The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 10

INTRODUCTION: Horror in 1998

Following a two-year decline in North America,a near-record number of genre books appeared in 1998. The total for horror titles was up slightly on the previous year, with around a quarter of those books published in the young adult market and more than 15 per cent of them featuring vampires.

However, the overall number of genre books published in Britain fell to its lowest for nearly a decade. Horror titles were down around 46 per cent on the previous year’s figures, accounting for a mere 12 per cent of publishers’ genre output (which was still 2 per cent above the share of the American market).

A new study revealed that romance books continued to lead all other genres in terms of book sales in America. The industry was worth more than $1 billion annually and accounted for nearly half of all mass-market paperbacks sold. Sales of romance titles nearly equalled the sales of all the other genres combined, including horror, science fiction, fantasy, mystery, thrillers and westerns.

German-owned international media company Bertelsmann AG, already owner of Bantam Doubleday Dell, purchased Random House in May for an estimated $1.3 billion. This resulted in a merger of the two publishers under the Random House name.

With a base of thirty-five million book and music club members worldwide, Bertelsmann announced an agreement with bookselling giant Barnes & Noble, Inc. to establish a joint venture with its Internet subsidiary, barnesandnoble.com. Under the agreement, Bertelsmann reportedly paid $200 million for a 50 per cent stake in the on-line service and each party also contributed $100 million capital. Launched in May 1997, barnesandnoble.com became one of the twenty-five fastest-growing Web sites in the world, generating sales of $22 million for the six months ending 1 August 1998.

Meanwhile, in November Bertelsmann separately launched its own BooksOnline service in several European countries. The service used its new collaboration with barnesandnoble.com to offer customers worldwide the experience of shopping on-line for books in multiple languages.

In another major deal, Barnes & Noble acquired distribution giant Ingram Book Group for $200 million in cash and $400 million in stock, much to the consternation of many in the publishing and bookselling world. The purchase put Barnes & Noble in control of the primary distributor for its main on-line competitor, Amazon.com, and for most of the small chains and independent bookstores throughout the United States. The American Booksellers Association issued an official statement in which it considered the purchase to be “a devastating development that threatens the viability of competition in the book industry, and limits the diversity and availability of books to consumers.”

In a separate case, the ABA and a number of independent booksellers filed an anti-trust lawsuit in March in the US District Court for Northern California, accusing Barnes & Noble and Borders bookstore chains of violating anti-trust laws by using their estimated combined annual buying power of $5 billion to receive secret preferential treatment from publishers. B&N chairman Len Riggio hit back with an open letter to the media denying the ABA’s assertion that book superstores were responsible for the decline in independents and stated that there was no evidence of wrongdoing on the part of Barnes & Noble.

America’s Crown Books filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in July after the new owner failed to find a buyer. This resulted in the closure of 79 of the chain’s 174 stores. Having already returned many books to publishers earlier in the year, Crown was subsequently sued by its principal supplier, Ingram, who claimed payment for $10 million in books. Ingram eventually agreed to accept more returns and extend new credit to the chain in exchange for “super-priority” status as an unsecured creditor.

A £300 million agreement between Waterstones and Dillons bookshop chains became the biggest-ever deal in British book retailing, with the result that most of the Dillons branches were re-branded to Waterstones. The move put the combined 200-plus stores in a good position to gain further market share before potential rivals Borders could make substantial inroads into the UK market.

In 1997 the publishing industry was watching HarperCollins closely, amid the turmoil of restructuring, the cancellation of numerous titles, and rumours of bankruptcy. A year later the company reported that it had increased its operating profits by 200 per cent. While revenues stayed even at $737 million, profits increased from $12 million to $37 million. According to the annual report from parent company News Corp., the results were due to “a more focused publishing programme, decreased returns and some significant bestsellers.” Fourth-quarter results for HarperCollins showed a $11 million operating profit, compared to only $1 million in 1997. Headed by publishing director John Silbersack, the HarperEntertainment imprint was launched in the autumn to cover all the media tie-ins being put out by HarperCollins.

America’s Leisure Books launched the Leisure Horror Book Club with two September titles, Alone With the Dead by Robert J. Randisi and The Halloween Man by Douglas Clegg.

French publisher Hachette Livre bought a 70 per cent equity stake in Britain’s Orion Publishing Group and Macmillan (owned by German publisher Holtzbrinck) made a hostile £7.3 million takeover bid for Cassell (which included the Gollancz and Vista imprints). The Cassell Board of Directors had rejected the offer of £1 per share (a 122 per cent premium over the public valuation of 45 pence) when, in an unexpected move, Orion outbid Macmillan with £1.23 per share and bought the company.

Canadian publisher Commonwealth, who had entered into “joint contracts” (aka vanity publishing) with an estimated 2,000 authors and had an annual budget of $6 million, declared bankruptcy in March. With lawsuits threatened by disgruntled writers and employees, publisher Don Phelan went into hiding, only to resurface briefly to blame an “internal and external conspiracy” for his problems, saying he would represent himself in class action suits brought against the firm by its clients.

Despite an announcement in May that Stanislaus Tal’s TAL Literary Agency had been sold to a company called Extreme Entertainment, it later emerged that Tal represented few if any authors and some royalties paid to the agency had never been reported.

The American Congress passed the Copyright Term Extension Act, adding a further twenty years to copyrights for individuals, bringing the length of copyright in the US up to life plus seventy years, and into line with the European copyright law which was amended in 1995. After vigorous lobbying by the Walt Disney Company (who was faced with losing its exclusive copyright to Mickey Mouse in 2003), another twenty years was added to the already existing seventy-five years of corporate copyrights. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act also gave full protection to work appearing on-line.

It was the summer of Stephen King. After his move in 1997 to Simon & Schuster for a $2 million advance and nearly 50 per cent of the profits, his big release for the year was the novel Bag of Bones. It was about bestselling author Mike Noonan, suffering from writer’s block following the unexpected death of his wife and their unborn child, who found himself caught up in a supernatural mystery centred around Dark Score Lake and a town in the grip of a tyrannical millionaire. In America the book had a first printing of 1,360,000 copies from Scribner, backed by a $1 million promotional budget.

Despite his phenomenal popularity on both sides of the Atlantic, the author had not appeared at a public event in Britain for nearly fifteen years. To coincide with the publication of the new book, King visited London in mid-August for a rare promotional tour. Bottles of a special “King Lager” were available during the UK launch party, produced especially for the event by a London micro-brewery, and a commemorative signed edition of Bag of Bones, limited to just 2,000 copies, went on sale at London’s Royal Festival Hall when King was interviewed by novelist and broadcaster Muriel Gray, read from his work, and answered questions in front of a capacity audience.

Books Etc. in association with Hodder & Stoughton gave away a free trade paperback omnibus to coincide with the publication of Bag of Bones. Only available from stores in the London area, King etc. included a brief message from the author plus extracts from twelve of his novels.

Just in time for Christmas, Donald M. Grant, Publisher, re-released the first three books in King’s Dark Tower series, packaged together at a suggested retail price of $110. This included a third printing of the first title in the series, The Gunslinger (1982), with a new dustjacket, and a second printing of The Drawing of the Three (1987), with a new dustjacket and ten new paintings by artist Phil Hale. The third book, The Waste Lands (1991), was a first edition. The set weighed a total of eight pounds and was available in a leatherette slipcase stamped on the spine in silver and maroon.

Dean Koontz’s Seize the Night was the sequel to the author’s Fear Nothing, and once again involved night-dweller Christopher Snow, who discovered more about the mutated gene virus infecting the inhabitants of Moonlight Bay and a secret government time-travel experiment. It was also released in a 750-copy signed, leatherbound, slipcased edition by Cemetery Dance Publications, illustrated by Phil Parks, along with a 52-copy lettered edition.

Anne Rice’s Pandora was the first volume in the “New Tales of the Vampire” series, as Rice’s undead characters David Talbot and Pandora returned from the author’s previous books. It was followed by The Vampire Armand, which told the tale of the eponymous bloodsucker and leader of the Theatre des Vampires across the centuries.

The first volume in a new two-part series, Clive Barker’s Galilee: A Romance was a Southern Gothic involving the eponymous male protagonist whose love affair with Rachel Pallenberg reawakened an old conflict between rival families. While the Gearys were rich and powerful, the Barbarossas were much darker and stranger.

Butterfly, Crystal, Brooke, Raven and Runaways comprised the “Orphans” series by V. C. Andrews® and marked a transition away from horror to young adult fiction for the late author. The story involved four teenage orphans who escaped from an evil foster home. Meanwhile, Music in the Night was the fourth in the Gothic horror “Logan Family” series under the Andrews byline, still probably written by Andrew Neiderman.

Thriller novelist Frederick Forsyth sold the American, Canadian and audio rights for The Phantom in Manhattan to New Millennium Entertainment, a new publisher based in Beverly Hills, for an advance reported to be in the mid-seven-figure area. The novel was a sequel to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s version of the Gaston Leroux classic,The Phantom of the Opera. New Millennium also planned to release the book in DVD format, while rumours of a stage version of The Phantom in Manhattan had already been circulating in theatrical circles for over a year. Forsyth had previously said he did not want to write another book, but apparently offered his services to Lloyd Webber at a dinner party in late 1997.

Published in America but not in his native Britain, Ramsey Campbell’s psychological thriller The Last Voice They Hear involved an investigative journalist who was challenged by his long-missing brother to solve a series of murders, with his own family as the prize.

Although not usually known for their horror or dark fantasy work, Terry Brooks’ A Knight of the World was the sequel to his bestseller Running with the Demon, while Homebody was a haunted house novel from Orson Scott Card.

Legacies was the second Repairman Jack novel from F. Paul Wilson (“writing as Colin Andrews” on the UK edition). The mysterious fixer became involved with a woman intent on destroying a house she had just inherited, and also the evil Arabs, Japanese agents, and American hit men who were out to discover the secrets concealed in the dilapidated mansion.

Charles Grant’s “Millennium Quartet” continued with Chariot, the third novel in the series about the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. This time Plague used smallpox to wreak havoc in a world already at the mercy of Famine and Death, and only Las Vegas was spared. The author also launched a new series about a private occult investigation service with Black Oak 1: Genesis and 2: The Hush of Dark Wings.

The Searchers: City of Iron by Chet Williamson marked the beginning of a new X Files-type trilogy about a team of three CIA agents investigating the supernatural. Phil Rickman’s The Wine of Angels was the first in a series featuring new vicar Merrily Watkins and a mystery linked to a town’s 17th century witch-hunts.

Set in the near-future, Peter James’ Denial was about a psychiatrist who gave the wrong advice to a patient, an aging movie actress, who killed herself as a result. Her sociopath son held the doctor responsible and decided to avenge her death. Soho Black by Christopher Fowler concerned the high-pressure lifestyle of a failing film executive who dropped dead in a trendy bar one evening, and by doing so revitalised his career.

Michael Marshall Smith’s One of Us was set in a world where dreams and memories could be accessed, a group of survivors confronted an ancient evil released from the Chasm by Stephen Laws, a horror writer discovered where he got his bizarre ideas from in Straker’s Island by Steve Harris, and the myths behind the Arabian Nights and the secret history of Tut-ankh-amen’s tomb were explored by Tom Holland in The Sleeper in the Sands.

Terror was the third in Graham Masterton’s series about Jim Rook, a teacher with supernatural powers, while House of Bones was a young adult novel in the Point Horror series from the same author.

After his success in 1997 with the mainstream thriller Bad Karma (under the “Andrew Harper” pseudonym), Douglas Clegg’s The Halloween Man marked a return to the horror field for the author. It was set in the quiet New England town of Stonehaven, which was filled with secrets of both natural and supernatural origin, including the terrifying figure of the title.

William Browning Spencer’s Irrational Fears followed Jack Lowry, an alcoholic ex-professor trying to dry out. After witnessing the bizarre death of a fellow inmate in a hospital ward and being introduced to The Clear, a group of clean-cut young men who are the sworn enemy of Alcoholics Anonymous, Jack was transferred to a rural retreat where everyone gave thanks to H. P. Lovecraft’s Elder Gods.

Greg Kihn’s Big Rock Beat was a sequel to the author’s Horror Show, also featuring director Landis Woodley, who this time became mixed-up in the production of a bizarre teen/monster beach movie.

Andrew Neiderman’s In Double Jeopardy was about a female medical student who found herself involved with a man who behaved just like her brother-in-law, who had been executed for the brutal murder of her sister. The Good Children by Kate Wilhelm strayed into V. C. Andrews and Shirley Jackson territory with its tale of four young people trying to keep their family together in the face of lies, love, insanity and possible murder.

Joe R. Lansdale’s Rumble, Tumble was the latest Hap and Leonard crime novel in which Hap Collins’ girlfriend learned that her teenage daughter was part of a hellish prostitution ring and the two friends were forced to confront a biker army turned vice barons and stone-mad killers. Norman Partridge’s The Ten-Ounce Siesta was the second volume in the enjoyable Jack Baddalach mysteries, in which the standard-issue good guy became involved with bikini girls with machine guns, cops with donuts, the heavyweight champion of the world, and a demon from Hell.

Voodoo Child by Michael Reaves was predictably set in New Orleans, while John Pritchard’s Dark Ages took place in present-day Oxford but harkened back to earlier horrors. A massacre in the 12th century resulted in a modern-day haunting in Jenny Jones’ Where the Children Cry. Mary Murrey’s The Inquisitor concerned a depressed woman who became involved with pagan mythology, while a young widow joined a village coven of white witches in The Witching Time by Jean Stubbs.

John Evans’ Gordius was a sequel to the author’s God’s Gift, Nick DiMartino’s A Seattle Ghost Story was illustrated by Charles Nitti, and Black as Blood by Rob Chilson was a humorous novel about a body that would not stay dead.

Reporter-turned-sleuth Hollis Ball was helped by her husband’s ghost in Ghost of a Chance by Helen Chappell, and David Beaty’s The Ghosts of the Eighth Attack involved a RAF squadron in World War II haunted by phantom flyers from the First World War. A supernatural western set in Mexico, Loren D. Estleman’s Journey of the Dead involved an ancient alchemist and the man who killed Billy the Kid.

A woman accused of murdering her husband claimed she was possessed by his first wife in A Mind to Kill by Andrea Hart, while in Richard La Plante’s Mind Kill, a serial killer stalked his victims in their dreams. A psychic female criminal profiler tracked down a serial killer who took his victim’s eyes in Joseph Glass’ aptly-titled Eyes, and a psychic journalist investigated the death of a colleague in Second Sight by Beth Amos.

The spirit of a dead serial killer returned in Kimberly Rangel’s The Homecoming, a woman’s paintings were connected to a serial killer in Retribution by Elizabeth Forrest (Rhondi Salsitz), and the victim of a recently-released serial killer was apparently reincarnated in a musician in Roxanne Conrad’s Copper Moon.

A serial killer menaced a near-future Glasgow in Paul Johnston’s The Bone Yard, and The Coffin Maker by Jeffery Deaver featured quadriplegic detective Lincoln Rhymes matching wits with a killer who planned to eliminate three important witnesses in a grand jury trial. Will Kingdom’s The Cold Calling was a police procedural involving yet another serial killer, as was Shaun Hutson’s Purity.

In The Last Days: The Apocryphon of Joe Panther by Australian writer Andrew Masterton, a priest was suspected of being a brutal serial killer, while an isolated boarding house for children and a religious cult based on sex and the authority of a messianic figure featured in Carmel Bird’s Red Shoes, another down-under novel, this one narrated by a guardian angel.

