Best New Horror 27 Read online

  #27

  Edited by

  Stephen Jones

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  THE EDITOR WOULD like to thank Kim Newman, David Barraclough, Andrew I. Porter, Mandy Slater, Amanda Foubister, Jo Fletcher, Sara Broecker, Gordon Van Gelder, Robert Morgan, Rosemary Pardoe, R.B. Russell, David A. Riley, Shawn Garrett (Pseudopod), Andy Cox, Michael Kelly, David Longhorn and, especially, Peter and Nicky Crowther, Michael Smith, Marie O’Regan and Michael Marshall Smith for all their help and support. Special thanks are also due to Locus, Ansible, Classic Images, Entertainment Weekly and all the other sources that were used for reference in the Introduction and the Necrology.

  INTRODUCTION: HORROR IN 2015 copyright © Stephen Jones 2016.

  THE COFFIN HOUSE Robert Aickman copyright © the Estate of Robert Aickman 2015. Originally published in The Strangers and Other Writings. Reprinted by permission of the author’s Estate and Artellus Ltd.

  THE LAKE Daniel Mills copyright © Daniel Mills 2015. Originally published in Aickman’s Heirs. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  THE BARNACLE DAUGHTER Richard Gavin copyright © Richard Gavin 2015. Originally published in Innsmouth Nightmares. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  EXPOSURE Helen Marshall copyright © Helen Marshall 2015. Originally published in Cassilda’s Song: Tales Inspired by Robert W. Chambers’ King in Yellow Mythos. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  THE LARDER Nicholas Royle copyright © Nicholas Royle 2015. Originally published in The 2nd Spectral Book of Horror Stories. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  THE SEVENTH WAVE Lynda E. Rucker copyright © Lynda E. Rucker 2015. Originally published in Terror Tales of the Ocean. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  UNDERGROUND ECONOMY John Langan copyright © John Langan 2015. Originally published in Aickman’s Heirs. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  THE DROWNING CITY Loren Rhoads copyright © Loren Rhoads 2015. Originally published in nEvermore! Tales of Murder, Mystery & the Macabre. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  THE CHAPEL OF INFERNAL DEVOTION Ron Weighell copyright © Ron Weighell 2015. Originally published in Romances of the White Day. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  ALMA MATER Kate Farrell copyright © Kate Farrell 2015. Originally published in The Eleventh Black Book of Horror. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  HIBAKUSHA L.P. Lee copyright © L.P. Lee 2015. Originally published in Eastlit Volume 4, Issue 32, August 2015. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  THE OFFING Conrad Williams copyright © Conrad Williams 2015. Originally published in Terror Tales of the Ocean. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  MARROWVALE Kurt Fawver copyright © Kurt Fawver 2015. Originally published in The 2nd Spectral Book of Horror Stories. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  HAIRWORK Gemma Files copyright © Gemma Files 2015. Originally published in She Walks in Shadows. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  BLACK DOG Neil Gaiman copyright © Neil Gaiman 2015. Originally published in Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances. Reprinted by permission of the author and his agent.

  IN THE EARTH Storm Constantine copyright © Storm Constantine 2015. Originally published in Creeping Crawlers.

  IN THE LOVECRAFT MUSEUM Steve Rasnic Tem copyright © Steve Rasnic Tem 2015. Originally published in In the Lovecraft Museum. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  NECROLOGY: 2015 copyright © Stephen Jones and Kim Newman 2016.

  USEFUL ADDRESSES copyright © Stephen Jones 2016.

  This one has to be for

  VIOLET REBECCA JONES

  (1926-2016)

  Thank you for all your love, encouragement

  and support over the years.

  “You see? No shock. No engulfment. No tearing asunder.

  What you feared would come like an explosion is like a whisper.

  What you thought was the end is the beginning.”

  —The Twilight Zone: ‘Nothing in the Dark’

  by George Clayton Johnson

  INTRODUCTION

  Horror in 2015

  IN 2015, HARPERCOLLINS finally came to a new, multi-year agreement with Amazon.com regarding both print and digital books. Starting in April, the publisher returned to full agency pricing for all its retailers, who would no longer be allowed to discount the publisher’s set price.

  Six months later, Amazon announced that it planned to sue more than 1,000 people it claimed were paid to write fake product reviews. In April, the online company had sued four websites for selling favourable reviews.

