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

The Ex Files: New Stories About Old Flames edited by Nicholas Royle contained twenty-five original stories about the breakup of relationships, from such authors as M. John Harrison, D. F. Lewis, Pat Cadigan, Conrad Williams, Joel Lane, John Burke, James Miller and Michael Marshall Smith. Royle also edited Neonlit: Time Out Book of New Writing Vol. 1, the first in a series of annual anthologies which featured Christopher Fowler (with the very clever “Thirteen Places of Interest in Kentish Town”), Mike O’Driscoll, James Miller, Jason Gould, Christopher Kenworthy and Conrad Williams.

Editor and book packager Martin H. Greenberg celebrated the publication of his 1,000th book in a career so far spanning twenty-three years. With John Heifers he edited Black Cats and Broken Mirrors, which included seventeen original stories based around the premise that superstitions can come true from such authors as Bruce Holland Rogers, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Peter Crowther and Charles de Lint.

Lawrence Schimel and Greenberg edited Fields of Blood: Vampire Stories of the Heartland, containing thirteen stories (four original) by Henry Kuttner, Nancy Holder, P. N. Elrod and others, and Streets of Blood: Vampire Stories from New York City, collecting another baker’s dozen tales by such writers as Suzy McKee Charnas, Edward Bryant and Esther M. Friesner.

From the editorial team of Stefan Dziemianowicz, Robert Weinberg and Greenberg, Horrors! 365 Scary Stories was a massive, 700-plus page instant remainder anthology published by Barnes & Noble Books. It featured original short shorts by numerous horror authors, both new and established, including Peter Atkins, Steve Rasnic Tem, Don Webb, Brian McNaughton, Brian Hodge, Nancy Kilpatrick, Phyllis Eisenstein, Donald R. Burleson, Mandy Slater, Michael Marshall Smith, Wayne Allen Sallee, Edward Bryant, Lisa Morton, Brian Stableford, Yvonne Navarro and Hugh B. Cave.

A much better anthology from the same editorial team was 100 Twisted Little Tales of Terror, also published by Barnes & Noble. It contained some excellent reprints by such well-known names as David J. Schow, Les Daniels, Karl Edward Wagner, Tanith Lee, H. P. Lovecraft, Frank Belknap Long, Fritz Leiber, Joe R. Lans-dale, Thomas Ligotti, Kim Newman, R. Chetwynd-Hayes, Ramsey Campbell, Hugh B. Cave, August Derleth, John Shirley, Edward Bryant, Joel Lane, Michael Marshall Smith, Clark Ash-ton Smith and many more.

Stefan Dziemianowicz, Denise Little and Robert Weinberg edited the Barnes & Noble instant remainder Mistresses of the Dark: 25 Macabre Tales by Master Storytellers, which included reprints by Margaret Atwood, A. S. Byatt, Angela Carter, Daphne du Maurier, Patricia Highsmith, Shirley Jackson, Doris Lessing, Joyce Carol Oates, Ruth Rendell, Muriel Spark and Fay Weldon.

The Raven and the Monkey’s Paw was an uncredited anthology of fifteen stories and eight poems. Eight of the tales and all the poems were by Edgar Allan Poe, and there were also classic reprints from W. W. Jacobs, Charles Dickins, Saki and Edith Wharton, amongst others. Classic Ghost Stories edited by John Grafton featured eleven tales of the supernatural by Charles Dickens, M. R. James, J. Sheridan Le Fanu and other familiar names, and Patricia Craig edited 12 Irish Ghost Stories for Oxford University Press.

Hot Blood X was the tenth volume in the sexual horror series edited by Jeff Gelb and Michael Garrett. It included seventeen pieces of fiction (one reprint) from Ramsey Campbell, Graham Masterton, Lawrence Block, Nancy Holder, Melanie Tem, Brian Hodge, and Bentley Little, amongst others. Demon Sex edited by Amarantha Knight (Nancy Kilpatrick) contained eleven explicit horror stories (including one reprint by Neil Gaiman) from Thomas S. Roche, Edo van Belkom and Kilpatrick herself.

Lisa Tuttle edited Crossing the Border: Tales of Erotic Ambiguity, which included twenty-two stories (thirteen reprints). Although not really a horror book, it included stories by Poppy Z. Brite, Graham Joyce, Angela Carter, Joyce Carol Oates, Michael Blumlein, Nicholas Royle, Carol Emshwiller, Lucy Taylor, Neil Gaiman, Geoff Ryman and the editor.

The Ghost of Carmen Miranda and Other Spooky Gay and Lesbian Tales edited by Julie K. Trevelyan and Scott Brassart, contained twenty-three stories (five reprints).

Most horror readers also probably passed on Otto Penzler’s new crime anthology Murder for Revenge. If they did, they missed Peter Straub’s remarkable novella “Mr Clubb and Mr Cuff”, plus new stories by David Morrell, Joyce Carol Oates, Eric Lustbader, Lawrence Block and others.

The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: Eleventh Annual Collection, ably edited as usual by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, weighed-in at more than 500 pages and contained thirty-seven stories, nine poems, and summaries by the editors, James Frenkel, Edward Bryant and Seth Johnson, along with the usual pointless list of “Honorable Mentions”. The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror Volume Nine edited by Stephen Jones contained nineteen stories, only one of which (Stephen Laws’ “The Crawl”) overlapped with the Datlow/Windling volume.

Eternal Lovecraft: The Persistence of HPL In Popular Culture was edited by Jim Turner and published under his Golden Gryphon Press imprint. Described as ex-Arkham House editor Turner’s farewell to H. P. Lovecraft, the retrospective anthology was split into three sections that contained eighteen reprints from Stephen King, Fritz Leiber, Nancy A. Collins, T. E. D. Klein and Harlan Ellison, amongst others.

Meanwhile, Arkham House itself returned to its dark fantasy roots with Flowers from the Moon and Other Lunacies by the late Robert Bloch, which contained twenty previously uncollected stories, mostly reprinted from Weird Tales and Strange Tales, edited and with an introduction by Robert M. Price. Also from Arkham, Peter Cannon edited Lovecraft Remembered, a collection of sixty-five reminiscences and other pieces about HPL by Robert Bloch, August Derleth, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith and others, many reprinted from obscure sources.

Canada’s Battered Silicon Dispatch Box revived Arkham’s Mycroft & Moran imprint to publish In Lovecraft’s Shadow, which collected all twenty-three of August Derleth’s original Cthulhu Mythos stories, along with three poems (one original) and an essay, illustrated by Stephen E. Fabian. The same imprint also issued Derleth’s The Final Adventures of Solar Pons, an original collection of early unpublished Sherlockian detective stories, comprising a novel, six stories (including two collaborations with Mack Reynolds) and a number of vignettes, edited by Peter Ruber.

Published by Fedogan & Bremer, A Coven of Vampires: The Collected Vampire Stories of Brian Lumley collected thirteen stories and a new foreword by the author. From the same imprint came Adam Niswander’s The Sand Dwellers, a Lovecraftian Cthulhu Mythos novel set in the mountains of the American southwest. Both books were available in trade hardcovers plus 100-copy signed and limited editions.

From Britain’s Pumpkin Books came Ghosts and Grisly Things, a collection of twenty of Ramsey Campbell’s uncollected stories (one original) in simultaneous hardcover and trade paperback format. Pumpkin also published the first UK trade paperback and first world hardcover of Dennis Etchison’s macabre murder mystery Double Edge, plus Nancy Kilpatrick’s “Power of the Blood” vampire trilogy in uniform trade paperback editions, comprising the original novel Reborn, along with reprints of the first two volumes, Child of the Night and Near Death.