The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 2003, Volume 14 Page 3
The Borrible Trilogy was a welcome and long-overdue omnibus of Michael De Larrabeiti’s young-adult novels The Borribles (1976), The Borribles Go for Broke (1981) and The Borribles Across the Dark Metropolis (1986). Hilaire Belloc’s 1907 book of children’s verse, Cautionary Tales for Children, was reissued with new illustrations by the late Edward Gorey.
From Penguin Classics, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Tales of Terror contained Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 short novel, a story and a related article, with an Introduction and notes by Robert Mighall. The Complete Stories of Robert Louis Stevenson: The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Nineteen Others was published by Random House and included a critical Introduction and notes by Barry Menikoff. Barnes & Noble Children’s Classics also got in on the act with yet another edition, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Stories, containing the title novel plus three additional stories, with an Introduction by Laura Victoria Levin.
Ramsey Campbell’s 1987 collection Scared Stiff: Tales of Sex and Death appeared from Tor Books with three added stories and a new Afterword by the author. Basil Copper’s 1994 novella “Beyond the Reef” was published in Germany in hardcover by Festa as Das Geheimnis von Innsmouth, limited to 400 signed and numbered copies.
Wake Up Screaming was a repackaging of sixteen stories by H.P. Lovecraft with a new Introduction by Poppy Z. Brite. With Lovecraft’s Library Vol.1, Hippocampus Press began a series reprinting some of the author’s favourite works with a reissue of The Metal Monster by A. Merritt. Introduced by Stefan Dziemianowicz, this edition restored close to 10,000 words of text that Merritt cut from the original.
Lovecraft at Last: The Master of Horror in His Own Words was a beautiful oversized hardcover from Cooper Square Press that reprinted the 1975 collection of correspondence between Lovecraft and Willis Conover. Illustrated throughout with letters, photographs and drawings, this impressive reissue also included a new Introduction by S.T. Joshi.
Joshi also contributed an Introduction and notes to the Penguin edition of Ancient Sorceries and Other Weird Stories, which collected nine classic tales by Algernon Blackwood. From California imprint Stark House Press, a reprint of Blackwood’s 1914 collection Incredible Adventures contained five stories and a new Introduction by Tim Lebbon.
Charles Brockden Brown’s 1798 novel Wieland, or The Transformation: An American Tale was reissued as a print-on-demand volume from Wildside Press.
Tor Books launched its Starscape imprint of young-adult books with titles by Joan Aiken, Patricia C. Wrede and Will Shetterly.
Sorcerers of the Nightwing was the first volume in Geoffrey Huntington’s (William J. Mann) “Ravenscliff” series and featured a young boy with supernatural powers, a Hellhole to another dimension and demonic clowns.
Midnight Predator by Amelia Atwater-Rhodes was about vampire-hunter Turquoise Draka in the city of Midnight, while Christopher Golden’s Wild Things was the fourth volume in the author’s Prowlers werewolf series.
The restoration of a Cornish watermill uncovered a lethal elemental force that should have been destroyed centuries ago in Demon Crossing by Louise Cooper.
Margaret McAllister’s Ghost at the Window involved a Scottish house that shifted through time, and a teenage girl discovered that her family hotel was haunted in Dead Gorgeous by Malorie Blackman. There were more ghosts in Face to Face by Sandra Glover and The Crying by Hazel Riley.
Garry Kilworth’s Nightdancer was a Polynesian horror story of age-old sorcery and deviousness striving for the soul of a modern boy.
Scholastic’s “Point Horror Unleashed” series continued with Moonchildren by Andrew Matthews and The Belltower by Samantha Lee.
Isobel Bird’s Circle of Three 13: And it Harm None, 14: The Challenge Box and 15: Initiation featured a trio of modern-day witches, while a teenage witch continued to discover her powers in Strife, Seeker, Eclipse, Reckoning and Full Circle, the latest volumes in Cate Tiernan’s Sweep (UK: Wicca) series packaged by 17th Street Productions.
The same packager was behind Blood War by Russell Moon, the third volume in the “Witch Boy” trilogy, and an orphaned teenager discovered that her relatives were witches in Wicked: Witch by Nancy Holder and Debbie Viguie.
Dead Wrong and Don’t Think Twice were the fourth and fifth volumes, respectively, in the T*witches series by H.B. Gilmour and Randi Reisfeld about twin sisters who fight evil with their supernatural powers. The sixth volume, Double Jeopardy, came packaged with a free hair-extension in the US!