  Well-respected horror editor Don D’Auria was let go by Samhain Publishing in early November. Some reports suggested that this was because D’Auria had spent too much time actually editing the books he published and neglected such things as social-media promotion.

  In May, the late John Wyndham was commemorated by a passageway in north London being officially named “Triffid Alley” after it was apparently identified as a location in his 1951 novel The Day of the Triffids.

  Meanwhile, Godzilla (aka Gojira) was made an official resident of Tokyo’s Shinjuku Ward for “promoting the entertainment of and watching over the Kabuki-cho neighbourhood and drawing visitors around the globe in the form of the (eighty ton) Godzilla head built atop the Shinjuku Toho Building”.

  The week before Hallowe’en, a branch of UK supermarket Tesco was forced to remove from display a rubber mask of a rat-eating zombie after one mother complained that it scared her two-year-old son and four-year-old daughter. “I would not let my children watch zombie films on TV,” she said, “so why should they be exposed to them when I am taking them round a local store?”

  In America, almost $7 billion was spent on Halloween in 2015 (down from an $8 billion high in 2012), with more than 157 million people celebrating the holiday. Perhaps the most scary thing was that twenty million of those planned on dressing-up as a pet.

  Meanwhile, a Dutch study based around the movie Insidious found that horror films could be bad for your health. Exposure to scary movies boosts a protein in the body called Factor VIII that congeals the blood and can raise the risk of a clot by around a fifth. It is, literally, “blood-curdling”!

  Stephen King’s initial publication of the year was the psychological thriller Finders Keepers, the second in a proposed trilogy linked to the author’s 2014 novel Mr. Mercedes. After an obsessed fan murdered a reclusive writer during a breakin, years later he crossed paths with a ten-year-old boy who had discovered the author’s hidden notebooks and refused to let them go.

  King followed that with his sixth short story collection, The Bazaar of Bad Dreams, which contained twenty short stories (nine original), each with brief introductions by the author.

  Stephen King was also amongst the year’s ten recipients of the US National Medal of Arts from President Obama on September 10.

  Joyce Carol Oates’ short novel Jack of Spades, loosely inspired by Edgar Allan Poe and, presumably, the work of one Stephen King, was another psychological thriller concerning a successful author, who had a second career under a secret pseudonym. After being sued by a crazy woman claiming he stole her ideas by breaking into her house, the writer uncovered hidden secrets of his own.

  Clive Barker’s long-awaited The Scarlet Gospels united his two most famous characters, the demonic Cenobite Pinhead and psychic investigator Harry D’Amour, in a descent into Hell itself. Earthling published a deluxe limited edition, signed by the author, illustrated by Les Edwards, and featuring a Foreword by actor Doug Bradley.

  Saint Odd was the seventh and final volume in the “Odd Thomas” series by Dean Koontz. The paperback edition included the first printing of a bonus prequel story.

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p; Visitors could go in, but they could never leave, as various people disappeared every eight years inside the eponymous edifice in David Mitchell’s novella Slade House, a sequel-of-sorts to the author’s novel The Bone Clocks.

  British bookseller Waterstones produced an exclusive 2,500-copy hardcover edition of A Song of Shadows, the thirteenth book in John Connolly’s “Charlie Parker” series, signed by the author and containing a bonus CD.

  Christopher’s Diary: Echoes of Dollanganger was the sixth in the “Dollanganger” series and Secret Brother was the third in “The Diaries” series by V.C. AndrewsÆ or, more likely, Andrew Niederman. Bittersweet Dreams was a stand-alone novel under the same, long-dead author’s, byline.

  The sign of any good writer is coming up with something new and interesting to say, which is probably why both Stephanie Meyer and E.L. James decided to simply recycle their previous work from different gender perspectives in Life and Death: Twilight Reimagined and Fifty Shades of Grey, respectively.

  Favourably compared to Stephen King, Michael Crichton and Patricia Highsmith, Under Ground by “S.L. Grey” (Sarah Lotz and Louis Greenberg) was a high-concept horror novel set in a subterranean survival condominium in rural Maine, where those escaping a global super-flu virus discovered that something even worse might be waiting for them underground.

