The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 13

INTRODUCTION Horror in 2001

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dorchester Publishing launched its Leisure hardcover line with Douglas Clegg’s The Infinte, yet another haunted-house novel involving a ghost hunter and psychic investigators.

Broadcaster Muriel Gray’s third horror novel, The Ancient, came with a recommendation from Stephen King. It involved the raising of a demon amongst the piles of garbage in Lima and a supertanker loaded with terrifying trash.

The Fury and the Terror was John Farris’s long-awaited sequel to The Fury, involving a young psychic and a government mind-control conspiracy. It was ‘The Most Dangerous Game’ time again in John Saul’s The Manhattan Hunt Club, as a secret society hunted human prey in the tunnels beneath New York.

Graham Joyce’s impressive Smoking Poppy was set in a spirit-haunted Thailand and involved a father’s search for his wayward daughter. Whole Wide World by Paul McAuley was a murder mystery and conspiracy thriller set in a future London monitored by a computer surveillance system.

In Simon R. Green’s Drinking Midnight Wine, bookseller Toby Dexter followed a mysterious woman through a door in a wall that was not there into a world of magic and monsters. Green’s 1994 novel Shadows Fall, about the eponymous supernatural haven threatened by a serial killer, received a welcome paperback reissue from Gollancz.

Robin Cook’s Shock was another medical thriller from the author of Coma.

Alan Dean Foster’s Interlopers involved archaeologist Cody Westcott investigating the cause of random acts of evil, while a man learned he was to be possessed by demons in Richard Calder’s Impakto.

A Crown of Lights and The Cure of Souls were the third and fourth volumes, respectively, in Phil Rickman’s series featuring female exorcist Merrily Watkins.

The prolific Christopher Golden’sStraight on ‘Til Morning was a reworking of the Peter Pan story, as a teenager’s girlfriend was stolen away to a nightmare Neverland. An illustrated version was also available from CD Publishing, limited to 1,000 signed copies and a lettered edition.

Past the Size of Dreaming was Nina Kiriki Hoffman’s sequel to A Red Heart of Memories, about a haunted house in a small Oregon town, and Evil Whispers by Owl Goingback was set in Florida’s backwater lagoons.

The Hauntings of Hood Canal by Jack Cady took place along the eponymous waterway in Washington State and involved the disappearance of a number of vehicles into its murky depths.

The Leisure imprint continued to churn out attractive-looking paperbacks every month: The Lost by Jack Ketchum (aka Dallas Mayr) and Wire Mesh Mothers by Elizabeth Massie were both non-supernatural horror novels, as was Mary Ann Mitchell’s Ambrosial Flesh, about a devout cannibal.

Gerald Houarner’s The Beast That Was Max featured a demon-possessed assassin, while The Evil Returns by veteran Hugh B. Cave involved voodoo in Haiti. Tom Piccirilli’s A Lower Deep featured a satanic coven, and a man discovered that his memories were not his own in Affinty by J. N. Williamson.

A living edifice built over a murder site was the location for House of Pain by Sephra Giron, and a writer found evil on his doorstep in Donald K. Beman’s Dead Love, also from Leisure.

Jeffrey E. Barlough’s The House in High Wood, which mixed Dickens, Lovecraft and Poe in its tale of a 19th century haunted manor, was the second volume in the ‘Western Lights’ series about an alternate England. In Gregory Maguire’s ghost story Lost, a writer searching for her cousin in London invoked the spirits of Jack the Ripper and Dickens’s Scrooge.

Sherlock Holmes and the Terror Out of Time was a Lovecraftian novella featuring Conan Doyle’s consulting detective and H. G. Wells’s Professor Challenger, from Gryphon Books. Randall Silvis’s On Night’s Shore was a ‘Thomas Dunne’ mystery featuring Edgar Allan Poe.

A couple moved into a bizarre community in Bentley Little’s The Association, and a woman had a premonition about her own death in Fear Itself by Barrett Schumacher.

A contemporary murder was linked to ancient Egyptian magic in The Alchemist by Donna Byrd, while an archaeological team in the Amazon jungle discovered The Altar Stone by Robert Hackman.

Bone Walker was the third volume in Kathleen O’Neal Gear and W. Michael Gear’s anthropological ‘Anasazi Mysteries’, and genetically engineered chimpanzees went wild in the same authors’ Dark Inheritance. There were more biomedical experiments gone awry in Alan Nayes’s Gargoyles.

A dark god was reborn in Los Angeles in D. A. Stern’s Black Dawn, and the dead were reborn on an alternate Earth in Eugene Byrne’s Things Unborn.

The restoration of a haunted house in Maine awakened past nightmares in The White Room by A. J. Matthews (aka Rick Hautala). Will Kingdom’s second suspense novel, Mean Spirit, involved four people trapped in a Victorian neo-Gothic castle in the Malvern Hills, menaced by a psychopathic killer and voices from beyond the grave.

Tananarive Due’s The Living Blood was a sequel to the author’s My Soul to Keep and involved a race of African immortals, and an immortal killer menaced a small mountain community in Tamara Thome’s Eternity.

The Burning Times by Jeanne Kalogridis (aka J. M. Dillard) was an historical horror novel about witchcraft and the Inquisition. A man’s girlfriend disappeared in front of his eyes in T. J. MacGregor’sVanished, and the owner of a successful construction business discovered that his past was about to come back and haunt him in Lucy Taylor’s Nailed.

An executed serial killer returned to possess a married woman on the brink of death in the paperback original Ghost Killer by Scott Chandler (aka Chandler Scott McMillin).

Scottish writer Anne Perry’sCome Armageddon was a sequel to Tathea and continued the battle between Good and Evil as the great and final war approached. Australian author Kim Wilkins’s Angel of Ruin was based on Milton’s Paradise Lost, and featured that writer’s daughters and their collective relationships with a dark angel they had conjured up.

The Family: Special Effects Book 1 by Kevin McCarthy and David Silva was the first volume in a new series packaged by Tekno Books for DAW. Full Moon Bloody Moon was the second in the horror/mystery series by Lee Driver (aka Sandra D. Tooley) featuring hero Chase Dagger.

Fool Moon and Grave Peril were the second and third books, respectively, in Jim Butcher’s series ‘The Dresden Files’ as Chicago’s only professional wizard and paranormal investigator discovered that werewolves turned up in different guises and something was stirring up the city’s ghosts.

Mark Ramsden’s kinky characters Matt and Sasha became involved with animal-rights fanatics, a midwinter neo-Nazi festival and a satanic cult known as the Black Order in The Sacred Blood, the author’s S&M sequel to The Dungeonmaster’s Apprentice, also published by Serpent’s Tail.

Vampires were as popular as ever in 2001. An Interpol agent was on the trail of the undead Miriam Blaylock in The Last Vampire, Whitley Strieber’s long-awaited sequel to The Hunger.

Necroscope: Avengers was the third and final volume in Brian Lumley’s E-Branch trilogy, in which Ben Trask’s team of talented psychics, including necroscope Jake Cutter, pursued three powerful Wamphyri lords who had joined forces.

Narcissus in Chains was the tenth volume in Laurell K. Hamilton’s popular ‘Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter’ series, once again given a classy-looking hardcover release in America. This time a changed Anita had to call on both her rival vampire and werewolf lovers to search for a kinky were-leopard who had disappeared from the eponymous S&M club. An excerpt from the novel appeared in the paperback anthology of ‘paranormal romance’,Out of this World, which also included original novellas by J. D. Robb, Susan Krinard and Maggie Shayne.

A Feast in Exile was Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s latest novel of Saint-Germain, this time set in 15th-century India. Karen Taylor’s The Vampire Vivienne featured vampire Deidre Griffin and her ex-cop husband in the fifth in the ‘Vampire Legacy’ series, and P. D. Cacek’s Night Players was the second book featuring new vampire Allison Garrett.

Laws of the Blood: Companions was the third volume in Susan Sizemore’s paperback series. This time undead ‘Enforcer of Enforcers’ Istvan and his unwilling companion, Chicago homicide detective Selena Crawford, uncovered a more serious motive behind the murder of a vampire.

Mick Farren’s More Than Mortal was a follow-up to his novels The Time of Feasting and Darklost in the series of ‘Victor Renquist’ Lovecraftian/vampire thrillers.

Set in 1899 London, a doctor investigated a series of apparent vampire murders in Sam Siciliano’s Darkness. The London Vampire Panic was the sixth in the series by Michael Romkey, set in Victorian Europe, and P. N. Elrod’s Quincey Morris, Vampire was yet another sequel to Stoker’s Dracula.

Stephen Gresham’s In the Blood was a Southern Gothic about a cursed family of vampires. Clairvoyant cocktail waitress Sookie Stackhouse discovered that her new boyfriend was a bloodsucker suspected of murder in Charlaine Harris’s (aka Charlaine Harris Schulz) Southern Vampire Mystery Dead Until Dark.

Psychologist Meghann O’Neill encountered a vampire in Crimson Kiss by Trisha Baker, while James M. Thompson’s Night Blood featured a vampire doctor infected with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD).

A senior in high school who fell prey to the family curse of vampirism and a billionaire industrialist fighting his own battle with mortality confronted each other in Billie Sue Mosiman’s Red Moon Rising, packaged by Tekno Books.

A woman working in a health resort discovered that her employers were vampires in Tamara Thorne’s Candle Bay, and Australian author Stephen Dedman’s Shadows Bite was a martial-arts mystery set in Los Angeles involving vampires, demons and the Yakuza.

Bound in Blood was a gay erotic novel by David Thomas Lord about a nineteenth-century vampire in modern New York. Vampire Vow by Michael Schiefelbein was another gay vampire novel.

A book critic in Venice investigated vampires and werewolves in Shannon Drake’s Deep Midnight.

Alice Borchardt’s The Wolf King was the third volume in the historical werewolf series by Anne Rice’s sister, while a man in Saxon times became involved with a trio of shapechanging siblings in Susan Price’s The Wolf-Sisters.

Gillian Bradshaw’s medieval thriller The Wolf Hunt contained elements of lycanthropy and was based on ‘Lai de Bisclavret’ by Marie de France. Bitten was a debut novel by Kelly Armstrong, about the first female werewolf.

In Sarah A. Hoyt’s debut novel, Ill Met by Moonlight, a young Will Shakespeare was drawn into a realm of elves and faeries in pursuit of his missing family. The book’s prologue and first two chapters were self-published as a chapbook sampler.

A vengeful spirit haunted a modern housing development in Wringland by newcomer Sally Spedding. The Music of Razors marked the debut horror novel of Cameron Rogers (aka Penguin Australia children’s editor Dmetri Kakmi). It was a coming-of-age story involving a fallen angel and the tools it fashioned from bones.

In Jonathan Carroll’s The Wooden Sea, the seventeen-year-old self of middle-aged Chief of Police Frannie McCabe turned up and told him that he had lived his life all wrong, just before he got a glimpse of the day he was going to die.

Jeremy Dronfield’s The Alchemist’s Apprentice was about the eponymous bestselling novel written by Madagascar Rhodes, which nobody appears to remember having read.

Jay Russell’s offbeat detective Marty Burns returned in Greed & Stuff, a novel set in the Los Angeles TV industry and involving a classic noir film, The Devil on Sunday.

Steve Aylett’s comedic Only an Alligator was the first book set in the demonic city of Accomplice, situated one step to the left of reality.

A new trade paperback edition of Bram Stoker’s Dracula from Random House included an introduction by Peter Straub, plus various review extracts and a reading guide.

The Library of Classic Horror was an instant-remainder hardcover featuring the complete novels Dracula, Frankenstein, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and The Island of Dr Moreau along with two other stories by Robert Louis Stevenson and six by Edgar Allan Poe.

Published as a slightly updated trade paperback in Dover’s Thrift Editions series, A Bottomless Grave and Other Victorian Tales of Terror was a welcome reprint of editor Hugh Lamb’s superior 1977 anthology Victorian Nightmares, featuring twenty-one stories by Ambrose Bierce, Guy de Maupassant, Richard Marsh, Erckmann-Chatrian, Guy Boothby and others.

The Collected Ghost Stories of E. F. Benson was a new edition of the 1992 volume edited by Richard Dalby that contained fifty-four tales, an essay by the author, and an introduction by Joan Aiken.

From Dutch publisher Coppens & Frenks, The House on the Borderland was a limited edition of William Hope Hodgson’s 1908 novel, with a new introduction by Brian Stableford.

La Bas: A Journey Into the Self was a new translation of the 1891 literary black-magic novel by French ‘décadent’ writer Joris-Karl Huysmans, published by Dedalus with an introduction by Brendan King and an afterword and chronology by Robert Irwin. From the same imprint, Geoffrey Farrington’s The Revenants was a revised edition of the author’s 1983 vampire novel with a new introduction by Kim Newman.

Black Seas of Infinity: The Best of H. P. Lovecraftwas a collection of nineteen stories and three non-fiction pieces from the Science Fiction Book Club, edited by SFBC editor Andrew Wheeler.

Edited by S. T. Joshi, The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories was the second collection of H. P. Lovecraft’s fiction published as part of the prestigious Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics series. With David E. Schultz, Joshi also edited and annotated HPL’s The Shadow Out of Time, a trade paperback from Hippocampus Press that contained the restored text of the original manuscript (discovered in 1995), along with an early draft and notes.

The ubiquitous Mr Joshi also edited and introduced The Mark of the Beast and Other Horror Tales by Rudyard Kipling, a collection of seventeen stories from Dover, and The Three Impostors and Other Stories, the first volume of The Best Weird Tales of Arthur Machen from Chaosium. Along with three other classic stories, this trade paperback also included the complete text of Machen’s 1895 linked novel.

The Conan Chronicles Volume II: The Hour of the Dragon was the second omnibus volume in Gollancz’s Fantasy Master-works series collecting Robert E. Howard’s eight remaining Conan stories (including the title novel), edited with an afterword by Stephen Jones.

Richard Matheson’s The Incredible Shrinking Man was a reissue of the omnibus from Tor containing the eponymous short novel and nine classic short stories.

R. L. Stine’s young-adult series The Nightmare Room continued with They Call Me Creature, The Howler, Shadow Girl and Camp Nowhere, some of which may have been written by George Sheanshang.

A famous YA horror writer apparently inspired a school-based mystery in The Mysterious Matter of I. M. Fine by Diane Stanley.

Murder victims were found mysteriously incinerated in Burning Bones by Christopher Golden and Rick Hautala, seventh in the ‘Jenna Blake’ young-adult mystery/horror series.

Golden’s own Prowlers, Prowlers: Laws of Nature and Prowlers: Predator and Prey launched a new series about a group of teenagers investigating reports of werewolves.

Tartabull’s Throw was a time-travel novel about werewolf detective Cyrus Nygerski and the third in the series by Henry Garfield after the adult books Moondog and Room 13.

Dr Franklin’s Island by Ann Halam (aka Gwyneth Jones) involved a group of teenage plane-crash survivors who were genetically altered into shapeshifters. A giant bat attacked researchers in the Amazon in Paul Zindel’s Night of the Bat.

In Pete Johnson’s The Frighteners a new girl in school was befriended by a strange boy whose drawings had the power to call up the eponymous supernatural creatures. Dark Things II: Journey Into Tomorrow by Joséph F. Brown once again featured Jarrod, who had the ability to make what he imagined real.

Musician Chris Wooding’s The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray was a gaslight romance set in Victorian London and inspired by Gormenghast and H. P. Lovecraft.

Margaret Mahy’s The Riddle of the Frozen Phantom was ‘A Vanessa Hamilton Book’. In Eva Ibbotson’s comedic Dial-a-Ghost, the eponymous agency mixed up its hauntings, and a teenager believed that ghostly phenomena may have had something to do with the arrest of his father in Nick Manns’s Operating Codes.

A girl who didn’t realize she was dead looked after the children living in her house in The Ghost Sitter by Peni R. Griffin, while a young boy encountered a Civil War phantom in Ghost Soldier by Elaine Alphin. My Brother’s Ghost was a novelette by Allan Ahlberg.

A girl’s dreams seemed to hold the answer to her parents’ disappearance in Joséph Bruchac’s Skeleton Man, and a young girl attempted to help her missing friend in Jonathan Stroud’s The Leap.

Vampire Mountain was the fourth volume in The Saga of Darren Shan and the first in a three-part sequence. The character returned in Trials of Death. Eponymous schoolboy author Shan is a pseudonym for Darren O’Shaughnessy.

A young witch discovered that one of her classmates was a vampire in Amelia Atwater-Rhodes’s Shattered Mirror, while Witch Hill was a time-travel fantasy by Marcus Sedgwick. With the help of a strange sea captain, two children battled the Night Witches in Michael Molloy’s The Witch Trade.

Cate Tiernan’s Sweep 1: Book of Shadows, 2: The Coven, 3: Blood Witch, 4: Dark Magick, 5: Awakening, 6: Spellbound and 7: The Calling were the initial volumes in a packaged series about a teenager who discovered she was a witch.

Silver Raven Wolf’s Witches’ Night of Fear and Witches’ Key to Terror were the second and third volumes, respectively, in the Witches’ Chillers series of occult murder mysteries, from Llewellyn Publications.

Isobel Bird’s Circle of Three series about a trio of modern-day teenage witches included 1: So Mote it Be, 2: Merry Meet, 3: Second Sight, 4: What the Cards Said, 5: In the Dreaming, 6: Ring of Light, 7: Blue Moon, 8: The Five Paths, 9: Through the Veil, 10: Making the Saint, 11: The House of Winter and 12: Written in the Stars.

T*witches #1: The Power of Two by H. B. Gilmour and Randi Reisfeld was about twin sisters, separated at birth, who meet in a theme park and discover that they share strange powers. It was followed by 2: Building a Mystery and 3: Seeing is Deceiving from the same authors.

Australian Kim Wilkins’s Bloodlace was the first volume in a new young-adult psychic detective series featuring Gina Champion, who investigated a mystery based on a past murder set in a seaside suburb of Sydney.

Ninth Key and Darkest Hour by Jenny Carroll (aka Meggin Cabot) were two new titles in the ongoing series The Mediator, about a girl who talked to the dead.

From Headline Australia, Shades 1: Shadow Dance, 2: Night Beast, 3: Ancient Light and 4: Black Sun Rising was a young-adult horror adventure series by Robert Hood, about a group of teenagers trapped in a ghostlike existence who battled an invasion by creatures from the shadows.

Scholastic’s ‘Point Horror Unleashed’ continued with Celia Rees’s The Cunning Man, about the eponymous shipwrecker. Paul Stewart’s Fright Train involved a ride through Hell, and a young girl paid a high price for consulting The Bearwood Witch in Susan Price’s novel.

Hair Raiser by Graham Masterton and Fly-Blown by Philip Wooderson, the latter about intelligent mutated blowflies, both appeared as ‘Mutant Point Horror’ titles.

Decayed: 10 Years of Point Horror was an omnibus containing the novels Trick or Treat and April Fools by Richie Tankersley Cusick and Blood Sinister by Celia Rees.

Bruce Colville’s The Monsters of Morley Manor was significantly revised and expanded from its 1996 serialization.

Shadows & Moonshine was a new collection of thirteen stories by Joan Aiken, while Vivian Vande Velde’s Being Dead collected seven stories about ghosts and the undead.

R. L. Stine’s The Haunting Hour featured ten stories, each illustrated by a different artist, including John Jude Palencar and Art Spiegelman. Spiegelman and Franqoise Mouly edited Little Lit: Strange Stories for Strange Kids, a graphic anthology of sixteen stories by such authors as Jules Feiffer and Maurice Sendak.

Brian Lumley’s The Whisperer and Other Voices collected eight reprint stories, plus the short Cthulhu Mythos novel ‘The Return of the Deep Ones’ and a new introduction by the author.

