It is doubtful that anybody needed yet another edition of Stephen King’s The Shining but, just in case you did, Cemetery Dance made sure it was packed with extras the deluxe limited edition included a long-lost forty-page prologue, a section on deleted material from the novel, an Introduction by King and an Afterword by Mick Garris, and full-colour illustrations by Don Maitz. All that didn’t come cheap: the 3,000-copy slipcased edition printed in two colours was $95.00, the 750-copy signed by artists Maitz and Glenn Chadbourne cost $275.00, while a fifty-two copy lettered edition of the same “artists edition” would set you back a whopping $1,250.00!
Edited by publisher Robert Morgan, Darkly Haunting was a limited and numbered hardcover anthology from Sarob Press featuring five new ghostly tales by James Doig, Colin Insole, Rhys Hughes, Peter Holman and D.P. Watt. As usual, Paul Lowe supplied the dust-jacket artwork, as he also did for From Ancient Ravens, which collected three new novellas by Mark Valentine, Ron Weighell and John Howard. The numbered and signed edition was limited to just 300 copies.
Tanith by Choice from NewCon Press featured twelve reprint stories by the late Tanith Lee chosen by, amongst others, editor Ian Whates, Storm Constantine, Stephen Jones, Sarah Singleton, Sam Stone, Freda Warrington and Cecelia Dart-Thornton. The book was also available as a 100-copy numbered hardcover.
With Gray Friar Press having ceased operation in 2016, Telos Publishing continued editor Paul Finch’s superior anthology series with Terror Tales from Cornwall. It contained sixteen stories (two reprints) by Mark Morris, Reggie Oliver, Mark Valentine, Kate Farrell, D.P. Watt, Adrian Cole, Mark Samuels, Thana Niveau and others, including the editor himself, along with a number of short folk tales and legends. Neil Williams’ evocative cover illustration perfectly captured the mythological mysteries of England’s most southwest county.
Tales from the Weekend was a slim anthology edited by David J. Howe that contained eight stories (six reprints) by Paul Lewis, Darren Shan, Freda Warrington, Justina L.A. Robson, Sam Stone, Steve Lockley, Simon Morden and the editor himself.
In Paul Lewis’ novella from Telos, Small Ghosts, a recently-widowed journalist returned to his roots and soon found himself investigating an unsolved murder case.
Nights of Blood Wine: Lush Dark Tales of Vampires…and Others collected fifteen stories (four original) by Freda Warrington. The attractive trade paperback was split into two sections, the first containing ten stories set in the author’s popular “Blood Wine” vampire universe, and the second part featuring five other tales, including a tribute to Tanith Lee.
Also from Telos, Cthulhu & Other Monsters was a collection of sixteen stories (six original) by Sam Stone. Just over half the contents were Lovecraft-inspired.
Edited with an Introduction by Mark Valentine for Ireland’s The Swan River Press, The Scarlet Soul: Stories for Dorian Gray was a handsome hardcover anthology of ten original stories inspired by Oscar Wilde’s classic novella by, amongst others, Reggie Oliver, Lynda E. Rucker, John Howard, D.P. Watt and the late Avalon Brantley. Limited to only 300 copies, the volume came with a colour postcard depicting the cover of the issue of Lippincott’s magazine (July, 1890) that contained the first publication of ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’.
In The Greenwood Faun, poet Nina Antonia speculated about what happened to Lucian Taylor’s literary masterpiece after the death of the hallucinated hero of Arthur Machen’s The Hill of Dreams. It was available from German imprint Egaeus Press in a hardcover edition limited to 420 copies.
From the same publisher, Buried Shadows contained ten previously uncollected stories and novellas by John Howard.
Murder Ballads was an anthology of seventeen original stories inspired by the “Penny Dreadfuls” from, amongst others, Alison Littlewood, Helen Marshall, Philip Fracassi, Angela Slatter, Reggie Oliver, Rhys Hughes, Daniel Mills and Lisa L. Hannett. It was limited to 375 copies.
Limited to 250 copies, The Echo of the Sea & Other Strange War Stories was the Egaeus Press Keynote Edition III. It contained four novellas by Paul StJohn Mackintosh, three of them connected to form a loose novel.
The House of Silence by Avalon Brantley was a homage to William Hope Hodgson’s The House on the Borderland from the Zagava imprint. The author tragically died the same month the book was published.
The Prozess Manifestations, the sixth collection from Mark Samuels, contained six linked stories and was limited to 170 numbered hardcover copies from the same publisher.
Zagava also produced the first-ever full facsimile of the first issue (January, 1919) of the German weird magazine Der Orchideengarten: Phantastische Bläter (The Orchid Garden: Fantastic Tales), translated by Helen Grant.