A woman about to commit suicide found an unconscious angel on the roof of her Manhattan apartment in Nancy A. Collins’ romantic dark fantasy Angels on Fire. The eponymous prince of Hell inhabited a dead body in James Byron Huggins’ Cain, and demon detectives set out to recover stolen crystal orbs in Camille Bacon-Smith’s Eyes of the Empress.

Jeff Rovin’s Vespers involved a police detective and a zoologist who discovered that millions of mutant killer bats had migrated to Manhattan. It was reportedly “soon to be a major motion picture”. In Dust by scientist Charles Pellegrino, a maverick palaeobiologist discovered that Mother Nature was attempting to wipe-out mankind through a series of natural plagues and disasters. Red Shadows by Yvonne Navarro was a sequel to the author’s Final Impact and set on a post-apocalyptic Earth that no longer rotated.

Frances Gordon’s Changeling was based on the Rumpelstiltskin fairy story, and The Pit and the Pendulum and Frankenstein were the latest erotic reworkings of horror classics in The Darker Passions series by Amarantha Knight (Nancy Kilpatrick).

Originally called Dracula Cha Cha Cha until the American publisher requested a change of title, Judgment of Tears: Anno Dracula 1959 was the third in Kim Newman’s acclaimed vampire series that mixed fact with fiction. Set in Rome on the eve of the wedding of Vlad, Count Dracula, to Moldavian princess Asa Vajda, the vampire elders of the Eternal City were falling victim to a murderer known as the Crimson Executioner.

The undead Saint-Germaine was involved in a plague in 14th century France in Blood Roses by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, and Sisters of the Night: The Angry Angel by the same author was the first in a packaged trilogy about Dracula’s vampire “brides”, illustrated by Christopher H. Bing. Vampyrrhic by Simon Clark concerned bloodsuckers nesting in a village in North Yorkshire, while a group of people inside a ring of standing stones were hurled back in time to a bloody past in the same author’s The Fall.

Of Masques and Martyrs was the third volume in Christopher Golden’s vampire “Shadow Saga”, a computer programmer involved with role-playing games was apparently killed by one of the undead in Linda Grant’s Vampire Bytes, and The Undying by Mudrooroo, a native Australian, was an unusual vampire novel and the second volume in the “Master of the Ghost Dreaming” series.

Blue Moon by Laurell K. Hamilton was the eighth instalment in the author’s horror/crime series featuring vampire-hunter Anita Blake, who had to figure out a way to get her ex-boyfriend, high school teacher and werewolf Richard, out of jail after he was framed for attempted rape in Tennessee. The characters returned in Burnt Offerings, which involved an arsonist destroying businesses owned by the undead and a visit from the vampire’s ruling council.

A Chill in the Blood was the seventh volume in P. N. Elrod’s “The Vampire Files” series about undead private eye Jack Fleming in a post-prohibition Chicago, and The Flesh, the Blood, and the Fire by S. A. Swiniarski (S. Andrew Swann) involved police detective Stefan Ryzard investigating a vampire conspiracy and a series of “torso” murders in Depression-era Cleveland.

A vampire had been hiding for years inside the Titanic in Michael Romkey’s Vampire Hunter, while in Miguel Conner’s The Queen of Darkness vampires ruled a post-holocaust Earth.

One of Britain’s most successful authors, Terry Pratchett was awarded the O.B.E. in the Queen’s Birthday honours list for his services to literature. He also published his twenty-third “Discworld” novel, Carpe Jugulum, which involved the rulers of Uberwald, who just happened to be modern-thinking vampires.

Elvira: The Boy Who Cried Werewolf was the third in the series by the camp TV horror host and John Paragon. Lycanthropic detective Ty Merrick returned in Manjinn Moon, the third volume in Denise Vitola’s mystery series set in the near-future. The Passion was a romantic tale about contemporary werewolves and a family secret by Donna Boyd, while a book of spells created a reluctant werewolf in Sandra Morris’ dark fantasy Green Moon and Wolfsbane.

A female werewolf attempted to control her own destiny in ancient Rome in Alice Borchardt’s historical dark fantasy The Silver Wolf. Borchardt is the sister of Anne Rice, who of course blurbed her sibling’s book.

Shadow of the Beast was a first novel by Margaret L. Carter, about a werewolf roaming the dark streets of a town in Maryland, while Julie Anne Parks’ Storytellers involved a bestselling horror author menaced by a legendary Native American evil. Both books were published by Designlmage Group.

Michael Marano’s ambitious debut novel Dawn Song followed the lives of a gay man in 1990s Boston and a body-hopping succubus from Hell intent on stealing twenty male souls. The city was soon caught up in a supernatural struggle between two of Hell’s demonic rulers against the backdrop of the Gulf War.

Respected short story author Caillm R. Kiernan made her novel debut with the paperback original Silk, about an emotionally disturbed woman named Spyder who invited the members of a struggling rock band into her world of blood rituals and vengeful spirits.

Published in the Do-Not Press’ FrontLines series, Head Injuries by Conrad Williams was about a group of old friends reunited at a British seaside town during the off-season who were forced to confront the ghosts of their past.

A man suffering from a strange neurological disease repaired a sinister house and investigated the chain of deaths surrounding the property in Daniel Hecht’s first novel Skull Session. Elizabeth Cody Kimmel’s debut novel In the Stone Circle was a young adult ghost story set in a haunted house in Wales, while King Rat by China Mieville was described as “urban Gothic” and set in London.

Valley of the Shadow by the brother-and-sister team of Earl Hardy and Naoma Hardy appeared from California’s ReGeJe Press, a modern woman searching for her lost son encountered ancient mythology in Raven Stole the Moon by Garth Stein, and a woman in a failing marriage was possessed by the soul of an exotic dancer in David L. Robbins’ Souls to Keep.

Christa Faust’s first book,Control Freak, was about a female writer researching a true-crime volume based on a grisly sex murder, who became involved in New York’s sadomasochism club scene and developed into a natural dominant. Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring won the Warner Aspect First Novel Contest and was set in a 21st century Toronto where Creole magic worked.

Ulysses G. Dietz made his debut with the gay vampire novel Desmond, and Jay Kasker’s Out of the Light involved more romantic vampires.

Movie tie-ins included Blade by Mel Odom, Dark City by Frank Lauria, Fallen by Dewey Gram, Disturbing Behavior by John Whitman,Species II by Yvonne Navarro, and Godzilla by Stephen Molstad.

Scott Ciencin continued his series of Godzilla novels aimed at both the adult and teenage markets with Godzilla vs. the Space Monster, Godzilla at World’s End, and Godzilla vs. the Robot Monster. Gargantua was a novelization of the inferior TV monster movie by Robert K. Andreassi (Keith R. A. DeCandido).

A sequel to the 1941 movie starring Lon Chaney, Jr., Return of the Wolf Man by Jeff Rovin was the first and apparently only volume in a series based on Universal Studios’ classic monster characters.

The X-Files: Fight the Future was the original title of the film by Chris Carter, “adapted” by Elizabeth Hand, and Ellen Steiber continued the series of young adult X-Files novelizations with Hungry Ghosts.

Replacing The X-Files as the hottest TV tie-in property was Buffy the Vampire Slayer with the novels Night of the Living Rerun by Arthur Byron Cover, Return to Chaos by Craig Shaw Gardner, and Blooded and Child of the Hunt, both by Christopher Golden and Nancy Holder. Holder was also responsible for the first book in the spin-off series, The Angel Chronicles, a young adult collection of three stories. Richie Tankersley wrote the second volume.

Once again proving that old vampires never die, Forever Knight: These Our Revels by Anne Hathaway-Nayne was based on the cancelled Canadian series, and actress Lara Parker revived her witch character Angelique from the old TV show Dark Shadows for the origin novel Angelique’s Descent, described as “a tale of erotic love and dark obsessions”.

Based on the graphic book and movie series created by James O’Barr, The Crow: Quoth the Crow by David Bischoff was about a dark fantasy writer forced to confront the evils he created to ultimately save his wife. Poppy Z. Brite’s The Lazarus Heart had less to do with the series and was an original novel about a resurrected New Orleans photographer, framed for the murder of his lover, and the bizarre cast of characters he encountered. Clash by Night by Chet Williamson was another Crow novel and involved the destruction of a day-care centre by an extreme militia group and the ghost of a woman seeking revenge.

Ray Garton found himself reduced to writing the Sabrina, the Teenage Witch TV novelization All That Glitters under his own name, and the busy Nancy Holder also added to the series with Spying Eyes.

From California’s Lucard Publishing, Dracul: An Eternal Love Story by Nancy Kilpatrick was a vampire novel based on a stage musical and came with an optional CD cast recording of the original San Diego performance.

Probably the two most unlikely crossovers of the year were Star Trek the Next Generation/X-Men: Planet X by Jan Michael Friedman, and the graphic novel Tarzan versus Predator: At the Earth’s Core by Walter Simonson and Lee Weeks, in which Edgar Rice Burroughs’ ape man and the alien hunter from the movies battled it out in Pellucidar.

White Wolf’s The World of Darkness series, based on the role-playing games, continued with To Speak in Lifeless Tongues and To Dream of Dreamers Lost by David Niall Wilson, the second and third volumes respectively in “The Grails Covenant” trilogy, and The War in Heaven by Robert Weinberg, the third and final volume in the “Horizon War” trilogy. The Winnowing and Dark Prophecy by Gherbod Fleming were the final two volumes in the vampiric “Trilogy of the Blood Curse”, Dark Kingdoms by Richard Lee Byers was an omnibus of three novels (two previously unpublished), and The Quintessential World of Darkness edited by Stewart Wieck and Anna Branscome contained three novels (one previously unpublished) by William Bridges, Rick Hautala and Edo van Belkom, along with two original stories by Kevin Andrew Murphy and Jody Lynn Nye.

Ravenloft: Shadowborn by William W. Connors and Carrie A. Bebris, and Ravenloft: I, Strahd: The War Against Azalin by P. N. Elrod were both based on the TSR role-playing vampire game.

Gabriel Knight: The Beast Within by Jane Jensen was the second novel based on the Gothic CD-ROM game, written by the game’s creator.

Jonathan Carroll’s Kissing the Beehive involved a bestselling paperback thriller writer who investigated a decades-old murder of a teenage beauty in his home town and encountered his most devoted fan, who called herself Veronica Lake.

Second Coming Attractions, the third novel from David Prill, was a funny and offbeat look at the Christian cinema industry which forced both the characters and reader to question their faith. With a nod to M. R. James and other authors of the supernatural, Andrew Klavan’s The Uncanny involved a Hollywood producer who travelled to Britain to discover a real ghost story.

The Migration of Ghosts contained twelve original stories by Pauline Melville, while A. S. Byatt’s Elements: Stories of Fire and Ice collected six reprints, all touched with magic, with at least two tales that could be considered horror.

The Collector of Hearts: New Tales of the Grotesque by Joyce Carol Oates contained twenty-seven stories, most of which were originally published over the past few years. Oates also edited Telling Stories: An Anthology for Writers, which included 111 stories, poems and non-fiction pieces designed as a learning tool for writers. Among the authors represented were Stephen King, H. P. Lovecraft, Harlan Ellison, Angela Carter and Oates herself.

The 1794 Gothic, The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe, was reprinted by Oxford University Press in a new edition edited by Bonamy Dobree with an introduction and notes by Terry Castle.

Published as part of Penguin/Viking Children’s Books “The Whole Story” series, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein reprinted the 1818 novel along with various pieces of art, including new illustrations by Philippe Munch.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula Unearthed was yet another edition published by Desert Island Books, annotated and introduced by editor Clive Leatherdale, which included an introduction by Stoker to the 1901 Icelandic edition. From the same publisher, Dracula: The Shade and the Shadow edited by Elizabeth Miller contained twenty critical essays about Stoker’s novel.

The Dream-Woman and Other Stories by Wilkie Collins collected eleven stories and an introduction by editor Peter Miles, The Dedalus Book of French Horror: The 19th Century included twenty-four stories translated by editor Terry Hale and Liz Heron, and Dover published The Complete John Silence, containing six supernatural stories about the psychic detective by Algernon Blackwood, edited by S. T. Joshi. Carroll & Graf’s edition of Thirty Strange Stories was a welcome reissue of mostly horror and dark fantasy tales by H. G. Wells, with a new introduction by Stephen Jones.

John Evangelist Walsh’s biography Midnight Dreary: The Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe looked into the cause of the author’s death, while Poe’s Selected Tales, published by Oxford University Press, was a new selection, edited and introduced by David Van Leer. The Penguin/Signet Classic edition of Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher collected fifteen stories, a new introduction by Stephen Marlowe and an updated bibliography.

Books of Wonder’s “Classic Frights” series of trade paperback reprints for young adults featured The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe, illustrated by William Sayer; Dracula’s Guest containing two stories by Bram Stoker, illustrated by Eric Shanower; The Haunting of Holmescroft by Rudyard Kipling, illustrated by Barb Armata; Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s The Southwest Chamber, illustrated by Margaret Organ-Kean; Who Knows? by Guy de Maupassant, illustrated by Jennifer Dickson, and The Inexperienced Ghost by H. G. Wells, Casting the Runes by M. R. James, Man-Size in Marble by E. Nesbit, The Body Snatcher by Robert Louis Stevenson and The Monkey’s Paw by W. W. Jacobs, all illustrated by Jeff White.

Academy Chicago’s edition of The Monkey’s Paw and Other Tales of Mystery and the Macabre collected eighteen stories by Jacobs, edited with an introduction by Gary Hoppenstand, while The Hazelwood Press published The Monkey’s Paw: A Facsimile of the Original Manuscript, limited to just 300 copies.

The Witch’s Tale was American network radio’s first dramatic series devoted to tales of terror, conceived, written and directed by Alonzo Deen Cole. Subtitled Stories of Gothic Horror from The Golden Age of Radio, Dunwich Press collected thirteen of the radio show’s original scripts as a limited edition trade paperback, edited by David S. Siegel. Two of the scripts were also re-created and broadcast live as a special Halloween programme on a west coast radio station on October 30th.

A trade paperback printing of Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos was significantly revised from the 1969 edition, with a new introduction by James Turner, and Arkham House finally reprinted Lovecraft’s Selected Letters III.

After going out of print for a short while, and just in time to tie-in with Gus Van Sant’s pointless shot-for-shot remake, Robert Bloch’s classic Psycho was reissued with a new cover by Tor Books.

As usual, R. L. Stine ruled the young adult market with the first volume of “Goosebumps Series 2000”, Cry of the Cat, plus Fear Street: Camp Out and Fear Street: Scream, Jennifer. Stine’s Fear Street: Seniors, a new twelve-part series about a class of doomed students at Shadyside High School, began with 1: Let’s Party, 2: In Too Deep, 3: The Thirst and 4: No Answer. Fear Street Super Chiller 1: Stepbrother was about a girl whose dreams revealed that her stepbrother murdered her in a previous life.

Although credited to R. L. Stine on the covers, the pseudonymously written Fear Street Sagas series continued with 11: Circle of Fire (by Wendy Haley), 12: Chamber of Fear (by Brandon Alexander), 13: Faces of Terror (by Cameron Dokey),14: One Last Kiss (by Brandon Alexander), IS: Door of Death (by Eric Weiner) and 16: The Hand of Power (by Cameron Dokey).

It Came from Ohio! My Life as a Writer was a young adult biography of Stine written by the author “as told to Joe Arthur”.

Christopher Pike’s The Hollow Skull involved the inhabitants of yet another small town being taken over by an alien evil, while Christopher Pike’s Tales of Terror 2 collected five stories by the author.

