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The finest exponents of horror fiction writing today, Neil Gaiman, China Mieville, Ramsey Campbell, Kim Newman, Graham Joyce, Paul McCauley, Stephen Gallagher, Caitlin R. Kiernan, Basil Cooper, Glen Hirshberg, Jay Russell, feature in the world's premier annual horror anthology series, another bumper showcase devoted exclusively to excellence in macabre fiction.
To accompany the very best in short stories and novellas is the year's most comprehensive horror overview and contacts listing as well as a fascinating necrology.
Release date: March 1, 2012
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Print pages: 160
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The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 2003
Stephen Jones
I would like to thank David Barraclough, Kim Newman, Hugh Lamb, Nick Austin, Richard Dalby, Mandy Slater, Andrew I. Porter, Brian Mooney, Douglas E. Winter, Robert T. Garcia, Andy Cox, Rodger Turner and Wayne MacLaurin (sfsite.com), Harris M. Lentz III, Bill Congreve, Gordon Van Gelder, Sara and Randy Broecker, David J. Schow, Robert Morgan, Barbara Roden and David Pringle for all their help and support. Special thanks are also due to Locus, Interzone, Science Fiction Chronicle, Classic Images, Variety and all the other sources that were used for reference in the Introduction and the Necrology.
INTRODUCTION: HORROR IN 2002 copyright © Stephen Jones 2003.
OCTOBER IN THE CHAIR copyright © Neil Gaiman 2002. Originally published in Conjunctions 39: The New Wave Fabulists. Reprinted by permission of the author.
DETAILS copyright © China Miéville 2002. Originally published in The Children of Cthulhu: Chilling New Tales Inspired by H.P. Lovecraft. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agent, Mic Cheetham Literary Agency.
THE WRETCHED THICKET OF THORN copyright © Donald Tumasonis 2002. Originally published in All Hallows 29, February 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author.
THE ABSOLUTE LAST OF THE ULTRA-SPOOKY, SUPER-SCARY HALLOWE’EN HORROR NIGHTS copyright © David J. Schow 2001. Originally published in The Spook, Issue No.6, January 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author.
STANDARD GAUGE copyright © Nicholas Royle 2002. Originally published in Thirteen. Reprinted by permission of the author.
LITTLE DEAD GIRL SINGING copyright © Stephen Gallagher 2002. Originally published in Weird Tales, Issue #327, Spring 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author.
NESTING INSTINCTS copyright © Brian Hodge 2002. Originally published in Lies & Ugliness. Reprinted by permission of the author.
THE TWO SAMS copyright © Glen Hirshberg 2002. Originally published in Dark Terrors 6: The Gollancz Book of Horror. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agent, Anderson/Grinberg Literary Management, Inc.
HIDES copyright © Jay Russell 2002. Originally published in Stranger: Dark Tales of Eerie Encounters. Reprinted by permission of the author.
THE UNBEHELD copyright © Ramsey Campbell 2002. Originally published in The Spook, July 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author.
ILL MET BY DAYLIGHT copyright © Basil Copper 2002. Originally published in Cold Hand on My Shoulder. Reprinted by permission of the author.
CATSKIN copyright © Kelly Link, 2002. Originally published as a limited edition in Catskin: a swaddled zine and McSweeny’s Quarterly, Winter 2002-03. Reprinted by permission of the author.
20TH CENTURY GHOST copyright © Joe Hill, 2001. Originally published in High Plains Literary Review, Vol. XVII, No.1-3, 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author.
EGYPTIAN AVENUE copyright © by Kim Newman 2002. Originally published in J.K. Potter’s Embrace the Mutation. Reprinted by permission of the author.
THE BOY BEHIND THE GATE copyright © James Van Pelt 2002. Originally published in Dark Terrors 6: The Gollancz Book of Horror. Reprinted by permission of the author.
NOR THE DEMONS DOWN UNDER THE SEA copyright © Caitlín R. Kiernan 2002. Originally published in The Children of Cthulhu: Chilling New Tales Inspired by H.P. Lovecraft. Reprinted by permission of the author.
THE COVENTRY BOY copyright © Graham Joyce 2002. Originally published in The Third Alternative, Issue 32, Autumn 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author.
THE PROSPECT CARDS copyright © Donald Tumasonis 2002. Originally published in Dark Terrors 6: The Gollancz Book of Horror. Reprinted by permission of the author.
THE CAGE copyright © Jeff VanderMeer 2002. Originally published in City of Saints and Madmen. Reprinted by permission of the author.
DR PRETORIUS AND THE LOST TEMPLE copyright © Paul McAuley 2002. Originally published on SciFiction, September 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author.
NECROLOGY: 2002 copyright © 2003 by Stephen Jones and Kim Newman 2003.
USEFUL ADDRESSES copyright © Stephen Jones 2003.
WITH THE CONTINUED SUCCESS of The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter books overwhelming everything else, it comes as no surprise that the number of fantasy books (especially young-adult editions) published in 2002 was up significantly on previous years. Science fiction titles remained roughly constant, while horror was down slightly on the previous year’s high, with vampires and media tie-ins the most popular categories as usual.
Tor Books remained the biggest publisher of genre material in the United States, closely followed by Penguin Putnam, while HarperCollins led the list of publishers in the UK, with Orion/Gollancz in the runner-up position.
Media conglomerates Random House, AOL Time Warner and Vivendi Universal all had a less than spectacular year, mostly blamed on a slowing economy.
In January, California book retailer and publisher Advanced Marketing Services bought independent distributor Publishers’ Group West for $37 million. However, PGW’s sister company, Avalon Publishing Group, which owns Carroll & Graf, Thunder’s Mouth Press and other imprints, was not part of the deal after a separate buy-out by a group of Avalon employees, including PGW CEO Charlie Winton.
Long-time German genre editor Wolfgang Jeschke left imprint Wilhelm Heyne when the publisher was faced with a loss of $45 million on sales of $165 million. Meanwhile, John Jarrold left Simon & Schuster UK’s Earthlight in August. Jarrold had set up the imprint in 1997.
According to research in Britain, forty per cent of people no longer read anything at all, with the remainder averaging around just fourteen minutes a day with a book. Meanwhile, in June, a study of library users conducted by Wales University came to the shattering conclusion that children who read scary books are three times more likely to have nightmares.
In September, Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling won a three-year New York court battle against Pennsylvania-born children’s author Nancy Stouffer, who claimed that Rowling had stolen the term “Muggles” from her 1984 book, The Legend of Rah and the Muggles. However, despite a number of similarities between the two books, the court ruled that Stouffer had lied and doctored evidence to support her claims. She was fined $50,000 for a “pattern of intentional bad faith conduct” and ordered to pay a portion of the defendants’ costs.
