Best New Horror 27 Read online

  Edited by Scott Connors and Ron Hilger, The End of the Story was the first of five volumes in “The Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith” from Night Shade Books. Presenting the late poet and author’s work in chronological order, the volume featured an Introduction by Ramsey Campbell and various notes and appendices by the editors.

  From Flame Tree Publishing, Chilling Horror Short Stories and Chilling Ghost Short Stories were two beautiful-looking hardcover anthologies of new and classic tales in the publisher’s “Gothic Fantasy” deluxe gift-book series (there was a third volume devoted to science fiction). With Forewords by Gothic expert Dr. Dale Townshend, the books included stories by, amongst others, E.F. Benson, Ambrose Bierce, Robert W. Chambers, Wilkie Collins, F. Marion Crawford, James Dorr, Arthur Conan Doyle, Sheridan Le Fanu, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Hope Hodgson, W.W. Jacobs, Henry James, M.R. James, D.H. Lawrence, H.P. Lovecraft, A. Merritt, Edith Nesbit, Edgar Allan Poe, Bram Stoker, Lucy Taylor, Edith Wharton, Oscar Wilde and Andrew J. Wilson. Biographical sources were given, although individual copyright notices were noticeable by their absence.

  Holly Black’s The Darkest Part of the Forest was a dark fairy tale set in a town where humans and fair folk co-existed, while Doll Bones from the same author was about a sinister children’s game.

  Monsters were loose in San Bernardino, California, in the young adult novel Trollhunters by Guillermo del Toro and Daniel Kraus.

  Derek Landy’s Demon Road, the first volume in a new series, was also available in a signed, limited “Platinum” edition.

  A girl’s new home turned out to be an asylum with a mind of its own in Katie Alender’s The Dead Girls of Hysteria Hall, and a girl found herself stuck in the body of a dying woman in an insane asylum in Ilsa J. Blick’s The Dickens Mirror, the second book in the “Dark Passages” series.

  A teenager inherited his father’s collection of ghosts in Leo Hunt’s 13 Days of Midnight, while a group of children making a ghost film discovered that the location was really haunted in Ghostlight by Sonia Gensler.

  A girl searching for a rare flower in the Okefenokee swamp discovered something nasty lurking in the water in Robert Lettrick’s The Murk. A teenager began to recall what happened to her and her missing sister years earlier in The Creeping by Alexandra Sirowy, and a group of high school girls found themselves trapped in a subterranean rave with a killer in Survive the Night by Danielle Vega.

  Michael Grant’s The Tattooed Heart was the second book in the “Messenger of Fear” series, and Hillary Monahan’s Mary Unleashed was the second volume in the “Bloody Mary” trilogy.

  Library of Souls was the third volume in Ransom Riggs’ “Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children” series, while Catacomb was the third volume in Madeleine Roux’s “Asylum” series, featuring “found” photographs. This was also available in a Barnes & Noble exclusive edition containing a boundin map and evidence board.

  In Daniel Kraus’ The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch Volume One: At the Edge of Vampire, a 19th-century Chicago gangster returned from the dead in a slowly-decomposing body.

  A young girl fell down a hole into a fantasy world of zombies in Once Upon a Zombie Book One: The Color of Fear by Billy Phillips and Jenny Nissenson, while A Mad Zombie Party was the fourth and final book in “The White Rabbit Chronicles” mash-up series.

  Zom-B Bride and Zom-B Fugitive were the tenth and eleventh volumes, respectively, in the YA series by Darren Shan (Darren O’Shaughnessy), illustrated by Warren Pleece. The author also had an adult horror novel out, Sunburn, under the name “Darren Dash”.

  Susan Dennard’s 1800’s-set steampunk zombie novel Strange and Ever After was a sequel to Something Strange and Deadly, and Kathleen Peacock’s Willowgrave was the third in the werewolf mystery series.

  Edited by April Genevieve Tucholke, Slasher Girls and Monster Boys was a young adult anthology containing fourteen original stories.

  Neil Gaiman’s latest collection, Trigger Warning: Short Fiction and Disturbances, contained a selection of fiction, poems, sketches and commentary, including a Doctor Who story.

  Night Music was the second volume of the “Nocturnes” series and collected thirteen stories by John Connolly with illustrations by Jim Tierney.

  Get in Trouble featured nine stories (one original) by Kelly Link, and Three Moments of an Explosion was China Mièville’s first collection of short stories.

  Edited by Joseph Nassise and Del Howison, Midian Unmade: Tales of Clive Barker’s Nightbreed was exactly what the title said, featuring stories based on the author’s 1990 movie and earlier novella by Amber Benson, Nancy Holder, Seanan McGuire, Weston Ochse, David J. Schow and others, along with an Introduction by Barker.

