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Synopsis
As usual, acclaimed horror anthologist Stephen Jones has chosen the finest short stories and novellas of supernatural and psychological fiction. With the most comprehensive review of the year, useful contact lists, and a fascinating necrology as a bonus, this is one book that every horror fan must have.
Release date: March 1, 2012
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Print pages: 160
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The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 11
Stephen Jones
I would like to thank Douglas E. Winter, Sara Broecker, David Barraclough, Mandy Slater, Andrew I. Porter, Jo Fletcher, Bill Congreve, Gordon Van Gelder, William K. Schafer, Robert Morgan, Peter Crowther, David Pringle, Frederick S. Clarke, Andy Cox, Peter Atkins, Nancy Kilpatrick and Don Hutchison for their help and support. Special thanks are due to Locus, Interzone, Science Fiction Chronicle, Variety and all the other sources that were used for reference in the Introduction and the Necrology.
INTRODUCTION: HORROR IN 1999 copyright © Stephen Jones 2000.
HALLOWEEN STREET copyright © Steve Rasnic Tem 1999. Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Number 575, July 1999. Reprinted by permission of the author.
OTHERS copyright © James Herbert 1999. Originally published in Others. Reprinted by permission of the author.
GROWING THINGS copyright © T.E.D. Klein 1999. Originally published in 999: New Stories of Horror and Suspense. Reprinted by permission of the author.
UNHASPED copyright © David J. Schow 1999. Originally published in White of the Moon: New Tales of Madness and Dread. Reprinted by permission of the author.
THE EMPEROR’S OLD BONES copyright © Gemma Files 1999. Originally published in Northern Frights 5. Reprinted by permission of the author.
THE ENTERTAINMENT copyright © Ramsey Campbell 1999. Originally published in 999: New Stories of Horror and Suspense. Reprinted by permission of the author.
HARLEQUIN VALENTINE copyright © Neil Gaiman 1999. Originally published in World Horror Convention 1999 Program Book. Reprinted by permission of the author.
THE STUNTED HOUSE copyright © Terry Lamsley 1999. Originally published in Subterranean Gallery. Reprinted by permission of the author.
JUST LIKE EDDY copyright © Kim Newman 1999. Originally published in Interzone, Number 148, October 1999. Reprinted by permission of the author.
THE LONG HALL ON THE TOP FLOOR copyright © Caitlín R. Kiernan 1999. Originally published in Carpe Noctem, Number 16. Reprinted by permission of the author.
LULU copyright © Thomas Tessier 1999. Originally published in Lulu and One Other. Reprinted by permission of the author.
THE BALLYHOOLY BOY copyright © Graham Masterton 1999. Originally published in Encre Noire, December 1999. Reprinted by permission of the author.
WELCOME copyright © Michael Marshall Smith 1999. Originally published in White of the Moon: New Tales of Madness and Dread. Reprinted by permission of the author.
BURDEN copyright © Michael Marano 1999. Originally published on Gothic.Net, March 1999. Reprinted by permission of the author.
NAMING THE DEAD copyright © Paul J. McAuley 1999. Originally published in Interzone, Number 149, November 1999. Reprinted by permission of the author.
AFTERSHOCK copyright © F. Paul Wilson 1999. Originally published in Realms of Fantasy, December 1999. Reprinted by permission of the author.
A FISH STORY copyright © Gene Wolfe 1999. Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Number 578, October/November 1999. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agent, the Virginia Kidd Agency, Inc.
JIMMY copyright © David Case 1999. Originally published in Brotherly Love and Other Tales of Trust and Knowledge. Reprinted by permission of the author.
WHITE copyright © Tim Lebbon 1999. Originally published in White. Reprinted by permission of the author.
PORK PIE HAT copyright © Peter Straub 1999. Originally published in Murder for Halloween (1994). This version published in Pork Pie Hat. Reprinted by permission of the author.
TRICKS & TREATS ONE NIGHT ON HALLOWEEN STREET copyright © Steve Rasnic Tem 1999. Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Number 579, December 1999. Reprinted by permission of the author.
NECROLOGY: 1999 copyright © Stephen Jones and Kim Newman 2000.
USEFUL ADDRESSES copyright © Stephen Jones 2000.
IN BOTH BRITAIN AND NORTH AMERICA MASS-MARKET HORROR PUBLISHING slipped slightly in 1999, despite an upturn in the number of science fiction and fantasy titles released. The young adult horror market also continued to decline (more so in the US), although vampire books were still popular – particularly the numerous Buffy-related tie-ins.
Barnes & Noble Inc., and Ingram Book Group called off their proposed merger when reports leaked out that the US Federal Trade Commission would recommend opposing the book retailer’s $600-million bid to acquire the major wholesaler. Both companies announced that protracted litigation would not be in their best interests, and that they planned to work closely together as they moved forward with alternative plans, including the building of new distribution centres. The merger had been opposed by many independent booksellers since it was announced in November 1998.
When Bertelsmann AG bought Random House in 1998, merging it with Bantam Doubleday Dell to create America’s biggest publishing house, the company promised that the move would enhance the “effectiveness and independence” of the various imprints and divisions. However, that promise was apparently forgotten when Bertelsmann announced it would be merging eight of its publishing units into four new groups. These included the amalgamation of Bantam and Dell, and the merging of Anchor Books and Vintage Books into a division of the Knopf Publishing Group. Meanwhile a number of SF editors at Del Rey were let go or else moved to other departments. Bertelsmann also bought an 80 per cent share in German publisher Springer Verlag for an estimated $600 million, and agreed to merge its book club activities in Italy with Mondadori.
In spring the HarperPrism imprint reduced its annual number of titles by almost half, and just a couple of months later cut them back again. Then in a surprise move in mid-June, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., owner of HarperCollins, announced its purchase of The Hearst Corporation’s book division, which included the Avon and Morrow imprints, for an estimated $180 million. Three months later more than seventy people were made redundant, including the former head of HarperPrism, John Silbersack; executive editor of HarperPrism, John Douglas; publisher of Avon, Lou Aronica and Clive Barker’s editor Paul McCarthy. A third of the adult imprints and almost half of the young adult lines also disappeared.
Formed in 1982 when Herman Graf and Kent Carroll left Grove Press, New York publishing house Carroll & Graf was purchased by independent distributor Publishers Group West through its Avalon Publishing Group subsidiary. However, the company was soon hit with a class action suit, originally filed by attorneys in 1998 on behalf of five Carroll & Graf authors, claiming the under-reporting of royalty payments and the holding of unreasonable reserves against returns. C&G president Herman Graf told the trade that he thought the ruling was an error and had “no merit whatsoever”.
