The Best New Horror 6 Read online

  Blood Ritual by Frances Gordon (aka Bridget Wood) was a history of Countess Elizabeth Bathory set against the Bosnian–Serb war. Death of the Devil by Caroline Gray was the third in a trilogy in which a seventeenth-century swordsman battled the vampire queen who destroyed his family. Death and the Maiden by P.N. Elrod was the second volume in the “Jonathan Barrett” series about a Tory vampire during the American Revolution, and For All Eternity by Linda Lael Miller was a vampire romance set during the American Civil War.

  Among the Immortals, a first novel by poet Paul Lake, used the premise that Percy Bysshe Shelley survived until the present day as a vampire in Berkeley’s academic community. Another first novel, Of Saints and Shadows by Christopher Golden, featured holy warriors battling a race of vampires, and former bookstore owner Sherry Gottlieb made her publishing debut with Love Bite, about a Los Angeles vampire searching for a mate through the personal columns. The Secret Life of Laszlo, Count Dracula by Roderick Anscombe was another first novel which treated the vampire as a flesh-eating, non-supernatural killer.

  Werewolves also remained popular in 1994, at least amongst readers of romantic fiction. Women fell in love with werewolves in both The Volan Curse by Jane Toombes and Prince of Wolves by Susan Krinard, while The Werewolf’s Sin was the third volume in the soap opera series by Cheri Scotch. Moon of Desire by Sophie Danson (aka Erin Caine) was an erotic novel about shapechangers, and All Things Under the Moon by Robert Morgan (aka C.J. Henderson) was the fourth book featuring occult private investigator Teddy London, this time on the trail of a lycanthrope.

  A number of novelists made promising débuts in the genre during 1994. Slippin’ Into Darkness was the eagerly awaited first novel from Norman Partridge, published in a handsome signed hardcover by CD Publications. Another writer better known for his short fiction is Robert Devereaux, who made his full-length début with the graphic Deadweight.

  Broadcaster Muriel Gray received plenty of media attention for The Trickster, based on native Canadian legends, and other first time horror novelists included Simon Magin (Sheep), Mark Chadbourn (Nocturne), Steve Zell (Wizard), James Buxton (Strange), John Douglas (The Late Show), Vivian Schilling (Sacred Prey), Mark Burnell (Freak), Ralph Vallone, Jr. (Second Vision) and Michael Marshall Smith (Only Forward, which was basically a science fiction novel but still contained many of the bizarre touches found in the author’s distinctive horror stories).

  1994 should have been the year of Frankenstein, and although Kenneth Branagh’s new version of the tale proved a disappointment at the box office, it didn’t seem to harm the sales of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein by Branagh (and others) which took a behind-the-scenes look at the making of the film and included the script by Steph Lady and Frank Darabont. It was also novelised by Leonore Fleischer in another book with the same title.

  Although Russell Mulcahy’s The Shadow also failed to cloud the minds of large audiences, James Luceno wrote the tie-in novel for the much underrated movie, based on the classic pulp magazine character. In Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, Freddy Krueger not only stalked the cast and crew of the new film, but also Alexander Besher, the author of the novelisation. Perhaps even stranger, Freddy Krueger’s Tales of Terror: Blind Date by Bruce Richards was an Elm Street novel aimed at young adults!

  Even worse was Eric Morse’s misogynistic young adult series based on the stalk ’n’ slash movies Friday the 13th: Mother’s Day, Jason’s Curse, The Carnival and Road Trip.

  King Kong by Anthony Browne and Merian C. Cooper was a children’s picture-book version of the classic story, but this time Fay Wray looked more like Marilyn Monroe.

  Randall Boyll continued the adventures of Sam Raimi’s Darkman (based on the 1990 movie) in a series of original novels, The Hangman, The Price of Fear and The Gods of Hell, and Sherlock Holmes teamed up with TV’s time-travelling Doctor Who to battle Lovecraftian monsters in Andy Lane’s original adventure All-Consuming Fire.

  Only fans of Oliver Stone’s uneven mini-series could care about Wild Palms: The Teleplay by Bruce Wagner, but The X Files: Goblins by Charles Grant was an instant bestseller, thanks to the popularity of the cult TV series.

  Ravenloft: Mordenheim by Chet Williamson, Ravenloft: The Enemy Within by Christie Golden, and Ravenloft: Tower of Doom by Mark Anthony were all based on the Gothic TSR role-playing game, as was the original anthology Ravenloft: Tales of Ravenloft edited by Brian Thomsen. Bloodshadows: Hell’s Feast by Greg Farshtey and Bloodshadows: The Fifth Horseman by Ed Stark were both based on West End Games’ role-playing adventure, and Shadowrun: Nosferatu by Carl Sargent and Marc Gascoigne was another game tie-in.