Nightworld: Witchlight by L. J. Smith was the ninth in the series, and Black Rot and Temper Temper were the third and fourth volumes, respectively, in the Weird World series by Anthony Masters.

Four children battled with a city’s supernatural forces in Celia Rees’ H.A.U.N.T.S.: H is for Haunting, A is for Apparition, U is for Undercover, N is for Nightmare and T is for Terror, the first five volumes in a six-book series. M. C. Sumner’s Extreme Zone series continued with Dead End, and Monsters and My One True Love by Dian Curtis Regan was the fourth and final volume in the “Monsters of the Month Club Quartet”.

Kipton & the Voodoo Curse by Charles L. Fontenay was the tenth volume in “The Kipton Chronicles” series of SF mysteries, and involved Kipton investigating a voodoo curse on Mars.

The Flesh Eater by the excellent John Gordon was a variation on “Casting the Runes”, about a mysterious club and its ghostly bogeyman. Theresa Radcliffe’s Garden of Shadows was inspired by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story “Rappacini’s Daughter”, and Louise Cooper’s Creatures: Once I Caught a Fish, If You Go Down to the Woods and See How They Run were the first three volumes in a series which reinterpreted old nursery rhymes.

Another small town was menaced by evil in Darker by Andrew Matthews, a girl defied her uncle and opened The Boxes by William Sleator, and a girl ended up at a Greek clinic run by gorgons in Snake Dreamer by Priscilla Galloway.

In A Coming Evil by Vivian Vande Velde, a young girl and a medieval ghost helped hide refugees from the Nazis. From the same author, Ghost of a Hanged Man was set in the Wild West. A boy encountered the ghost of an old actor in The Face in the Mirror by Stephanie S. Tolan, and a girl with agoraphobia could hear strange voices in Angels Turn Their Backs by Margaret Buffie.

Margaret Mahy’s novella The Horriby Haunted School was about a boy who had an allergy to ghosts, and there were more spooks in The Haunting by Joan Lowery Nixon, The Crow Haunting by Julia Jarman, The Ghost Twin by Richard Brown, The Ghost of Sadie Kimber by Pat Moon, The Ghost of Fossil Glen by Cynthia DeFelice, The Phantom Thief by Pete Johnson, and Blackthorn, Whitethorn by Rachel Anderson.

A boy was pursued by an evil he could never escape in Catchman by Chris Wooding, and there were more devilish happenings in The Secret of the Pit by Hugh Scott. Vlad the Undead by Hanna Liitzen was a translation of the 1995 Danish novel about a young woman who read an account of a vampire in an old journal.

Andrew Bromfield translated A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia and Other Stories, a collection of eight tales by Victor Pelevin, first published in 1994. Here There Be Ghosts collected eleven stories (five reprints) and seven poems (one reprint) by Jane Yolen. Shadows was a collection of seven horror stories by James Schmidt, and Somewhere Else featured two ghost/time-travel stories by Leon Rosselson.

Classic Ghost Stories II edited by Glen Bledsoe and Karen Bledsoe contained eight stories by M. R. James, Henry James, Charles Dickens, Mary Wilkins Freeman and others, illustrated by Barbara Kiwak. Great Ghost Stories edited by Barry Moser collected thirteen tales by such authors as H. P. Lovecraft, H. G. Wells and Joyce Carol Oates. Edited by Alan Durant and illustrated by Nick Hardcastle, Vampire & Werewolf Stories contained eighteen stories and novel extracts by Bram Stoker, Richard Matheson and Jane Yolen, amongst others.

Neil Gaiman’s Smoke and Mirrors collected thirty stories and poems. Subtitled “Short Fictions and Illusions”, it was a reworking of his 1993 collection Angels & Visitations, with the addition of several new stories, including a couple original to the volume, plus a new introduction by the author.

The Cleft and Other Odd Tales was exactly what you would expect from acclaimed cartoonist Gahan Wilson. Twenty-four stories of weirdness, including the original title story, illustrated by the author/artist.

F. Paul Wilson’s The Barrens and Others reprinted twelve stories from the late 1980s, plus a stage adaptation and a teleplay, with introductions by the author.

Published by Serpent’s Tail, Personal Demons by Christopher Fowler collected seventeen stories (eleven original), including a new “Spanky” novelette. Kathe Koja’s Extremities featured sixteen stories (two original) about human extremes.

Distributed as a promotional item through the UK’s WHSmith bookstore chain, When God Lived in Kentish Town & Others was a small-format paperback containing four stories (three original) by Michael Marshall Smith.

Bradley Denton’s One Day Closer to Death collected eight stories about the fate that awaits us all, including an original novella which was a coda to his novel Blackburn, featuring the sister of the eponymous serial killer. Published by The Book Guild, The Venetian Chair and Other Stories included twenty-two stories by Harry Turner.

Once Upon a Nightmare collected ten horror stories by Australian journalist John Michael Howson, while Bill Congreve’s Epiphanies of Blood: Tales of Desperation and Thirst contained six mutant vampire stories (three original) and was published by Australia’s MirrorDanse Books in an edition of 501 numbered copies.

Legends: Stories by the Masters of Modern Fantasy edited by Robert Silverberg was an anthology of new fiction which originally sold to Dutton/NAL for $650,000, before being resold to Tor Books. Although David Eddings and Terry Brooks eventually pulled out of the project, Terry Pratchett, Anne McCaffrey, Stephen King (a new “Dark Tower” story), Tad Williams, Robert Jordan, Robert Silverberg, Raymond E. Feist, Terry Goodkind, George R. R. Martin and Ursula K. Le Guin all contributed stories. The British edition came with two different covers, while in America Tor issued a boxed and leatherbound edition of 250 copies, signed by all the authors, for $250.00. These were apparently sold by lottery to book dealers only and, according to some reports, copies quickly surfaced for re-sale for as much as $1,000.

After a long delay, the latest Horror Writers Association anthology finally appeared in hardcover from CD Publications and paperback from Pocket Books. Unfortunately, Robert Block’s Psychos was not really worth the wait. Despite a line-up that included Stephen King (a new novelette), Richard Christian Matheson, Charles Grant, Ed Gorman, Jane Yolen and others, it contained a selection of lacklustre serial killer stories that failed to live up to the expectation generated by the volume’s title. Bloch died before the book was completed, but I suspect even he would have had difficulty saying anything positive about the tired tales included therein.

Dark Terrors 4: The Gollancz Book of Horror edited by Stephen Jones and David Sutton featured nineteen stories (one reprint) by such authors as Christopher Fowler, Neil Gaiman, Ramsey Campbell, David J. Schow, Roberta Lannes, Dennis Etchison, Poppy Z. Brite, Lisa Tuttle, Thomas Tessier, Michael Marshall Smith and Terry Lamsley.

Sirens and Other Daemon Lovers edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling contained twenty-two erotic stories of magical, obsessional and irresistible love by Storm Constantine, Joyce Carol Oates, Tanith Lee, Edward Bryant, Neil Gaiman, Brian Stableford, Conrad Williams and others.

At 550-plus pages, Dreaming Down Under was a major new anthology of Australian speculative fiction edited by Jack Dann and Janeen Webb. It contained thirty-one stories by such Australian authors as Cherry Wilder, Lucy Sussex, Damien Broderick, Stephen Dedman, Terry Dowling, Aaron Sterns, George Turner, Robert Hood and Sean McMullen, plus a preface by Harlan Ellison.

Ellison was also one of the writers featured in In the Shadow of the Gargoyle edited by Nancy Kilpatrick and Thomas S. Roche, which included sixteen stories and a novel excerpt (three reprints) by Charles L. Grant, Neil Gaiman, Katherine Kurtz, Brian Lumley, Christa Faust and Caitlin R. Kiernan, Brian Hodge and others.

The Crow: Shattered Lives & Broken Dreams edited by J. O’Barr and Ed Kramer contained nineteen stories and ten poems based on O’Barr’s graphic novel and movie series. Authors included Iggy Pop, Gene Wolfe, John Shirley and Nancy A. Collins, and it was illustrated by Bob Eggleton, Tom Canty, Don Maitz and others. A. A. Attanasio supplied the introduction.

Edited by Ric Alexander (Peter Haining), The Unexplained: Stories of the Paranormal contained twenty-one stories by Nigel Kneale, Ramsey Campbell, Richard Matheson, J. G. Ballard, Theodore Sturgeon, Arthur Machen, Basil Copper, Clive Barker, Harlan Ellison and others, including two originals by Graham Masterton and Richard Laymon and an introduction by Peter James. Under his own name, Haining also edited The Mammoth Book of Twentieth-Century Ghost Stories, which reprinted thirty tales from such unexpected authors as James Hadley Chase, Jack London, Stevie Smith, John Steinbeck, Muriel Spark, A. Merritt and P. G. Wodehouse, along with old hands Henry James, Agatha Christie, Arthur Machen, H. G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle and others.

Only available in a book club edition, editor Marvin Kaye’s Don’t Open This Book! was an anthology of thirty-nine dark fantasy stories (sixteen original) that included Tanith Lee, Ron Goulart and Patrick LoBrutto.

The Ex Files: New Stories About Old Flamesedited by Nicholas Royle contained twenty-five original stories about the breakup of relationships, from such authors as M. John Harrison, D. F. Lewis, Pat Cadigan, Conrad Williams, Joel Lane, John Burke, James Miller and Michael Marshall Smith. Royle also edited Neonlit: Time Out Book of New Writing Vol. 1, the first in a series of annual anthologies which featured Christopher Fowler (with the very clever “Thirteen Places of Interest in Kentish Town”), Mike O’Driscoll, James Miller, Jason Gould, Christopher Kenworthy and Conrad Williams.

Editor and book packager Martin H. Greenberg celebrated the publication of his 1,000th book in a career so far spanning twenty-three years. With John Heifers he edited Black Cats and Broken Mirrors, which included seventeen original stories based around the premise that superstitions can come true from such authors as Bruce Holland Rogers, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Peter Crowther and Charles de Lint.

Lawrence Schimel and Greenberg edited Fields of Blood: Vampire Stories of the Heartland, containing thirteen stories (four original) by Henry Kuttner, Nancy Holder, P. N. Elrod and others, and Streets of Blood: Vampire Stories from New York City, collecting another baker’s dozen tales by such writers as Suzy McKee Charnas, Edward Bryant and Esther M. Friesner.

From the editorial team of Stefan Dziemianowicz, Robert Weinberg and Greenberg, Horrors! 365 Scary Stories was a massive, 700-plus page instant remainder anthology published by Barnes & Noble Books. It featured original short shorts by numerous horror authors, both new and established, including Peter Atkins, Steve Rasnic Tem, Don Webb, Brian McNaughton, Brian Hodge, Nancy Kilpatrick, Phyllis Eisenstein, Donald R. Burleson, Mandy Slater, Michael Marshall Smith, Wayne Allen Sallee, Edward Bryant, Lisa Morton, Brian Stableford, Yvonne Navarro and Hugh B. Cave.

A much better anthology from the same editorial team was 100 Twisted Little Tales of Terror, also published by Barnes & Noble. It contained some excellent reprints by such well-known names as David J. Schow, Les Daniels, Karl Edward Wagner, Tanith Lee, H. P. Lovecraft, Frank Belknap Long, Fritz Leiber, Joe R. Lans-dale, Thomas Ligotti, Kim Newman, R. Chetwynd-Hayes, Ramsey Campbell, Hugh B. Cave, August Derleth, John Shirley, Edward Bryant, Joel Lane, Michael Marshall Smith, Clark Ash-ton Smith and many more.

Stefan Dziemianowicz, Denise Little and Robert Weinberg edited the Barnes & Noble instant remainder Mistresses of the Dark: 25 Macabre Tales by Master Storytellers, which included reprints by Margaret Atwood, A. S. Byatt, Angela Carter, Daphne du Maurier, Patricia Highsmith, Shirley Jackson, Doris Lessing, Joyce Carol Oates, Ruth Rendell, Muriel Spark and Fay Weldon.

The Raven and the Monkey’s Paw was an uncredited anthology of fifteen stories and eight poems. Eight of the tales and all the poems were by Edgar Allan Poe, and there were also classic reprints from W. W. Jacobs, Charles Dickins, Saki and Edith Wharton, amongst others. Classic Ghost Stories edited by John Grafton featured eleven tales of the supernatural by Charles Dickens, M. R. James, J. Sheridan Le Fanu and other familiar names, and Patricia Craig edited 12 Irish Ghost Stories for Oxford University Press.

Hot Blood X was the tenth volume in the sexual horror series edited by Jeff Gelb and Michael Garrett. It included seventeen pieces of fiction (one reprint) from Ramsey Campbell, Graham Masterton, Lawrence Block, Nancy Holder, Melanie Tem, Brian Hodge, and Bentley Little, amongst others. Demon Sex edited by Amarantha Knight (Nancy Kilpatrick) contained eleven explicit horror stories (including one reprint by Neil Gaiman) from Thomas S. Roche, Edo van Belkom and Kilpatrick herself.

Lisa Tuttle edited Crossing the Border: Tales of Erotic Ambiguity, which included twenty-two stories (thirteen reprints). Although not really a horror book, it included stories by Poppy Z. Brite, Graham Joyce, Angela Carter, Joyce Carol Oates, Michael Blumlein, Nicholas Royle, Carol Emshwiller, Lucy Taylor, Neil Gaiman, Geoff Ryman and the editor.

The Ghost of Carmen Miranda and Other Spooky Gay and Lesbian Tales edited by Julie K. Trevelyan and Scott Brassart, contained twenty-three stories (five reprints).

Most horror readers also probably passed on Otto Penzler’s new crime anthology Murder for Revenge. If they did, they missed Peter Straub’s remarkable novella “Mr Clubb and Mr Cuff”, plus new stories by David Morrell, Joyce Carol Oates, Eric Lustbader, Lawrence Block and others.

The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: Eleventh Annual Collection,ably edited as usual by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, weighed-in at more than 500 pages and contained thirty-seven stories, nine poems, and summaries by the editors, James Frenkel, Edward Bryant and Seth Johnson, along with the usual pointless list of “Honorable Mentions”. The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror Volume Nine edited by Stephen Jones contained nineteen stories, only one of which (Stephen Laws’ “The Crawl”) overlapped with the Datlow/Windling volume.

Eternal Lovecraft: The Persistence of HPL In Popular Culture was edited by Jim Turner and published under his Golden Gryphon Press imprint. Described as ex-Arkham House editor Turner’s farewell to H. P. Lovecraft, the retrospective anthology was split into three sections that contained eighteen reprints from Stephen King, Fritz Leiber, Nancy A. Collins, T. E. D. Klein and Harlan Ellison, amongst others.

Meanwhile, Arkham House itself returned to its dark fantasy roots with Flowers from the Moon and Other Lunacies by the late Robert Bloch, which contained twenty previously uncollected stories, mostly reprinted from Weird Tales and Strange Tales, edited and with an introduction by Robert M. Price. Also from Arkham, Peter Cannon edited Lovecraft Remembered, a collection of sixty-five reminiscences and other pieces about HPL by Robert Bloch, August Derleth, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith and others, many reprinted from obscure sources.

Canada’s Battered Silicon Dispatch Box revived Arkham’s Mycroft & Moran imprint to publish In Lovecraft’s Shadow, which collected all twenty-three of August Derleth’s original Cthulhu Mythos stories, along with three poems (one original) and an essay, illustrated by Stephen E. Fabian. The same imprint also issued Derleth’s The Final Adventures of Solar Pons, an original collection of early unpublished Sherlockian detective stories, comprising a novel, six stories (including two collaborations with Mack Reynolds) and a number of vignettes, edited by Peter Ruber.

