Introduction HORROR IN 2011

IN JANUARY, HarperCollins US changed the name of its genre imprint Eos to Harper Voyager, to bring the list in line with the publisher’s UK and Australian sister companies to create a global brand.

America’s second-largest bookstore chain, Borders, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in February with debts totalling $1.29 billion and assets of $1.275 billion. Despite closing more than 200 stores over the following few months, Borders eventually announced it was going into liquidation in July after no bidders for the troubled chain came forward. The remaining stores finally closed their doors in September.

February also saw the surprise collapse of Canada’s largest book distributor, H. B. Fenn & Company, when the company filed for bankruptcy with liabilities of around $25.6 million. The company’s entire workforce of more than 125 employees was laid off immediately.

RED group Retail, Australia and New Zealand’s largest bookseller with such chains as Angus & Robertson and Borders (no connection to the US bookstore), was also placed into voluntary administration the same month, with debts of around A$51.8 million.

In better news, the struggling HMV sold British bookshop chain Waterstone’s to Russian billionaire Alexander Mamut for £57 million. Bookseller James Daunt, owner of six independent Daunt Bookshops in London, was named as managing director and announced that he wanted the 296-branch chain “to feel like your local bookstore”.

A year after putting itself up for sale, America’s biggest bookseller, Barnes & Noble, received an injection of $204 million in August when conglomerate Liberty Media purchased a stake in the company, but declined to buy the company outright.

In October, Amazon Publishing announced that it would be launching 47 North, a new science fiction, fantasy and horror imprint edited by Alex Carr. The new imprint was named after the latitude co-ordinates in Seattle where Amazon is based. Titles would be available in print, audio and, of course, Kindle formats.

At the beginning of the year it was revealed that a new American edition of Mark Twain’s classic 1884 novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn had replaced the use of the racially offensive word “nigger” with “slave”, to make it more acceptable to modern readers. However, some critics complained that the censored version was “cultural vandalism” and was at odds with the anti-racist theme that Twain was writing about. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is reportedly the fourth most-banned book in US schools.

In May, a survey amongst secondary school English teachers in the UK found that they were ditching classic novels and Shakespeare from their curriculum because boys aged eleven to fourteen said they lost interest if the book they were studying was longer than 200 pages.

That same month, an investigation by the London Evening Standard newspaper discovered that one in three children in the city did not own a single book, one in four schoolchildren aged eleven could not read or write properly, and one in five school leavers was unable to read confidently.

Meanwhile, in December the results of a survey conducted by the UK’s National Literacy Trust revealed that around 3.8 million children in the country did not own a book. This meant that almost a third of all British children did not have any reading material, with boys again being the most likely to be missing out.

In Stephen King’s 11/22/63, a man dying of cancer travelled back through a wormhole in a Maine diner to a specific day in 1958 and attempted to prevent the assassination of President John F. Kennedy by Lee Harvey Oswald five years later. Curiously, the book was retitled 11.22.63 in the UK, but not 22.11.63!

The paperback edition of King’s Full Dark, No Stars added a new short story, “Under the Weather”, to the original four novellas.

J. K. Rowling planned to start exclusively selling the e-book versions of all seven of her Harry Potter novels via her new Pottermore.com website, which was supposed to launch in October but suffered from technical delays. Once fully operational, the free site would also offer other Potter-related material, including interactive games.

Meanwhile, the estate of a man claiming that Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire was plagiarised from the 1987 book, Willy the Wizard: Number 1: Livid Land, finally had its case dismissed in the UK after seven years when the plaintiff failed to start paying a £1.5 million deposit ordered by the Chancery Division of the High Court to cover costs.

Rowling also left her long-time literary agent, Christopher Little, and went to a new agency set up by Little’s business partner, Neil Blair.

Arabat: Absolute Midnight was the third volume in the projected five-book fantasy series written and extensively illustrated by Clive Barker, which began in 2002.

Miniaturised humans battled against giant-seeming insects in Micro, which Richard Preston completed from an unfinished draft by the late Michael Crichton.

The Burning Soul by John Connolly was the tenth in the “Charlie Parker” series, while Samuel Johnson vs. the Devil: Hell’s Bells (aka The Infernals) from the same author was a sequel to his YA novel The Gates.

Narrated by its murdered protagonist, Ghost Story was the thirteenth volume in Jim Butcher’s best-selling “Dresden Files” series.

Dean Koontz’s horror novel 77 Shadow Street was about a cursed apartment building. Bantam supported the book’s release with an online “360-degree immersive experience”.

The trade paperback of What the Night Knows, a supernatural serial killer novel from the busy Mr Koontz, also included a related novella originally published as an e-book, while Frankenstein: The Dead Town was the fifth and final book in the series from the same author.

Richard Matheson’s latest novel, Other Kingdoms, was about witchcraft and magic in a rural English village, as told by an ageing horror writer.

When a couple of ageing musicians discovered an abandoned baby girl in the woods, they set in motion a chain of horrific events in John Ajvide Lindqvist’s fourth novel, Little Star.

Family Storms and Cloudburst were the first volumes in a new series by the still long-dead V. C. Andrews®.

A couple buried in an avalanche emerged to discover a world apparently devoid of anyone but themselves in Graham Joyce’s The Silent Land. Stephen King described it as “Scary Twilight Zone stuff, but also a sensitive exploration of love’s redemptive power.”

A man found that his life had been “modified” out of his control in Killer Move by Michael Marshall (Smith).

Inspired by the Hammer Films tradition, Christopher Fowler’s Hell Train was set on a locomotive travelling through Eastern Europe during the First World War.

As a companion to its series of new Sherlock Holmes adventures, Titan Books issued Kim Newman’s novel Professor Moriarty: The Hound of the D’Urbervilles, which continued the exploits of “the Napoleon of Crime” and his debauched henchman, Colonel Sebastian Moran.

Meanwhile, John O’Connell’s novella The Baskerville Legacy focused on the relationship between Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and real-life journalist Bertram Fletcher Robinson, who some claim came up with the idea for The Hound of the Baskervilles.