Razor King, David Britton’s latest Absurdist fantasy from Savoy Books, was set against real historical events and influenced by Karl May’s series of German Westerns and Edgar Rice Burroughs’ “Mars” books. The lavishly produced hardcover was illustrated throughout in colour by Kris Guidio.
Looming Low Volume 1: Being an Anthology of Original Weird Fiction was a hefty large-size paperback anthology from Dim Shores edited and introduced by Justin Steele and publisher Sam Cowan. It contained twenty-six stories by, amongst others, Kurt Fawver, Brian Evenson, Daniel Mills, Damien Angelica Walters, Lucy A. Snyder, Simon Strantzas, Lisa L. Hannett, Michael Cisco, Jeffrey Thomas, Richard Gavin and Gemma Files. There was also a deluxe hardcover edition limited to 150 copies.
Centipede Press continued its series of huge retrospective volumes with In the Realms of Mystery and Wonder: Collected Prose, Poems and Artwork by Clark Ashton Smith edited with an Introduction by Scott Conners. It contained many full-colour photographs of Smith’s sculptures, paintings and drawings, along with a number of memoirs of Smith by George F. Haas and others. The oversized hardcover was available in a 300-copy numbered and slipcased edition signed by the editor.
Originally published as an out-of-print limited hardcover by Centipede, JaSunni/Cycatrix Press produced an affordable paperback edition of the collection It Only Comes Out at Night by Dennis Etchison, with the addition of previously uncollected fiction and unpublished appreciations by fellow authors. S.T. Joshi supplied a new Introduction, and there were story notes by the author.
Funded by a Kickstarter campaign, Tales from the Shadow Booth Vol.1 was a rack-sized paperback edited by Dan Coxon and featuring thirteen stories (two reprints) by, amongst others, Alison Moore, Paul Tremblay, Sarah Read, Richard Thomas and Joseph Sale.
From Dark Regions Press, Return of the Old Ones: Apocalyptic Lovecraftian Horror edited by Brian M. Sammons featured nineteen new stories of cosmic horror by, amongst others, Jeffrey Thomas, Lucy A. Snyder, Tim Curran, Pete Rawlik, Sam Gafford, Christine Morgan and Cody Goodfellow, while The Children of Gla’aki: A Tribute to Ramsey Campbell’s Great Old One edited by Sammons and Glynn Owen Barrass contained eighteen stories set around the Severn Valley town of Brichester by Nick Mamatas, Robert M. Price, W.H. Pugmire, Thana Niveau, William Meikle, Tim Waggoner and others, including Campbell himself.
From the same imprint, Nightmare’s Realm: New Tales of the Weird & Fantastic edited by S.T. Joshi featured seventeen original dream-stories by Ramsey Campbell, Gemma Files, Richard Gavin, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Nancy Kilpatrick, John Langan, Reggie Oliver, W.H. Pugmire, Darrell Schweitzer, John Shirley, Simon Strantzas, Steve Rasnic Tem and others, along with reprints from H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe.
Also from Dark Regions Press, Clive Barker’s The Body Book reprinted the stories ‘The Body Politic’ and ‘In the Flesh’, along with exclusive material from Mick Garris’ unproduced movie version of the latter story. It was available in a signed and numbered edition.
Issued by the Dark Regions Press imprint Written Backwards, Adam’s Ladder was a dark science fiction anthology co-edited by Michael Bailey and Darren Speegle that contained eighteen new stories by Chaz Brenchley, Ramsey Campbell, John Langan, Mark Morris, Erin L. Kemper, Lisa Morton, Tim Lebbon, Roberta Lannes, Scott Edelman and Mark Samuels, amongst others.
In July, Christopher Teague announced the closure of his Welsh-based small press horror imprint Pendragon Press, which was established in 1999. Teague cited lifestyle changes as the reason.
Paymon’s Trio, a tale of music and demonology, was originally written in 1949 by Colette de Curzon but remained unpublished until Nicholas Royle’s Nightjar Press put it out as one of the imprint’s short story chapbooks. Other Nightjar releases were The Automaton by David Wheldon, and Bremen and The Unwish by Claire Dean. All Nightjar chapbooks were limited to 200 signed copies.
From California’s Dim Shores imprint came four square-bound chapbooks limited to 200 numbered copies each: Palladium at Night by Christopher Slatsky was illustrated by Dave Felton; The Polite Ones by Cody Goodfellow was illustrated by Marcelo Gallegos; Edward Morris produced the artwork for The Resplendent Troswoman Below by Joseph S. Pulver, Sr., and Gemma Files’ Coffle was illustrated by Stephen Wilson.
Tom Johnstone’s twisted Christmas story How I Learned the Truth About Krampus was the third in the Eibonvale Chapbook Line.
