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

Touch of Evil by C. T. Adams and Cathy Clamp was the first volume in a new dark fantasy romance series involving vampires, werewolves and a psychic heroine.

Jan Underwood’s Day Shift Werewolf won the 28th Annual International 3-Day Novel Contest and also featured other image-challenged monsters.

Lori Handeland’s Crescent Moon, Midnight Moon and Rising Moon were all werewolf or other monster romances in the “Night-creatures” series, set in and around New Orleans.

Through a letter reputedly written by Jack the Ripper, pregnant werewolf Elena Michaels unwittingly unleashed a Victorian serial killer and a pair of zombie thugs into the modern world in Broken by Kelley Armstrong.

Late night radio host and celebrity werewolf Kitty Norville took on a Senate committee investigating the paranormal in Kitty Goes to Washington by Carrie Vaughn. The book also included a related story.

A werewolf and a werefox teamed up in Christine Warren’s Wolf at the Door , first in the “Others” series, while Gina Farago’s Ivy Cole and the Moon , about the eponymous female werewolf vigilante, was also the first in a series.

A new governess discovered the secret of Wolfram Castle in Donna Lea Simpson’s Awaiting the Moon , and a deadly legend had to be prevented from coming true in the sequel, Awaiting the Night .

A werewolf helped a woman who was turned into a were-jaguar by a serial killer in Howling Moon by C. T. Adams and Cathy Clamp. A Native American shape-changer was unable to kill his victim in Lindsay McKenna’s Unforgiven , and witchy PI Rachel had to deal with a werewolf problem in A Fistful of Charms , the latest book in the humorous series by Kim Harrison (Dawn Cook).

A werewolf pretended to be a dog while investigating a murder in Master of Wolves , the third book in the romantic trilogy by Angela Knight.

Ronda Thompson’s The Untamed One and The Cursed One were the second and third books, respectively, in the “Wild Wulfs of London” Regency romance series.

Shadow of the Moon was yet another werewolf romance, written by Rebecca York (Ruth Glick), whose earlier novels Witching Moon and Crimson Moon were reprinted in the omnibus Moon Swept .

Wolf Tales III was the third volume in the erotic werewolf series about the “Chanku” by Kate Douglas, and Dead and Loving It collected four humorous werewolf romances by Mary Jane Davidson, including one related to the author’s “Betsy the Vampire Queen” series. Three of the stories were originally published as e-books.

Diane Setterfield’s debut novel, The Thirteenth Tale , sparked an international bidding war amongst publishers. Days after the teacher-turned-first-time-novelist submitted the manuscript to an agent, it sold for £800,000 in the UK and a further $1 million in the US. A literary ghost story-within-a-story, the book went straight to #1 in America as the result of a major marketing campaign.

Following a global disaster, New York City was overrun by cannibal zombies in David Wellington’s debut Monster Island . The first in a trilogy about the walking dead, originally serialised on the author’s web site, it was followed by Monster Nation , which was set in California and looked back to when the dead first began to rise.

Sarah Langan’s debut novel The Keeper came with glowing quotes from Ramsey Campbell, Douglas E. Winter, Tim Lebbon, Kelly Link and Jack Ketchum. It was about yet another haunted house in Maine.

The Harrowing by screenwriter Alexandra Sokoloff was set in a college over Thanksgiving break and involved the discovery of an old Ouija board and a tragedy that happened more than eighty-five years earlier.

Set in an alternate London, Mike Carey’s first novel The Devil You Know introduced hardboiled exorcist Felix Castor. After dying for two minutes, small-time private investigator Harper Blaine returned to life with the power to see beyond the veil in Kat Richardson’s Greywalker .

Dead City by Joe McKinney was about a virus that reanimated the dead of Texas as cannibal zombies.

Gordon Dahlquist’s heavily promoted first novel, The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters , bought by its US publisher for a seven-figure sum, was a Victorian murder mystery set in a world where magic worked. Paul Malmont’s The Chinese Death Cloud Peril was a tribute to the old pulp magazine heroes as authors Walter Gibson, Lester Dent and L. Ron Hubbard investigated the horrifying poisoning of H. P. Lovecraft.

A boy who thought he had superpowers was actually possessed by a demon in Sam Enthoven’s YA debut, The Black Tattoo .

Michael Cox’s Victorian murder mystery, The Meaning of Night , was written in just over a year while the author suffered a severe illness and the threat of blindness. The book followed the exploits of murderer Edward Glyver, who set out to convince himself that his acts of vengeance were justified.

Paul Magrs’ comedic novel Never the Bride was set in a seaside town full of monsters.

Actor and scriptwriter Mark Gatiss’ The Devil in Amber was a Boy’s Own pastiche novel that involved the search by two-fisted hero Lucifer Box for the final fragment of an ancient papyrus that could raise Beelzebub. Tess Gerritsen’s The Mephisto Club was about a detective investigating a group who were attempting to prove that Satan walked the Earth.

Matthew Pearl’s The Poe Shadow dealt with the mystery of Edgar Allan Poe’s lost final hours before his death in 1849. Meanwhile, Louis Bayard’s thriller The Pale Blue Eye explored Poe’s life as a cadet at West Point in the 1830s.

A Shot in the Dark , from Hesperus Press’ classy Classics series, collected fifteen stories by “Saki” (H. H. Munro), along with a Foreword by Jeremy Dyson and an historical Introduction by Adam Newell.

From Strider Nolan Media, the first volume of Horror’s Classic Masters Remastered edited by Kurt S. Michaels featured twenty-one tales by W. W. Jacobs, William Hope Hodgson, M. R. James, Ambrose Bierce, Edgar Allan Poe, Bram Stoker, Robert Louis Stevenson, Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne and H. G. Wells, along with a very brief Foreword by Hollywood film producer J. C. Spink.

Dover Publications reissued Gaslit Nightmares edited by Hugh Lamb, first published in 1988, with sixteen selected stories by Barry Pain, Bernard Capes, Robert W. Chambers, Charles Dickens, Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman, Richard Marsh and Jerome K. Jerome, amongst others.

Tales to Freeze the Blood: More Great Ghost Stories , selected by R. Chetwynd-Hayes and Stephen Jones, contained a further twenty-four stories culled from The Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories . Authors included Ambrose Bierce, Sydney J. Bounds, Guy de Maupassant, F. Marion Crawford, J. Sheridan Le Fanu, M. R. James, Tony Richards, Steve Rasnic Tern and Chetwynd-Hayes himself.

Also edited by Jones, H. P. Lovecraft’s Book of the Supernatural: 20 Classic Tales of the Macabre Chosen by the Master of Horror Himself featured Washington Irving, Robert Louis Stevenson, Guy de Maupassant, Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce, Henry James, F. Marion Crawford, Rudyard Kipling, Lafcadio Hearn, Bram Stoker, H. R. Wakefield, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, William Hope Hodgson, Arthur Machen and many others, along with a Foreword on writing weird fiction by Lovecraft and original illustrations by Randy Broecker.

The Complete Chronicles of Conan: Centenary Edition collected all Robert E. Howard’s stories about the mighty barbarian in a single, leather-bound hardcover. Edited with an extensive Afterword by Stephen Jones, the more than 900-page volume was illustrated throughout by Les Edwards. Continuing the series originally started by Wandering Star, Kull: Exile of Atlantis from Del Rey contained twelve stories and fragments by Howard, all taken from the author’s original manuscripts. The trade paperback was illustrated by Justin Sweet, who also supplied the Foreword.