An American fan who had been stalking Rowling was deported from Britain in August, and the multi-millionaire author announced that she was expecting her second child in the Spring of 2003.
She also confirmed that she had plotted the sixth and final seventh novels in the series and, despite rumours she was suffering from writer’s block, that her long-awaited fifth instalment in the Potter saga, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, would be published by Christmas. (It wasn’t.)
Meanwhile, an American buyer purchased a ninety-three word synopsis of the fifth book at a Sotheby’s auction in London for £28,680 – that was around £20,000 more than the expected selling price and worked out at an incredible £300 a word! The money raised was donated to Book Aid International.
That was actually a better word-rate than Tom Clancy’s record-breaking $45 million advance for just two books, which New York Magazine estimated to work out at $42,694 per page or a measly $133 per word.
J.K. Rowling was also the UK’s top female British earner, with estimated receipts of £48 million from books and films – six times more than the income of the Queen of England! This was despite the fact that sales of Harry Potter books by Scholastic in the second quarter of 2002 totalled $25 million – $10 million below company expectations. However, Rowling’s projected sales of roughly $45 million throughout the year accounted for only 2.5 per cent of Scholastic’s total revenue.
In Stephen King’s From a Buick 8, which had a 1,750,000 first printing in the US, a vintage 1954 car found in police storage possibly held the secret to a gateway to another dimension.
Although initially rumoured to be written by King under the name “Joyce Reardon, Ph.D”, a character from the tie-in TV miniseries, The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer: My Life at Red Rose was actually written by the author’s friend, mysteries novelist Ridley Pearson.
King’s Three Complete Novels: Carrie/’Salem’s Lot/The Shining was an instant-remainder omnibus of more than 1,000 pages, and the writer also reiterated to the 27th January Los Angeles Times that he planned to stop writing books in the next year or so.
Clive Barker’s children’s book Abarat involved an epic journey by Candy Quackenbush to the eponymous twenty-five islands, a fantasy world filled with sorcery, mystery and fantastical characters. The first instalment of a proposed four-part “The Books of Abarat”, the volume featured more than 100 full-colour images painted by the author himself. Walt Disney Productions paid nearly $8 million for the film, theme park and multimedia rights to the concept.
From Dean Koontz, By the Light of the Moon involved an artist and a female comedian caught up in a mad doctor’s bizarre experiments. It had a 525,000 first printing.
Anne Rice’s Blackwood Farm brought together elements from both her “Vampire Chronicles” and “Mayfair Witches” series. The book, which had a 500,000 first printing, featured the vampiric Quinn Blackwood, haunted by a blood-drinking doppelgänger. His only hope was to travel through time to find the legendary Vampire Lestat.
PS Publishing became Ramsey Campbell’s British publisher with The Darkest Part of the Woods, the author’s first new supernatural novel in four years, about the evil influence a Severn Valley village exerted over the members of a specific family. Peter Straub contributed the Introduction, and the numbered hardcover was available in a signed edition of 500 copies and a 200-copy slip case printing.
Written as a diversion while he was working on his Hugo Award-winning American Gods, Neil Gaiman’s dark fantasy for children, Coraline, was a huge critical and commercial success on both sides of the Atlantic. Relating the adventures of the eponymous little girl in a bizarre, nightmarish mirror-world, the UK trade paperback wasn’t nearly as attractive as the slim American hardcover beautifully illustrated by the author’s long-time collaborator, Dave McKean.
Gaiman’s revisionist fairy tale Snow Glass Apples: A Play for Voices was issued with woodcut illustrations by George Walker and an Introduction by Jack Zipes in a signed, 250-copy limited edition from Biting Dog Press. A lettered edition sold out before publication.
To celebrate Gaiman’s stint as Guest of Honour at Boskone 39, The NESFA Press published Adventures in the Dream Trade, a collection of his more obscure stories, poems and non-fiction, in a hardcover edition of 2,000 numbered copies, of which 300 were signed by the writer and artist co-guest Stephen Hickman and issued in a slip case. Edited by Tony Lewis and Priscilla Olson, the book also featured an Introduction by John M. Ford.
Richard Matheson’s Hunted Past Reason was a new novel of psychological terror situated in the backwoods of Northern California, while Dan Simmons’s A Winter Haunting was a follow-up, set forty-one years later, to the author’s 1991 novel Summer of Night.
Best known for their epic fantasy collaborations, David and Leigh Eddings’s Regina’s Song was a departure for the writing team – a contemporary serial-killer novel set in Seattle.
After more than a decade away, Robert R. McCammon was back with a new novel (actually written in the mid-1990s). Speaks the Nightbird weighed in at nearly 700 pages and dealt with late-seventeenth century witchcraft in the American South. The book’s serialization in online magazine The Spook was cancelled after regional press River City Publishing expressed concerns about how sales might be affected.
The Straw Men, a novel about a secret society of serial killers, was Michael Marshall Smith’s most accomplished (and successful) book to date. Unfortunately, in today’s world of bean-counters his publishers on both sides of the Atlantic decided to put it out under the barely credible pseudonym “Michael Marshall” (despite a glowing cover quote from Stephen King). After carefully building his career for almost a decade, Smith’s publishers decided to ignore all his earlier triumphs (including numerous awards and film options) in a short-sighted attempt to “reinvent” an already well-established author.
Another writer to suffer the same ignominy was Mark Morris, whose psychological thriller Fiddleback appeared under the transparent byline “J.M. Morris” in an attempt by the publisher to ignore a fifteen-year career that encompassed nine previous novels and a short story collection.
The Facts of Life was a powerful new novel by Graham Joyce that told the story of a remarkable family of eight women living in the city of Coventry during and after World War II.
Better known for her “Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter” series, Laurell K. Hamilton’s A Caress of Twilight featured faerie-princess-turned-private-investigator Merry Gentry on the trail of a supernatural serial killer in Southern California. Meanwhile, Hamilton’s first “Anita Blake” volume, Guilty Pleasures, was reissued in hardcover for the first time, and the author signed a seven-figure deal with Ace Books for a further three novels in the series.
A crime scene cleaner discovered a link between several murders and a strange exotic species of Aztec insect in Graham Masterton’s Trauma, and a new species of human was revealed in Stranger by Simon Clark.
Douglas Clegg’s The Hour Before Dark began with the murder of the patriarch of a dysfunctional family haunted by memories of the past, while China Miéville’s third novel, The Scar, involved a prisoner’s journey and the search for the island of a forgotten people.
John Saul’s Midnight Voices was about the elderly residents of an exclusive Manhattan apartment block who sacrificed their younger neighbours so that they could prolong their own lives.
In The Cabinet of Curiosities, Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child brought back FBI agent Pendergast from Prey and Reliquary to investigate a missing scientist and his experiments in prolonging life a century before. John Connolly’s detective Charlie Parker investigated a cult which disappeared in rural Maine in The Killing Kind.