Andy Cox’s Black Static published the usual six bi-monthly issues featuring original fiction by, amongst others, Simon Avery, Mike O’Driscoll, Mark Morris, Helen Marshall, Kristi DeMeester, Rosalie Parker and Ray Cluley, along with regular opinion columns by Lynda E. Rucker and Ralph Robert Moore, film reviews by Gary Couzens, and book reviews by Peter Tennant. Amongst those interviewed were Stephen Volk, Andrew Hook, Richard Chizmar, Gwendolyn Kiste and Daniel Mills. The magazine celebrated its tenth anniversary with issue #60.
Black Static’s sci-fi sister title, Interzone, also turned out six issues. The March-April edition (#269) featured an editorial, new story and an interview with Steve Rasnic Tem, while Andy Hedgecock contributed a personal recollection of Brian W. Aldiss to #272.
Edited by C.C. Finlay, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction reached its sixty-eighth year of publication with its usual six bi-monthly issues featuring original fiction by Rachel Pollack, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Marc Laidlaw, Albert E. Cowdrey, Matthew Hughes, Gardner Dozois, Samuel R. Delany, Michael Swanwick, Kate Wilhelm and Larry Niven, amongst others. David Langford contributed half the ‘Curiosities’ essays along with Mark Esping, Paul Di Filippo and Robert Eldridge, and there were the usual review columns by Charles de Lint, James Sallis, Michelle West, Elizabeth Hand, Kathy Maio, Tim Pratt, Paul Di Filippo and David J. Skal.
John Gilbert’s venerable Fear magazine managed two more bi-monthly print editions early in the year before apparently disappearing back into the ether again. The brace of full-colour issues included interviews with writers Peter James, Susan Hill, David A. Sutton, Tim Lebbon, Adrian Cole, the multi-author nom de plume “Rowan Casey”, Christopher Rice and Stella Gemmell, along with actress Nichelle Nichols and literary agent John Jarrold. David J. Howe contributed some media reviews.
Aaron J. French’s Dark Discoveries included fiction by Brian Lumley, Reggie Oliver, Paul Tremblay, Barbie Wilde and others, along with interviews with Tremblay and Ellen Datlow, plus the usual non-fiction and poetry.
Occult Detective Quarterly was a new, large-size paperback magazine launched via Kickstarter by Electric Pentacle Press. Edited by Sam Gafford, John Linwood Grant and Dave Brzeski, the print-on-demand title featured pastiche fiction from, amongst others, William Meikle, Amanda DeWees, Adrian Cole, Josh Reynolds, T.E. Grau, Brandon Barrows (a “Carnacki” story), Mike Chinn, Tim Waggoner and Brian M. Sammons. There were also articles by Charles Routledge, Danyal Fryer, Bobby Derie and Tim Prasil, and brief interviews with Donald F. Glut and actor Dan Starkey.
Wildside Press’ PoD Weirdbook, edited by Doug Draa, put out four quarterly issues with new stories and poems from Adrian Cole, Franklin Searight, Frederick J. Mayer, Jason Rubis, Paul StJohn Mackintosh, L.J. Dopp, Darrell Schweitzer, John B. Rosenman, Cody Goodfellow, Lucy A. Snyder, K.A. Opperman, Jessica Amanda Salmonson and Kyla Lee Ward, amongst others. Issue #36 was entirely illustrated by Allen Koszowski.
The title also produced its first Weirdbook Annual, devoted to Witches. The same pulp-format as the regular issues, it contained twenty-one stories by Adrian Cole, Paul Dale Anderson, Franklyn Searight and others, along with twelve poems from, amongst others, Lucy A. Snyder, Frederick J. Mayer and K.A. Opperman.
David Longhorn’s PoD magazine Supernatural Tales featured new fiction from Tina Rath, Mark Valentine, Michael Chislett, John Howard, Helen Grant, Paul Lewis, Tom Johnstone and Gary Fry, amongst others, along with a regular reviews column by the editor. Issue #34 included Adam Golaski’s lecture notes on Mark Samuels’ 2012 collection The White Hands and Other Weird Tales.
The British Fantasy Society managed to turn out just one issue of the BFS Journal and two issues of BFS Horizons. While the former included a number of academic articles along with David A. Sutton’s look back at the history of the Society, the latter featured fiction and poetry by Paul Kane, Allen Ashley, Marie O’Regan, Richard Webb, Tim Major, Chris Morgan and others.
The ninth issue of Katushi Makihara’s attractive Japanese digest magazine Night Land Quarterly included fiction by Edward Lucas White, Lisa Tuttle, Angela Slatter, William Meikle, Manly Wade Wellman, Michael Chislett, Robert Aickman and others, including two Japanese authors, along with art, essays and interviews.
