, The Violent Ward, edited by Victor Heck and featuring stories by D.F. Lewis, James Dorr, Gerard Houarner and others.
Harlan was a new novel by David Whitman, while The Charm was the first book in the reissued ‘Shaman Cycle’ series of Southwestern supernatural thrillers by Adam Niswander. It was followed by The Serpent Slayers and The Hound Hunters, with more volumes in the projected thirteen-volume series due from DarkTales.
Harry Houdini and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle teamed up to battle dark magic in Harry R. Squires’s print-on-demand novel What Rough Beast.
Published in a signed and numbered 500-copy hardcover by Oregon’s IFD Publishing, Escaping Purgatory: Fables in Words and Pictures by Gary A. Braunbeck and Alan M. Clark contained seven thematically linked stories (five original) and a foreword by Peter Crowther, illustrated throughout by Clark. From the same imprint,Flaming Arrows was a collection of short-short stories by Bruce Holland Rogers, published in both trade paperback and hardcover, with an introduction by Kate Wilhelm. Set in a ridiculously huge typeface, the twenty-seven tales (many of them reprints) were illustrated by Jill Bauman and publisher Clark.
Edited by Elizabeth Engstrom,Imagination Fully Dilated Volume 2 contained twenty-nine stories by such authors as Ramsey Campbell, Poppy Z. Brite and Charles de Lint, based around Alan M. Clark’s artwork. With an introduction by Paula Guran, the hardcover was limited to 600 signed copies from IFD.
Independent Texas imprint Clockwork Storybook was founded in 2001 by a writers’ collective and published nine titles in its first year. These included the trade paperback collection Beneath the Skin and Other Stories, containing six original stories and a somewhat pretentious introduction by Matthew Sturges, and Chris Roberson’s Cybermancy Incorporated, a collection of two stories and two linked novellas introducing modern-day pulp hero Jon Bonaventure Carmody and his associates. The Clockwork Reader was a trade paperback sampler containing work by the above-mentioned authors, along with Mark Finn and Bill Willingham. Hundreds of short stories, novels and sample chapters were also available for free download on the publisher’s website.
William E. Rand’s Painted Demons was a collection of nine linked horror stories available from iUniverse/Writers Club Press. Rand’s That Way Madness Lies and Rita Dimitra’s The Blood Waltz were vampire novels from the same imprint.
Gus Smith’s Feather & Bone was a debut novel from British print-on-demand publisher Big Engine and involved an ancient spirit loose in a Northumberland farming community beset by BSE.
Edited by Forrest J. Ackerman,Rainbow Fantasia: 35 Spectrumatic Tales of Wonder from Sense of Wonder Press featured stories with colours in their titles by Ray Cummings, Robert W. Chambers and others.
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From Subterranean Press, Douglas Clegg’s Naomi was originally published as an online serial novel. About a man pursuing a ghost into the underground world that exists beneath New York City, it was limited to 1,500 signed copies. Clegg’s other novel from Subterranean, Dark of the Eye, involved a woman whose healing powers made her a target for evil forces.
Joe Lansdale’s Zeppelins West was a wild parody of Westerns, alternate universes and pulp stories, involving a cast of historical characters, the Frankenstein Monster and Captain Nemo and his intellectual seal, Ned. Illustrated by Mark A. Nelson, it was available in a signed hardcover edition limited to 1,500 copies with full-colour endpapers.
Ray Garton’s Sex and Violence in Hollywood lived up to its title, while John Shirley’s novel The View from Hell was published in a signed edition of 1,000 copies and a twenty-six-copy lettered edition.
Published as an attractive hardcover limited to 750 signed and numbered copies, Thomas Tessier’s novellaFather Panic’s Opera Macabre concerned a successful historical novelist who stumbled upon a remote Italian farmhouse filled with supernatural secrets. The story was unfortunately marred by some extremely graphic depictions of Naz
i tortures.
Delayed from the previous year, David J. Schow’s collection Eye contained thirteen stories (two original) and a witty afterword by the author, limited to 1,000 signed copies. An extra new story was included in the lettered-state edition.
Edward Bryant’s The Baku: Tales of the Nuclear Age contained a new introduction by the author, three short stories and a previously unpublished teleplay, bought by The Twilight Zone but never produced. It was limited to 500 signed copies and a twenty-six copy lettered edition.
Guilty But Insane was a collection of Poppy Z. Brite’s non-fiction, limited to 2,000 signed hardcover copies with a full-colour dust jacket and autograph page art by J.K. Potter. Brite and Caitlin R. Kiernan each had a new story plus a collaboration in Wrong Things, an attractive hardcover illustrated by Richard Kirk and published in a signed edition of 1,500 copies and a lettered edition.
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