Best New Horror: Volume 25 (Mammoth Book of Best New Horror) Read online

  STEPHEN JONES lives in London, England. He is the winner of three World Fantasy Awards, four Horror Writers Association Bram Stoker Awards, three International Horror Guild Awards and twenty-one British Fantasy Awards, as well as being a recipient of the HWA Lifetime Achievement Award and a Hugo Award nominee. A former television producer/director and genre movie publicist and consultant (the first three Hellraiser movies, Nightbreed, Split Second, etc.), he has written and edited more than 130 books, including Coraline: A Visual Companion, Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales of H. P. Lovecraft, The Essential Monster Movie Guide, Horror: 100 Best Books and Horror: Another 100 Best Books (both with Kim Newman) and the Dark Terrors, Dark Voices and The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror series. A Guest of Honour at the 2002 World Fantasy Convention in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and the 2004 World Horror Convention in Phoenix, Arizona, he has been a guest lecturer at UCLA in California and London’s Kingston University and St. Mary’s University College. You can visit his website at www.stephenjoneseditor.com

  PRAISE FOR BEST NEW HORROR

  “Best New Horror is a darkly shining beacon of hope in an unimaginative world.” Neil Gaiman

  “From its inception, the Best New Horror series has been an invaluable resource for all of us who believe in the genre.” Clive Barker

  “An essential record, invaluable and irreplaceable, of modern horror fiction in all its range and variousness.” Ramsey Campbell

  “No self-respecting relisher of the macabre should ever deny him-or herself a copy.” Gahan Wilson

  “Anyone who is interested in the contemporary horror scene should buy a copy of this book and devour it.” The Times (London)

  “Jones’ comprehensive coverage has become the horror genre’s most important journalistic effort.” Locus

  “The best horror anthologist in the business is, of course, Stephen Jones.” Time Out

  “A worthy reflection of the diversity and high quality of contemporary horror and dark fantasy, this annual volume remains an absolute necessity.” Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “The most valuable horror book of the year.” Kirkus Reviews

  First published in the UK as The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 25 by Robinson, 2014

  This edition published by Skyhorse Publishing, 2014

  Collection and editorial material

  Copyright © Stephen Jones, 2014

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, New York 10018

  Skyhorse publishing books may be purchased in bulk at special discounts for sales promotion, corporate gifts, fund-raising, or educational purposes. Special editions can also be created to specifications. For details, contact the Special Sales Department, Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, New York 10018 or [email protected]