Published by Fedogan & Bremer, A Coven of Vampires: The Collected Vampire Stories of Brian Lumley collected thirteen stories and a new foreword by the author. From the same imprint came Adam Niswander’s The Sand Dwellers, a Lovecraftian Cthulhu Mythos novel set in the mountains of the American southwest. Both books were available in trade hardcovers plus 100-copy signed and limited editions.

From Britain’s Pumpkin Books cameGhosts and Grisly Things, a collection of twenty of Ramsey Campbell’s uncollected stories (one original) in simultaneous hardcover and trade paperback format. Pumpkin also published the first UK trade paperback and first world hardcover of Dennis Etchison’s macabre murder mystery Double Edge, plus Nancy Kilpatrick’s “Power of the Blood” vampire trilogy in uniform trade paperback editions, comprising the original novel Reborn, along with reprints of the first two volumes, Child of the Night and Near Death.

The debut volume from Britain’s Wandering Star imprint was a superbly designed and produced collection, The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane by Robert E. Howard. Profusely illustrated in colour and black and white by Gary Gianni, the slipcased hardcover was published in a signed edition of 1,050 copies, 100 publisher’s copies, and 50 copies bound in goatskin. The book was accompanied by a CD recording of three Solomon Kane poems read by Paul Blake and a portfolio of Gianni’s full-page plates. Bowen Designs Inc. also offered a cold-cast bronze sculpture based on Howard’s sword-wielding puritan, designed by Gianni and sculpted by Randy Bowen.

Gauntlet Press issued a 40th anniversary edition of Ray Bradbury’s classic collection The October Country with the original illustrations and unpublished sketches by Joe Mugnaini, an introduction by Dennis Etchison, an afterword by Robert R. McCammon, and a previously unpublished preface by Bradbury, originally written for the 1955 printing. It was limited to a 500-copy slipcased edition, signed by all the writers.

Also from Gauntlet, Richard Matheson’s 1978 novel What Dreams May Come included a new introduction by the author, an introduction by Matthew R. Bradley, and an afterword by Douglas E. Winter. It was published in a 500-copy signed and slipcased edition, while a deluxe edition contained an additional afterword by Richard Christian Matheson.

The younger Matheson also contributed an afterword to Gauntlet publisher Barry Hoffman’s second novel,Eyes of Prey, a self-published sequel to his dark crime novel Hungry Eyes, in which that book’s female protagonist tracked down a woman with her own murderous agenda.

The cleverly titled Are You Loathsome Tonight? was a new collection of twelve short stories by Poppy Z. Brite, published by Gauntlet. It included an odd introduction by Peter Straub, an afterword by Caitlin R. Kiernan, and several distinctive photo-illustrations by J. K. Potter (including some bizarre portraits of the author). The 2,000-copy limited edition was signed by all the writers.

Cemetery Dance Publications had another busy year with the launch of a new series of hardcover novellas featuring full-colour dustjackets, interior illustrations, full-cloth binding and acid-free paper. Each book was signed by the author in an edition of 450 numbered copies and twenty-six lettered copies (bound in leather and traycased). The first six titles were The Wild by Richard Laymon, Spree by Lucy Taylor, 411 by Ray Garton, Untitled by Jack Ketchum, An Untitled Halloween Classic by William F. Nolan and Lynch by Nancy A. Collins.

Also from CD came Laymon’s The Midnight Tour and a reprint of his 1986 novel, The Beast House, both sequels to The Cellar and the third and second volumes respectively in the “Beast House Chronicles”. Both volumes featured a new introduction and the author’s preferred text, and were available in 400-copy signed and numbered editions and $175 deluxe lettered editions.

The Best of Cemetery Dance edited by Richard Chizmar was a massive retrospective volume, available in both trade and limited hardcover editions, containing sixty stories by such well-known names as Stephen King (with the terrible “Chattery Teeth”), Richard Laymon, Ramsey Campbell, Jack Ketchum, Poppy Z. Brite, Thomas Tessier, Hugh B. Cave, Richard Christian Matheson, Joe R. Lansdale, Nancy Collins, Peter Crowther, Norman Partridge and many others, along with interviews with Dean Koontz and the editor.

With an introduction by Tim Powers, writers such as Poppy Z. Brite, Ramsey Campbell, Douglas Clegg, Peter Crowther, Robert Devereaux, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Nancy Holder, Jack Ketchum, Ed Lee, Elizabeth Massie, Thomas F. Monteleone, Yvonne Navarro, Norman Partridge, Lucy Taylor, Steve Rasnic Tem and Melanie Tem, and F. Paul Wilson were among those who contributed twenty-eight stories (two reprints) based around the tipped-in artwork of Alan M. Clark for Imagination Fully Dilated, co-edited by Clark and Elizabeth Engstrom. Cemetery Dance published a limited edition hardcover, signed by all the contributors, for $75. A deluxe leatherbound and slipcased edition with extra art was also available for $195.

Clark and Engstrom also teamed up for The Alchemy of Love, a collection of eight stories and pieces of art with an introduction by Jack Ketchum, which was released in a signed 500-copy hardcover edition by Oregon’s Triple Tree Publishing.

Like Cemetery Dance Publications, Subterranean Press also launched its own series of short novels in hardcover format with Norman Partridge’s Wildest Dreams. Plainly labelled “A Horror Novel” on the cover, it was a hard-boiled mystery in which psychic hit-man Clay Saunders was hired by tattooed villainess Circe Whistler to kill her father so she could gain control of his infamous Satanic cult in San Francisco. It was followed by Joe R. Lansdale’s The Boar, which was written fifteen years ago (as Git Back, Satan) and had remained previously unpublished. The young adult adventure involved a fifteen-year-old boy’s hunt for a monstrous boar, called Old Satan, in the Texas of the Great Depression. The books were available in, respectively, 500-copy and 750-copy signed and numbered editions and twenty-six lettered copies.

Originally announced as Look Out, He’s Got a Knife! a few years ago, David J. Schow’s collection Crypt Orchids finally appeared as a signed and numbered 500-copy hardcover from Subterranean. With an introduction by Robert Bloch (written in 1992), it was only fitting that several of the eleven stories (three original) and one stage play were inspired by the late author of Psycho. It was also available in a lettered edition.

From Dark Highway Press, Robert Devereaux’s sexually explicit Santa Steps Out: A Fairy Tale for Grown-ups came with forewords by editors David Hartwell and Pat LoBrutto and illustrations by the ubiquitous Alan M. Clark.

Published by Mark V. Ziesing, Black Butterflies: A Flock on the Dark Side was a collection of seventeen horror stories (two original) by John Shirley, with a foreword by Paula Guran and illustrations by John Bergin.

Faces Under Water was the first volume in Tanith Lee’s new dark fantasy series “The Secret Book of Venus”, about a league of murderers in an alternate 18th century Venice, from the Overlook Connection Press. The same publisher issued a trade hardcover of Jack Ketchum’s (Dallas Myr) 1986 novel The Girl Next Door, which retained the 1996 limited edition’s introduction by Stephen King.

Obsidian Books published The Exit at Toledo Blade Boulevard, the first collection from Ketchum, containing twelve stories (six original), along with a memoir about the author’s meeting in the 1980s with Henry Miller and an introduction by Richard Laymon. It was available in a signed and limited edition of 500 copies and 52-copy lettered and leatherbound edition in a matching traycase. Ketchum also contributed the introduction to the novel Shifters by Edward Lee and John Pelan, published by Obsidian in a signed and numbered edition of 375 copies.

Splatter spunk: The Micah Hayes Stories was a collection of five hardcore horror stories by Lee and Pelan, available in a limited trade paperback edition of 550 copies and a lettered hardcover from Sideshow Press.

From Florida’s Necro Publications, Portrait of the Psychopath as a Young Woman by Edward Lee and Elizabeth Steffen concerned an emotionally disturbed advice columnist who attracted the attention of a crazed serial killer. It was available in a signed and limited trade paperback edition of 500 copies, a 150-copy signed hardcover and a deluxe lettered slipcased edition for $150. Also from Necro, Charlee Jacob’s vampire novel This Symbiotic Fascination was available in a 100-copy hardcover edition and a 300-copy trade paperback, both of which were signed and numbered.

Terminal Fright Press published the aptly-titled Terminal Frights edited by Ken Abner, which featured twenty-two stories originally scheduled for the eponymous magazine or specially commissioned for the anthology from such writers as Peter Crowther, Yvonne Navarro, J. N. Williamson, Tom Piccirilli and other regulars of the small press field. The same publisher also issued David Niall Wilson’s novel This is My Blood, which combined vampires with the Bible’s New Testament as an undead Mary Magdalene tempted Jesus Christ.

From Meisha Merlin Publishing, BloodWalk was an omnibus of Lee Killough’s vampire detective novels, Blood Hunt (1987) and Bloodlinks (1988), with a new foreword by the author.

Limited to 500–600 copies each, the latest releases from Canada’s busy Ash-Tree Press included Binscombe Tales: Sinister Saxon Stories by John Whitbourn, which collected fifteen linked stories (seven original) set in the southern England village where bizarre things always seemed to happen, and The Night Comes On, which included sixteen stories in the tradition of M. R. James by Steve Duffy. The Fellow Travellers & Other Ghost Stories by Sheila Hodgson contained twelve stories, several based on plot ideas by M. R. James and eight originally written as radio plays.

Edited and introduced by Hugh Lamb, Out of the Dark: Volume One: Origins by Robert W. Chambers was the first of two volumes and collected nine stories written prior to 1900, while The Black Reaper by Bernard Capes was a revised and expanded version of Lamb’s 1989 Equation edition, collecting twenty-three stories with a revised introduction by the editor and a foreword by Ian Burns. Nightmare Jack and Other Stories by John Metcalfe collected seventeen stories and an afterword by Alexis Lykiard, and Nights of the Round Table by Margery Lawrence was a reprint collection of twelve stories from the 1920s. Both volumes were edited with an introduction by Richard Dalby.

The Clock Strikes Twelve and Other Stories by H. R. Wakefield contained all eighteen stories from earlier editions plus a further three uncollected tales, along with a new introduction by Barbara Roden. Jessica Amanda Salmonson edited both Twilight and Other Supernatural Romances, the first of two collections by Marjorie Bowen, containing seventeen stories, and Lady Ferry and Other Uncanny People which included eleven stories by Sarah Orne Jewett and a preface by Joanna Russ. The latter volume was the first in Ash-Tree’s “Grim Maids” series, reprinting the supernatural fiction of unjustly neglected women writers.

Collected Spook Stories: The Terror by Night was the first in a series of five volumes collecting all E. F. Benson’s strange and supernatural tales. Edited and introduced by Jack Adrian, it contained fifteen stories. Adrian was also the editor of Aylmer Vance: Ghost-Seer by Alice and Claude Askew, a collection of eight stories which was the first volume in Ash-Tree Press’ Occult Detectives library, and The Ash-Tree Press Annual Macabre 1998, an anthology of six ghostly stories by authors not usually associated with the genre. These included W. Somerset Maugham, Arthur Ransome, Ford Madox Ford, E. C. Bentley, Hilaire Belloc and John Buchan.

Sarob Press in Wales launched a series of limited, numbered hardcovers with yet another edition of J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, limited to 200 copies. It was followed by a 350-copy numbered edition of Vengeful Ghosts collecting eight stories (two original) by C. E. Ward, and Skeletons in the Closet by William I. I. Read collected nine stories (three reprints) involving Dennistoun, the World’s Most Haunted Man.

Tartarus Press published a new edition of the 1907 novel The Hill of Dreams by Arthur Machen, with a new introduction by Mark Valentine, a 1954 introduction by Lord Dunsany and a previously unpublished introduction by the author. Featuring tipped-in illustrations by Sidney Sime, this was limited to 350 copies. Also from Tartarus, The Collected Strange Papers of Christopher Blayre reprinted author Blayre’s three short story collections in a single volume.

The Child of the Soul and Other Tales contained four unpublished stories plus a letter by Count Stenbock, limited to 500 numbered copies from Durto Press. Atlas Press published Jean Ray’s Malpertius in an English translation by Iain White.

Although he was better known as a writer of whimsical fantasy fiction, The Boss in the Wall: A Treatise on the House Devil was a genuinely creepy short novel based on a 600-page draft and a dream-inspired novella by the late Avram Davidson, completed by his ex-wife and editor Grania Davis. It came with brief but fascinating introductions by Peter S. Beagle and Michael Swanwick, and was published by San Francisco’s Tachyon Publications in a softcover edition, a 100-copy signed and numbered hardcover, and a boxed and lettered edition of twenty-six copies.

Charlie’s Bones by L. L. Thrasher was the first novel in a proposed series featuring an amateur detective and her ghostly partner, from Colorado’s Write Way Publishing.

After having his overdraft facility withdrawn by a new bank manager in October, British small press publisher Anthony Barker was forced to discontinue all his future publishing plans under the Tanjen imprint. Existing contracts with authors were cancelled and submissions were no longer invited as the remaining stock was sold off.

However, before the axe fell, Tanjen managed to publish Scaremongers 2: Redbrick Eden edited by Steve Saville. An anthology of twenty new and reprint (despite what it said on the copyright page) stories, it included such well-known names as Ramsey Campbell, Christopher Fowler, Stephen Laws, Kim Newman, Peter Crowther, Simon Clark, Nicholas Royle, Mark Morris and Joel Lane, amongst others. All royalties were donated to a charity for the homeless. The other final Tanjen title was Mesmer, a first novel by Tim Lebbon, in which a man who saw his murdered ex-girlfriend found himself in a world where the dead could live again.

From Britain’s RazorBlade Press, Tim Lebbon’s Faith in the Flesh: The First Law/From Bad Flesh collected two original novellas along with an introduction by Peter Crowther, while The Dreaming Pool by Gary Greenwood contained an introduction by Simon Clark.

The first three titles from new publisher The Designlmage Group were The Darkest Thirst, a trade paperback vampire anthology containing “Sixteen Provocative Tales of the Undead” by such authors as Robert Devereaux and Edo van Belkom; the vampire novelNight Prayers by P. D. Cacek, and Carmilla The Return, Kyle Marffin’s contemporary retelling of J. Sheridan LeFanu’s classic novella, set in Chicago. These were followed by another vampire anthology, The Kiss of Death, containing sixteen stories (three reprint) by Don D’Ammassa and others.

Silver Salamander Press published a collection of thirteen stories (five original) by Lucy Taylor entitled Painted in Blood. From the same imprint, Falling Idols by Brian Hodge was a trade paperback collection of seven stories (two original), available in a signed edition of 500 copies, along with a 300-copy hardcover edition and a 50-copy leatherbound version.

The first publication from Britain’s The Alchemy Press was The Paladin Mandates by Mike Chinn, which collected six stories (three original) about eponymous occult adventurer Damian Paladin, expertly illustrated by Bob Covington. Published as a slim hardcover by Airgedlamh Publications and The Alchemy Press, Shadows of Light and Dark collected thirty-two poems (twenty-one original) by Jo Fletcher in an edition of 250 numbered copies signed by the writer, artist Les Edwards, photographer Seamus A. Ryan, designer Michael Marshall Smith, and Neil Gaiman, who contributed the introduction.

From Boneyard Press, Noise & Other Night Terrors contained seven short stories (one original) and a novel extract by Newton E. Streeter, along with an introduction by Cindie Geddes. New Welsh imprint Oneiros Books published David Conway’s debut collection Metal Sushi, with an introduction by Grant Morrison.