  White Wolf took the plunge into publishing in a big way in 1994 with several anthologies: The Beast Within and When Will You Rage? were both edited by Stewart Wieck and based on the games Vampire: The Masquerade and Werewolf: The Apocalypse, respectively. Much better were Dark Destiny, featuring twenty-one stories nominally connected by White Wolf’s The World of Darkness scenario, and Elric: Tales of the White Wolf, featuring twenty-four original stories based on Michael Moorcock’s Elric character, both edited by Edward E. Kramer. Death and Damnation edited by Staley Krause and Stewart Wieck was based on the game World of Darkness: Wraith, while Keith Herber’s novel World of Darkness: Vampire: Dark Prince was also adapted from Vampire: The Masquerade.

  Perhaps the most unusual tie-in of the year was R.L. Stine’s The Beast, a young adult novel about a haunted roller-coaster which was based on a real roller-coaster at Paramount’s King’s Island theme park.

  Once again, R.L. Stine was the king of the young adult market (even outselling Stephen King!), with a new novel, Call Waiting, and a myriad number of new additions to his popular “Fear Street” series: Bad Dreams, The Thrill Club, The Dead Lifeguard, Cheerleaders: The New Evil and The Mind Reader, plus a new spin-off series beginning with 99 Fear Street: The House of Evil: The First Horror, and continuing with The Second Horror and The Third Horror.

  For many teenagers, school was not a good place to be, at least according to the latest titles in Nigel Robinson’s “Horror High” series: 9: Symphony of Terror, 10: Demon Breed, 11: Bad Moon Rising, 12: Rave On, 13: Remember Me and 14: Dream Lover. Nicholas Pine’s series “Terror Academy”, about another horror-filled high school, reached volume 13 with Night School, Science Project, The Prom and The Substitute. Also reaching its lucky 13th was the “Nightmare Hall” series by Diane Hoh – Monster was about a supernatural creature terrorizing the campus. M.C. Sumner’s The Principal (aka Nightmares – The Principal), about a high school principal who also happens to be a vampire, spawned two sequels, The Substitute (aka The Hunger) and The Coach, while all three were collected in an omnibus edition in the UK unimaginatively retitled 3 Books of Blood.

  L.J. Smith’s Dark Visions 1: The Strange Power featured psychic students, in The Locker by Richie Tankersley Cusick a school locker revealed nightmarish visions of its previous owner, and a lamia haunted another school in Poison by John Peel.

  The prolific Peel also published Shockers: Dead End and Shockers: Ghost Lake. A new series about the descendants of Victor Frankenstein was Frankenstein’s Children by Richard Pierce, beginning with The Creation and continuing with The Revenge and The Curse. A boy’s girlfriend was brought back from the dead in Forever Yours by David Pierce. Brad Strickland completed the late John Bellairs’ last “Johnny Dixon” novel, The Drum, the Doll and the Zombie.

  Teenagers with psychic or precognitive powers used their gifts in Just Pretend by J.V. Lewton, Overkill by Timothy Findley, The Warnings by Margaret Buffie and Night Terrors by Nicole Davidson. The Talisman by Cameron Dokey was about an ancient pendant with supernatural powers, and Sweet Terror by Mark Crose featured a magic ring. A perfume that caused people to kill turned up in Bloodlust 1: Irresistible by Michael Bates.

  Among the places to stay away from were Tower of Evil by Mary Main and The Forbidden Game Volume 1: The Hunter by L.J. Smith, in which a group of teens were transported into a haunted house filled wi
th their worst nightmares. A possessed doll’s house caused problems in Scream 9: The Gift by Michael August, and sinister puppets posed another threat in Painted Devil by Michael Bedard. In Call of the Wendigo by Robin Hardy the title creature stalked a group of teenage tennis players, and other kids were menaced by monstrous beasts in The Dark by M.C. Sumner and The Thing in Bablock Dip by Rachel Dixon, while Loch by Paul Zindel was about the hunt for a flesh-eating prehistoric beast in a Vermont lake.

  Evil spirits were abroad in The Band by Carmen Adams, Spring Break by Nick Baron, Whispers in the Graveyard by Theresa Breslin, Nightmare Matinee by G.G. Garth, My Soul to Keep by Jean Favors and The Forbidden Game Volume III: The Kill by L.J. Smith. Both Let Me Tell You How I Died by Sinclair Smith and Remember Me 2: The Return by Christopher Pike were about reincarnation, and Pike’s The Midnight Club involved terminally ill teenagers. 1-900-Killer and Vengeance were psycho thrillers by Joseph Locke (aka Ray Garton).