Published in trade paperback by Serpent’s Tail, The Devil in Me was the latest collection from Christopher Fowler, containing twelve stories and a new foreword by the author. From the same imprint came a welcome reissue of Fowler’s 1998 collection Personal Demons in a matching edition.

M. John Harrison’s Travel Arrangements collected fourteen stories, and Ed Gorman’s The Dark Fantastic collected seventeen stories with notes by the author and an introduction by Bentley Little.

Faithless: Tales of Transgression collected twenty-one stories (one original) by Joyce Carol Oates. Meanwhile, the author’s psychological Gothic novella Beasts was published as a trade paperback by Carroll & Graf.

Harper Collins produced a special sampler for the UK edition of Peter Straub’s collection Magic Terror containing the story ‘The Ghost Village’.

The second of Dorchester Publishing’s hardcover Leisure titles, The Museum of Horrors was presented by The Horror Writers Association. Although perhaps not up to the quality of some of editor Dennis Etchison’s previous compilations, it was still one of the best anthologies of the year. Even though most of the eighteen original stories did not appear to fit into the loose ‘theme’ of the book, and a few were surprisingly similar to each other, it still boasted some memorable contributions from Joyce Carol Oates, Ramsey Campbell, Peter Atkins, Tom Piccirilli, Joel Lane, Conrad Williams, Charles L. Grant, Lisa Morton, S. P. Somtow and a stunning but annoyingly incomplete tale by Peter Straub. It was all the more a shame that such a fine volume and its editor became embroiled in a totally unnecessary controversy publicized through the HWA itself.

Although subtitled Extreme Visions of Speculative Fiction, editor Al Sarrantonio’s massive new anthology Redshift actually contained some excellent dark fantasy stories amongst its thirty all-new contributions by Dan Simmons, Ursula K. Le Guin, Michael Moorcock, Thomas M. Disch, Stephen Baxter, David Morrell, Elizabeth Hand, Michael Marshall Smith, Gene Wolfe and the editor himself (who was also responsible for yet another self-congratulatory introduction).

Edited by P. N. Elrod (and probably an uncredited Martin H. Greenberg), Dracula in London contained sixteen stories about the vampire count living in some very peculiar interpretations of the city by Tanya Huff, Fred Saberhagen, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Nancy Kilpatrick and others, including a collaboration between the editor and actor Nigel Bennett.

Vampires: Encounters with the Undead was a huge, 600-page hardcover from Black Dog & c Leventhal Publishers, edited and with commentary by the erudite David J. Skal. Along with classic short stories by J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Bram Stoker, M. R. James, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Bloch, Fritz Leiber, Richard Matheson, David J. Schow, Kim Newman, Caitlin R. Kiernan and others, this value-for-money volume also contained articles, essays and extracts, all profusely illustrated with film stills and artwork.

Lords of Night: Tales of Vampire Love contained three romance novellas by Janice Bennett, Sara Blayne and Monique Ellis.

Hammer horror star Ingrid Pitt graced the cover and contributed the introduction and an original story to The Mammoth Book of Vampire Stories By Women, an anthology of thirty-three stories (fourteen original) and one poem edited by Stephen Jones with illustrations by Randy Broecker. Other contributors included Anne Rice, Poppy Z. Brite, Tanith Lee, Lisa Tuttle, Connie Willis and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro.

Mike Ashley’s excellent The Mammoth Book of Fantasy reprinted twenty-three classic tales by Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Fritz Leiber, Tanith Lee, Harlan Ellison, A. Merritt and many others.

Published in hardcover by The British Library, Meddling with Ghosts: Stories in the Tradition of M. R. James was a handsome reprint anthology selected and introduced by Ramsey Campbell. Among the sixteen authors included were J. Sheridan Le Fanu, F. Marion Crawford, Sabine Baring-Gould, Fritz Leiber, L. T. C. Rolt, A. N. L. Munby, T. E. D. Klein, Sheila Hodgson, Terry Lamsley and Campbell himself. Rosemary Pardoe also contributed a useful guide to writers who followed in James’s literary footsteps.

Edited by Don Hutchinson, Wild Things Live There: The Best of Northern Frights reprinted sixteen stories from the Canadian anthology series by Nancy Kilpatrick, Nalo Hopkins and others.

Into the Mummy’s Tomb, edited with a long introduction by John Richard Stephens, contained fifteen reprint stories, two excerpts and an abridgement by such authors as Louisa May Alcott, Tennessee Williams, H. P. Lovecraft, Agatha Christie, Mark Twain, Sir H. Rider Haggard, Edgar Allan Poe, Ray Bradbury, Rudyard Kipling, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Elizabeth Peters, Sax Rohmer, Anne Rice and Bram Stoker.

Edited by Marvin Kaye, The Ultimate Halloween contained seventeen stories (five reprints) about the horror holiday by Esther Friesner, Ron Goulart and others. Isaac Asimov’s Halloween was edited by Gardner Dozois and Sheila Williams and reprinted ten stories from Asimov’s Science Fiction. Andy Duncan, Lawrence Watt-Evans, Howard Waldrop, Steven Utley and Ian R. MacLeod were amongst the authors included.

Winning Tales of the Supernatural edited by Joyce Booth O’Brien contained eleven ‘prize-winning’ stories, while Nor of Human edited by Geoffrey Maloney was an Australian anthology published by the Canberra SF Guild writers’ group.

Published in trade paperback by Polygon, Damage Land, an anthology of New Scottish Gothic Fiction edited and introduced by Alan Bissett, contained twenty stories (six reprints) and a bibliography.

The busy Martin H. Greenberg teamed up with John Heifers to edit the all-original Villains Victorious and The Mutant Files. The former contained fourteen stories of evil triumphant, the latter sixteen tales about the next step in human evolution. The contributors (many of whom were featured in both books) included Charles de Lint, Tanya Huff, Alan Dean Foster, Janet Berliner, David Bischoff, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Ed Gorman, Peter Crowther and Peter Tremayne (with a new Sherlock Holmes story).

Greenberg was joined by Brittany A. Koren for Single White Vampire Seeks Same, an anthology of twelve stories based on paranormal personal ads from such familiar names as Rusch, Crowther, Hoffman, de Lint and Huff (a ‘Henry Fitzroy’ vampire tale). With Jean Rabe, Greenberg also edited Historical Hauntings, featuring eighteen original stories by Andre Norton, Bruce Holland Rogers and others.

The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror: 12 edited by Stephen Jones contained twenty-two stories and novellas, along with the usual comprehensive overview of the previous year in horror, a detailed necrology and a list of useful contact addresses for aspiring writers and horror fans. Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling’s The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: Fourteenth Annual Collection reprinted forty-four stories and nine poems, plus the annual summations by the two editors, Ed Bryant and Seth Johnson, obituaries by James Frenkel, and a list of so-called ‘Honorable Mentions’. The Datlow/Windling and Jones books overlapped with just four stories from Ramsey Campbell, Kathe Koja, Terry Lamsley and Paul McAuley.

After much ballyhoo in the small-press world and to the anger of many of its contributors, The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy: 2000, the first in a proposed new annual series announced by editor Steve Savile, was abruptly cancelled by print-on-demand publisher Cosmos Books.

HarperCollins globally launched its e-book imprint Perfect Bound in February with titles by Raymond E. Feist, Joyce Carol Oates and an omnibus of The Nightmare Room by R. L. Stine, containing six novels.

Following the May launch of AOL Time Warner’s digital imprint iPublish, The Authors’ Guild warned its 8,000 members that the new company’s publishing contract was ‘among the worst the Authors’ Guild has seen from a publisher of any size or reputation’. The Science Fiction Writers’ Association agreed, describing the publisher’s non-negotiable terms as ‘rights stealing’.

Ignoring the criticism, iPublish announced a new popularity contest in conjunction with the monthly publication of three works discovered through its website. However, in an unexpected move in December, AOL Time Warner pulled the plug, citing a slowdown in the overall economy as its reason for the decision. The company concluded that a separate electronic publishing division was not currently viable at that time. While iPublish titles remained available for the time being, electronic book sales were moved to other groups within Time Warner Trade Publishing.

In a landmark decision in June, the US Supreme Court ruled 7–2 on The New York Times v. Tasini case that publishers must obtain consent for the electronic reproduction of work originally created by freelancers for print. This resulted in thousands of articles being deleted from electronic databases and on the Internet.

After buying ‘exclusive electronic rights’ to around 100 backlist titles by authors such as Kurt Vonnegut, new e-book publisher RosettaBooks was sued by Random House, who claimed that their existing contracts with the authors giving them the right to publish the works in ‘book form’ included digital rights. In July, a federal judge in US District Court in Manhattan ruled against Random House’s request for a preliminary injunction, and the publisher subsequently appealed.

Barnes & Noble Digital debuted on September 11th with an original e-book by Dean Koontz, The Book of Counted Sorrows, but delayed the launch of its other titles until mid-October. Economic fallout from the 9/11 terrorist attacks may also have caused Random House to fold its AtRandom electronic imprint, launched in June 2000.

At the beginning of the year, editor Paula Guran announced that it had become obvious to her that the only way for her weekly electronic newsletter DarkEcho to evolve was ‘for it to head directly into extinction’, which it did. However, after publishing more than 300 issues since 1994, Guran did revive the title occasionally as a once-in-a-while informal newsletter.

Along with co-sponsoring a story contest, Leisure Books began sponsoring original fiction by new and established authors on Brett Savory’s quarterly webzine The Chiaroscuro.

Delirium Books’ website was removed by its host server in November after a complaint about the site’s graphic content. As a result, certain features such as the ‘Gross-Out Tournament’ were moved to another server.

The Spook was a fully downloadable electronic horror magazine in Adobe Acrobat (PDF) format launched in June by publisher/editor Anthony Sapienza. Featuring short fiction, celebrity profiles, reviews, cartoons and poetry, among the featured authors were Ramsey Campbell, Poppy Z. Brite, Dennis Etchison, Damon Knight, John Shirley, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Jonathan Carroll and Joyce Carol Oates. Features included interviews with Neil Gaiman, Jonathan Carroll, actress Linda Blair and artist Alan M. Clark, plus articles on Halloween’s Michael Meyers, the Zodiac Killer, the witchcraft of Shirley Jackson and the truth behind Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion. Ramsey Campbell’s opinion column (originally in Necrofile) began running from the second issue onwards. Because it was sponsored by advertisers, the full-colour monthly magazine was free to readers and received more than 4,000 hits in the first forty-eight hours.

Gothic.net underwent its annual make-over and the $15 subscription entitled readers to get the ‘premium’ short fiction, change the colour scheme, post comments and receive regular updates.

Among the authors whose stories were featured on Ellen Datlow’s Sci.Fiction on SciFi.Com in 2001 were Charles Beaumont, Terry Dowling, Ian R. MacLeod, James P. Blaylock, Geoffrey A. Landis, Lucius Shepard, Gerald Kersh, Glen Hirshberg, Richard Matheson, Pat Cadigan and many others.

After six issues as a print publication, Paul Lockey’s Unhinged, subtitled Disturbing Fiction for Discerning Adults, became a twice-yearly online magazine in May with articles, reviews and fiction by Sean Russell Friend, Mark Howard Jones, Michael Chant, T. M. Gray, Ray Clark and others.

Paul Fry’s Peep Show, published by Short, Scary Tales Publications, featured erotic horror fiction by David J. Schow and others, and more horror stories could be found on John Urbancik’s webzine Dark Fluidity.

The Zone SF, a non-fiction site, went live in mid-September with interviews with Dan Simmons and Simon Clark, and a list of the Top 10 Heavy Metal Albums with SF Themes.

Edited by Sara Creasy, aurealis Xpress was a monthly science fiction and fantasy e-bulletin for subscribers to Australia’s twice-yearly Aurealis magazine. The electronic update was issued eleven times a year (except January), and you could subscribe to both magazines by visiting the website and printing off an application form.

Pam Keesey’s Monsterzine.com looked at monster movies and was linked to the related site, BioHorror.com, while Ghoul Britannia was a tribute site for Hammer Films and other Brit horror movies.

Douglas Glegg’s ‘The Infinite Road Diary’ debuted on the Cemetery Dance website. While the author travelled across America promoting his new hardcover novel The Infinite with bookshop signings, he updated his electronic diary every few days. Neil Gaiman’s electronic diary was also credited with boosting sales of his latest novel, American Gods.

Stealth Press marked Halloween on its website with a free downloadable PDF e-anthology, All Hallows-e: Halloween Tales from Seven Masters of Terror, compiled by Paula Guran. It featured reprints by such Stealth authors as Ray Bradbury, F. Paul Wilson, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, John Shirley, William F. Nolan, Al Sarrantonio and Peter Straub.

Stealth’s e-freebie page also featured a downloadable e-chapbook of Nolan’s 1967 Playboy short story ‘The Party’, from his new collection Dark Universe, and a sample from Wilson’s novel An Enemy of the State, featuring a new introduction by the author along with the prologue and five chapters.

A follow-up to the previous year’s impressive electronic anthology, Brainbox II: Son of Brainbox, edited with an introduction by Steve Eller, featured contributions from eighteen writers, including Brett A. Savory, Charlee Jacob, Brian A. Hopkins and Mort Castle. Another CD-ROM anthology was Lone Wolf Publications’ Extremes 3: Terror on the High Seas, edited by Brian A. Hopkins and illustrated by Thomas Arensberg.

The UK print-on-demand publisher House of Stratus, which reissued much of Brian Aldiss’s backlist along with many other titles, ceased trading in June and apparently went into administration in September. Booksellers had apparently complained of late deliveries and poor billing.

After the cancellation of Enigmatic Tales, editors L. H. Maynard and M. P. N. Sims pretty much recreated their magazine as the first two volumes of the trade paperback anthology series Darkness Rising Volume One: Night’s Soft Pains and Volume Two: Hideous Dreams, from Cosmos Books, an on-demand imprint of Wildside Press. Along with obscure reprints by Howard Jones and Huan Mee introduced by Hugh Lamb, the books included original stories, with notable work from Lynda E. Rucker and Donald Murphy.

Also from Cosmos, Similar Monsters was a decade-spanning collection of fifteen stories (five original) and an afterword by Steve Savile, while City of Saints and Madmen: The Book of Ambergris collected four novellas by Jeff VanderMeer with an introduction by Michael Moorcock.

Dan Clore’s The Unspeakable and Others was a collection of forty-seven Lovecraftian tales and non-fiction pieces, with an introduction by S. T. Joshi. Stephen Mark Rainey’s Balak from Wildside Press was a Lovecraftian novel involving a woman searching for her missing child.

Fluid Mosaic collected thirteen horror stories (one original) by Michael Arnzen. Gemini Rising, Downward to Darkness and Worse Things Waiting were substantially revised versions of Brian McNaughton’s novels Satan’s Love Child (1977), Satan’s Mistress (1978) and Satan’s Seductress (1979), while McNaughton’s Nasty Stories and Even More Nasty Stories collected twenty-five stories (eight original) and twenty-one stories (two original), respectively.

Strange Pleasures was an anthology of fourteen stories edited by Cosmos Books’ Sean Wallace and featuring contributions by Keith Brooke, Adrian Cole, Barrington Bayley, Maynard and Sims, John Grant and others.

Wallace also announced a new imprint, Prime Books, which would include a number of titles originally announced by Imaginary Worlds. These included books by Tim Lebbon, Jeff VanderMeer, Brett Savory and Michael Laimo. Subsequently, Jeff VanderMeer’s Ministry of Whimsy Press became a print-on-demand imprint of Prime.

Edo van Belkom’s Teeth from Meisha Merlin was an erotic police procedural about vagina dentata, introduced by Richard Laymon. From the same publisher, Lee Killough’s Blood Games was the third in the series featuring vampire detective Garreth Mikaelian.

David Nordhaus’s online imprint DarkTales launched the collections Dial Your Dreams & Other Nightmares by Robert Weinberg, Cold Comfort by Nancy Kilpatrick and the erotic Six-Inch Spikes by Edo van Belkom at the Seattle World Horror Convention. Later in the year, the publisher released the novels Soul Temple by Steven Lee Climer, A Flock of Crows is Called a Murder by James Viscosi, and the second volume in the Asylum anthology series, The Violent Ward, edited by Victor Heck and featuring stories by D. F. Lewis, James Dorr, Gerard Houarner and others.

Harlan was a new novel by David Whitman, while The Charm was the first book in the reissued ‘Shaman Cycle’ series of Southwestern supernatural thrillers by Adam Niswander. It was followed by The Serpent Slayers and The Hound Hunters, with more volumes in the projected thirteen-volume series due from DarkTales.

Harry Houdini and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle teamed up to battle dark magic in Harry R. Squires’s print-on-demand novel What Rough Beast.

Published in a signed and numbered 500-copy hardcover by Oregon’s IFD Publishing, Escaping Purgatory: Fables in Words and Pictures by Gary A. Braunbeck and Alan M. Clark contained seven thematically linked stories (five original) and a foreword by Peter Crowther, illustrated throughout by Clark. From the same imprint, Flaming Arrows was a collection of short-short stories by Bruce Holland Rogers, published in both trade paperback and hardcover, with an introduction by Kate Wilhelm. Set in a ridiculously huge typeface, the twenty-seven tales (many of them reprints) were illustrated by Jill Bauman and publisher Clark.

Edited by Elizabeth Engstrom, Imagination Fully Dilated Volume 2 contained twenty-nine stories by such authors as Ramsey Campbell, Poppy Z. Brite and Charles de Lint, based around Alan M. Clark’s artwork. With an introduction by Paula Guran, the hardcover was limited to 600 signed copies from IFD.

Independent Texas imprint Clockwork Storybook was founded in 2001 by a writers’ collective and published nine titles in its first year. These included the trade paperback collection Beneath the Skin and Other Stories, containing six original stories and a somewhat pretentious introduction by Matthew Sturges, and Chris Roberson’s Cybermancy Incorporated, a collection of two stories and two linked novellas introducing modern-day pulp hero Jon Bonaventure Carmody and his associates. The Clockwork Reader was a trade paperback sampler containing work by the above-mentioned authors, along with Mark Finn and Bill Willingham. Hundreds of short stories, novels and sample chapters were also available for free download on the publisher’s website.

William E. Rand’s Painted Demons was a collection of nine linked horror stories available from iUniverse/Writers Club Press. Rand’s That Way Madness Lies and Rita Dimitra’s The Blood Waltz were vampire novels from the same imprint.

Gus Smith’s Feather & Bone was a debut novel from British print-on-demand publisher Big Engine and involved an ancient spirit loose in a Northumberland farming community beset by BSE.

Edited by Forrest J. Ackerman, Rainbow Fantasia: 35 Spectrumatic Tales of Wonder from Sense of Wonder Press featured stories with colours in their titles by Ray Cummings, Robert W. Chambers and others.

From Subterranean Press, Douglas Clegg’s Naomi was originally published as an online serial novel. About a man pursuing a ghost into the underground world that exists beneath New York City, it was limited to 1,500 signed copies. Clegg’s other novel from Subterranean, Dark of the Eye, involved a woman whose healing powers made her a target for evil forces.

Joe Lansdale’s Zeppelins West was a wild parody of Westerns, alternate universes and pulp stories, involving a cast of historical characters, the Frankenstein Monster and Captain Nemo and his intellectual seal, Ned. Illustrated by Mark A. Nelson, it was available in a signed hardcover edition limited to 1,500 copies with full-colour endpapers.

Ray Garton’s Sex and Violence in Hollywood lived up to its title, while John Shirley’s novel The View from Hell was published in a signed edition of 1,000 copies and a twenty-six-copy lettered edition.

Published as an attractive hardcover limited to 750 signed and numbered copies, Thomas Tessier’s novella Father Panic’s Opera Macabre concerned a successful historical novelist who stumbled upon a remote Italian farmhouse filled with supernatural secrets. The story was unfortunately marred by some extremely graphic depictions of Nazi tortures.

