Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s Darker Jewels and Better in the Dark were both in her historical “Saint-Germain” series, set in the court of Ivan the Terrible and the Dark Ages respectively. Tanith Lee’s Personal Darkness was the second volume in her “Blood Opera” sequence and a sequel to Dark Dance.
P.N. Elrod followed up her series The Vampire Files with Red Death, the first in a new series set during the American Revolution. In Laurell K. Hamilton’s Guilty Pleasures vampire hunter Anita Blake, also known as The Executioner, was hired by the undead to hunt down a serial killer depleting their ranks in an alternate New Orleans.
Some Things Never Die by Robert Morgan was the second volume featuring private investigator Teddy London on the trail of killer vampires in New York City, while Blood Pact by Tanya Huff was the fourth book in her series featuring private investigator Vicky Nelson and her vampire partner Henry Fitzroy, this time involved with a Frankenstein-like mad scientist.
Making Love by Melanie Tem and Nancy Holder was an erotic reworking of the Frankenstein story, while Sophie Galleymore Bird explored a similar concept in Maneater, about the creation of a “perfect” woman. In another variation on the theme, Michael Blumlein’s gender-swapping novel X, Y, concerned a man who found himself in a woman’s body.
Another horror icon received the splatterpunk treatment in Animals, a novel about shapechangers and apparently the final collaboration between John Skipp and Craig Spector. The Community by Ben Leech (aka Stephen Bowkett) featured the inhuman Kin living among mankind, and there were more immortal shapeshifters in The Others by D.M. Wind.
Children of the End by Mark A. Clements was about a race of genetically-created lycanthropes, and Moonrunner: Gathering Darkness by Jane Toombs was the second book in a series about a family of shapeshifters. For a change there were also Embrace of the Wolf by Pat Franklin and Wild Blood by Nancy A. Collins, while The Werewolf’s Kiss and The Werewolf’s Touch by Cheri Scotch were both romances set in the Louisiana bayous.
Proving that horror was still not the moribund genre most people predicted, a wealth of debut novels appeared in 1993 by both newcomers and more experienced hands: Richard Christian Matheson’s eagerly awaited first full-length work, Created By, skilfully blended the author’s knowledge of Hollywood and the television industry with his proven skill as a horror writer. It also came with some of the most impressive quotes of the year (including Clive Barker, William Friedkin and NBC-TV’s Brandon Tartikoff). Another book laden down with a remarkable number of quotes was Wet Work by Philip Nutman, however this expansion of an impressive short story about the walking dead didn’t really live up to its hype.
Much more promising novel debuts were Nina Kiriki Hoffman’s The Thread That Binds the Bones, about a family of witches, and Elisa DeCarlos The Devil You Say, an enjoyable P.G. Wodehousean-type spoof about psychic detective Aubrey Arbuthnot and his faithful manservant Hornchurch. An equally entertaining prequel, Strong Spirits, followed.
The first in a series, Knights of the Blood was an enjoyable romp mixing crusader vampires, undead Nazis and contemporary serial killings, created by Katherine Kurtz and written by her husband Scott MacMillan. Gail Petersen’s The Making of a Monster featured a rock star vampire in modern Los Angeles, while The Vampire Legacy: Blood Secrets by Karen E. Taylor was the first book in new series about a vampire fashion designer.
Other first novels included The Living One by Lewis Gannett, Rapid Growth by Mary L. Hanner, Night Sisters by John Pritchard, Imp by Michael Scott, and John Boston’s Naked Came the Sasquatch which was described as a cross between television’s Northern Exposure and Twin Peaks.
The Unfinished by the late Jay B. Laws was a gay horror novel consisting of three stories and a framing device set in a haunted house in San Francisco. Another gay novel, John L. Myers’ Holy Family, about demonic possession and ghosts, was the winner of the Lambda Rising First-Novel Contest. Robert Wise’s Midnight was billed as a Christian horror novel.
In 1993, the burgeoning Young Adult horror fiction market almost doubled, accounting for nearly twice as many titles as the adult horror market. In turn, vampire novels apparently contributed to around 18 per cent of the YA total.
The undisputed stars of teenage horror remained Christopher Pike and R.L. Stine (with a reported 8 million and 7.5 million books in print, respectively). Amongst a slew of reprints, Pike’s new novels included Road to Nowhere, The Eternal Enemy, The Immortal, and The Wicked Heart. Stine published The Dead Girl Friend and a new trilogy entitled The Fear Street Saga (1: The Betrayal; 2: The Secret; 3: The Burning) detailing the background to one of his most popular series.