  Under the same pseudonym, Garton also published Blood and Lace Book One: Vampire Heart and Book 2: Deadly Relations, the first two volumes in a new Gothic series about a family haunted by evil. The prolific Christopher Pike kicked off another new series with The Last Vampire and The Last Vampire 2: Black Blood, about a teenage boy hunted by a millennia-old vampire. Janice Harrell published three volumes about teenage twin vampires, Vampire Twins Volume 1: Bloodlines, 2: Bloodlust and 3: Bloodchoice, and Jesse Harris continued her adventures of teenage psychic Mackenzie Gold with volumes 7 and 8 of The Power series, The Vampire’s Kiss and The Obsession. Nicholas Adams also published a book entitled Vampire’s Kiss (not to be confused with those by either William Hill or Jesse Harris), Hunter’s Moon by Debra Doyle and James D. Macdonald was a sequel to Bad Blood, about a teenage werewolf and vampires, and volume 9 of The Nightmare Club series, Eternally Yours by Cameron Dokey, featured a vampire who was also a rock singer.

  The Nightmare Club 10: Die Laughing by Vincent Courtney was about a ghost, and there were plenty of other spirits abroad in The Haunting of Jessica Raven by Ann Halam (aka Gwyneth Jones), The Mirror Image Ghost by Catherine Storr, Sophie’s Ghost by Catherine Johnson, The Ghost Comes Calling by Betty Ren Wright, and Welcome Inn 2: Ghost of a Chance by E.L. Flood. Family ghosts turned up in Who’s There? by Stephanie S. Tolan, Beyond Another Door by Sonya Levitin and Someone’s Watching by Jessica Pierce. A girl encountered a ghostly nurse from the American Civil War in George Ella Lyon’s Here and Then, a young musician encountered a singing ghost in Jean Thesman’s Cattail Moon, and a haunted inn featured in Richie Tankersley Cusick’s The Drifter. Haunted Waters by Mary Pope Osborne was a romantic ghost story loosely based on the fairy tale “Undine”, the ghost of a cat helped a girl in Shadow by Joyce Sweeney, and phantom trains made timely appearances in both Ghost Train by Pat and Paul Erik Graverson and No Time at All by Susan Sallis.

  There were more beastly problems in Children of the Night: Dark Music by Ann Hodgman and Wild Magic: Wolf-Speaker by Tamora Pierce, both second volumes in werewolf series, while Clan of the Shape-Changers by Robert Levy was about a group of lycanthropes menaced by those without the power to change.

  Shades of Darkness: More of the Ghostly Best of Robert Westall was the second collection of the late author’s best work. Original tales appeared in Scared to Death and Other Ghostly Stories by Josephine Poole, Don’t Open the Door After the Sun Goes Down: Tales of the Real and Unreal by Al Carusone, Shadows & Whispers: Tales from the Other Side by Collin McDonald, Hostilities: Nine Bizarre Stories by Australian Caroline Macdonald, and A Night in Moonbeam County by Alexander Cramer, which featured ten connected ghost stories told around a campfire.

  The Puffin Book of Horror Stories edited by Anthony Horowitz included an extract from Bram Stoker’s Dracula along with ten reprints, Fun and Games at the Whacks Museum and Other Horror Stories edited by Cathleen Jordan selected thirteen stories from Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, and The Young Oxford Book of Ghost Stories edited by Dennis Pepper was a bumper volume of forty classic tales. Point Horror: Thirteen More Tales of Horror edited by A. Finnis was another original UK anthology in the bestselling series.

  For those with a more literary inclination, Jonathan Carroll’s latest novel, From the Teeth of Angels, combined fantasy and magic realism when a man dying from cancer encountered a personified Death. Ghostly presences also haunted the protagonists of Dagger Lane by Ann Victoria Roberts, A Skyhook in the Midnight Sun by Fiona Cooper and The Matrix by Jonathan Aycliffe (aka Daniel Easterman). Speak Daggers to Her by Rosemary Edghill (aka eluki bes shahar) was an occult thriller which featured a detective who also happened to be a white witch. A demon stalked the street people of Seattle in Jack Cady’s Street, while The Devil’s Own Work by Alan Judd was a Faustian tale of a writer possessed by a manuscript and its female muse.

  Radon Daughters by Iain Sinclair was about a manuscript that could have been a sequel to William Hope Hodgson’s The House on the Borderland. Michael Bishop’s Brittle Innings was described as a “Southern Gothic World War II Baseball Novel”, as well as being a sequel-of-sorts to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and the Bride of Frankenstein’s memorable Dr Pretorius turned up in Pasquale’s Angel by Paul J. McAuley, a tale of murder and magic set in an alternate Renaissance Florence.

  Sherlock Holmes met the Phantom of the Opera in The Angel of the Opera by Sam Siciliano, and an even stranger combination turned up in Nevermore by William Hjortsberg, in which Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was haunted by the ghost of Edgar Allan Poe and helped by Harry Houdini.