  A cruise shop was lost into an alternate, apocalyptic world in Lotz’s solo novel Day Four, which was set in the same world as The Three, and The Mariana Trench hid the potential cure to a deadly plague in The Deep by Nick Cutter (Craig Davidson).

  Academic book thief and savant Anna Verco found herself on a quest to find a medieval volume written in the language of witches in The Serpent Papers by Jessica Cornwall.

  Kim Newman’s The Secret of Drearcliff Grange School was set in the titular 1920s boarding school for Unusual Girls, where a secret superpowered society of pupils called the “Moth Club” uncovered a Hooded Conspiracy that ran through the strange Somerset establishment.

  A young boy was taken from his family and subjected to examinations for a genetic sickness in The Death House by Sarah Pinborough, which came with a glowing recommendation from Stephen King.

  Alison Littlewood’s The Hidden People was set in the mid-19th century and involved a man looking into the mysterious murder of his cousin, while the same author’s Zombie Apocalypse! Acapulcalypse Now was the third spin-off novel set in the shared world created by Stephen Jones.

  A race of subterranean creatures guided by sound laid waste to Europe in Tim Lebbon’s novel The Silence, and the world suddenly became full of doppelgangers in Christopher Golden’s Dead Ringers.

  An agent for Satan investigated a nasty murder in Hell in Simon Kurt Unsworth’s The Devil’s Detective, The Devil’s Only Friend was the first volume in a new “John Cleaver” trilogy by Dan Wells, and a man shared his soul with an evil Aztec priest in Adam Mansbach’s The Devil’s Bag Man.

  A woman recalled what really happened when her older sister had her demonic possession filmed by a popular reality TV show in Paul Tremblay’s A Head Full of Ghosts.

  The Society of Blood was the second book in Mark Morris’ “Obsidian Heart” series, and For a Few Souls More was the third and final book in the “Heaven’s Gate” trilogy by Guy Adams.

  The print edition of Shaun Hutson’s new novel Monolith contained an original short story as well.

  A private detective inherited a bookstore in Providence, Rhode Island, run by the last female descendant of H.P. Lovecraft in Carter & Lovecraft by Jonathan L. Howard.

  Chapelwood was the second volume in Cherie Priest’s Lovecraftian “Borden Dispatches” series, while Austin Grossman’s Crooked pitted US President Richard M. Nixon against Lovecraftian monsters.

  Melinda Snodgrass’ The Edge of Dawn was the third in the occult thriller series about paladin Richard Oort battling the inter-dimensional Old Ones.

  A person could take over other people’s bodies in Touch by “Claire North” (Catherine Webb), while The Touched by Joanna Briscoe was a Hammer novella about a family who moved to a haunted cottage in the country.

  Of Sorrow and Such was a new novella by Angela Slatter, set in the author’s “Sourdough” universe.

  A boy’s drawings of monsters became real in Keith Donohue’s The Boy Who Drew Monsters, while John Birmingham’s Dave vs. the Monsters: Emergence was the first book in the “Dave Hooper” trilogy, followed by Resistance and Ascendance.

  The Rules by Nancy Holder and Debbie Vigué was about a deadly high school scavenger hunt.

  In Dead Spots by Rhiannon Frater, a woman mourning her stillborn child discovered a “dead spot” where dreams or nightmares could be brought to life, and a boy was haunted by his psychopathic twin sister in Andrew Pyper’s The Damned.

  Stallo by journalist Stefan Sjput involved children kidnapped by trolls in an ancient forest in northern Sweden.

  Heather Graham’s The Dead Play On was part of the “Cafferty & Quinn” series, while The Forgotten and The Hidden were entries in the same author’s “Krewe of Hunters” series.

  The Last American Vampire, author Seth Grahame-Smith’s sequel to Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter, wandered into Kim Newman’s “Anno Dracula” territory as the author took an alternate look at American history using such real-life characters as Jack the Ripper, Arthur Conan Doyle, Rasputin and Nikola Tesla.

  An antiques dealer searched for a vampire’s treasure in The Fifth House of the Heart by Ben Tripp, while Vampires of Manhattan by Melissa de la Cruz was the first volume in the “New Blue Bloods Coven” series, a spin-off from the YA “Blue Bloods” series.

  Dracula of the Apes, Book One: The Urn, Book Two: The Ape and Book Three: The Curse was a trilogy of pastiches by G. Wells Taylor, and The Originals: The Rise, The Loss and The Resurrection comprised the packaged prequel trilogy to The Vampire Diaries, credited to that series’ creator Julie Plec.

