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Synopsis
Best New Horror combines dozens of the best and grisliest short stories of today. For twenty-five years this series has been published in the United Kingdom as The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, and now comes to the US to delight and terrify thriller enthusiasts. This has been the world’s leading annual anthology dedicated solely to showcasing the best in contemporary horror fiction. This newest volume offers outstanding new writing by masters of the genre, such as Joan Aiken, Peter Atkins, Ramsey Campbell, Christopher Fowler, Joe R. Lansdale, John Ajvide Lindqvist, Robert Silverberg, Michael Marshall Smith, Evangeline Walton, and many others! Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Arcade, Yucca, and Good Books imprints, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in fictionnovels, novellas, political and medical thrillers, comedy, satire, historical fiction, romance, erotic and love stories, mystery, classic literature, folklore and mythology, literary classics including Shakespeare, Dumas, Wilde, Cather, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.
Release date: November 11, 2014
Publisher: Skyhorse
Print pages: 160
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The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 25
Stephen Jones
I would like to thank Kim Newman, Vincent Chong, Rodger Turner and Wayne MacLaurin (sfsite.com), Peter Crowther and Nicky Crowther, Ray Russell and Rosalie Parker, Gordon Van Gelder, Merrilee Heifetz and Sarah Nagel of Writers House, Mark Miller, Titan Books, Nicholas Royle, Andy Cox, Michael Kelly, David Longhorn, David Barraclough, Johnny Mains, Amanda Foubister, Andrew I. Porter, Mandy Slater and, especially, Duncan Proudfoot, Emily Byron, Clive Hebard, Una McGovern and Max Burnell for all their help and support. Special thanks are also due to Locus, Ansible, Classic Images, Entertainment Weekly and all the other sources that were used for reference in the Introduction and the Necrology.
INTRODUCTION: HORROR IN 2013 copyright © Stephen Jones 2014.
WHO DARES WINS: ANNO DRACULA 1980 copyright © Kim Newman 2013. Originally published in Anno Dracula 1976–1991: Johnny Alucard. Reprinted by permission of the author.
CLICK-CLACK THE RATTLEBAG copyright © Neil Gaiman 2013. Originally published in Impossible Monsters. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agent.
DEAD END copyright © Nicholas Royle 2013. Originally published in X7: A Seven Deadly Sins Anthology. Reprinted by permission of the author.
ISAAC’S ROOM copyright © Daniel Mills 2013. Originally published in Black Static #35, Jul–Aug 2013. Reprinted by permission of the author.
THE BURNING CIRCUS copyright © Angela Slatter 2013. Originally published in The Burning Circus: BFS Horror 1: An Anthology for British Fantasy Society Members. Reprinted by permission of the author.
HOLES FOR FACES copyright © Ramsey Campbell 2013. Originally published in Holes for Faces. Reprinted by permission of the author.
BY NIGHT HE COULD NOT SEE copyright © Joel Lane 2013. Originally published in Crimewave 12: Hurts. Reprinted by permission of the Author’s Estate.
COME INTO MY PARLOUR copyright © Reggie Oliver 2013. Originally published in Dark World: Ghost Stories and Flowers of the Sea: Thirteen Stories and Two Novellas. Reprinted by permission of the author.
THE MIDDLE PARK copyright © Michael Chislett 2013. Originally published in Supernatural Tales 25, Winter 2013/14. Reprinted by permission of the author.
INTO THE WATER copyright © Simon Kurt Unsworth 2013. Originally published in Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth. Reprinted by permission of the author.
THE BURNED HOUSE copyright © Lynda E. Rucker 2013. Originally published in The Moon Will Look Strange. Reprinted by permission of the author.
WHAT DO WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT Z—copyright © Lavie Tidhar 2013. Originally published in Black Static #32, Jan–Feb 2013. Reprinted by permission of the author.
FISHFLY SEASON copyright © Halli Villegas 2013. Originally published in Chilling Tales: In Words, Alas, Drown I. Reprinted by permission of the author.
DOLL RE MI copyright © Tanith Lee 2013. Originally published in Nightmare: Horror & Dark Fantasy, Issue 8, May 2013. Reprinted by permission of the author.
A NIGHT’S WORK copyright © Clive Barker 2013. Originally published in The Bram Stoker Awards Weekend 2013 Incorporating World Horror Convention, New Orleans, LA, Souvenir Book. Reprinted by permission of the author.
THE SIXTEENTH STEP copyright © Robert Shearman 2013. Originally published in The Burning Circus: BFS Horror 1: An Anthology for British Fantasy Society Members. Reprinted by permission of the author.
STEMMING THE TIDE copyright © Simon Strantzas 2013. Originally published in Dead North: The Exile Book of Anthology Series, Number Eight: Canadian Zombie Fiction. Reprinted by permission of the author.
THE GIST copyright © Michael Marshall Smith 2013. Originally published in The Gist. Reprinted by permission of the author.
GUINEA PIG GIRL copyright © Thana Niveau 2013. Originally published in The Tenth Black Book of Horror. Reprinted by permission of the author.
MISS BALTIMORE CRABS: ANNO DRACULA 1990 copyright © Kim Newman 2013. Originally published in Anno Dracula 1976–1991: Johnny Alucard. Reprinted by permission of the author.
WHITSTABLE copyright © Stephen Volk 2013. Originally published in Whitstable. Reprinted by permission of the author.
NECROLOGY: 2013 copyright © Stephen Jones and Kim Newman 2014.
USEFUL ADDRESSES copyright © Stephen Jones 2014.
IN EARLY 2013, the US Department of Justice approved the merger of mega-publishers Penguin/Pearson and Random House/Bertelsmann. Australia, New Zealand and the European Union followed and, in early July, Penguin Random House became the largest publishing company in the world.
Meanwhile, Hachette Book Group purchased most of the Hyperion adult backlist from Disney, including the imprint’s name. The media-related and children’s imprints were not included in the sale.
Independent American imprint Night Shade Books, which had been struggling for several years, was sold to print publisher Skyhorse Publishing and digital publisher Start Publishing in June after some authors agreed to give up additional rights in return for the payment of all outstanding advances and late royalties. Night Shade immediately cancelled its electronic magazine Eclipse Online, edited by Jonathan Strahan.
After working on the transition with the new owners for a couple of months, Night Shade founder Jason Williams left the company in August.
Skyhorse and Start were also set to acquire independent publisher Underland Press, founded in 2007 by Victoria Blake. However, the deal was not completed and the imprint was instead purchased by Mark Teppo’s new publishing company, Resurrection House.
After being announced as an acquiring editor for Resurrection House, Jason Williams soon left that company as well.
In Britain, Tesco supermarkets were forced to withdraw a sixteen-page colouring book from their website after complaints that Colour Me Good Arrggghhhh!! by Mel Elliott featured images from, amongst other films, Hellraiser, Psycho, The Silence of the Lambs, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Jaws, An American Werewolf in London, The Shining and A Clockwork Orange. The book was being marketed online to children aged from five to eight.