The Dark at the End was reportedly the final volume in F. Paul Wilson’s long-running “Repairman Jack” series, while Out of Oz marked the end of Gregory Maguire’s best-selling “Wicked” series (at least for now).

In Adam Nevill’s The Ritual, a group of four campers encountered monsters both human and supernatural in an ancient Scandinavian forest.

A former airline pilot searched for his missing girlfriend in a strange coastal village in Loss of Separation by Conrad Williams, and a man believed he had discovered a map to the city of his dreams in Nicholas Royle’s novel Regicide, an expanded version of the author’s story “Night Shift Sister”.

The Shadow of the Soul was the second book in Sarah Pinborough’s “Dog-Faced Gods” series, as detective inspector Cassius “Cass” Jones continued his investigations into the sinister activities of the immortal “Network”.

Ghost of a Smile was the second in Simon R. Green’s “Ghost Finders” series about agents working for the Carnacki Institute.

A gate in an urban housing project led to a world of ghosts and monsters in Gary McMahon’s The Concrete Grove, the first volume in a new trilogy, while Dead Bad Things from the same author was about a reluctant psychic and included a bonus short story.

The dead were restless in Graveminder, the first adult novel by best-selling YA author Melissa Marr, and a seventeen-year-old girl uncovered her family’s dark secrets in Essie Fox’s Victorian Gothic mystery The Somnambulist.

Aloha from Hell: A Sandman Slim Novel was a sequel to Kill the Dead and Sandman Slim, as Richard Kadrey’s anti-hero took on an insane serial killer who was mounting a war against both Heaven and Hell.

Joseph Nassise’s Eyes to See was the first in a trilogy about a man with the ability to see ghosts, and a survivor of a terrorist attack could hear the voices of who perished in Robert J. King’s Death’s Disciples.

A woman could tell when men were about to die in Michael Koryta’s The Cypress House, while an ancient evil infected an island lighthouse and a big cat sanctuary in The Ridge, from the same author.

Something huge and tentacled emerged Out of the Waters, the second in David Drake’s “Books of the Elements” quartet.

People started turning into cannibalistic monsters in Vacation by Matthew Costello, and a woman’s New York apartment was infested with insects no one else could see in Ben H. Winters’ Bedbugs.

Fired Up by Jayne Ann Krentz was the first book in the “Dreamlight” series and the seventh in the “Arcane Society” series.

Diabolical was Hank Schwaeble’s sequel to Damnable, while I Don’t Want to Kill You was the third book in the humorous serial killer trilogy by Dan Wells about sociopath John Wayne Cleaver.

Skinners: The Breaking and Skinners: Extinction Agenda were the fifth and sixth books, respectively, in the series about monster-hunters by Marcus Pelegrimas.

Former Leisure executive editor Don D’Auria moved to small press/e-book imprint Samhain Publishing, where he launched a new horror line in October with no less than five books from Ramsey Campbell, including the new novel The Seven Days of Cain.

Other titles from the same publisher included Angel Board by Kristopher Rufty, Borealis by Ronald Malfi, Wolf’s Edge by W. D. Gagliani, Forest of Shadows by Hunter Shea, Dead of Winter by Brian Moreland, Dark Inspirations by Russell James, Catching Hell by Greg F. Gifune, and The Lamplighters by Frazer Lee.

Steve Hockensmith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dreadfully Ever After, illustrated by Patrick Arrasmith, was the third in the trilogy that started with Seth Grahame-Smith’s bestselling pastiche and continued with Hockensmith’s prequel.

Derived from the same source material, Mr Darcy’s Bite was a werewolf novel by Mary Lydon Simonsen, Jane Goes Batty was the second book in Thomas Michael Ford’s series about a vampire Jane Austen in the present day, and Jane Austen: Blood Persuasion was the second in the humorous vampire series by Janet Mullany.

And still the dross kept coming with such literary “mash-ups” as Alice in Zombieland “by” Lewis Carroll and Nickolas Cook, and The Twilight of Lake Woebegotten by “Harrison Geillor”.

In Grave Expectations credited to Charles Dickens and Sherri Browning Erwin, young Pip was a werewolf and Miss Havisham a vampire, while A Vampire Christmas: Ebenezer Scrooge, Vampire Slayer by Sarah Gray (Colleen Faulkner) pretty much spoke for itself.

Oscar Wilde teamed up with Arthur Conan Doyle and Bram Stoker to investigate some bizarre killings in Gyles Brandreth’s Oscar Wilde and the Vampire Murders, while The Damned Highway: Fear and Loathing in Arkham was a gonzo mash-up of H. P. Lovecraft and Hunter S. Thompson by Brian Keene and Nick Mamatas.

Gregor Samsa transformed into a kitten instead of a cockroach in The Meowmorphosis by Franz Kafka (who should be spinning in his grave) and the pseudonymous “Coleridge Cook”.

Maureen McGowan’s Sleeping Beauty: Vampire Slayer was a YA novel in the “Twisted Tales” series, but perhaps the year’s most interesting mash-up came from author Cecily von Ziegesar, who reworked her popular 2002 novel as Gossip Girl: Psycho Killer.

Charlaine Harris’ eleventh “Sookie Stackhouse” novel, Dead Reckoning, involved the telepathic waitress in the firebombing of Merlotte’s bar and a plot by her lover Eric to destroy his new vampire master.

In Hit List, the twentieth volume in Laurell K. Hamilton’s best-selling “Anita Blake” series, the vampire hunter found herself battling with the Mother of All Darkness once again for possession of her body.

The titular lawman’s job was to control the blood-drinking “Sunless” who lived in ghetto areas of London in James Lovegrove’s Redlaw, and a woman investigated her uncle’s murder in Piper Maitland’s Acquainted with the Night.

Although Trevor O. Munson’s Angel of Vengeance was the inspiration for the short-lived CBS-TV series Moonlight (2007– 08), featuring an undead private investigator, the novel had never been published before.

In S. M. Stirling’s The Council of Shadows, a follow-up to A Taint in the Blood, reluctant “Shadowspawn” Adrian Brézé embraced his dark heritage to save his kidnapped lover.

