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Synopsis
This new anthology represents the most outstanding new short stories and novellas by both contemporary masters of horror and exciting newcomers. The award-winning series offers a chilling overview of this year in horror.
Release date: October 23, 2012
Publisher: Running Press Adult
Print pages: 160
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The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 23
Stephen Jones
STEPHEN JONES lives in London, England. He is the winner of three World Fantasy Awards, four Horror Writers Association Bram Stoker Awards and three International Horror Guild Awards as well as being a twenty-one time recipient of the British Fantasy Award and a Hugo Award nominee. A former television producer/director and genre movie publicist and consultant (the first three Hellraiser movies, Night Life, Nightbreed, Split Second, Mind Ripper, Last Gasp etc.), he is the co-editor of Horror: 100 Best Books, Horror: Another 100 Best Books, The Best Horror from Fantasy Tales, Gaslight & Ghosts, Now We Are Sick, H. P. Lovecraft’s Book of Horror, The Anthology of Fantasy & the Supernatural, Secret City: Strange Tales of London, Great Ghost Stories, Tales to Freeze the Blood: More Great Ghost Stories and the Dark Terrors, Dark Voices and Fantasy Tales series. He has written Coraline: A Visual Companion, Stardust: The Visual Companion, Creepshows: The Illustrated Stephen King Movie Guide, The Essential Monster Movie Guide, The Illustrated Vampire Movie Guide, The Illustrated Dinosaur Movie Guide, The Illustrated Frankenstein Movie Guide and The Illustrated Werewolf Movie Guide, and compiled the record-breaking The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror series, The Mammoth Book of Terror, The Mammoth Book of Vampires, The Mammoth Book of Zombies, The Mammoth Book of Werewolves, The Mammoth Book of Frankenstein, The Mammoth Book of Dracula, The Mammoth Book of Vampire Stories by Women, The Mammoth Book of New Terror, The Mammoth Book of Monsters, The Very Best of Best New Horror, Shadows Over Innsmouth, Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth, Dark Detectives, Dancing with the Dark, Dark of the Night, White of the Moon, Keep Out the Night, By Moonlight Only, Don’t Turn Out the Light, H. P. Lovecraft’s Book of the Supernatural, Travellers in Darkness, Summer Chills, Brighton Shock!, the Zombie Apocalypse! trilogy, Visitants: Stories of Fallen Angels & Heavenly Hosts, Haunts: Reliquaries of the Dead and A Book of Horrors, along with books by or about Clive Barker, Leigh Brackett, David Case, R. Chetwynd-Hayes, Basil Copper, Charles L. Grant, James Herbert, Robert E. Howard, Rudyard Kipling, H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith and Karl Edward Wagner. A Guest of Honour at the 2002 World Fantasy Convention in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and the 2004 World Horror Convention in Phoenix, Arizona, he has been a guest lecturer at UCLA in California and London’s Kingston University and St. Mary’s University College. You can visit his web site at www.stephenjoneseditor.com.
I would like to thank David Barraclough, Kim Newman, Vincent Chong, Mandy Slater, Amanda Foubister, Rodger Turner and Wayne MacLaurin (sfsite.com), Peter Crowther and Nicky Crowther, Ray Russell and Rosalie Parker, Gordon Van Gelder, Andy Cox, Joe Morey, Ellen Datlow, Charles Black, Debra L. Hammond, Douglas A. Anderson, Gavin Grant, Nicholas Royle, Val and Les Edwards, Sandra Ferguson, Johnny Mains, Brian Mooney, Andrew I. Porter, Philip Harbottle, Conrad Williams and, especially, Duncan Proudfoot, Max Burnell and Dorothy Lumley for all their help and support. Special thanks are also due to Locus, Ansible, Entertainment Weekly and all the other sources that were used for reference in the Introduction and the Necrology.
INTRODUCTION: HORROR IN 2011 copyright © Stephen Jones 2012.
HOLDING THE LIGHT copyright © Ramsey Campbell 2011. Originally published in Holding the Light. Reprinted by permission of the author.
LANTERN JACK copyright © Christopher Fowler 2011. Originally published in Red Gloves: Deviltry: The London Horrors. Reprinted by permission of the author.
RAG AND BONE copyright © Paul Kane 2011. Originally published in The Butterfly Man and Other Stories. Reprinted by permission of the author.
SOME KIND OF LIGHT SHINES FROM YOUR FACE copyright © Gemma Files 2011. Originally published in Gutshot: Weird West Stories. Reprinted by permission of the author.
MIDNIGHT FLIGHT copyright © Joel Lane 2011. Originally published in The Horror Anthology of Horror Anthologies. Reprinted by permission of the author.
TRICK OF THE LIGHT copyright © Tim Lebbon 2011. Originally published in House of Fear: Nineteen New Stories of Haunted Houses and Spectral Encounters. Reprinted by permission of the author.
BUT NONE SHALL SING FOR ME copyright © Gregory Nicoll 2011. Originally published in Zombiesque. Reprinted by permission of the author.
ABOUT THE DARK copyright © Alison Littlewood 2011. Originally published in Black Static, Issue 25, November 2011. Reprinted by permission of the author.
THE PHOTOGRAPHER’S TALE copyright © Daniel Mills 2011. Originally published in Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction, Issue 36, Spring 2011. Reprinted by permission of the author.
THE TOWER copyright © Mark Samuels 2011. Originally published in The Man Who Collected Machen and Other Weird Tales. Reprinted by permission of the author.
DANCING LIKE WE’RE DUMB copyright © Peter Atkins 2011. Originally published in Rumours of the Marvellous. Reprinted by permission of the author.
AN INDELIBLE STAIN UPON THE SKY copyright © Simon Strantzas 2011. Originally published in Nightingale Songs. Reprinted by permission of the author.
HAIR copyright © Joan Aiken Estate 2011. Originally published in The Monkey’s Wedding and Other Stories and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction No. 696, July/August 2011. Reprinted by permission of Small Beer Press and the author’s estate.
MIRI copyright © Steve Rasnic Tem 2011. Originally published in Blood and Other Cravings. Reprinted by permission of the author.
CORBEAUX BAY copyright © Geeta Roopnarine 2011. Originally published in Murmurations: An Anthology of Uncanny Stories About Birds. Reprinted by permission of the author.
SAD, DARK THING copyright © Michael Marshall Smith 2011. Originally published in A Book of Horrors. Reprinted by permission of the author.
SMITHERS AND THE GHOSTS OF THE THAR copyright © Agberg Ltd. 2011. Originally published in Ghosts by Gaslight: Stories of Steampunk and Supernatural Suspense. Reprinted by permission of the author.