Later in the year Tesco had to apologize again, when it was forced to remove an orange “psycho ward” Hallowe’en costume off its shelves after it was denounced as “staggeringly offensive” by mental-health charities. Rival supermarket chain Asda was also compelled to remove a similar fancy dress costume.
As a result of these complaints, London’s famous Angels Fancy Dress shop decided to insist that any customers wanting to buy their “Apron of Souls” Texas Chainsaw Massacre Hallowe’en costume would have to show ID to prove that they were eighteen years old or over. The company also set an age restriction on their bloody intestines costume.
It is estimated that the Hallowe’en market in the UK is now worth around £300 million, up from just £12 million in 2001.
Fifty years after his death, writer C. S. Lewis was honoured with a memorial stone in Westminster Abbey in London. The stone was set in the floor of Poet’s Corner, alongside such other renowned literary figures as Geoffrey Chaucer and Charles Dickens.
In July, the Providence, Rhode Island, City Council agreed to rename the intersection of Prospect Street and Angell Street “H. P. Lovecraft Square”.
* * *
To paraphrase William Goldman’s famous quote about Hollywood, apparently nobody knows anything in publishing after it was revealed in July that a “debut” crime novel, The Cuckoo’s Calling by “former military man” Robert Galbraith, was actually written by J. K. Rowling.
After having been turned down by a number of publishers, including Orion, the book was published in April by Sphere to generally good reviews. However, it had sold just 1,500 copies (including ebooks) before the Sunday Times newspaper mounted a textual analysis investigation into the identity of the supposedly first-time author (following a mysterious tweeted tip-off), and the novel became a bestseller literally overnight.
Rowling subsequently accepted a donation to charity from the law firm that revealed her pseudonym.
Stephen King’s first novel of the year, Joyland, was published as a trade paperback original by Hard Case Crime. Despite the volume’s almost pulp-crime cover, the book concerned college student Devin Jones, who took a job at an independent amusement park in 1973 that featured, amongst other things, a haunted funhouse that was actually haunted. The author encouraged readers to buy print editions over ebooks when he announced that Joyland would only be available in printed form.
King was back later in the year with Doctor Sleep, which was a continuation of his 1977 best-seller The Shining. A grown-up Dan Torrance, still haunted by what happened to him as a child at The Overlook hotel, set out to save a girl who shared his psychic powers from a “family” of psychopathic travellers who wanted to feed off their remarkable gifts.
In Britain, there were exclusive slipcased “Special Editions” released separately to the WHSmith and Waterstones bookstore chains.
Joe Hill’s NOS4A2 (get it?) was about a woman who had the power to find “lost” objects and her encounter with a legendary bogeyman, who spirited his child victims away in his car to a magical realm where he drained their souls. Subterranean Press published a signed edition limited to 750 copies ($125.00) and twenty-six traycased lettered copies ($1,000.00).
Dean Koontz’s Deeply Odd was the sixth book in the “Odd Thomas” series, while the same author’s Innocence was about two people who lived in seclusion who found each other.
Dan Brown’s Inferno was the fourth novel concerning Robert Langdon, who investigated the secrets surrounding Dante’s “Inferno”. It sold one million copies in North America during the book’s first five days of release. The second printing was 2.3 million copies.
An unnamed narrator literally returned to his childhood memories, only to discover something evil waiting for his seven-year-old self in Neil Gaiman’s masterful novel The Ocean at the End of the Lane. In America, William Morrow issued a beautifully produced deluxe slipcased edition, illustrated in full colour by Dave McKean and limited to 2,000 signed and numbered copies ($150.00).
Dan Simmons’ The Abominable was set around a 1925 attempt to climb Mount Everest.
Billed simply as “a ghost story”, Graham Joyce’s The Year of the Ladybird was inspired by actual events. Set in the summer of 1976, a student took a job at a rundown holiday camp in Skegness and learned more about his past than he wanted to.
A surburban housewife house-sitting a high-rise apartment found herself drawn into a nightmare conspiracy involving an impossible murder in Christopher Fowler’s Plastic.
In The Heavens Rise by Christopher Rice, a group of Louisiana teens faced an ancient evil, while his mother, Anne Rice, published The Wolves of Midwinter, the second book in the “Wolf Gift Chronicles” werewolf series.
A complex conspiracy was at the heart of We Are Here, the latest thriller from Michael Marshall (Smith), while a retired policewoman inherited a house in a too-good-to-be-true town in Robert Jackson Bennett’s American Elsewhere.
In Carsten Stroud’s Southern Gothic Niceville, children kept disappearing from the eponymous town. It was followed by the even more offbeat The Homecoming, which combined time travel with the Mob.
Lauren Beukes’ The Shining Girls was about a survivor’s hunt for a time-travelling serial killer who used a condemned house in Chicago as his means of transportation. Reprints of the UK edition contained research photographs and an interview with the author.
A lecturer in creative writing scanned photos of famous writers’ studies to see if he could spot his only published book on their shelves in Nicholas Royle’s psychological thriller First Novel.
A drunken criminologist and an intrepid journalist teamed up to solve a mystery involving mad science and monsters in an alternate London of 1864 in T. Aaron Payton’s debut steampunk “Pimm & Skye Adventure”, The Constantine Affliction.
A second serial killer was at work in the streets of Jack the Ripper’s London in Sarah Pinborough’s Mayhem, while a young girl ventured into an alternate London to rescue her abducted mirror-sister in Tom Pollock’s The Glass Republic.
Patients were kept asleep for months as part of a new psychiatric therapy in F. R. Tallis’ The Sleep Room, and a university professor had to study John Milton’s Paradise Lost to save his daughter from a demon in The Demonologist by Andrew Pyper.
A woman investigated her uncle’s death in his apparently haunted house in Simone St. James’ An Inquiry Into Love and Death, while a couple inherited a house with a dark secret in Ronald Malfi’s Cradle Lake.
During the London Blitz, a brother and sister were evacuated to a house in the Lake District where the girl began to hear the voices of dead children in The Silence of Ghosts by Jonathan Aycliffe (aka Daniel Easterman). The author’s classic 1991 ghost story, Naomi’s Room, was reissued at the same time.
A new governess discovered something was very wrong in John Boyne’s Victorian ghost story, This House is Haunted, and a woman searched for her missing parents who helped haunted souls find peace in John Searles’ Help for the Haunted.
Dark secrets were revealed in the home of a taxidermist/puppeteer in House of Small Shadows by Adam Nevill, and an amnesiac boy brought terror to a family home in The Orphan by Christopher Ransom.
A boy was possessed by his father’s spirit in The Waking That Kills by Stephen Gregory, while Storm Demon was Gregory Lamberson’s fifth book featuring detective Jake Helman.
