The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 2002, Volume 13 Page 2

  Neil Gaiman’s American Gods was the author’s most assured novel to date, about an impending war between the old and new gods and a quest to the dark heart of the United States. An audio version was read by George Guidall.

  Despite reusing the title of a Roger Zelazny novel (itself a quote from Edgar Allan Poe), Richard Laymon’s Night in the Lonesome October involved a young man’s encounter with a mysterious girl while taking a scary stroll at night. Laymon’s posthumously published novel No Sanctuary was about a couple’s meeting with a serial killer during a vacation in the wilderness.

  Graham Masterton’s Swimmer was the fifth volume in the ‘Jim Rook’ series, while When the Cold Wind Blows was the fifth volume in Charles Grant’s Black Oak series. This time Grant’s paranormal investigators followed up rumours of a wolf man in the Georgia swamps.

  Caitlín R. Kiernan’s much-anticipated second novel, Threshold: A Novel of Deep Time, dealt with a woman who was recruited by a strange girl with alabaster skin to battle an ancient evil.

  Authorized by the late author’s estate, Simon Clark’s The Night of the Triffids was a disappointing sequel to John Wyndham’s classic 1951 novel, set twenty-five years after the events of the original. Much better was Tim Lebbon’s apocalyptic chiller The Nature of Balance, in which most of mankind were destroyed by their own nightmares and the few remaining humans tried to survive in a world seeking vengeance. It was published as a deluxe limited hardcover by Prime Books and in paperback by Leisure Books.

  Dorchester Publishing launched its Leisure hardcover line with Douglas Clegg’s The Infinte, yet another haunted-house novel involving a ghost hunter and psychic investigators.

  Broadcaster Muriel Gray’s third horror novel, The Ancient, came with a recommendation from Stephen King. It involved the raising of a demon amongst the piles of garbage in Lima and a supertanker loaded with terrifying trash.

  The Fury and the Terror was John Farris’s long-awaited sequel to The Fury, involving a young psychic and a government mind-control conspiracy. It was ‘The Most Dangerous Game’ time again in John Saul’s The Manhattan Hunt Club, as a secret society hunted human prey in the tunnels beneath New York.

  Graham Joyce’s impressive Smoking Poppy was set in a spirit-haunted Thailand and involved a father’s search for his wayward daughter. Whole Wide World by Paul McAuley was a murder mystery and conspiracy thriller set in a future London monitored by a computer surveillance system.

  In Simon R. Green’s Drinking Midnight Wine, bookseller Toby Dexter followed a mysterious woman through a door in a wall that was not there into a world of magic and monsters. Green’s 1994 novel Shadows Fall, about the eponymous supernatural haven threatened by a serial killer, received a welcome paperback reissue from Gollancz.

  Robin Cook’s Shock was another medical thriller from the author of Coma.

  Alan Dean Foster’s Interlopers involved archaeologist Cody Westcott investigating the cause of random acts of evil, while a man learned he was to be possessed by demons in Richard Calder’s Impakto.

  A Crown of Lights and The Cure of Souls were the third and fourth volumes, respectively, in Phil Rickman’s series featuring female exorcist Merrily Watkins.

  The prolific Christopher Golden’s Straight on ’Til Morning was a reworking of the Peter Pan story, as a teenager’s girlfriend was stolen away to a nightmare Neverland. An illustrated version was also available from CD Publishing, limited to 1,000 signed copies and a lettered edition.

  Past the Size of Dreaming was Nina Kiriki Hoffman’s sequel to A Red Heart of Memories, about a haunted house in a small Oregon town, and Evil Whispers by Owl Goingback was set in Florida’s backwater lagoons.

  The Hauntings of Hood Canal by Jack Cady took place along the eponymous waterway in Washington State and involved the disappearance of a number of vehicles into its murky depths.

  The Leisure imprint continued to churn out attractive-looking paperbacks every month: The Lost by Jack Ketchum (aka Dallas Mayr) and Wire Mesh Mothers by Elizabeth Massie were both non-supernatural horror novels, as was Mary Ann Mitchell’s Ambrosial Flesh, about a devout cannibal.

  Gerald Houarner’s The Beast That Was Max featured a demon-possessed assassin, while The Evil Returns by veteran Hugh B. Cave involved voodoo in Haiti. Tom Piccirilli’s A Lower Deep featured a satanic coven, and a man discovered that his memories were not his own in Affinty by J.N. Williamson.

  A living edifice built over a murder site was the location for House of Pain by Sèphra Girón, and a writer found evil on his doorstep in Donald K. Beman’s Dead Love, also from Leisure.