QUIETA NON MOVERE copyright © Reggie Oliver 2011. Originally published in The Eighth Black Book of Horror. Reprinted by permission of the author.
THE CRAWLING SKY copyright © Joe R. Lansdale 2011. Originally published on Subterranean, Spring 2011. Reprinted by permission of the author.
WAIT copyright © Conrad Williams 2011. Originally published in Haunts: Reliquaries of the Dead. Reprinted by permission of the author.
THE OCEAN GRAND, NORTH WEST COAST copyright © Simon Kurt Unsworth 2011. Originally published in Quiet Houses. Reprinted by permission of the author.
THEY THAT HAVE WINGS copyright © Debra L. Hammond as literary heir of Evangeline Walton 2011. Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction No. 698, November/December 2011. Reprinted by permission of the author’s agent and estate.
WHITE ROSES, BLOODY SILK copyright © Thana Niveau 2011. Originally published on Delicate Toxins: An Anthology Inspired by Hanns Heinz Ewers. Reprinted by permission of the author.
THE MUSIC OF BENGT KARLSSON, MURDERER copyright © John Ajvide Lindqvist 2011. English translation copyright © Marlaine Delargy 2011. Originally published in A Book of Horrors. Reprinted by permission of the author.
PASSING THROUGH PEACEHAVEN copyright © Ramsey Campbell 2011. Originally published in Portents. Reprinted by permission of the author.
HOLIDAY HOME copyright © David Buchan 2011. Originally published in Daily Frights 2012: 366 Days of Dark Flash Fiction. Reprinted by permission of the author.
NECROLOGY: 2011 copyright © Stephen Jones and Kim Newman 2012.
USEFUL ADDRESSES copyright © Stephen Jones 2012.
IN JANUARY, HarperCollins US changed the name of its genre imprint Eos to Harper Voyager, to bring the list in line with the publisher’s UK and Australian sister companies to create a global brand.
America’s second-largest bookstore chain, Borders, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in February with debts totalling $1.29 billion and assets of $1.275 billion. Despite closing more than 200 stores over the following few months, Borders eventually announced it was going into liquidation in July after no bidders for the troubled chain came forward. The remaining stores finally closed their doors in September.
February also saw the surprise collapse of Canada’s largest book distributor, H. B. Fenn & Company, when the company filed for bankruptcy with liabilities of around $25.6 million. The company’s entire workforce of more than 125 employees was laid off immediately.
REDgroup Retail, Australia and New Zealand’s largest bookseller with such chains as Angus & Robertson and Borders (no connection to the US bookstore), was also placed into voluntary administration the same month, with debts of around A$51.8 million.
In better news, the struggling HMV sold British bookshop chain Waterstone’s to Russian billionaire Alexander Mamut for £57 million. Bookseller James Daunt, owner of six independent Daunt Bookshops in London, was named as managing director and announced that he wanted the 296-branch chain “to feel like your local bookstore”.
A year after putting itself up for sale, America’s biggest bookseller, Barnes & Noble, received an injection of $204 million in August when conglomerate Liberty Media purchased a stake in the company, but declined to buy the company outright.
In October, Amazon Publishing announced that it would be launching 47North, a new science fiction, fantasy and horror imprint edited by Alex Carr. The new imprint was named after the latitude co-ordinates in Seattle where Amazon is based. Titles would be available in print, audio and, of course, Kindle formats.
At the beginning of the year it was revealed that a new American edition of Mark Twain’s classic 1884 novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn had replaced the use of the racially offensive word “nigger” with “slave”, to make it more acceptable to modern readers. However, some critics complained that the censored version was “cultural vandalism” and was at odds with the anti-racist theme that Twain was writing about. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is reportedly the fourth most-banned book in US schools.
In May, a survey amongst secondary school English teachers in the UK found that they were ditching classic novels and Shakespeare from their curriculum because boys aged eleven to fourteen said they lost interest if the book they were studying was longer than 200 pages.
That same month, an investigation by the London Evening Standard newspaper discovered that one in three children in the city did not own a single book, one in four schoolchildren aged eleven could not read or write properly, and one in five school leavers was unable to read confidently.
Meanwhile, in December the results of a survey conducted by the UK’s National Literacy Trust revealed that around 3.8 million children in the country did not own a book. This meant that almost a third of all British children did not have any reading material, with boys again being the most likely to be missing out.
In Stephen King’s 11/22/63, a man dying of cancer travelled back through a wormhole in a Maine diner to a specific day in 1958 and attempted to prevent the assassination of President John F. Kennedy by Lee Harvey Oswald five years later. Curiously, the book was retitled 11.22.63 in the UK, but not 22.11.63!
The paperback edition of King’s Full Dark, No Stars added a new short story, “Under the Weather”, to the original four novellas.
J. K. Rowling planned to start exclusively selling the e-book versions of all seven of her Harry Potter novels via her new Pottermore.com website, which was supposed to launch in October but suffered from technical delays. Once fully operational, the free site would also offer other Potter-related material, including interactive games.
Meanwhile, the estate of a man claiming that Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire was plagiarised from the 1987 book, Willy the Wizard: Number 1: Livid Land, finally had its case dismissed in the UK after seven years when the plaintiff failed to start paying a £1.5 million deposit ordered by the Chancery Division of the High Court to cover costs.
Rowling also left her long-time literary agent, Christopher Little, and went to a new agency set up by Little’s business partner, Neil Blair.
Arabat: Absolute Midnight was the third volume in the projected five-book fantasy series written and extensively illustrated by Clive Barker, which began in 2002.
Miniaturised humans battled against giant-seeming insects in Micro, which Richard Preston completed from an unfinished draft by the late Michael Crichton.
The Burning Soul by John Connolly was the tenth in the “Charlie Parker” series, while Samuel Johnson vs. the Devil: Hell’s Bells (aka The Infernals) from the same author was a sequel to his YA novel The Gates.
Narrated by its murdered protagonist, Ghost Story was the thirteenth volume in Jim Butcher’s best-selling “Dresden Files” series.
Dean Koontz’s horror novel 77 Shadow Street was about a cursed apartment building. Bantam supported the book’s release with an online “360-degree immersive experience”.
The trade paperback of What the Night Knows, a supernatural serial killer novel from the busy Mr Koontz, also included a related novella originally published as an e-book, while Frankenstein: The Dead Town was the fifth and final book in the series from the same author.
Richard Matheson’s latest novel, Other Kingdoms, was about witchcraft and magic in a rural English village, as told by an ageing horror writer.