Following the purchase of UK publisher Cassell by Anthony Cheetham’s Orion Group, the Gollancz (hardcover) and Millennium (paperback) genre lists were merged under the control of Orion Managing Director Malcolm Edwards.
Meanwhile, in late May, British bookseller WHSmith bought Hodder Headline for £185 million cash, a reported 43 per cent above the market value of shares at the time. The sale included all the company’s publishing divisions, including Hodder & Stoughton, Headline, New English Library and others. As an immediate result, shares in the publisher jumped 40 per cent while WHSmith’s shares fell 28 pence.
Nick Robinson and Ben Glazebrook announced in November that they had agreed terms to transfer their shareholdings in Robinson Publishing Ltd. and Constable & Co. Ltd into a single publishing company, Constable & Robinson Ltd. Robinson staff moved into Constable’s London offices the following month, with the production, sales and marketing and accounts departments merged at a cost of only two redundancies. For the next year, Robinson & Constable would continue to publish under their respective imprints.
California’s General Publishing Group, which published Forrest J Ackerman’s World of Science Fiction amongst other titles, went bankrupt and had its assets sold at auction in mid-June.
Carol Publishing, whose imprints included Citadel Press, Lyle Stuart and Birch Lane Press, ceased business in August after its proposed sale to distributor LPS fell through. Carol had liabilities of $12.3 million against a backlist of 1,300 titles, valued at $25.6 million, which included trade paperback editions of all Philip K. Dick’s short stories, a controversial exposé of L. Ron Hubbard, and various “unauthorized” media tie-ins.
Despite winning a runner-up award of £750.00 in the Shell Live WIRE Young Business Start Up Awards, Matt Weyland’s Pulp Publications, which reprinted classic adventure stories under the Pulp Fictions imprint by Jules Verne, H. Rider Haggard, Edgar Wallace and others, filed for bankruptcy in October with debts of £56,800 owed to its Finnish printers and British artist Bob Covington, amongst others.
In November, the commissioning editor of Virgin Books’ new SF imprint Virgin Worlds announced that the publisher would not be buying any more titles in the foreseeable future because sales reaction to the three launch titles in March had been less enthusiastic than hoped. Of course the lack of big name authors, dull cover art and negligible sales and marketing promotion had nothing to do with the book trade’s reaction.
Packager Byron Preiss announced the formation of iBooks, a new trade paperback imprint to be distributed by Pocket Books in America, which would be heavily promoted on the Internet. And agent Richard Curtis launched E-Rights™, which would distribute electronic editions of books whose rights had reverted back to the authors. A 5,000-title list was expected within a year.
An article in the 8 February edition of the New York Times revealed that Amazon.com had been charging publishers for advantageous placement and recommendation features. The criticism this provoked resulted in the online bookseller offering refunds to customers who had ordered the recommended books. Meanwhile, despite a huge rise in Amazon.com sales and customers, the company continued to make a dramatic loss, much of it due to acquisitions of other online companies.
In a blow to both publishers and authors, Australia’s upper chamber of Parliament agreed to apply a 10 per cent Goods and Services Tax on books, to be introduced in 2000. Higher GST on materials may also increase costs to publishers, prompting fears of higher cover prices. However, the tax would not apply to overseas books ordered through e-mail retailers outside the country.
Following a ludicrous attempt by parents in South Carolina to ban her popular Harry Potter books for children because they were “dark and evil”, author J.K. Rowling responded by stating, “I have yet to meet a single child who has said they want to be a Satanist, or is interested in the occult because of the books.”
However, in a move reminiscent of the infamous 1925 “Monkey Trial” in Dayton, Tennessee (in which the teaching of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution was banned in schools), when a school superintendent in Zeeland, Michigan, decided that the Potter titles were only suitable for older readers, teachers were prevented from reading the books in class, and children required parental permission before they could borrow them from school libraries or use them for book reports. Incredibly, the Potter books were then banned in schools in a dozen other American states and the titles were named by the American Library Association as the “most challenged” books of 1999.
Yet despite the negative reaction of some narrow-minded Americans, Rowling was the biggest-selling author of 1999. Her début fantasy novel Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (retitled Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone for its US publication) sold almost 500,000 copies in Britain alone, closely followed by the sequel, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. The third book in the series, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, was published in July. In a poll of the UK’s highest-paid women, 35-year-old Rowling ranked third with an estimated income of £14.5 million, after worldwide sales of the books she started writing in an Edinburgh cafe while an unemployed single parent reached a reported 30 million. Warner Bros. bought the film and merchandising rights for an estimated £1 million.
According to a Top 100 list submitted by book publishers to Publisher’s Weekly, John Grisham was the bestselling author of the 1990s with combined sales of more than sixty million copies. Stephen King narrowly beat out Danielle Steel for second place with cumulative sales of 38.3 million, with his six-part series The Green Mile being the author’s top selling title during the decade. In 1999, King’s fantastical prison drama was reissued in a single “soon to be a major movie” volume.
To tie-in with the ABC-TV mini-series shown during the February “sweeps” period, King’s original 300-page screenplay for Storm of the Century was published as a trade paperback, which also included an introduction by the author in which he discussed the filming.
King also surprised his fans with a previously unannounced new novel, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, which appeared in April. About a young girl lost in the woods who created an imaginary friendship with her hero, the real-life Red Sox baseball relief pitcher of the title, the book had a 1.25 million-copy first hardcover printing in America but was actually published in Britain first.
Following the Columbine High School shootings in April, when two students killed twelve classmates and a teacher before shooting themselves, King asked Penguin to withdraw from publication his novel Rage, originally issued under his “Richard Bachman” byline, with the next printing.
The same month, King celebrated his 25th anniversary as an author with a dinner party for around ninety guests at Tavern on the Green in New York City. Amongst those invited were Salman Rushdie, Peter Straub, Richard Chizmar, George Romero and Warren Zevon. Stanley Wiater provided the questions for a King trivia quiz, which was won by the author’s biographer, Douglas E. Winter.
Then on 19 June, Stephen King was seriously injured while walking along a rural highway when he was hit by a Dodge Caravan after 41-year-old driver Bryan E. Smith lost control. The author was thrown fourteen feet and suffered multiple fractures to his right leg and hip, a collapsed lung, a lacerated scalp and various facial injuries. He was taken to the Central Maine Medical Center in Lewiston where, after surgery, he was described as being in a serious, but stable condition. He was released on 9 July after four more operations on his injuries and faced several months of physical therapy.