  Jeffrey E. Barlough’s The House in High Wood, which mixed Dickens, Lovecraft and Poe in its tale of a 19th century haunted manor, was the second volume in the ‘Western Lights’ series about an alternate England. In Gregory Maguire’s ghost story Lost, a writer searching for her cousin in London invoked the spirits of Jack the Ripper and Dickens’s Scrooge.

  Sherlock Holmes and the Terror Out of Time was a Lovecraftian novella featuring Conan Doyle’s consulting detective and H.G. Wells’s Professor Challenger, from Gryphon Books. Randall Silvis’s On Night’s Shore was a ‘Thomas Dunne’ mystery featuring Edgar Allan Poe.

  A couple moved into a bizarre community in Bentley Little’s The Association, and a woman had a premonition about her own death in Fear Itself by Barrett Schumacher.

  A contemporary murder was linked to ancient Egyptian magic in The Alchemist by Donna Byrd, while an archaeological team in the Amazon jungle discovered The Altar Stone by Robert Hack-man.

  Bone Walker was the third volume in Kathleen O’Neal Gear and W. Michael Gear’s anthropological ‘Anasazi Mysteries’, and genetically engineered chimpanzees went wild in the same authors’ Dark Inheritance. There were more biomedical experiments gone awry in Alan Nayes’s Gargoyles.

  A dark god was reborn in Los Angeles in D.A. Stern’s Black Dawn, and the dead were reborn on an alternate Earth in Eugene Byrne’s Things Unborn.

  The restoration of a haunted house in Maine awakened past nightmares in The White Room by A.J. Matthews (aka Rick Hautala). Will Kingdom’s second suspense novel, Mean Spirit, involved four people trapped in a Victorian neo-Gothic castle in the Malvern Hills, menaced by a psychopathic killer and voices from beyond the grave.

  Tananarive Due’s The Living Blood was a sequel to the author’s My Soul to Keep and involved a race of African immortals, and an immortal killer menaced a small mountain community in Tamara Thorne’s Eternity.

  The Burning Times by Jeanne Kalogridis (aka J.M. Dillard) was an historical horror novel about witchcraft and the Inquisition. A man’s girlfriend disappeared in front of his eyes in T.J. MacGregor’s Vanished, and the owner of a successful construction business discovered that his past was about to come back and haunt him in Lucy Taylor’s Nailed.

  An executed serial killer returned to possess a married woman on the brink of death in the paperback original Ghost Killer by Scott Chandler (aka Chandler Scott McMillin).

  Scottish writer Anne Perry’s Come Armageddon was a sequel to Tathea and continued the battle between Good and Evil as the great and final war approached. Australian author Kim Wilkins’s Angel of Ruin was based on Milton’s Paradise Lost, and featured that writer’s daughters and their collective relationships with a dark angel they had conjured up.

  The Family: Special Effects Book 1 by Kevin McCarthy and David Silva was the first volume in a new series packaged by Tekno Books for DAW. Full Moon Bloody Moon was the second in the horror/mystery series by Lee Driver (aka Sandra D. Tooley) featuring hero Chase Dagger.

  Fool Moon and Grave Peril were the second and third books, respectively, in Jim Butcher’s series ‘The Dresden Files’ as Chicago’s only professional wizard and paranormal investigator discovered that werewolves turned up in different guises and something was stirring up the city’s ghosts.

  Mark Ramsden’s kinky characters Matt and Sasha became involved with animal-rights fanatics, a midwinter neo-Nazi festival and a satanic
cult known as the Black Order in The Sacred Blood, the author’s S&M sequel to The Dungeonmaster’s Apprentice, also published by Serpent’s Tail.

  Vampires were as popular as ever in 2001. An Interpol agent was on the trail of the undead Miriam Blaylock in The Last Vampire, Whitley Strieber’s long-awaited sequel to The Hunger.

  Necroscope: Avengers was the third and final volume in Brian Lumley’s E-Branch trilogy, in which Ben Trask’s team of talented psychics, including necroscope Jake Cutter, pursued three powerful Wamphyri lords who had joined forces.

  Narcissus in Chains was the tenth volume in Laurell K. Hamilton’s popular ‘Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter’ series, once again given a classy-looking hardcover release in America. This time a changed Anita had to call on both her rival vampire and werewolf lovers to search for a kinky were-leopard who had disappeared from the eponymous S&M club. An excerpt from the novel appeared in the paperback anthology of ‘paranormal romance’, Out of this World, which also included original novellas by J.D. Robb, Susan Krinard and Maggie Shayne.