When a couple of ageing musicians discovered an abandoned baby girl in the woods, they set in motion a chain of horrific events in John Ajvide Lindqvist’s fourth novel, Little Star.
Family Storms and Cloudburst were the first volumes in a new series by the still long-dead V. C. Andrews®.
A couple buried in an avalanche emerged to discover a world apparently devoid of anyone but themselves in Graham Joyce’s The Silent Land. Stephen King described it as “Scary Twilight Zone stuff, but also a sensitive exploration of love’s redemptive power.”
A man found that his life had been “modified” out of his control in Killer Move by Michael Marshall (Smith).
Inspired by the Hammer Films tradition, Christopher Fowler’s Hell Train was set on a locomotive travelling through Eastern Europe during the First World War.
As a companion to its series of new Sherlock Holmes adventures, Titan Books issued Kim Newman’s novel Professor Moriarty: The Hound of the D’Urbervilles, which continued the exploits of “the Napoleon of Crime” and his debauched henchman, Colonel Sebastian Moran.
Meanwhile, John O’Connell’s novella The Baskerville Legacy focused on the relationship between Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and real-life journalist Bertram Fletcher Robinson, who some claim came up with the idea for The Hound of the Baskervilles.
The Dark at the End was reportedly the final volume in F. Paul Wilson’s long-running “Repairman Jack” series, while Out of Oz marked the end of Gregory Maguire’s best-selling “Wicked” series (at least for now).
In Adam Nevill’s The Ritual, a group of four campers encountered monsters both human and supernatural in an ancient Scandinavian forest.
A former airline pilot searched for his missing girlfriend in a strange coastal village in Loss of Separation by Conrad Williams, and a man believed he had discovered a map to the city of his dreams in Nicholas Royle’s novel Regicide, an expanded version of the author’s story “Night Shift Sister”.
The Shadow of the Soul was the second book in Sarah Pinborough’s “Dog-Faced Gods” series, as detective inspector Cassius “Cass” Jones continued his investigations into the sinister activities of the immortal “Network”.
Ghost of a Smile was the second in Simon R. Green’s “Ghost Finders” series about agents working for the Carnacki Institute.
A gate in an urban housing project led to a world of ghosts and monsters in Gary McMahon’s The Concrete Grove, the first volume in a new trilogy, while Dead Bad Things from the same author was about a reluctant psychic and included a bonus short story.
The dead were restless in Graveminder, the first adult novel by best-selling YA author Melissa Marr, and a seventeen-year-old girl uncovered her family’s dark secrets in Essie Fox’s Victorian Gothic mystery The Somnambulist.
Aloha from Hell: A Sandman Slim Novel was a sequel to Kill the Dead and Sandman Slim, as Richard Kadrey’s anti-hero took on an insane serial killer who was mounting a war against both Heaven and Hell.
Joseph Nassise’s Eyes to See was the first in a trilogy about a man with the ability to see ghosts, and a survivor of a terrorist attack could hear the voices of who perished in Robert J. King’s Death’s Disciples.
A woman could tell when men were about to die in Michael Koryta’s The Cypress House, while an ancient evil infected an island lighthouse and a big cat sanctuary in The Ridge, from the same author.
Something huge and tentacled emerged Out of the Waters, the second in David Drake’s “Books of the Elements” quartet.
People started turning into cannibalistic monsters in Vacation by Matthew Costello, and a woman’s New York apartment was infested with insects no one else could see in Ben H. Winters’ Bedbugs.
Fired Up by Jayne Ann Krentz was the first book in the “Dreamlight” series and the seventh in the “Arcane Society” series.
Diabolical was Hank Schwaeble’s sequel to Damnable, while I Don’t Want to Kill You was the third book in the humorous serial killer trilogy by Dan Wells about sociopath John Wayne Cleaver.
Skinners: The Breaking and Skinners: Extinction Agenda were the fifth and sixth books, respectively, in the series about monster-hunters by Marcus Pelegrimas.
Former Leisure executive editor Don D’Auria moved to small press/e-book imprint Samhain Publishing, where he launched a new horror line in October with no less than five books from Ramsey Campbell, including the new novel The Seven Days of Cain.
Other titles from the same publisher included Angel Board by Kristopher Rufty, Borealis by Ronald Malfi, Wolf’s Edge by W. D. Gagliani, Forest of Shadows by Hunter Shea, Dead of Winter by Brian Moreland, Dark Inspirations by Russell James, Catching Hell by Greg F. Gifune, and The Lamplighters by Frazer Lee.
Steve Hockensmith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dreadfully Ever After, illustrated by Patrick Arrasmith, was the third in the trilogy that started with Seth Grahame-Smith’s bestselling pastiche and continued with Hockensmith’s prequel.
Derived from the same source material, Mr Darcy’s Bite was a werewolf novel by Mary Lydon Simonsen, Jane Goes Batty was the second book in Thomas Michael Ford’s series about a vampire Jane Austen in the present day, and Jane Austen: Blood Persuasion was the second in the humorous vampire series by Janet Mullany.
And still the dross kept coming with such literary “mash-ups” as Alice in Zombieland “by” Lewis Carroll and Nickolas Cook, and The Twilight of Lake Woebegotten by “Harrison Geillor”.
In Grave Expectations credited to Charles Dickens and Sherri Browning Erwin, young Pip was a werewolf and Miss Havisham a vampire, while A Vampire Christmas: Ebenezer Scrooge, Vampire Slayer by Sarah Gray (Colleen Faulkner) pretty much spoke for itself.
Oscar Wilde teamed up with Arthur Conan Doyle and Bram Stoker to investigate some bizarre killings in Gyles Brandreth’s Oscar Wilde and the Vampire Murders, while The Damned Highway: Fear and Loathing in Arkham was a gonzo mash-up of H. P. Lovecraft and Hunter S. Thompson by Brian Keene and Nick Mamatas.
Gregor Samsa transformed into a kitten instead of a cockroach in The Meowmorphosis by Franz Kafka (who should be spinning in his grave) and the pseudonymous “Coleridge Cook”.
Maureen McGowan’s Sleeping Beauty: Vampire Slayer was a YA novel in the “Twisted Tales” series, but perhaps the year’s most interesting mash-up came from author Cecily von Ziegesar, who reworked her popular 2002 novel as Gossip Girl: Psycho Killer.
Charlaine Harris’ eleventh “Sookie Stackhouse” novel, Dead Reckoning, involved the telepathic waitress in the firebombing of Merlotte’s bar and a plot by her lover Eric to destroy his new vampire master.
In Hit List, the twentieth volume in Laurell K. Hamilton’s best-selling “Anita Blake” series, the vampire hunter found herself battling with the Mother of All Darkness once again for possession of her body.