Willow, Wicked Forest and Twisted Roots were the first three volumes in the “De Beers” Gothic horror series published under the by-line of the long-dead V.C. Andrews®. Shooting Stars was an omnibus of the four Andrews novels comprising the titular 2001 series: Cinnamon, Ice, Rose and Honey. Andrew Neiderman was probably still responsible for the Andrews books and also published Dead Time and Under Abduction under his own name.
Eyes of the Virgin featured more Roman Catholic horrors from Thomas F. Monteleone, this time revolving around a piece of prophetic stained glass. The titular Demons turned the Earth into a living Hell in the two-part novel (one half reprint, the other original) by John Shirley.
Incorporating his 1993 short story “In the House of My Enemy”, Charles de Lint’s The Onion Girl was set in the author’s magical Newford and involved artist Jilly Coppercorn and a dark secret from her past.
A story about three seventeenth-century sisters and their love for a magical being formed the core of Kim Wilkin’s Fallen Angel, originally published in the author’s adopted home of Australia as Angel of Ruin.
In Thomas Sullivan’s Born Burning, an antique chair formed part of a dark family tradition, while Rodman Philbrick’s Coffins was set in the nineteenth century when members of the eponymous Maine family were dying mysteriously.
Owl Goingback’s Breed resurrected the old-cursed-Indian-burial ground plot one more time, as the Florida tourist town of St Augustine discovered that what was buried in its graveyard was more than legend. There were more small-town horrors unearthed in Bentley Little’s The Return, in which an ancient demonic beast was discovered during an archaeological dig, and Edo van Belkom’s Martyrs, where a demon was discovered beneath an old Jesuit mission in Canada.
The tenant of a new cottage was haunted by Welsh ghosts in Cloven, the second novel from Sally Spedding. A recently widowed woman discovered that she was sharing her home with a bereaved spirit in A Presence in Her Life by Louise Brindley, and Matthew Costello’s Unidentified was set in yet another haunted house.
A new bride could see ghosts in Where Darkness Lives by Robert Ross. A dead woman appeared in the body of another in Sleep No More by Greg Iles, and Hiding from the Light by Barbara Erskine involved the ghost of “Witchfinder General” Matthew Hopkins haunting a childhood home.
A man recovered his missing childhood memories in The Forgotten by Tamara Thorne, while a cursed lullaby proved fatal to infants in Chuck Palahniuk’s dark comedy Lullaby.
Something was taking infants and chickens from a small Texas town in David Searcy’s Last Things, and an ancient entity slept beneath the town of Sauls Run in Dale Bailey’s The Fallen.
A family of witches living in rural Alaska confronted an evil force in Stephen Gresham’s Dark Magic, and a woman could raise the dead in Haunted Ground, from the same author.
A coven of murderous mutant witches was killing the female population of a quiet New England town in Ed Gorman’s Rituals, which was dedicated to the memory of Richard Laymon.
All That Lives by Melissa Snaders-Self was about the Bell Witch, and a successful author’s latest book appeared to write itself in Shaun Hutson’s Hybrid.
A woman’s nightmares awakened a world of Mayan gods and demons in The Void by Teri A. Jacobs, and a demon caused others to commit mayhem in W.G. Griffiths’s Driven.
Following a near-death experience, a woman began experiencing visions in Quietus by cult movie actress Vivian Schilling. A family became involved in a secret invisibility experiment in Out of Sight by T.J. MacGregor, and a rapper-DJ used musical mind-control in Dmitry Radyshevsky’s The Mantra, translated by David Gurevich.
Packaged by Tekno Books, Ed Gorman and Kevin McCarthy, The Family Book 2: Into the Darkness by McCarthy and David Silva was the second volume in the series about mind manipulation.
Don D’Ammassa’s Servants of Chaos served up some Lovecraftian horrors off the coast of Massachusetts, Enoch’s Portal was the first volume chronicling the cult-busting exploits of A.W. Hill’s psychic detective Stephan Raszer, and in Sèphera Girón’s The Birds and the Bees the balance of nature turned against humanity.
In Jeffrey Ames’s Venom, Dallas cop Courtney Bedell found herself matching wits with a notorious serial killer, known to the police as “Fiddleback” because of the spiders of that name left on the bodies of his victims. A nearly blind woman was kidnapped by a religious fanatic who wanted to save her from Satan in Melanie Tem’s Slain in the Spirit, while Robert J. Randisi’s Curtains of Blood threw in everything but the kitchen sink as Bram Stoker’s theatrical production of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was disrupted by the mystery of Jack the Ripper.
Lisa Goldstein’s historical fantasy The Alchemist’s Door featured English magician Dr John Dee, who was exiled to Prague where he encountered Elizabeth Bathory and Rabbi Judah Loew helped him create a golem.
Robert Rankin’s The Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalypse featured a psychopathic serial killer murdering the millionaire nursery-rhyme inhabitants of Toy City. Steve Aylett’s The Velocity Gospel and Dummyland were the second and third novels, respectively, set in the author’s equally bizarre alternate world of Accomplice.
Nancy A. Collins’s Dead Roses for a Blue Lady: The Sonja Blue Short Fiction Collection appeared from Crossroads Press with cover and interior artwork by Stephen R. Bissette. Published in an edition of 400 signed and numbered hardcovers, the book also included an interview with the author by Stanley Wiater, two original short stories and a previously unpublished novelette. A twenty-six-copy slipcased lettered edition for $165.00 was bound in leather with Italian endpapers and included a ribbon bookmark and an additional short-short story.
Darkest Heart was the fifth “Sonja Blue” novel from Nancy Collins, published by White Wolf. This time the renegade vampire met a kindred spirit in a man who had lost everything to the undead.
Set in the eighth-century court of Charlemagne the Great, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s Night Blooming was the latest volume in the author’s “Chronicles of St Germain” series. This time the vampire protagonist became involved with a woman suffering from stigmata.
Whitley Streiber’s Lilith’s Dream was the author’s second sequel to The Hunger, while A Coldness in the Blood was the eighth entry in Fred Saberhagen’s long-running “Matthew Maule/Dracula” series, about the quest for a powerful Egyptian relic.
Underland was the fourth and final book in Mick Farren’s series of “Victor Renquist” counter-cultural vampire thrillers. This time Renquist battled ex-Nazis in a lost world beneath Antarctica.
Mary Ann Mitchell’s undead Marquis de Sade returned in Cathedral of Vampires, while Trisha Baker’s Crimson Knight was the second volume in a trilogy about vampire psychologist Meghann O’Neill.
Living Dead in Dallas was the follow-up to Charlaine Harris’s comedy/mystery Dead Until Dark. This time telepathic cocktail waitress Sookie Stackhouse travelled to Dallas in search of a missing vampire.
