Best New Horror

September 29, 2014
Jones’s acclaimed contemporary horror series celebrates its quarter-century with 21 stories from newcomers and veterans—primarily British and North American—who can find equal unease in a sunny holiday, a burnt-out lot, and the floodwaters at the end of the world. Ramsey Campbell’s “Holes for Faces” and Daniel Mills’s “Isaac’s Room” inhabit the eerie space between imagination and knowledge. Robert Shearman’s “The Sixteenth Step” and the late Joel Lane’s “By Night He Could Not See” mine their coldest chills from human behavior. Inexplicably few female authors are included, but they offer some of the most striking entries, including Angela Slatter’s stylish “The Burning Circus,” Halli Villegas’s unsparing “Fishfly Season,” and Thana Niveau’s acute dissection of erotic horror, “Guinea Pig Girl.” Some big-name contributions feel inessential; more than one excerpt from Kim Newman’s long-awaited novel Johnny Alucard is overkill. However, the reprint of Stephen Volk’s outstanding small-press novella Whitstable, a biographical fantasia in which grieving widower Peter Cushing must confront a real-life monster, helps the anthology live up to its title.

November 15, 2014

The 25th anniversary edition of this anthology series (published in Britain as The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror) ranges from mildly spooky to all-out gory. Creepy children's books haunt both Joel Lane's dark story of murder, "By Night He Could Not See," and Reggie Oliver's "Come Into My Parlour." Another winner is Robert Shearman's "The Sixteen Steps," a story of a bed-and-breakfast that houses secrets. Some tales are brief but land with a punch, such as Neil Gaiman's "Click-Clack the Rattlebag" or longer, yet still affecting, including Michael Marshall Smith's "The Gist," about a translator who learns to regret ever encountering a mysterious book. VERDICT The 21 stories collected here, while more uneven than expected in a "best of" anthology, also include two long excerpts from Kim Newman's latest "Anno Dracula" novel, a bloated roundup of the year's news, and an equally overlong memorial chapter dedicated to those who died in 2013.

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 1991
Enhancing their credibility, many of the 20 horror stories in this annual collection are shaped by a hard-edged realism. The forces of evil come in several guises. The young German teenager in Cherry Wilder's ``The House on Cemetery Street'' confronts the unspeakable after learning that her aunt, who hid their Jewish neighbors from the Nazis, later callously caused their deaths. In Ramsay Campbell's futuristic ``It Helps If You Sing,'' the protagonist awaits emasculation by the agents of a fanatic evangelist who wants to rid the world of demon lust. In another story set in the future, ``At First Just Ghostly'' by Karl Edward Wagner, an alcoholic writer sees that he must remain sober in order to combat Satan and prevent nuclear annihilation. ``Snow Cancellations'' by Donald R. Burlesson features a young boy who watches the town disappear as a mysteriously malevolent blizzard advances toward his home. A snowstorm also figures in ``The Horn,'' a tense story by Stephen Gallagher. In others of these tales corpses make love to former lovers and long-dead rapists disinter themselves in order to attack new victims. Ian Watson, Kim Newman and Chet Williamson also contribute chilling tales.

October 15, 2014
This twenty-fifth year of gathering stories from the best English-language horror writers has come with a fitting dose of circumstance for this quarter-century milestone. Prolific anthology editor Jones has brought together a team that simply demands attention, including constant favorite fantasy and horror writer Neil Gaiman, along with wild cards such as novelist and film director and video-game designer Clive Barker. The mix is especially varied in tone as well as in length: some stories are vignettes of a couple pages of stream-of-consciousness, but British screenwriter Stephen Volk's contribution is just short of a novella. But every story writer here deeply understands what makes for the most compelling, well-remembered horror. While many horror stories focus on eliciting shock and disgust, the stories in this anthology show that the best horror comes from the constant, subtle, disquieting power of the human imagination losing itself in the unknown. Readers will hardly find anything in this collection utilizing the shock of gruesome morbidity, but any horror enthusiast picking it up will be easily drawn in and thoroughly satisfied.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)