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Post by dem bones on Sept 23, 2011 7:23:16 GMT
Just got time to post up contents list of the forthcoming (end of month) publication of the latest volume. Congratulations to all who made the final cut (* usual terms and conditions apply), and a special "well done!" to Mark, Ramsey and, of course, her celestial magnificence, Lady Probert, flying the Black Book Of Horror skull & crossbones from The Pier! Stephen Jones (ed.) - Best New Horror 22 (Robinsons, October, 2011) Vincent Chong Stephen Jones - Introduction: Horror in 2010 Scott Edelman - What Will Come After Michael Marshall Smith - Substitutions Mark Valentine - A Revelation of Cormorants Garry Kilworth - Out Back Albert E. Cowdrey - Fort Clay, Louisiana: A Tragic History Brian Hodge - Just Outside Our Windows, Deep Inside Our Walls Mark Morris - Fallen Boys Simon Kurt Unsworth - The Lemon in the Pool Thana Niveau - The Pier Robert Shearman - Featherweight Joel Lane - Black Country Angela Slatter - Lavender and Lychgates Joe R. Lansdale - Christmas with the Dead Mark Samuels - Losenef Express Christopher Fowler - Oh I Do Like To Be Beside the Seaside Kirstyn McDermott - We All Fall Down Norman Partridge - Lesser Demons Steve Rasnic Tem - Telling Caitlín R. Kiernan - As Red as Red Ramsey Campbell - With The Angels Richard L. Tierney - Autumn Chill John Langan - City of the Dog Karina Sumner-Smith - When the Zombies Win
Stephen Jones and Kim Newman - Necrology: 2010
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Post by dem bones on Sept 30, 2011 16:55:31 GMT
FANTASYCON kicks off today which roughly translates as THERE WILL BE AN AWFUL LOT OF NEW BOOKS VIEING FOR BOTH YOUR ATTENTION & HARD-EARNED OVER THE WEEKEND. It is a fair guess that very few of them will have much by way of Vault appeal, but here's one that is well worth stumping up for and, at 575 pages for £7.99, it represents super VFM, too. If i read him right, Mr. Jones feels his series is a little undervalued by Vault and thinking back on some of the lukewarm and downright negative "reviews", i concede he probably has a point. Will see if we can do better this time! As ever, the annual horror round-up in itself provides enough subject matter to fill an entire message board and we might come back to it once we're a good number of stories down. Thana Niveau's The Piers and Steve Rasnic Tem's Telling we already met in The Seventh Black Book Of Horror but relax, they're not the only good ones! In no particular order: Scott Edelman - What Will Come After : One of a number of stories set in the aftermath of the zombie uprising, this one considering the unworkability of the traditional suicide pact now the first to die is likely to both half-devour and infect the other party so they both wind up walking. We follow a lone zombie on a marathon trek across several States to get at his wife and kid, his bits dropping off the while, but that isn't the most horrible thing at all. My advice would be to skip the introduction until directly after you've finished the story - you'll know why when you reach "And so I wrote a story in which I was the protagonist ..." Joe R. Lansdale - Christmas with the Dead: A terrific electrical storm on loan from The Day Of The Triffids has turned almost entire human race into zombies. Calvin, who slept through the light show, is one of very few "lucky" survivors and consequently the most desirable ready-meal in Mud Creek. According to his calendar, today is Christmas Eve and regardless of the walking dead, he's going to venture to the store and grab lights and decorations. Very soon he's embroiled in a scrap with the ravenous horde - and all over Buffy, a starving stray puppy dog . Considering all that's gone before (i've not given away the worst or anything near it) it all ends on a surprisingly cheery note! Christopher Fowler - Oh I Do Like To Be Beside the Seaside: Inspired in part by serial moaner Morrisey's Every Day Is Like Sunday (and possibly London?). Teen tearaway Toby is determined to get the hell out of the miserable seaside resort of his birth and escape to the smoke but he counts against Cole Bay's equal determination to detain him for eternity. Poisoning Winfrey the Arcade Manager and grabbing the days takings is the easy part. He still has to get past a particularly sleazy Widow Twanky and even then there's the wooden Jolly Jack Tar puppet to contend with. This is among tha author's funniest and i for one do not believe that he likes being beside the seaside! Hope you are enjoying BRIGHTON, Mr. F! Karina Sumner-Smith - When the Zombies Win: Short and sweet. Mankind's bitter last laugh on the walking dead. It's no fun to be an animated corpse when you've exhausted the food supply. Mark Samuels - Losenef Express: This one doesn't lend itself well to my crap way with a synopsis but i will have a go ! The late, great Karl E. Wagner endures a cosmic horror episode aboard an Eastern European train as he flees a murder scene. Is this waking nightmare due to the most severe case of Delirium Tremens or is he doomed to play out the adventure (in which, at one stage, his fellow passengers make like the entire cast of the Catacombe dei Cappuccini come back to life) over and over for eternity? Back with some more once I've unscrambled my brain some! Thank you very much to Sam and Jamie-Lee at Robinsons for their continued kindness and support! [/b][/center]
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Post by dem bones on Oct 1, 2011 10:21:38 GMT
Michael Marshall Smith - Substitutions: North London. A middle aged, work from home editor, contentedly bored with his lot receives a wrong food delivery parcel from the online supermarket. The van driver soon puts things right but our man develops an obsession about the woman who ordered in the tasty supplies and resolves to find out who she is. Finding out where the lady lives is easy enough and after a few hours of mildly creepy stalking and prowling up and down the street, he finally catches sight of her in her front room. The woman with the brown hair is not best pleased to catch him staring in, but that's hardly a surprise considering what she's up to.
