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

Although subtitled Extreme Visions of Speculative Fiction, editor Al Sarrantonio’s massive new anthology Redshift actually contained some excellent dark fantasy stories amongst its thirty all-new contributions by Dan Simmons, Ursula K. Le Guin, Michael Moorcock, Thomas M. Disch, Stephen Baxter, David Morrell, Elizabeth Hand, Michael Marshall Smith, Gene Wolfe and the editor himself (who was also responsible for yet another self-congratulatory introduction).

Edited by P. N. Elrod (and probably an uncredited Martin H. Greenberg), Dracula in London contained sixteen stories about the vampire count living in some very peculiar interpretations of the city by Tanya Huff, Fred Saberhagen, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Nancy Kilpatrick and others, including a collaboration between the editor and actor Nigel Bennett.

Vampires: Encounters with the Undead was a huge, 600-page hardcover from Black Dog & c Leventhal Publishers, edited and with commentary by the erudite David J. Skal. Along with classic short stories by J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Bram Stoker, M. R. James, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Bloch, Fritz Leiber, Richard Matheson, David J. Schow, Kim Newman, Caitlin R. Kiernan and others, this value-for-money volume also contained articles, essays and extracts, all profusely illustrated with film stills and artwork.

Lords of Night: Tales of Vampire Love contained three romance novellas by Janice Bennett, Sara Blayne and Monique Ellis.

Hammer horror star Ingrid Pitt graced the cover and contributed the introduction and an original story to The Mammoth Book of Vampire Stories By Women, an anthology of thirty-three stories (fourteen original) and one poem edited by Stephen Jones with illustrations by Randy Broecker. Other contributors included Anne Rice, Poppy Z. Brite, Tanith Lee, Lisa Tuttle, Connie Willis and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro.

Mike Ashley’s excellent The Mammoth Book of Fantasy reprinted twenty-three classic tales by Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Fritz Leiber, Tanith Lee, Harlan Ellison, A. Merritt and many others.

Published in hardcover by The British Library, Meddling with Ghosts: Stories in the Tradition of M. R. James was a handsome reprint anthology selected and introduced by Ramsey Campbell. Among the sixteen authors included were J. Sheridan Le Fanu, F. Marion Crawford, Sabine Baring-Gould, Fritz Leiber, L. T. C. Rolt, A. N. L. Munby, T. E. D. Klein, Sheila Hodgson, Terry Lamsley and Campbell himself. Rosemary Pardoe also contributed a useful guide to writers who followed in James’s literary footsteps.

Edited by Don Hutchinson, Wild Things Live There: The Best of Northern Frights reprinted sixteen stories from the Canadian anthology series by Nancy Kilpatrick, Nalo Hopkins and others.

Into the Mummy’s Tomb, edited with a long introduction by John Richard Stephens, contained fifteen reprint stories, two excerpts and an abridgement by such authors as Louisa May Alcott, Tennessee Williams, H. P. Lovecraft, Agatha Christie, Mark Twain, Sir H. Rider Haggard, Edgar Allan Poe, Ray Bradbury, Rudyard Kipling, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Elizabeth Peters, Sax Rohmer, Anne Rice and Bram Stoker.

Edited by Marvin Kaye, The Ultimate Halloween contained seventeen stories (five reprints) about the horror holiday by Esther Friesner, Ron Goulart and others. Isaac Asimov’s Halloween was edited by Gardner Dozois and Sheila Williams and reprinted ten stories from Asimov’s Science Fiction. Andy Duncan, Lawrence Watt-Evans, Howard Waldrop, Steven Utley and Ian R. MacLeod were amongst the authors included.

Winning Tales of the Supernatural edited by Joyce Booth O’Brien contained eleven ‘prize-winning’ stories, while Nor of Human edited by Geoffrey Maloney was an Australian anthology published by the Canberra SF Guild writers’ group.

Published in trade paperback by Polygon, Damage Land, an anthology of New Scottish Gothic Fiction edited and introduced by Alan Bissett, contained twenty stories (six reprints) and a bibliography.

The busy Martin H. Greenberg teamed up with John Heifers to edit the all-original Villains Victorious and The Mutant Files. The former contained fourteen stories of evil triumphant, the latter sixteen tales about the next step in human evolution. The contributors (many of whom were featured in both books) included Charles de Lint, Tanya Huff, Alan Dean Foster, Janet Berliner, David Bischoff, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Ed Gorman, Peter Crowther and Peter Tremayne (with a new Sherlock Holmes story).

Greenberg was joined by Brittany A. Koren for Single White Vampire Seeks Same , an anthology of twelve stories based on paranormal personal ads from such familiar names as Rusch, Crowther, Hoffman, de Lint and Huff (a ‘Henry Fitzroy’ vampire tale). With Jean Rabe, Greenberg also edited Historical Hauntings, featuring eighteen original stories by Andre Norton, Bruce Holland Rogers and others.

The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror: 12 edited by Stephen Jones contained twenty-two stories and novellas, along with the usual comprehensive overview of the previous year in horror, a detailed necrology and a list of useful contact addresses for aspiring writers and horror fans. Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling’s The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: Fourteenth Annual Collection reprinted forty-four stories and nine poems, plus the annual summations by the two editors, Ed Bryant and Seth Johnson, obituaries by James Frenkel, and a list of so-called ‘Honorable Mentions’. The Datlow/Windling and Jones books overlapped with just four stories from Ramsey Campbell, Kathe Koja, Terry Lamsley and Paul McAuley.

After much ballyhoo in the small-press world and to the anger of many of its contributors, The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy: 2000, the first in a proposed new annual series announced by editor Steve Savile, was abruptly cancelled by print-on-demand publisher Cosmos Books.

HarperCollins globally launched its e-book imprint Perfect Bound in February with titles by Raymond E. Feist, Joyce Carol Oates and an omnibus of The Nightmare Room by R. L. Stine, containing six novels.

Following the May launch of AOL Time Warner’s digital imprint iPublish, The Authors’ Guild warned its 8,000 members that the new company’s publishing contract was ‘among the worst the Authors’ Guild has seen from a publisher of any size or reputation’. The Science Fiction Writers’ Association agreed, describing the publisher’s non-negotiable terms as ‘rights stealing’.

Ignoring the criticism, iPublish announced a new popularity contest in conjunction with the monthly publication of three works discovered through its website. However, in an unexpected move in December, AOL Time Warner pulled the plug, citing a slowdown in the overall economy as its reason for the decision. The company concluded that a separate electronic publishing division was not currently viable at that time. While iPublish titles remained available for the time being, electronic book sales were moved to other groups within Time Warner Trade Publishing.

In a landmark decision in June, the US Supreme Court ruled 7–2 on The New York Times v. Tasini case that publishers must obtain consent for the electronic reproduction of work originally created by freelancers for print. This resulted in thousands of articles being deleted from electronic databases and on the Internet.

After buying ‘exclusive electronic rights’ to around 100 backlist titles by authors such as Kurt Vonnegut, new e-book publisher RosettaBooks was sued by Random House, who claimed that their existing contracts with the authors giving them the right to publish the works in ‘book form’ included digital rights. In July, a federal judge in US District Court in Manhattan ruled against Random House’s request for a preliminary injunction, and the publisher subsequently appealed.