  Brian Lumley collected together an impressive number of his stories and novellas set in H.P. Lovecraft’s “Cthulhu Mythos” for Return of the Deep Ones and Other Mythos Tales and Dagon’s Bell and Other Discords. Graham Masterton’s Fortnight of Fear collected fourteen horror stories, including the stomach-churning “Pig’s Dinner” and “Eric the Pie”. Although published as mainstream fiction, Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque by Joyce Carol Oates was divided into four sections, ranging from the supernatural to the psychological.

  The Original Dr Shade and Other Stories by Kim Newman collected together fifteen short stories, including the title novella (published in Best New Horror 2), with an introduction by Neil Gaiman. Gaiman also supplied the afterword to Nameless Sins by Nancy Collins, a collection of twenty-four stories published by Gauntlet Press, with an introduction by Joe R. Lansdale.

  Unconquered Countries: Four Novellas by Geoff Ryman, introduced by Samuel R. Delany, included the previously unpublished “A Fall of Angels, or On the Possibility of Life Under Extreme Conditions”. Born Bad was the first collection by Andrew Vachss, and British-born Australian author Andrew Derrett made his debut with the collection Black Angels from Janus Publishing. Irish Ghosts and Hauntings by Michael Scott was an original collection based upon the myths of Ireland, while A Darker Shade of Pale by German author Sabine Büssing was based on traditional horror concepts.

  Peter Haining edited The Real Opera Ghost and Other Tales by Gaston Leroux, and Women and Ghosts collected nine original stories by Alison Lurie. Nine of Lucy Taylor’s somewhat over-rated erotic horror stories appeared together in Unnatural Acts & Other Stories published by Masquerade Books’ Richard Kasak imprint, and Out There by Perry Brass was a collection of seven gay occult dark fantasy stories, published by the Belhue Press.

  Billed on the cover as “America’s new bestselling dark fantasy author”, Poppy Z. Brite teamed up with Martin H. Greenberg to edit one of the best anthologies of the year, Love in Vein, featuring twenty original tales of vampire erotica. The undead were also given a science fictional treatment in the eleven reprint stories included in Tomorrow Sucks edited by Greg Cox and T.K.F. Weisskopf.

  The hefty Little Deaths, from always-dependable editor Ellen Datlow, contained twenty-four mostly original tales of horror and sex by Clive Barker, Lucius Shepard, Joyce Carol Oates, Ruth Rendell and others. Published first in the UK, the subsequent American edition did not include all the stories. The third v
olume in Peter Crowther’s “Narrow Houses” series, Blue Motel, also featured an impressive line-up of contributors, including Brian W. Aldiss, Storm Constantine, James Lovegrove, Ursula K. LeGuin, Jonathan Aycliffe, Michael Moorcock and Mark Morris, but the stories were more fantasy than horror this time.

  Borderlands 4 edited by Elizabeth Monteleone and Thomas Monteleone only appeared as a costly hardcover from Borderlands Press, limited to 500 signed copies, and included stories by Peter Straub, Ramsey Campbell and Dennis Etchison. Another expensive hardcover from the same publisher was The Best of Whispers edited by Stuart David Schiff, featuring both original and reprint stories from the influential small press magazine. Borderlands also published From Hell: Book One by Alan Moore, which included the writer’s script, notes and annotations for his graphic collaboration with Eddie Campbell about the conspiracy surrounding Jack the Ripper.

  The Best from Fantasy & Science Fiction marked the 45th anniversary of the magazine, edited by Edward L. Ferman and Kristine Kathryn Rusch. It included nineteen stories published between 1988 and 1993. Long after the movement was gone and justifiably forgotten came Paul M. Sammon’s Splatterpunks II: Over the Edge, containing new and reprint fiction by Clive Barker, Poppy Z. Brite, Kathe Koja and Karl Edward Wagner, as well as a profile of movie director Brian de Palma by Martin Amis. Sammon also edited The King is Dead: Tales of Elvis Post-Mortem, with contributions by Harlan Ellison, Joe R. Lansdale and Joyce Carol Oates.

  Alien Pregnant By Elvis featured thirty-six tabloid tales edited by Esther M. Friesner and Martin H. Greenberg, including “The Bride of Bigfoot”, “My Husband Became a Zombie and it Saved Our Marriage”, “Loch Ness Monster Found – In the Bermuda Triangle” and “Frozen Hitler Found in Atlantean Love Nest”. The ever-busy Greenberg also co-edited Witch Fantastic with Mike Resnick, Deals With the Devil with Resnick and Loren D. Estleman, Weird Tales from Shakespeare with Katherine Kerr, and Return to the Twilight Zone with Carol Serling.