In Darren Shan’s (Darren O’Shaughnessy) Cirque Du Freak #3: Tunnels of Blood and #4: Vampire Mountain, half-vampire schoolboy Shan investigated a series of killings by the murderous vampaneze and travelled deep into the vampire world. Meanwhile, in The Saga of Darren Shan: Book 6: The Vampire Prince, Book 7: Hunters of the Dusk and Book 8: Allies of the Night, the teenager discovered more about his strange destiny.
Universal Studios Monsters #4: The Mummy: Book of the Dead by Larry Mike Garmon involved three children battling the classic movie monsters.
The five stories in David Wisniewski’s Halloweenies were based on old movie clichés. Joan Aiken’s Ghostly Beasts collected fifteen stories and poems (two original), while Cat in Glass and Other Tales of the Unnatural contained eight stories by Nancy Etchemendy, illustrated by David Ouimet.
Selected by Edo van Belkom and published in trade paperback by Canada’s Tundra Books, Be VERY Afraid!: More Tales of Horror was the sequel to the Bram Stoker Award-nominated Be Afraid! It contained fourteen stories about real-life problems facing teenagers, by such authors as Tanya Huff, Tom Piccirilli, Michael Rowe, Robert J. Sawyer and the editor himself.
City of the Dead was another Canadian young-adult anthology, edited by Sharon Stewart and containing ten stories about spirits.
Veteran anthologist Peter Haining collected twelve stories in Scary! 2: More Stories to Make You Scream!, and in Beware! R.L. Stine Picks His Favorite Scary Stories, the popular children’s author included thirteen stories, four poems, a novel excerpt and a comic strip, by Ray Bradbury, Gahan Wilson and others.
According to a poll published in USA Today, 35 per cent of American adults expected to spend $150-$250 over Hallowe’en in 2002. In an attempt to influence them while they’re still young, there were numerous Hallowe’en-themed books aimed at pre-teens.
Written by Kathryn Lasky and illustrated by David Jarvis, Porkenstein concerned the horrific hog created by the lone porcine survivor of the Big Bad Wolf, while Tim Egan’s The Experiments of Doctor Vermin involved a pig who had car trouble on Hallowe’en night.
Illustrated by Emily Bolam, Georgie Adams’s The Three Little Witches Storybook featured a magical Hallowe’en party, and a mischievous witch collected other creeps in Fright Night Flight by Laura Krauss, illustrated by Henry Cole. A witch took care of the eponymous human baby in Halloweena by Miriam Glassman, illustrated by Victoria Roberts, and Barbara Olsen’s collages illuminated Suzanne Williams’s The Witch Casts a Spell, in which a curious girl and her cat joined a costume party.
The Bones of Fred McFee by Eve Bunting was about the toy skeleton of the title, with scratchboard illustrations by Kurt Cyrus, while a skeleton could not polish his bones because of his hiccups in Margery Cuyler’s Skeleton Hiccups, illustrated by S.D. Schindler.
Elizabeth Winthrop’s rhyming Halloween Hats was illustrated by Sue Truesdell, while Trick or Treat? by Bill Martin Jr and Michael Sampson involved a costumed Dracula in word games.
Halloween: From Pagan Ritual to Party Night by Nicholas Rogers looked at the holiday’s history. For younger readers, there was Halloween Is . . . by Gail Gibbons and The Real Hallowe’en: Ritual and Magic for Kids and Adults by Sheena Morgan.
Ray Bradbury’s One More for the Road contained twenty-five previously uncollected stories (eight reprints), the earliest dating from the late 1940s. Published by Ireland’s Salmon Poetry, I Live by the Invisible collected forty-seven poems, many original, by Bradbury. On 1 April, the 81
-year-old author was honoured with the 2,193rd star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Nightmare at 20,000 Feet reprinted twenty classic horror stories by Richard Matheson with a short Introduction by Stephen King.
Everything’s Eventual was King’s own collection, the first for nine years. It contained fourteen previously published “dark tales”, including the first English-language print publications of “In the Deathroom”, “1408” and “Riding the Bullet”, along with a new Introduction and story notes by the author. King questioned the future of short story collections and anthologies, and the author also admitted that he chose the order of contents by shuffling all the spades and a joker in a deck of cards.
Brian Lumley’s Beneath the Moors and Darker Places featured nine previously published stories (the earliest dating back to 1971), including the short novel of the title and a new Introduction by the author. “The Second Wish” appeared for the first time with Lumley’s preferred ending.
Caliban and Other Tales included the eponymous original short novel and five reprint stories by Robert Devereaux.
Frights and Fancies was the final volume of the late R. Chetwynd-Hayes’s uncollected short fiction, containing twenty stories (three original), plus an Foreword by editor Stephen Jones and an Afterword about time travel by the author.
