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Book Review: The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 19, edited by Stephen Jones

October 14th, 2008

October can’t come around quick enough sometimes.

Stephen Jones‘ 19th annual selection of some of the most accessible and harrowing genre fiction out there is the foremost reason for me, (as is the onset of what will hopefully be a glorious autumn, a time when we lovers of the spook can anticipate those long nights settling in again…)

2007 was a fruitful year in horror, as Jones’ painstaking dissection of all-that-is-dark related activity shows. Personally I would like to see more of his comment and opinion in this introductory section, which is a relatively comprehensive list of books, comics, television, DVD, film, stage, merchandise and other related genre releases, (although Jones does comment on much of the genre television in the US and the UK). It would, of course, be impossible for Jones to keep track of everything published over the course of twelve months, but this section is a very useful primer for the fan who might have missed something along the way.

Jones does give us some insight into the trials and tribulations the committee, of which he was a member, experienced whilst organising the 2007 World Horror Convention, which was held outside the US for the first time, much to the chagrin of some horror fans and aspiring writers, who voiced their disgruntled opinions on some of the many online forums, available to anyone these days. Hence the boundaries between being a professional writer, genuinely aspiring and ill-considered wannabe is a grey area in some people’s minds, according to Jones, who argues that a well-managed Convention with invited professional speakers and writers’ contributions as part of a structured schedule is a good thing for the genre, and preferable to a loose free-for-all of wild and woolly opinions and debatable writing quality from those who have few, if any, publishing credentials, which would be to the detriment of all.

Within The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror Jones has collected some truly intriguing and spooky stories from such diverse sources as the World Horror Convention’s Souvenir Book, Travellers in Darkness; Peter Crowther’s consistently challenging Postscripts magazine; The Ghost Story Society‘s high-quality At Ease with the Dead anthology; Tartarus Press‘ equally good collection, Strange Tales Volume 11; as well as a Gothic Press chapbook, Estronomicon‘s online and print Halloween special, and Comma Press‘ Phobic: Modern Horror Stories anthology, among others.

The Things He Said, Michael Marshall Smith‘s extreme survivalist take on the aftermath of what must have been a zombie apocalypse is sparingly eloquent and backwoods-bitingly effective. Steve Erikson‘s This Rich Evil Sound evokes a sad atmosphere of the implications of age and isolation across the unspoilt snow-shrouded landscape of a National Park. Man, You Gotta See This! by Tony Richards is at first a simple story of paintings imbued with hypnotic qualities, but it gradually pushes the reader along the path to the beginnings of a bizarre apocalypse; as does Christopher Harman’s eerie Behind the Clouds: In Front of the Sun, wherein a shady antiques dealer buys a globe with something inside it, something that scratches to get out…

Mark Samuels‘ A Gentleman from Mexico takes us to the shadowy community that is Mexico City’s Distrito Federal, a place where a holidaying editor is introduced to a writer with a style and manner very much like a certain H.P. Lovecraft. Such introductions always have a price. Calico Black, Calico Blue by Joel Knight is a very, very dark urban tale set in two adjoining flats with two very, very different occupants. Loss, by the enigmatic Tom Piccirilli, is about a haunted building where the occupants are as equally troubled by their distant flirtations with fame as they are by the evil that is spreading around the corridors of their apartment block. Tim Pratt‘s From Around Here is an inventive tale of a neighbourhood blighted by an insidious and hidden evil, and a little-known, travelling God who is the only one who can see it, and wants to get rid of it, as he /she/it is considering settling down there.

13 O’Clock by Mike O’Driscoll, (a columnist for Black Static), and The Fisherman by David  A. Sutton bring us seaside chills, of the spiritual kind in the first instance, and something like guilt, rotten and swimming in the surf, in the second, as does The Admiral’s House by Marc Lecard – a bit of both in fact.

The Church on the Island by Simon Kurt Unsworth, from At Ease with the Dead, demonstrates the ghost story at its most sublime, as a tourist cannot deny her instinct to explore, whilst the same urge betrays the arguing friends in Simon Strantzas‘ The Other Village. Reggie Oliver‘s The Children of Monte Rosa, is a more traditional tourist tale of the supernatural, descriptive of the period, and, (not necessarily a bad thing), a little predictable for that detail.

Ghostly themes are continued in a very different style with Joe R. Lansdale‘s awesome round-the-campfire take on The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Deadman’s Road. You guessed it, a haunted road and some folks have to follow it after midnight;but this road’s not cursed with a headless rider and horse from hell, rather a bee-stung redneck with a vicious vendetta. Another ghost story, this time from Nicholas Royle, the last two lines from Lancashire, detailing a family’s encounter with a childless couple, actually made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Tight Wrappers by Conrad Williams is a stand-out too, a ghost and possibly a monster tale, he lends London a darkness like no other writer at the moment. Joel Lane, a regular fiction contributor to Black Static, gives us another spectrally damp atmosphere in the ambiguous revenge short of Still Water.

The volume finishes on a particularly enjoyable, though not necessarily horrific note, with Kim Newman‘s Cold Snap, a short story extracted from The Secret Files of the Diogenes Club, the sequel collection to The Man from the Diogenes Club. Here, the members of the Diogenes Club, ‘a cover for a body charged with handling delicate and often supernatural matters of state,’ get together in the summer of 1976 to battle The Cold, the strange intelligence that is, well, cold, and threatening to chill the entire planet, once it freezes Somerset that is. Newman’s Diogenes stories are a wonderfully amusing and densely-referenced mixture of a retro X-Files, the League of Extraordinary Gentleman and Life on Mars, and I urge you to purchase the two afore-mentioned collections.

Authors whose contributions can almost always be guaranteed, and hence need not be reviewed, include Christopher Fowler, Ramsey Campbell, Gary McMahon, Glen Hirschberg and Joe Hill. The only story I couldn’t bring myself to read is Neil Gaiman‘s The Witch’s Headstone, as this is apparently chapter four of the forthcoming and hugely anticipated, (on my part), The Graveyard Book, and I don’t want to dilute the anticipation, or the actual read, so this is definitely not a negative.

I cannot recommend The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror highly enough as, despite my having read possibly 50% of the stories in their original places of publication, there is enough dripping dark stuff here, in the form of ghost stories, weird tales and menacingly fantastic fables, to satisfy the appetite of the fattest and hungriest horror geek.

Roll on next October, my stomach’s always rumbling.

Reviewed by Mathew F. Riley

[Mathew's book reviews can also be found at Bookgeeks, and his film reviews at Quiet Earth].

Entry Filed under: Book Reviews,Reviews