Jacqueline Lepora’s Immortal with a Kiss was a sequel to Descent Into Dust and again featured vampire-hunter Emma Andrews, while Vampire Federation: The Cross was the second book in the mystery series by Scott G. Mariani (Sean McCabe).

The Moonlight Brigade by Sarah Jane Stratford was the second in the “Millennial” series about vampires fighting the Nazis in World War II.

Following on from The Strain and The Fall, The Night Eternal was the final volume in the vampire virus trilogy by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan.

Set in nineteenth century Russia, The Third Section was the third book in Jasper Kent’s historical “Danilov Quintet”.

Hateful Heart was the fourth volume in Sam Stone’s “Vampire Gene” series and involved time-travelling vampires and the last remnants of the Knights Templar.

Memories We Fear was the fourth in the “Vampire Memories” series by Barb Hendee, and Crossroads was the seventh book by Jeanne C. Stein to feature vampire Anna Strong.

Set in seventeenth century Bohemia, An Embarrassment of Riches was the twenty-third novel in Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s “Count Saint-Germain” historical vampire series.

Stay-at-home father Simon experienced some disturbing physical changes when he met a group of playground dads in Jason Starr’s The Pack, and the last known lycanthrope tried to evade capture from vampire monster hunters sanctioned by the Vatican in Glenn Duncan’s The Last Werewolf.

Wolf Tales 12 was the final volume in the erotic shape-shifter series by Kate Douglas.

2011 was definitely the year of the zombie. Film director Tobe Hooper collaborated with Alan Goldsher on the zombie horror novel Midnight Movie, which was based around a supposedly “lost” movie made by Hooper.

Acknowledgeing its debt to George Romero’s 1968 movie Night of the Living Dead, Daryl Gregory’s Raising Stony Mayhall detailed the life of the eponymous zombie narrator in an alternate world where the walking dead regained rational thought.

Set in the aftermath of the zombie apocalypse, the titular bookseller’s blog formed the basis of Allison Hewitt is Trapped by Madeleine Roux, while Colson Whitehead’s satirical novel Zone One looked at the repercussions of a zombie plague in a near-future New York.

Scavengers by Christopher Fulbright and Angeline Hawkes was a zombie novel from Elder Signs Press.

Steven Saknussemm’s debut novel The Zombie Autopsies was presented in the form of a series of scientific journals and other research documents, while Ray Wallace’s Escape from Zombie City had the format of a choose-your-own adventure.

A woman realised that she had become a zombie in Sophie Littlefield’s Aftertime, while a girl found she had the power to create zombies in Unforsaken, a YA novel from the same author.

K. Bennett’s Pay Me in Flesh was the first in the “Mallory Caine, Zombie at Law” series. No, really.

Dead of Night was a zombie novel by Jonathan Maberry, while Dust & Decay was a sequel to the author’s post-apocalyptic zombie novel Rot & Ruin.

Having been forced to kill his sister in Feed, future blogger Shaun Mason tried to discover who deliberately infected her with the zombie virus in Deadline, the second book in the “Newsflesh” trilogy by Mira Grant (Seanan McGuire).

A girl was the only survivor in her town of the “Feeding Plague” in Frail by Joan Frances Turner (Hilary Hall), the sequel to the post-apocalyptic Dust.

Originally published online for free in 2003 and in the UK in 2005, David Moody’s zombie novels Autumn: The City, Autumn: Purification and Autumn: Disintegration finally received their first American print editions from St. Martin’s Griffin. From the same author, Them or Us was the final book in the “Hater” trilogy.

Flip This Zombie and Eat Slay Love were the second and third books in Jesse Petersen’s humorous “Living with the Dead” series which began with Married with Zombies.

Xombies: Apocalypso was the third book in the series by Walter Greatshell, as was James Knapp’s Element Zero in the SF/zombie series which began with State of Decay.

Featuring zombie detective Matt Richter, Dark War was the third in the “Nekropolis” series by Tim Waggoner.

Abaddon Books’ Tomes of the Dead series continued with Chuck Wendig’s Double Dead and Tony Venables debut novel Viking Dead.

* * *

There was a touch of Bradbury about Erin Morgenstern’s debut novel The Night Circus, which concerned a pair of rival 19th century illusionists and a mysterious circus where magic really worked.

In Deborah Harkness’ debut A Discovery of Witches, the first in a planned trilogy, a woman with powers she had long denied teamed up with a 1,500-year-old vampire to solve a series of mysteries.

In The Taker by former CIA intelligence analyst Alma Katsu, an ER doctor encountered a mysterious woman who claimed to be 200 years old.

Saw screenwriters Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan teamed up with Stephen Romano for their debut novel, Black Light, about a private investigator/exorcist who found himself working on a case that might finally solve the mystery of what destroyed his family.

An ex-soldier and narcotics dealer hunted a serial child-killer through the ugly alleys of Low Town in Daniel Polansky’s first novel, The Straight Razor Cure.

When a First World War veteran inherited his family’s old Georgian plantation, he encountered an evil that had been patiently waiting for his return in poet and playwright Christopher Buehlman’s debut, Those Across the River.

Two sisters sent to stay with their elderly aunt uncovered an evil that had lain hidden for years in Lindsey Barraclough’s Long Lankin, which was inspired by an old English folk ballad.

In Outpost by former gravedigger and film projectionist Adam Baker, the skeleton crew on a derelict refinery platform in the Arctic Ocean discovered that the outside world had been devastated by a global pandemic.

After eating a teenager’s brain, a zombie decided to rescue the boy’s girlfriend in Warm Bodies, a first novel by Isaac Marion, and a college professor was transformed into an intelligent zombie in Scott Kenemore’s debut, Zombie, Ohio.

Beloved of the Fallen was a romantic angel thriller that marked the novel debut of “Savannah Kline” (Kelly Dunn).

A forensic psychologist was obsessed by the legend of Elizabeth Bathory in Holly Luhning’s Quiver, while a college freshman found herself in a battle between vampires and werewolves in Jennifer Knight’s debut Blood on the Moon.