The titular lawman’s job was to control the blood-drinking “Sunless” who lived in ghetto areas of London in James Lovegrove’s Redlaw, and a woman investigated her uncle’s murder in Piper Maitland’s Acquainted with the Night.
Although Trevor O. Munson’s Angel of Vengeance was the inspiration for the short-lived CBS-TV series Moonlight (2007– 08), featuring an undead private investigator, the novel had never been published before.
In S. M. Stirling’s The Council of Shadows, a follow-up to A Taint in the Blood, reluctant “Shadowspawn” Adrian Brézé embraced his dark heritage to save his kidnapped lover.
Jacqueline Lepora’s Immortal with a Kiss was a sequel to Descent Into Dust and again featured vampire-hunter Emma Andrews, while Vampire Federation: The Cross was the second book in the mystery series by Scott G. Mariani (Sean McCabe).
The Moonlight Brigade by Sarah Jane Stratford was the second in the “Millennial” series about vampires fighting the Nazis in World War II.
Following on from The Strain and The Fall, The Night Eternal was the final volume in the vampire virus trilogy by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan.
Set in nineteenth century Russia, The Third Section was the third book in Jasper Kent’s historical “Danilov Quintet”.
Hateful Heart was the fourth volume in Sam Stone’s “Vampire Gene” series and involved time-travelling vampires and the last remnants of the Knights Templar.
Memories We Fear was the fourth in the “Vampire Memories” series by Barb Hendee, and Crossroads was the seventh book by Jeanne C. Stein to feature vampire Anna Strong.
Set in seventeenth century Bohemia, An Embarrassment of Riches was the twenty-third novel in Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s “Count Saint-Germain” historical vampire series.
Stay-at-home father Simon experienced some disturbing physical changes when he met a group of playground dads in Jason Starr’s The Pack, and the last known lycanthrope tried to evade capture from vampire monster hunters sanctioned by the Vatican in Glenn Duncan’s The Last Werewolf.
Wolf Tales 12 was the final volume in the erotic shape-shifter series by Kate Douglas.
2011 was definitely the year of the zombie. Film director Tobe Hooper collaborated with Alan Goldsher on the zombie horror novel Midnight Movie, which was based around a supposedly “lost” movie made by Hooper.
Acknowledgeing its debt to George Romero’s 1968 movie Night of the Living Dead, Daryl Gregory’s Raising Stony Mayhall detailed the life of the eponymous zombie narrator in an alternate world where the walking dead regained rational thought.
Set in the aftermath of the zombie apocalypse, the titular bookseller’s blog formed the basis of Allison Hewitt is Trapped by Madeleine Roux, while Colson Whitehead’s satirical novel Zone One looked at the repercussions of a zombie plague in a near-future New York.
Scavengers by Christopher Fulbright and Angeline Hawkes was a zombie novel from Elder Signs Press.
Steven Saknussemm’s debut novel The Zombie Autopsies was presented in the form of a series of scientific journals and other research documents, while Ray Wallace’s Escape from Zombie City had the format of a choose-your-own adventure.
A woman realised that she had become a zombie in Sophie Littlefield’s Aftertime, while a girl found she had the power to create zombies in Unforsaken, a YA novel from the same author.
K. Bennett’s Pay Me in Flesh was the first in the “Mallory Caine, Zombie at Law” series. No, really.
Dead of Night was a zombie novel by Jonathan Maberry, while Dust & Decay was a sequel to the author’s post-apocalyptic zombie novel Rot & Ruin.
Having been forced to kill his sister in Feed, future blogger Shaun Mason tried to discover who deliberately infected her with the zombie virus in Deadline, the second book in the “Newsflesh” trilogy by Mira Grant (Seanan McGuire).
A girl was the only survivor in her town of the “Feeding Plague” in Frail by Joan Frances Turner (Hilary Hall), the sequel to the post-apocalyptic Dust.
Originally published online for free in 2003 and in the UK in 2005, David Moody’s zombie novels Autumn: The City, Autumn: Purification and Autumn: Disintegration finally received their first American print editions from St. Martin’s Griffin. From the same author, Them or Us was the final book in the “Hater” trilogy.
Flip This Zombie and Eat Slay Love were the second and third books in Jesse Petersen’s humorous “Living with the Dead” series which began with Married with Zombies.
Xombies: Apocalypso was the third book in the series by Walter Greatshell, as was James Knapp’s Element Zero in the SF/zombie series which began with State of Decay.
Featuring zombie detective Matt Richter, Dark War was the third in the “Nekropolis” series by Tim Waggoner.
Abaddon Books’ Tomes of the Dead series continued with Chuck Wendig’s Double Dead and Tony Venables debut novel Viking Dead.
* * *
There was a touch of Bradbury about Erin Morgenstern’s debut novel The Night Circus, which concerned a pair of rival 19th century illusionists and a mysterious circus where magic really worked.
In Deborah Harkness’ debut A Discovery of Witches, the first in a planned trilogy, a woman with powers she had long denied teamed up with a 1,500-year-old vampire to solve a series of mysteries.
In The Taker by former CIA intelligence analyst Alma Katsu, an ER doctor encountered a mysterious woman who claimed to be 200 years old.
Saw screenwriters Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan teamed up with Stephen Romano for their debut novel, Black Light, about a private investigator/exorcist who found himself working on a case that might finally solve the mystery of what destroyed his family.
An ex-soldier and narcotics dealer hunted a serial child-killer through the ugly alleys of Low Town in Daniel Polansky’s first novel, The Straight Razor Cure.
When a First World War veteran inherited his family’s old Georgian plantation, he encountered an evil that had been patiently waiting for his return in poet and playwright Christopher Buehlman’s debut, Those Across the River.
Two sisters sent to stay with their elderly aunt uncovered an evil that had lain hidden for years in Lindsey Barraclough’s Long Lankin, which was inspired by an old English folk ballad.
In Outpost by former gravedigger and film projectionist Adam Baker, the skeleton crew on a derelict refinery platform in the Arctic Ocean discovered that the outside world had been devastated by a global pandemic.
After eating a teenager’s brain, a zombie decided to rescue the boy’s girlfriend in Warm Bodies, a first novel by Isaac Marion, and a college professor was transformed into an intelligent zombie in Scott Kenemore’s debut, Zombie, Ohio.
Beloved of the Fallen was a romantic angel thriller that marked the novel debut of “Savannah Kline” (Kelly Dunn).
A forensic psychologist was obsessed by the legend of Elizabeth Bathory in Holly Luhning’s Quiver, while a college freshman found herself in a battle between vampires and werewolves in Jennifer Knight’s debut Blood on the Moon.