Ghostly fiction was well represented with A Ghost Waiting and A Box of Tricks by Hugh Scott, The Ghosts of Mercy Manor by Betty Ren Wright, The Summer of the Haunting by William Corlett, Summer Lightning by Wendy Corsi Staub, Acquainted With the Night by Sollace Hotze, and A Taste of Smoke by Marion Dane Bauer.
Other teen terror titles included The Wheatstone Pond by the late Robert Westall, Game Over by Joseph Locke (aka Ray Garton), Sweet Sixteen and Never Been Killed by Richard Posner, Somebody Help Me by Beverly Hastings, The Dead Hour by Pete Johnson, Call of the Deep by Linda Piazza, The Phantom by Barbara Steiner, The Initiation by Dian Curtis Regan and The Stranger by Caroline B. Cooney.
Cooney also published The Vampire’s Promise, while Angela Sommer-Bodenburg’s The Vampire in Love was translated from the original German by Sarah Gibson. Bad Blood by Debra Doyle and James D. MacDonald concerned a werewolf on a camping trip, and Children of the Night: Dark Dreams by Ann Hodgman was the first book in a series about a young girl who turns into a lycanthrope.
Series fiction was the Big Thing in YA publishing, and there were plenty of examples to keep the voracious readership happy: eight volumes of The Nightmare Club appeared by such authors as Richard Lee Byers, Rick Baron, Vincent Courtney, and Bruce Richards. T.S. Rue contributed Room 13, The Pool and The Attic to the Nightmare Inn series, and Diane Hoh’s new Nightmare Hall series included The Silent Scream, Deadly Attraction, The Wish, and The Scream Team.
Other new series included Haunted: You Can Never Go Home Anymore by Dyan Sheldon and three volumes of Dark Moon Legacy by romance writer Cynthia Blair. Charles L. Grant continued his Midnight Place series with two novels under the “Simon Lake” psuedonym (Death Cycle and He Told Me To), Michael August and Jo Gibson contributed to five more volumes in the loosely-connected Scream series, Jesse Harris added volumes seven and eight to The Power series (The Vampire’s Kiss and The Obsession), and Terror Academy: Night School by Nicholas Pine was the seventh book in that particular series.
Besides publishing a Star Trek The Next Generation novelization and two YA horror novels, Talons and Shattered, the prolific John Peel also launched another new series entitled Shockers featuring teens involved with aliens (Alien Prey), demonic killer wolves (Blood Wolf), a dream killer (Grave Doubts), and of course the ubiquitous vampire (Night Wings). Each volume had an initial print run of 50,000 copies.
Among those authors shying away from the genre appellation was Patrick McGrath, whose bizarre novel set in World War II Britain, Dr Haggard’s Disease, was as usual classified under the evasive “New Gothic” nomenclature. Jonathan Carroll and his publishers also went out of their way to distance his latest novel After Silence from the genre, despite its theme of realistic horror.
Bradley Denton’s acclaimed novel Blackburn was about the exploits of the titular psycho-killer in contemporary America, while In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead by James Lee Burke featured the author’s New Orleans detective Dave Robichaux solving a murder with help from a ghost.
Peter Ackroyd’s latest, The House of Doctor Dee, was also a ghost story, as was The Vanishment by Jonathan Aycliffe (aka Denis MacEoin/“Daniel Easterman”), published as part of the boxed set Here Lie Three Tales That Will Never Die. A.S. Byatt’s Angels & Insects was a collection of two novellas, one of which was a ghost story, and The Oracle at Stoneleigh Court by Peter Taylor co
ntained eleven stories and three one-act plays, mostly about the supernatural.
Voodoo Dreams by Jewell Parker Rhodes was an historical novel about New Orleans voodoo queen Marie Laveau, John Whitbourn’s episodic novel Popes and Phantoms was set in an alternate Renaissance Italy peopled by animated corpses, while Mrs de Winter was Susan Hill’s belated sequel to Daphne du Maurier’s classic Rebecca.
The List of 7 was a first novel by Mark Frost (co-creator of television’s Twin Peaks) in which Sir Arthur Conan Doyle teamed up with the inspiration for his famous fictional detective to battle the Dark Brotherhood, a satanic secret society planning world domination. Screenwriter/director Nicholas Meyer used his third Sherlock Holmes pastiche, The Canary Trainer, to pit the great detective against the Phantom of the Paris Opera. As usual it featured cameos by historical figures, including Gaston Leroux, Degas and Sigmund Freud.
1993 was also a year to re-appraise some of the classics of the field: Leonard Wolf offered both The Essential Dracula and The Essential Frankenstein, two newly annotated editions of the novels by Bram Stoker and Mary W. Shelley.