  Boasting a cover and interior illustrations by Barker, Horrorology: The Lexicon of Fear edited by Stephen Jones collected within a wraparound narrative twelve original stories and novellas based on the language of horror by Barker, Ramsey Campbell, Joanne Harris, Kim Newman, Lisa Tuttle, Pat Cadigan, Michael Marshall Smith, Muriel Gray, Reggie Oliver, Robert Shearman, Angela Slatter and Mark Samuels.

  The Doll Collection, edited and introduced by Ellen Datlow, contained seventeen stories by an impressive line-up of contributors that included Tim Lebbon, Stephen Gallagher, Joyce Carol Oates, Gemma Files, Pat Cadigan, John Langan and others, along with photos by the editor, Ellen Klages and Richard Bowes.

  Edited by Jason Blum, The Blumhouse Book of Nightmares: The Haunted City contained seventeen urban horror stories by Sarah Langan, Simon Kurt Unsworth and others.

  The Mammoth Book of Jack the Ripper Stories was a new anthology from Maxim Jakubowski, who had previously edited another compilation on the subject. It included thirty-seven stories by Steve Rasnic Tem, Rhys Hughes and others.

  Ghostly, edited, introduced and illustrated by Audrey Niffenegger, collected sixteen ghost stories by, amongst others, M.R. James, Edgar Allan Poe, Edith Wharton, P.G. Wodehouse, Neil Gaiman and Kelly Link.

  Edited by Marjorie Sandor, The Uncanny Reader: Stories from the Shadows contained thirty-one stories by Edgar Allan Poe, Joan Aiken, Kelly Link, China Mièville and others.

  Dead But Not Forgotten, edited by Charlaine Harris and Toni P. Kelner, was subtitled Stories from the World of Sookie Stackhouse and included contributions from Rachel Caine, Jonathan Maberry and Sean McGuire.

  Edited by Christopher Golden, Seize the Night: New Tales of Vampiric Terror contained twenty stories by Charlaine Harris, John Ajvide Lindqvist and others.

  Paula Guran edited Blood Sisters: Vampire Stories by Women, which contained twenty-five tales by Caitlín R. Kiernan, Laurell K. Hamilton and Tanya Huff, amongst others. From the same editor, New Cthulhu 2 reprinted nineteen Lovecraftian stories from 2010-14.

  The Madness of Cthulhu Volume Two, edited and introduced by S. T. Joshi, featured fourteen original stories “inspired by H.P. Lovecraft” by Greg Bear, Alan Dean Foster, Kevin J. Anderson, Nancy Kilpatrick, William F. Nolan, Steve Rasnic Tem and others. Kim Newman provided an Introduction.

  For fans of Arthur Conan Doyle’s consulting detective, The Big Book of Sherlock Holmes Stories edited by Otto Penzler was the largest collection of Sherlock Holmes stories ever assembled. It included more than eighty stories by, amongst others, Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, August Derleth, Michael Moorcock, Anthony Boucher, Tanith Lee, Poul Anderson, Peter Tremayne, Manly Wade Wellman, Davis Grubb, Peter Cannon and Doyle himself (with two parodies and an essay).

  Best New Horror #26 was the first volume in the series to be originally published—in signed and slipcased and regular hardcover editions—by PS Publishing. Edited by Stephen Jones, it included nineteen stories and novellas, along with the usual historical Introduction, Necrology and Useful Addresses.

  Ellen Datlow’s The Best Horror of the Year: Volume Seven featured twenty-two contributions, plus the editor’s Summation of the year and the inevitable Honourable Mentions, while Paula Guran’s The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror collected twenty-eight stories.

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p; The second and reportedly final volume in series editor Johnny Mains’ Best British Horror featured twenty-two tales, including a tribute to the late Graham Joyce, and the Year’s Best Weird Fiction Volume Two edited by Kathe Koja and Michael Kelly contained twenty stories.

  The Jones and Datlow anthologies overlapped by just one story (by Dale Bailey), the Jones and Mains books both featured the same story by Simon Kurt Unsworth under different titles, and the Datlow and Koja/Kelly both used the same story by Nathan Ballingrud.

  Dale Bailey had the distinction of appearing in four “Year’s Best” horror volumes, and he was followed by Nathan Ballingrud, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Helen Marshall and Angela Slatter, who were represented in three. Laird Barron, Gemma Files, Stephen Graham Jones, John Langan, Alison Littlewood, Robert Shearman, Simon Strantzas, Steve Rasnic Tem, Lavie Tidhar and Simon Kurt Unsworth all had stories reprinted in two volumes.

  Apparently everybody’s feeling the squeeze…even J.K. Rowling, whose online Pottermore site made a loss of around £6 million in 2015, down from a profit of £14.9 million the previous year. Much of the loss was blamed on the end of an agreement with Sony to package licensed “Harry Potter” video games and e-books with its Sony Reader.