  A Feast in Exile was Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s latest novel of Saint-Germain, this time set in 15th-century India. Karen Taylor’s The Vampire Vivienne featured vampire Deidre Griffin and her ex-cop husband in the fifth in the ‘Vampire Legacy’ series, and P.D. Cacek’s Night Players was the second book featuring new vampire Allison Garrett.

  Laws of the Blood: Companions was the third volume in Susan Sizemore’s paperback series. This time undead ‘Enforcer of Enforcers’ Istvan and his unwilling companion, Chicago homicide detective Selena Crawford, uncovered a more serious motive behind the murder of a vampire.

  Mick Farren’s More Than Mortal was a follow-up to his novels The Time of Feasting and Darklost in the series of ‘Victor Renquist’ Lovecraftian/vampire thrillers.

  Set in 1899 London, a doctor investigated a series of apparent vampire murders in Sam Siciliano’s Darkness. The London Vampire Panic was the sixth in the series by Michael Romkey, set in Victorian Europe, and P.N. Elrod’s Quincey Morris, Vampire was yet another sequel to Stoker’s Dracula.

  Stephen Gresham’s In the Blood was a Southern Gothic about a cursed family of vampires. Clairvoyant cocktail waitress Sookie Stackhouse discovered that her new boyfriend was a bloodsucker suspected of murder in Charlaine Harris’s (aka Charlaine Harris Schulz) Southern Vampire Mystery Dead Until Dark.

  Psychologist Meghann O’Neill encountered a vampire in Crimson Kiss by Trisha Baker, while James M. Thompson’s Night Blood featured a vampire doctor infected with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD).

  A senior in high school who fell prey to the family curse of vampirism and a billionaire industrialist fighting his own battle with mortality confronted each other in Billie Sue Mosiman’s Red Moon Rising, packaged by Tekno Books.

  A woman working in a health resort discovered that her employers were vampires in Tamara Thorne’s Candle Bay, and Australian author Stephen Dedman’s Shadows Bite was a martial-arts mystery set in Los Angeles involving vampires, demons and the Yakuza.

  Bound in Blood was a gay erotic novel by David Thomas Lord about a nineteenth-century vampire in modern New York. Vampire Vow by Michael Schiefelbein was another gay vampire novel.

  A book critic in Venice investigated vampires and werewolves in Shannon Drake’s Deep Midnight.

  Alice Borchardt’s The Wolf King was the third volume in the historical werewolf series by Anne Rice’s sister, while a man in Saxon times became involved with a trio of shapechanging siblings in Susan Price’s The Wolf-Sisters.

  Gillian Bradshaw’s medieval thriller The Wolf Hunt contained elements of lycanthropy and was based on ‘Lai de Bisclavret’ by Marie de France. Bitten was a debut novel by Kelly Armstrong, about the first female werewolf.

  In Sarah A. Hoyt’s debut novel, Ill Met by Moonlight, a young Will Shakespeare was drawn into a realm of elves and faeries in pursuit of his missing family. The book’s prologue and first two chapters were self-published as a chapbook sampler.

  A vengeful spirit haunted a modern housing development in Wringland by newcomer Sally Spedding. The Music of Razors marked the debut horror novel of Cameron Rogers (aka Penguin Australia children’s editor Dmetri Kakmi). It was a coming-of-age story involving a fallen angel and the tools it fashioned from bones.

  In Jonathan Carroll’s The Wooden Sea, the seventeen-year-old self of middle-aged Chief of Police Frannie McCabe turned up and told him that he had lived his life all wrong, just before he got a glimpse of the day he was going to die.

  Jeremy Dronfield’s The Alchemist’s Apprentice was about the eponymous bestselling novel written by Madagascar Rhodes, which nobody appears to remember having read.

  Jay Russell’s offbeat detective Marty Burns returned in Greed & Stuff, a novel set in the Los Angeles TV industry and involving a classic noir film, The Devil on Sunday.

  Steve Aylett’s comedic Only an Alligator was the first book set in the demonic city of Accomplice, situated one step to the left of reality.

  A new trade paperback edition of Bram Stoker’s Dracula from Random House included an introduction by Peter Straub, plus various review extracts and a reading guide.

  The Library of Classic Horror was an instant-remainder hardcover featuring the complete novels Dracula, Frankenstein, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and The Island of Dr Moreau along with two other stories by Robert Louis Stevenson and six by Edgar Allan Poe.

