Stephen Jones - The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 23

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 and Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Jules Verne, The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle and The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Tales by H. P. Lovecraft.

Edited with an Introduction and notes by S. T. Joshi, The White People and Other Weird Stories collected eleven stories by Arthur Machen, along with a Foreword by film director Guillermo del Toro.

Steampunk: Poe was a young adult collection of seven stories and six poems by Edgar Allan Poe, illustrated in steampunk-style by Zdenko Basic and Manuel Sumberac.

Tales of Mystery and Imagination from Barnes & Noble included twenty-nine stories by Poe, along with colour plates by Harry Clarke and an Introduction by Neil Gaiman, while the author’s The Raven and Other Poems was a companion volume collecting fifty-seven poems with the original colour illustrations by Edmund Dulac. An attractive illustrated tie-in book bag was also available.

Unfortunately, in February it was announced that the city of Baltimore was cutting its funding to the Edgar Allan Poe House and Museum, and that the popular tourist attraction would have to become self-sustaining or it would close.

From Barnes & Noble’s bargain Fall River imprint, The Body Snatcher and Other Classic Ghost Stories edited by “Michael Kelahan” (Stefan R. Dziemianowicz) contained twenty-nine tales by M. R. James, Charles Dickens, Edith Wharton and others.

Also edited under the “Kelahan” name from the same imprint, M is For Monster was an anthology of twenty-six stories arranged alphabetically by monster, from “Alien” to “Zombie”.

“Kelahan” also contributed an Introduction to H. P. Lovecraft Goes to the Movies , a collection of fifteen stories that were made into films (or at least inspired them), while Dziemianowicz himself introduced Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Terrifying Tales , which included the title novel and eight short stories.

Published as part of the Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading with an Introduction by Jeffrey Andrew Weintock, The Call of Cthulhu and Other Dark Tales was an attractive hardcover collection of fifteen tales that included notes and story introductions by S. T. Joshi.

From Creation Oneiros, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath and Other Oneiric Tales contained the title novella and fifteen stories by Lovecraft, with an Introduction by D. M. Mitchell.

Meanwhile, Eldritch Tales: A Miscellany of the Macabre was a companion volume to the earlier Lovecraft collection, Necronomicon (2008), once again edited with an Afterword by Stephen Jones and illustrated throughout by Les Edwards. The leather-bound volume contained fifty-four stories and poems, including the complete “Fungi from Yuggoth” cycle, along with the author’s seminal essay, “Supernatural Horror in Literature”.

From the same editor/illustrator team of Jones and Edwards, copies of Conan’s Brethren were actually produced in 2009, but distribution was delayed for more than a year over a legal wrangle concerning copyright in the works of Robert E. Howard, who died in 1936.

The 40th Anniversary edition of William Peter Blatty’s 1971 novel The Exorcist was slightly revised with a scene added.

Originally published in 1992, Kim Newman’s classic Victorian vampire fantasy Anno Dracula was re-issued by Titan Books as a classy-looking trade paperback that included plenty of additional material by the author.

A thirteen-year-old was told three stories of loss and grief by a walking tree in Patrick Ness’ powerful young adult novel A Monster Calls , inspired by an idea by the late children’s author Siobhan Dowd and illustrated by Jim Kay.

Eddie: The Lost Youth of Edgar Allan Poe was a novel about the misadventures of the author as a young man, written and beautifully illustrated by Scott Gustafson.

A young girl from Louisiana travelled to a London boarding school, where she became involved in a series of murders apparently inspired by Jack the Ripper in The Name of the Star , the first in Maureen Johnson’s “Shades of London” trilogy.

The offspring of a serial killer discovered a doorway to another place in Slice of Cherry by Dia Reeves.

Children sent to camp to overcome their phobias began to change ominously in Patrick Carman’s Dark Eden , which was also available in a multimedia app version.

In the near-future, a girl looked for her past in a New Orleans cut-off from the rest of the US and inhabited by supernatural creatures in Kelly Keaton’s Darkness Becomes Her .

In The Iron Thorn by Caitlin Kittredge, a teenager living in the city of Lovecraft in an alternate 1950s tried to avoid going mad, as the rest of her family had done, when she turned sixteen.

A girl became obsessed with the objects she discovered in her family’s new home in Jennifer Archer’s ghostly novel Through Her Eyes .

While they were staying at an old lake house, a girl’s boyfriend started acting strangely in Emma Carlson Berne’s Still Waters , and The Hunting Ground was another haunted house novel by Cliff McNish.

A teenager could hear the voices of his missing school-friends in Cryer’s Cross by Lisa McMann.

Two sisters encountered a powerful ghost in Texas Gothic by Rosemary Clement-Moore, the daughter of a fake Victorian medium could see a real ghost in Haunting Violet by Alyxandra Harvey, and a girl could see ghosts during a visit to the English city of York in Dark Souls by Paula Morris.

A ghost tried to solve her own murder in Ghost of a Chance by Rhiannon Lassiter, while a ghost watched as his former girlfriend and best friend got involved with each other in Wherever You Go by Heather Davis.

And a dead teen tried to discover what happened to her with the help of another spirit in Between by Jessica Warman.

Seventeen-year-old Cas and his Wiccan mother travelled to Ontario to destroy the ghost of a murdered 1950s high school teen in Anna Dressed in Blood by Kendare Blake.

A family of witches kept their powers secret in Witches of East End (aka Witches of the East ), the first in the “Beauchamp Family” series by best-selling author Melissa de la Cruz.