The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 17

by Stephen Jones

  F. Paul Wilson’s Infernal was the ninth in the “Repairman Jack” series, while James Herbert’s The Legend of Crickley Hall was described as a new spin on the ghost story.

  In David Morrell’s new novel Creepers, a group of urban explorers broke into a run-down hotel awaiting demolition and uncovered a festering evil.

  The agents of Chaos attempted to lure a woman carrying a very special child back to a bizarre dreamland of the dead in Jonathan Carroll’s witty new novel, Glass Soup, a sequel to the author’s White Apples.

  Child of Darkness was the third in the “Gemini” series credited to the long-deceased “V. C. Andrews”®, while April Shadows was the first volume in a new Gothic series. The author was still probably Andrew Neiderman, whose own novel The Hunted was about a killer stalking hunters in the woods.

  When a comedian’s son was killed by terrorists, he uncovered a darker mystery in Innocent Blood by Graham Masterton. A deaf social worker helped the police in Masterton’s Unspeakable, while Darkroom was the sixth volume in the author’s “Jim Rook” series. Manitou Blood was the busy Masterton’s fourth novel about the evil shaman Misquamacus, who turned his victims into vampires by spreading a plague through New York.

  In Lisa Turtle’s The Mysteries, a private investigator looking for a missing woman found himself involved in ancient Celtic myths and folklore in the Scottish Highlands.

  In her seventh mystery, parish priest Merrily Watkins was called in by the police to investigate sightings of a dead boy in Phil Rickman’s The Smile of a Ghost.

  Dance of Death by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child was a sequel to Brimstone and featured characters from the authors’ other series of books.

  Blood of Angels was the third in Michael Marshall (Smith)’s loosely connected trilogy of serial-killer novels featuring the sinister Straw Men organisation.

  A number of old foes also turned up in The Black Angel, the latest “Charlie Parker” novel by John Connolly, in which an abduction of the streets of New York involved the private detective in a centuries-old supernatural mystery.

  A strange piece of graffiti on the window of a London restaurant led to a series of gruesome murders, the mysterious Nomads’ Club, the rituals of a lost tribe and a secret history of espionage and mind-altering patterns in Paul McAuley’s latest thriller Mind’s Eye, which had its roots amidst the chaos of post-war Iraq.

  Dead Simple was the first novel in a new mystery series by Peter James featuring Detective Superintendent Roy Grace. The horrific death of a missing groom’s four friends pitted the loner policeman against a sadistic killer.

  Reputedly completed by Dean Koontz, The Glory Bus (aka Into the Fire) was the latest posthumous new novel from Richard Laymon, about a group of disparate and desperate characters on a journey into the dark heart of the Mojave Desert. In the UK, Headline Books began reissuing Laymon’s earlier novels in double omnibus editions beginning with The Beast House/After Midnight.

  Graham Joyce’s The Limits of Enchantment was set in the 1960s and was about a young woman who might have been a witch.

  A sequel to the acclaimed A Choir of Ill Children, Tom Piccirilli’s November Mourns was about a former convict investigating his teenage sister’s mysterious death who was haunted by ghostly visions.

  In Christopher Golden’s atmospheric Wildwood Road, a man found himself looking for an enigmatic ghost-child while trying to recover the woman he loved. The ever-busy Golden also collaborated with Thomas E. Sniegoski on Tears of the Furies, the second novel of “The Menagerie”, whose members investigated people being turned into stone in and around Athens. In collaboration with actress Amber Benson (Buffy the Vampire Slayer), Golden also wrote Ghosts of Albion: Accursed, a Victorian supernatural novel based on the animated BBC Internet serial.

  A series of covert tests released the ghosts of psychiatric patients and caused a twelve-year-old boy to unleash his latent psychic powers in Scott Nicholson’s latest Appalachian Gothic thriller, The Home.

  Joseph Nassise’s Heretic was the first volume in a new dark fantasy series, “The Templar Chronicles”, as the Vatican’s last defence in the war between good and evil took on a cabal of necromancers searching for a lost holy relic. The book was subsequently podcast free over thirty weekly audio episodes read by the author, sponsored by The Horror Channel and The Podcast Network.

  Under the Leisure imprint, a man was drawn by his repressed memories into the mysteries of his past in Tim Waggoner’s Like Death, while a disturbed young man moved into a very strange apartment in Tim Lebbon’s Desolation.

  In The Reckoning by British writer Sarah Pinborough, a group of old friends relived the nightmare of a summer twenty years before, as an evil influence spread out from an old house to infect the small town they grew up in.