While the driver faced charges of aggravated assault and driving to endanger (his driver’s license had already been suspended four times previously), King bought the van which hit him for $1,500 and revealed to a local newspaper that he was “Going to take a sledgehammer and beat it.” To avoid jail, Smith later pleaded guilty to driving to endanger after a charge of aggravated assault was dropped, and he was suspended from driving for six months.
According to one tabloid newspaper, the widow of “renowned” psychic Peter Hurkos claimed that her husband, who had been dead eleven years, was responsible for the accident because King had “stolen” Hurkos’ life story for his novel The Dead Zone. The same source also revealed that King’s 29-year-old lesbian daughter, Naomi, was planning a same-sex “ceremony of union” with her 53-year-old graduate school professor.
In Britain, a special paperback edition of the 1998 collection Bag of Bones, only available through WHSmith bookstores, included the additional sixty-page story “Blind Willie”; this was one of five interconnected, sequential stories which formed the basis of King’s collection Hearts in Atlantis, published in September. Ranging over the last three decades of the twentieth century, each story contained a hint of the supernatural and all were influenced by the 1960s and the Vietnam War. However, because of his injuries from the accident, publicity appearances by the author were cancelled.
King also released a three-story collection (two original) in November entitled Blood and Smoke, but only as a three-and-a-half hour audiobook. Read by the author himself, each of the stories dealt with cigarette smoking. In the UK, Hodder Headline Audio Books also issued Stephen King Live!, a recording of the author’s Royal Festival Hall appearance in August 1998 when he read the unpublished short story “LT’s Theory of Pets” and answered questions from novelist and broadcaster Muriel Gray.
Meanwhile, a San Francisco doctor discussed a new medical condition known as “Stephen King wrist” in the Western Journal of Medicine. Its symptoms of pain in the wrist and weakness in the hand’s grip were apparently caused by reading King’s books in bed and holding the hefty tomes with just one hand!
Hannibal, Thomas Harris’s much-anticipated sequel to The Silence of the Lambs, was rushed into print less than three months after it was delivered to the publisher, with a one-day laydown of around 500,000 hardcover copies. Once again FBI agent Clarice Starling was forced to confront the evil Dr Lecter, whose where-abouts had been discovered by one of his surviving victims looking for revenge.
With a first printing of 500,000 copies, Anne Rice continued her “New Tales of the Vampires” series with Vittorio, the Vampire, set in historical Florence and the seventh volume overall in her “Vampire Chronicles”. The trade paperback of Rice’s 1998 novel The Vampire Armand added a five-page “conversation” with the author.
With a move to British publisher Macmillan (who paid a reported £2 million for two books) James Herbert’s latest novel, Others, featured private investigator Nicholas Dismas, who was hired to find a missing baby and uncovered the dark secrets of a mysterious nursing home and his own existence. The novel was also released as a Macmillan Audio Book, read by actor Robert Powell. At the same time, Herbert’s backlist was reissued in paperback editions under the Pan imprint.
Peter Straub’s contemporary horror novel Mr. X was set in the southern Illinois town of Edgerton and involved family secrets, doppelgängers, a psychic serial killer, Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos and jazz music. The latter also featured predominantly in Straub’s superb 1994 novella Pork Pie Hat, about a legendary New York jazz musician and the extraordinary story he tells set on Halloween. It was published in Britain as a slim hardcover in the “Criminal Records” series edited by Otto Penzler.
Dean Koontz’s False Memory was about mind control and had a first hardcover printing in America of more than 400,000 copies. Robin Cook’s latest medical thriller, Vector, involved the effects of bioterrorism, John Saul’s The Right Hand of Evil was a Southern Gothic about a Louisiana family’s dark history, and Thomas M. Disch’s blackly comic The Sub: A Study in Witchcraft concerned a substitute teacher who was haunted by the ghost of her apparently abusive father and discovered that she had the power to transform humans into beasts.
Olivia was the fifth and final volume in the pseudonymous “Logan Family” series of Gothic horror novels credited to the late V.C. Andrews® (probably Andrew Neiderman). From (presumably) the same author came Misty, Star, Jade, Cat and Into the Garden, which formed “The Wildflowers” series about a group of girls undergoing therapy. Under his own name, Neiderman published Neighborhood Watch, about a Stepford-like community.
According to his official website, author Robert R. McCammon decided to retire from the publishing business.
Jeff Long’s The Descent was an ambitious lost world horror novel in which mankind discovered a labyrinth of demon-haunted caverns beneath the Earth’s surface.
Following the death of Harry Keogh, E-Branch’s new Necroscope was already under the influence of a vampire in Brian Lumley’s E-Branch: Invaders, the tenth volume in the long-running series and the first in a new trilogy. Tor Books also published the second volume in Lumley’s Titus Crow omnibus series, containing the early novels The Clock of Dreams and Spawn of the Winds.
Richard Laymon’s Come Out Tonight was a kidnapping thriller, while the author’s Among the Missing involved adultery and a California serial killer. The Return by Andrea Hart was another serial killer novel.
Charles Grant completed his “Millennium Quartet” series with Riders in the Sky, in which mankind battled the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The Hush of Dark Wings and Winter Knight were the second and third volumes, respectively, in Grant’s Black Oak series, in which the members of the eponymous security firm investigated flying shapeshifters in Kansas and a centuries-old ghost in an English village.
Another English ghost was the titular heroine of Peter S. Beagle’s Tamsin, while Aunt Dimity’s Christmas was the fifth volume in Nancy Atherto’s supernatural mystery series.
Set in the contemporary New York art scene and the upstate community of Kamensic Village, Elizabeth Hand’s Black Light involved a secret society’s age-old battle with witchcraft and the attempted resurrection of old gods. While a nature photographer discovered a pool used more than a century before by a spiritualist cult for weird rites in James P. Blaylock’s latest slice of West Coast weirdness, The Rainy Season.
Twin teenage sisters discovered they had The Heart of a Witch when they joined a coven in Judith Hawkes’ novel, and Chet Williamson continued his paranormal series The Searchers with the third volume, Siege of Stone.