Melvin Burgess’ Hunger was published under the Hammer imprint, as was Fire, the second volume in the “Engelsfors” trilogy by Sara Elfgren and Mats Strandberg. Sophie Hannah’s The Orphan Choir and Julie Myerson’s The Quickening were also both Hammer titles.
A serial killer was inspired by fairy tales in Alison Littlewood’s Path of Needles, and a warlock was stalked by a monster from Russian folklore in Christopher Buehlman’s The Necromancer’s House.
Girls were going missing on both sides of the Mexican–American border in Adam Mansbach’s supernatural thriller The Dead Run.
In the near future, a Hollywood studio used bio-engineered monsters to attack the inhabitants of a rural town in Assault on Sunrise, a sequel to The Extra, by Michael Shea.
James P. Blaylock’s steampunk romp The Aylesford Skull was set in 1883 and pitted eccentric scientist and explorer Professor Langdon St. Ives against his old nemesis, Dr. Ignacio Narbondo.
The Romanov Cross by Robert Masello involved victims of the 1918 flu epidemic frozen in the Alaskan ice, while in Justin Richards’ alternate reality thriller The Suicide Exhibition: The Never War, in 1940 the German war machine awakened an ancient civilization, the alien Vril, whose involvement could result in the Nazi’s ultimate victory in the war for Europe.
Weston Ochse’s Age of Blood was the second volume in the “Triple Six”/“SEAL Team 666” series, while James Swain’s Shadow People was a sequel to the author’s Dark Magic.
Piper Maitland’s Hunting Daylight was a sequel to Acquainted with the Night, Chuck Palahniuk’s Doomed was a sequel to Damned, and The Last Grave was the second in the “Witch Hunt” series by Debbie Viguié.
David Wong’s humorous This Book is Full of Spiders was a sequel to his John Dies at the End.
Watcher of the Dark was the third book in the “Jeremiah Hunt” series by Joseph Nassise, and The Lost Soul was the third and final instalment in Gabriella Pierce’s packaged “666 Park Avenue” series and a tie-in to the TV series.
Inspired by H. P. Lovecraft, Peter Rawlik’s novel Reanimators was about the rivalry between Dr. Stuart Hartwell and Herbert West, and their attempts to conquer death itself, while Jeremy Robinson’s Island 731 involved the monstrous results of Japanese experiments during World War II and was inspired by H. G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau.
With Blood Oranges, Caitlín R. Kiernan “writing as Kathleen Tierney” had some fun with the paranormal romance genre as her junkie monster-hunter protagonist became infected by both a werewolf and a vampire.
Dead Ever After was the thirteenth and final “Sookie Stackhouse” novel from Charlaine Harris, as the series ended with Sookie’s friends uniting to battle her enemies in a final showdown. A 2,500-copy linen-bound signed edition ($125.00) was also available.
Harris’ After Dead: What Came Next in the World of Sookie Stackhouse was an alphabetically arranged non-fiction companion to the series.
Fourteen years after the previous volume first appeared, Kim Newman’s long-awaited fourth book in his alternate world vampire series, Anno Dracula 1976–1991: Johnny Alucard, was finally published. It contained a number of loosely linked novellas and stories, several of which were original to the book.
The vampire novel Blood of the Lamb by Sam Cabot (Carlos Dews and S. J. Rozan) involved the search for a secret document stolen from the Vatican.
The Lair was a sequel to The Farm by Emily McKay, and Blood Bond was the ninth book in the “Anna Strong, Vampire” series by Jeanne C. Stein.
Appalachian Overthrow was the tenth volume in E. E. Knight’s “The Vampire Earth” series and marked the beginning of a new story arc, while The Dog in the Dark was the eleventh volume in the “Noble Dead” vampire series by Barb Hendee and J. C. Hendee.
The vampire Count Saint-Germain found a new companion in 13th-century Africa in Night Pilgrims, the twenty-sixth volume in the series by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro.
Benjamin Percy’s epic werewolf/alternate history novel Red Moon, set in an alternate world where “lycans” co-existed amongst humans, was heavily promoted as belonging to the new “literary horror” movement – thus basically dismissing the rest of the genre as something less worthy.
John Ringo’s Under a Graveyard Sky was set during the zombie apocalypse, as a family tried to find safe haven from an infected humanity. A limited, signed edition was also available from Baen Books.
Jamie McGuire’s Red Hill was about a man-made zombie outbreak, while Joe McKinney’s The Savage Dead was about a zombie outbreak on a cruise ship.
Rise Again: Below Zero, set in a small Californian mountain community during the zombie apocalypse, was Ben Tripp’s sequel to his 2010 novel.
David Towsey’s debut novel Your Brother’s Blood was set after the zombie apocalypse and was the first volume in “The Walkin’” series.
A meth addict and his friends found themselves facing a zombie outbreak in Peter Stenson’s first book, Fiend: A Novel, while in Seth Patrick’s debut novel The Reviver, the recently dead were brought back to testify to their own demise. It was the first in a trilogy.
R. S. Belcher’s weird Western novel, The Six-Gun Tarot was set in the cursed cattle town of Golgotha, which was invaded by the undead, and a boy’s mother and sister disappeared during a storm in John Mantooth’s The Year of the Storm.
Set in 1751 London, The Tale of Raw Head & Bloody Bones by Jack Wolf was based on a fairy tale, while a teenager was transported back to 1888 and Jack the Ripper’s London in Shelly Dickson Carr’s debut novel Ripped.
Guillermo del Toro “curated” and supplied new introductions to Penguin Horror’s stylish hardcover collector’s editions of Haunted Castles by Ray Russell, The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe, American Supernatural Tales, The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, Frankenstein by Mary Shelley and The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories by H. P. Lovecraft.
Edited with an Introduction by Roger Luckhurst for Oxford University Press, The Classic Horror Stories collected nine tales by Lovecraft, along with the author’s introduction to his essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature”.
The Complete Cthulhu Mythos Tales from Barnes & Noble/Fall River Press, edited with an Introduction by S. T. Joshi, collected twenty-three stories and “revisions” by H. P. Lovecraft.
Also from Barnes & Noble, Dracula and Other Horror Classics, collected Bram Stoker’s 1897 title novel, The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903) and The Lair of the White Worm (1911), along with the collection Dracula’s Guest and Other Stories (1914).
A new edition of William Hope Hodgson’s 1912 novel The Night Land from HiLoBooks included notes by Erik Davis.
Mike Ashley supplied the Introduction to Ten Minute Stories/Day and Night Stories, an omnibus reprinting of two previous collections by Algernon Blackwood from Stark House, which also included a previously uncollected ghost story.
The Complete Tales of Doctor Satan from Altus Press collected Paul Ernst’s series of eight stories about the eponymous super-villain from Weird Tales (1935–36) with an Introduction by John Pelan.
