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

The Migration of Ghosts contained twelve original stories by Pauline Melville, while A. S. Byatt’s Elements: Stories of Fire and Ice collected six reprints, all touched with magic, with at least two tales that could be considered horror.

The Collector of Hearts: New Tales of the Grotesque by Joyce Carol Oates contained twenty-seven stories, most of which were originally published over the past few years. Oates also edited Telling Stories: An Anthology for Writers, which included 111 stories, poems and non-fiction pieces designed as a learning tool for writers. Among the authors represented were Stephen King, H. P. Lovecraft, Harlan Ellison, Angela Carter and Oates herself.

The 1794 Gothic, The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe, was reprinted by Oxford University Press in a new edition edited by Bonamy Dobree with an introduction and notes by Terry Castle.

Published as part of Penguin/Viking Children’s Books “The Whole Story” series, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein reprinted the 1818 novel along with various pieces of art, including new illustrations by Philippe Munch.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula Unearthed was yet another edition published by Desert Island Books, annotated and introduced by editor Clive Leatherdale, which included an introduction by Stoker to the 1901 Icelandic edition. From the same publisher, Dracula: The Shade and the Shadow edited by Elizabeth Miller contained twenty critical essays about Stoker’s novel.

The Dream-Woman and Other Stories by Wilkie Collins collected eleven stories and an introduction by editor Peter Miles, The Dedalus Book of French Horror: The 19th Century included twenty-four stories translated by editor Terry Hale and Liz Heron, and Dover published The Complete John Silence, containing six supernatural stories about the psychic detective by Algernon Blackwood, edited by S. T. Joshi. Carroll & Graf’s edition of Thirty Strange Stories was a welcome reissue of mostly horror and dark fantasy tales by H. G. Wells, with a new introduction by Stephen Jones.

John Evangelist Walsh’s biography Midnight Dreary: The Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe looked into the cause of the author’s death, while Poe’s Selected Tales, published by Oxford University Press, was a new selection, edited and introduced by David Van Leer. The Penguin/Signet Classic edition of Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher collected fifteen stories, a new introduction by Stephen Marlowe and an updated bibliography.

Books of Wonder’s “Classic Frights” series of trade paperback reprints for young adults featured The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe, illustrated by William Sayer; Dracula’s Guest containing two stories by Bram Stoker, illustrated by Eric Shanower; The Haunting of Holmescroft by Rudyard Kipling, illustrated by Barb Armata; Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s The Southwest Chamber, illustrated by Margaret Organ-Kean; Who Knows? by Guy de Maupassant, illustrated by Jennifer Dickson, and The Inexperienced Ghost by H. G. Wells, Casting the Runes by M. R. James, Man-Size in Marble by E. Nesbit, The Body Snatcher by Robert Louis Stevenson and The Monkey’s Paw by W. W. Jacobs, all illustrated by Jeff White.

Academy Chicago’s edition of The Monkey’s Paw and Other Tales of Mystery and the Macabre collected eighteen stories by Jacobs, edited with an introduction by Gary Hoppenstand, while The Hazelwood Press published The Monkey’s Paw: A Facsimile of the Original Manuscript, limited to just 300 copies.

The Witch’s Tale was American network radio’s first dramatic series devoted to tales of terror, conceived, written and directed by Alonzo Deen Cole. Subtitled Stories of Gothic Horror from The Golden Age of Radio, Dunwich Press collected thirteen of the radio show’s original scripts as a limited edition trade paperback, edited by David S. Siegel. Two of the scripts were also re-created and broadcast live as a special Halloween programme on a west coast radio station on October 30th.

A trade paperback printing of Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos was significantly revised from the 1969 edition, with a new introduction by James Turner, and Arkham House finally reprinted Lovecraft’s Selected Letters III.

After going out of print for a short while, and just in time to tie-in with Gus Van Sant’s pointless shot-for-shot remake, Robert Bloch’s classic Psycho was reissued with a new cover by Tor Books.

As usual, R. L. Stine ruled the young adult market with the first volume of “Goosebumps Series 2000”, Cry of the Cat, plus Fear Street: Camp Out and Fear Street: Scream, Jennifer. Stine’s Fear Street: Seniors, a new twelve-part series about a class of doomed students at Shadyside High School, began with 1: Let’s Party, 2: In Too Deep, 3: The Thirst and 4: No Answer. Fear Street Super Chiller 1: Stepbrother was about a girl whose dreams revealed that her stepbrother murdered her in a previous life.

Although credited to R. L. Stine on the covers, the pseudonymously written Fear Street Sagas series continued with 11: Circle of Fire (by Wendy Haley), 12: Chamber of Fear (by Brandon Alexander), 13: Faces of Terror (by Cameron Dokey), 14: One Last Kiss (by Brandon Alexander), IS: Door of Death (by Eric Weiner) and 16: The Hand of Power (by Cameron Dokey).

It Came from Ohio! My Life as a Writer was a young adult biography of Stine written by the author “as told to Joe Arthur”.

Christopher Pike’s The Hollow Skull involved the inhabitants of yet another small town being taken over by an alien evil, while Christopher Pike’s Tales of Terror 2 collected five stories by the author.

Nightworld: Witchlight by L. J. Smith was the ninth in the series, and Black Rot and Temper Temper were the third and fourth volumes, respectively, in the Weird World series by Anthony Masters.

Four children battled with a city’s supernatural forces in Celia Rees’ H.A.U.N.T.S.: H is for Haunting, A is for Apparition, U is for Undercover, N is for Nightmare and T is for Terror, the first five volumes in a six-book series. M. C. Sumner’s Extreme Zone series continued with Dead End, and Monsters and My One True Love by Dian Curtis Regan was the fourth and final volume in the “Monsters of the Month Club Quartet”.

Kipton & the Voodoo Curse by Charles L. Fontenay was the tenth volume in “The Kipton Chronicles” series of SF mysteries, and involved Kipton investigating a voodoo curse on Mars.

The Flesh Eater by the excellent John Gordon was a variation on “Casting the Runes”, about a mysterious club and its ghostly bogeyman. Theresa Radcliffe’s Garden of Shadows was inspired by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story “Rappacini’s Daughter”, and Louise Cooper’s Creatures: Once I Caught a Fish, If You Go Down to the Woods and See How They Run were the first three volumes in a series which reinterpreted old nursery rhymes.

Another small town was menaced by evil in Darker by Andrew Matthews, a girl defied her uncle and opened The Boxes by William Sleator, and a girl ended up at a Greek clinic run by gorgons in Snake Dreamer by Priscilla Galloway.

In A Coming Evil by Vivian Vande Velde, a young girl and a medieval ghost helped hide refugees from the Nazis. From the same author, Ghost of a Hanged Man was set in the Wild West. A boy encountered the ghost of an old actor in The Face in the Mirror by Stephanie S. Tolan, and a girl with agoraphobia could hear strange voices in Angels Turn Their Backs by Margaret Buffie.