Best New Horror 29 Read online

  #29

  Edited by

  Stephen Jones

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  THE EDITOR WOULD like to thank Kim Newman, David Barraclough, Mandy Slater, Andrew I. Porter, Amanda Foubister, Ellen Datlow, Gordon Van Gelder, Robert Morgan, Lydia Gittins, Rosemary Pardoe, R.B. Russell, Andy Cox, James D. Jenkins, Michael Kelly, David Longhorn, Jason V. Brock, John Landis, Grete Kotryna Domarkaite, Robert T. Garcia, Angela Slatter, Michael Dirda and, especially, Peter and Nicky Crowther, Mike 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, ISFDB and all the other sources that were used for reference in the Introduction and the Necrology.

  INTRODUCTION: HORROR IN 2017 copyright © Stephen Jones 2019.

  SURVIVAL STRATEGIES copyright © Helen Marshall 2017. Originally published in Black Static #58, May-June 2017. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  CWTCH copyright © Conrad Williams 2017. Originally published in I Will Surround You. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  LAGAN copyright © Gemma Files 2017. Originally published in Unspeakable Horror 2: Abominations of Desire. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  THE ENTERTAINMENT ARRIVES copyright © Alison Littlewood 2017. Originally published in Darker Companions: Celebrating 50 Years of Ramsey Campbell. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  HIS HEART SHALL SPEAK NO MORE copyright © John Linwood Grant 2017. Originally published in A Persistance of Geraniums and Other Worrying Tales. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  BANISHMENTS copyright © Richard Gavin 2017. Originally published in Looming Low. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  THE FLOWER UNFOLDS copyright © Simon Strantzas 2017. Originally published in Nightscript III. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  THE VOICE OF THE PEOPLE copyright © Alison Moore 2017. Originally published in Shadows & Tall Trees 7. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  CARNIVOROUS copyright © William F. Nolan 2017. Originally published in Black Wings VI: New Tales of Lovecraftian Horror. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  A SONG OF DUST copyright © Angela Slatter 2017. Originally published as ‘No Good Deed’ in New Fears: New Horror Stories by Masters of the Genre. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  BORDER COUNTRY copyright © Danny Rhodes 2017. Originally published in Black Static #56, January-February 2017. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  IN STONE copyright © Tim Lebbon 2017. Originally published in Dark Cities. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  SPEAKING STILL copyright © Ramsey Campbell 2017. Originally published in New Fears: New Horror Stories by Masters of the Genre. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  UNDERWATER FERRIS WHEEL copyright © Michael Bailey 2017. Originally published in The Beauty of Death II: Death by Water. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  IN THE COMPLEX copyright © Mark Samuels 2017. Originally published in The Prozess Manifestations. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  AFTER SUNSET, IN THE SECOND DRAWING ROOM GARDEN copyright © Felice Picano 2017. Originally published in Cutting Block Single Slices Volume 1. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  DISPOSSESSION copyright © Nicholas Royle 2017. Originally published in Shadows & Tall Trees 7. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  THE ENDLESS CORRIDOR copyright © Reggie Oliver 2017. Originally published in Dark Discoveries #37. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  WHATEVER YOU WANT copyright © Steve Rasnic Tem 2017. Originally published in A Primer to Steve Rasnic Tem. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  THE SEVENTEEN-YEAR ITCH copyright © Garth Nix 2017. Originally published in Haunted Nights: A Horror Writers Association Anthology. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  TO DROWN THE WORLD copyright © Thana Niveau 2017. Originally published in Unquiet Waters. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  NECROLOGY: 2017 copyright © Stephen Jones and Kim Newman 2019.

  USEFUL ADDRESSES copyright © Stephen Jones 2019.

  This one is for my old pal

  Bill Nolan,

  like Logan, he’s still running!

  INTRODUCTION

  HORROR IN 2017

  IT WAS REPORTED in 2017 that physical books were making a comeback in the UK, with sales of e-books forecast to fall for the first time. With sales of physical books predicted to grow by 6% and e-reader sales set to fall by 1%, it was said that readers “appeared to be showing a new appreciation for the traditional print format”.