In Jim Butcher’s Summer Knight, the fourth volume in “The Dresden Files”, the war with the vampires was postponed as Chicago wizard Harry Dresden helped faerie queen Mab solve a murder amongst the Sidhe.
Karen E. Taylor’s Resurrection was the sixth in the “Vampire Legacy” series featuring the undead Deirdre and former detective Mitch. A sequel to Red Moon Rising, Billie Sue Mosiman’s Malachi’s Moon was packaged by Tekno Books and featured the titular dhampir – the offspring of a vampire and a human.
Wounds was Jemiah Jefferson’s second vampire novel and involved an encounter between her undead protagonist Daniel Blum and a stripper. Boston-based Lawson was an undead enforcer who took out renegade vampires with extreme prejudice in Jon F. Merz’s debut novel The Fixer. It was followed by The Invoker, featuring the same character.
Laws of the Blood: Deceptions was the fourth volume in Susan Sizemore’s series about vampire Enforcers, while Second Sunrise by David Thurlo and Aimée Thurlo was the first in a vampire mystery series featuring Native American detective Lee Nez, a half-human vampire who teamed up with a female FBI agent.
James M. Thompson’s Dark Blood was a sequel to the author’s Night Blood, a 100-year-old vampire awakened in contemporary San Francisco in Elaine Moore’s Retribution, and a plot to create vampire soldiers in the Balkans was at the heart of Team of Darkness by Tony Ruggiero.
Night Pleasures by Sherrilyn Kenyon (Kinley MacGregor) was the first volume in the “Dark-Hunters” vampire romance series. A young archaeologist in Paris was protected from a supernatural evil by a mysterious stranger in Shannon Drake’s romantic vampire novel Realm of Shadows, and a legendary vampire hunter awakened after centuries of sleep in Christine Feehan’s romantic Gothic Dark Legend.
Maggie Shayne’s Twilight Hunger was another bloodsucking romance, and Out of the Shadows was an omnibus of Linda Lael Miller’s vampire romances Forever and the Night (1993) and For All Eternity (1994).
Garry Kilworth’s animal fantasy Vampire Voles was the fifth volume in the “Welkin Weasels” series, while Sparkle Hayter’s satirical novel Naked Brunch from No Exit Press featured werewolves.
Published by Carroll & Graf in hardcover, Glen Hirshberg’s first novel, The Snowman’s Children, was set in mid-1970s Detroit as two eleven-year-old boys tried to save their friend’s sanity against a haunting backdrop of murders committed by the serial killer of the title. The book came with cover quotes by Ellen Datlow, Kelly Link and others.
Best known for her non-fiction books about Anne Rice, Katherine Ramsland’s debut novel The Heat Seekers was somewhat predictably the first in a new vampire series. Rice’s son Christopher also made his own novel debut with A Destiny of Souls, a Southern Gothic set in New Orleans involving white supremacists and the supernatural.
Ed O’Connor’s first novel, The Yeare’s Midnight, was a serial killer thriller in which police Inspector John Underwood discovered that the ritualistic murder of an Olympic athlete was connected with the works of classical poet John Donne.
Published by The Design Image Group, Tina L. Jens’s episodic debut novel The Blues Ain’t Nothin’: Tales of the Lonesome Blues Pub was set in the haunted Chicago establishment and featured its colourful proprietor, Miss Mustang Sally, and her enigmatic clientele. From the same imprint, D.G.K. Goldberg’s . . . Doomed to Repeat It was billed as “a modern Gothic” and involved a romance between a punk-cowgirl and an eighteenth-century Scottish ghost.
From Big Engine, Dead Ground by Chris Amies was a Lovecraftian first novel based around a 1930s archaeological investigation of a sacred temple on a Pacific Island.
An attempt to raise the Antichrist and the legend of a thing living in the bell tower haunted The Red Church by Writers of the Future winner Scott Nicholson. A college dropout was haunted by ghosts in C.W. Cannon’s Soul Resin, and a woman was drawn into her own nightmare world in Teri A. Jacobs’s debut novel, The Void.
M. John Harrison’s audacious novel Light was not only a literary space opera, but also involved a 1990s serial killer who was haunted by a terrifying presence called the “Shrander”.
In Jonathan Carroll’s White Apples, an advertising copywriter discovered that he had been resurrected from Purgatory by his one true love and their unborn child.
Tim Pratt’s Last Things was set in the East Texas town of Gilmer, where the inhabitants started seeing creepy scarecrows and believed in the coming Apocalypse.
The Devil had to live out his life as a human in order to be redeemed in Glen Duncan’s I, Lucifer. A man was haunted by his ghostly girlfriend in I’m a Believer by Jessica Adams, and Jolie Blon’s Bounce pitted James Lee Burke’s Southern sheriff Dave Robicheaux against a Cajun magic man who appeared to be involved in the brutal murders of young girls.
In Thane Rosenbaum’s The Golems of Gotham, a girl attempted to cure her father’s writing block by calling up the spirits of his dead parents.
Will Self’s Dorian was a contemporary “re-imagining” of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray set against the AIDS epidemic of the past twenty years. Death’s Enemy: The Pilgrimage of Victor Frankenstein was a historical novel told in the form of a biography of Dr Frankenstein by George Rosie.
Inspired by Frankenstein, Faust and Freud, Patricia Duncker’s The Deadly Space Between involved lesbianism, incest and the ghost of a mountaineer in the Alps.
A painter was hired to do a portrait without ever seeing his subject in Jeffrey Ford’s The Portrait of Mrs Charbuque, while sixteen of the author’s shorter pieces were collected by Golden Gryphon in The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant and Other Stories.
Published by Articulation, a new imprint of Do-Not-Press, Thirteen was an original anthology of stories each based around a nude by British photographer Marc Atkins. The thirteen contributors included Toby Litt, Julian Rathbone, Maxim Jakubowski, Mick Farren, Stella Duffy and Nicholas Royle.
Edited with an extensive Afterword by Stephen Jones, The Emperor of Dreams: The Lost Worlds of Clark Ashton Smith was #26 in Gollancz’s Fantasy Masterworks series. The paperback contained forty-three stories, two poems and an essay by the Weird Tales author, covering Smith’s publishing career from 1926 until 1989.
Also in the Fantasy Masterworks series, Black Gods and Scarlet Dreams (#31) collected fifteen classic stories (mostly from Weird Tales) by C.L. Moore, while William Hope Hodgson’s The House on the Borderland and Other Novels (#33) contained the title book plus The Boats of the “Glen Carrig”, The Ghost Pirates and The Night Land, along with a new Introduction by China Miéville.
HarperCollins’s less imaginative Voyager Classics series offered reprints of H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels of Terror (#29) and Michael Marshall Smith’s Only Forward (#36).
Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby was reprinted in the “Bloomsbury Film Classic” series, while the author’s The Stepford Wives was reissued by HarperPerennial with a new Introduction by Peter Straub.
Published by Night Shade Books in hardcover for the first time, Gods in Darkness: The Complete Novels of Kane collected Bloodstone, Dark Crusade and Darkness Weaves by the late Karl Edward Wagner in a single volume. Despite an appropriate cover painting by Ken Kelly, the book suffered from not having an Introduction to put the three novels in historical context or any interior illustrations. However, for anyone who had never read Wagner’s superior heroic fantasy, this omnibus was an excellent place to start. A slip case limited edition contained an extra illu
INTRODUCTION: HORROR IN 2002 copyright © Stephen Jones 2003.
OCTOBER IN THE CHAIR copyright © Neil Gaiman 2002. Originally published in Conjunctions 39: The New Wave Fabulists. Reprinted by permission of the author.
DETAILS copyright © China Miéville 2002. Originally published in The Children of Cthulhu: Chilling New Tales Inspired by H.P. Lovecraft. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agent, Mic Cheetham Literary Agency.
THE WRETCHED THICKET OF THORN copyright © Donald Tumasonis 2002. Originally published in All Hallows 29, February 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author.
THE ABSOLUTE LAST OF THE ULTRA-SPOOKY, SUPER-SCARY HALLOWE’EN HORROR NIGHTS copyright © David J. Schow 2001. Originally published in The Spook, Issue No.6, January 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author.
STANDARD GAUGE copyright © Nicholas Royle 2002. Originally published in Thirteen. Reprinted by permission of the author.
LITTLE DEAD GIRL SINGING copyright © Stephen Gallagher 2002. Originally published in Weird Tales, Issue #327, Spring 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author.
NESTING INSTINCTS copyright © Brian Hodge 2002. Originally published in Lies & Ugliness. Reprinted by permission of the author.
THE TWO SAMS copyright © Glen Hirshberg 2002. Originally published in Dark Terrors 6: The Gollancz Book of Horror. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agent, Anderson/Grinberg Literary Management, Inc.
HIDES copyright © Jay Russell 2002. Originally published in Stranger: Dark Tales of Eerie Encounters. Reprinted by permission of the author.
THE UNBEHELD copyright © Ramsey Campbell 2002. Originally published in The Spook, July 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author.
ILL MET BY DAYLIGHT copyright © Basil Copper 2002. Originally published in Cold Hand on My Shoulder. Reprinted by permission of the author.
CATSKIN copyright © Kelly Link, 2002. Originally published as a limited edition in Catskin: a swaddled zine and McSweeny’s Quarterly, Winter 2002-03. Reprinted by permission of the author.
20TH CENTURY GHOST copyright © Joe Hill, 2001. Originally published in High Plains Literary Review, Vol. XVII, No.1-3, 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author.
EGYPTIAN AVENUE copyright © by Kim Newman 2002. Originally published in J.K. Potter’s Embrace the Mutation. Reprinted by permission of the author.
THE BOY BEHIND THE GATE copyright © James Van Pelt 2002. Originally published in Dark Terrors 6: The Gollancz Book of Horror. Reprinted by permission of the author.
NOR THE DEMONS DOWN UNDER THE SEA copyright © Caitlín R. Kiernan 2002. Originally published in The Children of Cthulhu: Chilling New Tales Inspired by H.P. Lovecraft. Reprinted by permission of the author.
THE COVENTRY BOY copyright © Graham Joyce 2002. Originally published in The Third Alternative, Issue 32, Autumn 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author.
THE PROSPECT CARDS copyright © Donald Tumasonis 2002. Originally published in Dark Terrors 6: The Gollancz Book of Horror. Reprinted by permission of the author.
THE CAGE copyright © Jeff VanderMeer 2002. Originally published in City of Saints and Madmen. Reprinted by permission of the author.
DR PRETORIUS AND THE LOST TEMPLE copyright © Paul McAuley 2002. Originally published on SciFiction, September 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author.
NECROLOGY: 2002 copyright © 2003 by Stephen Jones and Kim Newman 2003.
USEFUL ADDRESSES copyright © Stephen Jones 2003.
WITH THE CONTINUED SUCCESS of The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter books overwhelming everything else, it comes as no surprise that the number of fantasy books (especially young-adult editions) published in 2002 was up significantly on previous years. Science fiction titles remained roughly constant, while horror was down slightly on the previous year’s high, with vampires and media tie-ins the most popular categories as usual.
Tor Books remained the biggest publisher of genre material in the United States, closely followed by Penguin Putnam, while HarperCollins led the list of publishers in the UK, with Orion/Gollancz in the runner-up position.
Media conglomerates Random House, AOL Time Warner and Vivendi Universal all had a less than spectacular year, mostly blamed on a slowing economy.
In January, California book retailer and publisher Advanced Marketing Services bought independent distributor Publishers’ Group West for $37 million. However, PGW’s sister company, Avalon Publishing Group, which owns Carroll & Graf, Thunder’s Mouth Press and other imprints, was not part of the deal after a separate buy-out by a group of Avalon employees, including PGW CEO Charlie Winton.
Long-time German genre editor Wolfgang Jeschke left imprint Wilhelm Heyne when the publisher was faced with a loss of $45 million on sales of $165 million. Meanwhile, John Jarrold left Simon & Schuster UK’s Earthlight in August. Jarrold had set up the imprint in 1997.
According to research in Britain, forty per cent of people no longer read anything at all, with the remainder averaging around just fourteen minutes a day with a book. Meanwhile, in June, a study of library users conducted by Wales University came to the shattering conclusion that children who read scary books are three times more likely to have nightmares.
In September, Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling won a three-year New York court battle against Pennsylvania-born children’s author Nancy Stouffer, who claimed that Rowling had stolen the term “Muggles” from her 1984 book, The Legend of Rah and the Muggles. However, despite a number of similarities between the two books, the court ruled that Stouffer had lied and doctored evidence to support her claims. She was fined $50,000 for a “pattern of intentional bad faith conduct” and ordered to pay a portion of the defendants’ costs.
An American fan who had been stalking Rowling was deported from Britain in August, and the multi-millionaire author announced that she was expecting her second child in the Spring of 2003.
She also confirmed that she had plotted the sixth and final seventh novels in the series and, despite rumours she was suffering from writer’s block, that her long-awaited fifth instalment in the Potter saga, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, would be published by Christmas. (It wasn’t.)
Meanwhile, an American buyer purchased a ninety-three word synopsis of the fifth book at a Sotheby’s auction in London for £28,680 – that was around £20,000 more than the expected selling price and worked out at an incredible £300 a word! The money raised was donated to Book Aid International.