From Haffner Press, The Complete John Thunstone collected all the stories about Manly Wade Wellman’s pulp hero, along with the novels What Dreams May Come (1983) and The School of Darkness (1985). Ramsey Campbell supplied the Introduction and George Evans the illustrations.
Valancourt Books reissued Basil Copper’s novels The Great White Space and Necropolis as attractive print-on-demand paperbacks, along with a welcome reissue of R. Chetwynd-Hayes’ The Monster Club. All came with new Introductions by Stephen Jones.
Other reissues from Valancourt included Nightshade and Damnations by Gerald Kersh, The Philosopher’s Stone by Colin Wilson and Bury Him Darkly by John Blackburn.
Kim Newman’s already hefty 1991 novel about a cursed English village, Jago, was reissued in a new edition by Titan Books with three additional stories that featured characters and settings from the book.
Tempting the Gods, a collection of twelve stories, was the first volume in “The Selected Stories of Tanith Lee” from Wildside Press and included a profile of the author by the late Donald A. Wolheim.
Graham Masterton’s 2003 novel A Terrible Beauty was reissued as White Bones, while Phil Rickman’s 1993 novel Crybbe was republished under the title Curfew.
Britain’s new Waterstone’s Children’s Laureate, Malorie Blackman, attacked “snobby attitudes” towards books in June, and defended the Twilight series against disparaging remarks made by Education Secretary Michael Gove. “The point is that they are reading,” said Ms Blackman.
Harry Potter film director Chris Columbus collaborated with Ned Vizzini on the young adult novel House of Secrets, in which three siblings were banished by a witch to a mythical land where they had to track down a mysterious tome.
A children’s game turned into something darker as three youngsters set out to bury a doll in the grave where it was supposed to be in Holly Black’s creepy Doll Bones, while childish games conjured up something nasty in the woods in The Haunting of Gabriel Ashe by Dan Poblocki.
Having apparently killed her boyfriend in self-defence, a teenager was shipped off to boarding school where something monstrous awaited her in Megan Miranda’s Hysteria.
A boy discovered that his new high school was haunted in The Unquiet by Jeannine Garsee, and a girl haunted her school to discover why she supposedly committed suicide in Katie Williams’ Absent.
A girl woke up in a hotel for the dead and had to solve her own murder in The Dead Girls Detective Agency, the first in a new series by Suzy Cox.
The new girl in town found a boyfriend in the local graveyard in The Lost Boys by Lilian Carmine.
Somebody in the town of Milton Lake was using a fabled Ghost Machine to call back the spirits of the dead in Haunted by William Hussey, while a young girl searching for her missing grandfather in a sleepy seaside village made friends with a mysterious local girl in Liz Kessler’s North of Nowhere.
A sea voyage turned to hell in The Dead Men Stood Together by Chris Priestley.
When Satan decided to retire, a group of teenagers had to undertake a series of deadly trials to decide who would become his replacement in The Devil’s Apprentice by Jan Siegel (Amanda Hemingway).
Students discovered that their summer camp dorm used to be an asylum for the criminally insane in Madeleine Roux’s Asylum, and a girl’s school trip to Paris involved ghosts and murder in Katie Alender’s Marie Antoinette, Serial Killer.
Shadowlands and Hereafter were the first two volumes in a new serial-killer trilogy by Kate Brian.
Teenagers became involved with Victorian spiritualists in Sonia Gensler’s The Dark Between, and a plague of murderous ghosts in London caused chaos in Jonathan Stroud’s Lockwood and Co.: The Screaming Staircase, the first in a new series.
Something was making the inhabitants of a small Kansas town commit murder/suicide in The Waking Dark by Robin Wasserman.
Teenagers used witchcraft to get revenge in Mariah Fredericks’ Season of the Witch, while Rebecca Alexander’s The Secrets of Life and Death featured alchemist Edward Kelley and the infamous Countess Bathory.
In Jon Skovron’s Man Made Boy, the son of the Frankenstein Monster and the Bride lived under Times Square in New York.
When a teenager questioned the beliefs of a doomsday cult, she found her own life in danger in Amy Christine Parker’s psychological thriller, Gated.
Dark City was the second book in the “Repairman Jack: The Early Years” series by F. Paul Wilson.
The Madness Underneath was the second volume in the “Shades of London” series by Maureen Johnson, and Belladonna was the second in the “Secrets of the Eternal Rose” series by Fiona Paul.
Monster High: Ghoulfriends Just Want to Have Fun by Gitty Daneshvari was the second novella based on a series of dolls, while Charles Gilman’s Tales from Lovecraft Middle School #2: The Slither Sisters, #3: Teacher’s Pest and #4: Substitute Creature were illustrated by Eugene Smith and came with lenticular covers.
The Creeps was the third book in the “Samuel Johnson” series by John Connolly, in which the teen hero and his faithful dachshund investigated a mysterious toyshop and were menaced by Christmas elves.
Andrew Hammond’s CRYPT: Blood Eagle Tortures was the fourth in the series featuring the Covert Response Youth Paranormal Team, while Witch & Wizard: The Kiss was the fourth in the series by James Patterson and Jill Dembowski.
With All My Soul was the seventh and final volume in Rachel Vincent’s “Soul Screamers” series, and Lover at Last was the eleventh title in the “Black Dagger Brotherhood” series by J. R. Ward.
As an American TV network once said – if you haven’t seen it before, then it’s new to you. This seems to be particularly true when it comes to young adult fiction these days:
Mary Lindsey’s Ashes on the Waves was a “dark retelling” of Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “Annabel Lee”, while Dance of the Red Death was the second book in a post-apocalyptic series by Bethany Griffin, based on a story by Poe.
The Ruining by Anna Collomore was inspired by Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”, and Jane Nickerson’s Strands of Bronze and Gold was based on the “Bluebeard” story.
Adam Gidwitz’s In a Glass Grimmly was a sequel to A Tale Dark and Grimm, based on the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, and Black Spring by Alison Croggon was inspired by Wuthering Heights.
A. E. Rought’s Broken and Tainted were inspired by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Mandy Hubbard’s Dangerous Boy was a contemporary YA reworking of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and The Madman’s Daughter was the first volume in a new trilogy by Megan Shepherd inspired by H. G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau.
Holly Black’s second young adult novel of the year, The Coldest Girl in Coldtown, was expanded from a short story of the same title by the author and involved a teenage girl trying to survive in a world infected with vampires.
Although credited in big type to L. J. Smith, Aubrey Clark actually wrote The Vampire Diaries: The Salvation: Unspoken, the second book in the spin-off series.
Department 19: The Rising and Department 19: Battle Lines were the second and third books in Will Hill’s series about a secret government agency that hunted vampires.
Richelle Mead’s The Indigo Spell and The Fiery Heart were the third and fourth titles in the “Bloodlines” series, a spin-off from the “Vampire Academy” series.
Christopher Pike returned to his “Last Vampire” series with Thirst No.5: The Sacred Veil.