Delayed from the previous year, David J. Schow’s collection Eye contained thirteen stories (two original) and a witty afterword by the author, limited to 1,000 signed copies. An extra new story was included in the lettered-state edition.

Edward Bryant’s The Baku: Tales of the Nuclear Age contained a new introduction by the author, three short stories and a previously unpublished teleplay, bought by The Twilight Zone but never produced. It was limited to 500 signed copies and a twenty-six copy lettered edition.

Guilty But Insane was a collection of Poppy Z. Brite’s non-fiction, limited to 2,000 signed hardcover copies with a full-colour dust jacket and autograph page art by J. K. Potter. Brite and Caitlin R. Kiernan each had a new story plus a collaboration in Wrong Things, an attractive hardcover illustrated by Richard Kirk and published in a signed edition of 1,500 copies and a lettered edition.

Subterranean also revived the old Dark Harvest Night Visions series with the tenth volume. Edited by Richard Chizinar and illustrated by Alan M. Clark, it contained new novellas by Jack Ketchum and John Shirley, along with five original short stories by David B. Silva. The volume was available as a trade hardcover and a 500-copy limited edition.

Simon Clark’s new novel, Darkness Demands, appeared from Cemetery Dance in a signed edition limited to 1,000 copies. It involved a writer of true-crime stories faced with choosing between the survival of his daughter or the rest of his family. A reissue of Clark’s 1995 end-of-civilization novel, Blood Crazy, was also available from the same publisher in a signed edition of 1,000 copies.

The signed, limited edition of Christopher Golden’s The Ferryman came with a quote from Clive Barker and involved a woman who spurned the eponymous soul-taker during a near-fatal medical ordeal. The book’s prologue was published as a chap-book with illustrations by Eric Powell.

Tim Lebbon’s short novel Until She Sleeps was about a young boy’s battle against a resurrected 300-year-old witch who released her suppressed nightmares on a quiet village. It was available in a deluxe limited edition of 1,000 signed copies. Edward Lee’s City Infernal was a Southern Gothic horror novel set in Hell and also limited to 1,000 copies.

The Cemetery Dance hardcover of Richard Laymon’s Night in Lonesome October was the first US edition of the late author’s Halloween novel. Also from CD, Friday Night at Beast House was a short novel that was nominally a sequel to the author’s previous three books in the series. Laymon’s fable The Halloween Mouse was a thin, oversized hardcover illustrated in full colour by Alan M. Clark and limited to only 300 signed and numbered copies inside a handmade cloth slipcase.

Richard Matheson’s Camp Pleasant was possibly an early novel, about a murder at a children’s summer camp, while a limited edition of 1,500 copies of Jack Ketchum’s The Lost was published by Cemetery Dance simultaneously with the Leisure paperback.

Edited by Richard Chizmar, Trick or Treat was the first in a new hardcover anthology series celebrating Halloween. It collected five original novellas by Gary A. Braunbeck, Nancy A. Collins, Rick Hautala, Al Sarrantonio and Thomas Tessier. It was also available in a signed edition, limited to 400 slipcased copies.

F. Paul Wilson’s Sims Book Two: The Portero Method was the second in a new series of hardcover novellas published exclusively by Cemetery Dance in a limited edition of 750 signed copies. Wilson’s latest ‘Repairman Jack’ novel, Hosts, appeared from Gauntlet Press in a signed, limited edition of 475 copies, with cover art by Harry O. Morris. It introduced the enigmatic Jack’s sister, Kate Iverson, and featured an insidious virus that threatened to deprive humanity of its individuality.

Originally published in 1991 as a paperback original, Nancy A. Collins’s second novel, Tempter, appeared from Gauntlet Press in a completely rewritten version that the author considered the preferred text. It was available as both a signed and numbered hardcover and in a lettered, leather-bound and tray-cased edition priced at $150.

Edited by Donn Albright, Ray Bradbury’s classic collection Dark Carnival was limited to only 700 numbered and slipcased copies signed by Bradbury and Clive Barker (who contributed the afterword). This edition added five stories not contained in the 1947 Arkham House edition, along with several black and white pulp-cover reproductions and an archival section featuring photos of manuscript pages, letters, and some other rare items. Bradbury produced the dust-jacket art and interior illustrations himself. A lettered, leather-bound, tray-cased edition of fifty-two copies, containing an extra twenty-five pages, sold for $1,000 apiece.

For those who purchased the book directly from the publisher, there was also a chapbook of Bradbury’s story ‘Time Intervening’, limited to 752 copies.

The deluxe reissue of Richard Matheson’s classic The Shrinking Man contained a new afterword by David Morrell, photos from the movie and several pages of facsimile script. It was limited to 500 numbered copies signed by Matheson and Morrell.

Gauntlet’s new Edge imprint concentrated on publishing mass-market trade paperbacks and hardcovers. Released as an Edge title, Barry Hoffman’s serial-killer novel Judas Eyes was the third in the series about bounty hunter Shara Farris, with an afterword by Jack Ketchum.

The Gauntlet Press Sampler was a chapbook featuring new stories by Richard Christian Matheson, Barry Hoffman, Rain Graves and Richard Matheson, along with a poem by Clive Barker, illustrated by Harry O. Morris and David Armstrong.

Launched in November 2000 by Craig Spector and a venture capital company to sell books directly through the Internet, Stealth Press consolidated its publishing schedule in 2001 with a raft of nicely produced hardcover volumes that were not initially available in bookstores.

Celebrating the fortieth anniversary of Dennis Etchison’s first professional short-story sale, Talking in the Dark: Selected Stories was a handsome collection of twenty-four tales (one original), the earliest dating back to 1972. Unfortunately, despite being a commemorative volume, the book contained neither an introduction nor any story notes by the author.

Darkness Divided collected twenty-two stories (four original) by John Shirley, presented in two sections — one featuring stories set in the past and the present, and the other set in myriad futures. The book included collaborations with Walter Gibson and Bruce Sterling, plus a short introduction by Poppy Z. Brite.

Dark Universe contained forty-one stories that author William F. Nolan considered to be amongst his best work from the past fifty years, with an introduction by Christopher Conlon. Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s Tempting Fate, her third Saint-Germain vampire book from Stealth Press, weighed in at more than 600 pages.

In December, Stealth published a 800-page-plus edition of Clive Barker’s Books of Blood. The massive collection was available as a trade hardcover, a 500-copy signed edition and as a lettered edition of fifty-two copies that sold out pre-publication. Featuring a cover photograph by the author and a new preface by Peter Atkins, it was the first and only edition containing all six books in one volume (including the final story, ‘On Jerusalem’s Street’, previously unavailable in any North American printing).

However, having gone through a reported $1.3 million in venture capital, Stealth suspended all publication at the end of the year and let its consulting staff go. Amongst those who found that they were out of a job were Craig Spector, Pat LoBrutto, Peter Schneider, Paula Guran, Douglas Clegg and Peter Atkins, while imminent editions of Ray Bradbury’s poetry collection They Have Not Seen the Stars and Tabitha King’s Small World were left in limbo.

Sporting a jokey dust jacket by Gahan Wilson, Acolytes of Cthulhu was the third Lovecraftian anthology edited and introduced by Robert M. Price and published in hardcover by Fedogan & Bremer. It contained twenty-eight stories (two original) by Joséph Payne Brennan, C. M. Eddy, Manly Wade Wellman, Henry Hasse, Edmond Hamilton, David H. Keller M. D., Jorge Luis Borges, Randall Garrett, S. T. Joshi, Dirk W. Mosig, Don Burleson, Peter Cannon, Gustav Meyrinck, Neil Gaiman and others.

Fedogan also reissued H. P. Lovecraft’s Fungi from Yuggoth as an audio CD containing thirty-five sonnets and with an accompanying booklet.

Inspired by Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos, Strange Aeons from Wiltshire’s Rainfall Records was an atmospheric two-disk CD collection of words and music produced and directed by artist Steve Lines. Contributors to the audio anthology included Ramsey Campbell, Brian Lumley, Simon Clark, John B. Ford, Joel Lane, Robert M. Price and Tim Lebbon.

Robert T. Garcia’s American Fantasy imprint published a 600-copy signed and slipcased edition of Michael Moorcock’s The Dreamthief’s Daughter: A Tale of the Albino, in which Elric of Melnibone, Count Ulzic von Bek and other characters battled the evils of Hitler’s Nazi Germany. The beautifully designed volume, illustrated by Randy Broecker, Donato Giancola, Gary Gianni, Robert Gould, Michael Kaluta, Todd Lockwood, Don Maitz and Michael Whelan, was also issued in a twenty-six-copy lettered and tray-cased edition.

Ranging from Lovecraftian horrors to hard SF, Claremont Tales was a collection of twelve recent stories (one original) by Richard A. Lupoff, illustrated by Nicholas Jainschigg and published by Golden Gryphon Press.

Peter Crowther’s PS Publishing released Tracy Knight’s impressive and offbeat debut novel The Astonished Eye (originally scheduled to appear from the now defunct Pumpkin Books) with an introduction by Philip José Farmer and dust-jacket illustration by Alan Clark. The hardcover was limited to 500 signed and numbered copies and twenty-six deluxe lettered editions.

Introduced by Paul Di Filippo, Eric Brown’s novella A Writer’s Life concerned an apparently immortal author whose previous incarnations included Ambrose Bierce. Conrad Williams’s Nearly People included an introduction by Michael Marshall Smith and concerned a woman’s quest through a decaying and dangerous landscape. Both were published by PS in limited signed and numbered editions of 500 paperback copies and 300 hardcovers.

Manchester’s Savoy Books reprinted Anthony Skene’s (aka George Norman Philips, 1886–1972) incredibly rare 1936 pulp detective novel Monsieur Zenith the Albino as an attractive hardcover with an introduction by Jack Adrian, a foreword by Michael Moorcock, and numerous black and white illustrations and cover reproductions throughout.

From the same publisher, David Britton’s Baptized in the Blood of Millions was the third ‘Lord Horror’ novel with illustrations by the author, set in a bizarre alternate England spanning World War II and featuring the traitorous Lord Haw-Haw, British film star Jessie Matthews and poet Sylvia Plath as characters.

From editor David Sutton’s Shadow Publishing imprint, Phantoms of Venice was a solid anthology often tales (two reprints) by Peter Tremayne, Cherry Wilder, Conrad Williams, Mike Chinn, Tim Lebbon, Brian Stableford and others, including one by the editor himself, set in the ‘Serene Republic’ of dark canals. The hardcover also included an informative foreword by Joel Lane and dust-jacket art by Harry O. Morris.

Produced in conjunction with The British Fantasy Society, Telos Publishing was launched with Urban Gothic: Lacuna and Other Trips edited by David J. Howe, a trade paperback and hardcover anthology based on the disappointing Channel 5 TV series. Along with a very brief introduction by actor Richard O’Brien and interviews with the creators of the show, it included three original tales about London (the first two of them reprints) by Christopher Fowler, Graham Masterton and Simon Clark and a trio of stories by Paul Finch, Steve Lockley and Paul Lewis, and Debbie Bennett based on previously produced scripts by Tom de Ville.

Telos also began publishing a series of original hardcover Doctor Who novellas. The first, Time and Relative by Kim Newman, appeared as a standard hardcover and in a deluxe signed edition featuring a colour frontispiece illustration by Bryan Talbot.

Published in trade paperback by Brooklyn’s Small Beer Press, Stranger Things Happen was the first collection from the talented Kelly Link, containing eleven quirky, spooky and smart stories (two original). Meet Me in the Moon Room from the same imprint contained thirty-three often surreal tales (six original) by Ray Vukcevich.

California’s Dark Regions Press issued the attractive trade paperback collections Strange Mistresses: Tales of Wonder and Romance containing fourteen stories (two original) and thirteen poems by James Dorr with an introduction by Marge Simon; Winter Shadows and Other Tales featuring twenty stories (four original) by Mary Soon Lee, and Salt Water Tears, a collection of ten stories (one original) by Brian Hopkins with an introduction by Gary A. Braunbeck. All three volumes featured cover art by A. B. Word.

Gary Braunbeck’s This Flesh Unknown was an erotic ghost novel from Foggy Windows Books/Chimeras, while D. G. K. Goldberg’s. Doomed to Repeat It, published by The Design Image Group, was about a woman with an abusive ghostly boyfriend.

From Overlook Connection Press, Gary Raisor’s Graven Images appeared in various signed editions with an introduction by Edward Lee, who also somewhat predictably supplied the introduction for Duet for the Devil, a hard-core horror novel by T. Winter-Damon and Randy Chandler about serial slayer The Zodiac Killer. It was published by Florida’s Necro Publications in a signed and numbered edition of 400 trade paperbacks and 100 hardcovers.

Necro’s Bedlam Press imprint, dedicated to bizarre, weird and darkly humorous fiction, was launched withTangy Bonanza’., a collection of two novellas by Doc Solammen published in a signed and numbered trade paperback edition of 300 copies and a fifty-two-copy signed and lettered hardcover.

Published by Delirium Books, Scott Thomas’s Cobwebs and Whispers collected twenty-six stories (seventeen original) of quiet horror with a foreword by Jeff VanderMeer and an introduction by Michael Pendragon in a signed hardcover edition limited to 250 numbered copies.

Also from Delirium, Greg F. Gifune’s Heretics contained eight short horror stories with an introduction by Brian Hopkins and was limited to just fifty signed and numbered hardcover copies. This also became the first title in Delirium’s new trade paperback line.

From the same publisher and edited by Shane Ryan Staley, The Dead Inn was an anthology of hardcore horror subtitled Gross Oddities, Erotic Perversities & Supernatural Entities. It featured stories by Don D’Ammassa, Charlee Jacob, Steve Beai, Mark McLaughlin, John B. Rosenman, Trey R. Barker, Jeffrey Thomas and others, including the editor. 4x4 contained eight stories by Michael Oliveri, Geoff Cooper, Brian Keene and Michael T. Huyck, Jr., with an afterword in which the authors/collaborators discussed why they write horror.

From Shadowlands Press, Tom Piccirilli’s The Night Class involved a college student who found his life unravelling around him, while Steven R. Cowan’s Gothica: Romance of the Immortals was a time-travel tale from Southern Charm Press involving vampires.

New York’s Soft Skull Press published Nick Mamatas’s novel Northern Gothic, about two serial killers connected over more than a century by the city’s bloody history.

Confessions of a Ghoul and Other Stories from Silver Lake Publishing contained seven stories by M. F. Korn and an introduction by D. F. Lewis. Boasting ‘Six Honorable Mentions’ in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror on the cover, Odd Lot: Stories to Chill the Heart was a collection of nine stories (one original) written and published by self-proclaimed ‘Storyteller of the Heart’ Steve Burt, illustrated by Jessica Hagerman.

The Bubba Chronicles was a collection of eleven stories (including several collaborations) by Selina Rosen from Yard Dog Press. Bubbas of the Apocalypse was a follow-up anthology edited by Rosen containing sixteen stories and three poems set in a zombie-filled post-holocaust future. From the same editor and imprint, Stories That Won’t Make Your Parents Hurl contained fifteen young-adult stories and three poems inspired by the Brothers Grimm.

Edited by Nicola Griffith and Stephen Pagel, Bending the Landscape: Horror was an anthology of eighteen original gay and lesbian horror stories published by Overlook Press.

Published by Chicago’s 11th Hour Productions and Twilight Tales, Blood & Donuts was a 250-copy trade paperback anthology edited by Tina L. Jens and containing eighteen crime/mystery stories (twelve original) by Jody Lynn Nye, Jay Bonansinga, Steve Lockley, Robert Weinberg, Brian Hodge, Yvonne Navarro, Edo van Belkom, Wayne Allen Salle and others.

John B. Ford’s collection of ten stories and four poems, Tales Of Deviltry & Doom, was published by artist Steve Lines’s Rainfall Books in a limited hardcover edition of 250 signed and numbered copies. Dark Shadows on the Moon contained a further thirty-six stories (seven original) by the same writer, published in trade paperback by Hive Press with an introduction by Simon Clark.

Meanwhile, Ford’s own BJM Press issued David Price’s The Evil Eye, Quentin S. Crisp’s The Nightmare Exhibition and Paul Kane’s Alone (in the Dark), each as trade paperback collections with introductions by the publisher.

Dark Whispers by Peter Ebsworth was a collection of ten stories published in trade paperback by Storybook, an imprint of David Searle’s Searle Publishing.

Edited and introduced by Nikolas Schreck for Creation Books, Flowers from Hell: A Satanic Reader featured stories, poetry and novel excerpts about the Devil by Edgar Allan Poe, John Milton, Charles Baudelaire and others.

The 1920s Investigator’s Companion to Chaosium’s Call of Cthulhu role-playing game included background material by Keith Herber, John Crowe, Kenneth Faig, Jr. and others. Bruce Ballon’s award-winning Call of Cthulhu: Unseen Masters was another guide to the game, including a scenario partly inspired by Philip K. Dick. The trade paperback was illustrated by Paul Carrick and Drashi Khendup.

Also from Chaosium, Song of Cthulhu: Tales of the Spheres Beyond Sound edited by Stephen Mark Rainey contained twenty Lovecraftian stories (nine original) by Thomas Ligotti, Caitlfn R. Kiernan and others.

Nameless Cults: The Cthulhu Mythos Fiction of Robert E. Howardwas the latest Chaosium anthology edited and introduced by Robert M. Price. It included thirteen vaguely Lovecraftian stories by Howard plus five collaborations (including the round-robin tale ‘The Challenge from Beyond’ by Howard, C. L. Moore, A. Merritt, H. P. Lovecraft and Frank Belknap Long), illustrated by H. E. Fassl and Dave Carson.

Robert Price also contributed an introduction to The Gardens of Lucullus, a Cthulhu Mythos/Roman gladiator novel by Richard L. Tierney and Glenn Rahman, published as an attractive trade paperback by the enigmatic Sidecar Preservation Society.

Introduced by David G. Rowlands, A Ghostly Crew: Tales from The Endeavour was a welcome collection of fifteen all-reprint stories by Roger Johnson, published by Robert Morgan’s Sarob Press in a hardcover edition of 300 copies. Spalatro: Two Italian Tales was a slim 250-copy hardcover containing two stories from the Dublin University Magazine by J. Sheridan Le Fanu, edited and introduced by Miles Stribling and superbly illustrated by Douglas Walters.

The Sistrum and Other Ghost Stories by Alice Perrin (1867–1934) was the fifth volume in editor Richard Dalby’s ‘Mistresses of the Macabre’ series, with illustrations by Paul Lowe. The publisher had to revise the binding specifications for The Haunted River & Three Other Ghostly Novellas by Mrs J. H. Riddell (1832–1906), which included an introduction by editor Dalby and twenty-four full-page original illustrations that accompanied the Routledge’s Christmas Annual publication of the four stories. Both books appeared in 300-copy numbered hardcover editions.

Published the same month by Sarob was Can Such Things Be? & By the Night Express by the mysterious Keith Fleming, with an introduction by John Pelan, an afterword by Dalby, and dust-jacket and interior art by Randy Broecker. It contained the title novel from 1889 and three supernatural novellas (‘By the Night Express’, ‘Dolores’ and ‘Love Stronger than Death’) from the very rare 1889 paperback By The Night Express. The book was limited to just 250 hardcover copies.

From San Francisco’s Night Shade Books came The Devil is Not Mocked and Other Warnings and Fearful Rock and Other Precarious Locales, the second and third volumes respectively in The Selected Stories of Manly Wade Wellman series edited by John Pelan. Ramsey Campbell contributed a reminiscent introduction to the former and Stephen Jones to the latter. These welcome collections were once again only marred by the poor interior artwork.

The Man With the Barbed-Wire Fists was a large collection of twenty-four stories (two original) by Norman Partridge, while Face was a new novel by Tim Lebbon about a supernatural hitchhiker. Both books were also issued in 100-copy signed/slipcased editions that included extra chapbooks.