The first in a new series of books published by Mythos Books and collectively titled “The Fan Mythos”,Correlated Contents included six Cthulhu Mythos tales (two original) by James Ambuehl, introduced by Robert M. Price and illustrated by Jeffrey Thomas. Price also edited The Innsmouth Cycle for Chaosium, which contained thirteen stories and three poems.

Published by Armitage House,Delta Green: Alien Intelligence edited by Bob Kruger and John Tynes was an anthology of eight Lovecraftian stories based on the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game.

Leviathan 2: The Legacy of Boccaccio,published by The Ministry of Whimsy Press and edited by Jeff VanderMeer and Rose Secrest, contained four novellas by Richard Calder, Rhys Hughes, L. Timmel Duchamp and Stepan Chapman, interviews with the authors, and an essay about novella writing by David Pringle.

A follow-up to the 1997 anthology, More Monsters from Memphis was published in trade paperback by California’s Zapizdat Publications, once again edited by Beecher Smith. It contained thirty-one stories set in the American south by Brent Monahan, Steve Rasnic Tem, Janet Berliner, Tim Waggoner, Tom Piccirilli, Tina Jens and others, including two by the editor.

Published by Space & Time,Going Postal edited by Gerard Daniel Houarner was an original paperback anthology of eighteen stories and one poem about people going crazy by such authors as Bentley Little, Gordon Linzner, Carlee Jacob, Tom Piccarilli, Melanie Tem, Don Webb and James Dorr. Harvest Tales & Midnight Revels edited by Michael Mayhew contained nineteen horror stories to be read aloud on Halloween night and was published by California’s Bald Mountain Books.

Subterranean Press continued its series of signed and numbered chapbooks with Red Right Hand by Norman Partridge, about a bank heist during the 1930s, and Fugue on a G-String by Peter Crowther (introduction by Ed Gorman), continuing the exploits of hardboiled private eye Kokorian Tate. Two more titles in the series released in time for Halloween were The Night in Fog by David B. Silva and The Keys to D’Espérance by Chaz Brenchley (introduced by Peter Crowther). These were each available in an edition of 250 copies and also twenty-six lettered hardcovers.

Also from Subterranean came Testament: The Unpublished Prologues by David Morrell, in which the author examined the writing of his 1975 thriller. It was available in numbered and lettered editions, both signed. Monsters and Other Stories by small press publisher/editor Richard Chizmar collected six recent tales, introduced by Edward Bryant. Subterranean’s lettered edition also added an essay by Hugh B. Cave.

Candles for Elizabeth was an attractive chapbook from Meisha Merlin Publishing that collected three stories (one original) by Caitlin R. Kiernan, with an introduction by Poppy Z. Brite.

Steve Harris’ Challenging the Wolf from The Squane’s Press was limited to 500 copies and contained the original novelette of the title plus the first chapter from the unpublished novel The Switch.

Dark Raptor Press released chapbooks of Expiry Date by Scottish author Carol Anne Davis, the werewolf tale The Case of the Police Officer’s Cock Ring and the Piano Player Who Had No Fingers by Ed Lee and John Pelan, The Adventures of Threadwell the Tailor or Alterations Made While You Wait by P. D. Cacek, and Yours Truly, Jackie the Stripper by Edo van Belkom. Each was limited to 333 signed copies.

Writhing in Darkness: Part I and Part II were a brace of chapbooks from California’s Dark Regions Press which collected, respectively, nineteen and seventeen pieces of “horrific verse” by Michael Arnzen, with introductions by Wayne Edwards and John Grey. Dark Tales & Light by Bruce Boston was a collection of ten stories from Dark Regions, while Poking the Gun: The Selected Poetry of John Grey contained twenty-eight poems (seven original) along with an introduction by Michael Arnzen and illustrations by Dale L. Sproule. Each was limited to 125 signed copies.

Nice Guys Finish Last was the title of a story by Gary Jonas, which Barnes & Noble Books cut from the anthology 100 Wicked Little Witch Stories. It was rescued by Oklahoma’s Ozark Triangle Press, who published it in chapbook format. From the same imprint also came Jonas’ Curse of the Magazine Killers, a collection of four stories which were sold to markets which subsequently folded before they could publish them.

Britain’s Enigma Press kicked off its series of Enigmatic Novellas chapbooks with Moths by L. H. Maynard and M. P. N. Sims, followed by The Dark Satanic, a collection of two novellas by Paul Finch, and Candlelight Ghost Stories, two traditional ghost stories by Anthony Morris.

11th Hour Productions launched a series of Twilight Tales chapbooks featuring Chicago-area authors with Tales of Forbidden Passion, Dangerous Dames, Strange Creatures and Winter Tales, all edited by Tina L. Jens.

There was not much horror or dark fantasy in the eleven issues of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction published in 1998 under editor Gordon Van Gelder. Novelettes by Joyce Carol Oates and Tanith Lee were the standouts, and there was also fine fiction from Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Ian MacLeod, Ian Watson, Elizabeth Hand, Howard Waldrop and Phyllis Eisenstein. At least Douglas E. Winter’s occasional book review column kept the flag flying for horror.

Edited by David Pringle, Britain’s monthly Interzone continued to showcase some of the best imaginative fiction available, along with articles and reviews. Among the authors featured were Tanith Lee, Paul J. McAuley, Don Webb, Thomas M. Disch, Ian Watson, Gary Couzens, Michael Bishop, Cherry Wilder, John Whitbourn, Gwyneth Jones, Darrell Schweitzer, Ramsey Campbell and Kim Newman, plus interviews with Whitbourn, Jones, Stephen Gallagher, Sarah Ash, Dennis Etchison, John Shirley and Jack Williamson.

Under new publisher DNA Publications, Worlds of Fantasy & Horror changed its name back again to Weird Tales, but it remained a pale imitation of the legendary pulp magazine under the editorship of Darrell Schweitzer. Tanith Lee, Melanie Tem, Ian Watson, David J. Schow, Brian Stableford and S. P. Somtow were among the authors who contributed to the two over-sized issues published in 1998.

Cemetery Dance edited by Richard T. Chizmar included fiction by Thomas Tessier, Nancy A. Collins, Ed Gorman, Gary Raisor, Chaz Brenchley, Hugh B. Cave, Norman Partridge, Jack Ketchum, Poppy Z. Brite, Dennis Etchison, Douglas Clegg, Joe R. Lansdale and Norman Partridge, plus interviews with Tessier, Cave, Brian Hodge, Michael Marshall Smith, Edward Bryant, David Morrell, David B. Silva and Ramsey Campbell. With the tenth anniversary number, the magazine moved from a quarterly to a bi-monthly schedule and expanded its content per issue.

Andy Cox’s glossy quarterly The Third Alternative included new fiction from Conrad Williams, Jason Gould, Rhys Hughes, Christopher Priest, James Lovegrove, Paul Finch, Joel Lane, Steve Rasnic Tem, Jeff VanderMeer and Tom Piccirilli, plus interviews with Priest, Graham Joyce, Jonathan Coe and Joyce Carol Oates. Odyssey edited by Liz Holliday published three issues with fiction by Darrell Schweitzer, Charles Stross, Richard Parks, Roz Kaveney and Ian Watson, interviews with Stephen Baxter and Tim Powers, and an appreciation of the late George Hay by David Langford.

After disappearing in 1994,Amazing Stories, the oldest of the science fiction magazines (created in 1926), was once again resurrected in July, this time by gaming company Wizards of the Coast. Unfortunately, despite an initial print-run of around 75,000 copies, the new contents were mostly limited to media tie-in fiction (including Star Trek), articles and reviews.

In June, Stephen King had a new short story, “That Feeling, You Can Only Say What it is in French” in the Summer Fiction Double Issue of The New Yorker.

The special S/M issue of Barry Hoffman’s Gauntlet: Exploring the Limits of Free Expression included an interview with Clive Barker by Del Howison and fiction by Poppy Z. Brite. The following number featured Howison’s interview with Richard Christian Matheson, a spoof interview with/by Brite, plus short fiction by Matheson and Richard T. Chizmar, and a novel excerpt from editor Hoffman.

Ténèbres: Toutes les couleurs du Fantastique was a new quarterly magazine launched in France that attempted to provide a professional market for fantastic literature. Edited by Daniel Conrad and Benoit Domis, the first three issues included fiction by Jay R. Bonansinga, Les Daniels, Stephen Dedman, Poppy Z. Brite, Christa Faust, Nancy Kilpatrick, John Brunner, Terry Dowling and Kim Newman, along with interviews with Dan Simmons, Brite, Faust, Kilpatrick and Newman.

Omni Online included a round-robin story written by Elizabeth Hand, John Clute, Kathleen Ann Goonan, Kim Newman and Jonathan Lethem, and another collaboration from Kelley Eskridge, Graham Joyce, Edward Bryant and Kathe Koja before the website was closed down in March, following the death of founder Kathy Keeton in 1997. Four former editors of the site, including Ellen Datlow, subsequently launched the new fiction webzineEvent Horizon (http://www.eventhorizon.com/sfzine) five months later with fiction and columns by Terry Dowling, Pat Cadigan, Lucius Shepard, Jack Womack, Edward Bryant and others. Another round-robin story by Jay Russell, Elizabeth Massie, Roberta Lannes and Brian Hodge appeared over the November and December issues.

The March issue of the Book and Magazine Collector contained an overview of the career of “R. Chetwynd-Hayes: Master of the Macabre” by David Whitehead, along with a very useful bibliography and a guide to the current values of the author’s first editions. The same issue also included articles on “Arthur Conan Doyle and the Paranormal”, “Aubrey Beardsley and The Savoy” and the usual pages of bookseller ads. The annual SF, fantasy and horror issue of AB Bookman’s Weekly in October featured a profile of Lord Dunsany by Henry Wessells, along with reviews and book dealer ads.

Dean Koontz was the featured writer in the December issue of Publisher’s Weekly’s The Author Series twenty-page supplement. During an informative interview with Jeff Zaleski, Koontz revealed that his presidency of the Horror Writers of America would haunt him forever, and that he resigned his office because of excessive political infighting in the organisation, particularly over awards. “I’ve written some horror,” the author also admitted, “but I don’t like horror.”

Edited monthly by Frederick S. Clarke and Steve Biodrowski, the always-excellent Cinefantastique included in-depth features on Tomorrow Never Dies, Blade, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Lost in Space, Species II, The X Files movie, Mulan, Virus, Mighty Joe Young, and double-issues based around The Outer Limits, The X Files and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

Tim and Donna Lucas’ indispensable Video Watchdog kept to its bi-monthly standard with features on David Lynch’s Lost Highway, The Lathe of Heaven, the Evil Dead trilogy, the awful Starship Troopers, Dracula on video, and director Ulli Lommel, along with Douglas E. Winter’s soundtrack column and all the news and reviews expected from one of the most intelligent and entertaining magazines in the field.

Edited by Dave Golder, the glossy monthly multi-media magazine SFX devoted cover features to Starship Troopers, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The X Files, Lost in Space, Godzilla, Star Wars, The Truman Show, Highlander: The Raven, Uma Thurman, former Doctor Who Tom Baker and the top twenty sexiest people in SF!

Over at Visual Imagination, David Richardson’s Starhurst concentrated on science fiction with Starship Troopers, Lost in Space, Babylon 5, Deep Impact, Godzilla, Star Trek: Insurrection, Armageddon, Star Trek: Voyager, Deep Space Nine and the inevitable Las Vegas’s Star Trek: The Experience. Meanwhile, David Miller’s companion horror title Shivers celebrated its 50th issue and featured The X Files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Scream 2, Wishmaster, John Carpenter’s Vampires, Species II, Halloween H20 and Blade.

Sci-Fi Entertainment, the official magazine of the Sci-Fi Channel, was just one of a growing number of titles edited by Scott Edelman. It included features on The X Files, Babylon 5, Sliders, Lost in Space, Xena Warrior Princess, Godzilla, Armageddon, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Stargate SG-1, 7 Days, Mercy Point and various Star Trek movies and TV shows, along with British and American news and numerous ads.

The 16 October issue of the film magazine Entertainment Weekly contained a surprisingly knowledgeable list of “The Sci-Fi 100” (from Star Wars at No. 1 to Independence Day at No. 100), along with some interesting sidebar features.

Despite some administration problems, Necronomicon Press continued to churn out numerous small press booklets, mostly dedicated to H. P. Lovecraft and his fiction. Robert M. Price’s Crypt of Cthulhu reached its 100th edition and along the way published a special Lin Carter issue commemorating the tenth anniversary of his death, which included an early story by the author and other tribute fiction.

Price also published HPL-inspired fiction and poetry in three issues each of Cthulhu Codex (featuring James Ambuehl, D. F. Lewis, Darrell Schweitzer and Richard L. Tierney), Midnight Shambler (with Adam Niswander, James Ambuehl, Stephen M. Rainey and Darrell Schweitzer), and Tales of Lovecraftian Horror (including W. H. Pugmire, Gary Myers, R. G. Capella and Peter Cannon).

S. T. Joshi edited three issues each of Lovecraft Studies and The New Lovecraft Collector (featuring Lovecraft news and releases around the world, including Joshi’s ongoing series “The Works of H. P. Lovecraft: A Listing by Magazine”), plus an issue of Studies in Weird Fiction with articles on Clive Barker, H. P. Lovecraft and Frank B. Long, and Richard Matheson.

Knowledgeably edited by Stefan Dziemianowicz, S. T. Joshi and Michael A. Morrison, Necronomicon’s quarterly Necrofile: The Review of Horror Fiction featured reviews by, amongst others, Brian Stableford, Chet Williamson, Peter Cannon and the editors, Ramsey Campbell’s regular offbeat column, and an opinion piece by Stephen Jones.

Peter Enfantino and John Scoleri’s BaremBones continued with articles about The X Files novels, interviews with cover artist Richard S. Prather and horror host Bob Wilkins, an index to Tales of the Frightened magazine, a look at the career of schlock director Jerry Warren, plus lots of other fascinating stuff.

Stuart Hughes and David Bell commemorated the eighth year of publishing their quarterly small press horror magazine Peeping Tom with stories by Stephen Gallagher, Steve Harris, D. F. Lewis, M.M. O’Driscoll, Derek Fox, Gavin Williams, Nicholas Royle, Chico Kidd and others.

Subtitled “A Magazine of Science Fiction & Dark Fantasy”, Patrick and Honna Swenson’s very professional-looking quarterly Talebones reached its thirteenth issue and included fiction and poetry by Stefano Donati, Trey R. Barker, Uncle River, Bruce Boston, Hugh Cook, Mary Soon Lee, Mark McLaughlin, Tom Piccirilli and Don D’Ammassa, interviews with Spider Robinson, Bill Ransom, Jack Cady and K. W. Jeter, plus book reviews by Ed Bryant and Janna Silverstein.

Also sporting a full-colour cover, Indigenous Fiction edited by Sherry Decker made its debut in August with fiction and poetry by Steve Lockley, James S. Dorr and others, plus an interview with Jeff VanderMeer.

Graeme Hurry’s neatly designed Kimota published two special issues, dedicated to SF and horror, featuring fiction by Joel Lane, Paul Finch, Peter Crowther, David Sutton, D. F. Lewis, Stephen Bowkett and Derek M. Fox, along with an interview with Peter Hamilton and an article by Ramsey Campbell. The tenth issue of Mark McLaughlin’s The Urbanite was published at Halloween and included fiction and poetry by W. H. Pugmire, John Pelan, Paul Pinn, Marni Scofidio Griffin and Caitlin R. Kiernan, based around the theme “On Whom the Pale Moon Gleams”, while Gordon Linzner’s twice-yearly Space and Time featured fiction by A. R. Morlan and Charlee Jacob.