Blood Prophecy by Alyxandra Harvey included a bonus story and was the sixth and final book in the “Drake Chronicles” series, while Gates of Paradise was the seventh and final book in the “Blue Bloods” series by Melissa de la Cruz.
Revealed was the eleventh title in the YA “House of Night” vampire series by P. C. Cast and Kristin Cast, while Neferet’s Curse was a novella set in the series.
Fall of Night was book fourteen in “The Morganville Vampires” series by Rachel Caine (Roxanne Longstreet Conrad). The series concluded with the next volume, Daylighters, which included a bonus novelette “for UK readers”.
A trio of children dealt with an outbreak of the walking dead in their hometown in Paolo Bacigalupi’s humorous novel, Zombie Baseball Beatdown, which also featured zombie cows.
Teens were trapped in their high school by a zombie epidemic in Tom Leveen’s Sick.
Deadlands and Death of a Saint were the first two books in a teen series by Lily H
INTRODUCTION: HORROR IN 2013 copyright © Stephen Jones 2014.
WHO DARES WINS: ANNO DRACULA 1980 copyright © Kim Newman 2013. Originally published in Anno Dracula 1976–1991: Johnny Alucard. Reprinted by permission of the author.
CLICK-CLACK THE RATTLEBAG copyright © Neil Gaiman 2013. Originally published in Impossible Monsters. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agent.
DEAD END copyright © Nicholas Royle 2013. Originally published in X7: A Seven Deadly Sins Anthology. Reprinted by permission of the author.
ISAAC’S ROOM copyright © Daniel Mills 2013. Originally published in Black Static #35, Jul–Aug 2013. Reprinted by permission of the author.
THE BURNING CIRCUS copyright © Angela Slatter 2013. Originally published in The Burning Circus: BFS Horror 1: An Anthology for British Fantasy Society Members. Reprinted by permission of the author.
HOLES FOR FACES copyright © Ramsey Campbell 2013. Originally published in Holes for Faces. Reprinted by permission of the author.
BY NIGHT HE COULD NOT SEE copyright © Joel Lane 2013. Originally published in Crimewave 12: Hurts. Reprinted by permission of the Author’s Estate.
COME INTO MY PARLOUR copyright © Reggie Oliver 2013. Originally published in Dark World: Ghost Stories and Flowers of the Sea: Thirteen Stories and Two Novellas. Reprinted by permission of the author.
THE MIDDLE PARK copyright © Michael Chislett 2013. Originally published in Supernatural Tales 25, Winter 2013/14. Reprinted by permission of the author.
INTO THE WATER copyright © Simon Kurt Unsworth 2013. Originally published in Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth. Reprinted by permission of the author.
THE BURNED HOUSE copyright © Lynda E. Rucker 2013. Originally published in The Moon Will Look Strange. Reprinted by permission of the author.
WHAT DO WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT Z—copyright © Lavie Tidhar 2013. Originally published in Black Static #32, Jan–Feb 2013. Reprinted by permission of the author.
FISHFLY SEASON copyright © Halli Villegas 2013. Originally published in Chilling Tales: In Words, Alas, Drown I. Reprinted by permission of the author.
DOLL RE MI copyright © Tanith Lee 2013. Originally published in Nightmare: Horror & Dark Fantasy, Issue 8, May 2013. Reprinted by permission of the author.
A NIGHT’S WORK copyright © Clive Barker 2013. Originally published in The Bram Stoker Awards Weekend 2013 Incorporating World Horror Convention, New Orleans, LA, Souvenir Book. Reprinted by permission of the author.
THE SIXTEENTH STEP copyright © Robert Shearman 2013. Originally published in The Burning Circus: BFS Horror 1: An Anthology for British Fantasy Society Members. Reprinted by permission of the author.
STEMMING THE TIDE copyright © Simon Strantzas 2013. Originally published in Dead North: The Exile Book of Anthology Series, Number Eight: Canadian Zombie Fiction. Reprinted by permission of the author.
THE GIST copyright © Michael Marshall Smith 2013. Originally published in The Gist. Reprinted by permission of the author.
GUINEA PIG GIRL copyright © Thana Niveau 2013. Originally published in The Tenth Black Book of Horror. Reprinted by permission of the author.
MISS BALTIMORE CRABS: ANNO DRACULA 1990 copyright © Kim Newman 2013. Originally published in Anno Dracula 1976–1991: Johnny Alucard. Reprinted by permission of the author.
WHITSTABLE copyright © Stephen Volk 2013. Originally published in Whitstable. Reprinted by permission of the author.
NECROLOGY: 2013 copyright © Stephen Jones and Kim Newman 2014.
USEFUL ADDRESSES copyright © Stephen Jones 2014.
IN EARLY 2013, the US Department of Justice approved the merger of mega-publishers Penguin/Pearson and Random House/Bertelsmann. Australia, New Zealand and the European Union followed and, in early July, Penguin Random House became the largest publishing company in the world.
Meanwhile, Hachette Book Group purchased most of the Hyperion adult backlist from Disney, including the imprint’s name. The media-related and children’s imprints were not included in the sale.
Independent American imprint Night Shade Books, which had been struggling for several years, was sold to print publisher Skyhorse Publishing and digital publisher Start Publishing in June after some authors agreed to give up additional rights in return for the payment of all outstanding advances and late royalties. Night Shade immediately cancelled its electronic magazine Eclipse Online, edited by Jonathan Strahan.
After working on the transition with the new owners for a couple of months, Night Shade founder Jason Williams left the company in August.
Skyhorse and Start were also set to acquire independent publisher Underland Press, founded in 2007 by Victoria Blake. However, the deal was not completed and the imprint was instead purchased by Mark Teppo’s new publishing company, Resurrection House.
After being announced as an acquiring editor for Resurrection House, Jason Williams soon left that company as well.
In Britain, Tesco supermarkets were forced to withdraw a sixteen-page colouring book from their website after complaints that Colour Me Good Arrggghhhh!! by Mel Elliott featured images from, amongst other films, Hellraiser, Psycho, The Silence of the Lambs, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Jaws, An American Werewolf in London, The Shining and A Clockwork Orange. The book was being marketed online to children aged from five to eight.
Later in the year Tesco had to apologize again, when it was forced to remove an orange “psycho ward” Hallowe’en costume off its shelves after it was denounced as “staggeringly offensive” by mental-health charities. Rival supermarket chain Asda was also compelled to remove a similar fancy dress costume.
As a result of these complaints, London’s famous Angels Fancy Dress shop decided to insist that any customers wanting to buy their “Apron of Souls” Texas Chainsaw Massacre Hallowe’en costume would have to show ID to prove that they were eighteen years old or over. The company also set an age restriction on their bloody intestines costume.
It is estimated that the Hallowe’en market in the UK is now worth around £300 million, up from just £12 million in 2001.
