The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 24 Read online

  Kristin Atherton portrayed the teenage author of Frankenstein in the Shared Experience company’s production of Mary Shelley, which played at London’s Tricycle theatre over the summer.

  At the beginning of October, Chicago’s WildClaw Theatre presented Charley Sherman’s world premiere adaptation of Clive Barker’s The Life of Death at the DCA Storefront Theater, directed by Carolyn Klein.

  The Barbican’s Hallowe’en presentation was the Polish company T. R. Warszawa’s Nosferatu, a new stage version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, with Wolfgang Michael as the worn-out vampire.

  Sarah Douglas starred in Cigarette Burns’s portmanteau production of The Hallowe’en Sessions, which related the stories of five patients who were apparently held in an insane asylum. Inspired by the old Amicus anthology movies, and scripted by Kim Newman, Stephen Volk, Maura McHugh, Anne Billson, Paul McAuley and director Sean Hogan, it ran for six nights over Hallowe’en at London’s Leicester Square Theatre as part of AlleyKat’s inaugural 13th Horror Festival, which included theatre, comedy, music, lectures and storytelling.

  Meanwhile, Theatre of the Damned took over the unre-furbished upstairs room of Whitechapel’s crumbling Wilton’s Music Hall over Hallowe’en for The Horror! The Horror! Theatre-goers were taken back to 1904 for a sneak-preview of a mysterious music hall company’s new season of variety acts – not least, Mr Merrick’s Miraculous Performing Puppies and their unfortunate fate.

  Alexandra Spencer-Jones’s highly physical version of Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange made the transition from the previous year’s Edinburgh Fringe to London’s Soho Theatre at the end of the year, while choreographer Matthew Bourne’s acclaimed reinterpretation of Sleeping Beauty: A Gothic Romance at London’s Sadler’s Wells added vampires and faries to Tchaikovsky’s ballet.

  Veteran British rock ’n’ roll singer Tommy Steele starred in a seasonal revival of Leslie Bricusse’s 1992 stage musical Scrooge at the London Palladium for a limited ten-week season.

  Warner Bros. Studio Tour London opened The Making of Harry Potter at the end of March near Watford, twenty miles north-west of London. Tickets, which ranged from £21.50 for a child aged five and above to £29.00 for adults sixteen and above, had to be purchased in advance.

  The Opening Ceremony of the London 2012 Olympics at the end of July was marked by director Danny Boyle’s somewhat skewered and overblown £27 million celebration of Britain. Author J. K. Rowling popped up to introduce a sequence combining the National Health Service with children’s literature, although it sometimes seemed more to do with movies than books as the latter included a giant puppet Lord Voldemort, Captain Hook from Peter Pan, Cruella Deville from One Hundred and One Dalmations, the Queen of Hearts from Alice in Wonderland, the Child Catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and a squadron of flying Mary Poppinses. Most people seemed to prefer a filmed insert in which Daniel Craig’s James Bond briefly interacted with the real 86-year-old Queen Elizabeth II.

  At the equally chaotic Closing Ceremonies two weeks later, a scary-looking Annie Lennox and some impressively undead dancers performed a song from the movie Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992). Meanwhile, for no apparent reason, after Caliban’s speech from William Shakespeare’s The Tempest was read by Kenneth Branagh (in character as Isambard Kingdom Brunel) during the opening event, Timothy Spall’s Winston Churchill popped out of a mock-up of Big Ben to do the same thing during the finale.

  In March, the video games retailer Game Group went into administration. The company had 610 shops in the UK and a further 663 overseas, employing 10,000 people. It was thought that the company was hurt by the shift to digital downloading and competition from specialist online sellers and supermarkets.

  Capcom swamped the market with a number of new Resident Evil games in 2012. Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City had the same setting but not the same gameplay as Resident Evil 2, while a new pathogen called the C-Virus created zombies that could use automatic weapons in Resident Evil 6, which abandoned the series’ survival roots and could randomly pair the player with others online.

  Resident Evil: No Hope Left was released later in the year, along with HD updates of two earlier entries in the series, The Umbrella Chronicles and The Darkside Chronicles.

  A viral zombie infection had decimated London in the survival game ZombiU from Ubisoft, and there were more zombies to shoot in Call of Duty: Black Ops II.