Will Hill’s debut, Department 19, was a young adult first novel about a secret government organization descended from Van Helsing that hunted vampires, and a fragile teenager began to remember why her friends died after experimenting with an Ouija board in Michelle Hodkin’s YA debut, The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer.

Chuck Palahniuk’s blackly comic Damned was about a spoiled teenager trapped in Hell with people she wouldn’t be seen dead with.

An African-American professor set out to find the lost world described in Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket” in Mat Johnson’s novel Pym.

An Uncertain Place, the seventh crime novel in the series featuring Commissaire Adamsberg by Fred Vargas (medieval archaeologist Frédérique Audoin-Rouzeau), took the French police chief and his colleague Danglard from a collection of severed feet outside London’s Highgate Cemetery to the hunt for a possible vampire in Serbia.

Steve Mosby’s Black Flowers was another crime-crossover, which began when a little girl mysteriously appeared on a seaside promenade with a disturbing story to tell.

Anthony Horowitz’s “missing story” pastiche, The House of Silk, found Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson investigating the disappearance of four Constable paintings along with the establishment of the title. It was the first spin-off book to be officially endorsed by the estate of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

New Random House imprint Vintage Classics, dedicated to publishing classic science fiction and horror novels, was launched in April with a series of anaglyphic 3-D covers and red-and-blue glasses included in each volume.

The initial five titles were Planet of the Apes by Pierre Boulle, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Jules Verne, The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle and The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Tales by H. P. Lovecraft.

Edited with an Introduction and notes by S. T. Joshi, The White People and Other Weird Stories collected eleven stories by Arthur Machen, along with a Foreword by film director Guillermo del Toro.

Steampunk: Poe was a young adult collection of seven stories and six poems by Edgar Allan Poe, illustrated in steampunk-style by Zdenko Basic and Manuel Sumberac.

Tales of Mystery and Imagination from Barnes & Noble included twenty-nine stories by Poe, along with colour plates by Harry Clarke and an Introduction by Neil Gaiman, while the author’s The Raven and Other Poems was a companion volume collecting fifty-seven poems with the original colour illustrations by Edmund Dulac. An attractive illustrated tie-in book bag was also available.

Unfortunately, in February it was announced that the city of Baltimore was cutting its funding to the Edgar Allan Poe House and Museum, and that the popular tourist attraction would have to become self-sustaining or it would close.

From Barnes & Noble’s bargain Fall River imprint, The Body Snatcher and Other Classic Ghost Stories edited by “Michael Kelahan” (Stefan R. Dziemianowicz) contained twenty-nine tales by M. R. James, Charles Dickens, Edith Wharton and others.

Also edited under the “Kelahan” name from the same imprint, M is For Monster was an anthology of twenty-six stories arranged alphabetically by monster, from “Alien” to “Zombie”.

“Kelahan” also contributed an Introduction to H. P. Lovecraft Goes to the Movies, a collection of fifteen stories that were made into films (or at least inspired them), while Dziemianowicz himself introduced Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Terrifying Tales, which included the title novel and eight short stories.

Published as part of the Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading with an Introduction by Jeffrey Andrew Weintock, The Call of Cthulhu and Other Dark Tales was an attractive hardcover collection of fifteen tales that included notes and story introductions by S. T. Joshi.

From Creation Oneiros, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath and Other Oneiric Tales contained the title novella and fifteen stories by Lovecraft, with an Introduction by D. M. Mitchell.

Meanwhile, Eldritch Tales: A Miscellany of the Macabre was a companion volume to the earlier Lovecraft collection, Necronomicon (2008), once again edited with an Afterword by Stephen Jones and illustrated throughout by Les Edwards. The leather-bound volume contained fifty-four stories and poems, including the complete “Fungi from Yuggoth” cycle, along with the author’s seminal essay, “Supernatural Horror in Literature”.

From the same editor/illustrator team of Jones and Edwards, copies of Conan’s Brethren were actually produced in 2009, but distribution was delayed for more than a year over a legal wrangle concerning copyright in the works of Robert E. Howard, who died in 1936.

The 40th Anniversary edition of William Peter Blatty’s 1971 novel The Exorcist was slightly revised with a scene added.

Originally published in 1992, Kim Newman’s classic Victorian vampire fantasy Anno Dracula was re-issued by Titan Books as a classy-looking trade paperback that included plenty of additional material by the author.

A thirteen-year-old was told three stories of loss and grief by a walking tree in Patrick Ness’ powerful young adult novel A Monster Calls, inspired by an idea by the late children’s author Siobhan Dowd and illustrated by Jim Kay.

Eddie: The Lost Youth of Edgar Allan Poe was a novel about the misadventures of the author as a young man, written and beautifully illustrated by Scott Gustafson.

A young girl from Louisiana travelled to a London boarding school, where she became involved in a series of murders apparently inspired by Jack the Ripper in The Name of the Star, the first in Maureen Johnson’s “Shades of London” trilogy.

The offspring of a serial killer discovered a doorway to another place in Slice of Cherry by Dia Reeves.

Children sent to camp to overcome their phobias began to change ominously in Patrick Carman’s Dark Eden, which was also available in a multimedia app version.

In the near-future, a girl looked for her past in a New Orleans cut-off from the rest of the US and inhabited by supernatural creatures in Kelly Keaton’s Darkness Becomes Her.

In The Iron Thorn by Caitlin Kittredge, a teenager living in the city of Lovecraft in an alternate 1950s tried to avoid going mad, as the rest of her family had done, when she turned sixteen.

A girl became obsessed with the objects she discovered in her family’s new home in Jennifer Archer’s ghostly novel Through Her Eyes.

While they were staying at an old lake house, a girl’s boyfriend started acting strangely in Emma Carlson Berne’s Still Waters, and The Hunting Ground was another haunted house novel by Cliff McNish.

A teenager could hear the voices of his missing school-friends in Cryer’s Cross by Lisa McMann.