Will Hill’s debut, Department 19, was a young adult first novel about a secret government organization descended from Van Helsing that hunted vampires, and a fragile teenager began to remember why her friends died after experimenting with an Ouija board in Michelle Hodkin’s YA debut, The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer.
Chuck Palahniuk’s blackly comic Damned was about a spoiled teenager trapped in Hell with people she wouldn’t be seen dead with.
An African-American professor set out to find the lost world described in Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket” in Mat Johnson’s novel Pym.
An Uncertain Place, the seventh crime novel in the series featuring Commissaire Adamsberg by Fred Vargas (medieval archaeologist Frédérique Audoin-Rouzeau), took the French police chief and his colleague Danglard from a collection of severed feet outside London’s Highgate Cemetery to the hunt for a possible vampire in Serbia.
Steve Mosby’s Black Flowers was another crime-crossover, which began when a little girl mysteriously appeared on a seaside promenade with a disturbing story to tell.
Anthony Horowitz’s “missing story” pastiche, The House of Silk, found Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson investigating the disappearance of four Constable paintings along with the establishment of the title. It was the first spin-off book to be officially endorsed by the estate of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
New Random House imprint Vintage Classics, dedicated to publishing classic science fiction and horror novels, was launched in April with a series of anaglyphic 3-D covers and red-and-blue glasses included in each volume.
The initial five titles were Planet of the Apes by Pierre Boulle, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
I would like to thank David Barraclough, Kim Newman, Vincent Chong, Mandy Slater, Amanda Foubister, Rodger Turner and Wayne MacLaurin (sfsite.com), Peter Crowther and Nicky Crowther, Ray Russell and Rosalie Parker, Gordon Van Gelder, Andy Cox, Joe Morey, Ellen Datlow, Charles Black, Debra L. Hammond, Douglas A. Anderson, Gavin Grant, Nicholas Royle, Val and Les Edwards, Sandra Ferguson, Johnny Mains, Brian Mooney, Andrew I. Porter, Philip Harbottle, Conrad Williams and, especially, Duncan Proudfoot, Max Burnell and Dorothy Lumley for all their help and support. Special thanks are also due to Locus, Ansible, Entertainment Weekly and all the other sources that were used for reference in the Introduction and the Necrology.
INTRODUCTION: HORROR IN 2011 copyright © Stephen Jones 2012.
HOLDING THE LIGHT copyright © Ramsey Campbell 2011. Originally published in Holding the Light. Reprinted by permission of the author.
LANTERN JACK copyright © Christopher Fowler 2011. Originally published in Red Gloves: Deviltry: The London Horrors. Reprinted by permission of the author.
RAG AND BONE copyright © Paul Kane 2011. Originally published in The Butterfly Man and Other Stories. Reprinted by permission of the author.
SOME KIND OF LIGHT SHINES FROM YOUR FACE copyright © Gemma Files 2011. Originally published in Gutshot: Weird West Stories. Reprinted by permission of the author.
MIDNIGHT FLIGHT copyright © Joel Lane 2011. Originally published in The Horror Anthology of Horror Anthologies. Reprinted by permission of the author.
TRICK OF THE LIGHT copyright © Tim Lebbon 2011. Originally published in House of Fear: Nineteen New Stories of Haunted Houses and Spectral Encounters. Reprinted by permission of the author.
BUT NONE SHALL SING FOR ME copyright © Gregory Nicoll 2011. Originally published in Zombiesque. Reprinted by permission of the author.
ABOUT THE DARK copyright © Alison Littlewood 2011. Originally published in Black Static, Issue 25, November 2011. Reprinted by permission of the author.
THE PHOTOGRAPHER’S TALE copyright © Daniel Mills 2011. Originally published in Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction, Issue 36, Spring 2011. Reprinted by permission of the author.
THE TOWER copyright © Mark Samuels 2011. Originally published in The Man Who Collected Machen and Other Weird Tales. Reprinted by permission of the author.
DANCING LIKE WE’RE DUMB copyright © Peter Atkins 2011. Originally published in Rumours of the Marvellous. Reprinted by permission of the author.
AN INDELIBLE STAIN UPON THE SKY copyright © Simon Strantzas 2011. Originally published in Nightingale Songs. Reprinted by permission of the author.
HAIR copyright © Joan Aiken Estate 2011. Originally published in The Monkey’s Wedding and Other Stories and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction No. 696, July/August 2011. Reprinted by permission of Small Beer Press and the author’s estate.
MIRI copyright © Steve Rasnic Tem 2011. Originally published in Blood and Other Cravings. Reprinted by permission of the author.
CORBEAUX BAY copyright © Geeta Roopnarine 2011. Originally published in Murmurations: An Anthology of Uncanny Stories About Birds. Reprinted by permission of the author.
SAD, DARK THING copyright © Michael Marshall Smith 2011. Originally published in A Book of Horrors. Reprinted by permission of the author.
SMITHERS AND THE GHOSTS OF THE THAR copyright © Agberg Ltd. 2011. Originally published in Ghosts by Gaslight: Stories of Steampunk and Supernatural Suspense. Reprinted by permission of the author.
QUIETA NON MOVERE copyright © Reggie Oliver 2011. Originally published in The Eighth Black Book of Horror. Reprinted by permission of the author.
THE CRAWLING SKY copyright © Joe R. Lansdale 2011. Originally published on Subterranean, Spring 2011. Reprinted by permission of the author.
WAIT copyright © Conrad Williams 2011. Originally published in Haunts: Reliquaries of the Dead. Reprinted by permission of the author.
THE OCEAN GRAND, NORTH WEST COAST copyright © Simon Kurt Unsworth 2011. Originally published in Quiet Houses. Reprinted by permission of the author.
THEY THAT HAVE WINGS copyright © Debra L. Hammond as literary heir of Evangeline Walton 2011. Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction No. 698, November/December 2011. Reprinted by permission of the author’s agent and estate.
WHITE ROSES, BLOODY SILK copyright © Thana Niveau 2011. Originally published on Delicate Toxins: An Anthology Inspired by Hanns Heinz Ewers. Reprinted by permission of the author.
THE MUSIC OF BENGT KARLSSON, MURDERER copyright © John Ajvide Lindqvist 2011. English translation copyright © Marlaine Delargy 2011. Originally published in A Book of Horrors. Reprinted by permission of the author.
PASSING THROUGH PEACEHAVEN copyright © Ramsey Campbell 2011. Originally published in Portents. Reprinted by permission of the author.