  Tellrale Games’ The Walking Dead was a five-game series based on the comic book rather than the dull TV show, while Deadlight was a survival zombie game that didn’t live up to its graphics.

  Konami’s Silent Hill: Downpour was not up to previous entries in the series, and a woman escorting a mysterious young girl on a train discovered everyone around her turning into zombies in Amy.

  Based on the comic book, The Darkness II once again followed the exploits of Mafia hitman Jackie Estacado and his monstrous tentacles, while you had the ability to become a nine-foot tall vampire lord that could teleport via a swarm of bats in the multi-player game The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim – Dawnguard.

  Vampires, zombies, and every other mythological creature existed in The Secret World, set in a contemporary world of magic and munitions, and there was more monster-hunting to be played in Torchlight II.

  The great detective was framed for crimes he didn’t commit in The Testament of Sherlock Holmes.

  In July, the free online interactive game RuneScape became the first in the world to total 200 million players – almost the combined populations of the UK, France and Germany.

  The Amazing Spider-Man video game for multiple platforms was set directly after the new film reboot and featured an innovative “web rush” option that allowed the player to jump around the screen at incredible speed.

  It was certainly a lot better than Battleship – a game based on a movie which itself was based on a game – and the disappointing The Dark Knight Rises for iOS, which came with in-app purchases.

  Based on the 1980s movie trilogy, the boxed set of Back to the Future: The Game featured the voice of Christopher Lloyd as a motion-capture Doc Brown and a cameo by original star Michael J. Fox.

  Hotel Transylvania was another film tie-in game, which could be played in 3-D.

  Lego’s Monster Fighter sets included versions of Dracula, the Frankenstein Monster and a werewolf, while the Mummy Minimates Box Set was based on the classic 1932 movie.

  Moebius Models’ Bela Lugosi Dracula Model Kit was based on the 1927 stage play with a base modelled on actual props from the production, and for $35.00 you could buy a replica of Lugosi’s Dracula ring, once owned by Forrest J Ackerman.

  Round 2 Model’s Dark Shadows statues of Barnabas Collins, the Werewolf and Vampire Van were exact replicas of the 1969 model kits down to the retro box art.

  The thirty-six ounce Cthulhu Tiki Mug was created via a Kickstarter campaign.

  On February 23rd, Britain’s Royal Mail issued a new set of ten stamps honouring “Britons of Distinction”. Amongst those who were considered to have made a major contribution to society was M. R. James, “scholar and author of ghost stories”.

  The March set of “Comics Characters” stamps included first-class stamps depicting Dan Dare from Eagle and Judge Dredd from 2000 A.D.

  Ireland marked the centenary of the death of Bram Stoker on April 19th with a set of two stamps commemorating the creator of Dracula.

  Over Hallowe’en, the Royal Armouries museum in Leeds put on show a “Vampire-Slaying Kit”, thought to have been commissioned in the 1890s by an unknown owner. It included wooden stakes, a mallet, holy water and a pistol, and was estimated to be worth £7,500.

  In November, a recently discovered presentation copy of the first edition of Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), signed by author Mary Shelley to Lord Byron, was sold in London for an undisclosed sum to a UK collector, with the proviso that the book would be made available for future viewings by the public. The Chelsea auction house selling the copy had invited bids “in exces
s of £350,000”.

  That same month, at a sale of pop culture memorabilia at Christie’s in London, one of Indiana Jones’s kangaroo-hide bullwhips sold for £20,000. A Holy Grail prop made for Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade went for £11,875, while a diary kept by Sean Connery’s Henry Jones fetched £18,750.

  T. E. D. Klien was the recipient of the Grand Master Award announced at the 2012 World Horror Convention held in Salt Lake City, Utah, over March 29th–April 1st. Guests of Honor included author Sherrilyn Kenyon, artist Mike Mignola and editor Scott Allie, along with a raft of “special guests”. P. N. Elrod was Toastmistress.

  The event was held in conjunction with The Horror Writers Association 2011 Bram Stoker Awards weekend, which additionally had Joe R. and Karen Lansdale, Robert McCammon, Dacre Stoker and Jeff Strand as guests.

