Best New Horror #26 Read online

  26

  Edited by

  Stephen Jones

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  THE EDITOR WOULD like to thank Kim Newman, David Barraclough, Ellen Datlow, Gordon Van Gelder, Robert Morgan, Rosemary Pardoe, R.B. Russell, Amanda Foubister, Andrew I. Porter, Johnny Mains, Mandy Slater, Jason V. Brock, Andy Richards, 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 2014 copyright © Stephen Jones 2015.

  SECONDHAND MAGIC copyright © Helen Marshall 2014. Originally published in Gifts for the One Who Comes After. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  THE CULVERT copyright © Dale Bailey 2014. Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, September/October 2014. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  THE PATTER OF TINY FEET copyright © Richard Gavin 2014. Originally published in Searchers After Horror: New Tales of the Weird and Fantastic. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  THE FOUR STRENGTHS OF SHADOW copyright © Ron Weighell 2014. Originally published in Summonings. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  THE NIGHT RUN copyright © Simon Kurt Unsworth 2014. Originally published as ‘The Private Ambulance’ in Noir. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  HOME AND HEARTH copyright © Angela Slatter 2014. Originally published in Home and Hearth. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  DUST copyright © Rebecca Lloyd 2014. Originally published in Mercy and Other Stories. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  SUFFER LITTLE CHILDREN copyright © Robert Shearman 2014. Originally published in Fearful Symmetries. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  THE NIGHT DOCTOR copyright © Steve Rasnic Tem 2014. Originally published in The Spectral Book of Horror Stories. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  THE DESECRATOR copyright © Derek John 2014. Originally published in The Ghosts & Scholars Book of Shadows Volume 2. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  THE WALK copyright © Dennis Etchison 2014. Originally published on Tor.com. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  DIRT ON VICKY copyright © Clint Smith 2014. Originally published in Ghouljaw and Other Stories. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  SKULLPOCKET copyright © Nathan Ballingrud 2014. Originally published in Nightmare Carnival. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  TESTIMONY OF SAMUEL FROBISHER REGARDING EVENTS UPON HIS MAJESTY’S SHIP CONFIDENCE, 14-22 JUNE 1818, WITH DIAGRAMS copyright © Ian Tregillis 2014. Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, July/August 2014. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  AT LORN HALL copyright © Ramsey Campbell 2014. Originally published in Searchers After Horror: New Tales of the Weird and Fantastic. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  SELFIES copyright © Lavie Tidhar 2014. Originally published on Tor.com, September 2014. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  MATILDA OF THE NIGHT copyright © Stephen Volk 2014. Originally published in Terror Tales of Wales. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  THE COLLECTED SHORT STORIES OF FREDDIE PROTHERO, INTRODUCTION BY TORLESS MAGNUSSEN, PH.D. copyright © Peter Straub 2014. Originally published in Turn Down the Lights and Conjunctions: 62 Exile, Spring 2014. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  BURNT BLACK SUNS copyright © Simon Strantzas 2014. Originally published in Burnt Black Suns: A Collection of Weird Tales. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  NECROLOGY: 2014 copyright © Stephen Jones and Kim Newman 2015.

  USEFUL ADDRESSES copyright © Stephen Jones 2015.

  INTRODUCTION

  HORROR IN 2014

  A NEW SURVEY by Nielsen Books & Consumer found that 67% of books sold in America were in print format, with just 23% reading e-books. Audiobooks accounted for 3% and the remaining 7% consisted of mysterious “other formats”. Of those figures, 42% of books sold were published in paperback and 25% in hardcover.

  Nielsen also reported that sales of print books increased 2.4% over 2013. Unfortunately, this was mostly driven by sales of children’s literature and adult non-fiction, whereas adult fiction actually declined by 7.9%—the only publishing category that did not show an increase.

  Meanwhile, book industry research company Bowker released the results of a six-year overview that revealed that the growth of self-publishing was slowing down on a year-on-year basis in both the print and e-book markets. However, the survey did not include self-published works available on Amazon without an ISBN.

  In January, almost exactly five months after the death of founder and publisher Nick Robinson, UK imprint Constable & Robinson was sold to Little, Brown Book Group, part of Hachette UK Ltd. That same month independent publisher Quercus, which includes genre imprint Jo Fletcher Books, was put up for sale following a “significant trading loss” for 2013.

