The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 13 - [Anthology] Read online

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  The Mammoth Book of

  Best New Horror 13

  Edited By Stephen Jones

  Scanned & Proofed By MadMaxAU

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  CONTENTS

  Introduction: Horror in 2001

  Mark of the Beast

  CHICO KIDD

  Crocodile Lady

  CHRISTOPHER FOWLER

  All for Sale

  RAMSEY CAMPBELL

  The Two Dicks

  PAUL McAULEY

  By Her Hand, She Draws You Down

  DOUGLAS SMITH

  O Death, Where Is Thy Spatula?

  POPPY Z. BRITE

  Got to Kill Them All

  DENNIS ETCHISON

  No More A-Roving

  LYNDA E. RUCKER

  First, Catch Your Demon

  GRAHAM JOYCE

  Pump Jack

  DONALD R. BURLESON

  Outfangthief

  GALA BLAU

  The Lost District

  JOEL LANE

  Simeon Dimsby’s Workshop

  RICHARD A. LUPOFF

  Our Temporary Supervisor

  THOMAS LIGOTTI

  Whose Ghosts These Are

  CHARLES L. GRANT

  Shite Hawks

  MURIEL GRAY

  Off the Map

  MICHAEL CHISLETT

  Most of My Friends Are Two-Thirds Water

  KELLY LINK

  City in Aspic

  CONRAD WILLIAMS

  Where All Things Perish

  TANITH LEE

  Struwwelpeter

  GLEN HIRSHBERG

  Cleopatra Brimstone

  ELIZABETH HAND

  Cats and Architecture

  CHICO KIDD

  Necrology: 2001

  STEPHEN JONES & KIM NEWMAN

  Useful Addresses

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  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.

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  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.

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  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 impressiveSmoking 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.

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  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’sGargoyles.

  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.

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  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.