Dark Terrors 6: The Gollancz Book of Horror was another bumper volume edited by Stephen Jones and David Sutton and containing thirty-three original stories and novellas by, among others, Ramsey Campbell, Christopher Fowler, Stephen Baxter, Basil Copper, Graham Masterton, David J. Schow, Michael Marshall Smith, Jeff VanderMeer, Les Daniels, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Tim Lebbon, Kim Newman, Richard Christian Matheson, Chico Kidd (a “Luís da Silva” adventure), Tanith Lee, Mick Garris and several newer names.
Despite the misnomer of its title, The Children of Cthulhu edited by John Pelan and Benjamin Adams featured twenty-one (mostly) original stories inspired by the work of H.P. Lovecraft by such eclectic writers as China Miéville, James Van Pelt, L.H. Maynard and M.P.N. Sims, Richard Laymon, Tim Lebbon, Mark Chadbourn, Paul Finch, Alan Dean Foster, Poppy Z. Brite, Steve Rasnic Tem, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Brian Hodge and a collaboration by the editors.
John Pelan also edited the paperback original The Darker Side: Generations of Horror. The unthemed anthology contained twenty-seven original stories from Simon Clark, Brian Hodge, Paul Finch, Poppy Z. Brite, Joel Lane, Richard Laymon, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Peter Crowther, Tim Lebbon and the editor himself.
Stranger: Dark Tales of Eerie Encounters edited by Michele Slung contained twenty-two stories (five original) by Ray Bradbury, Shirley Jackson, Tabitha King, Lisa Tuttle, Thomas M. Disch, Muriel Gray, Jay Russell and others.
Guest-edited by Peter Straub, Conjunctions 39, published by New York’s Bard College, was subtitled The New Wave Fabulists. It contained essays by Gary K. Wolfe and John Clute, plus eighteen “uncompartmentalizable” stories by genre writers such as Kelly Link, M. John Harrison, Jonathan Lethem, Joe Haldeman, China Miéville, Andy Duncan, Gene Wolfe, Jonathan Carroll, Elizabeth Hand, Neil Gaiman and several others, including Straub himself. The anthology was illustrated throughout by Gahan Wilson.
Published by Syracuse University Press, The Literary Werewolf: An Anthology was edited by Charlotte F. Otten and contained twenty-two stories by Stephen King, Saki, Seabury Quinn, Brian Stableford, Fritz Leiber, August W. Derleth, Algernon Blackwood and Jane Yolen, amongst others.
The anonymously edited Four Dark Nights from Leisure contained a quartet of novellas by Douglas Clegg, Christopher Golden, Bentley Little and Tom Piccirilli. Darker Masques was an omnibus of the anthologies Masques III and IV, both edited by J.N. Williamson.
From Dover, Great Tales of Terror edited by S.T. Joshi contained twenty-three classic stories from such authors as Lord Dunsany, Walter de la Mare and E. Nesbit.
Edited by Leslie Pockell, The 13 Best Horror Stories of All Time included work by M.R. James, H.G. Wells and H.P. Lovecraft, while The Colour Out of Space edited by D. Thin contained twelve stories of “cosmic horror” by, among others, Arthur Machen, Bram Stoker, Ambrose Bierce and, of course, Lovecraft.
Witches’ Brew edited by Yvonne Jocks (and an uncredited Denise Little and Martin H. Greenberg) contained twenty-four previously published stories, nine poems, a play excerpt and three essays, by H.P. Lovecraft and August Derleth, Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, Shirley Jackson, Dean Koontz, Ursula K. Le Guin, Kathryn Ptacek and others, including the editor (under the pseudonym “Evelyn Vaughan”). Little (and a still uncredited Greenberg) also published Familiars, an anthology of fifteen stories about witches’ familiars by such authors as Andre Norton, P.N. Elrod and Kristine Kathryn Rusch.
Vengeance Fantastic featured seventeen original tales of revenge by Nina Kiriki Hoffman, P.N. Elrod, Alan Rodgers, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Gary A. Braunbeck and others, edited with an Introduction by Denise Little and packaged by Greenberg’s Tekno Books. Greenberg and Brittany A. Koren edited Pharaoh Fantastic, which contained original “Ancient Egyptian” stories by fifteen authors, including Alan Dean Foster, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Tanya Huff and Mickey Zucker Reichert.
Lighthouse Hauntings: 12 Original Tales of the Supernatural edited by Charles G. Waugh and Martin H. Greenberg included stories by Thomas F. Monteleone, Nina Kiriki Hoffman and Jane Lindskold, plus an Introduction by John Helfers.