Two sisters encountered a powerful ghost in Texas Gothic by Rosemary Clement-Moore, the daughter of a fake Victorian medium could see a real ghost in Haunting Violet by Alyxandra Harvey, and a girl could see ghosts during a visit to the English city of York in Dark Souls by Paula Morris.

A ghost tried to solve her own murder in Ghost of a Chance by Rhiannon Lassiter, while a ghost watched as his former girlfriend and best friend got involved with each other in Wherever You Go by Heather Davis.

And a dead teen tried to discover what happened to her with the help of another spirit in Between by Jessica Warman.

Seventeen-year-old Cas and his Wiccan mother travelled to Ontario to destroy the ghost of a murdered 1950s high school teen in Anna Dressed in Blood by Kendare Blake.

A family of witches kept their powers secret in Witches of East End (aka Witches of the East), the first in the “Beauchamp Family” series by best-selling author Melissa de la Cruz.

Crave was the first book in a trilogy by Melissa Darnell about a war between witches and vampires.

The Cellar by A. J. Whitten (Shirley Jump and Amanda Jump) was a YA horror novel inspired by Romeo and Juliet, while Stacey Jay’s Juliet Immortal found Shakespeare’s lovers on opposite sides in the battle between Good and Evil.

Jackson Pearce’s Sweetly was a dark twist on the “Hansel and Gretel” story, and This Dark Endeavor by Kenneth Ogiwara was a prequel to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, about Victor Frankenstein and his dying twin brother Konrad. Chris Priestley’s Mister Creecher was based on the same source novel.

Two teenagers found themselves staring at death after a car wreck in August by New Zealand writer Bernard Beckett, while three teens living a New Zealand town discovered the secret behind the suspicious deaths of their brothers in The Shattering by Karen Healey.

Death Watch was the first in the “Undertaken” trilogy by Ari Berk.

Illustrated by Coleman Polhemus, Return to Daemon Hall: Evil Roots was the second volume in the series by Andrew Nance, and From Bad to Cursed was the second title in Katie Alender’s “Bad Girls Don’t Die” series.

A girl was torn between her living and ghostly boyfriends in Shift, the sequel to Jeri Smith-Ready’s Shade, while The Waking: Spirits of the Noh was the second book in a Japan-set trilogy by “Thomas Randall” (Christopher Golden).

Ocean of Blood and Palace of the Damned were the second and third volumes in the “The Saga of Larten Crepsley” vampire spin-off series by “Darren Shan” (Darren O’Shaughnessy).

Lisi Harrison’s Monster High 2: The Ghoul Next Door and Monster High 3: Where There’s a Wolf There’s a Way were the second and third volumes in a series of YA tie-in novels based on a series of dolls.

Set in a haunted boarding school, The Screaming Session was the third book in Nancy Holder’s “Possessions” series. The busy author also teamed up with Debbie Viguié for Damned, the second in the “Wicked” spin-off series, “Crusade”, and Unleashed, the first volume in the “Wolf Springs Chronicles”.

The Isle of Blood was the third in Rick Yancy’s “Monstrumologist” series about an apprentice monster-hunter.

Everfound was the final book in Neal Shusterman’s supernatural “Skinjacker” trilogy, while The Hidden was the third and final book in Jessica Verday’s trilogy set in Sleepy Hollow.

The Spook’s Destiny (aka The Last Apprentice: Rage of the Fallen) was the eighth in Joseph Delaney’s series about an apprentice ghost-buster, illustrated by Patrick Arrasmith.

A young girl had a strange reaction to a vampire’s bite in R. A. Nelson’s Throat, and Jane Jones: Worst Vampire Ever was a humorous novel about a nerdy undead teenager by Caissie St. Onge.

The Slayer Chronicles: First Kill was the first in a spin-off series from “The Chronicles of Vladimir Tod” by Heather Brewer, while By Midnight was the first volume in Mia James’ “Ravenwood” vampire mystery series. It was followed by Darkness Falls.

Catlyn Youngblood, a descendant of Abraham Van Helsing, unknowingly fell in love with a vampire in After Midnight, the first volume in the “Youngbloods” series by “Lynn Viehl” (Sheila Kelly, who writes under a variety of pseudonyms).

Jason Henderson’s Alex Van Helsing: Voice of the Undead was the second book about another teenage vampire-hunter, and The President’s Vampire was the second book in a series by Christopher Farnsworth.

The Vampire Diaries: The Return Vol.3: Midnight was the seventh volume in the overall series by L. J. Smith, while The Vampire Diaries: Stefan’s Diaries Vol.3: The Craving and Vol.4: The Ripper were the third and fourth volumes in the uncredited spin-off series based on Smith’s books and TV series. The author was also only credited as “creator” on Vampire Diaries: Hunters: Phantom.

Thirst No.4: The Shadow of Death was the latest volume in the YA “Last Vampire” series by Christopher Pike, and Afterlife was the fourth book in the vampire school series by “Claudia Gray” (Amy Vincent).

Waking Nightmares was the fifth in Christopher Golden’s “Shadow Saga” series about Christopher Octavian.

Blood Ties by Mari Mancusi was the sixth in the “Blood Coven Vampire” series, and Melissa de la Cruz’s Bloody Valentine and Lost in Time were the latest titles in the prolific author’s “Blue Bloods” series.

Awakened and Destined were the eighth and ninth volumes, respectively, in the “House of Night” vampire series by P. C. Cast and Kristin Cast.

After an electromagnetic pulse wiped out technology, a sixteen-year-old girl and her friends attempted to evade the flesh-eating “Changed” of a post-apocalyptic world in Ashes, the first in a new trilogy by Ilsa J. Bick.

In Ty Drago’s The Undertakers: Rise of the Corpses, a boy discovered that he could see that many of the people around him were actually the walking dead.

The Fear by Charlie Higson was the third in the author’s zombie series that began with The Enemy and The Dead, and following on from The Forest of Hands and Teeth and The Dead-Tossed Waves, The Dark and Hollow Places was the final volume in Carrie Ryan’s post-apocalyptic zombie trilogy.