That was actually a better word-rate than Tom Clancy’s record-breaking $45 million advance for just two books, which New York Magazine estimated to work out at $42,694 per page or a measly $133 per word.
J.K. Rowling was also the UK’s top female British earner, with estimated receipts of £48 million from books and films – six times more than the income of the Queen of England! This was despite the fact that sales of Harry Potter books by Scholastic in the second quarter of 2002 totalled $25 million – $10 million below company expectations. However, Rowling’s projected sales of roughly $45 million throughout the year accounted for only 2.5 per cent of Scholastic’s total revenue.
In Stephen King’s From a Buick 8, which had a 1,750,000 first printing in the US, a vintage 1954 car found in police storage possibly held the secret to a gateway to another dimension.
Although initially rumoured to be written by King under the name “Joyce Reardon, Ph.D”, a character from the tie-in TV miniseries, The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer: My Life at Red Rose was actually written by the author’s friend, mysteries novelist Ridley Pearson.
King’s Three Complete Novels: Carrie/’Salem’s Lot/The Shining was an instant-remainder omnibus of more than 1,000 pages, and the writer also reiterated to the 27th January Los Angeles Times that he planned to stop writing books in the next year or so.
Clive Barker’s children’s book Abarat involved an epic journey by Candy Quackenbush to the eponymous twenty-five islands, a fantasy world filled with sorcery, mystery and fantastical characters. The first instalment of a proposed four-part “The Books of Abarat”, the volume featured more than 100 full-colour images painted by the author himself. Walt Disney Productions paid nearly $8 million for the film, theme park and multimedia rights to the concept.
From Dean Koontz, By the Light of the Moon involved an artist and a female comedian caught up in a mad doctor’s bizarre experiments. It had a 525,000 first printing.
Anne Rice’s Blackwood Farm brought together elements from both her “Vampire Chronicles” and “Mayfair Witches” series. The book, which had a 500,000 first printing, featured the vampiric Quinn Blackwood, haunted by a blood-drinking doppelgänger. His only hope was to travel through time to find the legendary Vampire Lestat.
PS Publishing became Ramsey Campbell’s British publisher with The Darkest Part of the Woods, the author’s first new supernatural novel in four years, about the evil influence a Severn Valley village exerted over the members of a specific family. Peter Straub contributed the Introduction, and the numbered hardcover was available in a signed edition of 500 copies and a 200-copy slip case printing.
Written as a diversion while he was working on his Hugo Award-winning American Gods, Neil Gaiman’s dark fantasy for children, Coraline, was a huge critical and commercial success on both sides of the Atlantic. Relating the adventures of the eponymous little girl in a bizarre, nightmarish mirror-world, the UK trade paperback wasn’t nearly as attractive as the slim American hardcover beautifully illustrated by the author’s long-time collaborator, Dave McKean.
Gaiman’s revisionist fairy tale Snow Glass Apples: A Play for Voices was issued with woodcut illustrations by George Walker and an Introduction by Jack Zipes in a signed, 250-copy limited edition from Biting Dog Press. A lettered edition sold out before publication.
To celebrate Gaiman’s stint as Guest of Honour at Boskone 39, The NESFA Press published Adventures in the Dream Trade, a collection of his more obscure stories, poems and non-fiction, in a hardcover edition of 2,000 numbered copies, of which 300 were signed by the writer and artist co-guest Stephen Hickman and issued in a slip case. Edited by Tony Lewis and Priscilla Olson, the book also featured an Introduction by John M. Ford.
Richard Matheson’s Hunted Past Reason was a new novel of psychological terror situated in the backwoods of Northern California, while Dan Simmons’s A Winter Haunting was a follow-up, set forty-one years later, to the author’s 1991 novel Summer of Night.
Best known for their epic fantasy collaborations, David and Leigh Eddings’s Regina’s Song was a departure for the writing team – a contemporary serial-killer novel set in Seattle.
After more than a decade away, Robert R. McCammon was back with a new novel (actually written in the mid-1990s). Speaks the Nightbird weighed in at nearly 700 pages and dealt with late-seventeenth century witchcraft in the American South. The book’s serialization in online magazine The Spook was cancelled after regional press River City Publishing expressed concerns about how sales might be affected.
The Straw Men, a novel about a secret society of serial killers, was Michael Marshall Smith’s most accomplished (and successful) book to date. Unfortunately, in today’s world of bean-counters his publishers on both sides of the Atlantic decided to put it out under the barely credible pseudonym “Michael Marshall” (despite a glowing cover quote from Stephen King). After carefully building his career for almost a decade, Smith’s publishers decided to ignore all his earlier triumphs (including numerous awards and film options) in a short-sighted attempt to “reinvent” an already well-established author.
Another writer to suffer the same ignominy was Mark Morris, whose psychological thriller Fiddleback appeared under the transparent byline “J.M. Morris” in an attempt by the publisher to ignore a fifteen-year career that encompassed nine previous novels and a short story collection.
The Facts of Life was a powerful new novel by Graham Joyce that told the story of a remarkable family of eight women living in the city of Coventry during and after World War II.
Better known for her “Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter” series, Laurell K. Hamilton’s A Caress of Twilight featured faerie-princess-turned-private-investigator Merry Gentry on the trail of a supernatural serial killer in Southern California. Meanwhile, Hamilton’s first “Anita Blake” volume, Guilty Pleasures, was reissued in hardcover for the first time, and the author signed a seven-figure deal with Ace Books for a further three novels in the series.
A crime scene cleaner discovered a link between several murders and a strange exotic species of Aztec insect in Graham Masterton’s Trauma, and a new species of human was revealed in Stranger by Simon Clark.
Douglas Clegg’s The Hour Before Dark began with the murder of the patriarch of a dysfunctional family haunted by memories of the past, while China Miéville’s third novel, The Scar, involved a prisoner’s journey and the search for the island of a forgotten people.
John Saul’s Midnight Voices was about the elderly residents of an exclusive Manhattan apartment block who sacrificed their younger neighbours so that they could prolong their own lives.
In The Cabinet of Curiosities, Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child brought back FBI agent Pendergast from Prey and Reliquary to investigate a missing scientist and his experiments in prolonging life a century before. John Connolly’s detective Charlie Parker investigated a cult which disappeared in rural Maine in The Killing Kind.
Willow, Wicked Forest and Twisted Roots were the first three volumes in the “De Beers” Gothic horror series published under the by-line of the long-dead V.C. Andrews®. Shooting Stars was an omnibus of the four Andrews novels comprising the titular 2001 series: Cinnamon, Ice, Rose and Honey. Andrew Neiderman was probably still responsible for the Andrews books and also published Dead Time and Under Abduction under his own name.
Eyes of the Virgin featured more Roman Catholic horrors from Thomas F. Monteleone, this time revolving around a piece of prophetic stained glass. The titular Demons turned the Earth into a living Hell in the two-part novel (one half reprint, the other original) by John Shirley.