  The award for poetry went to How to Recognize a Demon Has Become Your Friend by Linda Addison, while Rocky Wood’s Stephen King: A Literary Companion won for Superior Achievement in Non-Fiction. The Corn Maiden and Other Nightmares by Joyce Carol Oates picked up the Collection award and the Anthology award was collected by editor John Skipp for Demons: Encounters with the Devil and His Minions, Fallen Angels and the Possessed.

  Stephen King’s “Herman Wouk is Still Alive” won for Superior Achievement in Short Fiction and “The Ballad of Ballard and Sandrine” by Peter Straub won in the Long Fiction category. The Young Adult Novel award was a tie between The Screaming Season by Nancy Holder and Dust & Decay by Jonathan Maberry, the First Novel went to Allyson Bird’s Isis Unbound, and Joe McKinney’s Flesh Eaters won the Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Novel.

  Rick Hautala and Joe R. Lansdale were given Life Achievement Awards, and Derrick Hussey of Hippocampus Press and Roy Robbins of Bad Moon Books each won Specialty Press Awards. The HWA’s Silver Hammer Award for outstanding service to the organisation went to Guy Anthony DeMarco, while Karen Lansdale received The President’s Richard Laymon Service Award.

  As if all that wasn’t enough, for one time only the HWA, in conjunction with the Bram Stoker Family Estate and the Rosenbach Museum & Library, presented a Vampire Novel of the Century Award to Richard Matheson for I Am Legend.

  FantasyCon 2012 was held in Brighton, England, over September 27th–30th. Guests of Honour were authors Joe R. Lansdale, Muriel Gray and Brent Weeks. Veteran anthology editor Mary Danby, writer and actor Mark Gatiss and film director Robin Hardy were Special Guests, while Tim Lebbon was Master of Ceremonies.

  A whole slew of winners of British Fantasy Awards were announced at the banquet on the Sunday afternoon. The Karl Edward Wagner Special Award went to Peter and Nicky Crowther for PS Publishing, and the Sydney J. Bounds Best Newcomer Award went to Kameron Allen.

  Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris won for Screenplay, Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez won Comic/Graphic Novel for Locke & Key, Magazine/Periodical went to Black Static, and Chômu Press received The PS Publishing Independent Press Award.

  Daniele Serra won The Artist Award, The Non-Fiction Award went to Grant Morrison’s Supergods: Our World in the Age of the Superhero, Robert Shearman’s Everyone’s Just So So Special won for Collection, and the Anthology award went to The Weird edited by Ann and Jeff Vander-Meer. Angela Slatter’s “The Coffin Maker’s Daughter” won for Short Fiction, and Novella went to Gorel and the Pot Bellied God by Lavie Tidhar.

  With the Novel award for the first time split into two categories, the August Derleth Award for horror went to The Ritual by Adam Nevill, while the winner of the newly created Robert Holdstock Award for fantasy was presented to Among Others by Jo Walton.

  Despite claiming to be held in Toronto, Canada, the 38th World Fantasy Convention actually took place in the suburb of Richmond Hill from November 1st–4th. Guests of Honour were Elizabeth Hand, John Clute and Richard A. Kirk, with Gary K. Wolfe as Toastmaster. Special Guests included Charles de Lint, Tanya Huff, Patricia Briggs, Mercedes Lackey and Larry Dixon.

  At the World Fantasy Awards Banquet on the Sunday afternoon, the Special Award – Non-Professional went to Raymond Russell and Rosalie Parker for Tartarus Press, and Eric Lane of Dedalus Books received the Special Award – Professional for publishing in translation.

  John Coulthart won the Artist award, Collection went to Tim Powers’s The Bible Repairman and Other Stories and the VanderMeers once again picked up the Anthology award for The Weird. Ken Liu’s “The Paper Menagerie” won for Short Fiction, the Novella award went to “A Small Price to Pay for Birdsong”, and Lavie Tidhar’s Osama was deemed the best Novel.

  Lifetime Achievement Awards had earlier been announced for Alan Garner and George R. R. Martin.

  As I mentioned above, in recent years there has been a huge increase in PoD (print-on-demand) and digital publishing, particularly in our genre. However, greater choice does not always lead to better quality.