Frank M. Robinson belatedly revisited the theme of his 1956 novel The Power as a race of mutant telepaths forced their victims to kill themselves in Waiting. Thunderhead was Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child’s follow-up to their previous bestsellers Relic and Reliquary and involved Native American witchcraft and a legendary lost city of gold.
Kim Newman’s Life’s Lottery: A Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Book was an interactive novel which allowed the reader to become the central character and make his choices for him.
Graham Masterton’s Snowman was the fourth in the series about psychic school teacher Jim Rook. From Piatkus Books, Mark Morris’s Genesis was about a journalist who began experiencing strange hallucinations and unspeakable nightmares.
Graham Joyce’s Indigo involved a mysterious manuscript which revealed how to achieve invisibility and took its English protagonist on a quest to Chicago and Rome. A woman found herself drawn to the mysterious Greek island of Voros in Simon Clark’s Judas Tree, which was compared by its publisher to both Rebecca and The Shining.
In Bentley Little’s The House, five strangers discovered they shared a dark childhood memory as they returned to the identical homes in which they were born. The family in Elizabeth Massie’s Welcome Back the Night experienced psychic visions as they attempted to change the future.
Charles Wilson’s hi-tech thriller Embryo involved unethical medical experiments with an artificial womb, while The Reckoning by Thomas Monteleone was a Millennial horror novel about a new pope created from DNA taken from the Shroud of Turin.
Phil Rickman’s Midwinter of the Spirit was a sequel to Wine of Angels and the second in his series of mysteries featuring exorcist Merrily Watkins. The Haunt by J.N. Williamson featured a family menaced by an over-protective ghost.
Although better known for his Buffy the Vampire Slayer novelizations, Christopher Golden’s Strangewood turned out to be an atmospheric horror novel in which the son of author Thomas Randall was held hostage in the fantasy world his father created. In Lisa Goldstein’s Dark Cities Underground a man discovered that he could re-enter a dark fantasy world chronicled by his author mother.
Musician Greg Kihn’s fourth novel, Mojo Hand, involved murder by voodoo and the return of Blues legend Robert Johnson. Andrew Vachss’ anti-hero Burke returned in Choice of Evil, in which the vigilante teamed up with a witch-woman and others to track down a serial killer who had apparently returned from the dead. The novel was optioned by New Line Cinema.
Sean Hutson moved to publisher Macmillan with his latest novel, Warhol’s Prophecy, and in Windsor Chorlton’s Cold Fusion a man emerged from a coma into a twenty-first century in the grip of a cosmic winter, where his memory held the key to both the past and the future. Dead Cold was a novel from celebrity spoon-bender Uri Geller and featured a psychic who shared a link with a murderer.
A serial killer was hunted by a reluctant psychic and others in The Visionary by Don Passman. Written by pseudonymous author Michael Bishop (not the well-established genre writer), Seven Deadly Sins was about a serial killer who had sold his soul.
Tom Piccirilli published two new novels, Hexes and Sorrow’s Crown, the latter a sequel to the author’s The Dead Past. Owl Goingback’s Darker Than Night featured a house which was a gateway to another world, and a woman developed a psychic link with the dead in Elizabeth McGregor’s Second Sight.
Martha C. Lawrence’s Aquarius Descending was the third novel in the series about psychic detective/parapsychologist Elizabeth Chase, and a young woman discovered her telekinetic powers in Teek by “Steve Krane” (aka Steven Swiniarski/S. Andrew Swan). New York City detective Charlie Parker used an old psychic and necromantic visions to track a serial killer in John Connolly’s Every Dead Thing.
Graveyard Dust by Barbara Hambly was the third in the author’s historical mystery series featuring free Creole Benjamin January, who was threatened by a voodoo curse while investigating a murder. The Visitant was the first in Kathleen O’Neal Gear and W. Michael Gear’s “Anasazi Mysteries” series.
A horror novelist moved into one of those pesky haunted houses in Barbara Rogan’s Suspicion, while scientifically-created ghosts were conjured up in Skeptic by Holden Scott.
Richard Bowes’ Minions of the Moon was an urban supernatural novel based on a series of stories, one of which won the 1998 World Fantasy Award for Best Novella. Noel Hynd’s The Lost Boy was another ghost novel, and Nina Kiriki Hoffman’s A Red Heart of Memories also involved magic and ghosts.
Authors Arthur Conan Doyle and Charles Dodgson (aka “Lewis Carroll”) teamed up to investigate a murder during a seance in Roberta Rogow’s The Problem of the Spiteful Spiritualist. Barbara Michael’s Other Worlds collected two stories set in a gentleman’s club, where Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini were amongst those who debated the tales involving a poltergeist and a possibly haunted house.
In Brian Stableford’s futuristic bio-tech thriller Architects of Emortality, policemen Watson and Holmes and an amateur detective named Oscar Wilde investigated a series of killings apparently committed by man-eating plants. Hunter by Byron Huggins was a techno-thriller featuring the world’s greatest hunter on the trail of a genetically-created monster, while a small town was invaded by the eponymous Incubus by Ann Arensberg.
Originally published by Arrow Australia, Aurealis Award-winning author Kim Wilkins’ Grimoire involved a group of power-hungry academics trying to reassemble a Victorian volume to summon up Satan in present-day Melbourne. There was more magic in Traci Harding’s Alchemist’s Key, set in an English village, while Victor Kelleher’s Into the Dark was about the real Count Dracula and the young boy he took into his service. Underground by Mudrooroo was the third in the Australian author’s “Masters of the Ghost Dreaming” sequence, revolving around a clash of mythologies.
The spirit of a nineteenth century suffragette appeared to her modern descendent in Kate Muir’s Suffragette City, and Jilly Cooper’s mainstream novel Score also featured ghosts.
Available as an attractively-packaged CD from Savoy Records, 1960s pop singer P.J. Proby read three extracts from David Britton’s infamously suppressed novel Lord Horror, accompanied by the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra.
Communion Blood was the twelfth volume in Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s series featuring vampire Comte de Saint-Germain, while The Soul of an Angel was the second volume in Yarbro’s Sisters of the Night, a packaged series about Dracula’s trio of undead brides, illustrated by Christopher H. Bing.
P.N. Elrod’s The Dark Sleep, the eighth in “The Vampire Files” featuring undead detective Jack Fleming, was set in the world of showbusiness, and published in hardcover. Lords of Light was the third volume in the vampire series by Steven Spruill, which began with Rulers of Darkness and Daughter of Darkness.