Dracula: The Ultimate Illustrated Edition of the World Famous Vampire Play collected together the two stage versions of Stoker’s novel – by Hamilton Deane, and Deane and John L. Balderston – edited and annotated by David J. Skal. Robert M. Philmus edited and introduced The Island of Dr Moreau: A Variorum Text by H.G. Wells, which included manuscript deviations and two essays by Wells.
Elaine Bergstrom and P.N. Elrod both contributed to the adventures of vampire Count Strahd Von Zarovich with Ravenloft: Tapestry of Dark Souls and Ravenloft: I, Strahd respectively, based on the dark fantasy game from TSR. And from Games Workshop came Warhammer: Genevieve Undead by Jack Yeovil (aka Kim Newman), which included three novellas featuring the vampire character first introduced in the same author’s Drachenfels.
In the Fog edited by Charles L. Grant was subtitled The Last Chronicle of Greystone Bay, the fourth in the shared-world series, and Mary Gentle and Roz Kaveney edited The Weerde: Book 2, a shared-world anthology about a secret society of shapechangers.
The Aliens series of novelizations, based on the movie series from Twentieth Century Fox and the Dark Horse graphic novels, continued with Nightmare Asylum by Steve Perry, The Female War by Steve Perry and Stephani Perry, and Genocide by David Bischoff. Todd Strasser’s Addams Family Values was another movie tie in.
The big Stephen King book of the year was Nightmares & Dreamscapes, with a first printing of 1.5 million copies. The 800-page volume collected together twenty stories and various associational material.
Lovedeath by Dan Simmons was subtitled Five Tales of Love and Death, only two of which were really horror. No such problem with Alone With the Horrors, an Arkham House retrospective of Ramsey Campbell’s thirty year career, containing thirty-nine stories and beautifully illustrated by J.K. Potter. Strange Things and Stranger Places was another Campbell collection, containing ten stories and including the first US publication of his novella “Needing Ghosts”.
Fruiting Bodies and Other Fungi by Brian Lumley collected thirteen tales of the macabre, while Thomas Ligotti’s Noctuary contained seven stories, a new novella, an introductory essay, and nineteen vignettes.
Garry Kilworth published two collections, In the Country of the Tattooed Men and Hogfoot Right and Bird-Hands, both containing some horror material, the latter introduced by Robert Holdstock. Tanith Lee’s Nightshades was subtitled Thirteen Journeys Into Shadow, while Bestsellers Guaranteed by Joe R. Lansdale was an omnibus volume of sixteen stories, revised from his 1991 Pulphouse collection Stories By Mama Lansdale’s Youngest Boy.
In the Young Adult market, Demons and Shadows: The Ghostly Best of Robert Westall was the first of two very welcome volumes containing eleven tales. Joan Aiken’s A Creepy Company collected the same number of stories, while Night Terrors by Jim Murphy contained twelve tales narrated by a sinister gravedigger. Darkness Creeping by Neal Shusterman consisted of eight stories and two poems, and Bruce Coville’s Book of Monsters: Tales to Give You the Creeps offered a baker’s dozen of YA shorts.
Martin H. Greenberg, the reigning king of the anthology market, was as prolific as ever during 1993. He solo edited Frankenstein: The Monster Wakes and teamed up with Ed Gorman for Predators, Carol Serling for Journeys Into the Twilight Zone, Mike Resnick for Christmas Ghosts, Charles G. Waugh for Lighthouse Horrors, Robert Weinberg and Stefan R. Dziemianowicz for The Mists from Beyond, and Richard Gilliam and Edward E. Kramer for Confederacy of the Dead. Although his name didn’t appear on the covers, Greenberg was also involved with Robert Bloch’s Monsters In Our Midst, a follow-up to the editors’ earlier Psycho-Paths, and Ramsey Campbell’s Deathport, the latest in a series of anthologies from the Horror Writers Association, featuring twenty-eight stories set in an airport built over a cursed Indian burial ground.
Veteran anthologist Peter Haining returned to the genre with The Television Late Night Horror Omnibus containing thirty-two stories used as the basis for late-night horror shows on television, while Richard Dalby’s Vampire Stories included eighteen tales of the undead plus an introduction by Peter Cushing.
Pam Keesey edited Daughters of Darkness: Lesbian Vampire Stories, Michelle Slung followed up her bestselling 1991 anthology I Shudder At Your Touch with Shudder Again, and Hottest Blood edited by Jeff Gelb and Michael Garrett continued the series presenting “the ultimate in erotic horror”. Dark Seductions edited by Alice Alfonsi and John Scognamiglio attempted to cover similar ground, and from the same publisher, Zebra, came Spellbound Kisses, an anonymous anthology of four romantic novellas.