  This was borne out by a 31% rise in the sale of hardcovers to £97 million, although sales of audiobooks also increased 25% to £31 million and income from overseas sales rose 8% to £3.4 billion.

  Meanwhile, funding for English libraries was down for the fifth year in a row, with local authorities cutting a further 5% on spending, wiping around £37 million off the library budget.

  In July, Pearson sold a 22% stake in its publishing company, Penguin Random House, to Germany’s Bertelsmann for £776 million, while Canongate bought the independent Severn House imprint from founder Edwin Buckhalter, who remained on as a consultant.

  Chaosium, Inc., the company behind the popular Call of Cthulhu role-playing game, announced that it was relaunching its Lovecraftian fiction line in 2018 under new fiction editor James Lowder, however the American horror imprint Samhain Publishing closed down at the end of February due to “declining sales” and the “changing market”.

  Forbes updated its annual guesstimates about what the top authors earned for the twelve months ending May 31, 2017. With new books, a West End play and futher movie adaptations, J.K. Rowling returned to the top of the list with an estimated $95 million. James Patterson was second with $87 million and then, some way behind, came Dan Brown at fourth with $20 million and Stephen King at fifth with a measly $15 million. Percy Jackson author Rick Riordan tied with Danielle Steel at 10th place with $11 million.

  The cumulative estimated earnings of the top authors rose to $311 million up from the 2016 total, but down from the consecutive four years before that.

  No.2 on that list, James Patterson, continued to donate $1.75 million to US school libraries as part of his School Library Campaign started in 2015, while George R.R. Martin (who didn’t even make the Forbes list!) announced in April that he would fund the “Miskatonic Scholarship” to a writer of Lovecraftian fiction for the annual Odyssey Writing Workshop held every summer in Manchester, New Hampshire.

  Women all over the world suddenly dozed off in cocoons, leaving the men to sort things out in Sleeping Beauties, a hefty, high-concept collaborative novel between Stephen King and his youngest son, Owen King. The authors named their sleeping sickness “Aurora” after the Disney princess in Sleeping Beauty (1959).

  King also collaborated with Richard Chizmar on Gwendy’s Button Box, a new novella about temptation set in the author’s Maine town of Castle Rock during the early 1970s. It was published by Chizmar’s Cemetery Dance imprint with cover art by Ben Baldwin and interior illustrations by Keith Minnion. A custom slipcase was also available, which could be additionally ordered for $49.95.

  After a seventeen-year wait, Philip Pullman returned to the “His Dark Materials” universe with The Book of Dust: Volume One: La Belle Sauvage, the first in a new prequel trilogy inspired by the English poet and painter William Blake and illustrated by Chris Wormell.

  Neil Gaiman’s Norse Mythology contained the author’s retellings of fifteen myths for a new audience.

  The Silent Corner and The Whispering Room were the first two books in Dean Koontz’s “Jane Hawk” series, and Ramses the Damned: The Passion of Cleopatra by Anne Rice and Ch
ristopher Rice was a belated sequel to Anne Rice’s 1989 novel The Mummy, or Ramses the Damned.

  Broken Glass and Shattered Memories were the second and third volumes in the “Mirror Sisters” series, which was still being credited to the long-deceased V.C. Andrews®.

  In Naomi Alderman’s The Power, women and teenage girls suddenly found themselves enabled with lethal electric powers. It came with a glowing cover blurb by Margaret Atwood.

  Written in alternating first-person chapters, Sarah Pinborough’s Behind Her Eyes told its story from the perspective of two women the wife and secretary of a rich and handsome doctor before it took an unexpected turn into lucid dreaming and a surprise twist ending.

  Kerri Maniscalco’s murder mystery Hunting Prince Dracula, the author’s sequel to her #1 best-seller Stalking Jack the Ripper, was presented by James Patterson, which probably gave a clue to its quality.

  In Joanne Harris’ novella A Pocketful of Crows, a young girl took her revenge on a squire’s son and the family that wronged her.

  Irish film director and screenwriter Neil Jordan’s novel Carnivalesque could have been inspired by Ray Bradbury, as a teenage boy found himself trapped in a Hall of Mirrors when a creepy carnival visited the Irish coastal town where he lived.