  Three months later, Quercus was sold as an independent division to Hodder & Stoughton, which is yet another Hachette subsidiary. However, Hachette’s planned purchase of the Perseus Book Group (which includes Running Press) was cancelled in July, after the parties could not reach agreement.

  The Denmark-owned Egmont Publishing Group decided to sell its Egmont USA division, which publishes YA and children’s books, while Osprey Publishing Group’s SF imprint Angry Robot cancelled its young adult genre imprint, Strange Chemistry, letting editor Amanda Rutter go. Osprey then subsequently sold the Angry Robot imprint to American entrepreneur Etan Ilfeld, before itself being sold to Bloomsbury.

  Stephen King’s novel Mr. Mercedes involved a former policeman’s hunt for a psychopath who used a stolen car as a murder weapon. An excerpt from the novel appeared in the May 16 issue of Entertainment Weekly. The author’s second blockbuster book of the year, Revival, was dedicated to H.P. Lovecraft, amongst others. It was about a small-town Methodist minister who had started experimenting with “secret electricity” in the 1960s, and disappeared following the loss of his family in a freak accident.

  Meanwhile, King’s 2009 novel Under the Dome (the basis of the CBS-TV series) was reissued in two volumes.

  Thirty-eight years after she made her debut with Interview with a Vampire, Anne Rice returned to her bloodsucker roots with Prince Lestat, the thirteenth volume in The Vampire Chronicles.

  In Jeffery Deaver’s The Skin Collector, quadriplegic investigator Lincoln Rhyme was on the trail of a psychopath who kidnapped women with perfect skin and tattooed cryptic messages on their flesh with deadly bio-toxins.

  John Connolly’s The Wolf in Winter, the twelfth volume in the author’s “Charlie Parker” series, was available in a 3,000-copy signed edition exclusive to Waterstones bookshops. It came with a bonus CD.

  Neil Gaiman promoted the single-volume reprinting of his short fantasy/ horror story The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains with live appearances in London and Edinburgh in July, supported by Eddie Campbell’s projected illustrations and music by Australia’s FourPlay String Quartet.

  Meanwhile, Gaiman’s Newbery Medal-winning The Graveyard Book was reissued as a two-volume graphic novel illustrated by P. Craig Russell, Scott Hampton, Galen Showman and others, and in a “Commemorative Edition” featuring bonus material. A new audio version of the same title featured a cast that included Derek Jacobi, Miriam Margolyes, Julian Rhind-Tutt, Reece Shearsmith, Lenny Henry and Gaiman himself.

  Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, who lives in Edinburgh, donated £1 million to the “Better Together” campaign to keep Sc
otland in the United Kingdom. In September, the majority of four million Scottish residents voted against going independent.

  In a shock revelation posted on an online blog, author Marion Zimmer Bradley’s daughter Moira Greyland accused her late mother of molesting her as a child, along with her father, Walter Breen, a convicted long-time molester who died in prison.

  Charlaine Harris’ Midnight Crossroad (aka Midnight) was the first in a trilogy set in the near-deserted town of Midnight, Texas.

  A Detroit policewoman was on the trail of a ritualistic serial killer in Broken Monsters by South African author Lauren Beukes.

  A troop of boy scouts encountered a bio-engineered horror in the Canadian wilderness in The Troop by the pseudonymous “Nick Cutter” (Craig Davidson), which came with a cover quote by Stephen King that described the novel as “old-school horror at its best”.

  Keith Donohue’s The Boy Who Drew Monsters was set at Christmas, as the behaviour of a young boy with Asperger’s may have been connected to a shipwreck that occurred near his home.

  Valerie Martin’s historical novel The Ghost of the Mary Celeste combined the mystery of the famously abandoned ship and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

  Set in Victorian times, the worlds of two Yorkshire orphans and London’s mysterious Aegolius Club collided in The Quick by Lauren Owen, while the long-dead V.C. Andrews® was credited as the author of The Unwelcomed Child, about a girl who was considered evil by the religious extremists who raised her.