  Evil was also spreading out from an old mansion in The Abandoned by Douglas Glegg, and people started going through bizarre changes in James A. Moore’s Rabid Growth.

  A man plagued with visions consulted an occult expert in Michael Laimo’s The Demonologist, a stolen gold coin carried a gypsy curse in Grave Intent by Deborah LeBlanc, and an Italian teenager became a vampire in nineteenth-century Paris in Jemiah Jefferson’s Fiend.

  Thomas Tessier’s Finishing Touches combined the title novel with the novella “Father Panic’s Opera Macabre”.

  Mistress of the Dark was the latest novel from Sèphera Girón, Flesh Gothic and The Backwoods were two new novels by Edward Lee, and Simon Clark’s The Tower was yet another haunted house tale.

  Stephen Laws’ 1993 vampire novel Gideon was reissued by Leisure as Fear Me, and the imprint also reprinted City of the Dead by Brian Keene, Come Out Tonight by Richard Laymon and The Girl Next Door by Jack Ketchum (Dallas Mayr), the latter adding a new author’s note and two stories (one original).

  Christine Feehan’s Night Game was about the GhostWalkers, a Special Forces squad called in to fight the paranormal.

  The Smiling Affair by Jeremy Sheldon featured paranormal investigator Jay Richards, while Lee Killough’s Killer Karma was about a ghostly detective.

  John Taylor investigated the origins of the Nightside and discovered a clue to his missing mother in Simon R. Green’s Hex and the City.

  The Good, the Bad, and the Undead by Kim Harrison (Dawn Cook) was a humorous sequel to the author’s Dead Witch Walking. It was followed by Every Which Way But Dead featuring the same witchy private investigator.

  Renegade witch Eve Levine was sent back from the afterworld to battle evil in Kelley Armstrong’s Haunted, and Jack the Ripper stalked a virtual theme park recreation of nineteenth-century London in Hervé Jubert’s Dance of the Assassins.

  Better Read Than Dead and A Vision of Murder were the second and third books in Victoria Laurie’s “Psychic Eye” series featuring psychic Abby Cooper, while violet-eyed empath Natalie Lindstrom unearthed a cursed treasure in Peru that led to murder in Golden Blood, the third volume in the series by Stephen Woodworth.

  Charlaine Harris’ Grave Sight was the first in a new series about Harper Connelly, who found the bodies of dead people by talking to them, and a couple could sense the dead in T. G. Arsenault’s Forgotten Souls.

  If Angels Burn and Private Demon were the first and second volumes in the “Darkyn” paranormal series by “Lynn Viehl” (Sheila Kelly, who also writes under a number of other pseudonyms).

  A psychic child tracked down a secret society of cannibals in The Epicure, and a small Pennsylvania town was gripped by evil in Ashes, both by “H. R. Howland” (Holly Newstein and Ralph W. Bieber II).

  Set in the 1950s, John Farris’ Phantom Nights featured a mute boy haunted by the raped and murdered nurse who befriended him.

  A recently released mental patient confronted a supernatural evil in T.M. Gray’s Ghosts of Eden.

  Steel Ghosts by Michael Paine (John Michael Curlovich) was set in an abandoned Pennsylvanian steel mill, and Nora Roberts’ ghostly novels Black Rose and Red Lily were the second and third volumes in the “In the Garden�
� series.

  A music festival was held at a haunted house in Matty Groves by Deborah Grabien, the third volume in the “Haunted Ballard” series based on traditional folk songs, while an up-and-coming singer found she was being haunted in Tananarive Due’s Joplin’s Ghost.

  The ghostly Aunt Dimity was consigned to the sidelines in Aunt Dimity and the Next of Kin, the tenth volume in the “cozy” mystery series by Nancy Atherton, while Innocence by Kathleen Tessaro was another ghost novel.

  A pregnant woman believed she was carrying the spirit of a murder victim in The Unwelcome Child by Terese Pampellonne, and a paediatrician’s miracle cure had an unforeseen side-effect in James M. Thompson’s Dark Moon Rising.

  Dying of cancer, loser Tommy O’Brien still had time for one more horrific mistake in Brian Keene’s Terminal, a letter-writing job turned into a nightmare in Bentley Little’s Dispatch, and a woman searched for her long-lost grandfather in Christopher Nicole’s The Falls of Death.