HOLIDAY HOME copyright © David Buchan 2011. Originally published in Daily Frights 2012: 366 Days of Dark Flash Fiction. Reprinted by permission of the author.
NECROLOGY: 2011 copyright © Stephen Jones and Kim Newman 2012.
USEFUL ADDRESSES copyright © Stephen Jones 2012.
IN JANUARY, HarperCollins US changed the name of its genre imprint Eos to Harper Voyager, to bring the list in line with the publisher’s UK and Australian sister companies to create a global brand.
America’s second-largest bookstore chain, Borders, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in February with debts totalling $1.29 billion and assets of $1.275 billion. Despite closing more than 200 stores over the following few months, Borders eventually announced it was going into liquidation in July after no bidders for the troubled chain came forward. The remaining stores finally closed their doors in September.
February also saw the surprise collapse of Canada’s largest book distributor, H. B. Fenn & Company, when the company filed for bankruptcy with liabilities of around $25.6 million. The company’s entire workforce of more than 125 employees was laid off immediately.
REDgroup Retail, Australia and New Zealand’s largest bookseller with such chains as Angus & Robertson and Borders (no connection to the US bookstore), was also placed into voluntary administration the same month, with debts of around A$51.8 million.
In better news, the struggling HMV sold British bookshop chain Waterstone’s to Russian billionaire Alexander Mamut for £57 million. Bookseller James Daunt, owner of six independent Daunt Bookshops in London, was named as managing director and announced that he wanted the 296-branch chain “to feel like your local bookstore”.
A year after putting itself up for sale, America’s biggest bookseller, Barnes & Noble, received an injection of $204 million in August when conglomerate Liberty Media purchased a stake in the company, but declined to buy the company outright.
In October, Amazon Publishing announced that it would be launching 47North, a new science fiction, fantasy and horror imprint edited by Alex Carr. The new imprint was named after the latitude co-ordinates in Seattle where Amazon is based. Titles would be available in print, audio and, of course, Kindle formats.
At the beginning of the year it was revealed that a new American edition of Mark Twain’s classic 1884 novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn had replaced the use of the racially offensive word “nigger” with “slave”, to make it more acceptable to modern readers. However, some critics complained that the censored version was “cultural vandalism” and was at odds with the anti-racist theme that Twain was writing about. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is reportedly the fourth most-banned book in US schools.
In May, a survey amongst secondary school English teachers in the UK found that they were ditching classic novels and Shakespeare from their curriculum because boys aged eleven to fourteen said they lost interest if the book they were studying was longer than 200 pages.
That same month, an investigation by the London Evening Standard newspaper discovered that one in three children in the city did not own a single book, one in four schoolchildren aged eleven could not read or write properly, and one in five school leavers was unable to read confidently.
Meanwhile, in December the results of a survey conducted by the UK’s National Literacy Trust revealed that around 3.8 million children in the country did not own a book. This meant that almost a third of all British children did not have any reading material, with boys again being the most likely to be missing out.
In Stephen King’s 11/22/63, a man dying of cancer travelled back through a wormhole in a Maine diner to a specific day in 1958 and attempted to prevent the assassination of President John F. Kennedy by Lee Harvey Oswald five years later. Curiously, the book was retitled 11.22.63 in the UK, but not 22.11.63!
The paperback edition of King’s Full Dark, No Stars added a new short story, “Under the Weather”, to the original four novellas.
J. K. Rowling planned to start exclusively selling the e-book versions of all seven of her Harry Potter novels via her new Pottermore.com website, which was supposed to launch in October but suffered from technical delays. Once fully operational, the free site would also offer other Potter-related material, including interactive games.
Meanwhile, the estate of a man claiming that Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire was plagiarised from the 1987 book, Willy the Wizard: Number 1: Livid Land, finally had its case dismissed in the UK after seven years when the plaintiff failed to start paying a £1.5 million deposit ordered by the Chancery Division of the High Court to cover costs.
Rowling also left her long-time literary agent, Christopher Little, and went to a new agency set up by Little’s business partner, Neil Blair.
Arabat: Absolute Midnight was the third volume in the projected five-book fantasy series written and extensively illustrated by Clive Barker, which began in 2002.
Miniaturised humans battled against giant-seeming insects in Micro, which Richard Preston completed from an unfinished draft by the late Michael Crichton.
The Burning Soul by John Connolly was the tenth in the “Charlie Parker” series, while Samuel Johnson vs. the Devil: Hell’s Bells (aka The Infernals) from the same author was a sequel to his YA novel The Gates.
Narrated by its murdered protagonist, Ghost Story was the thirteenth volume in Jim Butcher’s best-selling “Dresden Files” series.
Dean Koontz’s horror novel 77 Shadow Street was about a cursed apartment building. Bantam supported the book’s release with an online “360-degree immersive experience”.
The trade paperback of What the Night Knows, a supernatural serial killer novel from the busy Mr Koontz, also included a related novella originally published as an e-book, while Frankenstein: The Dead Town was the fifth and final book in the series from the same author.
Richard Matheson’s latest novel, Other Kingdoms, was about witchcraft and magic in a rural English village, as told by an ageing horror writer.
When a couple of ageing musicians discovered an abandoned baby girl in the woods, they set in motion a chain of horrific events in John Ajvide Lindqvist’s fourth novel, Little Star.
Family Storms and Cloudburst were the first volumes in a new series by the still long-dead V. C. Andrews®.
A couple buried in an avalanche emerged to discover a world apparently devoid of anyone but themselves in Graham Joyce’s The Silent Land. Stephen King described it as “Scary Twilight Zone stuff, but also a sensitive exploration of love’s redemptive power.”
A man found that his life had been “modified” out of his control in Killer Move by Michael Marshall (Smith).
Inspired by the Hammer Films tradition, Christopher Fowler’s Hell Train was set on a locomotive travelling through Eastern Europe during the First World War.
As a companion to its series of new Sherlock Holmes adventures, Titan Books issued Kim Newman’s novel Professor Moriarty: The Hound of the D’Urbervilles, which continued the exploits of “the Napoleon of Crime” and his debauched henchman, Colonel Sebastian Moran.
Meanwhile, John O’Connell’s novella The Baskerville Legacy focused on the relationship between Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and real-life journalist Bertram Fletcher Robinson, who some claim came up with the idea for The Hound of the Baskervilles.
The Dark at the End was reportedly the final volume in F. Paul Wilson’s long-running “Repairman Jack” series, while Out of Oz marked the end of Gregory Maguire’s best-selling “Wicked” series (at least for now).
In Adam Nevill’s The Ritual, a group of four campers encountered monsters both human and supernatural in an ancient Scandinavian forest.