  The Dark Arts of Blood was the fourth volume in Freda Warrington’s “Blood” series.

  Cherry Bomb was the third book in the series about werepire demon hunter Siobhan Quinn by “Kathleen Tierney” (Caitlín R. Kiernan), and a detective found himself cursed in Werewolf Cop by Andrew Klavan.

  A screenwriter working on a script about the walking dead got carried away in Alexsandar Haydon’s comic novel The Making of Zombie Wars, while World War Moo was the second volume of Michael Logan’s “Apocalypse Cow” series, about bovine zombies.

  The New Hunger was a prequel to Isaac Marion’s 2011 post-apocalypse zombie romance Warm Bodies, which was reissued in a movie tie-in edition.

  David Towsey’s Your Brother’s Blood was the first book in “The Walkin’”, a post-apocalyptic Western zombie series. Joe McKinney’s The Dead Won’t Die was the second novel in the “Deadlands” series, and Drifters and Crossbones were the third and fourth books, respectively, in John L. Campbell’s “Omega Days” zombie series.

  Strands of Sorrow was the fourth and final volume in John Ringo’s “Black Tide Rising” zombie apocalypse series. White Trash Zombie Gone Wild was the fifth volume in Diana Rowland’s series featuring zombie Angel Crawford, while The Remaining: Allegiance and The Remaining: Extinction were the fifth and sixth and final volumes, respectively, in the zombie series by D.J. Molles.

  The daughter of Henry Jekyll and her uncultured alter-ego Lizzie Hyde hunted a serial killer in an alternate 19th-century London in Viola Carr’s steampunk debut novel, The Diabolical Miss Hyde. It was followed by The Devious Dr. Jekyll.

  Shutter was a first novel by Courtney Alameda, about teenage ghost hunters, while Henry Turner made his debut with the YA horror novel Ask the Dark.

  A girl being stalked could see the ghost of her older sister in Shannon Grogan’s From Where I Watch You, and a girl could travel through other people’s dreams in Robert L. Anderson’s first novel Dreamland.

  A man revisited his childhood home and discovered strange secrets in Robert Levy’s debut The Glittering World, and a pregnant teenager and her fami
ly moved into an apparently haunted prairie house in Amy Lukavics’ Daughters Unto Devils.

  Indra Das’ The Devourers was a first novel about werewolves, published by Penguin India.

  Stephen King supplied a new Introduction to The Rim of Morning: Two Tales of Horror, an omnibus of the novels To Walk the Night (1937) and Edge of Running Water (1939) by William Sloane.

  Edited with an Introduction by Mike Ashley, The Face of the Earth and Other Imaginings from Stark House collected eighteen stories and twelve essays by Algernon Blackwood. The book also included a useful Chronology of Blackwood’s published works.

  From the same PoD publisher, The King in Yellow/The Mystery of Choice was an omnibus of two 19th-century collections, introduced by Stefan Dziemianowicz. It was the first volume in “The Complete Weird Fiction of Robert W. Chambers”.

  With another Introduction by Dziemianowicz, Classic Horror Stories from Barnes & Noble was a gilt-edged, leather-bound anthology of forty-one stories by M.R. James, H.P. Lovecraft, E. Nesbit and others.

  In the Shadow of Edgar Allan Poe, edited by Leslie S. Klinger, contained twenty stories from 1816-1914 by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Robert W. Chambers, Arthur Conan Doyle and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, amongst others. The Annotated Poe collected stories and poems by the author, edited and extensively annotated by Kevin J. Hayes. William Giraldi contributed a Foreword.

  Angela Carter’s classic collection The Bloody Chamber was reissued in a deluxe paperback edition by Penguin to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the author’s birth. Kelly Link supplied a new Introduction.

  Issued as part of the Penguin Classics imprint, Perchance to Dream collected twenty-three stories by Charles Beaumont along with a 1981 Foreword by Ray Bradbury and a new Afterword by William Shatner.

  Published as part of the same series, Laird Barron supplied a Foreword to Ray Russell’s 1962 novel The Case Against Satan, while Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe was an omnibus edition of two early collections by Thomas Ligotti, with a new Foreword by Jeff VanderMeer.