Pendragon Publications’ Penny Dreadful: Tales and Poems of Fantastic Terrors included work from John B. Ford, James S. Dorr and editor Michael Pendragon.

Writer and editor John B. Ford continued to build his small press publishing empire with Ghouls & Gore & Twisted Tales, a collection of fourteen stories illustrated by Steve Lines, and The Derelict of Death, a William Hope Hodgson pastiche co-written with Simon Clark. He also edited the final two issues of Terror Tales, featuring stories by Michael Pendragon, Paul Finch, Derek M. Fox and L. H. Maynard and M. P. N. Sims.

Mick Sims and Len Maynard also launched their own supernatural ghost and horror story magazine, Enigmatic Tales. The three perfect-bound issues featured fiction and poetry by John B. Ford, Bernard Capes, Paul Finch, Rhys Hughes, Steve Sneyd, A. F. Kidd, Peter Tennant and the editors, along with articles by Hugh Lamb and Richard Dalby.

The first volume of Steve Algieri’s Pulp Eternity was a time-travel issue, with fiction by Cynthia Ward, Christopher Rowe and others. Published back-to-back, Dark Regions/The Year’s Best Fantastic Fiction edited by Joe Morey and Morey and Mike Olson, respectively, featured fiction and poetry by Brian Lumley, Brian Hodge and Bruce Boston. The ninth issue of Rod Heather’s Lore included fiction from Stefan Grabinski, W. H. Pugmire and Elizabeth Massie, while the fourth issue of Epitaph; Tales of Dark Fantasy & Horror edited by Tom Piccirilli included an interview with Melanie Tern.

D. E. Davidson’s Night Terrors celebrated its second anniversary with two issues that contained fiction by Hugh B. Cave and Don D’Ammassa. Canadian book dealer Raymond Alexander also included a new story by Cave in his first My Back Pages “magalog”.

There were two issues of Dreams of Decadence: Vampire Poetry and Fiction edited by Angela Kessler, and Vampire Dan’s Story Emporium edited by Daniel Paul Medici featured interviews with Janet Fox and Jim Baen.

The premiere issue of Masque Noir from editor Rod Marsden billed itself as “The New Wave of Australian Avant-Garde”. Meanwhile, Eidolon 25–26 appeared a bit late, with stories by Terry Dowling and Rick Kennett, and Aurealis managed just one issue in 1998. Altair was the title of a new Australian speculative magazine edited and published by Rob Stevenson.

Issue 45 of Joe R. Christopher’s Niekas was a special “Dark Fantasy” number with essays about Stephen King, H. P. Lovecraft and others by such contributors as Mike Ashley, S. T. Joshi, Sam Moskowitz and Darrell Schweitzer (who was also interviewed). Issue 72 of Foundation: The Review of Science Fiction edited by Edward James included an article about Suzy McKee Charnas plus an interview with the author.

The 9th issue of Horror Magazine from Dark Regions Press featured interviews with Joe R. Lansdale, Yvonne Navarro, Darrell Schweitzer and Suzy McKee Charnas, plus a report on the 1997 World Horror Convention.

Still the leading news and reviews magazine of the F&SF field, Locus celebrated its 30th year of publication with interviews with Tim Powers, Tanith Lee, Joan Aiken, S. P. Somtow, Stephen Baxter, Paul J. McAuley, Nelson Bond, Lucy Taylor, P. D. Cacek, Peter Straub and many others. Andrew I. Porter’s news and reviews magazine Science Fiction Chronicle managed only five issues in 1998 (one up on the previous year), and included interviews with Charles L. Grant and Tanya Huff.

The Ghost Story Society’s excellent journal All Hallows published three perfect-bound editions edited by Barbara Roden and Christopher Roden that contained stories by Rhys Hughes, Paul Finch, Tina Rath and Simon MacCulloch. They also included reviews, news columns and non-fiction by Roger Dobson, Richard Dalby, David G. Rowlands and others about The Twilight Zone, Charles L. Grant, Robert Aickman, Arthur Conan Doyle, and The Innocents.

Given a welcome re-design by editor Debbie Bennett, The British Fantasy Society’s bi-monthly newsletter,Prism UK, featured articles by Mark Chadbourn, Mike Chinn, Meg Turville-Heitz, Simon Clark and Stephen Gallagher, interviews with Whitley Streiber, Peter Atkins, Graham Joyce and Stephen King, and regular columns from Nicholas Royle, Tom Holt and Chaz Brenchley, along with all the usual news and book and media reviews. Dark Horizons No. 37 was edited and produced for the Society by Peter Coleborn, Mike Chinn and Phil Williams and included fiction from Simon MacCulloch, Rick Cadger, Paul Finch, Mark McLaughlin and D. F. Lewis, plus an article by Storm Constantine. The BFS also published its first major paperback and hardback release, Manitou Man: The Worlds of Graham Masterton by Graham Masterton, Ray Clark and Matt Williams. Containing ten tales of sex, death and terror (three original), a critical analysis of the author and a complete Masterton bibliography, the book was limited to a 300-copy paperback edition and a 100-copy deluxe cased edition signed by the three authors plus cover artist Les Edwards, illustrator Bob Covington, editor David J. Howe, and Peter James, who supplied the introduction.

The Horror Writers Association Newsletter finally found its direction under editor Meg Turville-Heitz, appearing on schedule and with each issue packed with news, controversy and a lively letters column.

Issue 16 was the final edition of Aaron Sterns’ Severed Head: The Journal of the Australian Horror Writers, as AHW president Bryce Stevens decided to close down the organisation in February because of lack of finances.

The Governing Body of Britain’s The Vampyre Society agreed unanimously to wind down the Society in 1998. The action was taken following the resignation of six committee members in April. Meanwhile, The Vampire Guild continued to publish Crimson, which included an interview with Stephen Laws and an article on Mexico’s mythical Chupacabra.

Issue 8 of That’s Clive! the magazine of the official German Clive Barker fanclub, included interviews with Barker (who also contributed several pieces of artwork) and Peter Atkins, articles about Stephen Jones and the H. R. Giger museum, plus related news and reviews. An irregularly-published news magazine about Stephen King and his work, editor George Beahm’s Phantasmagoria changed its format with the eighth issue to a larger, more-easily readable layout, with extra photos and content.

George Beahm also published the non-fiction study Stephen King from A to Z: An Encyclopedia of His Life and Work, with an introduction by Michael R. Collings and illustrated with photos, movie stills and artwork. Stephen King: America’s Best-Loved Bogeyman was yet another biography of the author by Beahm, with an introduction by Stephen J. Spignesi plus sixteen pages of photos.

Spignesi’s own The Lost Work of Stephen King: A Guide to Unpublished Manuscripts, Story Fragments, Alternative Versions, and Oddities included more scrapings from the bottom of the barrel, published by Carol Publishing/Birch Lane Press. Part of the Chelsea House Modern Critical Views series, Stephen King edited by Harold Bloom collected fifteen essays about the author and his work by Clive Barker, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro and others, along with a bibliography.

Published by Borgo Press,Scaring Us to Death: The Impact of Stephen King on Popular Culture was a significantly expanded and updated second edition of a 1987 book by Michael R. Collings. Also from Borgo, Tony Magistrale substantially revised and updated his 1991 Starmount book The Shining Reader as Discovering Stephen King’s The Shining.

Discovering Dean Koontz edited by Bill Munster was Borgo’s revised edition of the 1988 volume Sudden Fear, collecting ten critical essays by Richard Laymon, Elizabeth Massie and others, with an introduction by Tim Powers and an afterword by Joe R. Lansdale.

Joy Dickinson’s travel guide Haunted City: An Unauthorized Guide to the Magical, Magnificent New Orleans of Anne Rice was published in a revised and updated edition. Manly Wade Wellman: The Gentleman from Chapel Hill: A Working Bibliography was the third updated edition of the booklet from Galactic Central Publications edited by Phil Stephensen-Payne and Gordon Benson, Jr.

Joan Kane Nichols’ Mary Shelley: Frankenstein’s Creator: First Science Fiction Writer was a young adult biography, while Betty T. Bennett’s Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley: An Introduction was aimed at older readers who wanted to discover more about the woman who wrote Frankenstein.

A series of critical essays about the author of “The Yellow Wallpaper” were collected in A Very Different Story: Studies on the Fiction of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, edited by Val Gough and Jill Rudd for Liverpool University Press.

California’s Night Shade Books published The Necronomicon Files: The Truth Behind The Legend edited by Daniel M. Harms and John Wisdom Gonce III, which collected essays about the history and rumours surrounding H. P. Lovecraft’s fictional book of magic. Along the same lines, Armitage House offered Fred L. Pelton’s A Guide to the Cthulhu Cult, supposedly written in 1946 by a delusional paranoid. A revised and expanded second edition of Encyclopedia Cthulhiana by Daniel Harms was a reference guide to H. P. Lovecraft’s Mythos from Chaosium.

Published by Deadline Press, A Writer’s Tale was an autobiographical volume in which Richard Laymon talked about his experiences writing and publishing within the horror genre.

In Northern Dreamers: Interviews with Famous Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror Writers, editor Edo van Belkon interviewed twenty-two fellow Canadian authors, including Nancy Baker, Charles de Lint, Candas Jane Dorsey, Phyllis Gotlieb, Tanya Huff, Nancy Kilpatrick and Robert Charles Wilson.

Reflections on Dracula: Ten Essays by Elizabeth Miller appeared from Transylvania Press, Piercing the Darkness: Undercover with Vampires in America Today was a revealing look at contemporary underground vampire culture by Katherine Rams-land, and The Vampire: A Casebook was an academic study of the legends, edited by Alan Dundes.

From Scarecrow Press, Vampire Readings: An Annotated Bibliography by Patricia Altner covered almost 800 items and was indexed by author and title, while The Vampire Gallery: A Who’s Who of the Undead was a guide to bloodsuckers from the past two centuries by the often unreliable Gordon J. Melton.

St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost, and Gothic Writers edited by David Pringle looked at more than 440 fiction authors, arranged alphabetically with an emphasis on the 20th century. Mike Ashley and Brian Stableford were contributing editors, and there was an introduction by Dennis Etchison.

In Screams of Reason: Mad Science and Modern Culture, David J. Skal explored the concept of the mad scientist in literature and the media, while Marina Warner’s No Go the Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling and Making Mock was a critical look at figures of terror from fairy tales to horror fiction.

Edited by Clive Bloom, Gothic Horror: A Reader’s Guide from Poe to King and Beyond contained more than thirty excerpts and essays on horror by Poe, Freud, Barker and others, including a chronology of “Significant Horror and Ghost Tales” and a selected bibliography. Susan Jennifer Navarette looked at 19th century literature and society in The Shape of Fear: Horror and the Fin de Siecle Culture of Decadence.

Waterstone’s Guide to Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror turned out to be an idiosyncratic reference work edited by staff members Paul Wake, Steve Andrews and Ariel for the British bookstore chain. Despite such contributors as Stephen Baxter, Ramsey Campbell, John Clute, Neil Gaiman and Anne McCaffrey, and the inclusion of an interview with Michael Marshall Smith, the book contained some curious omissions.

A decade after the original volume appeared, Carroll & Graf reprinted a revised and updated edition of the Bram Stoker Award-winning Horror: 100 Best Books edited by Stephen Jones and Kim Newman.

Part of Visible Ink Press’ seemingly never-ending series of movie reference guides, Videohound’s Horror Show: 999 Hair-Raising, Hellish and Humorous Movies by Mike Mayo included an alphabetical listing of reviews and special “Hound Salutes”. The Sci-Fi Channel Encyclopedia of TV Science Fiction was a guide to various series from the past five decades by Roger Fulton and John Betancourt.

The Avengers: The Making of the Movie by Dave Rogers was certainly more interesting than the film it was promoting, as was The Official Godzilla Compendium: A 40-Year Retrospective by J. D. Lees and Marc Cerasini, which appeared in time to tie-in with the big-budget remake.

“They’re Here. ” Invasion of the Body Snatchers: A Tribute contained essays about the classic 1956 SF movie by Stephen King, Tom Piccirilli and others with an introduction by Dean Koontz. It was edited by the film’s star, Kevin McCarthy, and Ed Gorman.

The Making of The X-Files was an illustrated look at the creation of the feature film by Jody Duncan, while I Want to Believe: The Official Guide to The X-Files was the third in a series of illustrated episode guides by Andy Meisler.

Christopher Golden and Nancy Holder’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Watcher’s Guide, the official companion to the hit show, was a confusingly-designed look at the first two seasons, complete with background information and an exclusive interview with creator Joss Whedon. However, Buffy X-Posed by Ted Edwards was an unauthorised biography of actress Sarah Michelle Gellar that also included an episode guide plus black-and-white-photos.

All I Need to Know About Filmmaking I Learned from The Toxic Avenger by Lloyd Kaufman and James Gunn was the former’s autobiography and charted the history of his Troma distributing company. At the other end of the spectrum, James Whale: A New World of Gods and Monsters by James Curtis was a biography of the famed Hollywood director.

McFarland’s expensive reference works included Of Gods and Monsters: A Critical Guide to Universal Studio’s Science Fiction, Horror and Mystery Films 1929–1939 by John T. Soister, Italian Horror Films of the 1960s: A Critical Catalogue of 62 Chillers, an A-Z guide by Lawrence McCallum, and Tom Weaver’s Science Fiction and Fantasy Film Flashbacks: Conversations with 24 Actors, Writers, Producers and Directors from the Golden Age, which included interviews with John Badham, Edward Dmytryk and Debra Paget.

From the same publisher came John Kenneth Muir’s Wes Craven: The Art of Horror, while Brian J. Robb’s Screams & Nightmares: The Films of Wes Craven appeared from Titan Books.

Batman: Animated by Paul Dini and Chip Kidd was a beautifully produced, full-colour look at the stylised TV cartoon series based on the classic DC Comics character.

Also superbly designed by Chip Kidd, Superman: The Complete History: The Life and Times of the Man of Steel was impeccably researched by Les Daniels.

From Collectors Press, Pulp Culture: The Art of Fiction Magazines was a marvellously illustrated history of pulp magazines edited by the knowledgeable Frank M. Robinson and Lawrence Davidson and featuring full-colour reproductions of more than 400 mint-condition covers. It was also available as a limited edition hardcover.

William Gibson contributed the introduction to The Art of the X-Files edited by Marvin Heiferman and Carole Kismaric. The Haunted Tea Cozy was Edward Gorey’s very strange reworking of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.

Published by Morpheus International, Barlowe’s Inferno contained various personal views of Hell by artist Wayne Barlowe, with an introduction by Tanith Lee, and The Fantastic Art of Beksinski collected the paintings of Polish artist Zdzislaw Beksinski. Also from Morpheus, H. R. Giger’s Retrospective: 1964–1984 was a translation of a 1984 German edition, covering two decades of the artist’s work.

For Underwood Books, Arnie Fenner and Cathy Fenner edited Icon: A Retrospective Collection by the Grand Master of Fantastic Art, the single largest collection of Frank Frazetta’s work ever published. It also included text by Rick Berry, James Bama and William Stout, along with an illustrated biography. Besides the trade edition, it was published in a deluxe slipcased edition of 1,200 copies containing an extra sixteen pages of art, and as a $300 leatherbound traycased edition of 100 copies which included an unpublished Frazetta drawing. Also from Underwood and edited by the Fenners, Spectrum 5: The Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art included more than 300 pieces of art from over 180 artists, selected by a jury system. The only hardcover edition appeared from the Science Fiction Book Club.