  All of a Winter’s Night was the fourteenth volume in Phil Rickman’s popular “Merrily Watkins” series.

  The undead Geneviève Dieudonné found herself exiled to Japan by Count Dracula and on the trail of a vicious murderer in Anno Dracula: One Thousand Monsters, the latest novel in Kim Newman’s best-selling alternate vampire mythology.

  A group of holidaymakers found themselves trapped in a strange world in John Ajvide Lindqvist’s I Am Behind You, the first in a trilogy, while Night Shift was the third and final installment in Charlaine Harris’ “Midnight Texas” trilogy.

  A group of mercenaries investigated a New Mexico kidnapping cult and were forced to confront something much more monstrous in Little Heaven by Canadian author Nick Cutter (Craig Davidson), and Rhyming Rings was a previously unpublished serial killer novel by the late fantasy writer David Gemmell (who died in 2006), which came with an Afteword by Stan Nicholls.

  Marcus Sakey’s thriller Afterlife was set in an alternate world, as a pair of murdered FBI agents were hunted by the serial killer responsible for their deaths.

  An American criminology student discovered an underground black market for high-priced arcane artefacts in Tim Lebbon’s Relics, the first volume in a new trilogy, and Adam Nevill’s Under a Watchful Eye followed on from the author’s short story ‘Yellow Teeth’.

  It Devours! was a sequel to the novel and podcast Welcome to Night Vale by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor and found the small desert town menaced by the Smiling God and its Joyous Congregation. Jessica Hayworth supplied the illustrations.

  In Daniel Kehlmann’s You Should Have Left, a screenwriter and his family found the world around them changing while staying at a wintry Alpine retreat, and Andrew Michael Hurley’s Devil’s Day was a slice of folk horror set around a Lancashire farm where tradition was important.

  Paul La Farge’s The Night Ocean featured H.P. Lovecraft himself as a character along with other historical writers and editors in the genre before lifting the lid on Lovecraft’s (fictional) gay relationship with his teenage protégé, Robert Barlow, who possibly didn’t commit suicide in 1951.

  Eric Flint and Mike Resnick teamed up for the Lovecraftian SF novel The Gods of Sagittarius, which featured a race of aliens known as the “Old Ones”, and an FBI agent and one of two survivors of Innsmouth teamed up in 1949 in Ruthanna Emrys’ Winter Tide.

  James Lovegrove’s The Cthulhu Casebooks: Sherlock Holmes and the Miskatonic Monstrosities was another literary mash-up nobody needed, while Black Goat Blues was the second volume in Levi Black’s contemporary “Mythos War” series.

  There was also an echo of Lovecraft in Caitlín R. Kiernan’s novella Agents of Dreamland, as secret agents combated an alien fungus plague.

  The grown-up members of the Blyton Summer Detective Club reunited after thirteen years to confront the suppressed horrors they witnessed during their final case unmasking the “Sleepy Lake Monster” in Spanish writer and cartoonist Edgar Cantero’s Meddling Kids, a postmodern homage to everything from Scooby-Doo to Lovecraft.

  Alison Littlewood’s Victorian horror novel The Crow Garden involved an obsessed asylum doctor, while a woman locked in a psychiatric hospital revealed the tragic history of a dilapidated haunted house in The Silent Companions by Laura Purcell.

  Three friends unearthed something horrific beneath an old mansion’s outhouse in Jeffrey Ford’s novella The Twilight Pariah, and a teenager connected with his Native American roots in his own house in Stephen Graham Jones’ ghostly novel Mapping the Interior.

  A young dead girl found herself still trapped in the world of the living in Seanan McGuire’s novella Dusk or Dark or Dawn or Day, while Into the Drowning Deep was the second in the “Rolling in the Deep” series by the same author writing under the name “Mira Grant”.

  Corpselight was the second volume in Angela Slatter’s “Verity Fassbinder” series, and In the Still of the Night, David L. Golemon’s sequel to The Supernaturals, found the TV ghost-hunting team trying to save the President.

  A group of characters in present-day Portland discovered that something evil was planning to invade this dimension through the Internet in Benjamin Percy’s The Dark Net.