  Twin sisters had to quieten the souls of the damned in the Forest of the Dead in Sea of Shadows, the first in a new trilogy by Kelley Armstrong.

  Pandemic was the third and final volume in Scott Sigler’s “Infected” series about a plague of alien parasites.

  Kim Newman’s long-awaited haunted house novel, An English Ghost Story, was published by Titan Books, who also issued an updated edition of Newman’s 1990 novel Bad Dreams, which included the novella ‘Bloody Students’ (aka ‘Orgy of the Blood Parasites’) and a new historical Afterword by the author.

  Steve Rasnic Tem’s Southern Gothic Blood Kin alternated between the Great Depression and the present day, and a plague of insomnia left victims unable to differentiate between dreams and reality in Kenneth Calhoun’s Black Moon.

  In Christopher Fowler’s Nyctophobia, an architect became convinced that something lived in the perpetual shadows of her new house in Spain, which was built into the side of a cliff.

  A woman rented a room in a house of horrors in No One Gets Out Alive by Adam Nevill, and a woman inherited a haunted home in The Unquiet House by Alison Littlewood.

  Children started disappearing from a quiet suburb in the early 1990s in December Park by Ronald Malfi.

  A restored Southern plantation mansion was beset by evil forces in The Vines by Christopher Rice, and strange things happened in a hospital for soldiers recovering from the First World War in Silence for the Dead by Simone St. James (Simone Seguin).

  Red Delicious was the second volume about a werepire demon hunter by Kathleen Tierney (Caitlín R. Kiernan).

  Something blew into the town of Coventry during a mammoth blizzard that left its victims frozen in Snowblind by Christopher Golden, while the disappearance of a woman’s mother was related to past events in The Winter People by Jennifer McMahon.

  A former convict forced to steal a mysterious object was pursued by a group of deadly assassins in Mark Morris’ The Wolves of London, the first in the “Obsidian Heart” series.

  Three child survivors of the simultaneous crashing of four planes may have heralded the apocalypse in The Three by Sarah Lotz, and a woman and her children wore blindfolds to protect themselves from being driven mad in an apocalyptic near-future world in Josh Malerman’s Bird Box.

  The owner of Poe’s Tooth Books was haunted by a bird in Wakening the Crow by Stephen Gregory, and a woman became a companion to a reclusive horror writer in The Vanishing by Wendy Webb.

  The Ghoul Next Door was the eighth volume in Victoria Laurie’s super-natural mystery series about ghost hunter M.J. Holliday.

  A scientist attempted to communicate with plants on a remote island in Seeders by A.J. Colucci, while mutant sea creatures attacked Long Island Sound in Mount Misery by Angelo Peluso.

  Cat Out of Hell by Lynne Truss, the best-selling author of Eats, Shoots and Leaves, was published under the Hammer imprint.

  Inspired by the works of H.P. Lovecraft, Pete Rawlik’s The Weird Company was a sequel to Reanimators.

  Daniel Levine’s Hyde re-told Robert Louis Stevenson’s short novel from the point-of-view of the titular character. It also included the original 1886 work with an Introduction by Levine.

  In The Carpathian Assignment, Chip Wagar re-told Bram Stoker’s Dracula from the point-of-view of the local authorities.

  Children all over the world came back from the dead hungry for blood in Craig DiLouie’s Suffer the Children, while the protagonist of Christopher Buehlman’s The Lesser Dead was an eternally adolescent vampire living in New York City in 1978.

  The Vault was the third in the vampire series by Emily McKay that began with The Farm, and A Wind in the Night was the twelfth volume in the “Noble Dead” series by Barb Hendee and J.C. Hendee.

  Sustenance, the twenty-seventh volume in Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s “Count Saint-Germain” series, was set in post-World War II Paris, as the vampire helped a group of Americans branded communists.

  Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter, helped a werewolf sort out his relationship problems in Jason, which also contained a preview of the next novel in the series, Dead Ice.

  An ancient vampire believed that a werewolf was the reincarnation of his lost love in By Blood We Live, the third in the series by Glen Duncan, and The Frenzy Wolves was the third in the “Frenzy Cycle” by Gregory Lamberson.