M. M. S.'s What Happens When You Wake Up In The Night made all three of 2009's Best of year anthologies, even walked away with a BFS Award for Best Short Fiction but i so much prefer this unlikely 'New Tale of Lovecraftian Horror'!
Next up, a delightfully macabre ghost story.
Mark Morris - Fallen Boys: Cornwall. Young, enthusiastic Tess Martin, and her worldly-wise colleague Yvonne Harrison supervise a party of thirteen year olds on a field trip to the Victorian tin mines at Porthellion. The kids are relatively well behaved but, as ever, the universally unpopular Matthew Bellings comes in for relentless bullying from his classmates. Tess does her best to put a stop to it and all is well until they take the mine train deep into the pit. As their guide relates a grim local legend, Matthew's chief tormentor, Jason Hayes, can't resist another jab at the little creep, but it is to be his last. Somebody lurks waiting in the tunnel, somebody long dead who remembers exactly what it's like to be mercilessly picked-upon ...
Mark Valentine - A Revelation of Cormorants: Mr. Utter rents a cottage in Galloway where he can compile his encyclopaedia of myths and legend relating to wild birds. The inscrutable cormorant, with its bad boy looks and sinister reputation, is of particular interest and he becomes so engrossed in observing them from his perch upon a rock that he loses all sense of time and dozes off. When Mr. Utter awakens, the fast-rising tide has cut him off from the shore and he's left clinging by his numbed fingers. A cormorant flaps over to keep him company. Have they set him up or is it just one of those things? This will be one of the subtle ones.
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Post by dem bones on Oct 5, 2011 10:25:27 GMT
Stephen Jones - Horror In 2010: as far as the stories are concerned, I've tended to dip in and out of the YBH's because certain authors hold no interest for me whatsoever, but i read the introductions through without fail. This years annual round-up runs to 105 pages and for once, a considerable number of the anthologies and single author collections have received some kind of coverage on here: Zombie Apocalypse, the sixth & seventh Black Book's Of Horror ("The contents of each volume varied wildly between subtlety and the worst excesses of The Pan Book Of Horror Stories": if you're not proud of that backhanded compliment, Dr. Terror, you should be), Back From The Dead, End Of The Line, Never Again, Macabre: A Journey Through Australia's Darkest Fears, JLP's Wicked Delights and Against The Darkness, Johnny Mains With Deepest Sympathy, etc., likewise publications like Paperback Fanatic (deservedly praised as the best of its kind), Prism and SFX. These introductions and, perhaps to a lesser extent, the depressing Necrology are an indispensable bibliographers tool and I like that Mr. Jones spruces them up some with spiky observations on stuff he considers to fall some way short of 'Best Of' material, though on this occasion he's mostly shooting fish in a barrel. His 2010 targets include literary mash-ups, "the depressing trend toward comedy non-fiction guides" (if he's thinking desperately unfunny likes of 'Miles Proctor's The New Vampire's Handbook' then he's dead on the money), dubious if well-intended 'charity anthologies' (I can already hear the screams), Women In Horror Awareness month (ditto), and - that pet hate of every small press superstar of the multiple awards, zero sales persuasion - the incredibly popular and lucrative Paranormal Romance genre. Mr Jones dislikes the latter because it is 'horror lite' and, fair play to him, he's read enough of the stuff to form an opinion, which, I strongly suspect, is more than can be said for a number of the P.R. disparagers who think they know it all because they've sneered through an episode of Twilight. Seems to me, PR is coming in for the kind of kicking the lit snobs once reserved for the Hamlyn nasties, and the original Vaulters sporadically dispensed to the 'thoughtful' spot-the-horror efforts that predominated throughout the 'nineties. Hastily back to the stories before my mouth runs away with me. The more I read of it, BNH 22 is putting me in mind of the first of Mr. Jones & David Sutton's Dark Terror anthologies. Plenty different styles but it's all hanging together well. Kirstyn McDermott - We All Fall Down: A macabre ghost story this one, set in 1984 and the present. Emma and whiny lover Holly are forced off the road by a low flying kangaroo and smash into a telegraph pole. Battered and bloodied they drag themselves to the nearest house where an elderly widow, Mrs. Jacoby, reluctantly answers their persistent knocks. Almost from the first, Emma realises there's something not quite right here, and, when their weary hostess offers them a room for the night things go from bad to weird once the brattish Holly gets her hands on Mrs. Jacoby's dolls house. To be frank, Holly has been getting on our nerves throughout, but that can all change in the space of one horrible revelation ... Pop culture reference fans will appreciate this unlikely pairing: Wham! circa rotten 'CHOOSE LIFE' t-shirts and the Velvet Underground (!) Joel Lane - Black Country: Clayheath, W. Midlands. A cop returns to his birthplace to find a town run down out of existence. He's been sent to investigate a series of increasingly weird crimes perpetuated by primary school children. Who is manipulating our pop kids and what is the significance of a derelict railway cottage? Bonus point for referencing Robert Lloyd's indie legends, The Nightingales. From the brooding and atmospheric to a dirty, greasy dollop of total pulp horror with a particularly epic opening scene. I speak of; Norman Partridge - Lesser Demons: County Sheriff Jim Dalton, a grim loner in the mould of Jim Thomson's Lou Ford, defends the town versus a plague of Lovecraftian entities and their disciples. Deputy Barnes, a scholarly man, realises what they're up against when he retrieves a Grimoire from the scene of the initial incident. But it is brawn and not brains that are required in this battle, and Barnes' attempt to counter black magic with black magic does not end well for him. It's down to the unflinching Dalton to clean up his neck of the woods. With a chainsaw. Huge body-count, top razor-throated monsters (including man-arachnid hybrids and one handsome devil, looks like an "inside out grizzly") plus loads of chewing on gobbets of human flesh, etc. This is very good indeed.
