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

Margaret Mahy’s novella The Horriby Haunted School was about a boy who had an allergy to ghosts, and there were more spooks in The Haunting by Joan Lowery Nixon, The Crow Haunting by Julia Jarman, The Ghost Twin by Richard Brown, The Ghost of Sadie Kimber by Pat Moon, The Ghost of Fossil Glen by Cynthia DeFelice, The Phantom Thief by Pete Johnson, and Blackthorn, Whitethorn by Rachel Anderson.

A boy was pursued by an evil he could never escape in Catchman by Chris Wooding, and there were more devilish happenings in The Secret of the Pit by Hugh Scott. Vlad the Undead by Hanna Liitzen was a translation of the 1995 Danish novel about a young woman who read an account of a vampire in an old journal.

Andrew Bromfield translated A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia and Other Stories, a collection of eight tales by Victor Pelevin, first published in 1994. Here There Be Ghosts collected eleven stories (five reprints) and seven poems (one reprint) by Jane Yolen. Shadows was a collection of seven horror stories by James Schmidt, and Somewhere Else featured two ghost/time-travel stories by Leon Rosselson.

Classic Ghost Stories II edited by Glen Bledsoe and Karen Bledsoe contained eight stories by M. R. James, Henry James, Charles Dickens, Mary Wilkins Freeman and others, illustrated by Barbara Kiwak. Great Ghost Stories edited by Barry Moser collected thirteen tales by such authors as H. P. Lovecraft, H. G. Wells and Joyce Carol Oates. Edited by Alan Durant and illustrated by Nick Hardcastle, Vampire & Werewolf Stories contained eighteen stories and novel extracts by Bram Stoker, Richard Matheson and Jane Yolen, amongst others.

Neil Gaiman’s Smoke and Mirrors collected thirty stories and poems. Subtitled “Short Fictions and Illusions”, it was a reworking of his 1993 collection Angels & Visitations, with the addition of several new stories, including a couple original to the volume, plus a new introduction by the author.

The Cleft and Other Odd Tales was exactly what you would expect from acclaimed cartoonist Gahan Wilson. Twenty-four stories of weirdness, including the original title story, illustrated by the author/artist.

F. Paul Wilson’s The Barrens and Others reprinted twelve stories from the late 1980s, plus a stage adaptation and a teleplay, with introductions by the author.

Published by Serpent’s Tail, Personal Demons by Christopher Fowler collected seventeen stories (eleven original), including a new “Spanky” novelette. Kathe Koja’s Extremities featured sixteen stories (two original) about human extremes.

Distributed as a promotional item through the UK’s WHSmith bookstore chain, When God Lived in Kentish Town & Others was a small-format paperback containing four stories (three original) by Michael Marshall Smith.

Bradley Denton’s One Day Closer to Death collected eight stories about the fate that awaits us all, including an original novella which was a coda to his novel Blackburn, featuring the sister of the eponymous serial killer. Published by The Book Guild, The Venetian Chair and Other Stories included twenty-two stories by Harry Turner.

Once Upon a Nightmare collected ten horror stories by Australian journalist John Michael Howson, while Bill Congreve’s Epiphanies of Blood: Tales of Desperation and Thirst contained six mutant vampire stories (three original) and was published by Australia’s MirrorDanse Books in an edition of 501 numbered copies.

Legends: Stories by the Masters of Modern Fantasy edited by Robert Silverberg was an anthology of new fiction which originally sold to Dutton/NAL for $650,000, before being resold to Tor Books. Although David Eddings and Terry Brooks eventually pulled out of the project, Terry Pratchett, Anne McCaffrey, Stephen King (a new “Dark Tower” story), Tad Williams, Robert Jordan, Robert Silverberg, Raymond E. Feist, Terry Goodkind, George R. R. Martin and Ursula K. Le Guin all contributed stories. The British edition came with two different covers, while in America Tor issued a boxed and leatherbound edition of 250 copies, signed by all the authors, for $250.00. These were apparently sold by lottery to book dealers only and, according to some reports, copies quickly surfaced for re-sale for as much as $1,000.

After a long delay, the latest Horror Writers Association anthology finally appeared in hardcover from CD Publications and paperback from Pocket Books. Unfortunately, Robert Block’s Psychos was not really worth the wait. Despite a line-up that included Stephen King (a new novelette), Richard Christian Matheson, Charles Grant, Ed Gorman, Jane Yolen and others, it contained a selection of lacklustre serial killer stories that failed to live up to the expectation generated by the volume’s title. Bloch died before the book was completed, but I suspect even he would have had difficulty saying anything positive about the tired tales included therein.

Dark Terrors 4: The Gollancz Book of Horror edited by Stephen Jones and David Sutton featured nineteen stories (one reprint) by such authors as Christopher Fowler, Neil Gaiman, Ramsey Campbell, David J. Schow, Roberta Lannes, Dennis Etchison, Poppy Z. Brite, Lisa Tuttle, Thomas Tessier, Michael Marshall Smith and Terry Lamsley.

Sirens and Other Daemon Lovers edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling contained twenty-two erotic stories of magical, obsessional and irresistible love by Storm Constantine, Joyce Carol Oates, Tanith Lee, Edward Bryant, Neil Gaiman, Brian Stableford, Conrad Williams and others.

At 550-plus pages, Dreaming Down Under was a major new anthology of Australian speculative fiction edited by Jack Dann and Janeen Webb. It contained thirty-one stories by such Australian authors as Cherry Wilder, Lucy Sussex, Damien Broderick, Stephen Dedman, Terry Dowling, Aaron Sterns, George Turner, Robert Hood and Sean McMullen, plus a preface by Harlan Ellison.

Ellison was also one of the writers featured in In the Shadow of the Gargoyle edited by Nancy Kilpatrick and Thomas S. Roche, which included sixteen stories and a novel excerpt (three reprints) by Charles L. Grant, Neil Gaiman, Katherine Kurtz, Brian Lumley, Christa Faust and Caitlin R. Kiernan, Brian Hodge and others.

The Crow: Shattered Lives & Broken Dreams edited by J. O’Barr and Ed Kramer contained nineteen stories and ten poems based on O’Barr’s graphic novel and movie series. Authors included Iggy Pop, Gene Wolfe, John Shirley and Nancy A. Collins, and it was illustrated by Bob Eggleton, Tom Canty, Don Maitz and others. A. A. Attanasio supplied the introduction.

Edited by Ric Alexander (Peter Haining), The Unexplained: Stories of the Paranormal contained twenty-one stories by Nigel Kneale, Ramsey Campbell, Richard Matheson, J. G. Ballard, Theodore Sturgeon, Arthur Machen, Basil Copper, Clive Barker, Harlan Ellison and others, including two originals by Graham Masterton and Richard Laymon and an introduction by Peter James. Under his own name, Haining also edited The Mammoth Book of Twentieth-Century Ghost Stories, which reprinted thirty tales from such unexpected authors as James Hadley Chase, Jack London, Stevie Smith, John Steinbeck, Muriel Spark, A. Merritt and P. G. Wodehouse, along with old hands Henry James, Agatha Christie, Arthur Machen, H. G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle and others.

Only available in a book club edition, editor Marvin Kaye’s Don’t Open This Book! was an anthology of thirty-nine dark fantasy stories (sixteen original) that included Tanith Lee, Ron Goulart and Patrick LoBrutto.