  www.skyhorsepublishing.com

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  ISBN: 978-1-62873-818-6

  Printed and bound in the UK

  US Library of Congress Control Number is available on file

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction: Horror in 2013

  Who Dares Wins: Anno Dracula 1980

  KIM NEWMAN

  Click-clack the Rattlebag

  NEIL GAIMAN

  Dead End

  NICHOLAS ROYLE

  Isaac’s Room

  DANIEL MILLS

  The Burning Circus

  ANGELA SLATTER

  Holes for Faces

  RAMSEY CAMPBELL

  By Night He Could Not See

  JOEL LANE

  Come Into My Parlour

  REGGIE OLIVER

  The Middle Park

  MICHAEL CHISLETT

  Into the Water

  SIMON KURT UNSWORTH

  The Burned House

  LYNDA E. RUCKER

  What Do We Talk About When We Talk About Z—

  LAVIE TIDHAR

  Fishfly Season

  HALLI VILLEGAS

  Doll Re Mi

  TANITH LEE

  A Night’s Work

  CLIVE BARKER

  The Sixteenth Step

  ROBERT SHEARMAN

  Stemming the Tide

  SIMON STRANTZAS

  The Gist

  MICHAEL MARSHALL SMITH

  Guinea Pig Girl

  THANA NIVEAU

  Miss Baltimore Crabs: Anno Dracula 1990

  KIM NEWMAN

  Whitstable

  STEPHEN VOLK

  Necrology: 2013

  STEPHEN JONES & KIM NEWMAN

  Useful Addresses

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I would like to thank Kim Newman, Vincent Chong, Rodger Turner and Wayne MacLaurin (sfsite.com), Peter Crowther and Nicky Crowther, Ray Russell and Rosalie Parker, Gordon Van Gelder, Merrilee Heifetz and Sarah Nagel of Writers House, Mark Miller, Titan Books, Nicholas Royle, Andy Cox, Michael Kelly, David Longhorn, David Barraclough, Johnny Mains, Amanda Foubister, Andrew I. Porter, Mandy Slater and, especially, Duncan Proudfoot, Emily Byron, Clive Hebard, Una McGovern and Max Burnell for all their help and support. Special thanks are also due to Locus, Ansible, Classic Images, Entertainment Weekly and all the other sources that were used for reference in the Introduction and the Necrology.

  INTRODUCTION: HORROR IN 2013 copyright © Stephen Jones 2014.

  WHO DARES WINS: ANNO DRACULA 1980 copyright © Kim Newman 2013. Originally published in Anno Dracula 1976–1991: Johnny Alucard. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  CLICK-CLACK THE RATTLEBAG copyright © Neil Gaiman 2013. Originally published in Impossible Monsters. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agent.

  DEAD END copyright © Nicholas Royle 2013. Originally published in X7: A Seven Deadly Sins Anthology. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  ISAAC’S ROOM copyright © Daniel Mills 2013. Originally published in Black Static #35, Jul–Aug 2013. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  THE BURNING CIRCUS copyright © Angela Slatter 2013. Originally published in The Burning Circus: BFS Horror 1: An Anthology for British Fantasy Society Members. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  HOLES FOR FACES copyright © Ramsey Campbell 2013. Originally published in Holes for Faces. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  BY NIGHT HE COULD NOT SEE copyright © Joel Lane 2013. Originally published in Crimewave 12: Hurts. Reprinted by permission of the Author’s Estate.

  COME INTO MY PARLOUR copyright © Reggie Oliver 2013. Originally published in Dark World: Ghost Stories and Flowers of the Sea: Thirteen Stories and Two Novellas. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  THE MIDDLE PARK copyright © Michael Chislett 2013. Originally published in Supernatural Tales 25, Winter 2013/14. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  INTO THE WATER copyright © Simon Kurt Unsworth 2013. Originally published in Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  THE BURNED HOUSE copyright © Lynda E. Rucker 2013. Originally published in The Moon Will Look Strange. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  WHAT DO WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT Z—copyright © Lavie Tidhar 2013. Originally published in Black Static #32, Jan–Feb 2013. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  FISHFLY SEASON copyright © Halli Villegas 2013. Originally published in Chilling Tales: In Words, Alas, Drown I. Reprinted by permission of the author
.

  DOLL RE MI copyright © Tanith Lee 2013. Originally published in Nightmare: Horror & Dark Fantasy, Issue 8, May 2013. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  A NIGHT’S WORK copyright © Clive Barker 2013. Originally published in The Bram Stoker Awards Weekend 2013 Incorporating World Horror Convention, New Orleans, LA, Souvenir Book. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  THE SIXTEENTH STEP copyright © Robert Shearman 2013. Originally published in The Burning Circus: BFS Horror 1: An Anthology for British Fantasy Society Members. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  STEMMING THE TIDE copyright © Simon Strantzas 2013. Originally published in Dead North: The Exile Book of Anthology Series, Number Eight: Canadian Zombie Fiction. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  THE GIST copyright © Michael Marshall Smith 2013. Originally published in The Gist. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  GUINEA PIG GIRL copyright © Thana Niveau 2013. Originally published in The Tenth Black Book of Horror. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  MISS BALTIMORE CRABS: ANNO DRACULA 1990 copyright © Kim Newman 2013. Originally published in Anno Dracula 1976–1991: Johnny Alucard. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  WHITSTABLE copyright © Stephen Volk 2013. Originally published in Whitstable. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  NECROLOGY: 2013 copyright © Stephen Jones and Kim Newman 2014.