  As never before, the publishing industry is in a state of upheaval. While publishers’ profits are beign squeezed by falling sales and closing bookstores and libraries, advances in new technology such as the insidious Apple iBooks Author app and Amazon’s digital text platform are creating a generation of self-published authors who think they can write.

  In most cases, they can’t.

  At a time when writers such as Anthony Horowitz have questioned the role of the publisher in modern publishing and the UK’s latest children’s laureate, Malorie Blackman, has spoken out against those who criticise the quality of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series, we need publishers like never before.

  We need the experienced agents, editors, proof readers, designers, advertising and marketing departments, and booksellers. In short, we need all the things that sort the wheat from the chaff. This is not being elitist – it is simply the best method of filtering out the good stuff from the bad.

  The rise of self-publishing and e-books might mean that it is now easier for the neophyte author to potentially reach a much wider audience, but at the end of the day it is no substitute for creativity, technique and knowledge. And all that only comes from working with professional publishers.

  It was once said that everybody has a book in them. But really, you know, they don’t.

  The Editor

  July, 2013

  NEIL GAIMAN

  Witch Work

  NEIL GAIMAN has co-scripted (with Roger Avary) Robert Zemeckis’s motion-capture fantasy film Beowulf, while both Matthew Vaughn’s Stardust and Henry Selick’s Coraline were based on his novels. Next up, his Newbery Medal-winning children’s novel The Graveyard Book is being adapted for the movies, with Gaiman on board as one of the producers.

  The busy author also has out a book of poems, Blueberry Girl, illustrated by Charles Vess; Crazy Hair, a new picture book with regular collaborator Dave McKean, and the graphic novel compilation Batman: Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader? (with art by Andy Kubert). The Tales of Odd is a follow-up to the 2008 children’s book Odd and the Frost Giants, while The Absolute Death and The Complete Death from DC/Vertigo feature the character from the Gaiman’s Sandman comic. He is also working on a non-fiction volume about China, following his visit to that country in 2007.

  About the poem that opens this volume, Gaiman says: “I wanted to write something that seemed to be about the person it was about, while it was actually about the person telling it. I wanted something that felt like a nursery rhyme and which echoed. In my head, this is probably a Dunsany story I never actually wrote . . .”

  The witch was as old as the mulberry tree

  She lived in the house of a hundred clocks

  She sold storms and sorrows and calmed the sea

  And she kept her life in a box.

  The tree was the oldest that I’d ever seen

  Its trunk flowed like liquid. It dripped with age.

  But every September its fruit stained the green

  As scarlet as harlots, as red as my rage.

  The clocks whispered time which they caught in their gears

  They crept
and they chattered, they chimed and they chewed.

  She fed them on minutes. The old ones ate years.

  She feared and she loved them, her wild clocky brood.

  She sold me a storm when my anger was strong

  And my hate filled the world with volcanoes and laughter

  I watched as the lightnings and wind sang their song

  And my madness was swallowed by what happened after.

  She sold me three sorrows all wrapped in a cloth.

  The first one I gave to my enemy’s child.

  The second my woman made into a broth.

  The third waits unused, for we reconciled.

  She sold calm seas to the mariners’ wives

  Bound the winds with silk cords so the storms could be tied there,

  The women at home lived much happier lives

  Till their husbands returned, and their patience be tried there.

  The witch hid her life in a box made of dirt,

  As big as a fist and as dark as a heart

  There was nothing but time there and silence and hurt

  While the witch watched the waves with her pain and her art.

  (But he never came back. He never came back . . .)

  The witch was as old as the mulberry tree

  She lived in the house of a hundred clocks

  She sold storms and sorrows and calmed the sea

  And she kept her life in a box.

  ALISON LITTLEWOOD

  The Discord of Being

  ALISON LITTLEWOOD was raised in Penistone, South Yorkshire, and went on to attend the University of Northumbria at Newcastle (now Northumbria University). Originally she planned to study graphic design, but “missed the words too much” and switched to a joint English and History degree. She followed a career in marketing before developing her love of writing fiction.

  She is the author of A Cold Season, published by Jo Fletcher Books, an imprint of Quercus. The devilish novel was selected for the UK’s Richard and Judy Book Club, where it was described as “perfect reading for a dark winter’s night”. Her second book, Path of Needles, published in May 2013, combines a crime story with a look at the more horrific side of fairy tales.