  A mystery writer encountered a strange woman in Within the Shadows by Brandon Massey, a deaf and blind boy could hear whispers of evil in Chandler McGrew’s In Shadows, and a group of old college friends faced off against something nasty in Craig Spector’s Underground,

  Originally published in Japan in 1998, Koji Suzuki’s Loop (Rapu) was the third and final book in “The Ring” trilogy, translated by Glynne Walley.

  A seaside town was plagued by a mysterious disease and strange creatures in The Town That Forgot How to Breathe by Kenneth J. Harvey, while a palaeontologist uncovered a fossil older than the Earth in Robert Masello’s Vigil.

  The new proprietors of a seaside inn discovered that local disappearances were linked to the legend of a century-old creature prowling the Atlantic coast in Chris Blaine’s Drowned Night: A Novel of the Abbadon Inn, the third book in the series after Twisted Branch and Dark Whispers. “Blaine” was a house name for, amongst others, Matthew Costello and Craig Shaw Gardner.

  Twisted Souls was the latest novel by Shaun Hutson, while Follow was written by Rick Hautala and published under the pen name “A. J. Matthews”.

  Mark Wm. Simmons’ Habeas Corpses was the third novel in the humorous series that began with One Foot in the Grave.

  Jewell Parker Rhodes’ mystery Voodoo Season, a sequel to Voodoo Dreams, once again featured the great great granddaughter of voodoo queen Marie Laveau.

  Suspense and Sensibility or, First Impressions Revisited was the second volume in Carrie Bebris’ series featuring Jane Austen’s Mr and Mrs Darcy investigating the supernatural.

  In Ann Lawrence’s dark romance Do You Believe?, a woman searched for her missing sister with the help of a horror writer. A biographer discovered that her subject, Lord Byron, was still alive in Melanie Jackson’s supernatural romance Divine Fire, and Carved in Stone was the first volume in Vickie Taylor’s paranormal romance series about shape-shifting gargoyle Nathan Cross.

  Day of the Dead was an erotic supernatural novel set in Mexico and featuring Vivid adult movie star “Mercedez” as the main character. Author “Desirée Knight” turned out to be Nancy Kilpatrick.

  A strange book from her father’s library led a young girl to investigate the secret history of Vlad the Impaler in The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova. Publisher Little, Brown reportedly bought the debut novel for $2 million and, predictably, the 642-page volume quickly sold to the movies after being on the US best-seller lists for eighteen weeks

  Tim Lucas’ clever and meticulously researched The Book of Renfield: A Gospel of Dracula was an alternate version of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, as seen through the eyes of the fly-eating madman, R. M. Renfield.

  Octavia E. Butler’s Fledgling was about amnesiac Shori Matthews, the survivor of a death squad massacre who discovered that she was a vampire genetically modified to survive in sunlight.

  Set during the Inquisition, State of Grace was the eighteenth volume in Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s popular historical series about vampire Count Saint-Germain.

  The Priest of Blood was the first volume in Douglas Clegg’s new trilogy “The Vampyricon”, in which mediaeval warrior Aleric discovered his destiny in a pagan temple in the Holy Land. An extract from the book appeared in a free sampler from Penguin’s Ace and Roc imprints, containing excerpts from seven novels by different authors.

  A witch and a vampire teamed up to protect musicians and their fans from a psychic soul-sucker in Children of the Night by Mercedes Lackey, Already Dead introduced Charles Huston’s vampire investigator Joe Pitt, and Liz Maverick’s Crimson City was the first in a series set in a Los Angeles overrun by vampires.

  Pale Death by David Thurlo and Aimée Thurlo was the third book featuring Native American Nightwalker police officer Lee Nez.

  The alien Reapers were confronted by pockets of resistance in E. E. Knight’s Tale of the Thunderbolt and Valentine’s Rising, the third and fourth volumes in “The Vampire Earth” SF series, and The Bitten and The Forbidden were the fourth and fifth volumes in the “Vampire Huntress Legends” series by “L. A. Banks” (Leslie Esdale Banks).

  The vampiric Marquis de Sade was not the only one leaving bodies drained of blood in Mary Ann Michell’s In the Name of the Vampire.

  Seize the Night, Sins of the Night and Unleash the Night were the sixth, seventh and eighth volumes in the “Were-Hunters” and “Dark-Hunters” series by Sherrilyn Kenyon (aka “Kinley MacGregor”).

  A vampire stole a woman’s memory in Be Mine Forever by Rosemary Laurey. Savannah Russe’s Beyond the Pale was the first book of “The Darkwind Chronicles” introducing vampire spy Daphne Urban, and Bite Club was a gay debut novel by Hal Bodner, set in West Hollywood. All three titles were published in hardcover by the Science Fiction Book Club.