The Mammoth Book of Zombies edited by Stephen Jones contained twenty-six stories of the walking dead but no mammoths, while The Ultimate Zombie and The Ultimate Witch, both edited by Byron Preiss and John Betancourt, failed to live up to their titles. Phobias was another theme anthology edited by Wendy Webb, Richard Gilliam and Edward Kramer, with an introduction by Robert Bloch, and Peter Crowther’s Touch Wood: Narrow Houses Volume Two built upon the success of the first book.
Maria Lexton edited The Time Out Book of London Short Stories which included new fiction by Clive Barker, Anne Billson, Jonathan Carroll, Christopher Fowler, Neil Gaiman, Kim Newman and Lisa Tuttle, amongst others.
Despite Thomas F. Monteleone’s claim that his much-delayed Borderlands 3 was the only regular non-themed anthology in the field, The Pan Book of Horror reached its thirty-fourth year with Dark Voices 5 edited by David Sutton and Stephen Jones.
Unfortunately, only members of the Science Fiction Book Club saw Masterpieces of Terror & the Unknown, containing fifty-eight stories and poems of the macabre, edited by the always-reliable Marvin Kaye. The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales edited by Chris Baldick included thirty-seven stories, while 4 Classic Ghostly Tales edited by Anita Miller somewhat confusingly featured eight examples of Victorian horrors.
The expanding instant remainder/bargain book market was ideal for value-for-money anthologies and, to be expected, Martin H. Greenberg was at the forefront of this growing outlet. Along with Stefan R. Dziemianowicz and Robert Weinberg he edited To Sleep, Perchance to Dream . . . Nightmares, Nursery Crimes, and 100 Ghastly Little Ghost Stories, and teamed up with Al Sarrantonio for 100 Hair-Raising Little Horror Stories. Cathleen Jordan edited Alfred Hitchcock’s Tales of the Supernatural and the Fantastic, but nobody would own up to compiling Horror By Lamplight.
When it came to the Young Adult market, Greenberg was there again, editing A Newberry Halloween with Charles G. Waugh, containing thirteen ghost and horror stories by winners of the prestigious Newberry Award. There was also All Hallow’s Eve: Tales of Love and the Supernatural edited by Mary Elizabeth Allen, Don’t Give Up the Ghost: The Delacorte Press Book of Original Ghost Stories edited by David Gale, Short Circuits: Thirteen Shocking Stories by Outstanding Writers for Young Adults edited by Donald R. Gallo, Please Do Not Touch edited by Judith Gorog, and the anonymously-edited Mysterious Christmas Tales: Horror Stories for th
e Festive Season.
Sometimes it is easy to forget that America and Britain are not the only countries where horror fiction is published. As a timely reminder of this fact, Leigh Blackmore edited the first Australian mass-market horror anthology, Terror Australis: The Best of Australian Horror, while from Canada came Northern Frights, the first in a new series edited by Don Hutchison.
As always, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: Sixth Annual Collection edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling contained a bumper selection of forty-nine stories and three poems. The Year’s Best Horror Stories celebrated its twenty-first anniversary under the distinctive editorship of Karl Edward Wagner, and our own Best New Horror 4 was once again the only annual showcase to appear on both sides of the Atlantic.
With most mainstream publishers already planning to cut back their output for the next couple of years, it has fallen to the small, independent imprints to pick up many worthwhile projects, publishing them in often beautifully designed, small press editions.
One of the fastest-growing of these young imprints is Minneapolis-based Fedogan & Bremer, which continued its policy of publishing the kind of books Arkham House used to with House of the Toad, a new Lovecraftian novel by Richard L. Tierney, and Basil Copper’s The Exploits of Solar Pons, a collection of four novellas illustrated by Stefanie Hawks, based on the Holmes-like investigator created by August Derleth.
Another Minneapolis publisher, DreamHaven Books, issued Neil Gaiman’s first collection, Angels & Visitations: A Miscellany, a very handsome collection which lived up to its subtitle with ten stories and various poems, articles and essays.
From publisher Mark V. Ziesing came Pat Cadigan’s new collection Dirty Work, which pretty much covered all the genres, and a revised version of Harlan Ellison’s impressive psycho novella Mefisto in Onyx.
Borderlands Press issued Poppy Z. Brite’s first collection of Southern Gothic tales, Swamp Foetus, while from Deadline Press came Richard Laymon’s collection of twenty stories, A Good, Secret Place with an introduction by Ed Gorman. Gorman’s own collection, Dark Whispers & Other Stories, appeared from Pulphouse/Mystery Scene Press, and the long-delayed last volume of Pulphouse The Hardback Magazine: Issue Twelve finally appeared, edited by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.
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