Fifty years after his death, writer C. S. Lewis was honoured with a memorial stone in Westminster Abbey in London. The stone was set in the floor of Poet’s Corner, alongside such other renowned literary figures as Geoffrey Chaucer and Charles Dickens.
In July, the Providence, Rhode Island, City Council agreed to rename the intersection of Prospect Street and Angell Street “H. P. Lovecraft Square”.
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To paraphrase William Goldman’s famous quote about Hollywood, apparently nobody knows anything in publishing after it was revealed in July that a “debut” crime novel, The Cuckoo’s Calling by “former military man” Robert Galbraith, was actually written by J. K. Rowling.
After having been turned down by a number of publishers, including Orion, the book was published in April by Sphere to generally good reviews. However, it had sold just 1,500 copies (including ebooks) before the Sunday Times newspaper mounted a textual analysis investigation into the identity of the supposedly first-time author (following a mysterious tweeted tip-off), and the novel became a bestseller literally overnight.
Rowling subsequently accepted a donation to charity from the law firm that revealed her pseudonym.
Stephen King’s first novel of the year, Joyland, was published as a trade paperback original by Hard Case Crime. Despite the volume’s almost pulp-crime cover, the book concerned college student Devin Jones, who took a job at an independent amusement park in 1973 that featured, amongst other things, a haunted funhouse that was actually haunted. The author encouraged readers to buy print editions over ebooks when he announced that Joyland would only be available in printed form.
King was back later in the year with Doctor Sleep, which was a continuation of his 1977 best-seller The Shining. A grown-up Dan Torrance, still haunted by what happened to him as a child at The Overlook hotel, set out to save a girl who shared his psychic powers from a “family” of psychopathic travellers who wanted to feed off their remarkable gifts.
In Britain, there were exclusive slipcased “Special Editions” released separately to the WHSmith and Waterstones bookstore chains.
Joe Hill’s NOS4A2 (get it?) was about a woman who had the power to find “lost” objects and her encounter with a legendary bogeyman, who spirited his child victims away in his car to a magical realm where he drained their souls. Subterranean Press published a signed edition limited to 750 copies ($125.00) and twenty-six traycased lettered copies ($1,000.00).
Dean Koontz’s Deeply Odd was the sixth book in the “Odd Thomas” series, while the same author’s Innocence was about two people who lived in seclusion who found each other.
Dan Brown’s Inferno was the fourth novel concerning Robert Langdon, who investigated the secrets surrounding Dante’s “Inferno”. It sold one million copies in North America during the book’s first five days of release. The second printing was 2.3 million copies.
An unnamed narrator literally returned to his childhood memories, only to discover something evil waiting for his seven-year-old self in Neil Gaiman’s masterful novel The Ocean at the End of the Lane. In America, William Morrow issued a beautifully produced deluxe slipcased edition, illustrated in full colour by Dave McKean and limited to 2,000 signed and numbered copies ($150.00).
Dan Simmons’ The Abominable was set around a 1925 attempt to climb Mount Everest.
Billed simply as “a ghost story”, Graham Joyce’s The Year of the Ladybird was inspired by actual events. Set in the summer of 1976, a student took a job at a rundown holiday camp in Skegness and learned more about his past than he wanted to.
A surburban housewife house-sitting a high-rise apartment found herself drawn into a nightmare conspiracy involving an impossible murder in Christopher Fowler’s Plastic.
In The Heavens Rise by Christopher Rice, a group of Louisiana teens faced an ancient evil, while his mother, Anne Rice, published The Wolves of Midwinter, the second book in the “Wolf Gift Chronicles” werewolf series.
A complex conspiracy was at the heart of We Are Here, the latest thriller from Michael Marshall (Smith), while a retired policewoman inherited a house in a too-good-to-be-true town in Robert Jackson Bennett’s American Elsewhere.
In Carsten Stroud’s Southern Gothic Niceville, children kept disappearing from the eponymous town. It was followed by the even more offbeat The Homecoming, which combined time travel with the Mob.
Lauren Beukes’ The Shining Girls was about a survivor’s hunt for a time-travelling serial killer who used a condemned house in Chicago as his means of transportation. Reprints of the UK edition contained research photographs and an interview with the author.
A lecturer in creative writing scanned photos of famous writers’ studies to see if he could spot his only published book on their shelves in Nicholas Royle’s psychological thriller First Novel.
A drunken criminologist and an intrepid journalist teamed up to solve a mystery involving mad science and monsters in an alternate London of 1864 in T. Aaron Payton’s debut steampunk “Pimm & Skye Adventure”, The Constantine Affliction.
A second serial killer was at work in the streets of Jack the Ripper’s London in Sarah Pinborough’s Mayhem, while a young girl ventured into an alternate London to rescue her abducted mirror-sister in Tom Pollock’s The Glass Republic.
Patients were kept asleep for months as part of a new psychiatric therapy in F. R. Tallis’ The Sleep Room, and a university professor had to study John Milton’s Paradise Lost to save his daughter from a demon in The Demonologist by Andrew Pyper.
A woman investigated her uncle’s death in his apparently haunted house in Simone St. James’ An Inquiry Into Love and Death, while a couple inherited a house with a dark secret in Ronald Malfi’s Cradle Lake.
During the London Blitz, a brother and sister were evacuated to a house in the Lake District where the girl began to hear the voices of dead children in The Silence of Ghosts by Jonathan Aycliffe (aka Daniel Easterman). The author’s classic 1991 ghost story, Naomi’s Room, was reissued at the same time.
A new governess discovered something was very wrong in John Boyne’s Victorian ghost story, This House is Haunted, and a woman searched for her missing parents who helped haunted souls find peace in John Searles’ Help for the Haunted.
Dark secrets were revealed in the home of a taxidermist/puppeteer in House of Small Shadows by Adam Nevill, and an amnesiac boy brought terror to a family home in The Orphan by Christopher Ransom.
A boy was possessed by his father’s spirit in The Waking That Kills by Stephen Gregory, while Storm Demon was Gregory Lamberson’s fifth book featuring detective Jake Helman.
Melvin Burgess’ Hunger was published under the Hammer imprint, as was Fire, the second volume in the “Engelsfors” trilogy by Sara Elfgren and Mats Strandberg. Sophie Hannah’s The Orphan Choir and Julie Myerson’s The Quickening were also both Hammer titles.
A serial killer was inspired by fairy tales in Alison Littlewood’s Path of Needles, and a warlock was stalked by a monster from Russian folklore in Christopher Buehlman’s The Necromancer’s House.
Girls were going missing on both sides of the Mexican–American border in Adam Mansbach’s supernatural thriller The Dead Run.
In the near future, a Hollywood studio used bio-engineered monsters to attack the inhabitants of a rural town in Assault on Sunrise, a sequel to The Extra, by Michael Shea.
James P. Blaylock’s steampunk romp The Aylesford Skull was set in 1883 and pitted eccentric scientist and explorer Professor Langdon St. Ives against his old nemesis, Dr. Ignacio Narbondo.