  Chicago wizard Harry Dresden was being blackmailed by a vampire and searching for a dangerous book of magic in Dead Beat by Jim Butcher, the seventh book in the “Dresden Files” series, and vampire detective Jack Fleming found himself working for the mob in P. N. Elrod’s Song in the Dark, the eleventh volume in “The Vampire Files”.

  Containing a new Introduction by the author, The Vampire Genevieve was a hefty omnibus volume that also included the novels Drachenfels, Genevieve Undead, Beasts in Velvet and Silver Nails by Kim Newman writing as “Jack Yeovil”.

  Nancy Collins’ 1995 “Sonja Blue” novel Paint It Black was reissued as a single volume by Two Wolf Press. The book also included a preview of the author’s new werewolf novel, Wild Blood.

  British imprint Orbit released Quick Bites: Fiction to Sink Your Teeth Into as a free paperback sampler containing vampire novel extracts by Laurell K. Hamilton, Kelley Armstrong, Charlene Harris, Tanya Huff, and Barb and J. C. Hendee.

  In her fifth humorous Southern mystery, waitress Sookie Stack-house was surrounded by supernatural suitors while investigating a killer of were-creatures in Dead as a Doorbell by Charlaine Harris. Dead by Day was an omnibus of the author’s latest novel and Dead to the World, published by the Science Fiction Book Club. Television rights to the series were sold to HBO.

  A woman’s Christmas was spoiled when she turned into a vampire and received death threats from a fairy in The Midnight Work by Kassandra Sims, and vampire and werewolf buddies helped a restaurant owner with her zombie problem in A. Lee Martinez’s humorous Gil’s All Fright Diner.

  In Tanya Huff’s Smoke and Mirrors, the second volume in the series about TV researcher Tony Foster, the cast and crew of a vampire-detective show were trapped inside a real haunted house.

  How to Marry a Millionaire Vampire was a humorous romance novel by Kerelyn Sparks about a female dentist and a vampire who had lost his fangs, while a fledgling bloodsucker got advice from a suicidal vampire in Bitten & Smitten by Michelle Rowen.

  Susan Sizemore’s I Hunger for You was the third volume in the vampire romance series that began with I Burn for You and I Thirst for You. All three novels were collected in the omnibus Crave the Night.

  Undead and Unappreciated by MaryJanice Davidson was the third volum
e in the chick-lit vampire series featuring queen of the vampires Betsy Taylor, who discovered that her illegitimate daughter may be the spawn of Satan. In the fourth volume, Undead and Unreturnable, Betsy’s Christmas and forthcoming wedding were disrupted by a serial killer. Betsy the Vampire Queen was an omnibus from SFBC that reprinted all four novels.

  Dark Secret was the latest volume in Christine Feehan’s “Carpathian” series of novels. A vampire fell in love with a human in Fangs for the Memories by Kathy Love, and other vampire romances included Night’s Kiss by Amanda Ashley (Madeline Baker) and Sex, Lies and Vampires by Katie MacAlister (aka “Katie Maxwell”), while Waltz with a Vampire by Maggie MacKeever was a Regency romance.

  Despite its title, The Remarkable Miss Frankenstein by Minda Webber was yet another vampire romance novel, featuring the niece of the notorious doctor. The author followed it with The Reluctant Miss Van Helsing, in which the heroine fell in love with a vampire.

  Two by Twilight was an omnibus collection of two novels in Maggie Shayne’s “Wings in the Night” series, Run from Twilight and Twilight Vows.

  The vampire romance anthology Bite contained another “Anita Blake” story by Laurell K. Hamilton, a “Sookie Stackhouse” tale by Charlaine Harris and a “Betsy Taylor, Queen of the Vampires” story by MaryJanice Davidson, along with an Arthurian tale by Angela Knight and a story by romance writer Vickie Taylor.

  MaryJanice Davidson’s Derik’s Bane was the first volume in the “Wyndham Werewolf” romance series about shape-shifter Derik Gardner, who was assigned to kill a nurse who turned out to be a reincarnation of Morgan Le Fay.

  Carrie Vaughn’s debut novel, Kitty and the Midnight Hour, introduced werewolf radio talk show host Kitty Norvill, who discovered that her show about the paranormal was popular with depressed supernatural creatures.

  A female werewolf and a sidhe warrior teamed up to battle a vampire in Angela Knight’s Master of the Moon, and Moon’s Web was a werewolf romance novel by C. T. Adams and Cathy Clamp.