Meanwhile the Science Fiction Book Club collected two of Laurell K. Hamilton’s “Anita Blake” novels from 1998, Burnt Offerings and Blue Moon, in the omnibus Black Moon Inn. The hardcover came with a shrinkwrapped poster of Luis Royo’s cover art.
The Hunt was the first volume in Susan Sizemore’s series Laws of the Blood, about a group of vampire Enforcers. Sherry Gottlieb’s Worse Than Death was a sequel to her humorous mystery Love Bite, as an undead LA cop in the
INTRODUCTION: HORROR IN 1999 copyright © Stephen Jones 2000.
HALLOWEEN STREET copyright © Steve Rasnic Tem 1999. Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Number 575, July 1999. Reprinted by permission of the author.
OTHERS copyright © James Herbert 1999. Originally published in Others. Reprinted by permission of the author.
GROWING THINGS copyright © T.E.D. Klein 1999. Originally published in 999: New Stories of Horror and Suspense. Reprinted by permission of the author.
UNHASPED copyright © David J. Schow 1999. Originally published in White of the Moon: New Tales of Madness and Dread. Reprinted by permission of the author.
THE EMPEROR’S OLD BONES copyright © Gemma Files 1999. Originally published in Northern Frights 5. Reprinted by permission of the author.
THE ENTERTAINMENT copyright © Ramsey Campbell 1999. Originally published in 999: New Stories of Horror and Suspense. Reprinted by permission of the author.
HARLEQUIN VALENTINE copyright © Neil Gaiman 1999. Originally published in World Horror Convention 1999 Program Book. Reprinted by permission of the author.
THE STUNTED HOUSE copyright © Terry Lamsley 1999. Originally published in Subterranean Gallery. Reprinted by permission of the author.
JUST LIKE EDDY copyright © Kim Newman 1999. Originally published in Interzone, Number 148, October 1999. Reprinted by permission of the author.
THE LONG HALL ON THE TOP FLOOR copyright © Caitlín R. Kiernan 1999. Originally published in Carpe Noctem, Number 16. Reprinted by permission of the author.
LULU copyright © Thomas Tessier 1999. Originally published in Lulu and One Other. Reprinted by permission of the author.
THE BALLYHOOLY BOY copyright © Graham Masterton 1999. Originally published in Encre Noire, December 1999. Reprinted by permission of the author.
WELCOME copyright © Michael Marshall Smith 1999. Originally published in White of the Moon: New Tales of Madness and Dread. Reprinted by permission of the author.
BURDEN copyright © Michael Marano 1999. Originally published on Gothic.Net, March 1999. Reprinted by permission of the author.
NAMING THE DEAD copyright © Paul J. McAuley 1999. Originally published in Interzone, Number 149, November 1999. Reprinted by permission of the author.
AFTERSHOCK copyright © F. Paul Wilson 1999. Originally published in Realms of Fantasy, December 1999. Reprinted by permission of the author.
A FISH STORY copyright © Gene Wolfe 1999. Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Number 578, October/November 1999. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agent, the Virginia Kidd Agency, Inc.
JIMMY copyright © David Case 1999. Originally published in Brotherly Love and Other Tales of Trust and Knowledge. Reprinted by permission of the author.
WHITE copyright © Tim Lebbon 1999. Originally published in White. Reprinted by permission of the author.
PORK PIE HAT copyright © Peter Straub 1999. Originally published in Murder for Halloween (1994). This version published in Pork Pie Hat. Reprinted by permission of the author.
TRICKS & TREATS ONE NIGHT ON HALLOWEEN STREET copyright © Steve Rasnic Tem 1999. Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Number 579, December 1999. Reprinted by permission of the author.
NECROLOGY: 1999 copyright © Stephen Jones and Kim Newman 2000.
USEFUL ADDRESSES copyright © Stephen Jones 2000.
IN BOTH BRITAIN AND NORTH AMERICA MASS-MARKET HORROR PUBLISHING slipped slightly in 1999, despite an upturn in the number of science fiction and fantasy titles released. The young adult horror market also continued to decline (more so in the US), although vampire books were still popular – particularly the numerous Buffy-related tie-ins.
Barnes & Noble Inc., and Ingram Book Group called off their proposed merger when reports leaked out that the US Federal Trade Commission would recommend opposing the book retailer’s $600-million bid to acquire the major wholesaler. Both companies announced that protracted litigation would not be in their best interests, and that they planned to work closely together as they moved forward with alternative plans, including the building of new distribution centres. The merger had been opposed by many independent booksellers since it was announced in November 1998.
When Bertelsmann AG bought Random House in 1998, merging it with Bantam Doubleday Dell to create America’s biggest publishing house, the company promised that the move would enhance the “effectiveness and independence” of the various imprints and divisions. However, that promise was apparently forgotten when Bertelsmann announced it would be merging eight of its publishing units into four new groups. These included the amalgamation of Bantam and Dell, and the merging of Anchor Books and Vintage Books into a division of the Knopf Publishing Group. Meanwhile a number of SF editors at Del Rey were let go or else moved to other departments. Bertelsmann also bought an 80 per cent share in German publisher Springer Verlag for an estimated $600 million, and agreed to merge its book club activities in Italy with Mondadori.
In spring the HarperPrism imprint reduced its annual number of titles by almost half, and just a couple of months later cut them back again. Then in a surprise move in mid-June, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., owner of HarperCollins, announced its purchase of The Hearst Corporation’s book division, which included the Avon and Morrow imprints, for an estimated $180 million. Three months later more than seventy people were made redundant, including the former head of HarperPrism, John Silbersack; executive editor of HarperPrism, John Douglas; publisher of Avon, Lou Aronica and Clive Barker’s editor Paul McCarthy. A third of the adult imprints and almost half of the young adult lines also disappeared.
Formed in 1982 when Herman Graf and Kent Carroll left Grove Press, New York publishing house Carroll & Graf was purchased by independent distributor Publishers Group West through its Avalon Publishing Group subsidiary. However, the company was soon hit with a class action suit, originally filed by attorneys in 1998 on behalf of five Carroll & Graf authors, claiming the under-reporting of royalty payments and the holding of unreasonable reserves against returns. C&G president Herman Graf told the trade that he thought the ruling was an error and had “no merit whatsoever”.
Following the purchase of UK publisher Cassell by Anthony Cheetham’s Orion Group, the Gollancz (hardcover) and Millennium (paperback) genre lists were merged under the control of Orion Managing Director Malcolm Edwards.
