Christopher Fowler - The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 10

George Beahm also published the non-fiction study Stephen King from A to Z: An Encyclopedia of His Life and Work, with an introduction by Michael R. Collings and illustrated with photos, movie stills and artwork. Stephen King: America’s Best-Loved Bogeyman was yet another biography of the author by Beahm, with an introduction by Stephen J. Spignesi plus sixteen pages of photos.

Spignesi’s own The Lost Work of Stephen King: A Guide to Unpublished Manuscripts, Story Fragments, Alternative Versions, and Oddities included more scrapings from the bottom of the barrel, published by Carol Publishing/Birch Lane Press. Part of the Chelsea House Modern Critical Views series, Stephen King edited by Harold Bloom collected fifteen essays about the author and his work by Clive Barker, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro and others, along with a bibliography.

Published by Borgo Press, Scaring Us to Death: The Impact of Stephen King on Popular Culture was a significantly expanded and updated second edition of a 1987 book by Michael R. Collings. Also from Borgo, Tony Magistrale substantially revised and updated his 1991 Starmount book The Shining Reader as Discovering Stephen King’s The Shining.

Discovering Dean Koontz edited by Bill Munster was Borgo’s revised edition of the 1988 volume Sudden Fear, collecting ten critical essays by Richard Laymon, Elizabeth Massie and others, with an introduction by Tim Powers and an afterword by Joe R. Lansdale.

Joy Dickinson’s travel guide Haunted City: An Unauthorized Guide to the Magical, Magnificent New Orleans of Anne Rice was published in a revised and updated edition. Manly Wade Wellman: The Gentleman from Chapel Hill: A Working Bibliography was the third updated edition of the booklet from Galactic Central Publications edited by Phil Stephensen-Payne and Gordon Benson, Jr.

Joan Kane Nichols’ Mary Shelley: Frankenstein’s Creator: First Science Fiction Writer was a young adult biography, while Betty T. Bennett’s Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley: An Introduction was aimed at older readers who wanted to discover more about the woman who wrote Frankenstein.

A series of critical essays about the author of “The Yellow Wallpaper” were collected in A Very Different Story: Studies on the Fiction of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, edited by Val Gough and Jill Rudd for Liverpool University Press.

California’s Night Shade Books published The Necronomicon Files: The Truth Behind The Legend edited by Daniel M. Harms and John Wisdom Gonce III, which collected essays about the history and rumours surrounding H. P. Lovecraft’s fictional book of magic. Along the same lines, Armitage House offered Fred L. Pelton’s A Guide to the Cthulhu Cult, supposedly written in 1946 by a delusional paranoid. A revised and expanded second edition of Encyclopedia Cthulhiana by Daniel Harms was a reference guide to H. P. Lovecraft’s Mythos from Chaosium.

Published by Deadline Press, A Writer’s Tale was an autobiographical volume in which Richard Laymon talked about his experiences writing and publishing within the horror genre.

In Northern Dreamers: Interviews with Famous Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror Writers, editor Edo van Belkon interviewed twenty-two fellow Canadian authors, including Nancy Baker, Charles de Lint, Candas Jane Dorsey, Phyllis Gotlieb, Tanya Huff, Nancy Kilpatrick and Robert Charles Wilson.

Reflections on Dracula: Ten Essays by Elizabeth Miller appeared from Transylvania Press, Piercing the Darkness: Undercover with Vampires in America Today was a revealing look at contemporary underground vampire culture by Katherine Rams-land, and The Vampire: A Casebook was an academic study of the legends, edited by Alan Dundes.

From Scarecrow Press, Vampire Readings: An Annotated Bibliography by Patricia Altner covered almost 800 items and was indexed by author and title, while The Vampire Gallery: A Who’s Who of the Undead was a guide to bloodsuckers from the past two centuries by the often unreliable Gordon J. Melton.

St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost, and Gothic Writers edited by David Pringle looked at more than 440 fiction authors, arranged alphabetically with an emphasis on the 20th century. Mike Ashley and Brian Stableford were contributing editors, and there was an introduction by Dennis Etchison.

In Screams of Reason: Mad Science and Modern Culture, David J. Skal explored the concept of the mad scientist in literature and the media, while Marina Warner’s No Go the Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling and Making Mock was a critical look at figures of terror from fairy tales to horror fiction.

Edited by Clive Bloom, Gothic Horror: A Reader’s Guide from Poe to King and Beyond contained more than thirty excerpts and essays on horror by Poe, Freud, Barker and others, including a chronology of “Significant Horror and Ghost Tales” and a selected bibliography. Susan Jennifer Navarette looked at 19th century literature and society in The Shape of Fear: Horror and the Fin de Siecle Culture of Decadence.

Waterstone’s Guide to Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror turned out to be an idiosyncratic reference work edited by staff members Paul Wake, Steve Andrews and Ariel for the British bookstore chain. Despite such contributors as Stephen Baxter, Ramsey Campbell, John Clute, Neil Gaiman and Anne McCaffrey, and the inclusion of an interview with Michael Marshall Smith, the book contained some curious omissions.

A decade after the original volume appeared, Carroll & Graf reprinted a revised and updated edition of the Bram Stoker Award-winning Horror: 100 Best Books edited by Stephen Jones and Kim Newman.

Part of Visible Ink Press’ seemingly never-ending series of movie reference guides, Videohound’s Horror Show: 999 Hair-Raising, Hellish and Humorous Movies by Mike Mayo included an alphabetical listing of reviews and special “Hound Salutes”. The Sci-Fi Channel Encyclopedia of TV Science Fiction was a guide to various series from the past five decades by Roger Fulton and John Betancourt.

The Avengers: The Making of the Movie by Dave Rogers was certainly more interesting than the film it was promoting, as was The Official Godzilla Compendium: A 40-Year Retrospective by J. D. Lees and Marc Cerasini, which appeared in time to tie-in with the big-budget remake.

“They’re Here. ” Invasion of the Body Snatchers: A Tribute contained essays about the classic 1956 SF movie by Stephen King, Tom Piccirilli and others with an introduction by Dean Koontz. It was edited by the film’s star, Kevin McCarthy, and Ed Gorman.

The Making of The X-Files was an illustrated look at the creation of the feature film by Jody Duncan, while I Want to Believe: The Official Guide to The X-Files was the third in a series of illustrated episode guides by Andy Meisler.

Christopher Golden and Nancy Holder’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Watcher’s Guide, the official companion to the hit show, was a confusingly-designed look at the first two seasons, complete with background information and an exclusive interview with creator Joss Whedon. However, Buffy X-Posed by Ted Edwards was an unauthorised biography of actress Sarah Michelle Gellar that also included an episode guide plus black-and-white-photos.

All I Need to Know About Filmmaking I Learned from The Toxic Avenger by Lloyd Kaufman and James Gunn was the former’s autobiography and charted the history of his Troma distributing company. At the other end of the spectrum, James Whale: A New World of Gods and Monsters by James Curtis was a biography of the famed Hollywood director.