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

In 2001, book sales in the uk were boosted by the success of the Harry Potter series to more than £1 billion. Almost 130 million titles were sold by booksellers, although a higher proportion of books are now purchased over the Internet.

Horror titles were up in America for the first time since the mid-1990s. However, the number of horror books published in Britain dropped to its lowest since the late 1980s and, according to The Bookseller, accounted for just 2.4 per cent of the total books published.

In February, the Crown Books chain filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy again, having only emerged from bankruptcy protection in November 1999. Books-A-Million bought the inventory and property leases on a number of stores, while the remainder closed down. Crown was once the third-largest book retailer in America.

With the failure of its online bookselling business, Borders Group, Inc. turned over its website Borders.com to rival Amazon in April.

Meanwhile, according to a Gallup poll, two-thirds of Americans read ten books or fewer a year, and 13 per cent read no books at all. Even more disturbing is that more than half of adult Americans spend less that thirty minutes every day reading printed matter of any kind — and that includes newspapers and food labels!

Britain’s Bloomsbury Publishing announced a tenfold rise in profits in September, mostly due to the continuing success of the Harry Potter books. Pre-tax profits rose from £273,000 to £2.85 million in the first six months of the year, and turnover was up 100 per cent at £22.7 million.

With worldwide sales passing 100 million in May, Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling became the highest-paid female author in the world, earning a reported £45 million and bringing her estimated worth to around £220 million. She was invested as an Officer of the Order of the British Empire by Prince Charles in March, for her contributions to children’s literature.

However, young fans were disappointed to learn that there would be no new adventure of the boy wizard in 2001. Rowling broke a promise to produce a Harry Potter adventure every year for seven years because she was reportedly too busy with the movie version and supervising merchandising deals.

In Stephen King’s alien-contact novel Dreamcatcher, the survivors of a bizarre encounter twenty-five years earlier were reunited as adults on an annual hunting trip, where they came upon a disoriented stranger who gave birth to something with very sharp teeth.

Black House , King and Peter Straub’s much-anticipated sequel to their 1984 collaboration The Talisman, featured a grown-up Jack Sawyer on the trail of a child-eating serial killer known as ‘The Fisherman’. He was aided in his quest by blind DJ Henry Leyden and The Thunder Five, a group of Harley bikers. The novel also included references to a number of other King books, including ‘The Dark Tower’ sequence. The two authors were reportedly paid a $20 million advance, and the book went to the top of the bestseller list in the US with a first printing of two million copies. A one million-copy mass-market paperback reissue of The Talisman contained a teaser first chapter from Black House.

Clive Barker’s Coldheart Canyon was a big Hollywood ghost story dating from the 1920s. The author himself appeared on the cover of the American edition, suitably attired in period costume and earring.

Somewhat aptly, HarperCollins designated October as ‘Ray Bradbury Month’ in America with the publication of the author’s latest work, From the Dust Returned: A Family Remembrance. First conceived more than fifty-five years ago, this beautifully written novel about the weird family, the Elliotts, who live in October Country, was constructed around seven previously published stories, including the classic ‘Homecoming’. Along with an afterword by the author, the US hardcover also featured a dust-jacket illustration by Charles Addams. An audio version was released simultaneously, read by actor John Glover.

In another honour, Mayor James K. Hahn of Los Angeles declared December 14th ‘Ray Bradbury Day’.

James Herbert’s Once . was an adult fairy tale about the dark side of magic. A clever promotion involving the placing of chained elves around London landmarks had to be scrapped on September 11th after the terrorist attacks on America. The beautifully illustrated and designed hardcover (which included four full colour plates) was published in two editions by Macmillan with complementary black and white dustjackets.

One Door Away from Heaven by Dean Koontz had 500,000 copies in print after three printings. It involved a woman on a quest to save a disabled child from the girl’s strange stepfather, who believed that she would be taken by aliens before her tenth birthday. The Paper Doorway: Funny Verse and Nothing Worse was a young-adult poetry collection by Koontz, illustrated by Phil Parks. In Britain, Headline published a paperback omnibus of Koontz’s Watchers/Mr Murder.

Anne Rice’s Blood and Gold: The Vampire Marius, the tenth book in ‘The Vampire Chronicles’, featured one of the oldest members of the undead and his meeting in the present day with a creature of snow and ice.

The End of the Rainbow by V. C. Andrews® was the fourth in the Gothic ‘Hudson’ series, while Cinnamon, Ice, Rose, Honey and Falling Stars comprised the five-volume ‘Shooting Stars’ sequence. They were all still probably written by Andrew Niederman. A paperback omnibus of Andrews’s four 1999 ‘Wildflower’ novels was also published. Meanwhile, Niederman’s own novel, Amnesia , was a twist on the Circe myth.

Ramsey Campbell’s The Pact of the Fathers was about the daughter of a dead movie producer who discovered that her father had made a diabolical deal involving his first-born.

Neil Gaiman’s American Gods was the author’s most assured novel to date, about an impending war between the old and new gods and a quest to the dark heart of the United States. An audio version was read by George Guidall.

Despite reusing the title of a Roger Zelazny novel (itself a quote from Edgar Allan Poe), Richard Laymon’s Night in the Lonesome October involved a young man’s encounter with a mysterious girl while taking a scary stroll at night. Laymon’s posthumously published novel No Sanctuary was about a couple’s meeting with a serial killer during a vacation in the wilderness.

Graham Masterton’s Swimmer was the fifth volume in the ‘Jim Rook’ series, while When the Cold Wind Blows was the fifth volume in Charles Grant’s Black Oak series. This time Grant’s paranormal investigators followed up rumours of a wolf man in the Georgia swamps.

Caitlin R. Kiernan’s much-anticipated second novel, Threshold: A Novel of Deep Time, dealt with a woman who was recruited by a strange girl with alabaster skin to battle an ancient evil.

Authorized by the late author’s estate, Simon Clark’s The Night of the Triffids was a disappointing sequel to John Wyndham’s classic 1951 novel, set twenty-five years after the events of the original. Much better was Tim Lebbon’s apocalyptic chiller The Nature of Balance, in which most of mankind were destroyed by their own nightmares and the few remaining humans tried to survive in a world seeking vengeance. It was published as a deluxe limited hardcover by Prime Books and in paperback by Leisure Books.