  Published as a slightly updated trade paperback in Dover’s Thrift Editions series, A Bottomless Grave and Other Victorian Tales of Terror was a welcome reprint of editor Hugh Lamb’s superior 1977 anthology Victorian Nightmares, featuring twenty-one stories by Ambrose Bierce, Guy de Maupassant, Richard Marsh, Erckmann-Chatrian, Guy Boothby and others.

  The Collected Ghost Stories of E.F. Benson was a new edition of the 1992 volume edited by Richard Dalby that contained fifty-four tales, an essay by the author, and an introduction by Joan Aiken.

  From Dutch publisher Coppens & Frenks, The House on the Borderland was a limited edition of William Hope Hodgson’s 1908 novel, with a new introduction by Brian Stableford.

  Là Bas: A Journey Into the Self was a new translation of the 1891 literary black-magic novel by French ‘décadent’ writer Joris-Karl Huysmans, published by Dedalus with an introduction by Brendan King and an afterword and chronology by Robert Irwin. From the same imprint, Geoffrey Farrington’s The Revenants was a revised edition of the author’s 1983 vampire novel with a new introduction by Kim Newman.

  Black Seas of Infinity: The Best of H.P. Lovecraft was a collection of nineteen stories and three non-fiction pieces from the Science Fiction Book Club, edited by SFBC editor Andrew Wheeler.

  Edited by S.T. Joshi, The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories was the second collection of H.P. Lovecraft’s fiction published as part of the prestigious Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics series. With David E. Schultz, Joshi also edited and annotated HPL’s The Shadow Out of Time, a trade paperback from Hippocampus Press that contained the restored text of the original manuscript (discovered in 1995), along with an early draft and notes.

  The ubiquitous Mr Joshi also edited and introduced The Mark of the Beast and Other Horror Tales by Rudyard Kipling, a collection of seventeen stories from Dover, and The Three Impostors and Other Stories, the first volume of The Best Weird Tales of Arthur Machen from Chaosium. Along with three other classic stories, this trade paperback also included the complete text of Machen’s 1895 linked novel.

  The Conan Chronicles Volume II: The Hour of the Dragon was the second omnibus volume in Gollancz’s Fantasy Masterworks series collecting Robert E. Howard’s eight remaining Conan stories (including the title novel), edited with an afterword by Stephen Jones.

  Richard Matheson’s The Incredible Shrinking Man was a reissue of the omnibus from Tor containing the eponymous short novel and nine classic short stories.

  R.L. Stine’s young-adult series The Nightmare Room continued with They Call Me Creature, The Howler, Shadow Girl and Camp Nowhe
re, some of which may have been written by George Sheanshang.

  A famous YA horror writer apparently inspired a school-based mystery in The Mysterious Matter of I.M. Fine by Diane Stanley.

  Murder victims were found mysteriously incinerated in Burning Bones by Christopher Golden and Rick Hautala, seventh in the ‘Jenna Blake’ young-adult mystery/horror series.

  Golden’s own Prowlers, Prowlers: Laws of Nature and Prowlers: Predator and Prey launched a new series about a group of teenagers investigating reports of werewolves.

  Tartabull’s Throw was a time-travel novel about werewolf detective Cyrus Nygerski and the third in the series by Henry Garfield after the adult books Moondog and Room 13.

  Dr Franklin’s Island by Ann Halam (aka Gwyneth Jones) involved a group of teenage plane-crash survivors who were genetically altered into shapeshifters. A giant bat attacked researchers in the Amazon in Paul Zindel’s Night of the Bat.

  In Pete Johnson’s The Frighteners a new girl in school was befriended by a strange boy whose drawings had the power to call up the eponymous supernatural creatures. Dark Things II: Journey Into Tomorrow by Joseph F. Brown once again featured Jarrod, who had the ability to make what he imagined real.

  Musician Chris Wooding’s The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray was a gaslight romance set in Victorian London and inspired by Gormenghast and H.P. Lovecraft.

  Margaret Mahy’s The Riddle of the Frozen Phantom was ‘A Vanessa Hamilton Book’. In Eva Ibbotson’s comedic Dial-a-Ghost, the eponymous agency mixed up its hauntings, and a teenager believed that ghostly phenomena may have had something to do with the arrest of his father in Nick Manns’s Operating Codes.

  A girl who didn’t realize she was dead looked after the children living in her house in The Ghost Sitter by Peni R. Griffin, while a young boy encountered a Civil War phantom in Ghost Soldier by Elaine Alphin. My Brother’s Ghost was a novelette by Allan Ahlberg.

  A girl’s dreams seemed to hold the answer to her parents’ disappearance in Joseph Bruchac’s Skeleton Man, and a young girl attempted to help her missing friend in Jonathan Stroud’s The Leap.