  Ezekiel Boone’s Skitter was a sequel to the author’s spider-horror novel The Hatching.

  Scientists in Antarctica reawakened a deadly, dormant organism in Michael McBride’s Subhuman, the first book in the “Unit 51” series, and a mining operation awakened something nasty underground in Kurt Anderson’s Resurrection Pass.

  A teacher having visions of missing students was drawn back to an ancient woodland, the site of a mysterious disappearance a decade before, in Hekla’s Children by James Brogden, and a street musician discovered that his former girlfriend had unusual psychic powers in Rio Youers’ The Forgotten Girl.

  Mysterious events occurred around a writers’ and artists’ retreat in Wendy Webb’s The End of Temperance Dare, and paranormal investigator Jenny Logan was faced with a possible werewolf killing at a writers’ retreat in Lincoln Child’s Full Wolf Moon.

  Victorian artifacts awakened a killer in modern-day California in Robert Masello’s The Jekyll Revelation, while Dr. Jekyll’s daughter Eliza investigated another mystery in The Dastardly Miss Lizzie, Viola Carr’s follow-up to The Diabolical Miss Hyde.

  Molly Tanzer’s Creatures of Will and Temper was inspired by Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.

  M.R. Carey’s novella The Boy on the Bridge was set in the same zombie post-apocalyptic Britain as The Girl with All the Gifts.

  The Burning World was the second book in Isaac Marion’s zombie post-apocalypse “Warm Bodies” series, while Scott Kenemore’s Zombie-in-Chief: Eater of the Free World was a satirical spoof on the 2016 American presidential election.

  A woman could communicate with the dead in Sara Flannery Murphy’s debut novel, The Possessions, and a reporter investigated an Appalachian snake-handling cult in Kristi DeMeester’s first novel, Beneath.

  In Emily Bain Murphy’s first book, The Disappearances, aimed at the young adult market, everyday things began to vanish every seven years.

  A former mummy-turned-vice cop and his undead partner investigated an attempt to upset the relationship between vampires and humans in Michael F. Haspil’s first novel, Graveyard Shift, which could perhaps have done with a more original title.

  The New Annotated Frankenstein celebrated the forthcoming 200th anniversary of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel. Edited and annotated by Leslie S. Klinger, the book included around 200 illustrations, an Introduction by Guillermo del Toro and an Afterword by Anne K. Mellor.

  With a Foreword by Dacre Stoker and an Afterword by John Edgar Browning, Powers of Darkness: The Lost Version of Dracula from Overlook Pre
ss reprinted Valdimar Ásmundsson’s 1901 Icelandic translation/reinterpretation of Bram Stoker’s novel (Makt Myrkranna), translated back into English with notes and annotations by Hans Corneel de Roos, who speculated in his Introduction that Ásmundsson’s version may have been based on an earlier, unpublished draft of Dracula.

  Harper’s “Collins Chillers” series continued with a new anthology of neglected vampire stories, Dracula’s Brethren, edited by Richard Dalby and Brian J. Frost, along with the reprint collections In the Dark by E. Nesbit, The Black Reaper by Bernard Capes and Three Men in the Dark by Jerome K. Jerome, Barry Pain and Robert Barr, all edited with revised Introductions by Hugh Lamb.

  Selected with an Introduction by Mark Gatiss, Ghost Stories collected nine tales by E.F. Benson, while the British Library published Out of the Deep and Other Supernatural Tales, which reprinted thirteen stories by Walter de la Mare, along with an Introduction by Gary Buzwell.

  The Best of Richard Matheson appeared as part of the Penguin Classics series. It contained thirty-three stories first published between 1950-2010, with an Introduction by editor Victor LaValle.

  The Horror on the Links and The Devil’s Rosary were the first two volumes in Night Shade Books’ handsome hardcover series “The Complete Tales of Jules de Grandin”, reprinting Seabury Quinn’s tales of the dapper occult detective from Weird Tales. Edited by George A. Vanderburgh, the first volume was introduced by Vanderburgh and the late Robert E. Weinberg and the second by Stefan Dziemianowicz. Both books featured terrific cover paintings by Donato Giancola.