From Mythos Books came The Lovecraft Tarot, a handsome-looking set of seventy-eight illustrated cards by David Wynn and illustrator D. L. Hutchinson, accompanied by a ten-page booklet. A $20 °CD-ROM compilation of the complete archives of Heavy Metal magazine was withdrawn from sale when a number of contributors complained that they had not been notified about the project nor offered any compensation for the re-use of their work.

Night of the Living Dead co-author John A. Russo and composer/computer artist Vlad Licina launched Midnight Comics in November. The imprint kicked off with Children of the Dead, a three-issue mini-series by Steven Hughes, Phil Nutman and John Russo, based on a proposed film written by Russo, that examined the lives of a “special” group of youngsters born during the zombie plague. A special CD soundtrack was composed and recorded for the series by Vlad and The Dark Theater.

Winter’s Edge II, a special from DC Comics/Vertigo, featured a new story about Death written by Neil Gaiman and illustrated by Jeffrey Jones, plus stories by other hands featuring the Golden Age Sandman Wesley Dodds, John Constantine, Tim Hunter and several more characters. Meanwhile, artist Yoshitaka Amano produced a new Sandman poster as part of the tenth anniversary of Gaiman’s character.

Dark Horse comics launched a new series based on the popular TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer, written by Andi Watson and illustrated by Joe Bennett. As a special promotion, a five-page colour Buffy strip scripted by Christopher Golden appeared exclusively in the 21–27 November issue of TV Guide. Along with its ongoing regular series, Dark Horse also published a three-issue Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Origin mini-series, based on Joss Whedon’s 1992 movie, from the creative team of Dan Brereton, Golden and Bennett.

Also from Dark Horse came The Curse of Dracula, a three-part series in which veterans Marv Wolfman and Gene Colan (reunited from Marvel’s Tomb of Dracula two decades earlier) teamed up for a contemporary version of Stoker’s story. The same publisher also revived its licence for The Terminator, written by Alan Grant and illustrated by Steve Pugh.

Image’s new Cliffhanger imprint added Crimson to the lineup, which was artist Humberto Ramos’ unique look at vampires, and Britain’s Games Workshop launched a series of black and white Warhammer comics set in the popular fantasy gaming world.

At the 70th Academy Awards presentation in Los Angeles, James Cameron’s overblown Titanic (which features a supernatural coda) tied with the Oscar record set by Ben-Hur (1959), picking up mostly technical awards for Visual Effects, Sound Effects Editing, Sound, Original Score, Film Editing, Costume Design, Cinematography, Art Direction, Director and Best Picture. Rick Baker and David LeRoy collected the Make-up award for their work on Men in Black.

To celebrate a century of American films, in 1998 the American Film Institute created a highly controversial list of the 100 Best American Movies, based on the recommendations of a 1,500 member panel, including President Bill Clinton.Citizen Kane was voted the top film, but the list was so skewed towards contemporary titles that Steven Spielberg was the most chosen director and nothing by Buster Keaton, Greta Garbo or Fred Astaire was even listed. Only nineteen of the final 100 were genre titles: 6: The Wizard of Oz; 11: It’s a Wonderful Life; 12: Sunset Boulevard; 15: Star Wars; 18: Psycho; 22:2001: A Space Odyssey; 25: E. T. The Extra-Terrestrial; 26: Dr. Strangelove; 43: King Kong (1933); 46: A Clockwork Orange; 48: Jaws; 49: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs; 58: Fantasia; 60: Raiders of the Lost Ark; 61: Vertigo; 64: Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 65: The Silence of the Lambs; 67: The Manchurian Candidate, and 87:Frankenstein (1931).

Starring Vince Vaughn as the nutty Norman Bates and Anne Heche as his shower victim, director Gus Van Sant’s superfluous colour remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho was quickly forgotten. However, ten years after the murder by strangulation of actress Myra Davis (the voice of Norman Bates’s mother and Janet Leigh’s body double in the Hitchcock original), Los Angeles detectives used DNA evidence to charge a 31-year-old man with her death and with another, similar killing.

Jamie Lee Curtis returned as Laurie Strode, once again menaced by Michael Myers’ homicidal Shape in Halloween H20, based on a treatment by Kevin Williamson. The title actually celebrated the series’ twentieth anniversary and had nothing to do with water. Meanwhile, police in Riverside, California, reported that a 15-year-old boy claimed that the character of Myers from the latest sequel directed him to stab and strangle a 62-year-old woman who was babysitting other children in his home. The boy, who was found with the knife believed to have been used in the attack, was arrested and placed in a facility for psychiatric observation.

Survivor Jennifer Love Hewitt and her friends found themselves on a vacation from Hell as they were stalked by the hook-handed killer of the derivative sequel I Still Know What You Did Last Summer. Disturbing Behaviour should have been called The Stepford Kids as bad teenagers were turned into “A” students by an experimental psychiatric facility, and more stupid teens were bumped off by an unseen serial killer in Urban Legend. Scott Reynolds’ The Ugly was a gruesome serial-killer story set in New Zealand, while Neil Jordan’s The Butcher Boy was based on the novel by Patrick McCabe.

Scriptwriter Kevin Williamson once again plundered the past and rehashed some old movie plots for Robert Rodriguez’s The Faculty, in which a group of teen students discovered that their teachers were really body-stealing aliens.

The most successful film of the year was Armageddon, starring Bruce Willis, Ben Affleck and Steve Buscemi. Despite being overlong and filled with clichés, Michael Bay’s big-budget disaster movie worked, thanks to memorable characters, strong performances and superb special effects as a team of oilworkers were sent into space to destroy a huge asteroid that was on a collision course with Earth. Mimi Leder’s Deep Impact covered similar ground, as a comet hit the Earth, causing a giant tidal wave which decimated the American east coast and thankfully drowned star Tea Leoni.

Despite a massive publicity campaign in America, the huge boxoffice take for Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin’s misguided $120 million reworking of Godzilla was still considered a disappointment. Daily Variety reported that the film had trouble in Japan as well. Even though it broke records there when 500,000 people turned out to see it on the opening day, ticket sales dropped considerably during the second week.

In Stephen Sommers’s underrated Deep Rising, the likeable Treat Williams found himself unwittingly involved in a raid on a cruise ship and discovered that most of the crew and passengers had been killed by giant flesh-eating worms from the ocean depths. Ron Underwood’s remake of the 1949 RKO movie Mighty Joe Young also used some impressive special effects to bring the eponymous fifteen-foot ape to life.

The X Files movie followed on directly from the fifth season of the TV series, as FBI agents Mulder and Scully (David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson) finally uncovered what was really behind all the conspiracies and cover-ups. It also included a flying saucer climax that was straight out of The Thing from Another World (1951).

Alex Proyas’ wonderfully noir-ish Dark City involved Rufus Sewell as a man framed as a serial killer who discovered that he and everyone else were living in outer space, where a dying race of alien “Strangers” (who looked like Clive Barker creations) possessed the bodies of the dead and could stop time.

A big opening weekend for the fast, flashy and violent vampire action movie Blade, based on the Marvel Comics character, quickly led to rumours of a sequel to again star Wesley Snipes as the moody half-undead, half-human killing machine. The arty Wisdom of Crocodiles starred Jude Law as a psychic vampire who fed off the positive emotions that existed in his victims’ blood streams, while John Carpenter’s Vampires, based on John Steakley’s 1990 novel, was one of the director’s worst movies, thanks to a dumb script (Don Jakoby), laughable performances (especially James Woods), unconvincing special effects and the obvious low budget. Even so, it was still way ahead of Razor Blade Smile, a woefully cheap-looking vampire thriller that simply didn’t have the talent or budget to match the high concepts of 26-year-old writer/director Jake West. It also marked a sad end to the career of actor David Warbeck.

As Death, Brad Pitt took a holiday in the interminable Meet Joe Black. Based on the novel by Richard Matheson, Robin Williams had a colourful look at the after-life in What Dreams May Come, and Michael Keaton came back from the dead to revisit his children as a silly-looking snowman in Frost.

Al Pacino’s Satanic John Milton hired hotshot lawyer Keanu Reeves for his Manhattan law firm in The Devil’s Advocate, based on the novel by Andrew Neiderman. Denzel Washington played a detective attempting to catch a body-hopping demonic killer in Fallen, and Universal successfully revived its killer-doll franchise with Bride of Chucky, in which the possessed plaything was reanimated by voodoo and teamed up with his sexy psychopath girlfriend played by Jennifer Tilly.

An adaptation of Christopher Bram’s superior gay novel Father of Frankenstein, Bill Condon’s Gods and Monsters was an over-long and occasionally plodding look at the final months of retired film director James Whale, expertly played by Ian McKellan. McKellan also appeared as a former Nazi being blackmailed by a 16-year-old student in Bryan Singer’s Apt Pupil, based on the story by Stephen King.

Based on the novel by executive producer Dean Koontz, Phantoms starred Peter O’Toole and Ben Affleck investigating a small town where a blob monster had caused everyone to disappear.

Produced by star Oprah Winfrey,Beloved was a Civil War ghost story that flopped at the boxoffice. Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman played witchy sisters looking for love inPractical Magic, and the long-delayed Spanish film Killer Tongue involved a woman infected by an alien rock.

Natasha Henstridge returned as a sexy alien shape-changer still looking to get laid in the laughable Species II. Star Trek: Insurrection, the third film to feature The Next Generation crew, suffered from a weak storyline but did include an evil race of facelifting aliens, and Kurt Russell battled a cyborg warrior on another planet in the futuristic flop Soldier.

Joe Dante’s subversive dark comedy Small Soldiers was set in a small town which became a battleground for voice-activated toys fitted with munitions chips.

Vincenzo Natali’s student film Cube resembled an overlong Twilight Zone episode, as a group of strangers found themselves trapped in a endless maze of interlocking cubes, some of which contained lethal traps. In Sphere, based on the novel by Michael Crichton, Sharon Stone, Dustin Hoffman and Samuel L. Jackson discovered an alien artifact underwater which gave them the power to unconsciously manifest their dark sides.

Lost in Space starring William Hurt, Gary Oldman, Matt LeBlanc and Mimi Rogers was loosely based on the 1960s TV show about the space family Robinson. Supposedly inspired by the same period, Jeremiah Chechik’s The Avengers was an incompetent travesty of the cult sci-spy show, with Ralph Fiennes and Uma Thurman lacking any screen chemistry as John Steed and Mrs. Peel, and Sean Connery hamming it up as the villain. It reportedly lost $40 million and became the third biggest boxoffice disaster of all time after Inchon and Heaven’s Gate.

It was hard to believe that yet another version of The Phantom of the Opera, starring a maskless Julian Sands, was the movie Italian cinemagoers said they wanted to see from co-writer/ director Dario Argento.

The anniversary re-release of William Friedkin’s 1973 classic The Exorcist in Britain meant extra business for the clergy, who were inundated with requests for spiritual guidance from moviegoers overwhelmed by the experience. BBC Radio 4 also broadcast a half-hour programme entitled Lucifer Rising — 25 Years of “The Exorcist”, in which journalist Mark Kermode interviewed writer William Peter Blatty and director William Friedkin.

Although it didn’t have much to do with the author, Bram Stoker’s Shadowbuilder was quite an impressive direct-to-video horror thriller involving a black magic demon that used the dark to kill off its victims. Don Coscarelli reworked his 1979 film again as Phantasm IV, once more featuring Angus Scrimm as the Tall Man, and Christopher Walken returned as the psychopathic angel Gabriel in Prophecy 2. Ahmet Zappa, David Carradine and Fred Williamson all turned up in Ethan Wiley’s Children of the Corn V: Fields of Terror.

Curse of the Puppetmaster and Subspecies 4 were the latest entries in executive producer Charles Band’s direct-to-video series, while Frankenstein Reborn! and Werewolf Reborn! were the first two titles in Band’s Filmonsters! series aimed at teenagers.

Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island was an enjoyable direct-to-video cartoon feature in which the cowardly dog and his pals met up with some scary E. C. Comics-style zombies, however Addams Family Reunion was a disappointing video entry in the live-action series, with Tim Curry and Daryl Hannah taking over the roles of Gomez and Morticia.

With his daughter Sara Jane and co-stars Adrienne Corri and Christopher Lee among those present on November 23rd, an English Heritage Blue Plaque was unveiled at the birthplace of horror film star Boris Karloff, who was born William Henry Pratt in Peckham, south London, in 1887.

Steve Barron’s Merlin was a magical TV mini-series that looked at the myths and legends of Arthurian Britain from the perspective of the eponymous sorcerer (Sam Neill) and other supernatural characters. Peter Benchley’s Creature was another fun mini-series, in which scientist Craig T. Nelson and his family encountered a mutated monster land shark, created during the Vietnam war and accidently released by treasure hunters.

A series of underwater earthquakes released a family of mutated salamanders that had grown to gigantic proportions in Gargantua, a cable TV monster movie made without any sophistication by Bradford May. Wes Craven “presented” Don’t Look Down, a Halloween TV movie in which Megan Ward played a reporter afraid of heights.

Stephen Tompkinson was the wimpy hero who uncovered a plot by a mysterious pharmaceutical company to develop a drug that caused those who took it to share their thoughts in the three-part series Oktober, based on the novel by writer/director Stephen Gallagher.

When a million year-old giant artifact was discovered in hyperspace, writer/executive producer J. Michael Straczynski reworked familiar themes from both H. P. Lovecraft and Nigel Kneale into Babylon 5: Thirdspace, the second in a series of TV movies based on the SF show, and David Hasselhoff certainly looked the part as special agent Nick Fury in the TV movie based on the Marvel Comics character. When dubbed scientist Udo Kier predicted that sun spots would result in the Earth experiencing a new ice age, various west coast characters whined and panicked as it got cold in the count-the-cliches disaster movie Ice.

Veteran Debbie Reynolds played a witchy grandmother who had to stop an evil warlock from returning the powers of darkness to the colourful world of ghosts and monsters in the Disney TV movie Halloweentown.

The best genre show to debut during the 1998 TV season was the Fox Network’s grim Brimstone, in which Peter Horton played dead police officer Ezekiel Stone who made a deal with the Devil (John Glover) to return to Earth and recover 113 escaped souls from Hell. Unfortunately, it was soon cancelled.

Meanwhile, the Wes Craven/Shaun Cassidy series Hollyweird, which was also being prepared for a fall debut on Fox, was never aired after the network decided to make some major changes in the show, including bringing in an all-new cast. It was supposed to be about three midwest teenagers who brought their local-access cable TV show about unsolved murders and bizarre nightlife to Hollywood.

At least Buffy the Vampire Slayer continued to build upon its solid fan base with strong characterizations and surprisingly dark stories, as the high school vampire-hunter (Sarah Michelle Gellar) and her friends discovered that Willow’s new boyfriend Oz was the werewolf terrorizing Sunnydale; a jealous science student used a potion to turn himself into the kind of man he thought his girlfriend wanted him to be; a Nigerian demon mask belonging to Buffy’s mother brought the recently dead back as homicidal zombies; an experimental DNA process had the side-effect of turning school swim-team members into monstrous gill-men, and Buffy’s undead boyfriend Angel (David Boreanaz) escaped after spending centuries in Hell, only to be confronted by his many victims.

Buffy cast members also selected their all-time favourite music videos on the 1998 MTV Halloween special, Videos That Don’t Suck, which also included a behind-the-scenes look at the series, and Fox Consumer Products announced its own Buffy clothing line aimed at teenage girls.