Incorporating his 1993 short story “In the House of My Enemy”, Charles de Lint’s The Onion Girl was set in the author’s magical Newford and involved artist Jilly Coppercorn and a dark secret from her past.
A story about three seventeenth-century sisters and their love for a magical being formed the core of Kim Wilkin’s Fallen Angel, originally published in the author’s adopted home of Australia as Angel of Ruin.
In Thomas Sullivan’s Born Burning, an antique chair formed part of a dark family tradition, while Rodman Philbrick’s Coffins was set in the nineteenth century when members of the eponymous Maine family were dying mysteriously.
Owl Goingback’s Breed resurrected the old-cursed-Indian-burial ground plot one more time, as the Florida tourist town of St Augustine discovered that what was buried in its graveyard was more than legend. There were more small-town horrors unearthed in Bentley Little’s The Return, in which an ancient demonic beast was discovered during an archaeological dig, and Edo van Belkom’s Martyrs, where a demon was discovered beneath an old Jesuit mission in Canada.
The tenant of a new cottage was haunted by Welsh ghosts in Cloven, the second novel from Sally Spedding. A recently widowed woman discovered that she was sharing her home with a bereaved spirit in A Presence in Her Life by Louise Brindley, and Matthew Costello’s Unidentified was set in yet another haunted house.
A new bride could see ghosts in Where Darkness Lives by Robert Ross. A dead woman appeared in the body of another in Sleep No More by Greg Iles, and Hiding from the Light by Barbara Erskine involved the ghost of “Witchfinder General” Matthew Hopkins haunting a childhood home.
A man recovered his missing childhood memories in The Forgotten by Tamara Thorne, while a cursed lullaby proved fatal to infants in Chuck Palahniuk’s dark comedy Lullaby.
Something was taking infants and chickens from a small Texas town in David Searcy’s Last Things, and an ancient entity slept beneath the town of Sauls Run in Dale Bailey’s The Fallen.
A family of witches living in rural Alaska confronted an evil force in Stephen Gresham’s Dark Magic, and a woman could raise the dead in Haunted Ground, from the same author.
A coven of murderous mutant witches was killing the female population of a quiet New England town in Ed Gorman’s Rituals, which was dedicated to the memory of Richard Laymon.
All That Lives by Melissa Snaders-Self was about the Bell Witch, and a successful author’s latest book appeared to write itself in Shaun Hutson’s Hybrid.
A woman’s nightmares awakened a world of Mayan gods and demons in The Void by Teri A. Jacobs, and a demon caused others to commit mayhem in W.G. Griffiths’s Driven.
Following a near-death experience, a woman began experiencing visions in Quietus by cult movie actress Vivian Schilling. A family became involved in a secret invisibility experiment in Out of Sight by T.J. MacGregor, and a rapper-DJ used musical mind-control in Dmitry Radyshevsky’s The Mantra, translated by David Gurevich.
Packaged by Tekno Books, Ed Gorman and Kevin McCarthy, The Family Book 2: Into the Darkness by McCarthy and David Silva was the second volume in the series about mind manipulation.
Don D’Ammassa’s Servants of Chaos served up some Lovecraftian horrors off the coast of Massachusetts, Enoch’s Portal was the first volume chronicling the cult-busting exploits of A.W. Hill’s psychic detective Stephan Raszer, and in Sèphera Girón’s The Birds and the Bees the balance of nature turned against humanity.
In Jeffrey Ames’s Venom, Dallas cop Courtney Bedell found herself matching wits with a notorious serial killer, known to the police as “Fiddleback” because of the spiders of that name left on the bodies of his victims. A nearly blind woman was kidnapped by a religious fanatic who wanted to save her from Satan in Melanie Tem’s Slain in the Spirit, while Robert J. Randisi’s Curtains of Blood threw in everything but the kitchen sink as Bram Stoker’s theatrical production of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was disrupted by the mystery of Jack the Ripper.
Lisa Goldstein’s historical fantasy The Alchemist’s Door featured English magician Dr John Dee, who was exiled to Prague where he encountered Elizabeth Bathory and Rabbi Judah Loew helped him create a golem.
Robert Rankin’s The Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalypse featured a psychopathic serial killer murdering the millionaire nursery-rhyme inhabitants of Toy City. Steve Aylett’s The Velocity Gospel and Dummyland were the second and third novels, respectively, set in the author’s equally bizarre alternate world of Accomplice.
Nancy A. Collins’s Dead Roses for a Blue Lady: The Sonja Blue Short Fiction Collection appeared from Crossroads Press with cover and interior artwork by Stephen R. Bissette. Published in an edition of 400 signed and numbered hardcovers, the book also included an interview with the author by Stanley Wiater, two original short stories and a previously unpublished novelette. A twenty-six-copy slipcased lettered edition for $165.00 was bound in leather with Italian endpapers and included a ribbon bookmark and an additional short-short story.
Darkest Heart was the fifth “Sonja Blue” novel from Nancy Collins, published by White Wolf. This time the renegade vampire met a kindred spirit in a man who had lost everything to the undead.
Set in the eighth-century court of Charlemagne the Great, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s Night Blooming was the latest volume in the author’s “Chronicles of St Germain” series. This time the vampire protagonist became involved with a woman suffering from stigmata.
Whitley Streiber’s Lilith’s Dream was the author’s second sequel to The Hunger, while A Coldness in the Blood was the eighth entry in Fred Saberhagen’s long-running “Matthew Maule/Dracula” series, about the quest for a powerful Egyptian relic.
Underland was the fourth and final book in Mick Farren’s series of “Victor Renquist” counter-cultural vampire thrillers. This time Renquist battled ex-Nazis in a lost world beneath Antarctica.
Mary Ann Mitchell’s undead Marquis de Sade returned in Cathedral of Vampires, while Trisha Baker’s Crimson Knight was the second volume in a trilogy about vampire psychologist Meghann O’Neill.
Living Dead in Dallas was the follow-up to Charlaine Harris’s comedy/mystery Dead Until Dark. This time telepathic cocktail waitress Sookie Stackhouse travelled to Dallas in search of a missing vampire.
In Jim Butcher’s Summer Knight, the fourth volume in “The Dresden Files”, the war with the vampires was postponed as Chicago wizard Harry Dresden helped faerie queen Mab solve a murder amongst the Sidhe.
Karen E. Taylor’s Resurrection was the sixth in the “Vampire Legacy” series featuring the undead Deirdre and former detective Mitch. A sequel to Red Moon Rising, Billie Sue Mosiman’s Malachi’s Moon was packaged by Tekno Books and featured the titular dhampir – the offspring of a vampire and a human.