Wereworld: Rise of the Wolf was the first in a new YA series by Curtis Jobling, while Fateful was a werewolf romance set on the Titanic by “Claudia Gray” (Amy Vincent).

Christine Johnson’s werewolf novel Nocturne was a sequel to Claire de Lune, Karen Kincy’s Bloodborn was the second novel about a shape-shifting teen in the “Others” series, and Trial by Fire was the second volume in Jennifer Lynn Barnes’ “Raised by Wolves” series about human Were-pack alpha Bryn.

The Abused Werewolf Rescue Group was Australian writer Catherin Jinks’ follow-up to the humorous The Reformed Vampire Support Group, as a teenage werewolf received help from an unexpected source.

Changeling: Zombie Dawn was the fifth and final volume about a teenage werewolf by Steve Feasey.

R. L. Stine, Margaret Mahy and Nina Kiriki Hoffman were amongst the contributors to the young adult anthology Bones: Terrifying Tales to Haunt Your Dreams.

The Doll: The Lost Short Stories was a collection of thirteen “forgotten” short stories (not all genre) by Daphne du Maurier, mostly written between 1926–32, eight of which were re-discovered online by a bookseller in Cornwall. Cemetery Dance published a limited hardcover edition.

Steel and Other Stories was a collection of fifteen stories by Richard Matheson, published to coincide with the release of the movie Real Steel, which was based on the title story.

Give Me Your Heart: Tales of Mystery and Suspense collected ten reprint stories by Joyce Carol Oates.

* * *

Ellen Datlow’s Supernatural Noir featured sixteen original dark fantasy stories with a noir sensibility by Lucius Shepard, Jeffrey Ford, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Joe R. Lansdale, Melanie Tem, John Langan and others, while Naked City: Tales of Urban Fantasy from the same editor contained twenty contributions from, amongst others, Shepard, Ford, Kiernan, Jim Butcher, Peter S. Beagle, Christopher Fowler, John Crowley and Pat Cadigan.

Datlow’s Blood and Other Cravings was about different kinds of vampirism and featured seventeen (two reprint) mostly horror-lite stories by Reggie Oliver, Steve Duffy, Melanie Tem, Lisa Tuttle, Barbara Roden, Kathe Koja, Steve Rasnic Tem, Carol Emshwiller and Margo Lanagan.

Co-edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, Teeth contained seventeen YA vampire stories by Garth Nix, Kathe Koja, Lucius Shepard and others, along with a poem and the lyrics to a song.

Edited by George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois, Down These Mean Streets: All-New Stories of Urban Fantasy collected sixteen tales by Charlaine Harris (whose name was bigger than everybody else’s on the cover), Joe R. Lansdale, Simon R. Green, S. M. Sterling, Carrie Vaughn and others.

Ghosts by Gaslight: Stories of Steampunk and Supernatural Suspense edited by Jack Dann and Nick Gevers brought together seventeen original stories by Lucius Shepard, Robert Silverberg, Garth Nix, Gene Wolfe, Margo Lanagan, Peter S. Beagle, James Morrow, Terry Dowling and others. Unfortunately, most were more steampunk than supernatural.

One of the first titles to be published by the new Jo Fletcher Books imprint from Quercus was A Book of Horrors, edited by Stephen Jones. The original anthology contained fourteen alternating novellas and short stories by Stephen King, Peter Crowther, Angela Slatter, Dennis Etchison, John Adjvide Lindqvist, Ramsey Campbell, Michael Marshall Smith, Elizabeth Hand and others.

To mark the launch of the imprint, JFB also produced a paperback sampler that included contributions from, amongst others, Tom Fletcher, Charlaine Harris and Christopher Golden, Alison Littlewood, Sarah Pinborough, Tom Pollock and Michael Marshall Smith, as well as a useful ring-bound notebook.

Edited by Jonathan Oliver, House of Fear: Nineteen New Stories of Haunted Houses and Spectral Encounters included original fiction by Lisa Tuttle, Terry Lamsley, Robert Shearman, Christopher Fowler, Nicholas Royle, Tim Lebbon, Joe R. Lansdale and others, along with more irritating story introductions by the editor.

There were more ghosts to be found in Haunts: Reliquaries of the Dead edited by Stephen Jones. However, these revenants haunted specific items, locations and people in twenty-four stories (ten original) and a poem by such authors as Ramsey Campbell, Neil Gaiman, M. R. James, Tanith Lee, Richard Matheson, Robert Silverberg and Michael Marshall Smith.

From Virago, Something Was There. Asham Award-Winning Ghost Stories edited by Kate Pullinger featured sixteen stories, including the winner of the 2011 writing award for women and a recently discovered new tale by Daphne du Maurier.

With Vampires, Zombies, Werewolves, and Ghosts: 25 Classic Stories of the Supernatural, editors Barbara H. Solomon and Eileen Panetta covered all their bases with stories by Stephen King, Ray Bradbury, Ramsey Campbell, H. P. Lovecraft and, er. Woody Allen.

Edited by John Skipp, Demons: Encounters with the Devil and His Minions, Fallen Angels, and the Possessed was another catchall anthology of thirty-five stories, two novel excerpts and two essays by Neil Gaiman, Kim Harrison, W. W. Jacobs and others.

The Monster’s Corner edited by Christopher Golden contained nineteen stories (one reprint) told from the monster’s point-of-view by Kelley Armstrong, Michael Marshall Smith, Kevin J. Anderson, Simon R. Green, Sarah Pinborough and others.

In the Shadow of Dracula from IDW Publishing contained twenty-one classic vampire stories from 1816–1914, edited with story introductions by Leslie S. Klinger.

From Skyhorse Publishing, Vintage Vampire Stories edited by Robert Eighteen-Bisang and Richard Dalby included thirteen rare vampire stories, along with two novel excerpts, notes for an early draft of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and a historical essay.

Mike Ashley edited and introduced Vampires: Classic Tales that included twelve stories, mostly written before Stoker’s novel, but also featuring contributions by Brian Stableford, Nancy Holder and Tanith Lee.