Meanwhile, in late May, British bookseller WHSmith bought Hodder Headline for £185 million cash, a reported 43 per cent above the market value of shares at the time. The sale included all the company’s publishing divisions, including Hodder & Stoughton, Headline, New English Library and others. As an immediate result, shares in the publisher jumped 40 per cent while WHSmith’s shares fell 28 pence.
Nick Robinson and Ben Glazebrook announced in November that they had agreed terms to transfer their shareholdings in Robinson Publishing Ltd. and Constable & Co. Ltd into a single publishing company, Constable & Robinson Ltd. Robinson staff moved into Constable’s London offices the following month, with the production, sales and marketing and accounts departments merged at a cost of only two redundancies. For the next year, Robinson & Constable would continue to publish under their respective imprints.
California’s General Publishing Group, which published Forrest J Ackerman’s World of Science Fiction amongst other titles, went bankrupt and had its assets sold at auction in mid-June.
Carol Publishing, whose imprints included Citadel Press, Lyle Stuart and Birch Lane Press, ceased business in August after its proposed sale to distributor LPS fell through. Carol had liabilities of $12.3 million against a backlist of 1,300 titles, valued at $25.6 million, which included trade paperback editions of all Philip K. Dick’s short stories, a controversial exposé of L. Ron Hubbard, and various “unauthorized” media tie-ins.
Despite winning a runner-up award of £750.00 in the Shell Live WIRE Young Business Start Up Awards, Matt Weyland’s Pulp Publications, which reprinted classic adventure stories under the Pulp Fictions imprint by Jules Verne, H. Rider Haggard, Edgar Wallace and others, filed for bankruptcy in October with debts of £56,800 owed to its Finnish printers and British artist Bob Covington, amongst others.
In November, the commissioning editor of Virgin Books’ new SF imprint Virgin Worlds announced that the publisher would not be buying any more titles in the foreseeable future because sales reaction to the three launch titles in March had been less enthusiastic than hoped. Of course the lack of big name authors, dull cover art and negligible sales and marketing promotion had nothing to do with the book trade’s reaction.
Packager Byron Preiss announced the formation of iBooks, a new trade paperback imprint to be distributed by Pocket Books in America, which would be heavily promoted on the Internet. And agent Richard Curtis launched E-Rights™, which would distribute electronic editions of books whose rights had reverted back to the authors. A 5,000-title list was expected within a year.
An article in the 8 February edition of the New York Times revealed that Amazon.com had been charging publishers for advantageous placement and recommendation features. The criticism this provoked resulted in the online bookseller offering refunds to customers who had ordered the recommended books. Meanwhile, despite a huge rise in Amazon.com sales and customers, the company continued to make a dramatic loss, much of it due to acquisitions of other online companies.
In a blow to both publishers and authors, Australia’s upper chamber of Parliament agreed to apply a 10 per cent Goods and Services Tax on books, to be introduced in 2000. Higher GST on materials may also increase costs to publishers, prompting fears of higher cover prices. However, the tax would not apply to overseas books ordered through e-mail retailers outside the country.
Following a ludicrous attempt by parents in South Carolina to ban her popular Harry Potter books for children because they were “dark and evil”, author J.K. Rowling responded by stating, “I have yet to meet a single child who has said they want to be a Satanist, or is interested in the occult because of the books.”
However, in a move reminiscent of the infamous 1925 “Monkey Trial” in Dayton, Tennessee (in which the teaching of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution was banned in schools), when a school superintendent in Zeeland, Michigan, decided that the Potter titles were only suitable for older readers, teachers were prevented from reading the books in class, and children required parental permission before they could borrow them from school libraries or use them for book reports. Incredibly, the Potter books were then banned in schools in a dozen other American states and the titles were named by the American Library Association as the “most challenged” books of 1999.
Yet despite the negative reaction of some narrow-minded Americans, Rowling was the biggest-selling author of 1999. Her début fantasy novel Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (retitled Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone for its US publication) sold almost 500,000 copies in Britain alone, closely followed by the sequel, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. The third book in the series, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, was published in July. In a poll of the UK’s highest-paid women, 35-year-old Rowling ranked third with an estimated income of £14.5 million, after worldwide sales of the books she started writing in an Edinburgh cafe while an unemployed single parent reached a reported 30 million. Warner Bros. bought the film and merchandising rights for an estimated £1 million.
According to a Top 100 list submitted by book publishers to Publisher’s Weekly, John Grisham was the bestselling author of the 1990s with combined sales of more than sixty million copies. Stephen King narrowly beat out Danielle Steel for second place with cumulative sales of 38.3 million, with his six-part series The Green Mile being the author’s top selling title during the decade. In 1999, King’s fantastical prison drama was reissued in a single “soon to be a major movie” volume.
To tie-in with the ABC-TV mini-series shown during the February “sweeps” period, King’s original 300-page screenplay for Storm of the Century was published as a trade paperback, which also included an introduction by the author in which he discussed the filming.
King also surprised his fans with a previously unannounced new novel, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, which appeared in April. About a young girl lost in the woods who created an imaginary friendship with her hero, the real-life Red Sox baseball relief pitcher of the title, the book had a 1.25 million-copy first hardcover printing in America but was actually published in Britain first.
Following the Columbine High School shootings in April, when two students killed twelve classmates and a teacher before shooting themselves, King asked Penguin to withdraw from publication his novel Rage, originally issued under his “Richard Bachman” byline, with the next printing.
The same month, King celebrated his 25th anniversary as an author with a dinner party for around ninety guests at Tavern on the Green in New York City. Amongst those invited were Salman Rushdie, Peter Straub, Richard Chizmar, George Romero and Warren Zevon. Stanley Wiater provided the questions for a King trivia quiz, which was won by the author’s biographer, Douglas E. Winter.
Then on 19 June, Stephen King was seriously injured while walking along a rural highway when he was hit by a Dodge Caravan after 41-year-old driver Bryan E. Smith lost control. The author was thrown fourteen feet and suffered multiple fractures to his right leg and hip, a collapsed lung, a lacerated scalp and various facial injuries. He was taken to the Central Maine Medical Center in Lewiston where, after surgery, he was described as being in a serious, but stable condition. He was released on 9 July after four more operations on his injuries and faced several months of physical therapy.
While the driver faced charges of aggravated assault and driving to endanger (his driver’s license had already been suspended four times previously), King bought the van which hit him for $1,500 and revealed to a local newspaper that he was “Going to take a sledgehammer and beat it.” To avoid jail, Smith later pleaded guilty to driving to endanger after a charge of aggravated assault was dropped, and he was suspended from driving for six months.