Chris Carter’s phenomenally popular The X Files came up with a couple of scary episodes amongst the usual aliens and conspiracy plots. In “Folie a Deux” a man holding his colleagues as hostages tried to convince Mulder (David Duchovny) that his boss was really a mind-clouding insectoid monster that had been turning its victims into blank-eyed zombies, while in “Bad Blood” Mulder was accused of staking a pizza delivery boy because he believed he was a vampire. As the surprise ending revealed, the whole trailer park community was made up of the glowing-eyed undead. Unfortunately, the killer doll episode “Chinga”, co-scripted by Stephen King and creator Carter, turned out to be a big disappointment.

Lance Henriksen’s Frank Black had little more than a cameo in the best Millennium episode, “Somehow, Satan Got Behind Me”, in which four demons in human guise got together in a donut shop to discuss how things were going with their soul collecting. The rest of the second season plodded on, despite some major plot changes.

Poltergeist The Legacy, the series about the members of a San Francisco-based secret society who protect others from the supernatural, returned with a two-part story in which anthropologist Alex Moreau (Robbi Chong) was bitten by an old friend while visiting New Orleans and soon found herself transforming into a vampire.

Psi Factor: Chronicles of the Paranormal was hosted by an unconvincing Dan Aykroyd and supposedly inspired by the actual case files of The Office of Scientific Investigation and Research. Adding Matt Frewer and Michael Moriarty to the second season, O.S.I.R. investigators looked into the case of a family who had survived for more than a century without aging by drinking fresh blood, and travelled to swamp country to investigate the case of two murdered brothers who were brought back from the dead by their family as putrefying zombies.

Ultraviolet was a moody six-part British serial in which a police detective (Jack Davenport) found himself recruited by a covert organisation dedicated to eradicating modern-day vampires in a secret war being fought on the streets of contemporary London.

Malcolm McDowell brought a nice dark edge to his role as Mr. Rourke in the ill-fated revival of Fantasy Island, and Jeremy Piven was either the eponymous Roman god or a madman in the light-hearted Cupid.

In Charmed, Shannen Doherty, Holly Marie Combs and Alyssa Milano starred as the three Halliwell sisters, who discovered they were witches. Using a magic recipe book found in the attic of their San Francisco home, the trio solved crimes of a supernatural nature. Mark Dacascos played a musician brought back from the dead seeking revenge in The Crow: Stairway to Heaven, which was based on the books and movies created by James O’Barr.

The usually tedious Star Trek: Deep Space Nine managed at least one memorable episode (“Far Beyond the Stars”) that looked at racism in the 1950s against the background of the SF pulp magazines.

Debra Messing portrayed bioanthropologist Dr Sloan Parker, who uncovered the existence of a new species dedicated to the annihilation of mankind in the underrated Prey. Robert Lee-shock was the new lead in Earth Final Conflict, playing bodyguard Liam Kincaid, a man more than human who was caught in the struggle between the alien Taelons and the human Resistance.

Sliders also revised its cast as Jerry O’Connell, Cleavant Derricks, Kari Wuhrer and the talentless Charlie O’Connell continued to travel (“slide”) between parallel Earths on the Sci-Fi Channel and discovered an apparently haunted hotel and a digitised world where their real bodies wandered around as zombie-like “Empties”. 7 Days was a time-travel series about an ex-CIA agent (Jonathan LaPaglia) who had to save the Earth on a weekly schedule.

Following a 1996 pilot movie,The Vanishing Man finally made it to British TV screens for an inane six-part series starring the irritating Neil Morrissey as undercover agent Nick Cameron, who turned invisible whenever he came into contact with water. Even worse was the BBC Scotland and Sci-Fi Channel-produced Invasion: Earth, which was shown in six fifty-minute episodes (each costing a reported $1.2 million). Written by Jed Mercurio, this tale of aliens from another dimension invading a remote Scottish village was one of the most ludicrously inept science fiction shows ever broadcast in the UK.

Having apparently lost the title they wanted (see above), Steven Spielberg’s DreamWorks SKG produced the anime-style cartoon Invasion America in three hour-long segments. Despite a cast of well-known voices (including Leonard Nimoy), old ideas and poor animation didn’t help. DreamWorks and Spielberg had more success with Toonsylvania, featuring the gruesome comedy cartoon adventures of Igor (Wayne Knight), Dr Frankenstein (David Warner) and his dumb Monster Phil, along with the zombie family of Night of the Living Fred.

The Simpsons Halloween Special IX was also fun as Homer’s new hairpiece was possessed by the revenge-seeking spirit of an executed criminal, Bart and Lisa were sucked into an Itchy and Scratchy cartoon on TV, and Maggie turned out to be the offspring of alien commander Kang. Even better was The Angry Beavers episode “The Day the World Got Really Screwed Up!”, an hilarious Halloween special narrated by Peter Graves in which beavers Daggett and Norbert ended up at the home of “B” movie actor Oxnard Montalvo where they battled monsters controlled by an evil vampiric alien intelligence from another dimension. Guest voices included Adrienne Barbeau, William Schallert and Jonathan Haze.

Van-pires was a syndicated live action and computer-animated series in which a group of teens attempted to stop parasites from sapping the Earth of all its natural gases. The Fox Saturday morning cartoon Godzilla: The Series was a vast improvement over the flashy movie it was based on, and Saban’s cartoon Monster Farm was set on a rural farm full of monsters, including vampiric rooster Cluckula, Jekyll and Hyde sheep Dr. Woolly, monster pig Frankenswine, living-dead bull Zombeef and Egyptian mummy Cowapatra.

A quartet of transforming mummies with superhuman powers (“With the strength of Ra!”) and their sacred cat protected a twelve year-old San Francisco skateboarder, who was the reincarnation of an Egyptian prince in the cartoon Mummies Alive! The inevitable action toys followed.

Goggle Watch: The Horror of the House of Goggle Part 13 was a daily half-hour children’s series featuring the Goggle Family who decided to turn their guest house into a themed hotel, “Goggle House of Horror”. Even more infantile was the BBC’s Julia Jekyll and Harriet Hyde, in which a schoolgirl (Olivia Hallinan) periodically transformed into a hairy giant monster.

A juvenile spin-off from the Kevin Sorbo show Hercules the Legendary Journeys, Young Hercules involved the teenage son (Ryan Gosling) of Zeus and his friends battling the fanged followers of the evil god Bacchus over several half-hour episodes.

Based on the short-lived 1991–92 series,Eerie Indiana “The Other Dimension” involved Mitchell Taylor (Bill Switzer) and his friend Stanley (Daniel Clark), who discovered that weirdness was spilling into their world via an inter-dimensional television signal.

The New Addams Family was an unfunny half-hour comedy series based upon the creepy characters created by Charles Addams. At least it included a welcome guest appearance by John Astin (the original Gomez from the 1964–66 series) and the excellent Nicole Fugere as Wednesday.

Inspired by the 1989 hit film and characters created by Stuart Gordon, Brian Yuzna and co-executive producer Ed Naha, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids followed the usually-bizarre exploits of scientist Wayne Szalinski (Peter Scolari) and his family.

The title of Kevin Brownlow’s slightly disappointing cable TV documentary, Universal Horror, was something of a misnomer as it also included material from several other studios. The History Channel’s In Search of History series featured two well-researched documentaries based around genre themes: Legends of the Werewolves looked at lycanthropes both real and fictional, while The Real Dracula investigated the life of Dracula author Bram Stoker and the historical facts behind the character. However, E! Entertainment’s Mysteries & Scandals: Bela Lugosi was a sleazy, tabloid-style expose of “the tormented life” of the actor that simply rehashed rumour, innuendo and myths as it concentrated on the end of Lugosi’s career as an alcoholic and drug addict.

For computer-users, The Learning Company/Red Orb, a division of Mindscape, released Blackstone Chronicles: An Adventure in Terror, a game for the PC that was based on John Saul’s series of books set in and around a haunted asylum.

The 8th World Horror Convention was held in Phoenix, Arizona, over the weekend of 7–10 May. Guests of honour were Brian Lumley, Bernie Wrightson and publisher Tom Doherty, with John Steakley as Toastmaster. The Media Guest, Tom Savini, failed to show up.

The Bram Stoker Awards were presented by the Horror Writers Association at a banquet on 6 June in New York City, with Douglas E. Winter as the Keynote Speaker and Edward Bryant as Toastmaster. The winners were Children of the Dusk by HWA President Janet Berliner and George Guthridge in the Novel category; Lives of the Monster Dogs by Kirsten Bakis for First Novel; “The Big Blow” by Joe R. Lansdale (from Revelations/ Millennium) for Long Fiction/Novelette; “Rat Food” by Edo van Belkom and David Nickle (from On. Spec magazine) for Short Story; Karl Edward Wagner’s Exorcisms and Ecstasies edited by Stephen Jones for Collection, and Stanley Wiater’s Dark Thoughts: On Writing for Non-Fiction. Both William Peter Blatty and Jack Williamson were presented with Life Achievement Awards, a Specialty Press Award was given to Richard Chizmar for Cemetery Dance magazine and CD Books, while Sheldon Jaffery received the Board of Trustees’s 1998 Hammer Award for his service to the HWA.

Winners of the International Horror Guild Award were announced at the Dragon*Con Awards Banquet on Friday 5 September in Atlanta, Georgia. The Lifetime Achievement award went to Hugh B. Cave; Ramsey Campbell’s Nazareth Hill was voted Best Novel; The Throne of Bones by Brian McNaughton won in the Collection category; the Best Anthology award went to Revelations/Millennium edited by Douglas E. Winter; Drawn to the Grave by Mary Ann Mitchell won First Novel; “Coppola’s Dracula” by Kim Newman (from The Mammoth Book of Dracula) won in Short Form; “Cram” by John Shirley (from Wet-bones 2) was Best Short Story; Stephen R. Bissette was Best Artist; Best Graphic Story went to Preacher: Proud Americans by Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon, and Best Publication was Necrofile edited by Dziemianowicz, Joshi and Morrison. Although nominations were made in the film category, judges Edward Bryant, Hank Wagner and Fiona Webster abstained from presenting an award.

The 1998 British Fantasy Awards were presented at Fantasy-Con XXII in Birmingham, England, on Sunday 13 September. Voted for by members of the British Fantasy Society and FantasyCon, the winners were announced at the Awards Banquet by Master of Ceremonies Ramsey Campbell and Guests of Honour Freda Warrington and Jane Yolen. Light Errant by Chaz Brenchley won the Best Novel award (The August Derleth Fantasy Award); Best Short Story was Christopher Fowler’s “Wage-slaves” (from Destination Unknown/Secret City: Strange Tales of London); Dark Terrors 3: The Gollancz Book of Horror edited by Stephen Jones and David Sutton was voted Best Anthology; Jim Burns was Best Artist; the Best Small Press Award went to Interzone edited by David Pringle; D. F. Lewis was presented with the Special Karl Edward Wagner Award, and a Special Convention Award was announced for past BFS President Kenneth Bulmer.

Only the location saved one of the worst-ever organised World Fantasy Conventions, held in Monterey, California, over 29 October to 1 November. Guest of Honour was Gahan Wilson, Special Guests were Frank M. Robinson, Cecelia Holland and Richard Laymon, and Richard A. Lupoff was Toastmaster. The winners of the World Fantasy Awards, selected by a panel of judges, were announced at an anti-climactic buffet lunch. The Special Award — Non-Professional went to Fedogan & Bremer for book publishing; the Special Award — Professional was won by The Encyclopedia of Fantasy edited by John Clute and John Grant; Best Artist was Alan Lee; Best Collection went to The Throne of Bones by Brian McNaughton; the Best Anthology was Bending the Landscape: Fantasy edited by Nicola Griffith and Stephen Pagel; “Dust Motes” by P. D. Cacek (from Gothic Ghosts) won for Best Short Fiction; Richard Bowes’ “Streetcar Dreams” (from The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, April 1997) was voted Best Novella, and the Best Novel was The Physiognomy by Jeffrey Ford. Life Achievement Awards were announced for editor Edward L. Ferman and writer Andre Norton.

California-based dealer Barry R. Levin announced that Peter F. Hamilton had won his Collectors Award for 1998 for Most Collectible Author of the Year. The limited Tor edition of Robert Silverberg’s anthology Legends was Most Collectible Book of the Year, and Britain’s George Locke received the special Lifetime Collectors Award for His Unique Contribution to the Bibliography of Fantastic Literature.

Ten years is a long time. It’s even longer in publishing. The past decade has not been kind to horror fiction, with the erosion of the mid-list and the cancellation of genre imprints resulting in the all-but-collapse of the commercial field.

Which makes it all the more remarkable that the Best New Horror series has reached this landmark number of volumes. This is mostly due to the tenacity of Nick Robinson of Britain’s Robinson Publishing and Kent Carroll and Herman Graf of America’s Carroll & Graf Publishers. Despite various changes of title and format, they have continued to publish and support this series of anthologies in the face of industry apathy to the genre.

If not for them, I could not have reprinted more than 1.5 million words of the best horror fiction to have appeared over the past ten years.

I have always said that the aim of this series is to present a representative sampling of stories which are being nominally published under the description of “horror”, or “dark fantasy” or whatever the publishers’ current nomenclature for the genre is.

That is why I have been proud to select work by such new and up-and-coming authors as Thomas Ligotti, Kim Newman, Michael Marshall Smith, Poppy Z. Brite, Neil Gaiman, Kathe Koja, Douglas E. Winter, Terry Lamsley, Brian Hodge, Grant Morrison, Roberta Lannes, Norman Partridge, Storm Constantine, Ian R. MacLeod, Elizabeth Massie, Nicholas Royle, Elizabeth Hand, Graham Joyce, Caitlin R. Kiernan, Chaz Brenchley, Joel Lane, Conrad Williams, Donald R. Burleson, D. F. Lewis and many others alongside more established names such as Peter Straub, Ramsey Campbell, Brian Lumley, Clive Barker, Harlan Ellison, F. Paul Wilson, Robert R. McCammon, Dennis Etchison, Charles Grant, Jonathan Carroll, Gene Wolfe, M. John Harrison, Iain Sinclair, Tanith Lee, T. E. D. Klein, Graham Masterton, Kate Wilhelm, Richard Laymon, Gahan Wilson and Thomas Tessier, to name only a few. Sadly, others like Karl Edward Wagner, Robert Bloch, Manly Wade Wellman, John Brunner and Robert Westall are no longer with us, but their work lives on, preserved in the pages of this series and elsewhere.

In fact, Best New Horror has published a total of 239 stories and novellas and one poem in its ten-year history. During that period only two authors have ever refused a request to reprint their work — it just so happens that they are the two biggest-selling names in horror on either side of the Atlantic. Go figure.

Best New Horror has also been fortunate enough to win the World Fantasy Award, the British Fantasy Award and The International Horror Critics Guild Award, as well as being nominated on several other occasions. To everyone who voted for the book and has supported it over the years, my sincere thanks.

I would also especially like to thank Ramsey Campbell, who co-edited the first five volumes with me and who remains this series’ spiritual inspiration. I continue to strive to match his taste, skill and intelligence with every new edition.

But what of the future? As the new Millennium arrives and the horror field claws its way back from the brink of the abyss and begins to find its commercial voice again, Best New Horror will hopefully be there to chart its resurgence and supply a few pointers along the way. This series will continue to discover the most exciting new names in dark fiction (in all its myriad forms) and present them alongside some of the best-known authors currently working in the field.

At its best, horror fiction is amongst the most imaginative and challenging work being published today, and Best New Horror will continue to reflect that literary excellence into the 21st century.

I hope you’ll be along for the ride.

The Editor

May, 1999