  The Girl with All the Gifts by M.R. (Mike) Carey was a road trip with a difference, as a 10-year-old zombie girl who was part of an experiment to give the “hungries” intelligence attempted to survive in a post-apocalyptic Britain.

  Creator Stephen Jones spun his Zombie Apocalypse! franchise off into a new series of inter-connected novels with Horror Hospital by Mark Morris and Washington Deceased by Lisa Morton.

  Joseph Nassise’s On Her Majesty’s Behalf was the second volume in the “Great Undead War” series set during an alternate zombie First World War, while Jonathan Maberry’s Fall of Night was a sequel to Dead of Night.

  A virus turned people into flesh-eating zombies in Omega Days and Ship of the Dead, the first two books in a trilogy by John L. Campbell, and Zombie, Indiana was the second in a series by Scott Kenemore.

  Dana Fredsti’s Plague World was the third book in the “Ashley Parker” zombie series.

  D.J. Molles’ series The Remaining, The Remaining: Aftermath, The Remaining: Refugees and The Remaining: Fractured were originally self-published as e-books. The first volume included a “bonus novella” set in the same zombie series.

  John Ringo’s To Sail a Darkling Sea was a sequel to Under a Graveyard Sky and second in the “Black Tide Rising” zombie apocalypse series. It was followed by Islands of Rage & Hope and the final volume in the series, Strands of Sorrow.

  Peter Clines’ Ex-Purgatory was the fourth in a series that pitted zombies against superheroes.

  Three Bayou siblings with unworldly powers teamed up to track down the monstrous serial killer that murdered their father in Deadroads, a first novel by Robin Riopelle (Elizabeth Todd Doyle).

  Girls were disappearing along a Canadian highway in Adrianne Harun’s debut A Man Came Out of a Door in the Mountain.

  Martin Rose’s debut mystery novel, Bring Me Flesh, I’ll Bring Hell, was about an undead private investigator, and Lauren Owen’s The Quick was about Victorian vampires.

  A girl discovered her new boarding school held dark secrets in The Unseemly Education of Anne Merchant by new writer Joanna Wiebe.

  A troubled boy discovered the titular creature in the attic that was hungry
for stories in Simon P. Clark’s young adult debut novel Eren, while Mary: The Summoning was the first book by Hillary Monahan and the first in the author’s “Bloody Mary” trilogy.

  Cruel Beauty, a first novel by Rosamund Hodge, was a YA retelling of ‘Beauty and the Beast’.

  In June, the 7th Circuit US Court of Appeals ruled that the thirty pre-1923 Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle were in the public domain, despite attempts by the author’s estate to have copyright protection extended backwards from the remaining ten stories written between 1923-27.

  Edited with a Foreword and Notes by Leslie S. Klinger, The New Annotated H.P. Lovecraft was a predictably hefty volume from Liveright Publishing. It came with an Introduction by Alan Moore and featured numerous illustrations and photographs.

  Published in limited editions of 500 copies as part of the “Centipede Press Library of Weird Fiction”, H.P. Lovecraft contained twenty-four stories, while Algernon Blackwood featured twenty-two stories. William Hope Hodgson collected twenty-one stories plus the short novels The House on the Borderland (1908) and The Ghost Pirates (1909), and Edgar Allan Poe brought together thirty-eight stories, twenty-one poems and the short novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838). All four volumes were edited with Introductions by S.T. Joshi.

  Published by California’s Stark House, The Empty House and Other Ghost Stories/The Listener and Other Stories was an omnibus edition of two early 1900s collections by Algernon Blackwood with Introductions by Storm Constantine and Mike Ashley.

  From the same publisher, The Slayer of Souls/The Maker of Moons was an omnibus of two collections by Robert W. Chambers that dropped three non-supernatural stories. Gregory Shepard supplied an Introduction.

  Translated from the original French by Brian Stableford and published in three hefty print-on-demand volumes by Black Coat Press, The Mysterious Doctor Cornelius 1: The Sculptor of Human Flesh, 2: The Island of Winged Men and 3: The Rochester Bridge Catastrophe reprinted all eighteen instalments of the mad doctor serial by Gustave Le Rouge.

  From the same imprint and also translated by Stableford, The Vampires of London reprinted the 1852 French novel by Angelo de Sorr (Ludovic Sclafer).