Stephen (ed.) - The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 18

Dave Lindschmidt’s glossy City Slab included stories by Jack Ketchum and Sonya Taffe, interviews with Ketchum, Bill Moseley and Ray Garton, and articles about film directors Dario Argento and Takashi Miike.

Edited by Doyle Eldon Wilmoth Jr. and published by SpecFic-World, Rogue Worlds was another magazine featuring horror fiction and poetry, while the twentieth anniversary issue of Eric M. Hei-deman’s perfect-bound Tales of the Unanticipated #27 was a special “Monsters Issue”.

From Elder Sign Press, William Jones’ Dark Wisdom: The Magazine of Dark Fiction took on a more professional appearance with full colour covers and fiction and poetry from John Shirley, Paul Finch, Gerard Houarner, Bruce Boston, Jay Caselberg, Scott Nicholson, James S. Dorr, William C. Dietz, Stephen Mark Rainey, Gene O’Neill and others. Each issue also featured a graphic tale and a serial.

Issue #23 of Cthulhu Sex Magazine , described as “the magazine for connoisseurs of sensual horror”, included a portfolio of illustrators featured on the www.spookyART.com website, including co-founders Chad Savage and Alan M. Clark, Jill Bauman, Alex McVey, Jason Beam, Dan Ouellette, Robert Morris and John Schwegel.

With still no sign of their long-promised tome on Italian director Mario Bava, Tim and Donna Lucas managed to get just five issues of Video Watchdog out in 2006. Despite too much obvious “filler” material, there were still interesting articles on the making of Amityville 3-D , Edgar Wallace’s involvement in the original King Kong , and a look at the films of low budget director Del Tenney. While Joe Dante bowed out with his long-running review column, Ramsey Campbell joined the magazine with “Ramsey’s Rambles”.

Canada’s Rue Morgue magazine turned out eleven glossy issues in 2006. Along with all the usual movie, DVD, book and music coverage, issues also featured interviews with Roger Corman, Clive Barker, Wes Craven, Jean Rollin, Lina Romay, Stuart Gordon, Jeffrey Combs, Basil Gogos, David Seltzer, Richard Donner, Peter Straub, Adrienne Barbeau, Takashi Miike, Pete Walker, R. Lee Ermey, Ingrid Pitt, Ramsey Campbell, the late Billy Van, Elvira, Bob Clark and John Saxon. The 9th Anniversary Halloween Issue was a tribute to late Italian director Lucio Fulci and also included “The Connoisseur’s Guide to 50 Alternative Horror Books”.

The annual Rue Morgue Festival of Fear, held over three days in September in Toronto included special guests Alice Cooper, Guillermo del Toro, Jeffrey Combs, Linda Blair, Roddy Piper, Ben Chapman, Michael Berryman and others.

HorrorHound was a new glossy magazine out of Cincinnati, Ohio, which was devoted to movies, comic books, video games, model kits, DVDs and gore.

Charles N. Brown’s newszine Locus entered its 40th year of publication with interviews with, amongst others, Geoff Ryman, S. M. Stirling, Dave Duncan, the inevitable Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, Jay Lake, Betsy Wollheim, Peter Straub, China Miéville,, and Joe Hill (who was outed by Variety in early 2006 as Joseph Hillstrom King, the son of Stephen and Tabitha King). The May issue looked at “Young Adult Fiction” with essays by Ursula K. Le Guin, Garth Nix, Graham Joyce and others, while the July issue’s “Special Horror Section” featured commentary from Edward Bryant, Ellen Datlow and bookseller Alan Beatts.

Prism: The Newsletter of the British Fantasy Society had an erratic schedule under the editorship of Jenny Barber. Despite this, each issue was packed with publishing and media news, and there was a brief interview with David Sutton.