A new edition of The Mammoth Book of Dracula edited by Stephen Jones added a reprint “Sookie Stackhouse” story by Charlaine Harris.

Harris and Toni L. P. Kellner edited Home Improvement: Undead Edition, which contained fourteen stories about horrific house renovations, including a new “Sookie Stackhouse” tale about an old murder and a ghost.

Zombies! Zombies! Zombies! edited with an Introduction by Otto Penzler was a huge anthology about (mostly). zombies. It contained fifty-seven stories by Stephen King, Ramsey Campbell, Robert R. McCammon, Theodore Sturgeon, Henry Kuttner, Manly Wade Wellman, H. P. Lovecraft and others.

Zombiesque, edited with Stephen L. Antczak, James C. Bassett and Martin H. Greenberg, featured sixteen original stories told from the walking dead’s point of view by Nancy Collins, Tim Waggoner, Gregory Nicoll, Nancy Holder, Wendy Webb and others.

Ellen Datlow’s The Best Horror of the Year: Volume Three featured twenty-one stories, Stephen Jones’ The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 22 contained twenty-three, and Paula Guran’s The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2011 Edition collected thirty-one.

The Datlow and Jones volumes overlapped with six stories (by John Langan, Brian Hodge, Norman Partridge, Karina Sumner-Smith, Mark Morris and Christopher Fowler) and one author (Joe R. Lansdale). The Jones and Guran books each contained the same stories by Caitlín R. Kiernan and Partridge, and different stories by Lansdale and Angela Slatter, while the Datlow and Guran anthologies shared just the Partridge story and authors Laird Barron, Stephen Graham Jones and Tanith Lee.

“Lesser Demons” by Norman Partridge was the only story to appear in all three “Year’s Best” horror volumes.

From new print-on-demand imprint Dark Continents Publishing, Quiet Houses was a portmanteau collection of seven haunted house stories by Simon Kurt Unsworth, loosely linked together by paranormal researcher Richard Nakata. The author also helpfully supplied a guide to his inspirations for the buildings concerned.

Paul Kane’s novel Pain Cages from Books of the Dead Press came with an Introduction by Stephen Volk.

We Live Inside You from Swallowdown Press collected nineteen stories by Jeremy Robert Johnson and featured glowing cover quotes from Jack Ketchum, John Skipp, Cody Goodfellow and Chuck Palahniuk.

From Mythos Books, Dreams collected fourteen stories (four original) by Richard A. Lupoff with notes on each by the author.

Florida’s Distillations Press issued These Strange Worlds: Fourteen Dark Tales by Daniel Powell, seven of which were original to the collection, while Eyeballs Growing All Over Me. Again contained twenty-three short short stories by Tony Rauch, available as a trade paperback from Eraserhead Press.

Weird Horror Tales from Cornerstone Books/Airship 27 Productions was a collection of seventeen Lovecraftian horror stories and three poems by Michael Vance, based around the small town of Lights End, Maine. Earl Geier supplied the illustrations.

From Miskatonic River Press, Scott David Aniolowski “selected and edited” the Lovecraftian-themed anthology Horror for the Holidays. Featuring twenty-five stories (three reprints) and a poem based around different holidays during the year, contributors included H. P. Lovecraft, Ramsey Campbell, Thomas Ligotti, Will Marray, Donald R. Burleson, Robert M. Price, W. H. Pugmire, Don Webb, William Meikle and Cody Goodfellow.

Edited by S. T. Joshi for the same PoD imprint, Dissecting Cthulhu: Essays on the Cthulhu Mythos contained twenty-one articles by such well-known Lovecraftians as Richard L. Tierney, Dirk W. Mosig, David E. Schultz, Simon MacCulloch, Robert M. Price, Will Murray and Stefan Dziemianowicz, amongst others.

The Undying Thing and Others from Hippocampus Press collected twenty-six stories by Barry Pain, with an Introduction by Joshi.

The Man Who Collected Machen and Other Weird Tales from Chômu Press reprinted Mark Samuels’ 2009 collection with four additional stories (one original). From the same publisher, Daniel Mills’ Revenants was a historical novel about a cursed New England village, while the undead hero of Michael Cisco’s The Great Lover resisted the white-noise forces of Vampirism.

Originally published as an e-book, Spore by John Skipp and Cody Goodfellow was yet another zombie novel, available as a print-on-demand title from Dorchester.

A girl was mysteriously drawn to her grandmother’s unusual house in Tanith Lee’s Greyglass, from Immanion Press, and an ancient evil returned to a Massachusetts town in Brendan P. Myers’ Applewood, available from By Light Unseen Media.

From LCR Books, The Fourth Fog: A Horror Novel for the Ages by Chris Daniels was about the breakdown of society and killer flies.

Frankenstein in London was the third in Brian Stableford’s “The Empire of the Necromancers” series from PoD publisher Black Coat Press.

For the same imprint, Stableford also translated and supplied the Introductions for The Vampire Lord Ruthwen (Lord Ruthwen, ou les Vampires), an 1820 sequel to Polidori’s The Vampyre by French writer Cyprien Bénard, and the 1824 novel The Virgin Vampire (La Vampire, ou la vierge de Hongrie) by Etienne-Léon de Lamothe-Langdon.

Christopher Fulbright’s novella The Bone Tree was set in a Civil War graveyard and was available from PoD imprint Bad Moon Books. From the same publisher, Bill Gauthier’s Alice on the Shelf was a twisted novella inspired by the classic children’s book, while The Templar contained three horror novels by Joseph Nassise, two original.

Terror Tales of the Lake District from Gray Friar Press was an original anthology of thirteen stories (two reprints and another revised) inspired by the old Fontana Books series of the 1970s. The solid line-up of contributors included Adam L. G. Nevill, Simon Clark, Simon Bestwick, Peter Crowther, Ramsey Campbell, Gary McMahon, Reggie Oliver and editor Paul Finch, who also interlaced the fiction with accounts of myths and legends of the area.