Wounds was Jemiah Jefferson’s second vampire novel and involved an encounter between her undead protagonist Daniel Blum and a stripper. Boston-based Lawson was an undead enforcer who took out renegade vampires with extreme prejudice in Jon F. Merz’s debut novel The Fixer. It was followed by The Invoker, featuring the same character.
Laws of the Blood: Deceptions was the fourth volume in Susan Sizemore’s series about vampire Enforcers, while Second Sunrise by David Thurlo and Aimée Thurlo was the first in a vampire mystery series featuring Native American detective Lee Nez, a half-human vampire who teamed up with a female FBI agent.
James M. Thompson’s Dark Blood was a sequel to the author’s Night Blood, a 100-year-old vampire awakened in contemporary San Francisco in Elaine Moore’s Retribution, and a plot to create vampire soldiers in the Balkans was at the heart of Team of Darkness by Tony Ruggiero.
Night Pleasures by Sherrilyn Kenyon (Kinley MacGregor) was the first volume in the “Dark-Hunters” vampire romance series. A young archaeologist in Paris was protected from a supernatural evil by a mysterious stranger in Shannon Drake’s romantic vampire novel Realm of Shadows, and a legendary vampire hunter awakened after centuries of sleep in Christine Feehan’s romantic Gothic Dark Legend.
Maggie Shayne’s Twilight Hunger was another bloodsucking romance, and Out of the Shadows was an omnibus of Linda Lael Miller’s vampire romances Forever and the Night (1993) and For All Eternity (1994).
Garry Kilworth’s animal fantasy Vampire Voles was the fifth volume in the “Welkin Weasels” series, while Sparkle Hayter’s satirical novel Naked Brunch from No Exit Press featured werewolves.
Published by Carroll & Graf in hardcover, Glen Hirshberg’s first novel, The Snowman’s Children, was set in mid-1970s Detroit as two eleven-year-old boys tried to save their friend’s sanity against a haunting backdrop of murders committed by the serial killer of the title. The book came with cover quotes by Ellen Datlow, Kelly Link and others.
Best known for her non-fiction books about Anne Rice, Katherine Ramsland’s debut novel The Heat Seekers was somewhat predictably the first in a new vampire series. Rice’s son Christopher also made his own novel debut with A Destiny of Souls, a Southern Gothic set in New Orleans involving white supremacists and the supernatural.
Ed O’Connor’s first novel, The Yeare’s Midnight, was a serial killer thriller in which police Inspector John Underwood discovered that the ritualistic murder of an Olympic athlete was connected with the works of classical poet John Donne.
Published by The Design Image Group, Tina L. Jens’s episodic debut novel The Blues Ain’t Nothin’: Tales of the Lonesome Blues Pub was set in the haunted Chicago establishment and featured its colourful proprietor, Miss Mustang Sally, and her enigmatic clientele. From the same imprint, D.G.K. Goldberg’s . . . Doomed to Repeat It was billed as “a modern Gothic” and involved a romance between a punk-cowgirl and an eighteenth-century Scottish ghost.
From Big Engine, Dead Ground by Chris Amies was a Lovecraftian first novel based around a 1930s archaeological investigation of a sacred temple on a Pacific Island.
An attempt to raise the Antichrist and the legend of a thing living in the bell tower haunted The Red Church by Writers of the Future winner Scott Nicholson. A college dropout was haunted by ghosts in C.W. Cannon’s Soul Resin, and a woman was drawn into her own nightmare world in Teri A. Jacobs’s debut novel, The Void.
M. John Harrison’s audacious novel Light was not only a literary space opera, but also involved a 1990s serial killer who was haunted by a terrifying presence called the “Shrander”.
In Jonathan Carroll’s White Apples, an advertising copywriter discovered that he had been resurrected from Purgatory by his one true love and their unborn child.
Tim Pratt’s Last Things was set in the East Texas town of Gilmer, where the inhabitants started seeing creepy scarecrows and believed in the coming Apocalypse.
The Devil had to live out his life as a human in order to be redeemed in Glen Duncan’s I, Lucifer. A man was haunted by his ghostly girlfriend in I’m a Believer by Jessica Adams, and Jolie Blon’s Bounce pitted James Lee Burke’s Southern sheriff Dave Robicheaux against a Cajun magic man who appeared to be involved in the brutal murders of young girls.
In Thane Rosenbaum’s The Golems of Gotham, a girl attempted to cure her father’s writing block by calling up the spirits of his dead parents.
Will Self’s Dorian was a contemporary “re-imagining” of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray set against the AIDS epidemic of the past twenty years. Death’s Enemy: The Pilgrimage of Victor Frankenstein was a historical novel told in the form of a biography of Dr Frankenstein by George Rosie.
Inspired by Frankenstein, Faust and Freud, Patricia Duncker’s The Deadly Space Between involved lesbianism, incest and the ghost of a mountaineer in the Alps.
A painter was hired to do a portrait without ever seeing his subject in Jeffrey Ford’s The Portrait of Mrs Charbuque, while sixteen of the author’s shorter pieces were collected by Golden Gryphon in The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant and Other Stories.
Published by Articulation, a new imprint of Do-Not-Press, Thirteen was an original anthology of stories each based around a nude by British photographer Marc Atkins. The thirteen contributors included Toby Litt, Julian Rathbone, Maxim Jakubowski, Mick Farren, Stella Duffy and Nicholas Royle.
Edited with an extensive Afterword by Stephen Jones, The Emperor of Dreams: The Lost Worlds of Clark Ashton Smith was #26 in Gollancz’s Fantasy Masterworks series. The paperback contained forty-three stories, two poems and an essay by the Weird Tales author, covering Smith’s publishing career from 1926 until 1989.
Also in the Fantasy Masterworks series, Black Gods and Scarlet Dreams (#31) collected fifteen classic stories (mostly from Weird Tales) by C.L. Moore, while William Hope Hodgson’s The House on the Borderland and Other Novels (#33) contained the title book plus The Boats of the “Glen Carrig”, The Ghost Pirates and The Night Land, along with a new Introduction by China Miéville.
HarperCollins’s less imaginative Voyager Classics series offered reprints of H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels of Terror (#29) and Michael Marshall Smith’s Only Forward (#36).
Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby was reprinted in the “Bloomsbury Film Classic” series, while the author’s The Stepford Wives was reissued by HarperPerennial with a new Introduction by Peter Straub.
Published by Night Shade Books in hardcover for the first time, Gods in Darkness: The Complete Novels of Kane collected Bloodstone, Dark Crusade and Darkness Weaves by the late Karl Edward Wagner in a single volume. Despite an appropriate cover painting by Ken Kelly, the book suffered from not having an Introduction to put the three novels in historical context or any interior illustrations. However, for anyone who had never read Wagner’s superior heroic fantasy, this omnibus was an excellent place to start. A slip case limited edition contained an extra illu
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