And the Angel with Television Eyes was a new fantasy novel by John Shirley, loosely based on the short story of the same title, and Lies & Ugliness was a big new collection from Brian Hodge, containing two new stories. The signed/slipcased edition of the latter also included a CD by the author’s musical side project, Axis Mundi.

Also from Night Shade, editor S. T. Joshi’s The Ancient Track: The Complete Poetical Works of H. P. Lovecraft eventually appeared in hardcover and trade paperback after a few delays.

Edited with an introduction by Joshi, Robert Hichens’s The Return of the Soul and Other Stories from Seattle’s Midnight House contained eight reprint tales and was the first of a proposed two-book set presenting the definitive collection of the prolific author’s supernatural tales.

The Scarecrow and Other Stories was an expanded edition of the 1918 collection containing seventeen tales by G. (Gwendolyn) Ranger Wormser (1893–1953), edited by Douglas A. Anderson. As a follow-up to the author’s earlier collection The House of the Nightmare and Other Stories, the same publisher also issued Edward Lucas White’s (1866–1934) Sesta & Other Strange Stories, which included fifteen stories (several previously unpublished), two poems, an introduction by Lee Weinstein and a bibliography.

Nineteen of Fritz Leiber’s best horror tales were collected in The Black Gondolier & Other Stories, the first of two hardcover volumes edited by John Pelan and Steve Savile.

The Beasts of Brahm was a reprint of the rare 1937 novel by the possibly pseudonymous Mark Hansom, with a fascinating introduction by Pelan. The equally obscure H. B. Gregory’s Dark Sanctuary was another rare British novel also rescued from obscurity, with an historical introduction by D. H. Olson. Both volumes appeared on the late Karl Edward Wagner’s list of ‘forgotten’ works of fantasy and horror and, like all the titles from Midnight House, were published in hardcover editions of just 460 copies with cover artwork by Allen Koszowski.

From Tartarus Press, Ghost Stories by Oliver Onions collected twenty-two classic tales. First published in 1931, Forrest Reid’s Uncle Stephen was a dream-story with a new introduction by Colin Cruise, while L. P. Hartley’s The Collected Macabre Stories, also from Tartarus, contained thirty-seven ghost stories by the author of The Go-Between, with an introduction by Mark Valentine. All were limited to just 350 copies.

L. T. C. Rolt’s Sleep No More: Railway, Canal and Other Stories of the Supernatural was a trade paperback collection of fourteen classic ghost stories from Sutton Publishing, with an introduction by Susan Hill.

From Ash-Tree Press, Where Human Pathways End: Tales of the Dead and the Un-Dead collected all ten of the supernatural short stories of 1930s author Shamus Frazer, whose story ‘The Fifth Mask’ is cited as an influence on Ramsey Campbell, with an introduction by editor Richard Dalby. Edited and introduced by John Pelan and Dalby, The Shadow on the Blind and Other Ghost Stories reprinted the 1895 collection of nine stories by Alfred Louisa Bladwin, along with a previously uncollected tale, and included seven illustrations by Symington from the first edition.

The Golden Gong and Other Night-Pieces by Thomas Burke reprinted twenty-one tales complete with an introductory essay by editor Jessica Amanada Salmonson.

Edited by David Rowlands and limited to 500 copies, Mystic Voices by Roger Pater (aka Dom Gilbert Hudleston), a member of the Order of St. Benedict, collected fourteen stories about psychic squire-priest Father Philip Rivers Pater, along with a chapter from a companion work, My Cousin Philip, and a contemporary obituary of the author.

Mrs Amworth, the third volume of The Collected Spook Stories of E. F. Benson, was limited to 600 copies and contained sixteen short supernatural stories (dating from 1922–23), with an introduction by editor Jack Adrian. Adrian was also responsible for Couching at the Door and Other Strange and Macabre Tales, which collected the supernatural stories of popular novelist D. (Dorothy) K. (Kathleen) Broster (1877–1950), including one previously unpublished tale. It was also limited to 600 copies, with dust-jacket art by Jason Van Hollander.

As usual, Adrian edited The Ash-Tree Annual Macabre 2001, which was limited to 500 copies and contained thirteen stories, only one of which had appeared in book form before, by writers better known for working in other genres. These included such well-known names as Marjorie Bowen, Jessie Douglas Kerruish and Leigh Brackett.

After Shocks was a collection of eighteen ‘classical’ supernatural stories by prolific small-press contributor Paul Finch, and Steve Rasnic Tem’s The Far Side of the Lake was a welcome collection of eight of the author’s ‘Charlie Goode’ ghost stories and twenty-five other horror tales, limited to 500 copies.

The Five Quarters by Steve Duffy and Ian Rodwell collected five novellas about meetings of the eponymous society with a handful of members, at which the talk inevitably turned to the supernatural. It was limited to 500 copies, and the dust jacket was illustrated by Paul Lowe.

Probably Ash-Tree’s finest achievement of the year was A Pleasing Terror: The Complete Supernatural Writings of M. R. James. With a preface by Christopher and Barbara Roden, and an introduction by Steve Duffy, the $75.00 hardcover reprinted thirty-four annotated stories plus prefaces, several rare fragments, articles, letters, translations, appendices, a bibliography, and information on James on film, radio and television. Paul Lowe also provided thirty-three illustrations along with a full-colour dust jacket.

The series of chapbooks published by the mysterious and elusive Sidecar Preservation Society (named after a classic Prohibition-era cocktail) continued with Richard L. Tierney’s The Blob That Gobbled Abdul and Other Poems and Songs, a collection of thirteen Lovecraftian verses, illustrated by Dave Carson and with an introduction by Ramsey Campbell. Tierney in turn introduced Campbell’s time-travel story Point of View, illustrated by Allen Koszowski.

Hugh B. Cave’s Loose Loot was a detective yarn featuring Officer Coffey with an afterword by Milt Thomas, while Swedish Lutheran Vampires of Brainerd was a humorous story by Anne Waltz, with an afterword by Karen Taylor and cover art by Jon Arfstrom.

Edited by D. H. Olsen, A Donald Wandrei Miscellany contained a number of shorter pieces of fiction, non-fiction, verse and humour by the late author, and Lee Brown Coye’s Chips & Savings and Another Writing (already in its second printing) was a collection of the artist’s homespun newspaper column in the Mid-York Weekly during the 1960s. Each of the Sidecar booklets was limited to 100 numbered copies (except for the Cave, which totalled 175), some of which may have been bound in boards by the publisher.

From Subterranean Press, Graham Joyce’s chapbook Black Dust contained the 1994 story ‘The Apprentice’ along with the previously unpublished title story, limited to 250 signed and numbered copies. From the same imprint, Graham Masterton’s The Scrawler, about an urban monster, was limited to 500 numbered copies.

Also from Subterranean, On Pirates was a deluxe chapbook by William Ashbless (a pseudonym for Tim Powers and James P. Blaylock) with interior two-colour illustrations by Gahan Wilson. Limited to 1,000 signed and numbered copies, it included ‘Slouching Toward Mauritius’, a short pirate story written more than twenty-five years ago but never published, along with a lengthy pirate poem, ‘Moon-Eye Agonistes’. Powers and Blaylock supplied the introduction and afterword respectively.

Cat Stories by Michael Marshall Smith was published by Paul Miller’s Earthling Publications, collecting three tales (one original) featuring fantastique felines in an attractive 350-copy chapbook designed by the author. Fifteen lettered and signed hardcover copies were also issued in a slipcase, along with a facsimile of the original handwritten manuscript for Smith’s short story ‘The Man Who Drew Cats’.

Chico Kidd’s self-publishedSecond Sight and Other Stories contained four rousing supernatural adventures introducing readers to turn-of-the-century sea captain Luis Da Silva, who had the power to see ghosts after losing his left eye to a demon. It proved an impressive showcase for one of the genre’s most interesting and genuinely original new characters.

From Sean A. Wallace’s Prime Books, The Hidden Language of Demons was a 33,000-word modern novella by L. H. Maynard and M. P. N. Sims which was billed as ‘Poe in his Sgt. Pepper period’.

Limited to 100 copies, W. (Wilum) H. (Hopfrog) Pugmire’s Songs of Sesqua Valley was published by Imelod and contained thirty-three weird sonnets inspired by H. P. Lovecraft, The Cthulhu Mythos and various dark places, with an introduction and cover illustration by Peter Worthy. From the same author, Tales of Love and Death published by Delirium Books was a 300-copy signed chapbook containing sixteen horror and Lovecraftian short stories (two original).

Mark McLaughlin’s Shoggoth Cacciatore and Other Eldritch Entrees was a chapbook collection of ten Lovecraftian stories (six original) also from Delirium, with an introduction by Simon Clark. The Night the Lights Went Out in Arkham was an anthology of Lovecraftian stories set in the 1970s from Undaunted Press. It contained five new tales by Shawn James, Megan Powell, Octavio Ramos, Jr., Lawrence Barker and the ever-popular McLaughlin.

Louis de Bernieres’s Gunter Weber’s Confession: The Final Chapter to Captain Corelli’s Mandolin was a thin chapbook from Tartarus Press, published in a special limited edition of 350 numbered copies. Hand-set in Perpetua type and printed and bound by Alan Anderson at the Tragara Press, it was available in a 250-copy edition on Teton paper or as one of 100 special copies on Zerkall paper signed by the author for $120.00.

Eden was a novelette by Ken Wisman about a drug-fuelled spiritual journey, published by California’s Dark Regions Press. True Tales of the Scarlet Sponge by Wayne Allen Sallee and Weston Ochse’s Natural Selection were both available from DarkTales.

Billed as ‘A Double Shot of Repugnance’, the first release in the new Necro Chapbooks line from Florida wasPartners in Chyme, featuring Ryan Harding’s ‘Gross-Out Contest’-winning story ‘Damaged Goods’ paired with ‘The Dritiphilist’ by Edward Lee. It was published as a 300-copy signed and numbered chapbook and a twenty-six-copy signed and lettered hardcover.

Quantum Theology Publications was a new chapbook line from Canada that launched with The Narrow World, a collection of five stories by the talented Gemma Files, including a new vampire tale, plus an introduction by Michael Rowe.

Colorado’s new online bookstore and specialty press Worm-hole Books launched its limited-edition Contemporary Chapbook line in May with Pioneer by Melanie Tem, briefly introduced by Nancy Holder, and A Sad Last Love at the Diner of the Damned by Edward Bryant, with a new introduction by S. P. Somtow and an afterword by the author.

Also from Wormhole, Pink Marble and Never Say Die were two short stories by Dawn Dunn with an introduction by Nancy Kilpatrick, and Dunn also contributed an author biography to While She Was Out by Bryant. Steve Rasnic Tern’s bizarre novella about a travelling salesman, In These Final Days of Sales, included an autobiographical afterword by the author and interior photography by Bryant.

Each Wormhole booklet was limited to 750 signed copies, a 200-copy hardcover edition and a fifty-two-copy lettered edition, featuring full-colour covers, illustrated interiors and archival materials.

Fallen Angel Blues was an apocalyptic round-robin novella from Succubus Press/horror.net which, despite owing a little too much to Stephen King’s The Stand, succeeded because of the enthusiasm of its ten collaborators, who included Suzanne Donahue, James Newman, Steve Savile and Mark Tyree.

Lee Martindale’s The Folly of Assumption was a chapbook collection of five stories (one original) from Yard Dog Press, while A Game of Colors by John Urbanick was a novella from the same publisher.

The Exchange by Nicholas Sporlender (aka Jeff VanderMeer) was a beautifully produced little enveloped chapbook illustrated by Louis Verden (aka Eric Schaller) and published by Hoegbottom & Sons to celebrate the city of Ambergris’s 300th Festival of the Freshwater Squid. It was available in a 300-copy edition or as a 100-copy deluxe limited signed edition in a box containing several items traditionally used during the Festival.

The Haunted River produced Oliver Onions’s Tragic Casements: A Ghost Story as a seventy-five-copy chapbook with an introduction by Jonathan Harker. Published by Athanor Press, Because Horrors Linger contained four classic tales by Terence Ekenan.

The second volume of Jeff Paris and Adam Golaski’s New Genre included new SF and horror stories by M. J. Murphy, Jan Wildt, Barth Anderson, Jon-Michael Emory and Zohar A. Goodman.

Darrell Schweitzer’s They Never Found His Head: Poems of Sentiment and Reflection collected twelve Lovecraftian poems, four of which were Cthulhuoid hymns, in a chapbook published by Zadok Allen.

Defacing the Moon and Other Poems by Mike Allen was a slim chapbook from DNA Publications with illustrations by the poet. From Dark Regions Press, A Box Full of Alien Skies collected thirty-one poems by G. O. Clark in a signed edition of 200 copies.

Published by New Jersey’s Flesh & Blood Press, What the Cacodaemon Whispered by Chad Hensley and Jacie Ragan’s Deadly Nightshade both collected thirteen poems each and were limited to 150 copies apiece. The Temporary King by P. K. Graves was a short story also available from the same imprint.

Travelers by Twilight was the first volume of a portfolio of selected illustrations by Allen Koszowski with an introduction by Brian Lumley and an appreciation by fellow artist Jason Van Hollander. It was published by Magic Pen Press in an edition of 350 numbered copies.

It was reported that Famous Monsters of Filmland was facing an uncertain future after US Bankruptcy Judge Arthur Greenwald declared that its publisher, Ray Ferry, fraudulently transferred the magazine’s ownership to his housemate, Gene Reynolds. In 2000, a Van Nuys jury found Ferry liable for breach of contract, libel and trade-mark infringement and awarded the title’s creator and former editor Forrest J. Ackerman $518,000 and rights to the pen name ‘Dr Acula’.

Ferry then transferred his assets to Reynolds and filed for bankruptcy protection. However, the judge found the asset transfers fraudulent because Ferry was trying to keep them away from creditors (including Ackerman) and continued to function as the magazine’s editor. As a result, a US Bankruptcy trustee filed suit for $750,000 plus punitive damages against the law firm that represented Ferry in the case.

Published in Canada, Rod Gudino’sRue Morgue is probably the most attractive and informative magazine currently covering horror in popular culture. The glossy bi-monthly featured interviews with Dario Argento, William Lustig, Alan Moore, Rob Zombie, Guillermo del Toro and many others, along with plenty of film, DVD and video, book, audio, toy and gaming news and reviews.

As usual, Weird Tales produced four issues from DNA Publications with fiction and verse by Keith Taylor, Ian Watson, editor Darrell Schweitzer, Tanith Lee, Stephen Dedman, Thomas Ligotti, Ashok Banker, David Langford, Phyllis and Alex Eisenstein and others, along with articles by Douglas Winter (on Clive Barker), Gary J. Weir (on how he rediscovered his father through the latter’s correspondence with H. P. Lovecraft), S. T. Joshi (reviews of Cthulhu Mythos fiction), and John Betancourt (on vampires).

From the same publisher, but far less professional-looking, was the quarterly Dreams of Decadence: Vampire Poetry and Fiction. Edited by Angela Kessler, contributors included Brian Stableford, Sarah A. Hoyt, N. Lee Wood, Wendy Rathbone and others.

Meanwhile, DNA’s Aboriginal SF, the semi-professional magazine first published in 1985, folded with the spring issue. Editor Charles C. Ryan cited the periodical’s excessive time demands, rather than any failure of the magazine, for his decision. Aboriginal’s inventory was absorbed by Absolute Magnitude, which also agreed to fulfil all outstanding Aboriginal subscriptions with its own magazine.

Edited by Richard Chizmar, Robert Morrish and Kara L. Tipton, the long-running Cemetery Dance published four issues featuring fiction by John Shirley, Jack Ketchum, Richard Laymon, Christa Faust, Dennis Etchison, Richard Christian Matheson, Simon Clark, Al Sarrantonio, Darrell Schweitzer, David B. Silva, Tim Lebbon, Bentley Little, Nancy Holder, T. M. Wright, Conrad Williams, Michael Cadnum and others. The magazine also included interviews with Bentley Little, Douglas Clegg, Simon Clark, Peter Straub, Tim Lebbon, Kim Newman, T. M. Wright and Al Sarrantonio, the usual review and opinion columns by Poppy Z. Brite, Bev Vincent (Stephen King news), Thomas F. Monteleone, John Pelan, Michael Marano, Charles L. Grant and various tributes to Richard Laymon.

Paula Guran’s Horror Garage published a further two issues featuring pin-up covers of a woman in a fur bikini and another wielding a bloody cleaver. That aside, there was fiction by the mandatory John Shirley, Kim Newman (a new ‘Anno Dracula’ story), Peter Crowther, Don Webb, Gerard Houarner, Bruce Holland Rogers and others, a reprint interview with China Mieville, Norman Partridge’s Drive-In reviews and various other regular columns.

As usual, Gordon Van Gelder’sThe Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction featured an impressive selection of fiction by such authors as Lucius Shepard, Esther M. Friesner, Michael Bishop, Geoff Ryman, Lucy Sussex, Michael Cadnum, Robert Sheckley, Thomas M. Disch, Paul McAuley, Ron Goulart, Terry Bisson, Ian Watson, the late Poul Anderson, James Morrow, Ray Bradbury, Gene Wolfe, Neil Gaiman, Carol Emshwiller, Michael Blumlein, and even actor Alan Arkin! There were also all the usual book and film review columns by Charles de Lint, Elizabeth Hand, Robert K. J. Killheffer, Michelle West, James Sallis, Kathi Maio and the always excellent Lucius Shepard, plus other non-fiction from Mike Ashley, Paul Di Filippo, Jeff VanderMeer, Bradley Denton and Barry N. Malzberg, amongst others. Unfortunately, a number of copies of the April issue were printed without any punctuation, and the bumper October/November issue appeared without its cartoons, although all the gag-lines were included!

David Pringle’s Interzone published stories by Stephen Baxter, John Whitbourn, Graham Joyce, Ian Watson, Ashok Banker, Eric Brown, Liz Williams, Ian R. MacLeod, Gwyneth Jones, Thomas M. Disch, Lisa Tuttle, Gregory Benford and Richard Calder’s interminable ‘Lord Soho’ series based around famous operas and operettas. The monthly magazine also featured interviews with Calder, Stephen Baxter, John Clute, Frank Kelly Freas, Lucius Shepard, Ian R. MacLeod, Ian McDonald, Connie Willis, David Zindell and John Christopher (the March issue was a special celebration of his career), an always lively letters column, David Langford’s ‘Ansible’ column, Gary Westfahl’s opinion column, Evelyn Lewes’s controversial media commentary, plus various book and film reviews by Nick Lowe, Paul McAuley, Tom Arden, Liz Williams, Chris Gilmore, David Mathew, Paul Beardsley, Matt Colborn, Phil Stephensen-Payne, Paul Brazier, John Clute and others.

Having finally succumbed to illustrated covers, Paul Fraser’s Spectrum SF produced two issues featuring fiction by John Christopher, Stephen Baxter, Michael Coney, Mary Soon Lee, Eric Brown and Charles Stross. The best thing about this paperback periodical was its extensive listing and often grumpy reviews of recent publications.

Realms of Fantasy included a feature on Stephen King’s best and worst, and managed to spell the author’s name incorrectly on the cover!

Christopher Fowler joined Andy Cox’s The Third Alternative with a regular column about the cinema. The three issues published also featured fiction by James Lovegrove, Simon Ings, Mike O’Driscoll, Joel Lane, Muriel Gray, James Van Pelt, Douglas Smith and others; interviews with Lovegrove, Gray and Graham Joyce, and articles about film directors Michael Powell, Andrei Tarkovsky and Tim Burton. With Issue 28, there was a subtle title change to The 3rd Alternative.

Also edited by Andy Cox, Crimewave 5: Dark Before Dawn featured three novellas and seven short stories, the stand-out being Christopher Fowler’s contribution.

