Stephen Jones - The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 13

Richard Matheson’s The Incredible Shrinking Man was a reissue of the omnibus from Tor containing the eponymous short novel and nine classic short stories.

R. L. Stine’s young-adult series The Nightmare Room continued with They Call Me Creature, The Howler, Shadow Girl and Camp Nowhere, some of which may have been written by George Sheanshang.

A famous YA horror writer apparently inspired a school-based mystery in The Mysterious Matter of I. M. Fine by Diane Stanley.

Murder victims were found mysteriously incinerated in Burning Bones by Christopher Golden and Rick Hautala, seventh in the ‘Jenna Blake’ young-adult mystery/horror series.

Golden’s own Prowlers, Prowlers: Laws of Nature and Prowlers: Predator and Prey launched a new series about a group of teenagers investigating reports of werewolves.

Tartabull’s Throw was a time-travel novel about werewolf detective Cyrus Nygerski and the third in the series by Henry Garfield after the adult books Moondog and Room 13.

Dr Franklin’s Island by Ann Halam (aka Gwyneth Jones) involved a group of teenage plane-crash survivors who were genetically altered into shapeshifters. A giant bat attacked researchers in the Amazon in Paul Zindel’s Night of the Bat.

In Pete Johnson’s The Frighteners a new girl in school was befriended by a strange boy whose drawings had the power to call up the eponymous supernatural creatures. Dark Things II: Journey Into Tomorrow by Joséph F. Brown once again featured Jarrod, who had the ability to make what he imagined real.

Musician Chris Wooding’s The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray was a gaslight romance set in Victorian London and inspired by Gormenghast and H. P. Lovecraft.

Margaret Mahy’s The Riddle of the Frozen Phantom was ‘A Vanessa Hamilton Book’. In Eva Ibbotson’s comedic Dial-a-Ghost, the eponymous agency mixed up its hauntings, and a teenager believed that ghostly phenomena may have had something to do with the arrest of his father in Nick Manns’s Operating Codes.

A girl who didn’t realize she was dead looked after the children living in her house in The Ghost Sitter by Peni R. Griffin, while a young boy encountered a Civil War phantom in Ghost Soldier by Elaine Alphin. My Brother’s Ghost was a novelette by Allan Ahlberg.

A girl’s dreams seemed to hold the answer to her parents’ disappearance in Joséph Bruchac’s Skeleton Man, and a young girl attempted to help her missing friend in Jonathan Stroud’s The Leap.

Vampire Mountain was the fourth volume in The Saga of Darren Shan and the first in a three-part sequence. The character returned in Trials of Death. Eponymous schoolboy author Shan is a pseudonym for Darren O’Shaughnessy.

A young witch discovered that one of her classmates was a vampire in Amelia Atwater-Rhodes’s Shattered Mirror, while Witch Hill was a time-travel fantasy by Marcus Sedgwick. With the help of a strange sea captain, two children battled the Night Witches in Michael Molloy’s The Witch Trade.

Cate Tiernan’s Sweep 1: Book of Shadows, 2: The Coven, 3: Blood Witch, 4: Dark Magick, 5: Awakening, 6: Spellbound and 7: The Calling were the initial volumes in a packaged series about a teenager who discovered she was a witch.

Silver Raven Wolf’s Witches’ Night of Fear and Witches’ Key to Terror were the second and third volumes, respectively, in the Witches’ Chillers series of occult murder mysteries, from Llewellyn Publications.

Isobel Bird’s Circle of Three series about a trio of modern-day teenage witches included 1: So Mote it Be, 2: Merry Meet, 3: Second Sight, 4: What the Cards Said, 5: In the Dreaming, 6: Ring of Light, 7: Blue Moon, 8: The Five Paths, 9: Through the Veil, 10: Making the Saint, 11: The House of Winter and 12: Written in the Stars.

T*witches #1: The Power of Two by H. B. Gilmour and Randi Reisfeld was about twin sisters, separated at birth, who meet in a theme park and discover that they share strange powers. It was followed by 2: Building a Mystery and 3: Seeing is Deceiving from the same authors.

Australian Kim Wilkins’s Bloodlace was the first volume in a new young-adult psychic detective series featuring Gina Champion, who investigated a mystery based on a past murder set in a seaside suburb of Sydney.

Ninth Key and Darkest Hour by Jenny Carroll (aka Meggin Cabot) were two new titles in the ongoing series The Mediator, about a girl who talked to the dead.

From Headline Australia, Shades 1: Shadow Dance, 2: Night Beast, 3: Ancient Light and 4: Black Sun Rising was a young-adult horror adventure series by Robert Hood, about a group of teenagers trapped in a ghostlike existence who battled an invasion by creatures from the shadows.

Scholastic’s ‘Point Horror Unleashed’ continued with Celia Rees’s The Cunning Man , about the eponymous shipwrecker. Paul Stewart’s Fright Train involved a ride through Hell, and a young girl paid a high price for consulting The Bearwood Witch in Susan Price’s novel.

Hair Raiser by Graham Masterton and Fly-Blown by Philip Wooderson, the latter about intelligent mutated blowflies, both appeared as ‘Mutant Point Horror’ titles.

Decayed: 10 Years of Point Horror was an omnibus containing the novels Trick or Treat and April Fools by Richie Tankersley Cusick and Blood Sinister by Celia Rees.

Bruce Colville’s The Monsters of Morley Manor was significantly revised and expanded from its 1996 serialization.

Shadows & Moonshine was a new collection of thirteen stories by Joan Aiken, while Vivian Vande Velde’s Being Dead collected seven stories about ghosts and the undead.

R. L. Stine’s The Haunting Hour featured ten stories, each illustrated by a different artist, including John Jude Palencar and Art Spiegelman. Spiegelman and Franqoise Mouly edited Little Lit: Strange Stories for Strange Kids, a graphic anthology of sixteen stories by such authors as Jules Feiffer and Maurice Sendak.

Brian Lumley’s The Whisperer and Other Voices collected eight reprint stories, plus the short Cthulhu Mythos novel ‘The Return of the Deep Ones’ and a new introduction by the author.

Published in trade paperback by Serpent’s Tail, The Devil in Me was the latest collection from Christopher Fowler, containing twelve stories and a new foreword by the author. From the same imprint came a welcome reissue of Fowler’s 1998 collection Personal Demons in a matching edition.

M. John Harrison’s Travel Arrangements collected fourteen stories, and Ed Gorman’s The Dark Fantastic collected seventeen stories with notes by the author and an introduction by Bentley Little.

Faithless: Tales of Transgression collected twenty-one stories (one original) by Joyce Carol Oates. Meanwhile, the author’s psychological Gothic novella Beasts was published as a trade paperback by Carroll & Graf.

Harper Collins produced a special sampler for the UK edition of Peter Straub’s collection Magic Terror containing the story ‘The Ghost Village’.

The second of Dorchester Publishing’s hardcover Leisure titles, The Museum of Horrors was presented by The Horror Writers Association. Although perhaps not up to the quality of some of editor Dennis Etchison’s previous compilations, it was still one of the best anthologies of the year. Even though most of the eighteen original stories did not appear to fit into the loose ‘theme’ of the book, and a few were surprisingly similar to each other, it still boasted some memorable contributions from Joyce Carol Oates, Ramsey Campbell, Peter Atkins, Tom Piccirilli, Joel Lane, Conrad Williams, Charles L. Grant, Lisa Morton, S. P. Somtow and a stunning but annoyingly incomplete tale by Peter Straub. It was all the more a shame that such a fine volume and its editor became embroiled in a totally unnecessary controversy publicized through the HWA itself.