Perceptively edited by Brian M. Thomsen (and an uncredited Martin H. Greenberg), The American Fantasy Tradition was a hefty 600-page hardcover anthology from Tor Books that reprinted forty-three classic stories by such notable North American authors as Washington Irving, Robert W. Chambers, H.P. Lovecraft, Manly Wade Wellman, R. A. Lafferty, Shirley Jackson, Stephen King, Ursula K. Le Guin, Henry James, Ambrose Bierce, Charles Beaumont, Avram Davidson, Henry Kuttner, Karl Edward Wagner, Harlan Ellison, Edith Wharton, Theodore Sturgeon, Jack Finney, Richard Matheson, Fredric Brown, Gene Wolfe, Michael Bishop and Ray Bradbury, among many others.
From Tindal Street Press, Birmingham Noir edited by Joel Lane and Steve Bishop contained twenty-three tales of crime and horror from the West Midlands city by Nicholas Royle, Paul Finch, Pauline E. Dungate, Mike Chinn and others, including both the editors.
Edited as usual by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: Fifteenth Annual Collection contained forty-nine stories and poems from 2001 along with various summations and Honorable Mentions by the editors and others. The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 13 featured twenty-three stories and novellas, plus the usual Necrology and yearly round-up by editor Stephen Jones. The two books overlapped with just four stories, by Christopher Fowler, Glen Hirshberg, Elizabeth Hand and the pseudonymous “Gala Blau” (Conrad Williams).
Celebrated horror author Dennis Etchison adapted eight original scripts by Rod Serling for the first two volumes of The Twilight Zone Radio Dramas, released on audio CD and to selected radio stations by Falcon Picture Group. Hosted by Stacy Keach, the full-cast recordings also featured Lou Diamond Phillips, Jane Seymour, Blair Underwood and Ed Begley, Jr.
Two Plays for Voices was a two-hour audio recording of Neil Gaiman’s stories “Snow Glass Apples” and “Murder Mysteries” recorded by Bebe Neuwirth and Brian Dennehy respectively, supported by a full cast. It was available on cassette or CD from Harper Audio. Meanwhile, Gaiman himself read his book Coraline from Harper Children’s Audio, with original music by The Gothic Archies.
Laurell K. Hamilton’s A Caress of Twilight, a tale of erotic faeries, was produced unabridged on eight cassettes, read by Laural Merlington.
In April, The Science Fiction & Fantasy Zone was closed down. Founded in May 1998 by Anne Gay and Stan Nicholls, the electronic newszine was initially part of Internet Service Provider LineOne’s member content, averaging 130,000 visitors a month. However, since Italian media group Tiscali took over LineOne in 2001, financial “streamlining” resulted in staff cuts and the loss of “name” contributors and Tiscali eventually decided that it no longer wished to support the
service.
After four years and thirty-two issues, Gary W. Conner’s online magazine Twilight Showcase ceased publication in August, and in December Garrett Peck’s electronic newsletter Hellnotes folded after five years. Peck had taken over the weekly electronic newsletter four months earlier from David B. Silva and Paul F. Olson. It was subsequently revived by Judi Rohrig.
The free downloadable PDF magazine The Spook contained new fiction by David J. Schow, “Edward Lee” (Lee Seymour) and others, while contributing editor Paula Guran interviewed Clive Barker, Dennis Etchison interviewed Richard Matheson, and Ramsey Campbell continued his regular opinion column.
Towards the end of the year, The Spook decided to change its title to the less-than-memorable Metropole. Editor Anthony Sapienza revealed that “The name change is only a key to help open new doors to the genre” after some advertisers were put off by the old name, while others thought “spook” was a racial slur. Novelist Daniel Quinn also became the magazine’s fiction editor.
Ellen Datlow’s busy Sci Fiction/scifi.com site featured new and classic reprint stories from, among others, William F. Nolan, Fredric Brown, R.A. Lafferty, Anthony Boucher, Robert Bloch, Gerald Kersh, Ray Vukcevich, Peter Beagle, Tom Reamy, James Van Pelt, Paul McAuley, J.R. Dunn and numerous others.
E-book publisher ElectricStory.com produced Ghosts and Other Lovers and My Pathology, two new collections of short stories by Lisa Tuttle, as HTML files (readable on any computer), or in Microsoft Reader and Mobipocket formats (for hand-held devices). The electronic volumes contained thirteen and sixteen stories respectively. From the same publisher came Colonel Rutherford’s Colt, an original novel by Lucius Shepard only available as an e-book.
Fans of the author’s work could visit the Clive Barker: Revelations website