According to one tabloid newspaper, the widow of “renowned” psychic Peter Hurkos claimed that her husband, who had been dead eleven years, was responsible for the accident because King had “stolen” Hurkos’ life story for his novel The Dead Zone. The same source also revealed that King’s 29-year-old lesbian daughter, Naomi, was planning a same-sex “ceremony of union” with her 53-year-old graduate school professor.
In Britain, a special paperback edition of the 1998 collection Bag of Bones, only available through WHSmith bookstores, included the additional sixty-page story “Blind Willie”; this was one of five interconnected, sequential stories which formed the basis of King’s collection Hearts in Atlantis, published in September. Ranging over the last three decades of the twentieth century, each story contained a hint of the supernatural and all were influenced by the 1960s and the Vietnam War. However, because of his injuries from the accident, publicity appearances by the author were cancelled.
King also released a three-story collection (two original) in November entitled Blood and Smoke, but only as a three-and-a-half hour audiobook. Read by the author himself, each of the stories dealt with cigarette smoking. In the UK, Hodder Headline Audio Books also issued Stephen King Live!, a recording of the author’s Royal Festival Hall appearance in August 1998 when he read the unpublished short story “LT’s Theory of Pets” and answered questions from novelist and broadcaster Muriel Gray.
Meanwhile, a San Francisco doctor discussed a new medical condition known as “Stephen King wrist” in the Western Journal of Medicine. Its symptoms of pain in the wrist and weakness in the hand’s grip were apparently caused by reading King’s books in bed and holding the hefty tomes with just one hand!
Hannibal, Thomas Harris’s much-anticipated sequel to The Silence of the Lambs, was rushed into print less than three months after it was delivered to the publisher, with a one-day laydown of around 500,000 hardcover copies. Once again FBI agent Clarice Starling was forced to confront the evil Dr Lecter, whose where-abouts had been discovered by one of his surviving victims looking for revenge.
With a first printing of 500,000 copies, Anne Rice continued her “New Tales of the Vampires” series with Vittorio, the Vampire, set in historical Florence and the seventh volume overall in her “Vampire Chronicles”. The trade paperback of Rice’s 1998 novel The Vampire Armand added a five-page “conversation” with the author.
With a move to British publisher Macmillan (who paid a reported £2 million for two books) James Herbert’s latest novel, Others, featured private investigator Nicholas Dismas, who was hired to find a missing baby and uncovered the dark secrets of a mysterious nursing home and his own existence. The novel was also released as a Macmillan Audio Book, read by actor Robert Powell. At the same time, Herbert’s backlist was reissued in paperback editions under the Pan imprint.
Peter Straub’s contemporary horror novel Mr. X was set in the southern Illinois town of Edgerton and involved family secrets, doppelgängers, a psychic serial killer, Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos and jazz music. The latter also featured predominantly in Straub’s superb 1994 novella Pork Pie Hat, about a legendary New York jazz musician and the extraordinary story he tells set on Halloween. It was published in Britain as a slim hardcover in the “Criminal Records” series edited by Otto Penzler.
Dean Koontz’s False Memory was about mind control and had a first hardcover printing in America of more than 400,000 copies. Robin Cook’s latest medical thriller, Vector, involved the effects of bioterrorism, John Saul’s The Right Hand of Evil was a Southern Gothic about a Louisiana family’s dark history, and Thomas M. Disch’s blackly comic The Sub: A Study in Witchcraft concerned a substitute teacher who was haunted by the ghost of her apparently abusive father and discovered that she had the power to transform humans into beasts.
Olivia was the fifth and final volume in the pseudonymous “Logan Family” series of Gothic horror novels credited to the late V.C. Andrews® (probably Andrew Neiderman). From (presumably) the same author came Misty, Star, Jade, Cat and Into the Garden, which formed “The Wildflowers” series about a group of girls undergoing therapy. Under his own name, Neiderman published Neighborhood Watch, about a Stepford-like community.
According to his official website, author Robert R. McCammon decided to retire from the publishing business.
Jeff Long’s The Descent was an ambitious lost world horror novel in which mankind discovered a labyrinth of demon-haunted caverns beneath the Earth’s surface.
Following the death of Harry Keogh, E-Branch’s new Necroscope was already under the influence of a vampire in Brian Lumley’s E-Branch: Invaders, the tenth volume in the long-running series and the first in a new trilogy. Tor Books also published the second volume in Lumley’s Titus Crow omnibus series, containing the early novels The Clock of Dreams and Spawn of the Winds.
Richard Laymon’s Come Out Tonight was a kidnapping thriller, while the author’s Among the Missing involved adultery and a California serial killer. The Return by Andrea Hart was another serial killer novel.
Charles Grant completed his “Millennium Quartet” series with Riders in the Sky, in which mankind battled the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The Hush of Dark Wings and Winter Knight were the second and third volumes, respectively, in Grant’s Black Oak series, in which the members of the eponymous security firm investigated flying shapeshifters in Kansas and a centuries-old ghost in an English village.
Another English ghost was the titular heroine of Peter S. Beagle’s Tamsin, while Aunt Dimity’s Christmas was the fifth volume in Nancy Atherto’s supernatural mystery series.
Set in the contemporary New York art scene and the upstate community of Kamensic Village, Elizabeth Hand’s Black Light involved a secret society’s age-old battle with witchcraft and the attempted resurrection of old gods. While a nature photographer discovered a pool used more than a century before by a spiritualist cult for weird rites in James P. Blaylock’s latest slice of West Coast weirdness, The Rainy Season.
Twin teenage sisters discovered they had The Heart of a Witch when they joined a coven in Judith Hawkes’ novel, and Chet Williamson continued his paranormal series The Searchers with the third volume, Siege of Stone.
Frank M. Robinson belatedly revisited the theme of his 1956 novel The Power as a race of mutant telepaths forced their victims to kill themselves in Waiting. Thunderhead was Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child’s follow-up to their previous bestsellers Relic and Reliquary and involved Native American witchcraft and a legendary lost city of gold.
Kim Newman’s Life’s Lottery: A Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Book was an interactive novel which allowed the reader to become the central character and make his choices for him.
Graham Masterton’s Snowman was the fourth in the series about psychic school teacher Jim Rook. From Piatkus Books, Mark Morris’s Genesis was about a journalist who began experiencing strange hallucinations and unspeakable nightmares.