Under editors Marie O’Regan and the busy Barber, the BFS’ journal Dark Horizons was a messy mixture of short stories and non-fiction, including book and media reviews that would have been better suited in Prism . The two issues published in 2006 featured new and reprint fiction from Mark Chadbourn, Debbie Bennett, John Howard, Lavie Tidhar, Mark Morris, Ramsey Campbell, Tim Lebbon and others, along with interviews with Neil Gaiman and independent film-maker Jeff Brookshire.

Edited with an Afterword by the ubiquitous Paul Kane and Marie O’Regan, and featuring a “heartfelt” Introduction by Stephen Jones, The British Fantasy Society: A Celebration was an attractive trade paperback anthology of twenty horror, fantasy and SF stories (six original) with contributions from Christopher Fowler, Clive Barker, Michael Marshall Smith, John Connolly, Ramsey Campbell, Kim Newman, Peter Straub, Neil Gaiman, Brian Aldiss, Richard Christian Matheson, Robert Silverberg, Stephen Gallagher and others. All profits from the book went to the Society and the “Black Dust” Nqabakazula Charity Project in South Africa.

BFS members were also treated to a special edition of Cinema Macabre edited by Mark Morris. This trade paperback version replaced the J. K. Potter cover art on the PS Publishing edition with a new painting by Les Edwards, and Jonathan Ross’ Introduction was dropped in favour of one by Marie O’Regan and Paul Kane.

From the Ghost Story Society, All Hallows contained fiction by Stephen Volk and others along with an interview with Australian author John Harwood, plus the usual reviews, columns and articles by Ramsey Campbell, Roger Dobson, Reggie Oliver and Gary McMahon.

Edited by Gwilym Games, Machenalia was the newsletter of The Friends of Arthur Machen. Along with plenty of Machen-related news, each issue also contained reviews of other genre material.

The tenth issue of David Longhorn’s annual Supernatural Tales was another bumper volume featuring contributions from Don Tumasonis, Gary McMahon, Andrew Darlington, Lynda E. Rucker, Tina Rath and Michael Chislett, amongst others. Whispers of Wickedness included an interview with author Steven Pirie.

The two issues of John Benson’s Not One of Us contained stories and poems by Sonya Taaffe and others. Change was the latest in a series of annual, variously-titled publications from the same publisher. A trade paperback anthology edited by Benson, The Best of Not One of Us , was published by Prime Books/Wildside Press and included fifteen stories that originally appeared in the magazine.

Gavin J. Grant and Kelly Link’s Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet and Heather Shaw and Tim Pratt’s Flytrap featured the usual mixture of slipstream fiction, poetry and articles.

The October issue of The New York Review of Science Fiction included interviews with Thomas Ligotti and Peter Straub, and the Winter issue of The Bulletin of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America featured an introductory essay by Bud Webster on Donald A. Wollheim’s classic horror anthologies The Macabre Reader and More Macabre .

Published by Writer’s Digest in association with “The Horror Writers of America” [sic], Mort Castle’s guide On Writing Horror: Revised Edition contained forty-four essays (twenty-four original and the others mostly revised) on how to write horror with a Foreword by Stanley Wiater and an Afterword by Harlan Ellison.

Dorothy Hoobler and Thomas Hoobler’s The Monsters: Mary Shelley & the Curse of Frankenstein looked at the origins of Mary Shelley’s influential novel.

Edited by Scott Connors for print-on-demand publisher Hippocampus Press, The Freedom of Fantastic Things: Selected Criticism on the Writings of Clark Ashton Smith collected twenty-six critical essays (five original) by Brian Stableford, S. T. Joshi, James Blish, Donald Sidney-Fryer and others on the author’s work, along with a gathering of contemporary reviews.

H. P. Lovecraft’s Collected Essays Volume 3: Science and Collected Essays Volume 4: Travel were also available from Hippocampus, edited with notes and an Introduction by S. T. Joshi. From the same imprint came Lovecraft’s New York Circle: The Kalem Club 1924–1927 , edited by Kirk Mara Hart and Joshi, with a Preface by Peter Cannon and an Introduction by Mara Kirk Hart.