The ever-busy Mr Cox also launched the first two issues of The Fix: The Ultimate Review of Short Fiction from TTA Press, featuring interviews with Gordon Van Gelder and Ellen Datlow, columns and features by Mat Coward, Peter Tennant, Tim Lebbon and others, and numerous reviews of magazines, anthologies and collections.

For vampire fans, Arlene Russo’sBite Me: The Magazine for the Night People from Scotland, included interviews with ‘Gothic supermodel’ Donna Ricci, film director Kevin J. Lindenmuth, authors Nancy Kilpatrick and Fred Saberhagen, articles about Hammer’s Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb and Captain Kronos, Vampire Hunter, plus such useful hints as ‘10 Ways to Become a Werewolf!’.

The fourteenth issue of the impressive French magazine Ténèbres featured modern ghost stories by L. H. Maynard and M. P. N. Sims, Stephen Laws, Rick Hautala and others, articles by Brian Stableford, Ramsey Campbell and Maynard and Sims, and interviews with Laws and Hautala.

The Book and Magazine Collector contained a useful article by David Whitehead looking at books about ‘Horror Stars’, while ‘Relaunch of Clive Barker’ was a special sixteen-page magazine ‘outsert’ by Jeff Zaleski which appeared in Publishers Weekly to tie-in with the publication of Barker’s latest novel, Coldheart Canyon.

After publishing two bi-monthly issues in 2001, Sovereign Media officially terminated Dan Perez’s editorship of Sci Fi at the end of May, following the breakdown of negotiations between the publisher and the Sci Fi Channel regarding the transfer of ownership and the future management of the magazine.

Despite the tragic death of founder Frederick S. Clarke, Cinefantastique still produced six issues under publisher Celeste C. Clarke and editor Dan Pearsons. These included a Far scape double issue and cover features on Hannibal, The Mummy Returns, Planet of the Apes, Ghosts of Mars and The Lord of the Rings.

Produced on a strict monthly schedule, Tim and Donna Lucas’s Video Watchdog featured the usual fascinating articles on James Bond, AIP’s Beach Party series, both versions of The Haunting of Hill House, Godzilla 2000, Frank Herbert’s Dune, Hitchcock on DVD, the restorations of The Lost World and Planet of the Vampires, superheroes and an interview with Mel Welles. With a list of contributors that included Kim Newman, Douglas E. Winter, Stephen R. Bissette and Tom Weaver, the quality of the reviews was exemplary. However, readers were once again left wondering whether Lucas’s long-promised book on Mario Bava would ever be published.

From Visual Imagination Limited, David Miller’s Shivers included cover features on Shadow of the Vampire, the cinema’s greatest bogeymen, the Buffy monster make-up, Resident Evil, Jeepers Creepers and a bumper edition on The Mummy Returns.

Cult Movies featured a fascinating piece about Bela Lugosi visiting England, while Dennis J. Druktenis’s enthusiastic Scary Monsters Magazine reached its fortieth issue and celebrated ten years of publication with the usual articles on TV horror hosts, regional conventions and old movies.

Alternative Cinema, the magazine of independent and underground film-making edited by Michael J. Raso, included interviews with Donald F. Glut, Julie Strain and Sam Sherman, plus an article about the making of Erotic Witch Project 2.

The revived Castle of Frankenstein magazine began reprinting Don Glut’s series of novels The New Adventures of Frankenstein in an appallingly illustrated magazine format from Druktenis Publishing. At least they also included a black and white reprint of Dick Briefer’s Frankenstein comic book from the 1950s.

For serious fans of model kits, the fortieth issue of Kitbuilders was a special Halloween edition featuring some impressive monster models.

After twenty-one years, Rosemary Pardoe’s acclaimed M. R. Jamesian publication Ghosts & Scholars rounded out the year and its print incarnation with issues 32 and 33 featuring fiction by David Longhorn, C. E. Ward, Anthony Wilkins, Don Tumasonis, James Doig, David G. Rowlands, Katherine Haynes and Michael Chislett, plus articles by Pardoe, Christopher and Barbara Roden, and Andy Sawyer.

With Pardoe’s fine fanzine transformed into a web-based, non-fiction magazine and the recent demise of Maynard and Sims’s Enigmatic Tales, David Longhorn launched Supernatural Tales to fill the gap in the British small-press market. The first two issues contained some fine new supernatural stories by Chico Kidd, Michael Chislett, David G. Rowlands, Tina Rath and Steve Duffy. However, the dull presentation and lack of artwork did not do the new title any favours.

As usual, Gordon Linzner’s Space and Time published two issues, featuring fiction and poetry by Mary Soon Lee, Darrell Schweitzer, Bruce Boston and others, plus interviews with Ursula K. Le Guin and James Morrow. Joe Morey and Bobbi Sinha-Morey’s Dark Regions: A Journal of Fantasy, Horror & Science Fiction also managed two issues that included stories and poems by Charlee Jacob, Bruce Boston, P. D. Cacek and James S. Dorr.

James Van Pelt, Denise Dumars and Bruce Boston were amongst those contributing fiction and poetry to Patrick and Honna Swenson’s Talebones, which also featured interviews with Dan Simmons and Charles de Lint and a review column by Edward Bryant.

The twelfth issue of Mark McLaughlin’s The Urbanite was a special ‘Zodiac’ issue featuring stories by Christopher Fowler, Shane Ryan Staley, John Pelan, Hugh B. Cave and others, plus an impressive poetry suite by Jo Fletcher.

Subtitled ‘a journal of parthenogenetic fiction and late labelling’, the first edition of Nemonymdus was an attractively designed collection of sixteen stories, whose author bylines would not be revealed until the second issue.

Graeme Hurry’s Kimota published its regular two issues, with stories by Peter Tennant, Joel Lane, Hugh Cook, Paul Finch and others, along with articles on old radio drama and artist Sidney H. Sime, the usual reviews and letters columns, and more outstanding artwork from ‘T23’.

Indigenous Fiction, edited by Sherry Decker, featured the usual mix of fiction, poetry and reviews, while Jack Fisher’sFlesh & Blood: Tales of Dark Fantasy & Horror included an interview with Tom Piccirilli.

Paul Bradshaw’s The Dream Zone reached its tenth number with two issues packed with fiction and poetry by Ian Watson, Mark McLaughlin, Allen Ashley, Peter Tennant, Rhys Hughes and many less familiar names, plus reviews and letters columns, and a useful article aimed at writers explaining how to avoid rejection.

Robert M. Price’s Crypt of Cthulhu No.104 featured fiction and poetry by Joséph S. Pulver, Sr., Darrell Schweitzer, Richard L. Tierney, Frank Searight and David E. Schultz, articles by Ross F. Bagby, Rawlik and T. G. Cockcroft, plus the usual ‘Mail-Call of Cthulhu’ and ‘R’lyeh Reviews’.

The Lovecraftian Dark Legacy from ‘H’chtelegoth Press included Cthulhu Mythos fan fiction and poetry from James Ambuehl, Phillip A. Ellis, Ron Shiflet and Peter Worthy, plus artwork by Sinestro. There was more of the same in Cthulhu Cultus, including work by James and Tracy Ambuehl, and Chris Loveless.

The fourth issue of Pentagram Publications’ Lovecraft’s Weird Mysteries featured four stories and a poem, plus an old interview with Weird Tales cover artist Margaret Brundage.

Brian Lingard’s Mythos Collector was a new magazine devoted to Lovecraft with fiction by Christopher O’Brian and James P. Roberts, an interview with artist John Coulthart, and articles on collecting Mythos-related material.

Paul Fry’s Peep Show was launched by Birmingham’s Short, Scary Tales Publishing with a colour cover by Mike Bohatch and fiction from Sheri White, Daniel Harr, Michael O’Connor, Alex Severin, Glen Hamilton, Kobe Nihilis and Jim Lee.

The latest double issue ofAurealis, Australia’s longest-running science fiction and fantasy magazine, was mailed to subscribers just before Christmas. It included fifteen stories by Dirk Strasser, Robert Hood, Robert Browne and others, plus a warts-and-all interview with outgoing editors Strasser and Stephen Higgins, an interview with author Ian Irvine, Bill Congreve’s book reviews, and new editor Keith Stevenson’s plans for the future of the title.

Also from Australia came the second issue of small-press magazine Orb, edited by Sarah Endacott, and former Allen & Unwin publicist Darran Jordan launched two issues of a new magazine called Eschaton from his Eclectica imprint.

The July issue of the monthly The New York Review of Science Fiction had an article about Clark Ashton Smith and the 1999 tribute anthology The Last Continent, while the November issue included a special forty-four-page supplement with reactions to the terrorist attacks of September 11th.

Charles N. Brown’s monthly Locus boasted new cover designs by Arnie Fenner and included interviews with Frank Kelly Freas, Ellen Datlow, John Crowley, Thomas M. Disch, Harlan Ellison, Bob Eggleton, Andy Duncan, Lucius Shepard and several others, along with all the usual news and reviews.

Now available through Warren Lapine’s DNA Publications, Science Fiction Chronicle was almost back on schedule, producing eleven issues with founder Andrew I. Porter staying on as news editor. Along with introducing interior colour, the magazine also revived Marvin Kaye’s opinion column, premiered Brian Keene’s new horror column, and featured interviews with various SF writers.

As always, The Bulletin of The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, edited by David A. Truesdale, contained plenty of useful articles and business advice for writers. Contributors included Harry Harrison, Michael Cassutt, Mike Resnick and Barry Malzberg, Barry B. Longyear, Kevin J. Anderson and others. The four quarterly issues also featured tributes to Gordon R. Dickson and Poul Anderson, a history of the Nebula Award, an interview with Patrick Nielsen Hayden, and market reports by Derryl Murphy and Randy Dannenfelser.

Despite a couple of confusing format changes and an editorial switch, The British Fantasy Society’s newsletter Prism still managed to produce six bimonthly issues for members. These featured the usual news and reviews along with articles on young-adult fantasies, regular columns by Tom Arden and Chaz Brenchley, plus interviews with Lisa Tuttle and Canadian director John Fawcett.

The society also published two square-bound volumes of Dark Horizons, both of which were all-fiction issues edited by Debbie Bennett and featuring D. F. Lewis, Paul Lewis, Tina Rath, Peter Tennant, Mark McLaughlin and Allen Ashley, amongst others. The second volume of F20, published by Enigmatic Press and the BFS, and co-edited by David J. Howe with Maynard and Sims, was an all-fantasy issue themed around the seven deadly sins. Contributors included Freda Warrington, Juliet McKenna, Storm Constantine and Louise Cooper.

Voices from the Vault, the newsletter of Britain’s Dracula Society, included obituaries for actor Francis Lederer (by Basil Copper) and author R. Chetwynd-Hayes, along with various reviews.

The Official Newsletter of the Horror Writers Association, edited on a monthly schedule by Kathryn Ptacek, featured all the usual columns and the editor’s extensive market reports, plus a fascinating article on reverting rights by Richard Laymon, an interview with Laymon by Vincent Fahey, an extensive tribute to R. Chetwynd-Hayes, and self-congratulatory reports on the 2001 World Horror Convention/Bram Stoker Weekend.

Most of the March issue was devoted to remembrances and tributes to HWA President Laymon, who died suddenly in February. Former vice-president David Niall Wilson succeeded the author as the group’s president, with Tim Lebbon stepping into the role of VP until the next regular election, when both were officially returned to office.

Barbara and Christopher Roden’s excellent All Hallows: The Journal of the Ghost Story Society included numerous book reviews, Roger Dobson’s film news and Richard Dalby’s obituary column, Ramsey Campbell’s take on The Blair Witch Project, articles on Vernon Lee, Blood of the Vampire (1958), The Ghost Breakers (1940) and The Skull (1965), and an interview with Douglas Clegg by Michael Rowe. There was also fiction by Stephen Volk, Paul Finch, Geoffrey Warburton, Peter J. Wilson and others, plus artwork by Paul Lowe, Douglas Walters, Dallas Goffin, Iain Maynard and veteran Alan Hunter.

The Stephen King Universe: A Guide to the Worlds of the King of Horror by Stanley Wiater, Christopher Golden and Hank Wagner was a chunky trade paperback from Renaissance Books which looked at the influences on King’s work by grouping the author’s novels and stories by setting and theme. A deluxe, signed, limited edition containing extra text and illustrative material not included in the paperback version was available in hardcover from Cemetery Dance Publications at $75.00.

The Essential Stephen King was yet another reference guide by Stephen J. Spignesi ranking 101 books, stories and movies by King.

Douglas E. Winter’s long-awaited authorized biography, Clive Barker: The Dark Fantastic, stretched to more than 650 pages and contained useful primary and secondary bibliographies, two eight-page photo inserts, headings by Barker and a story written when the author was fourteen years old.

A follow-up to his 1990 volumeThe Weird Tale, The Modern Weird Tale was S. T. Joshi’s critical study of such authors as Stephen King, Clive Barker, Anne Rice, Ramsey Campbell, Peter Straub, Robert Aickman, Shirley Jackson, William Peter Blatty, T. E. D. Klein, Thomas Ligotti and Thomas Tryon.

Published by Liverpool University Press, Ramsey Campbell and Modern Horror Fiction was an in-depth study of the Liverpool-based horror writer by the prolific Joshi, including a detailed bibliography plus a look back at his early life by Campbell himself. From the same publisher and author, A Dreamer and a Visionary: H. P. Lovecraft in His Time proved that there were still more minutiae to be squeezed out of poor HPL’s short life.

From 1923 until 1937, C. M. Eddy, Jr. and Muriel E. Eddy enjoyed a close relationship with H. P. Lovecraft. Fenham Publishing’s trade paperback The Gentleman from Angell Street: Memories of H. P. Lovecraft contained four essays/memoirs of HPL, three poems about Lovecraft by Muriel Eddy, and several pages of photographs. A collection of five of Eddy’s weird tales, Exit Into Eternity: Tales of the Bizarre and Supernatural, was reprinted by the same publisher, with an introduction by the author’s wife.

After researching his subject for more than twenty years, Mike Ashley’s Starlight Man: The Extraordinary Life of Algernon Blackwood (aka Algernon Blackwood: An Extraordinary Life) was a long-anticipated and fascinating illustrated biography published on the fiftieth anniversary of the death of the acclaimed writer of the supernatural.

In Search of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Raymond T. McNally and Radu R. Florescu looked at Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel and its cultural impact.

Edited by James Van Hise, The Fantastic Worlds of Robert E. Howard was an illustrated guide to the work of the Weird Tales writer, with contributions from Rusty Burke, Rick Lai, Roy Krenkel and others, mostly taken from The Robert E. Howard United Press Association (REHUPA).

Subtitled Friends of Yesteryear: Fictioneers & Others and limited to 4,000 copies, Book of the Dead was written in the 1970s and contained wonderful personal reminiscences by the late E. Hoffman Price about friends and colleagues such as H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Seabury Quinn, Henry Kuttner, August Derleth and others. Unfortunately, like other recent Arkham House volumes, the book was poorly edited and filled with unnecessary typos.

Greenwood’s The Supernatural in Short Fiction of the Americas by Dana Del George was a somewhat skewered look at short horror fiction by such authors as Poe, Hawthorne, Bradbury and others. However, most modern writers were notable by their absence. Bob Madison’s American Horror Writers was a young-adult study of ten authors, including King, Lovecraft and Poe.

French fan Alain Sprauel added to his series of attractive self-published bibliographies with a chronological listing of Peter Straub’s published work in France.

One of the best art books of the year was Fantasy of the 20th Century: An Illustrated History written by artist Randy Broecker. Beautifully designed and printed by Collectors Press, the stunning oversized hardcover not only contained around 450 exemplarily chosen full-colour illustrations (including many rare pulp and paperback covers), but also a detailed history of the genre and its practitioners that was immaculately researched and presented with an infectious enthusiasm for its subject matter.

From the same publisher, Richard A. Lupoff’s The Great American Paperback: An Illustrated Tribute to Legends of the Book contained more than 600 lavishly produced cover reproductions from all genres.

After issuing a profits warning in January, Collins & Brown Publishing, owner of Pavilion and the Paper Tiger art-book imprint, was taken over by the Chrysalis Group in a reported £2.1 million deal.

The Art of Richard Powers by Jane Frank was a beautiful and in-depth tribute from Paper Tiger to the American artist (1921–1996) whose often surreal covers graced many horror collections and anthologies in the 1950s and early 1960s. It additionally included a foreword by Vincent Di Fate; a memoir by the artist’s son, Richard Gid Powers; a previously unpublished interview and a checklist of book covers. Also from the Paper Tiger imprint, Offerings was the latest full-colour collection of Brom’s dark depictions of demonic heroes and villains.

Testament: The Life and Art of Frank Frazetta was the third and final volume in the Frazetta series from Underwood Books, edited by Cathy and Arnie Fenner. It included a wealth of previously unpublished material and appreciations by Bernie Wrightson, Dave Stevens, Michael Kaluta and others.

Introduced by Dave Stevens, Wings of Twilight: The Art of Michael Kaluta included much of the artist’s comics work plus illustrations for The Lord of the Rings, Prince Valiant, Vampirella and Metropolis.

The Wally Wood Sketchbook was a large-sized paperback from Vanguard Productions which featured fascinating commentary on the comics artist by Steranko, Al Williamson and Joe Orlando.

Visionary, edited by Mark Wheatley and Allan Gross, collected the art of Gray Morrow from the late 1950s onwards, with an introduction by Al Williamson.

From Cemetery Dance Publications, Dark Dreamers: Facing the Masters of Fear was a book of monochrome photographs by Beth Gwinn, with commentary by Stanley Wiater and an introduction by Clive Barker. Just over 100 horror authors, artists, editors and film-makers were featured, along with a short commentary by the subject or from Wiater, who also supplied brief recommended reading lists. Some of the most poignant shots were those of people who are no longer with us — Robert Bloch, R. Chetwynd-Hayes, Richard Laymon, and Karl Edward Wagner (with an uncredited Lynne Gauger). There were also signed, limited and leather-bound lettered editions. Despite the dull dust jacket, the book was billed as the official companion volume to Dark Dreamers, a weekly Canadian television series hosted by Wiater.

Dynamic Forces released two full-colour lithographs of ‘Universale Mightiest Monsters’. Alex Horley’s Dracula: Crimson Kiss and Greg and Tim Hildebrandt’s Bride of Frankenstein were available both as regular prints and in limited editions signed by the artists.

Co-authored in German and English by film director Jorg Buttgereit (Nekromantik), Nightmares in Plastic looked at horror-inspired model kits through nearly 150 photos of completed kits and box art.

Despite his death the year before, Edward Gorey continued to have wicked fun with the month-by-month misfortune that mysteriously plagued The Deranged Cousins. Edited by Karen Wilkin, Ascending Peculiarity: Edward Gorey on Edward Gorey collected interviews, photographs and unpublished artwork by the late artist.

Probably the most superfluous book of the year was The Quotable Sandman: Memorable Lines from the Acclaimed Series by Neil Gaiman. Unless such pithy pensées as ‘That which is dreamed can never be lost, can never be undreamed’ had some kind of resonance for the reader, the attractive pocket hardcover was only worth acquiring for the full-colour illustrations by ‘a remarkable ensemble of artists’, including Dave McKean, Kent Williams, Glenn Fabry, Charles Vess, Rick Berry, Brian Bolland and others.

It was also hard to know who would want Edison’s Frankenstein 2002 Calendar, featuring twelve rare stills from the 1910 film, with anecdotes, trivia and interesting facts written by Frederick C. Wiebel, Jr. At least Midnight Marquee’s Attack of the Movie Monsters 2002 Calendar included stills from 1950s and 1960s sci-fi films featuring ‘Damsels in Distress and the Monsters Who Terrorize Them’.