  John Joseph Adams’ free monthly online Nightmare Magazine featured new fiction by, amongst others, Kealan Patrick Burke, Alison Littlewood, Chuck Palahniuk and Silvia Moreno-Garcia; reprints from Brian Everson, Halli Villegas, Robert Shearman, Lynda E. Rucker, Nancy Kilpatrick, Stephen Graham Jones, Chet Williamson, Lisa Tuttle, Christopher Golden, Steve Rasnic Tem, Richard Christian Matheson, Reggie Oliver, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Poppy Z. Brite, Tim Lebbon, Gemma Files and F. Paul Wilson; columns on horror by Helen Marshall, Lynda E. Rucker, Paul Tremblay, Nancy Holder and Lucy A. Snyder, and interviews with Helen Marshall, Chuck Palahniuk, Richard Chizmar, William F. Nolan, Lucy A. Snyder, Clive Barker and Jason Blum. The October issue was a special “Queers Destroy Horror!” issue edited by Wendy N. Wagner.

  Jeani Rector’s monthly online magazine The Horror Zine presented fiction and poetry from, amongst many others, Sarah Pinborough, Terry Grimwood, Yvonne Navarro, Piers Anthony and Graham Masterton.

  The free bi-monthly online magazine The Dark, edited by Jack Fisher and Sean Wallace, featured dark fantasy and strange fiction from Lisa L. Hannett, Angela Slatter and others.

  Two years after being revived as a print “sampler”, John Gilbert’s Fear magazine finally reappeared in a digital format. It included interviews with Barbie Wilde, Adam Nevill, Christopher Rice, Jack Ketchum, John Jarrold, and associate editor Dean M. Drinkel, along with news and reviews.

  The same day that the first season of Fear the Walking Dead ended in early October, AMC launched the sixteen-part online companion series Fear the Walking Dead: Flight 462. Featuring a group of aeroplane passengers dealing with an onboard outbreak of the zombie virus, one of its characters was slated to join the sophomore season of the TV series.

  Channel 4 streamed A Moment of Horror, an anthology of six short-short films online over Hallowe’en.

  The latest volume of editor Paul Finch’s excellent series of print-on-demand anthologies for Gray Friar Press was Terror Tales of the Ocean, which included thirteen stories (four reprints) by, amongst others, Peter James, Terry Grimwood, Robert Shearman, Stephen Laws, Adam Nevill, Simon Strantzas, Lynda E. Rucker and Conrad Williams.

  Publisher Charles Black selected fourteen often gruesome tales for The Eleventh Black Book of Horror by, amongst others, Thana Niveau, John Llewellyn Probert, Kate Farrell, David A. Riley, Tony Earnshaw, Marion Pitman and Sam Dawson.

  Perhaps best known for playing the female Cenobite in Hellbound: Hellraiser II, Barbie Wilde’s debut collection of stories, Voices of the Damned, was impressively published by Birmingham’s Short, Scary Tales Publications. Featuring eleven tales (two original), the book boasted a cover painting by Clive Barker, a Foreword by Fangoria editor-in-chief Chris Alexander, an Afterword from filmmakers the Soska Sisters, and full-colour illustrations by various artists, including Barker, Ben Baldwin, Daniele Serra and others.

  Also from SST Publications, Blood Red was a werewolf retelling of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ and collected Paul Kane’s original 2008 novella Red, the titular sequel, and two Introductions by Alison Littlewood and Tim Lebbon. The signed, limited hardcover also included extracts from an award-winning screenplay adaptation by Sundae Jahant-Osborn, excerpts from a graphic novel script with character sketches by the author, and a portion of another novella by Kane. Dave McKean supplied the cover art.

  Published in hardcover and boasting a terrific cover painting by Clive Barker and an Introduction by Nicholas Vince, Monsters from The Alchemy Press collected eighteen stories (one original) and an Afterword by Paul Kane. It came with a bonus DVD of the short film The Weeping Woman, directed by Mark Steensland from a story and script by Kane.

  Music in the Bone and Other Stories collected twenty stories (one original) by Marion Pitman, who also included author notes on each one.

  Evocations featured seventeen tales (one original) and story notes by James Brogden, while Mike Chinn’s Give Me These Moments Back contained eighteen stories (two original) and an Afterword by the author.

  Also from Alchemy, Leinster Gardens and Other Subtleties included fourteen stories (one original) and an Afterword by Jan Edwards, with an Introduction by David A. Sutton.

  Dead Water and Other Weird Tales from the same imprint collected eighteen career-spanning stories (two original) by Sutton, along with an Introduction by David A. Riley, story notes by the author, and a frontispiece illustration by Jim Pitts.

  From David Sutton’s own Shadow Publishing, Creeping Crawlers was a hefty anthology edited and introduced by Allen Ashley, featuring nineteen stories (one reprint) about insects, arachnids, arthropods and other slithering things by Storm Constantine, Adrian Cole, Dennis Etchison, John Grant, Andrew Darlington and others.