  USEFUL ADDRESSES copyright © Stephen Jones 2014.

  For everyone who has appeared in Best New Horror over the past quarter of a century – and especially in memory of those who are no longer with us.

  INTRODUCTION

  Horror in 2013

  IN EARLY 2013, the US Department of Justice approved the merger of mega-publishers Penguin/Pearson and Random House/Bertelsmann. Australia, New Zealand and the European Union followed and, in early July, Penguin Random House became the largest publishing company in the world.

  Meanwhile, Hachette Book Group purchased most of the Hyperion adult backlist from Disney, including the imprint’s name. The media-related and children’s imprints were not included in the sale.

  Independent American imprint Night Shade Books, which had been struggling for several years, was sold to print publisher Skyhorse Publishing and digital publisher Start Publishing in June after some authors agreed to give up additional rights in return for the payment of all outstanding advances and late royalties. Night Shade immediately cancelled its electronic magazine Eclipse Online, edited by Jonathan Strahan.

  After working on the transition with the new owners for a couple of months, Night Shade founder Jason Williams left the company in August.

  Skyhorse and Start were also set to acquire independent publisher Underland Press, founded in 2007 by Victoria Blake. However, the deal was not completed and the imprint was instead purchased by Mark Teppo’s new publishing company, Resurrection House.

  After being announced as an acquiring editor for Resurrection House, Jason Williams soon left that company as well.

  In Britain, Tesco supermarkets were forced to withdraw a sixteen-page colouring book from their website after complaints that Colour Me Good Arrggghhhh!! by Mel Elliott featured images from, amongst other films, Hellraiser, Psycho, The Silence of the Lambs, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Jaws, An American Werewolf in London, The Shining and A Clockwork Orange. The book was being marketed online to children aged from five to eight.

  Later in the year Tesco had to apologize again, when it was forced to remove an orange “psycho ward” Hallowe’en costume off its shelves after it was denounced as “staggeringly offensive” by mental-health charities. Rival supermarket chain Asda was also compelled to remove a similar fancy dress costume.

  As a result of these complaints, London’s famous Angels Fancy Dress shop decided to insist that any customers wanting to buy their “Apron of Souls” Texas Chainsaw Massacre Hallowe’en costume would have to show ID to prove that they were eighteen years old or over. The company also set an age restriction on their bloody intestines costume.

  It is estimated that the Hallowe’en market in the UK is now worth around £300 million, up from just £12 million in 2001.

  Fifty years after his death, writer C. S. Lewis was honoured with a memorial stone in Westminster Abbey in London. The stone was set in the floor of Poet’s Corner, alongside such other renowned literary figures as Geoffrey Chaucer and Charles Dickens.

  In July, the Providence, Rhode Island, City Council agreed to rename the intersection of Prospect Street and Angell Street “H. P. Lovecraft Square”.

  *

  To paraphrase William Goldman’s famous quote about Hollywood, apparently nobody knows anything in publishing after it was revealed in July that a “debut” crime novel, The Cuckoo’s Calling by “former military man” Robert Galbraith, was actually written by J. K. Rowling.

  After having been turned down by a number of publishers, including Orion, the book was published in April by Sphere to generally good reviews. However, it had sold just 1,500 copies (including ebooks) before the Sunday Times newspaper mounted a textual analysis investigation into the identity of the supposedly first-time author (following a mysterious tweeted tip-off), and the novel became a bestseller literally overnight.

  Rowling subsequently accepted a donation to charity from the law firm that revealed her pseudonym.