The Classic Movie Tin Sign set contained poster reproductions of The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Invisible Man and Creature from the Black Lagoon.

An original poster advertising Boris Karloff’s 1932 The Mummy sold to a telephone bidder at Christie’s in London for £80,750 in March. Designed by artist Karoly Grosz, it was one of only three copies known to have survived and was discovered amongst a collection found in a garage in Arizona.

From Pentagram Publications, Dracula: The Graphic Novel reprinted the 1966 Ballantine Books comic strip with introductions by Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee.

Dark Horse Comics’ Buffy the Vampire Slayer featured a four-part mini-series, False Memories, scripted by Tom Fassbender and Jim Pascoe, which explored the effect that Buffy’s younger sister Dawn had on the history of the Scooby gang.

Also from Dark Horse came a 168-page Buffy the Vampire Slayer graphic novel, which included such reprint stories as TV scriptwriter Doug Petrie’s ‘Food Chain’ and ‘Double Cross’, plus Christopher Golden and Tom Sniegoski’s first Buffy collaboration.

Meanwhile, Buffy creator Joss Whedon made his comic writing debut with Dark Horse Comics’ eight-issue miniseries Fray, which was set in a future where vampires, demons, and other supernatural creatures existed. The books were illustrated by newcomer Karl Moline.

Neil Gaiman’s Books of Magic character Tim Hunter returned, somewhat older and wiser, in DC/Vertigo Comics’ Hunter: The Age of Magic, a new series written by Dylan Horrocks and illustrated by Richard Case, which picked up three years after the recent mini-series Names of Magic.

DC/Vertigo’s House of Secrets: Facade was a two-issue mini-series scripted by Steven T. Seagle and illustrated by Teddy Kristiansen in which human witness Rain Harper fled the Spirit Court.

Despite a promise by publisher Brian Pulido that the character would never return after being killed off, Chaos! Comics launched a new series of Evil Ernie on Halloween while, from the same publisher, Phil Nutman continued the original story of Tommy Doyle from the lacklustre movie Halloween IV in the somewhat confusingly titled comics Halloween II and Halloween III: The Devil’s Eyes (which featured a variant cover design).

As usual there were novelizations of the summer blockbusters, such as The Mummy Returns by Max Allan Collins and Dave Wolverton’s young-adult The Mummy Chronicles: Revenge of the Scorpion King, Lara Croft Tomb Raider by Dave Stern, Final Fantasy The Spirits Within by Dean Wesley Smith and Planet of the Apes by William T. Quick.

Frankenstein: The Legacy and Night of Dracula were a pair of pot-boilers updating the classic monsters by Christopher Schildt, featuring introductions by Sara Jane Karloff and Bela G. Lugosi, respectively.

Larry Mike Garmon’s Return of Evil: Dracula, Blood Moon Rising: The Wolf Man and Anatomy of Terror: Frankenstein were the first three volumes in Scholastic’s young-adult series Universal Studios Monsters, about a trio of children battling the classic movie monsters when the latter were released during a special film transfer.

David Jacobs’s The Devil’s Night was the second volume in another series featuring all the classic Universal Monsters.

A. A. Attanasio’s The Crow: Hellhound was the latest novelization of the movie and comic-book series created by James O’Barr.

Based on the Hallmark Entertainment TV miniseries, The Monkey King by Kathryn Wesley (aka Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch) contained sixteen pages of colour photos.

There was no sign of the series of Buffy the Vampire Slayer novelizations slowing down. Yvonne Navarro contributed The Willow Files Vol. 2 and Nancy Holder’s latest was The Book of Fours. The Faith Trials by James Laurence contained eight pages of colour stills, and the prolific Christopher Golden published his four-volume serial novel The Lost Slayer, comprising Prophecies, Dark Times, King of the Dead and Original Sins. Tales of the Slayer Vol. 1 was an anthology of seven stories about different Slayers by Nancy Holder, Yvonne Navarro and others.

As if that was not enough, Holder and Jeff Mariotte published the Buffy/Angel crossover trilogy Unseen: The Burning, Door to Alternity and Long Way Home, while Angel continued in his own series of novelizations with Avatar by John Passarella, Soul Trade by Thomas E. Sniegoski, The Summoned by Cameron Dokey and Bruja by Mel Odom.

TV’s witchy Halliwell Sisters appeared in the young-adult Charmed novelizations The Legacy of Merlin by Eloise Flood, Soul of the Bride by Constance M. Burge and Beware What You Wish by Diana G. Gallagher. Blair Witch Files: The Death Card by Cade Merrill was the fifth in the unlikely young-adult series.

She may be growing up on TV, but Sabrina the Teenage Witch still proved popular with younger readers in Pirate Pandemonium and Dream Boat by Mel Odom, Wake-Up Call and From the Horse’s Mouth by Diana G. Gallagher, Witch Way Did She Go? by Paul Ruditis and Milady’s Dragon by Cathy East Dubowski.

Hidden Passions: Secrets from the Diaries of Tabitha Lenox was purported to be written by Juliet Mills’s evil witch from the daytime soap opera, but was more likely authored by series creator James E. Reilly.

Lawrence Miles’s The Adventures of Henrietta Street was set in 18th-century England and featured the eighth Doctor Who encountering a coven of comely witches. The Ghost Hunter’s House of Horror by Ivan Jones was a young-adult novelization of the BBC-TV series.

Resident Evil 6: Code Veronica by S. D. Perry was based on the popular zombie video games.

Featuring his mismatched heroes Gotrek Gurnisson and Felix Jaeger, William King’s Beastslayer and Vampireslayer were the author’s fifth and sixth Warhammer novels in the new series from Black Library, based on the fantasy role-playing game.

White Wolf’s ever-popular World of Darkness series, based on the role-playing games, continued with Predator & Prey: Judge and Jury, both by Gherbod Fleming. Heralds of the Storm was Book One in the ‘Year of the Scarab’ trilogy by Andrew Bates, and Tremere: Widow’s Walk and Widow’s Weeds were the first two books in a new trilogy by Eric Griffin based on the Clan series.

Inherit the Earth edited by Stewart Wieck, collected nine stories based on Hunter: The Reckoning. Silent Striders and Black Furies, Red Talons and Fianna and Shadow Lords and Get of Fenris were all omnibus volumes in the ‘Tribe’ series based on White Wolf’sWerewolf: The Apocalypse game.

Diablo #1: Legacy of Blood by Richard Knaak was based on the Blizzard Entertainment computer game.

Inspired by Eden Studios’ zombie survival role-playing game All Flesh Must be Eaten, editor James Lowder’s trade paperback anthology The Book of All Flesh contained twenty-five original stories about the walking dead by Scott Nicholson, L. H. Maynard and M. P. N. Sims, Michael Laimo, Mark McLaughlin, Scott Edelman and others.

Edited by the busy Stanley Wiater, Richard Matheson’s The Twilight Zone Scripts was the first volume of a projected two-volume trade paperback set from Gauntlet Press/Edge Books that would publish for the first time all fourteen of Matheson’s scripts for the legendary TV series. The collection also included extensive commentary by Wiater on each episode, new interviews with Matheson, plus supplementary material.

Published as a large-sized softcover by Reynolds & Hearn, Christopher Lee: The Authorized Screen History was an excellent biography of the Hammer horror star by Jonathan Rigby, with a foreword by George Lucas and profusely illustrated with numerous black and white stills and a useful film and television filmography. Lee (who was busier than ever in 2001) became a Commander of the British Empire (CBE) in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List in June.

Daniel O’Brien’s The Hannibal Files from the same imprint was an unauthorized guide to the Hannibal Lecter trilogy, illustrated with two colour spreads.

Boasting a foreword by actor Ian Richardson, David Stuart Davies’s information-packed Starring Sherlock Holmes from Titan Books detailed every Holmes movie, TV show and stage production, illustrated with numerous rare stills and posters. This beautifully designed hardcover also had a reversible cover for those readers who preferred either Basil Rathbone or Jeremy Brett as their ideal Holmes.

From the same publisher, Stephen Jones’s Creepshows: The Illustrated Stephen King Movie Guide looked at the movies, sequels, spin-offs and TV adaptations of books and stories by King, illustrated with posters, stills and book covers. It also included an introduction by director Mick Garris and an exclusive career interview with King.

The Greatest Sci-Fi Movies Never Made was a fascinating volume in which David Hughes looked at movies that never went into production or eventually emerged from development hell. These included Ridley Scott’s I Am Legend, the confusion over The Watchmen, the truth behind Supernova and the disasters that befell Richard Stanley’s The Island of Dr Moreau. It was published in hardcover by Titan Books, with a foreword by H. R. Giger and an eight-page colour section of pre-production artwork.

Hollywood Vampire: A Revised and Updated Unofficial and Unauthorized Guide to Angel was a new version of the 2000 book by Keith Topping. Edited by Roz Kaveney, Reading the Vampire Slayer was subtitled An Unofficial Critical Companion to Buffy and Angel and included some heavy academic essays along with an episode guide to the plots.

Andy Lane’s Randall & Hopkirk {Deceased}: The Files was an illustrated guide to the revived TV series, with an introduction by producer Charlie Higson.

Scarecrow Press reprinted the late Curt Siodmak’s 1997 autobiography, revised under the new title Wolf Man’s Maker: Memoir of a Hollywood Scriptwriter.

From McFarland 8c Company, Lisa Morton’s The Cinema of Tsui Hark was an illustrated hardcover that looked at the career of one of China’s most famous film-makers.

David Kalat’s The Strange Case of Dr Mabuse: A Study of the Twelve Films and Five Novels was an illustrated look at the career of the super-villain created by German author Norbert Jacques and most famously filmed by Fritz Lang.

The Zombie Movie Encyclopedia by Peter Dendle was an A-Z guide of the walking dead, while White Zombie: Anatomy of a Horror Film was Gary D. Rhodes’s in-depth illustrated study of the 1932 poverty-row film starring Bela Lugosi, with a foreword by the late George E. Turner.

The Gorehound’s Guide to Splatter Films of the 1960s and 1970s by Scott Aaron Stine was an A-Z guide of gore films.

John Kenneth Muir’s Terror Television: American Series, 1970–1999 was another hefty reference work, while the same author’s An Analytical Guide to Television’s ‘One Step Beyond’, 1959–1961 looked at the now-obscure ‘reality’ anthology show.

In I Was a Monster Movie Maker: Conversations with 22 SF and Horror Film-makers, the talented Tom Weaver talked with such nearly-forgotten actors as Faith Domergue, Ray Walston and Maureen O’Sullivan.

Also from McFarland, Harris M. Lentz III’s monumental Science Fiction, Horror & Fantasy Film and Television Credits: Second Edition combined four earlier books and updated and revised more than 2,000 pages into one of the most important and impressive reference volumes of the year.

From Midnight Marquee came Memories of Hammer Films, editors Gary J. Svehla and Susan Svehla’s collection of interview transcripts from the annual FANEX convention in Baltimore, Maryland. Amongst those profiled were Christopher Lee, Barbara Shelley, Ingrid Pitt and Jimmy Sangster. In Monsters Mutants and Heavenly Creatures, Tom Weaver interviewed the people behind the drive-in classics.

From the same publisher, The Spawn of Skull Island was Michael H. Price and Douglas Turner’s revised and expanded edition of the 1975 volume The Making of King Kong by the late George E. Turner and Orville Goldner. Forgotten Horrors 2: Beyond the Horror Ban was Price and Turner’s follow-up to their previous volume about poverty-row horrors.

Published by The John Hopkins University Press as an oversized softcover, Chris Fujiwara’s Jacques Tourneur: The Cinema of Nightfall was a welcome reissue of the 1998 illustrated study of the director of Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie and Night of the Demon, with a foreword by Martin Scorsese.

In Italian Cannibal and Zombie Movies, Jay Slater looked at the gory sub-genre from the 1970s through to the early 1990s, and The Horror Movie Survival Guide by Matteo Molinari and Jim Kamm was a pointless A-Z list of movie monsters and their various attributes.

From Maryland’s Sense of Wonder Press, Famous Forry Fotos: Over 70 Years of AckerMemories was a softcover collection of black and white stills from the archives of legendary fan and editor Forrest J. Ackerman, who turned eighty-five in November and celebrated with a party at The Friar’s Club in Beverly Hills, California. To commemorate the event, guests received It’s Alive @ 85, a special publication limited to 250 copies with an introduction by Ray Bradbury.

Among the attendees at Ackerman’s birthday celebrations was director John Landis, who guest-edited The Best American Movie Writing 2001, which included essays by Jack Kerouac, Tom Weaver, Lawrence Kasdan, John Irving, Stanley Kubrick and others.

Although Gladiator walked off with Best Picture at the 2001 Academy Awards, the martial-arts fantasy Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon picked up Best Foreign Language Film, Best Art Direction, Best Cinematography and Best Original Score Oscars, while The Grinch won Best Make-up for Rick Baker.

Arthur C. Clarke presented the Oscar for Best Screenplay Based on Material Already Published or Produced via a pre-recorded clip from his home in Sri Lanka. He did not know in advance that Traffic was the winner.

Meanwhile, the terrorist attacks of September 11th had an immediate effect on Hollywood, with studios shelving, postponing or abandoning any films that might have appeared insensitive. These included Tim Allen’s new Disney comedy Big Trouble and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Collateral Damage.

Somewhat more bizarrely, even just the inclusion of the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers resulted in scenes being changed and promotional campaigns being pulled. The trailer for Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man film was withdrawn from theatres and the Internet because it contained a scene (produced exclusively for the trailer) in which a helicopter was trapped in a giant spider’s web strung between the two buildings. Meanwhile, the producers of Columbia Pictures’ sequel Men in Black 2 announced that the ending of the movie would be re-shot because the World Trade Center was used as a backdrop. Any other scenes featuring the structures would also be changed.

Warner Bros, even postponed by one week its planned 500 sneak previews of the Stephen King adaptation, Hearts in Atlantis starring Anthony Hopkins. It didn’t help, and after an opening of $9.8 million the film took less than $21 million at the US box office.

Costing £90 million to make and £30 million for Warner Bros, to market, Christopher Columbus’s Harry Potter and The Philosopher’s Stone (retitled Harry Potter and The Sorcerer’s Stone in America) was released the first weekend in November and smashed box-office records on both sides of the Atlantic. In the US, where it was released on a quarter of all the screens in the country, it easily beat the previous record set by The Lost World — Jurassic Park ($71 million) and the Potter movie became the first film to make $100 million in its first four days. In the UK it beat the previous weekend record set by Star Wars I: The Phantom Menace (£14.7 million), and the film went on to take more than $300 million worldwide.

At almost three hours, Peter Jackson’s version of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (filmed for $270 million back-to-back with the two sequels, to be released a year apart) was truly an epic. Although it had a lower box-office opening than Harry Potter, the film went on to gross more than $290 million in the US. Ian McKellen was perfectly cast as Gandalf, and there was some nice villainy from Christopher Lee.

Directed by The Hughes Brothers (Albert and Allen), From Hell was based on the grim graphic novel by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell and grossed an impressive $70 million in the US: Johnny Depp gave a powerful performance as the opium-smoking psychic Inspector Abberline, investigating the Jack the Ripper killings in 1888 London.

Ridley Scott’s Hannibal was the much-anticipated sequel to The Silence of the Lambs (1991), based on the novel by Thomas Harris (which had a different ending). Anthony Hopkins reprised his role as cannibal killer Dr Hannibal Lecter, Gary Oldman hammed it up as one of his mutilated victims, and Julianne Moore ably stepped into the role of FBI agent Clarice Starling.

Thir13en Ghosts, Steve Beck’s loose remake of the disappointing 1960 William Castle film, involved a strange house that was actually an occult machine powered by the trapped souls of twelve ghosts designed to open a gateway to Hell. Co-scripted by Adam Simon, Ernest Dickerson’s Bones brought rapper Snoop Dogg back from the dead as the eponymous 1970s ghetto pimp for a very brief Halloween run at the box office.

Although boasting a rave quote from Clive Barker and having Francis Ford Coppola amongst its executive producers, much of the criticism surrounding Jeepers Creepers centred on its controversial director, convicted paedophile Victor Salva. It opened in the US at No. 1 with $15.8 million, and went on to gross $33.6 million.

In Soul Survivors, a woman slipping in and out of a coma attempted to recall the events that led to her predicament. Writer/director Stephen Carpenter’s teen horror film suffered from being cut by its distributor from an ‘R’ rating to a ‘PG-13’ in America.

When it came to the summer blockbusters, Stephen Sommers’s The Mummy Returns was a fun action sequel to his 1999 original which enjoyed a record-breaking opening weekend before finally taking a worldwide total of more than $400 million.

Despite cameos from original stars Charlton Heston and Linda Harrison, Tim Burton’s disappointing and impersonal $100 million ‘re-imagining’ of Planet of the Apes took $69.5 million, during its first week in late July at the US box office. Only the first Jurassic Park had enjoyed a better opening weekend at the time. However, audiences quickly dropped off and the film ended up grossing just under $170 million. Meanwhile, extras from the film announced that they were suing the producers, claiming they were exposed to a cancer-causing substance during a dust storm scene.

Executive producer Steven Spielberg handed Jurassic Park III over to director Joe Johnston, and the result was a short but impressive ‘B’ movie. Filming reportedly began without a finished script, and it showed, despite the film earning $168 million.

Based on the successful interactive game, Lara Croft-Tomb Raider starred Angelina Jolie as the eponymous upper-crust adventurer attempting to prevent the Illuminati from tracking down the secret of an ancient device that could alter space and time.

Although Marlon Brando pulled out, reportedly suffering from pneumonia, after agreeing to appear in a cameo for $2 million, the dire Scary Movie 2 still went on to take nearly $70 million in the US.

Ice Cube, Natasha Henstridge and Pam Grier found themselves battling centuries-old spooks in John Carpenter’s incompetent Ghosts of Mars, which opened and closed with a miserable $3.8 million. Woody Allen’s 1940s spoof The Curse of the Jade Scorpion did even worse, grossing just $2.5 million.

Denise Richards and David Boreanaz were among the suspects as a cupid-masked killer cut up the teen cast in the derivative slasher Valentine, and three teens travelling across the desert found themselves battling the undead in J. S. Cardone’s low-budget vampire thriller The Forsaken.

David Caruso was part of a crew sent into an abandoned mental hospital to clear asbestos who were soon affected by the building’s brooding atmosphere in Brad Anderson’s Session 9. Daniel Minahan’s low-budget Series 7: The Contenders involved a lethal TV game show where the last surviving contestant was the winner.

A good Jet Li battled an evil Jet Li from a different dimension in The One, Jake Gyllenhaal played a schizophrenic teenager who listened to a man-sized rabbit with a twisted face in Donnie Darko, and Steve Railsback portrayed the Wisconsin cannibal killer who inspired Psycho and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in Chuck Parello’s Ed Gein.

Jeremy Irons and Bruce Payne hammed it up as villains in the juvenile sword-and-sorcery adventure Dungeons & Dragons, which also starred Thora Birch. The young American actress also turned up in The Hole, a low-budget British chiller about a group of boarding-school teens trapped in an old war bunker.

In Rob Green’s The Bunker, a group of German soldiers took refuge in an underground storage tunnel and wished they hadn’t. Urban Ghost Story starred Jason Connery as a journalist involved with a Glasgow family bothered by moving furniture and other spooky occurrences after the daughter’s near-death experience.

Chris Rock discovered he was dead before his time in Down to Earth, an unnecessary remake of Heaven Can Wait, while Martin Lawrence travelled back in time to visit Camelot in the equally pointless Black Knight.

Despite the acrimonious divorce of star Nicole Kidman and co-producer Tom Cruise, The Others, from young Spanish writer/director/composer Alejandro Amenabar, was a classic haunted house story set in 1945 that grossed an impressive $90.6 million. Meanwhile, Guillermo de Toro’s ghost story The Devil’s Backbone was set in a boy’s orphanage during the last days of the Spanish Civil War.