Finnish Weird 4: Call of the Weird was published in English by the Helsinki Science Fiction Society and included short stories by Magdalena Hai and J.S. Meresmaa, along with a novel excerpt by Viivi Hyvönen and interviews with the three authors by Anne Leinonen.
The December 10 issue of The New York Times Magazine featured ‘The Year in Horror’, which was nowhere near as interesting as it sounded and mostly consisted of ten performers (including Andy Serkis, Cynthia Nixon, Daniel Kaluuya, Jake Gyllenhaal and Nicole Kidman) in slightly spooky photographs.
Actors Mark Gatiss, Steve Pemberton, Jeremy Dyson and Reece Shearsmith wrote ‘The League of Gentleman’s Christmas Ghost Story’ for the December 16-22 issue of Radio Times.
The Canadian media magazine Rue Morgue included interviews with actors James McAvoy, Bill Skarsgård and Doug Bradley, directors Colm McCarthy, M. Night Shyamalan, Paul W.S. Anderson, Julia Ducournau, Jordan Peele, John Hough, Gary Sherman, Clive Barker and Franck Khalfoun, and producers Jason Blum, Roger Corman and Bruan Fuller. The 20th anniversary annual Halloween double issue was devoted to “A Century of Witches”.
The British Scream, which debuted back in 2010, billed itself as “The World’s No.1 Horror Magazine”, which may be true. Edited by Richard Cooper, the colour glossy contained much of the same kind of material to be found in Rue Morgue. The 100-page Hallowe’en edition (#45) featured retrospective looks at British witchcraft movies, A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, the legacy of Leatherface, horror movies released in the first half of 2014, Hammer’s The Revenge of Frankenstein and DC’s Vertigo imprint, alongside interviews with a number of current film-makers and some mostly negative reviews of the latest book and DVD releases.
Having announced that they would no longer be publishing print editions of the magazine, Tim and Donna Lucas managed to squeeze out a final “Farewell Issue” of Video WatcHDog thanks to the generosity of several supporters (including Martin Scorsese). The 184th edition featured a number of apparently left-over reviews, along with columns by Ramsey Campbell, Douglas E. Winter and Larry Blamire, and the conclusion of John-Paul Checkett’s in-depth look at movies based on or inspired by J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s ‘Carmilla’.
Classic Images reached its 500th issue in February. The monthly newsprint included fascinating feature articles on the restorations of The Old Dark House (1932) and The Vampire Bat (1933), Universal’s sound serials, and veteran actors George Zucco (‘Hollywood Madman’) an
d Robert Shayne, along with interviews with B-movie performers Jan England and Robert Clarke. Tom Weaver’s column ‘The Sci-Fi Stalwarts’ shone the spotlight on Jeff Morrow, Barbara Rush, Marshall Thompson, Mara Corday and John Agar amongst others, while Dr. Robert J. Kiss contributed a terrific meditation on Boris Karloff’s involvement with NBC-TV’s Thriller series (1960-62). The magazine also got a long-overdue design update.
Entertainment Weekly issued a special Halloween double issue that included “Untold Stories” about such movies and TV series as The Stepford Wives, The Night Stalker, Little Shop of Horrors (1986), The Craft, Hocus Pocus, Shaun of the Dead, Supernatural, Psych, Hannibal, Black Mirror and other titles, along with a brief interview with Neil Gaiman.
The monthly Locus featured interviews with, amongst others, Jane Yolen, John Joseph Adams, Paul Tremblay and Matt Ruff. The April issue was an artist spotlight on Kinuko Y. Craft and other illustrators.
The two issues of Rosemary Pardoe’s The Ghosts & Scholars M.R. James Newsletter featured the usual mixture of news, non-fiction, stories and reviews. Issue #31 included a story by C.E. Ward, while the following issue not only featured a brief interview with M.R. James from 1923, which had probably never been reprinted before, but also a bonus chapbook of Daniel McGachey’s story Ting-a-Ling-a-Ling, published under the Haunted Library imprint.
The two issues of Hildy Silverman’s Space and Time: The Magazine of Fantasy, Horror, and Science Fiction featured the expected mix of fiction and poetry by Scott Edelman, Thomas Canfield, Larry Hodges, Paul Michael Anderson, Gordon Linzner, Jill Bauman and others, along with a couple of author self-portrait articles and poetry reviews by Linda D. Addison.
The first issue of Steve Dillon’s annual Trickster’s Treats: Tales from the Pumpkin Patch appeared in time for Halloween. It was split into six themes and featured thirty-two short short stories (two reprints) by Theresa Derwin and others, including three by the editor.
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