Stephen Jones: Best New Horror #26

Salt Publishing launched yet another “Year’s Best” anthology series with Best British Horror 2014 edited by Johnny Mains. Despite not casting its net as wide as the other “Best” volumes, it featured twenty-one stories plus a tribute section to author Joel Lane.

Datlow and Jones overlapped with just a single story by Simon Strantzas, along with authors Neil Gaiman, Lynda E. Rucker, Kim Newman and Robert Shearman. Datlow and Guran included the same contributions from Nathan Ballingrud and K.J. Kabza, and both featured different stories by Dale Bailey, Laird Barron, Neil Gaiman and Priya Sharma. The contents of the Jones and Guran books didn’t overlap at all, although they shared authors Neil Gaiman, Tanith Lee and Angela Slatter.

The Jones and Mains volumes shared three stories (by Tanith Lee, Thana Niveau and Reggie Oliver) along with authors Ramsey Campbell, Joel Lane, Robert Shearman, Michael Marshall Smith and Stephen Volk. Datlow and Mains only shared a story by Robert Shearman, and there was no overlap of either fiction or authors between the Guran and Mains volumes.

In May Amazon.com stopped accepting pre-orders for all Hachette Book Group imprints over an ongoing dispute about how much the online book retailer took from e-book sales. Amazon was also accused of delaying delivery of some Hachette books, running banner ads for deeply discounted rival titles on authors’ pages and even removing pre-order buttons for print and Kindle editions of many Hachette titles.

Heavy-hitters such as James Patterson and Jeffery Deaver came out against Amazon, and Douglas Preston circulated a series of open letters signed by a number of authors and editors. Stephen King publicly accused the bookseller of “strong-arm tactics”.

Meanwhile, writers in Austria, Germany and Switzerland also accused Amazon of using similar tactics to put pressure on Swedish publisher Bonnier Group during negotiations.

Hachette and Amazon finally announced in November that they had come to a “new, multi-year agreement for e-book and print sales in the US”. The settlement allowed Hachette to set the prices of its e-books, known as the “Agency model”, while maintaining the same royalty revenue for authors.

It was also estimated that Amazon paid around $5-10 million for the new Internet domain “.book” and $4.6 million for “.buy”.

In July, Amazon launched a new subscription service, Kindle Unlimited that, for a $9.99/£7.99 monthly subscription, gave Kindle owners unlimited access to some e-books and audiobooks on offer from Amazon, up to ten titles at a time. The majority of the 600,000 titles available were self-published and their creators, unlike traditionally published authors, shared a monthly pool of cash determined by Amazon instead of a standard royalty payment.

Tor Books announced a new imprint, Tor.com, to publish novellas, short novels and serialisations as e-books, print-on-demand and audiobooks. Authors were offered a choice of a traditional advance against net earnings, or no advance against a higher royalty rate.

Doing just what it said in the title, Bradbury/Matheson: Interviews with the Authors featured a pair of fascinating interviews with the two late masters of the genre by Dennis Etchison (with a little help from George Clayton Johnson on the second one). It was available as an e-book from Crossroad Press, which also put out digital editions of Etchison’s novel California Gothic and his collections The Dark Country , Red Dreams , The Blood Kiss and The Death Artist .

John Joseph Adams’ monthly online Nightmare Magazine featured new fiction from, amongst others, Tim Pratt, Adam Troy-Castro, Dale Bailey and Tim Lebbon, along with reprints by Lucy Taylor, Gary Braunbeck, Tanith Lee, Glen Hirshberg, Nathan Ballingrud, Lucy A. Snyder, Michael Cisco, Dennis Etchison, Tom Piccirilli, Simon Strantzas, Charles L. Grant, Lisa Tuttle, David Morrell, Christa Faust and Michael Marshall Smith. Artists showcased included Mike Worrall, Jel Ena, David Palumbo, Federico Bebber, Márcio Martins, Leslie Ann O’Dell, Galen Dara, Reiko Murakami, Sam Guay, Jeff Simpson and Brom. Kate Jonez, Ramsey Campbell, Joe McKinney, Nicholas Kaufmann, Don D’Auria, Brandon Massey, Janice Gable Bashman, Lucy A. Snyder, Lesley Bannatyne, Chesya Burke, Eric J. Guignard and Simon Strantzas all provided columns on horror, and there were interviews with Christopher Golden, Dean Koontz, Jeff Strand, Darren Shan, Nancy Holder, Mark Morris, Del Howison, Daniel Knauf, Cecil Baldwin, Joyce Carol Oates, Leslie Klinger and Robert Shearman.

The e-book editions of Nightmare Magazine included exclusive content not found on the website version, while the October issue was a special Kickstarter-funded “Women Destroy Horror!” issue guest-edited by Ellen Datlow.

The Winter edition of the excellent Subterranean magazine was guest-edited by Jonathan Strahan. Unfortunately, the free online title suspended publication with its Summer 2014 issue.

Amber Benson and Robert Picardo starred in Morganville , a six-part Kickstarter-funded digital series based on the “Morganville Vampires” novels by Rachel Caine.

Dark Hearts: The Secret of Haunting Melissa on iTunes was a horror movie app, a sequel to Haunting Melissa (2013), which changed the audio and visual clues each time an episode was re-watched.

Burnt Black Suns: A Collection of Weird Tales from print-on-demand publisher Hippocampus Press collected nine superior stories (five reprints) by Canadian author Simon Strantzas, along with a Foreword by Laird Barron. From the same imprint, Through Dark Angles: Works Inspired by H.P. Lovecraft contained twenty-four stories and poems (nine original) by Don Webb, along with an entertaining biographical Introduction by the author.

The wonderfully titled Ghouljaw and Other Stories collected fourteen stories (six original) by Clint Smith, along with an Introduction by S.T. Joshi, while Bone Idle in the Charnel House: A Collection of Weird Stories contained twenty tales (nine reprints) by Rhys Hughes.

The Witch of the Wood was a novel by Michael Aronovitz, while Donald Tyson’s The Lovecraft Coven contained two novellas, including the title story featuring HPL himself.

Edited by S.T. Joshi, the first issue of Spectral Realms from Hippocampus Press was a new journal of poetry featuring original work by Ann K. Schwader, Richard L. Tierney, Charles Lovecraft, Leigh Blackmore, W.H. Pugmire, Darrell Schweitzer, Randall D. Larson, Kyla Lee Ward, Jason V. Brock and many others. There were also classic reprints from, amongst others, George Sterling, Lord Dunsany and Bruce Boston, along with a reviews section.

Valancourt books reissued Basil Copper’s Gothic mystery House of the Wolf with the original illustrations from the Arkham House edition by Stephen E. Fabian, along with the collection Looking for Something to Suck: The Vampire Stories of R. Chetwynd-Hayes illustrated by Jim Pitts. Both PoD titles included new or updated editorial material by Stephen Jones.

Also from Valancourt, a welcome reissue of the late Michael McDowell’s 1981 Southern Gothic The Elementals came with a new Introduction by Michael Rowe.

Joe Morey’s Dark Renaissance Books continued to put out attractive PoD paperbacks and deluxe signed and numbered hardcovers, including Daniel Mills’ collection of fourteen stories (two original), The Lord Came at Twilight , featuring an Introduction by Simon Strantzas and illustrations by M. Wayne Miller.

From Chris Morey’s Dark Regions Press, Jeffrey Thomas’ Ghosts of Punktown collected nine stories (four original) set in the author’s mystical city.