Sophie Marceau played the eponymous ghost in Belphegor: Phantom of the Louvre, based on the popular 1965 French TV mini-series. Julie Christie and Juliette Greco had cameos. Christophe Gans’s Brotherhood of the Wolf saw an 18th-century gardener and his Iroquois Indian blood brother sent to Gevaudan to track down a legendary beast. A box-office hit in its native France, it was apparently that country’s highest-grossing genre film ever.

Veteran Kinji Fukasaku’s Battle Royale was a combination of gruesome game show and Lord of the Flies, while Alex de la Iglesias’s gory homage to Hitchcock, La Comunidad, was banned worldwide by George Lucas because one of the characters dressed like Darth Vader. Lucas also sued the producers of the porno movie Star Balk, claiming consumers could be confused into thinking that Lucasfilm sponsored the hardcore Star Wars spoof.

Billy Crystal, John Goodman and Steve Buscemi were among those who voiced the nightmare inhabitants of Monstropolis in the Disney and Pixar computer-animated Monsters Inc., which opened in November and took more than $244.8 million. However, it was overshadowed by rival DreamWorks’ revisionist fairy tale Shrek, featuring the vocal talents of Mike Myers, Eddie Murphy, Cameron Diaz and John Lithgow. The computer-created cartoon grossed $255.5 million, consequently blowing Disney’s traditionally animated adventure Atlantis — The Lost Empire out of the water!

Inspired by the video game, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within went one step further and created its realistic human characters and alien invaders totally through CGI animation.

In May, director William Friedkin and screenwriter William Peter Blatty sued Warner Bros, and others for unspecified damages in the federal court, claiming they were denied residuals from both the 1973 and 2000 versions of The Exorcist. They also maintained that the latter version violated federal copyright law by identifying the studio as the movie’s author and by failing to register the film as a derivative of the original.

Despite having already been shown on UK satellite television, in August the British Board of Film Classification finally passed Tobe Hooper’s long-banned 1986 sequel The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 uncut with an ‘18’ certificate.

In America, films such as Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings helped boost cinema attendances to their highest levels since the 1950s. Ticket sales rose to 1.5 billion in 2001, a 5 per cent increase on the previous year and the highest since 1958. Despite the September 11th attacks, US box-office takings were a record $5.9 billion. The same upward trend was also to be seen in Britain, where the number of admissions rose by four million to 141 million, the highest figure since 1972.

Unjustly banished to video, Ellory Elkayem’s They Nest was an enjoyable chiller set on a remote island invaded by mutated African cockroaches that nested inside the bodies of their victims. A likeable cast (including Thomas Calabro, Dean Stockwell and John Savage), fine special effects and a knowing script raised this often gory chiller into a whole different class.

Despite featuring music from Kid Rock, Rob Zombie and others, the third film in The Crow series, Salvation, starring Kirsten Dunst and Eric Mabius, went straight to video and DVD in most markets.

Tom Arnold and Tiffani-Amber Thiessen investigated a series of murders at the Bulemia Fall High School in the slasher spoof Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th.

Venomous starring Treat Williams and some genetically engineered snakes was just what you would expect from director Fred Olen Ray and co-producer Jim Wynorski working under pseudonyms.

Brian Yuzna’s Spanish-made Faust: Love of the Damned featured Andrew Divoff and Jeffrey Combs and was based on yet another comic book series.

Donald F. Glut’s low-budget softcore comedy The Erotic Rites of Countess Dracula was simply embarrassing. The unlikely-named Brick Randall played a singer bitten by Count Dracula (a sick-looking William Smith), who lived in Hollywood with her faithful servant Renfield (Del Howison). From the same producers, Glut’s half-hour short The Vampire Hunters Club resembled a home movie. John Agar, William Smith, Bob Burns, Dave Donham and Forrest J. Ackerman played members of the eponymous group, still searching for a young girl kidnapped in 1958 by Dracula (Daniel Roebuck). This included special guest appearances by Belinda Balaski, Conrad Brooks, Del Howison, Irwin Keyes, Carla Laemmle, Brinke Stevens, Mink Stole, Carel Struycken, Mary Woronov and others.

Erotic Witch Project 2: Book of Seduction was another of Seduction Cinema’s softcore lesbian romps from the production team of producer Michael Beckerman and director John Bacchus, who were also responsible for The Erotic Ghost. Terry M. West’s The Sexy Sixth Sense was more of the same, also from Seduction.

From Video Outlaw, Cremains was a shot-on-video anthology movie from writer/director Steve Sessions that featured Lilith Stabs and Debbie Rochon. In David A. Goldberg’s Demon Lust, Brinke Stevens was a sexy demon confronted by Tom Savini’s hit man for the mob, while Jeff Burton’s The Night Divides the Day was about a psychopathic killer stalking a group of students camping in the woods.

Blood: The Last Vampire was an anime about a sword-wielding girl battling shapeshifters on an American military base during the Vietnam war.

All Day Entertainment’s The Horror of Hammer and Tales of Frankenstein contained numerous trailers of varying quality, while the latter also included the 1958 Hammer TV pilot Tales of Frankenstein as a bonus.

Some of the scariest bogeymen to appear on film, including Jason, Freddy, Michael Myers, Chucky, Leatherface and Pinhead, were profiled in Bogeymen: The Killer Compilation, a three-hour documentary featuring an audio commentary by Robert Englund.

Jay Holben’s Paranoid was an eight-minute short adapted from the 100-line poem ‘Paranoid: A Chant’ by Stephen King.

Hallmark Entertainment’s The Infinite Worlds of H. G. Wells was an enjoyable three-part mini-series, based upon the author’s short stories. Tom Ward portrayed Wells, interviewed by a secret government agency about the mysterious adventures he and his future wife (Katy Carmichael) were involved with.

Co-produced with The Jim Henson Company, Jack and the Beanstalk: The Real Story was an inventive two-part TV movie in which a millionaire industrialist (Matthew Modine) discovered that the fairy tale lied. Daryl Hannah and Richard Attenborough turned up as giant gods.

Allan Arkush’s Prince Charming was just as good, as two humans (Sean Maguire and Martin Short), transformed into frogs 500 years earlier, found themselves in contemporary New York. Hallmark’s Snow White was yet another version of the fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm, with the princess (Kristin Kreuk) menaced by Miranda Richardson’s wicked queen. Clancy Brown played a creepy Granter of Wishes, and Warwick Davis and Vincent Schiavelli were amongst the dwarves named after the days of the week.

The Disney cable TV movie Halloweentown II: Kalabar’s Revenge reunited the cast of the 1998 original, including veteran Debbie Reynolds, for an inferior sequel where everyone living in Halloweentown was placed under a warlock’s spell.

Christopher Lloyd played the zombie who helped a town overcome its Halloween curse in the Fox Family movie When Good Ghouls Go Bad, based on a story by R. L. Stine.

In The Evil Beneath Loch Ness, Patrick Bergin and Lysette Anthony discovered that a giant prehistoric creature had been released from an underwater abyss. Infinitely better was the two-part BBC-TV movie of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, in which Bob Hoskins’s gruff Professor Challenger led an expedition to discover superb-looking CGI dinosaurs.

Murder Rooms: The Dark Beginnings of Sherlock Holmes was a series of four superior BBC films created by David Pirie. Charles Edwards portrayed Arthur Conan Doyle, who teamed up with his old friend Dr Joséph Bell (the superb Ian Richardson) to investigate various murders. The Kingdom of Bones (scripted by Stephen Gallagher) included a number of allusions to Doyle’s The Lost World while, in The White Knight Stratagem, comedian Rik Mayall gave a stand-out performance as the likely inspiration for Professor Moriarty.

A totally miscast Matt Frewer played Doyle’s great detective in Hallmark’s Canadian version of The Sign of Four, the second in a series of ‘public domain’ adaptations of the Sherlock Holmes stories.

John Fawcett’s impressive Canadian cable TV movie Ginger Snaps linked lycanthropy and menstruation when the weird Brigitte (Emily Perkins) realized that her rebellious older sister (Katharine Isabelle) was turning into a sexy werewolf.

Wolf Girl was a USA Cable Entertainment movie for Halloween in which the eponymous hirsute heroine was trapped in a freak show run by an over-the-top Tim Curry.

The Cinemax/HBO series Creature Features comprised loose ‘remakes’ of five old AIP movies — She Creature, The Day the World Ended, How to Make a Monster, Earth vs. The Spider and Teenage Caveman — executive-produced by the late Samuel Z. Arkoff and with special effects credited to Stan Winston on all but the last title. Despite the presence of such stars as Rufus Sewell, Nastassja Kinski, Randy Quaid, Colleen Camp, Julie Strain, Dan Aykroyd and Theresa Russell, the results were definitely mixed.

Lost Voyage, starring Judd Nelson and Lance Henriksen, was a fun, low-budget horror thriller set on a cruise ship that disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle and returned from Hell possessed by evil. Almost exactly the same story was told in Lewis Teague’s inferior The Triangle, a TBS movie starring Luke Perry and Dan Cortese amongst a group of vacationers killed off by evil spirits on a lost liner.

Judd Nelson also reprised his role as psychotic screenwriter Stanley Caldwell in the USA Cable Entertainment sequel Return to Cabin by the Lake.

Bo Derek was the professor with a killer curriculum in the Sci Fi original movie Horror 101, while Fox’s The Rats apparently had nothing to do with James Herbert as the verminous creatures ran riot through a Manhattan department store where Madchen Amick was trying to shop.

UPN’s Curse of the Talisman featured killer gargoyles, and in Robin Cook’s Acceptable Risk, from TBS, Chad Lowe discovered that a drug made out of a strange fungus had horrifying side effects.

Showtime’s On the Edge anthology featured a trio of actresses making their directorial debuts with three half-hour shorts: Helen Mirren’s ‘Happy Birthday’ was based on a Keith Laumer story and featured John Goodman, Beverly D’Angelo and Christopher Lloyd; Anthony LaPaglia starred as a terminally ill scientist in Mary Stuart Masterson’s ‘The Other Side’, based on a story by Bruce Holland Rogers, and the multi-talented Anne Heche both scripted and directed ‘Reaching Normal’ from Walter M. Miller’s short story, starring Andie MacDowell and Joel Grey.

In 2001, Buffy the Vampire Slayer lost its sense of humour, while spin-off series Angel finally found one, at least for a while. Vampire Spike (James Masters) fell in love with Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar), Buffy’s mother (Kristine Sutherland) died, and the evil god Glory (Clare Kramer) discovered that the hidden ‘Key’ she was searching for was actually Buffy’s younger sister Dawn (Michelle Trachtenberg). The fifth season of Buffy ended with the 100th episode as the eponymous Slayer sacrificed her own life to save Dawn.

After very public arguments over the price paid per episode, the sixth season of Buffy moved from The WB to UPN in October with a two-hour premiere featuring Gellar as the android Buffy-bot. Once resurrected by Willow’s (Alyson Hannigan) dark magic, Buffy had hot sex with Spike, battled a trio of super-nerd villains and went to work in a fast-food outlet. Meanwhile, Willow allowed her use of magic to get out of control. The best episode was done entirely as a musical.

There were also rumours that Buffy creator Joss Whedon was developing a spin-off series for British character Giles (Anthony Stewart Head, who left the series after the first few episodes of the new season) which would be made in collaboration with the BBC. Buffy also finally went into syndication five nights a week on FX.

Meanwhile, over on Angel, the eponymous vampire’s (David Boreanaz) obsession with Wolfram & Hart broke up the team, which eventually reunited only to travel to The Host’s (Andy Hallett) alternate demon dimension. For the new season, Angel and his companions were joined by Amy Acker’s physicist Winifred ‘Fred’ Burke. Darla (Julie Benz) announced she was pregnant with Angel’s child, and Angel was pursued by an old enemy, vampire hunter Holtz (Keith Szarabajka), seeking revenge for the deaths of his family.

With David Duchovny’s Agent Mulder apparently gone for good, and Gillian Anderson’s Scully now a mother, the ninth season of Fox’s The X Files added Annabeth Gish’s FBI agent Monica Reyes as a full-time lead alongside Robert Patrick’s John Doggett. Cary Elwes joined the cast as an FBI assistant director, and former Xena actress Lucy Lawless also turned up for a couple of episodes.

Unfortunately, the quirky spin-off series The Lone Gunmen failed because it ignored the core genre audience that had made The X Files so successful.

The reworked pilot for CBS-TV’sWolf Lake was delayed after the terrorist attacks in September. Twin Peaks met The Howling as a Seattle detective (Lou Diamond Phillips) traced his missing girlfriend to the eponymous Pacific Northwest town where most of the humans turned into wolves. The hour-long series, created by John Leekley, lasted just eight episodes in America.

Yancy Butler starred as Sara Pezzini, a New York cop who used a mystical gauntlet to battle evil in the TNT series Witchblade, based on the Top Cow comic book.

After the series was renewed by The WB for three more seasons, actress Shannen Doherty quit Charmed as one of the witchy Halliwell sisters. In her final episode (which she also directed), Doherty’s character Prue was killed by a demon assassin. At the start of the new series, the remaining two sisters discovered that they had a long-lost half-sister who had magic of her own. After such actresses as Tiffani Thiessen and Jennifer Love Hewitt were reportedly considered, Rose McGowan joined the cast as Paige in a two-hour season premiere.

Dawson’s Creek met The X Files in the hit WB series Smallville, about the contemporary adventures of Clark Kent/Superboy (Tom Welling) and his friends Lana Lang (Kristin Kreuk) and Lex Luthor (Michael Rosenbaum). Each episode usually involved green meteor fragments giving other people strange powers. John Glover had a recurring role as Lex’s industrialist father, Lionel Luthor.

In UPN’s All Souls, a young doctor (Grayson McCouch) began inquiring into a series of mysterious deaths in a hospital, while Rae Dawn Chong and Adrian Pasdar were back investigating mysteries and miracles in a second series of Mysterious Ways on PAX and NBC-TV.

The Sci Fi Channel’s The Chronicle was about a tabloid newspaper that researched bizarre but true stories, and The WB’s Dead Last was about the members of a rock band who obtained the power to see ghosts from a mysterious amulet.

In UPN’s Special Unit 2, a covert branch of the Chicago Police Department investigated ‘the monsters of every child’s nightmare’. These apparently included gargoyles, virgin-craving mermen, werewolf stockbrokers and a ninja mummy, all created by Patrick Tatopoulos.

Following the movie pilot featuring Eric Roberts and Judd Nelson, Strange Frequency was an anthology series on VH1 hosted by Roger Daltrey, who appeared as a satanic talent agent in the first episode. Meanwhile, Aidan Quinn, Lou Diamond Phillips and Samantha Mathis were among the stars of the Fox anthology series Night Visions, which also failed to identify its audience.

The second series of Shockers comprised three offbeat hour-long dramas written by Stephen Volk, Joe Ahearne and Chris Bucknall.

In the Halloween episode of Relic Hunter, Sydney (Tia Carrere) teamed up with charismatic vampire novelist Lucas Blackmer (Adrian Paul) to find Vlad Tepes’s mystical chalice.

Season four of the Sci Fi series Lexx included a two-part episode, co-written by Tom De Ville, in which Stanley (Brian Downey), Xev (Xenia Seeberg) and Kai (Michael McManus) travelled to the Transylvanian castle of Count Dracul (John Standing) and encountered the power of the revived Vlad (Minna Aaltonen). Veteran Lionel Jeffries turned up briefly as a priest.

Vampire High was a Canadian teen series in which five young vampires were entrusted to the Mansbridge Academy, where they would learn to tame their instincts and live among mortals.

More Land of the Lost than Conan Doyle, the Australian syndicated series Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World featured episodes in which members of the stranded expedition discovered a mysterious valley full of werewolves and received psychic visions from the knife belonging to Jack the Ripper. Judith Reeves-Stevens and Garfield Reeves-Stevens were creative consultants, and a slightly more risqué version apparently aired on DirecTV in America.

Filmed in New Zealand, the Dungeons and Dragons-inspired fantasy series Dark Knight, created by co-producer Terry Marcel, included episodes in which Ivanhoe (Ben Pullen) and his companions came to the aid of a village menaced by an ancient werewolf cult and battled an Egyptian mummy raised from the dead by a band of Templar Knights.

In the second season of the syndicated BeastMaster, Dar (Daniel Goddard) and Tao (Jackson Raine) encountered the shapechanging demon Lara (Sam Healy and Danielle Spencer) and the original film series’ star, Marc Singer, joined the cast as spirit guide Dartanus.

TV’s Tarzan, Ron Ely, turned up as a villain in Sheena, starring Gena Lee Nolin as the shapechanging heroine, while TV Batman Adam West was among those battling Black Scorpion.

During the fifth season of Melissa Joan Hart’s Sabrina, The Teenage Witch (how long can they keep using that title?), Sabrina finally moved out and lived with roommates on campus.

Creator R. L. Stine described his anthology series The Nightmare Room on Kids’ WB as ‘a Twilight Zone for kids’. Tippi Hedren (Hitchcock’s The Birds) was one of the guest stars.

Dr Terrible’s House of Horrible was a not very funny BBC series created by and starring comedian Steve Coogan. Spoofing everything from Hammer Films to Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu and the Amicus anthology movies of the 1970s, the shows did feature such interesting guest stars as Oliver Tobias, Sheila Keith, Warwick Davis, Angela Pleasence, Tom Bell and Graham Crowden.

In the crazy world of American daytime soap operas, NBC-TV’s Passions featured homages to five classic horror films before 300-year-old witch Tabitha (Juliet Mills!) lost her head and had it sewn back on by little Timmy (Josh Ryan Evans). Meanwhile, Timmy’s magic left Charity with some odd side effects.

Over at ABC-TV’s even wackierPort Charles, after a twelve-week ‘telenovella’ involving time-travel, the town’s inhabitants found themselves succumbing to schizophrenic vampire Caleb (Michael Easton). The characters also saw the year out with an apocalyptic plot involving angels and devils.

Not to be outdone, on ABC-TV’s All My Children Gillian (Esta TerBlanche) was shot in the head by an assassin and then visited by the ghostly spirits of previous characters from the show, who helped her find her way towards the bright light.

Reworking themes and characters from The Mummy Returns, the Universal cartoon series The Mummy featured the ancient Egyptian sorcerer Imhotep searching for the ancient Scrolls of Thebes. In one episode, Rick O’Connell (voiced by John Schneider) was bitten by a wolf in Ireland and transformed into a werewolf.

Shown on the digital TV channel BBC Choice, The Fear was a series of fifteen-minute readings (with dramatized inserts) by such actors as Marianne Jean Baptiste, Jason Flemyng, Anna Friel, Sadie Frost, Kelly Macdonald, Neve Mcintosh, Nick Moran, Sean Pertwee and Ray Winstone. Authors whose work was adapted included Honore de Balzac, M. E. Braddon, F. Marion Crawford, Arthur Conan Doyle, John Berwick Harwood and Edgar Allan Poe.

American Movie Classics’ hour-long Halloween tribute to American International Pictures, It Conquered Hollywood, featured interviews with Beverly Garland, Roger Corman, Bruce Dern, Samuel Z. Arkoff, Dick Miller, Susan Hart and others.

Produced for Channel Four Television by Pete Tombs and Andy Starke, Mondo Macabro was a wonderful half-hour documentary series looking at exploitation and genre film-making in Argentina, Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, the Philippines, South Asia and Turkey. Among those interviewed were Eddie Romero and José Mojica Marins (aka Coffin Joe/Ze do Caixao).

SF: UK was a jingoistic documentary series written and hosted by the irritating Mathew De Abaitua for Channel Four and The Sci-Fi Channel. Topics included Frankenstein and War of the Worlds, and Mark Gatiss and Kim Newman were among the regular contributors.