A former airline pilot searched for his missing girlfriend in a strange coastal village in Loss of Separation by Conrad Williams, and a man believed he had discovered a map to the city of his dreams in Nicholas Royle’s novel Regicide, an expanded version of the author’s story “Night Shift Sister”.
The Shadow of the Soul was the second book in Sarah Pinborough’s “Dog-Faced Gods” series, as detective inspector Cassius “Cass” Jones continued his investigations into the sinister activities of the immortal “Network”.
Ghost of a Smile was the second in Simon R. Green’s “Ghost Finders” series about agents working for the Carnacki Institute.
A gate in an urban housing project led to a world of ghosts and monsters in Gary McMahon’s The Concrete Grove, the first volume in a new trilogy, while Dead Bad Things from the same author was about a reluctant psychic and included a bonus short story.
The dead were restless in Graveminder, the first adult novel by best-selling YA author Melissa Marr, and a seventeen-year-old girl uncovered her family’s dark secrets in Essie Fox’s Victorian Gothic mystery The Somnambulist.
Aloha from Hell: A Sandman Slim Novel was a sequel to Kill the Dead and Sandman Slim, as Richard Kadrey’s anti-hero took on an insane serial killer who was mounting a war against both Heaven and Hell.
Joseph Nassise’s Eyes to See was the first in a trilogy about a man with the ability to see ghosts, and a survivor of a terrorist attack could hear the voices of who perished in Robert J. King’s Death’s Disciples.
A woman could tell when men were about to die in Michael Koryta’s The Cypress House, while an ancient evil infected an island lighthouse and a big cat sanctuary in The Ridge, from the same author.
Something huge and tentacled emerged Out of the Waters, the second in David Drake’s “Books of the Elements” quartet.
People started turning into cannibalistic monsters in Vacation by Matthew Costello, and a woman’s New York apartment was infested with insects no one else could see in Ben H. Winters’ Bedbugs.
Fired Up by Jayne Ann Krentz was the first book in the “Dreamlight” series and the seventh in the “Arcane Society” series.
Diabolical was Hank Schwaeble’s sequel to Damnable, while I Don’t Want to Kill You was the third book in the humorous serial killer trilogy by Dan Wells about sociopath John Wayne Cleaver.
Skinners: The Breaking and Skinners: Extinction Agenda were the fifth and sixth books, respectively, in the series about monster-hunters by Marcus Pelegrimas.
Former Leisure executive editor Don D’Auria moved to small press/e-book imprint Samhain Publishing, where he launched a new horror line in October with no less than five books from Ramsey Campbell, including the new novel The Seven Days of Cain.
Other titles from the same publisher included Angel Board by Kristopher Rufty, Borealis by Ronald Malfi, Wolf’s Edge by W. D. Gagliani, Forest of Shadows by Hunter Shea, Dead of Winter by Brian Moreland, Dark Inspirations by Russell James, Catching Hell by Greg F. Gifune, and The Lamplighters by Frazer Lee.
Steve Hockensmith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dreadfully Ever After, illustrated by Patrick Arrasmith, was the third in the trilogy that started with Seth Grahame-Smith’s bestselling pastiche and continued with Hockensmith’s prequel.
Derived from the same source material, Mr Darcy’s Bite was a werewolf novel by Mary Lydon Simonsen, Jane Goes Batty was the second book in Thomas Michael Ford’s series about a vampire Jane Austen in the present day, and Jane Austen: Blood Persuasion was the second in the humorous vampire series by Janet Mullany.
And still the dross kept coming with such literary “mash-ups” as Alice in Zombieland “by” Lewis Carroll and Nickolas Cook, and The Twilight of Lake Woebegotten by “Harrison Geillor”.
In Grave Expectations credited to Charles Dickens and Sherri Browning Erwin, young Pip was a werewolf and Miss Havisham a vampire, while A Vampire Christmas: Ebenezer Scrooge, Vampire Slayer by Sarah Gray (Colleen Faulkner) pretty much spoke for itself.
Oscar Wilde teamed up with Arthur Conan Doyle and Bram Stoker to investigate some bizarre killings in Gyles Brandreth’s Oscar Wilde and the Vampire Murders, while The Damned Highway: Fear and Loathing in Arkham was a gonzo mash-up of H. P. Lovecraft and Hunter S. Thompson by Brian Keene and Nick Mamatas.
Gregor Samsa transformed into a kitten instead of a cockroach in The Meowmorphosis by Franz Kafka (who should be spinning in his grave) and the pseudonymous “Coleridge Cook”.
Maureen McGowan’s Sleeping Beauty: Vampire Slayer was a YA novel in the “Twisted Tales” series, but perhaps the year’s most interesting mash-up came from author Cecily von Ziegesar, who reworked her popular 2002 novel as Gossip Girl: Psycho Killer.
Charlaine Harris’ eleventh “Sookie Stackhouse” novel, Dead Reckoning, involved the telepathic waitress in the firebombing of Merlotte’s bar and a plot by her lover Eric to destroy his new vampire master.
In Hit List, the twentieth volume in Laurell K. Hamilton’s best-selling “Anita Blake” series, the vampire hunter found herself battling with the Mother of All Darkness once again for possession of her body.
The titular lawman’s job was to control the blood-drinking “Sunless” who lived in ghetto areas of London in James Lovegrove’s Redlaw, and a woman investigated her uncle’s murder in Piper Maitland’s Acquainted with the Night.
Although Trevor O. Munson’s Angel of Vengeance was the inspiration for the short-lived CBS-TV series Moonlight (2007– 08), featuring an undead private investigator, the novel had never been published before.
In S. M. Stirling’s The Council of Shadows, a follow-up to A Taint in the Blood, reluctant “Shadowspawn” Adrian Brézé embraced his dark heritage to save his kidnapped lover.
Jacqueline Lepora’s Immortal with a Kiss was a sequel to Descent Into Dust and again featured vampire-hunter Emma Andrews, while Vampire Federation: The Cross was the second book in the mystery series by Scott G. Mariani (Sean McCabe).
The Moonlight Brigade by Sarah Jane Stratford was the second in the “Millennial” series about vampires fighting the Nazis in World War II.
Following on from The Strain and The Fall, The Night Eternal was the final volume in the vampire virus trilogy by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan.
Set in nineteenth century Russia, The Third Section was the third book in Jasper Kent’s historical “Danilov Quintet”.
Hateful Heart was the fourth volume in Sam Stone’s “Vampire Gene” series and involved time-travelling vampires and the last remnants of the Knights Templar.