The Romanov Cross by Robert Masello involved victims of the 1918 flu epidemic frozen in the Alaskan ice, while in Justin Richards’ alternate reality thriller The Suicide Exhibition: The Never War, in 1940 the German war machine awakened an ancient civilization, the alien Vril, whose involvement could result in the Nazi’s ultimate victory in the war for Europe.
Weston Ochse’s Age of Blood was the second volume in the “Triple Six”/“SEAL Team 666” series, while James Swain’s Shadow People was a sequel to the author’s Dark Magic.
Piper Maitland’s Hunting Daylight was a sequel to Acquainted with the Night, Chuck Palahniuk’s Doomed was a sequel to Damned, and The Last Grave was the second in the “Witch Hunt” series by Debbie Viguié.
David Wong’s humorous This Book is Full of Spiders was a sequel to his John Dies at the End.
Watcher of the Dark was the third book in the “Jeremiah Hunt” series by Joseph Nassise, and The Lost Soul was the third and final instalment in Gabriella Pierce’s packaged “666 Park Avenue” series and a tie-in to the TV series.
Inspired by H. P. Lovecraft, Peter Rawlik’s novel Reanimators was about the rivalry between Dr. Stuart Hartwell and Herbert West, and their attempts to conquer death itself, while Jeremy Robinson’s Island 731 involved the monstrous results of Japanese experiments during World War II and was inspired by H. G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau.
With Blood Oranges, Caitlín R. Kiernan “writing as Kathleen Tierney” had some fun with the paranormal romance genre as her junkie monster-hunter protagonist became infected by both a werewolf and a vampire.
Dead Ever After was the thirteenth and final “Sookie Stackhouse” novel from Charlaine Harris, as the series ended with Sookie’s friends uniting to battle her enemies in a final showdown. A 2,500-copy linen-bound signed edition ($125.00) was also available.
Harris’ After Dead: What Came Next in the World of Sookie Stackhouse was an alphabetically arranged non-fiction companion to the series.
Fourteen years after the previous volume first appeared, Kim Newman’s long-awaited fourth book in his alternate world vampire series, Anno Dracula 1976–1991: Johnny Alucard, was finally published. It contained a number of loosely linked novellas and stories, several of which were original to the book.
The vampire novel Blood of the Lamb by Sam Cabot (Carlos Dews and S. J. Rozan) involved the search for a secret document stolen from the Vatican.
The Lair was a sequel to The Farm by Emily McKay, and Blood Bond was the ninth book in the “Anna Strong, Vampire” series by Jeanne C. Stein.
Appalachian Overthrow was the tenth volume in E. E. Knight’s “The Vampire Earth” series and marked the beginning of a new story arc, while The Dog in the Dark was the eleventh volume in the “Noble Dead” vampire series by Barb Hendee and J. C. Hendee.
The vampire Count Saint-Germain found a new companion in 13th-century Africa in Night Pilgrims, the twenty-sixth volume in the series by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro.
Benjamin Percy’s epic werewolf/alternate history novel Red Moon, set in an alternate world where “lycans” co-existed amongst humans, was heavily promoted as belonging to the new “literary horror” movement – thus basically dismissing the rest of the genre as something less worthy.
John Ringo’s Under a Graveyard Sky was set during the zombie apocalypse, as a family tried to find safe haven from an infected humanity. A limited, signed edition was also available from Baen Books.
Jamie McGuire’s Red Hill was about a man-made zombie outbreak, while Joe McKinney’s The Savage Dead was about a zombie outbreak on a cruise ship.
Rise Again: Below Zero, set in a small Californian mountain community during the zombie apocalypse, was Ben Tripp’s sequel to his 2010 novel.
David Towsey’s debut novel Your Brother’s Blood was set after the zombie apocalypse and was the first volume in “The Walkin’” series.
A meth addict and his friends found themselves facing a zombie outbreak in Peter Stenson’s first book, Fiend: A Novel, while in Seth Patrick’s debut novel The Reviver, the recently dead were brought back to testify to their own demise. It was the first in a trilogy.
R. S. Belcher’s weird Western novel, The Six-Gun Tarot was set in the cursed cattle town of Golgotha, which was invaded by the undead, and a boy’s mother and sister disappeared during a storm in John Mantooth’s The Year of the Storm.
Set in 1751 London, The Tale of Raw Head & Bloody Bones by Jack Wolf was based on a fairy tale, while a teenager was transported back to 1888 and Jack the Ripper’s London in Shelly Dickson Carr’s debut novel Ripped.
Guillermo del Toro “curated” and supplied new introductions to Penguin Horror’s stylish hardcover collector’s editions of Haunted Castles by Ray Russell, The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe, American Supernatural Tales, The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, Frankenstein by Mary Shelley and The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories by H. P. Lovecraft.
Edited with an Introduction by Roger Luckhurst for Oxford University Press, The Classic Horror Stories collected nine tales by Lovecraft, along with the author’s introduction to his essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature”.
The Complete Cthulhu Mythos Tales from Barnes & Noble/Fall River Press, edited with an Introduction by S. T. Joshi, collected twenty-three stories and “revisions” by H. P. Lovecraft.
Also from Barnes & Noble, Dracula and Other Horror Classics, collected Bram Stoker’s 1897 title novel, The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903) and The Lair of the White Worm (1911), along with the collection Dracula’s Guest and Other Stories (1914).
A new edition of William Hope Hodgson’s 1912 novel The Night Land from HiLoBooks included notes by Erik Davis.
Mike Ashley supplied the Introduction to Ten Minute Stories/Day and Night Stories, an omnibus reprinting of two previous collections by Algernon Blackwood from Stark House, which also included a previously uncollected ghost story.
The Complete Tales of Doctor Satan from Altus Press collected Paul Ernst’s series of eight stories about the eponymous super-villain from Weird Tales (1935–36) with an Introduction by John Pelan.
From Haffner Press, The Complete John Thunstone collected all the stories about Manly Wade Wellman’s pulp hero, along with the novels What Dreams May Come (1983) and The School of Darkness (1985). Ramsey Campbell supplied the Introduction and George Evans the illustrations.
Valancourt Books reissued Basil Copper’s novels The Great White Space and Necropolis as attractive print-on-demand paperbacks, along with a welcome reissue of R. Chetwynd-Hayes’ The Monster Club. All came with new Introductions by Stephen Jones.
Other reissues from Valancourt included Nightshade and Damnations by Gerald Kersh, The Philosopher’s Stone by Colin Wilson and Bury Him Darkly by John Blackburn.
Kim Newman’s already hefty 1991 novel about a cursed English village, Jago, was reissued in a new edition by Titan Books with three additional stories that featured characters and settings from the book.
Tempting the Gods, a collection of twelve stories, was the first volume in “The Selected Stories of Tanith Lee” from Wildside Press and included a profile of the author by the late Donald A. Wolheim.