  Stephen King’s first novel of the year, Joyland, was published as a trade paperback original by Hard Case Crime. Despite the volume’s almost pulp-crime cover, the book concerned college student Devin Jones, who took a job at an independent amusement park in 1973 that featured, amongst other things, a haunted funhouse that was actually haunted. The author encouraged readers to buy print editions over ebooks when he announced that Joyland would only be available in printed form.

  King was back later in the year with Doctor Sleep, which was a continuation of his 1977 bestseller The Shining. A grownup Dan Torrance, still haunted by what happened to him as a child at The Overlook hotel, set out to save a girl who shared his psychic powers from a “family” of psychopathic travellers who wanted to feed off their remarkable gifts.

  In Britain, there were exclusive slipcased “Special Editions” released separately to the WHSmith and Waterstones bookstore chains.

  Joe Hill’s NOS4A2 (get it?) was about a woman who had the power to find “lost” objects and her encounter with a legendary bogeyman, who spirited his child victims away in his car to a magical realm where he drained their souls. Subterranean Press published a signed edition limited to 750 copies ($125.00) and twenty-six traycased lettered copies ($1,000.00).

  Dean Koontz’s Deeply Odd was the sixth book in the “Odd Thomas” series, while the same author’s Innocence was about two people who lived in seclusion who found each other.

  Dan Brown’s Inferno was the fourth novel concerning Robert Langdon, who investigated the secrets surrounding Dante’s “Inferno”. It sold one million copies in North America during the book’s first five days of release. The second printing was 2.3 million copies.

  An unnamed narrator literally returned to his childhood memories, only to discover something evil waiting for his seven-year-old self in Neil Gaiman’s masterful novel The Ocean at the End of the Lane. In America, William Morrow issued a beautifully produced deluxe slipcased edition, illustrated in full colour by Dave McKean and limited to 2,000 signed and numbered copies ($150.00).

  Dan Simmons’ The Abominable was set around a 1925 attempt to climb Mount Everest.

  Billed simply as “a ghost story”, Graham Joyce’s The Year of the Ladybird was inspired by actual events. Set in the summer of 1976, a student took a job at a rundown holiday camp in Skegness and learned more about his past than he wanted to.

  A suburban housewife house-sitting a high-rise apartment found herself drawn into a nightmare conspiracy involving an impossible murder in Christopher Fowler’s Plastic.

  In The Heavens Rise by Christopher Rice, a group of Louisiana teens faced an ancient
evil, while his mother, Anne Rice, published The Wolves of Midwinter, the second book in the “Wolf Gift Chronicles” werewolf series.

  A complex conspiracy was at the heart of We Are Here, the latest thriller from Michael Marshall (Smith), while a retired policewoman inherited a house in a too-good-to-be-true town in Robert Jackson Bennett’s American Elsewhere.

  In Carsten Stroud’s Southern Gothic Niceville, children kept disappearing from the eponymous town. It was followed by the even more offbeat The Homecoming, which combined time travel with the Mob.

  Lauren Beukes’ The Shining Girls was about a survivor’s hunt for a time-travelling serial killer who used a condemned house in Chicago as his means of transportation. Reprints of the UK edition contained research photographs and an interview with the author.

  A lecturer in creative writing scanned photos of famous writers’ studies to see if he could spot his only published book on their shelves in Nicholas Royle’s psychological thriller First Novel.

  A drunken criminologist and an intrepid journalist teamed up to solve a mystery involving mad science and monsters in an alternate London of 1864 in T. Aaron Payton’s debut steampunk “Pimm & Skye Adventure”, The Constantine Affliction.

  A second serial killer was at work in the streets of Jack the Ripper’s London in Sarah Pinborough’s Mayhem, while a young girl ventured into an alternate London to rescue her abducted mirror-sister in Tom Pollock’s The Glass Republic.

  Patients were kept asleep for months as part of a new psychiatric therapy in F. R. Tallis’ The Sleep Room, and a university professor had to study John Milton’s Paradise Lost to save his daughter from a demon in The Demonologist by Andrew Pyper.