Gatiss and Newman also turned up in Inventing Monsters, an impressive half-hour documentary for digital channel BBC Knowledge hosted by Professor Christopher Frayling, who looked at the attraction of monsters in popular culture. Other contributors included David J. Skal, Marina Warner, Anne Bill-son and Ingrid Pitt, plus archive interviews with Jimmy Sangster and Yutte Stensgaard.

Mario Bava, Maestro of the Macabre was an hour-long documentary about the cult Italian director with commentary from film-makers Tim Burton, Joe Dante, John Carpenter, John Saxon, Samuel Z. Arkoff, Lamberto Bava, John Philip Law, Alfred Leone and Daria Nicoldi and from critics Allan Bryce, Tim Lucas and the ubiquitous Kim Newman.

Michelle Trachtenberg from Buffy the Vampire Slayer hosted the half-hour Discovery Kids seriesT ruth or Scare, in which she looked at such subjects as Dracula, The Curse of Tutankhamun, werewolves and Irish ghosts with the help of Dr Leonard Wolf, David J. Skal, James V. Hart and Professor Nina Auerbach.

In September, Canada’s Corus Entertainment launched the country’s first twenty-four-hour digital-access horror channel, entitled Scream. Horror author Edo van Belkom hosted the midnight-movie programme Post Mortem, supplying commentary during breaks in the films.

Peggy Sue Got Married, the stage musical starring Ruthie Henshall and based on the 1986 movie, became the first theatrical casualty of the September 11th terrorist attacks when it closed after just six weeks in London’s West End, blaming plummeting audience figures. It was soon followed by Notre-Dame de Paris, in which Hazel Fernandez had replaced Dannii Minogue after the Australian actress/singer walked out in June, and The Witches of Eastwick, in which Clarke Peters had taken over from Ian McShane as the Devil.

The Secret Garden at London’s Aldwych Theatre in March was the Royal Shakespeare Company’s musical version of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s classic children’s fantasy. From October, the RSC mounted a new dramatization of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass in London and Stratford-Upon-Avon.

The Northern Ballet Theatre’s production of Jekyll and Hyde at Sadler’s Wells the same month had received poor reviews when it originally opened in Leeds. Daniel de Andrade played Henry Jekyll while the leather-clad Edward Hyde was portrayed by Jonathan Olliver.

The Russian Ice Stars mounted a chilling version of The Phantom of the Opera on Ice at London’s Wimbledon Theatre in April.

Writer Jeremy Dyson and actors Mark Gattis, Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith took The League of Gentlemen, based on the cult radio and TV show, to the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane in March.

The Perrier Award-winning stage spoof Garth Marenghi’s Netherhead featured the eponymous ‘Sculptor of Nightmares’ and ‘Duke of Darkness’ talking about his bestselling literary career and giving advice to would-be horror writers. Unfortunately, the show was neither as funny nor as clever as it thought it was.

Supposedly inspired by the works of H. P. Lovecraft, Alone in the Dark — The New Nightmare was the fourth interactive computer game in the supernatural series featuring occult detective Edward Carnby, armed with just a flashlight to keep the evil creatures at bay on Shadow Island.

Clive Barker’s Undying from EA Games was promoted with the tag-line, ‘What does not kill you will make you wish it had’. Set in Ireland in the 1920s, it involved an undead family attempting to destroy its last surviving member.

Silent Hill 2 was set in a fogbound town where strange creatures inhabited a blood-splattered mental asylum and an abandoned apartment block, while Soul Reaver 2 was based in a world filled with vampires.

The From Dusk Till Dawn game picked up from the end of the 1995 movie, with Seth Gecko imprisoned on a prison ship infested with vampires, and Blade featured the eponymous Marvel Comics character hunting down his undead brethren.

Alien Versus Predator 2 pitched the two movie monsters against a gun-toting marine, while The Mummy recreated the 1999 Universal movie, including video sequences, as Rick O’Connell confronted Imhotep and other marauding mummies.

Return to Castle Wolfenstein was set during World War II, when the Nazis of Wolfenstein had cellars full of genetically-created, fire-breathing zombies.

A sword- and pistol-wielding demon hunter/investigator battled more supernatural foes in Devil May Care. Created by the team who came up with Resident Evil, it was one of the most eagerly anticipated games of the year. Meanwhile, Resident Evil Code: Veronica X picked up the plot from Resident Evil III: Nemesis as heroine Claire Redfield searched for her lost brother in a world filled with zombies, worms, freaks and mutants.

In 2001 it seemed that almost any film character could be turned into an action figure or a collectable. Sideshow Toys’ series of eight-inch Universal figures finally included Bela Lugosi as a fully articulated Count from Dracula, Lugosi again as the broken-necked Ygor from Son of Frankenstein and Lon Chaney, Sr. as the Red Death from The Phantom of the Opera with a variant unmasked head. There was also a translucent green plastic Creature from the Black Lagoon special-edition figure with fourteen points of articulation.

The same company also released twelve-inch figures of Lugosi’s Dracula, Chaney Jr.’s Wolf Man and Chaney Sr.’s Phantom, plus vampire figures from London After Midnight, Nosferatu and Son of Dracula, The Invisible Man (with a clear plastic head!), and a trio of figures from Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein.

A set of three six-inch articulated figures from Full Moon’s Demonic Toys series was also released, along with a twelve-inch figure of Pimp from Blood Dolls.

Another twelve-inch figure released during the year was The Fly from the sequel Return of the Fly.

Mezco’s ‘Reel Masters’, the second series of Silent Screamers six-inch figures, included Graf Orlock from Nosferatu, Edison’s Frankenstein, the 1920 Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and the Metropolis robot Maria, all with their own diorama bases.

The Shadow of the Vampire deluxe figure set featured F. W. Murnau with movie camera filming Max Schreck in a detailed display case.

Produced by McFarlane Toys, Clive Barker’s Tortured Souls featured six Cenobite-like action figures — I: Agonistes, II: The Scythe-Meister, III: Lucidique, IV: Talisac, V: Venal Anatomica and VI: Mongroid — each accompanied by a connected short story written by Barker. The concept was subsequently sold by Barker and Todd McFarlane for a mid-six-figure option to Universal Pictures.

McFarlane continued its Movie Maniacs series with figures of Tony Todd as Candyman and Todd McFarlane’s version of The Blair Witch.

The Mummy Returns spawned a series of articulated figures from Jakks Pacific, including The Rock’s Scorpion King, Rick O’Connell with a pygmy mummy, Anubis and Alex O’Connell, and Imhotep.

Special-effects expert Stan Winston teamed up with X-Toys to produce Stan Winston’s Creature Features, a new line of toys that was launched in October. The initial releases included five new characters developed for a series of films based on old AIP movies of the 1950s, accompanied by a CD-ROM detailing the design, sculpting and development of each figure. At least five additional lines were also being developed — Monster Mythology, Nightmare Demons, Extreme Gargoyles, Stan Winston’s Alien Universe and Animal Kingdom, the latter featuring half-man, half-beast creations.

Ray Harryhausen fans could choose between the X-Plus USA series of limited-edition four-inch chess pieces (which included harpies, hydra, Selenites and sword-fighting skeletons), and the twelve-inch cold-cast statues of Kali, the Ymir and various mythological creatures.

From Japan there were twelve-inch poseable vinyl figures of Harryhausen’s Cyclops and Dragon from The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, and Talos from Jason and the Argonauts.

The Japanese also seemed to go crazy for Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas with a fourteen-inch Jack Skellington coffin doll, a gold ‘Millennium’ edition and a twelve-inch version dressed in pyjamas; a ten-inch Sandy Claws doll; a reversible pillow featuring Jack; a hand-painted set with Lock, Shock and Barrel, or a similar set of four vampires; a set of pull-back racers featuring Jack’s faithful dog Zero and Jack’s snowmobile; a Zero choker necklace, and various die-cast Jack key-chains, amongst numerous other items.

A Halloween treat for little girls with a twisted sense of humour was the Barbie-and-Ken-as-The Munsters gift set. The dolls were surprisingly faithful recreations of Lily and Herman from the cult 1960s TV show. And if that wasn’t enough, there was always Mezco Toyz’s series of nine-inch Living Dead Dolls complete with their own death certificate!

The Scooby-Doo five-piece bendable gift set included five-inch figures of Scooby, Shaggy, Velma, Daphne and Fred.

A series of limited-edition retro tin lunch boxes from NECA included designs for Evil Dead and Halloween, each with a free metal thermos and holographically numbered. Stephen King’s 1958 Plymouth Fury Christine turned up as a 1/8th scale die-cast model.

For Christmas trees, Clayburn Moore designed and sculpted a Vampirella Ornament complete with crescent moon and vampire bat.

William Marshall’s Blacula, David Hedison’s The Fly and a Morlock from George Pal’s 1960 movie of The Time Machine were recreated as quarter-scale resin bust kits sculpted by Joe Simon.

Sculpted by Richard Force, the Nosferatu mini resin model kit featured Max Schrek playing with a yo-yo and was limited to just 200 figures. A ten-inch caricature of Boris Karloff from Mad Monster Party? was sculpted by Tony Cipriano and limited to 500 pieces at $100 each.

Lovecraft fans could choose between a ‘Collect Call of Cthulhu’ T-Shirt or a ‘Pokethulu’ T-shirt, while a company called Java’s Crypt offered in sterling silver an Elder Sign Brooch/Pin, an Elder Sign Pendant and Elder Sign earrings. Bad Boy Designs introduced Cthulhu Beer Glasses with four designs — Innsmouth Golden Lager, Ithaqua Ice, Wizard Whateley’s Dunwich Ale and Witch House Dark (‘It’s the beer you’ve been dreaming of’).

Meanwhile, Mythos Books launched its second revised edition of The Lovecraft Tarot, containing twenty new cards and an expanded book by Eric Friedman.

In celebration of the 70th Anniversary of three of Universal’s most famous Classic Monsters, in October Universal Studios Home Video and Madame Tussaud’s-New York unveiled lifelike wax figures of Count Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster and The Mummy to pay tribute to legendary horror icons Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi.

From Giant Manufacturing came a Classic Horror T-shirt depicting Universal’s The Mummy.

The Mummy Returns trading cards featured scenes from the movie or early designs of CGI characters, while the Ghosts of Mars trading cards included plenty of background information and even a limited-edition card signed by director John Carpenter himself.

The 2000 Bram Stoker Awards for Superior Achievement were presented on May 26th at the Horror Writers’ Association Banquet, held in conjunction with the World Horror Convention in Seattle, Washington. The Traveling Vampire Show by late HWA president Richard Laymon predictably won in the Novel category, while Brian A. Hopkins’s The Licking Valley Coon Hunters Club was chosen in the First Novel section. Steve Rasnic Tem and Melanie Tern’s chapbook The Man on the Ceiling won for Long Fiction, and Jack Ketchum’s ‘Gone’ (from October Dreams) picked up the award for Short Fiction. Magic Terror: Seven Tales by Peter Straub was the winner in the Fiction Collection category, and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: Thirteenth Annual Collection edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling won the Anthology award. Stephen King’s autobiographical On Writing was the Non-Fiction winner, Alan Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was voted best Illustrated Narrative, while Steven Katz’s Shadow of the Vampire collected the Screenplay award. Nancy Etchemendy’s The Power of Un won in the Work for Younger Readers category, Tom Piccirilli’s A Student of Hell won in the Poetry Collection section, and Patricia Lee Macomber, Steve Eller, Sandra Kasturi and Brett A. Savory’s web site The Chiaroscuro won the Other Media award. The Specialty Press Award went to William K. Schafer for Subterranean Press, and Nigel Kneale was honoured with the Lifetime Achievement Award.

Held over July 19th-22nd on the Roger Williams University campus in Bristol, Rhode Island, the guests at the informal Necon XXI were Tim Powers and Elizabeth Massie.

The International Horror Guild’s awards recognizing outstanding achievements in the field of horror and dark fantasy were presented on September 1st during Dragon*”Con in Atlanta, Georgia. Best Novel was Declare by Tim Powers, Adams Fall by Sean Desmond was voted best First Novel, The Man on the Ceiling by Melanie and Steve Rasnic Tem won in the Long Story category, while Steve Duffy’s ‘The Rag-and-Bone Men’ (from Shadows and Silence) won in the Short Story section. I Feel Sick #1–2 by Jhonen Vasquez won the Illustrative Narrative award, and there was a tie for Collection between City Fishing by Steve Rasnic Tem and Ghost Music and Other Tales by Thomas Tessier. Best Anthology went to October Dreams: A Celebration of Halloween edited by Richard Chizmar and Robert Morrish, At the Foot of the Tree by William Sheehan won in the Non-fiction category, and Paula Guran’s Horror Garage was voted Best Publication. Joel-Peter Witkin won Best Artist, American Psycho was voted Best Film, and Angel picked up the Television award.

The International Horror Guild also presented shock-rock performer Alice Cooper with its Living Legend Award. Cooper also received Dragon*Con’s ‘Julie’ Award — named for science fiction/comic legend Julius Schwartz — which recognizes universal achievement spanning multiple genres.

The 2001 British Fantasy Awards were presented on September 23rd at the British Fantasy Society’s one-day 30th Birthday Bash in London’s West End. The winners of this year’s awards were announced by Guests of Honour Hugh Lamb and Simon Clark: The August Derleth Award for Best Novel went to Perdido Street Station by China Mieville, Hideous Progeny edited by Brian Willis was judged Best Anthology and Kim Newman’s Where the Bodies Are Buried won Best Collection. Tim Lebbon’s zombie novella ‘Naming of Parts’ was voted Best Short Fiction, Best Artist was Jim Burns, and Peter Crowther’s PS Publishing was named Best Small Press. The special Karl Edward Wagner Award was presented to legendary anthologist Peter Haining.

The 2001 World Fantasy Awards were presented on November 4th at the World Fantasy Convention in Montreal, Canada. Guests of Honour were Fred Saberhagen, Joel Champetier, artist Donato Giancola and toastmaster Charles de Lint. The Best Novel result was a tie between Declare by Tim Powers and Galveston by Sean Stewart. Steve Rasnic Tem and Melanie Tem’s The Man on the Ceiling picked up yet another award with Best Novella, while ‘The Pottawatomie Giant’ by Andy Duncan was voted Best Short Fiction. Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora edited by Sheree R. Thomas was considered the Best Anthology, Andy Duncan made it a double when his Beluthahatchie and Other Stories won Best Collection, and the artist award went to Australian Shaun Tan. Tom Shippey received the Special Award: Professional for J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century, and the Special Award: Non-Professional went to Bill Sheehan for At the Foot of the Story Tree: An Inquiry into the Fiction of Peter Straub. Life Achievement Awards were announced for Philip José Farmer and Frank Frazetta.

Unsurprisingly, the staff and clientele of California book-dealer Barry R. Levin voted J. K. Rowling the Most Collectable Author of the Year. Charnel House won the Collector’s Award for Most Collectable Book of the Year for the lettered-state edition of From the Corner of His Eye by Dean Koontz, and the Lifetime Collectors Award went to Henry Hardy Heins for his outstanding bibliographic contributions to the study of the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs.

I guess it was inevitable that, in view of the terrorist attacks of September 11th on New York’s World Trade Center and Washington’s Pentagon building, and their continuing consequences for the entire world, any other topic I might attempt to address in this introduction would just seem trivial, even in context.

Like millions of others, I watched dumbfounded as events unfolded live on television. As a babyboomer, born after World War II, the images I saw that afternoon were amongst the most horrific I have ever witnessed. Yet there was also a sense of awe. A sense of unreality. I was genuinely astonished that anybody could create such wholesale destruction and massive loss of life in what I, probably naively, considered to be a ‘civilized’ world. I was appalled that something I had only ever encountered in the movies or science fiction was actually happening in real life while the world tuned in.

Perhaps more than anything else, I was aware that the events taking place in front of us all would shape the still-fledgling twenty-first century for years, perhaps decades, to come.

So what has all this to do with horror — the fictional kind?

Well, in the aftermath of ‘9/11’ (as American media pundits quickly dubbed the attacks) fiction sales dropped dramatically around the world. Almost immediately, and especially in America, reading tastes shifted towards non-fiction titles and self-help books. With media coverage focused on terrorism and war news, new books were unable to get the publicity they needed. This, coupled with a looming global economic recession, meant that the already struggling horror field was even further marginalized.

In general publishing, the New York Times claimed that book sales had slumped by at least 15 per cent, while bestselling novels by top authors were off by as much as 25 per cent to 40 per cent. Although the Harry Potter books and The Lord of the Rings reissues continued to sell well, supported by blockbuster movies, new books from such authors as Stephen King, Anne Rice and James Herbert were said to be selling well below expectations. And if those authors were not doing well, you can imagine how much worse it was for mid-list horror writers.

Meanwhile, the series of anthrax attacks through the mail in America resulted in some publishing houses refusing any longer to accept unsolicited manuscripts.

Although fiction sales began to pick up again in mid-December, publishers were already having to tighten their belts by laying off staff (including editors), cancelling sales conferences, cutting the number of books published, reducing authors’ advances and marketing budgets, and cutting print runs.

The consequences of these actions will affect the publishing industry for a long time to come.

Perhaps even more bizarrely, given the movie industry’s knee-jerk reaction to the attacks, the US Army held a meeting with Hollywood writers and directors (including Danny Bilson and Spike Jonze) to brainstorm ways to prevent further terrorist assaults on America. Life really was beginning to imitate art.

Soon after the attacks I expressed publicly my concern that once again the horror genre, which was still desperately trying to crawl out of a decade-long recession, would be caught in some kind of moral and media backlash. We had seen it happen before, and there was no reason to assume that this time — given the immensity of the tragedy — events would be any different.

Thankfully, my fears ultimately proved to be unfounded. A few days after the attacks, Stephen King’s radio station WKIT raised money for the American Red Cross Disaster Relief Fund with listeners pledging a minimum of $10.00 to hear a song. Stephen and Tabitha King matched all pledges dollar-for-dollar, and the estimated total raised reached $140,000.

The New York City Chapter of the Horror Writers Association published Scars, a charity anthology whose proceeds also went to the Red Cross on behalf of victims of the World Trade Center attack. Authors involved in the project included Gerard Houarner, Jack Ketchum, Michael Laimo, Gordon Linzner and Monica O’Rourke.

As Halloween approached, there was a real possibility that parents more concerned with anthrax spores or hijacked airplanes would prevent their children from celebrating ghoulies, ghosties, and things that go bump in the night.

However, according to one Internet source, Uncle Sam, Lady Liberty, Rudolph Giuliani and firefighter and rescue-worker masks were big sellers at Halloween. We were already beginning to adapt.

Horror writers have always argued that their stories can be cathartic — by embracing our fictional fears we can sometimes overcome our real-life demons — and this was never more evident than in 2001.

As critic Douglas E. Winter has said: ‘Great horror fiction has never really been about monsters, but about mankind. It shows us something about ourselves, something dark, occasionally monstrous… Its writers literally drag our terrors from the shadows and force us to look upon them with despair — or relief. ’

Proof that horror could perhaps be therapeutic was evidenced when Stephen King and Peter Straub’s collaborative novel Black House, initially released the week of the terrorist attack, finally reached the top of the American bestseller lists, despite an initial postponing of print advertising.

‘The current context makes these things more relevant, more important,’ Straub was quoted as saying. ‘You say, yes, the world is really like this. The writing my colleagues and I do is to awaken people to the fragility of existence and the possibility of extremity.’

For the foreseeable future the world has new monsters to fear, new bogeymen to keep us awake at night. It may not mean much in the greater scheme of things, but horror fiction also has a role to play in our recovery.

The world as we knew it before that fateful day will never be the same again. Yet horror fiction, as it has always done, can help us move towards confronting our fears and, by allowing us to recognize them for what they really are, we can use it to hopefully lessen the hold they have over us.

The Editor

May, 2002