  Edited by Pete Kahle, Not Your Average Monster! A Bestiary of Horrors was an attractive PoD trade paperback featuring twenty-two stories about unusual creatures by Christine Morgan, Adrian Cole, Billie Sue Mosiman and others, including the editor himself.

  Published by Tickety Boo Press and boasting dustjacket artwork by Jim Burns, Spectral Press founder Simon Marshall-Jones’ episodic novel Biblia Longcrofta was set in the titular town on the northern coastline of Britain.

  From Surinam Turtle Press, Richard A. Lupoff’s on-demand imprint for Ramble House, Christopher Conlon’s The TellTale Soul: Two Novellas was inspired by the work of Edgar Allan Poe and Eugene O’Neill and came with an Introduction by John Pelan.

  Working Stiff by Kevin J. Anderson from WordFire Press collected seven stories about zombie private investigator Dan Shamble. It was reprinted with bonus material by Gauntlet Press in an edition of 500 signed copies and a traycased lettered edition.

  Welcome trade paperback reprints from Valancourt Books included the novels Cold Moon Over Babylon and Katie by Michael McDowell; The Woodwitch by Stephen Gregory with an Introduction by Paul Tremblay; House of Fire by Arch Oboler with an Introduction by Christopher Conlon, and Burnt Offerings by Robert Marasco with an Introduction by Stephen Graham Jones.

  Edited with an Introduction by Stephen Jones and featuring new movie-themed Afterwords by Kim Newman, Fengriffin & Other Gothic Tales and The Cell & Other Transmorphic Tales were original collections from Valancourt of some of the best stories and novellas by David Case.

  Other collections from the same PoD imprint included On an Odd Note, a reprint of the 1958 volume containing thirteen stories by Gerald Kersh and a new Introduction by Nick Mamatas, and Antique Dust, an excellent collection of ghost stories by Robert Westall, with an Introduction by Orrin Grey.

  Nightscript: Volume One, edited by C.M. Muller for Chthonic Matter, was billed on the cover as “An Anthology of Strange and Darksome Tales”. It lived up to that description with twenty original stories by, amongst others, Daniel Mills, Clint Smith, Eric J. Guignard, Michael Kelly and
Jason A. Wycoff.

  Edited by Jean-Marc Lofficier and Randy Lofficier for their Black Coat Press imprint, The Vampire Almanac (Volume 1) collected twenty-one original pastiche vampire stories. Frank Schildiner’s novel The Quest of Frankenstein from the same PoD publisher united Mary Shelley’s Monster and H.P. Lovecraft’s Herbert West in the trenches of the First World War.

  Nicole Cushing’s first full-length collection, The Mirrors, was issued by Cycatrix Press, an imprint of JaSunni Productions. It contained twenty stories (two original) along with a Foreword by S.T. Joshi and a Preface and Story Notes by the author.

  Issued by on-demand publisher Hippocampus Press, Josh Kent’s The Witch at Sparrow Screek: A Jim Falk Novel was about its titular young protagonist using ancient knowledge to rid the land of evil.

  A Confederacy of Horrors from Hippocampus was a first collection from James Robert Smith containing twenty-five stories (nine original), along with an Afterword by Smith’s former Deathrealm alumnus Stephen Mark Rainey.

  From the same imprint came the collections Dreams of Ys and Other Invisible Worlds by Jonathan Thomas, The Bloody Tugboat and Other Witcheries by Robert H. Waugh, and Dark Equinox and Other Tales of Lovecraftian Horror by Ann K. Schwader, all featuring a mix of original and reprint material.

  Cult of the Dead and Other Weird and Lovecraftian Tales collected twenty reprint stories by Lois H. Gresh with an Introduction by S.T. Joshi, while W.H. Pugmire’s Monstrous Aftermath: Stories in the Lovecraft Tradition included fifteen reprint stories plus, for no apparent reason, Lovecraft’s sonnet-cycle ‘Fungi from Yuggoth’.

  Translated by Maria Mountokalaki and Elizabeth Georgiades, Necronomicon: The Manuscript of the Dead by German-born Greek writer Antonis Antoniades was a historical Lovecraftian novel set in the 10th century and concerned the translation of the blasphemous tome written by the mad Arab, Abdul Alhazred.

  Edited by S.T. Joshi, the second issue of the attractively-designed Spectral Realms from Hippocampus Press featured more than sixty poems by Donald Sydney-Fryer, Ann K. Schwader, Gemma Files, Darrell Schweitzer, John Shirley, William F. Nolan, Michael Kelly, W.H. Pugmire and many others, along with an article about the poetry of Leah Bodine Drake by Leigh Blackmore and reviews by Sunni K. Brock.