Graham Joyce’s Indigo involved a mysterious manuscript which revealed how to achieve invisibility and took its English protagonist on a quest to Chicago and Rome. A woman found herself drawn to the mysterious Greek island of Voros in Simon Clark’s Judas Tree, which was compared by its publisher to both Rebecca and The Shining.
In Bentley Little’s The House, five strangers discovered they shared a dark childhood memory as they returned to the identical homes in which they were born. The family in Elizabeth Massie’s Welcome Back the Night experienced psychic visions as they attempted to change the future.
Charles Wilson’s hi-tech thriller Embryo involved unethical medical experiments with an artificial womb, while The Reckoning by Thomas Monteleone was a Millennial horror novel about a new pope created from DNA taken from the Shroud of Turin.
Phil Rickman’s Midwinter of the Spirit was a sequel to Wine of Angels and the second in his series of mysteries featuring exorcist Merrily Watkins. The Haunt by J.N. Williamson featured a family menaced by an over-protective ghost.
Although better known for his Buffy the Vampire Slayer novelizations, Christopher Golden’s Strangewood turned out to be an atmospheric horror novel in which the son of author Thomas Randall was held hostage in the fantasy world his father created. In Lisa Goldstein’s Dark Cities Underground a man discovered that he could re-enter a dark fantasy world chronicled by his author mother.
Musician Greg Kihn’s fourth novel, Mojo Hand, involved murder by voodoo and the return of Blues legend Robert Johnson. Andrew Vachss’ anti-hero Burke returned in Choice of Evil, in which the vigilante teamed up with a witch-woman and others to track down a serial killer who had apparently returned from the dead. The novel was optioned by New Line Cinema.
Sean Hutson moved to publisher Macmillan with his latest novel, Warhol’s Prophecy, and in Windsor Chorlton’s Cold Fusion a man emerged from a coma into a twenty-first century in the grip of a cosmic winter, where his memory held the key to both the past and the future. Dead Cold was a novel from celebrity spoon-bender Uri Geller and featured a psychic who shared a link with a murderer.
A serial killer was hunted by a reluctant psychic and others in The Visionary by Don Passman. Written by pseudonymous author Michael Bishop (not the well-established genre writer), Seven Deadly Sins was about a serial killer who had sold his soul.
Tom Piccirilli published two new novels, Hexes and Sorrow’s Crown, the latter a sequel to the author’s The Dead Past. Owl Goingback’s Darker Than Night featured a house which was a gateway to another world, and a woman developed a psychic link with the dead in Elizabeth McGregor’s Second Sight.
Martha C. Lawrence’s Aquarius Descending was the third novel in the series about psychic detective/parapsychologist Elizabeth Chase, and a young woman discovered her telekinetic powers in Teek by “Steve Krane” (aka Steven Swiniarski/S. Andrew Swan). New York City detective Charlie Parker used an old psychic and necromantic visions to track a serial killer in John Connolly’s Every Dead Thing.
Graveyard Dust by Barbara Hambly was the third in the author’s historical mystery series featuring free Creole Benjamin January, who was threatened by a voodoo curse while investigating a murder. The Visitant was the first in Kathleen O’Neal Gear and W. Michael Gear’s “Anasazi Mysteries” series.
A horror novelist moved into one of those pesky haunted houses in Barbara Rogan’s Suspicion, while scientifically-created ghosts were conjured up in Skeptic by Holden Scott.
Richard Bowes’ Minions of the Moon was an urban supernatural novel based on a series of stories, one of which won the 1998 World Fantasy Award for Best Novella. Noel Hynd’s The Lost Boy was another ghost novel, and Nina Kiriki Hoffman’s A Red Heart of Memories also involved magic and ghosts.
Authors Arthur Conan Doyle and Charles Dodgson (aka “Lewis Carroll”) teamed up to investigate a murder during a seance in Roberta Rogow’s The Problem of the Spiteful Spiritualist. Barbara Michael’s Other Worlds collected two stories set in a gentleman’s club, where Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini were amongst those who debated the tales involving a poltergeist and a possibly haunted house.
In Brian Stableford’s futuristic bio-tech thriller Architects of Emortality, policemen Watson and Holmes and an amateur detective named Oscar Wilde investigated a series of killings apparently committed by man-eating plants. Hunter by Byron Huggins was a techno-thriller featuring the world’s greatest hunter on the trail of a genetically-created monster, while a small town was invaded by the eponymous Incubus by Ann Arensberg.
Originally published by Arrow Australia, Aurealis Award-winning author Kim Wilkins’ Grimoire involved a group of power-hungry academics trying to reassemble a Victorian volume to summon up Satan in present-day Melbourne. There was more magic in Traci Harding’s Alchemist’s Key, set in an English village, while Victor Kelleher’s Into the Dark was about the real Count Dracula and the young boy he took into his service. Underground by Mudrooroo was the third in the Australian author’s “Masters of the Ghost Dreaming” sequence, revolving around a clash of mythologies.
The spirit of a nineteenth century suffragette appeared to her modern descendent in Kate Muir’s Suffragette City, and Jilly Cooper’s mainstream novel Score also featured ghosts.
Available as an attractively-packaged CD from Savoy Records, 1960s pop singer P.J. Proby read three extracts from David Britton’s infamously suppressed novel Lord Horror, accompanied by the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra.
Communion Blood was the twelfth volume in Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s series featuring vampire Comte de Saint-Germain, while The Soul of an Angel was the second volume in Yarbro’s Sisters of the Night, a packaged series about Dracula’s trio of undead brides, illustrated by Christopher H. Bing.
P.N. Elrod’s The Dark Sleep, the eighth in “The Vampire Files” featuring undead detective Jack Fleming, was set in the world of showbusiness, and published in hardcover. Lords of Light was the third volume in the vampire series by Steven Spruill, which began with Rulers of Darkness and Daughter of Darkness.
Meanwhile the Science Fiction Book Club collected two of Laurell K. Hamilton’s “Anita Blake” novels from 1998, Burnt Offerings and Blue Moon, in the omnibus Black Moon Inn. The hardcover came with a shrinkwrapped poster of Luis Royo’s cover art.
The Hunt was the first volume in Susan Sizemore’s series Laws of the Blood, about a group of vampire Enforcers. Sherry Gottlieb’s Worse Than Death was a sequel to her humorous mystery Love Bite, as an undead LA cop in the
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The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 11
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