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Post by Jojo Lapin X on Oct 18, 2011 18:13:54 GMT
"Substitutions" brings back fond memories of Iris Murdoch, of all people. It could almost be a parody.
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Post by dem bones on Oct 18, 2011 21:30:29 GMT
No surprise that I've never read Iris Murdoch but would be interested (and not a little terrified!) to hear your take on BNH 22 if you stick with it, JoJo. Anyone else started or even finished it yet?
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Post by noose on Oct 18, 2011 21:37:24 GMT
I've read A Severed Head and The Good Apprentice by Iris - they were both simply quite brilliant. As to BNH 22 - I've read the year in horror, necrology and about 5 stories so far. It's better than BNH 20 and 21 so far...
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Post by Jojo Lapin X on Oct 19, 2011 9:55:04 GMT
i'd be interested (and not a little terrified!) to hear your take on BNH 22 if you stick with it, JoJo. Just for you, I tried another one, "We All Fall Down." It is cute, but too derivative of other things, including Aickman's "The Inner Room" and, of course, any number of ghost films from about ten years ago. The kangaroo action is novel, though.
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Post by dem bones on Oct 19, 2011 18:31:33 GMT
thank you, JoJo, and yes, i agree with all of that, but still liked the story a great deal. It's been a few weeks now but that particularly unpleasant image of the kangaroo and the wrecked car has stayed with me.
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Post by Jojo Lapin X on Oct 19, 2011 19:53:26 GMT
"Fallen Boys" is really good, traditional stuff. But it has the world's least likeable victim of bullying; the boy hardly even seems human.
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Post by andydecker on Oct 20, 2011 13:23:24 GMT
Got mine today. Nice cover. Just read the Horror in 2010 at lunch and it was exhausting. 100 pages on mostly stuff I missed. And while I don´t share Mr. Jones opinions on some movies, he is right about a lot of other things. The paranormal romance opinion is a no-brainer, but I ordered a few issues of Weird Tales on the Kindle, and wow, did the tales suck. So now it is on for the tales, which I guess I will read a third, if last years volume is any indication.
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Post by mattofthespurs on Oct 22, 2011 16:56:07 GMT
Got my copy today. Have read the 'Horror in 2010' and took a sneak peak at the back to see The Vault listed again. Mr Jones decides to tar everyone on this board with the same brush in stating that 'we'" apparently don't care much for this series." Hurumph! Perhaps I should stop buying it then as I have done each year, without fail, since volume 1! Anyhoo ( ) I've only just started the first story as I'm currently reading "Ghost Story" by Straub but I shall dip in and out as the mood takes me.
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Post by mattofthespurs on Oct 22, 2011 17:23:14 GMT
Just finished " What Will Come After".
I enjoyed it. The story seemed to be tinged throughout with an utter sadness except for the end.
I found the end of the story strangely uplifting. I'm not sure that was the intention but that's they way it came across to me. Whatever the intentions I found it to be an excellent opener to this years volume.
Just started MMS' "Substitutions" and have found the first few pages intriguing. I look forward to reading more but my steak and chips won't eat itself (unless it's zombie steak), and more importantly I have two bottles of cheap red plonk to devour which will make reading later all but impossible.
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Post by Craig Herbertson on Oct 22, 2011 18:55:18 GMT
That's strange. I've been following the thread and wouldn't regard it as very negative. I haven't read the anthology so I couldn't comment on the selection. Some august names among the cast...
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Post by mattofthespurs on Oct 23, 2011 13:03:42 GMT
Michael Marshall Smith - "Substitutions"
An intriguing premise is not followed through in my opinion. Disappointed with ending. Whilst well written I felt the motivations of the protagonist were weak to say the least. A shame. I liked this very much until the final page.
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