Graham Masterton’s 2003 novel A Terrible Beauty was reissued as White Bones, while Phil Rickman’s 1993 novel Crybbe was republished under the title Curfew.
Britain’s new Waterstone’s Children’s Laureate, Malorie Blackman, attacked “snobby attitudes” towards books in June, and defended the Twilight series against disparaging remarks made by Education Secretary Michael Gove. “The point is that they are reading,” said Ms Blackman.
Harry Potter film director Chris Columbus collaborated with Ned Vizzini on the young adult novel House of Secrets, in which three siblings were banished by a witch to a mythical land where they had to track down a mysterious tome.
A children’s game turned into something darker as three youngsters set out to bury a doll in the grave where it was supposed to be in Holly Black’s creepy Doll Bones, while childish games conjured up something nasty in the woods in The Haunting of Gabriel Ashe by Dan Poblocki.
Having apparently killed her boyfriend in self-defence, a teenager was shipped off to boarding school where something monstrous awaited her in Megan Miranda’s Hysteria.
A boy discovered that his new high school was haunted in The Unquiet by Jeannine Garsee, and a girl haunted her school to discover why she supposedly committed suicide in Katie Williams’ Absent.
A girl woke up in a hotel for the dead and had to solve her own murder in The Dead Girls Detective Agency, the first in a new series by Suzy Cox.
The new girl in town found a boyfriend in the local graveyard in The Lost Boys by Lilian Carmine.
Somebody in the town of Milton Lake was using a fabled Ghost Machine to call back the spirits of the dead in Haunted by William Hussey, while a young girl searching for her missing grandfather in a sleepy seaside village made friends with a mysterious local girl in Liz Kessler’s North of Nowhere.
A sea voyage turned to hell in The Dead Men Stood Together by Chris Priestley.
When Satan decided to retire, a group of teenagers had to undertake a series of deadly trials to decide who would become his replacement in The Devil’s Apprentice by Jan Siegel (Amanda Hemingway).
Students discovered that their summer camp dorm used to be an asylum for the criminally insane in Madeleine Roux’s Asylum, and a girl’s school trip to Paris involved ghosts and murder in Katie Alender’s Marie Antoinette, Serial Killer.
Shadowlands and Hereafter were the first two volumes in a new serial-killer trilogy by Kate Brian.
Teenagers became involved with Victorian spiritualists in Sonia Gensler’s The Dark Between, and a plague of murderous ghosts in London caused chaos in Jonathan Stroud’s Lockwood and Co.: The Screaming Staircase, the first in a new series.
Something was making the inhabitants of a small Kansas town commit murder/suicide in The Waking Dark by Robin Wasserman.
Teenagers used witchcraft to get revenge in Mariah Fredericks’ Season of the Witch, while Rebecca Alexander’s The Secrets of Life and Death featured alchemist Edward Kelley and the infamous Countess Bathory.
In Jon Skovron’s Man Made Boy, the son of the Frankenstein Monster and the Bride lived under Times Square in New York.
When a teenager questioned the beliefs of a doomsday cult, she found her own life in danger in Amy Christine Parker’s psychological thriller, Gated.
Dark City was the second book in the “Repairman Jack: The Early Years” series by F. Paul Wilson.
The Madness Underneath was the second volume in the “Shades of London” series by Maureen Johnson, and Belladonna was the second in the “Secrets of the Eternal Rose” series by Fiona Paul.
Monster High: Ghoulfriends Just Want to Have Fun by Gitty Daneshvari was the second novella based on a series of dolls, while Charles Gilman’s Tales from Lovecraft Middle School #2: The Slither Sisters, #3: Teacher’s Pest and #4: Substitute Creature were illustrated by Eugene Smith and came with lenticular covers.
The Creeps was the third book in the “Samuel Johnson” series by John Connolly, in which the teen hero and his faithful dachshund investigated a mysterious toyshop and were menaced by Christmas elves.
Andrew Hammond’s CRYPT: Blood Eagle Tortures was the fourth in the series featuring the Covert Response Youth Paranormal Team, while Witch & Wizard: The Kiss was the fourth in the series by James Patterson and Jill Dembowski.
With All My Soul was the seventh and final volume in Rachel Vincent’s “Soul Screamers” series, and Lover at Last was the eleventh title in the “Black Dagger Brotherhood” series by J. R. Ward.
As an American TV network once said – if you haven’t seen it before, then it’s new to you. This seems to be particularly true when it comes to young adult fiction these days:
Mary Lindsey’s Ashes on the Waves was a “dark retelling” of Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “Annabel Lee”, while Dance of the Red Death was the second book in a post-apocalyptic series by Bethany Griffin, based on a story by Poe.
The Ruining by Anna Collomore was inspired by Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”, and Jane Nickerson’s Strands of Bronze and Gold was based on the “Bluebeard” story.
Adam Gidwitz’s In a Glass Grimmly was a sequel to A Tale Dark and Grimm, based on the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, and Black Spring by Alison Croggon was inspired by Wuthering Heights.
A. E. Rought’s Broken and Tainted were inspired by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Mandy Hubbard’s Dangerous Boy was a contemporary YA reworking of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and The Madman’s Daughter was the first volume in a new trilogy by Megan Shepherd inspired by H. G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau.
Holly Black’s second young adult novel of the year, The Coldest Girl in Coldtown, was expanded from a short story of the same title by the author and involved a teenage girl trying to survive in a world infected with vampires.
Although credited in big type to L. J. Smith, Aubrey Clark actually wrote The Vampire Diaries: The Salvation: Unspoken, the second book in the spin-off series.
Department 19: The Rising and Department 19: Battle Lines were the second and third books in Will Hill’s series about a secret government agency that hunted vampires.
Richelle Mead’s The Indigo Spell and The Fiery Heart were the third and fourth titles in the “Bloodlines” series, a spin-off from the “Vampire Academy” series.
Christopher Pike returned to his “Last Vampire” series with Thirst No.5: The Sacred Veil.
Blood Prophecy by Alyxandra Harvey included a bonus story and was the sixth and final book in the “Drake Chronicles” series, while Gates of Paradise was the seventh and final book in the “Blue Bloods” series by Melissa de la Cruz.
Revealed was the eleventh title in the YA “House of Night” vampire series by P. C. Cast and Kristin Cast, while Neferet’s Curse was a novella set in the series.
Fall of Night was book fourteen in “The Morganville Vampires” series by Rachel Caine (Roxanne Longstreet Conrad). The series concluded with the next volume, Daylighters, which included a bonus novelette “for UK readers”.
A trio of children dealt with an outbreak of the walking dead in their hometown in Paolo Bacigalupi’s humorous novel, Zombie Baseball Beatdown, which also featured zombie cows.
Teens were trapped in their high school by a zombie epidemic in Tom Leveen’s Sick.
Deadlands and Death of a Saint were the first two books in a teen series by Lily H
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