Memories We Fear was the fourth in the “Vampire Memories” series by Barb Hendee, and Crossroads was the seventh book by Jeanne C. Stein to feature vampire Anna Strong.
Set in seventeenth century Bohemia, An Embarrassment of Riches was the twenty-third novel in Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s “Count Saint-Germain” historical vampire series.
Stay-at-home father Simon experienced some disturbing physical changes when he met a group of playground dads in Jason Starr’s The Pack, and the last known lycanthrope tried to evade capture from vampire monster hunters sanctioned by the Vatican in Glenn Duncan’s The Last Werewolf.
Wolf Tales 12 was the final volume in the erotic shape-shifter series by Kate Douglas.
2011 was definitely the year of the zombie. Film director Tobe Hooper collaborated with Alan Goldsher on the zombie horror novel Midnight Movie, which was based around a supposedly “lost” movie made by Hooper.
Acknowledgeing its debt to George Romero’s 1968 movie Night of the Living Dead, Daryl Gregory’s Raising Stony Mayhall detailed the life of the eponymous zombie narrator in an alternate world where the walking dead regained rational thought.
Set in the aftermath of the zombie apocalypse, the titular bookseller’s blog formed the basis of Allison Hewitt is Trapped by Madeleine Roux, while Colson Whitehead’s satirical novel Zone One looked at the repercussions of a zombie plague in a near-future New York.
Scavengers by Christopher Fulbright and Angeline Hawkes was a zombie novel from Elder Signs Press.
Steven Saknussemm’s debut novel The Zombie Autopsies was presented in the form of a series of scientific journals and other research documents, while Ray Wallace’s Escape from Zombie City had the format of a choose-your-own adventure.
A woman realised that she had become a zombie in Sophie Littlefield’s Aftertime, while a girl found she had the power to create zombies in Unforsaken, a YA novel from the same author.
K. Bennett’s Pay Me in Flesh was the first in the “Mallory Caine, Zombie at Law” series. No, really.
Dead of Night was a zombie novel by Jonathan Maberry, while Dust & Decay was a sequel to the author’s post-apocalyptic zombie novel Rot & Ruin.
Having been forced to kill his sister in Feed, future blogger Shaun Mason tried to discover who deliberately infected her with the zombie virus in Deadline, the second book in the “Newsflesh” trilogy by Mira Grant (Seanan McGuire).
A girl was the only survivor in her town of the “Feeding Plague” in Frail by Joan Frances Turner (Hilary Hall), the sequel to the post-apocalyptic Dust.
Originally published online for free in 2003 and in the UK in 2005, David Moody’s zombie novels Autumn: The City, Autumn: Purification and Autumn: Disintegration finally received their first American print editions from St. Martin’s Griffin. From the same author, Them or Us was the final book in the “Hater” trilogy.
Flip This Zombie and Eat Slay Love were the second and third books in Jesse Petersen’s humorous “Living with the Dead” series which began with Married with Zombies.
Xombies: Apocalypso was the third book in the series by Walter Greatshell, as was James Knapp’s Element Zero in the SF/zombie series which began with State of Decay.
Featuring zombie detective Matt Richter, Dark War was the third in the “Nekropolis” series by Tim Waggoner.
Abaddon Books’ Tomes of the Dead series continued with Chuck Wendig’s Double Dead and Tony Venables debut novel Viking Dead.
* * *
There was a touch of Bradbury about Erin Morgenstern’s debut novel The Night Circus, which concerned a pair of rival 19th century illusionists and a mysterious circus where magic really worked.
In Deborah Harkness’ debut A Discovery of Witches, the first in a planned trilogy, a woman with powers she had long denied teamed up with a 1,500-year-old vampire to solve a series of mysteries.
In The Taker by former CIA intelligence analyst Alma Katsu, an ER doctor encountered a mysterious woman who claimed to be 200 years old.
Saw screenwriters Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan teamed up with Stephen Romano for their debut novel, Black Light, about a private investigator/exorcist who found himself working on a case that might finally solve the mystery of what destroyed his family.
An ex-soldier and narcotics dealer hunted a serial child-killer through the ugly alleys of Low Town in Daniel Polansky’s first novel, The Straight Razor Cure.
When a First World War veteran inherited his family’s old Georgian plantation, he encountered an evil that had been patiently waiting for his return in poet and playwright Christopher Buehlman’s debut, Those Across the River.
Two sisters sent to stay with their elderly aunt uncovered an evil that had lain hidden for years in Lindsey Barraclough’s Long Lankin, which was inspired by an old English folk ballad.
In Outpost by former gravedigger and film projectionist Adam Baker, the skeleton crew on a derelict refinery platform in the Arctic Ocean discovered that the outside world had been devastated by a global pandemic.
After eating a teenager’s brain, a zombie decided to rescue the boy’s girlfriend in Warm Bodies, a first novel by Isaac Marion, and a college professor was transformed into an intelligent zombie in Scott Kenemore’s debut, Zombie, Ohio.
Beloved of the Fallen was a romantic angel thriller that marked the novel debut of “Savannah Kline” (Kelly Dunn).
A forensic psychologist was obsessed by the legend of Elizabeth Bathory in Holly Luhning’s Quiver, while a college freshman found herself in a battle between vampires and werewolves in Jennifer Knight’s debut Blood on the Moon.
Will Hill’s debut, Department 19, was a young adult first novel about a secret government organization descended from Van Helsing that hunted vampires, and a fragile teenager began to remember why her friends died after experimenting with an Ouija board in Michelle Hodkin’s YA debut, The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer.
Chuck Palahniuk’s blackly comic Damned was about a spoiled teenager trapped in Hell with people she wouldn’t be seen dead with.
An African-American professor set out to find the lost world described in Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket” in Mat Johnson’s novel Pym.
An Uncertain Place, the seventh crime novel in the series featuring Commissaire Adamsberg by Fred Vargas (medieval archaeologist Frédérique Audoin-Rouzeau), took the French police chief and his colleague Danglard from a collection of severed feet outside London’s Highgate Cemetery to the hunt for a possible vampire in Serbia.
Steve Mosby’s Black Flowers was another crime-crossover, which began when a little girl mysteriously appeared on a seaside promenade with a disturbing story to tell.
Anthony Horowitz’s “missing story” pastiche, The House of Silk, found Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson investigating the disappearance of four Constable paintings along with the establishment of the title. It was the first spin-off book to be officially endorsed by the estate of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
New Random House imprint Vintage Classics, dedicated to publishing classic science fiction and horror novels, was launched in April with a series of anaglyphic 3-D covers and red-and-blue glasses included in each volume.
The initial five titles were Planet of the Apes by Pierre Boulle, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
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