As usual selected by Charles Black for Mortbury Press, The Eighth Black Book of Horror featured a strong line-up of names, with thirteen original stories by Reggie Oliver, David A. Riley, Gary Fry, Mark Samuels, Paul Finch, John Llewellyn Probert and Thana Niveau, amongst others.

Edited by website founder Jeani Rector for Imajiin Books, What Fears Become: An Anthology from the Horror Zine contained thirty-three stories (including two by the editor, plus nine reprints), along with poetry and artwork. Contributors included Bentley Little, Graham Masterton, Ramsey Campbell, Joe R. Lansdale, Elizabeth Massie, Melanie Tem, Scott Nicholson, Piers Anthony, Richard Hill and Conrad Williams. Simon Clark supplied the Foreword.

Published by Rainstorm Press, Mutation Nation: Tales of Genetic Mishaps, Monsters and Madness was edited by Kelly Dunn and included eleven original stories by Roberta Lannes, Maria Alexander, Barbie Wilde, Stephen Woodworth, Wendy Rathbone and others.

Editor Peter Mark May dedicated Alt-Dead: The Alternative Dead Anthology to “the independent writers and authors in the horror genre that don’t always get the breaks and the big deals”. Available on-demand from Hersham Horror Books, it contained sixteen original stories by Stephen Bacon, Stuart Young, Gary McMahon, Jan Edwards, Stuart Hughes, Johnny Mains and others, including a collaboration between Steven Savile and Steve Lockley.

Karen A. Romanko edited and introduced Jack-o’-Spec: Tales of Halloween and Fantasy for PoD imprint Raven Electrick Ink. The trade paperback featured twenty-six stories and poems by Bruce Boston, Geoffrey A. Landis, James S. Dorr, Marge Simon and others, including the editor.

James Ward Kirk edited Indiana Horror Anthology 2011, which included poetry, flash fiction and short stories by Matt Cowan, James S. Dorr, Lee Forsythe and other writers living in the south-western state.

Published by Stumar Press, Derby Scribes 2011 was an anthology of eleven stories (one reprint), written by members of the eponymous writing group and edited by Stuart Hughes. Contributors included Simon Clark, Alison J. Hill, Conrad Williams and the editor himself, while group founder Alex Davis supplied the Introduction.

Edited by Asa Merritt for Phoenix Pick/Arc Manor Publishers, more than half of the print-on-demand First Blood: Birth of the Vampire was taken up with a moderately annotated reprinting of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The rest of the book included five obscure precedents to Stoker’s novel, plus “The Vampyre: A Tale” by John William Polidori and “Carmilla” by J. Sheridan Le Fanu, along with selected chapters from John William Rymer’s Varney the Vampire: Or, the Feast of Blood.

Edited by publisher Russell B. Farr for Ticonderoga Publications, Dead Red Heart: Australian Vampire Stories was a bumper anthology of thirty-three stories about different kinds of vampires. From the same imprint, editor Liz Grzyb’s More Scary Kisses contained seventeen paranormal romance stories.

Bluegrass Symphony by Lisa L. Hannett was a debut collection of twelve dark fantasy stories (one reprint), with an Introduction by Ann VanderMeer and an Afterword by the author.

Also published by Ticonderoga, The Year’s Best Australian Fantasy and Horror 2010 edited by Grzyb and Talie Helene contained thirty-two stories and a poem.

Dead But Dreaming 2 was an on-demand Cthulhu anthology from Miskatonic River Press. Edited with a Foreword by Kevin Ross, it featured twenty-two original stories by William Meikle, Don Webb, Darrell Schweitzer, W. H. Pugmire, Rick Hautala, Donald R. Burleson, Cody Goodfellow and Will Murray, amongst others.

After a hiatus of fifteen years, editor Doug Ellis finally published the fourteenth issue of Pulp Vault through Tattered Pages Press/Black Dog Books as a substantial softcover volume. Boasting a previously unpublished cover painting by Virgil Finlay, it featured many fascinating articles and classic pulp fiction by, amongst others, Bob Weinberg, Will Murray, D. H. Olsen, Donald Wandrei, Hugh B. Cave, Otto Binder, Doug Klauba, Tom Roberts and Mike Ashley.

Only nine months after the launch of the Kindle, Amazon.co.uk announced that e-books were now outstripping the sale of hardcover books by two-to-one on its site in the UK. However, the online retailer also added that hardback sales were continuing to grow. In America, e-books reportedly sold more than all the paperback and hardcover copies put together.

Figures released by the Association of American Publishers in June confirmed that revenues for print books had decreased dramatically, while the income from e-books jumped 161 per cent from $30 million to $181.3 million in just one year.

In the UK, e-books accounted for up to 10 per cent of total book sales after a rise of 600 per cent in the first half of the year, resulting in a total revenue of £25 million.

As a result of these dramatic increases, it was also revealed that e-book piracy had become a huge problem, with many hundreds of recorded books being offered illegally for free downloads.

Penguin announced in November that it would withhold editions of its e-books from British and American libraries amid “concerns about security”. The publisher said that it was also considering withdrawing its electronic books from Amazon’s lending service for the Kindle e-reader. Penguin joined Simon & Schuster and Hachette Book Group, who already had a similar ban in place, while HarperCollins restricted the number of times a library book could be loaned out digitally.

Amazon.com announced that Charlaine Harris became the first genre author to sell more than a million books for the Kindle e-reader, putting her alongside other “Kindle Million Club” members Stieg Larsson, James Patterson and Nora Roberts/J. D. Robb. She was soon followed by Michael Connelly, Suzanne Collins, Lee Child and George R. R. Martin.

BlackBerry launched its compact PlayBook in June as a direct rival to Apple’s hugely successful iPad, despite complaints about a lack of available software.

Brian Keene was one of a number of disgruntled authors, including Tim Waggoner, Craig Spector and Mary SanGiovanni, who called for a boycott of the troubled Dorchester Publishing for reportedly selling e-books of various titles after the rights had been reverted.

In September, Gollancz launched its SF Gateway digital library with plans to have around 5,000 back-list titles available as e-books in three years’ time.

Stephen King’s original story Mile 81, about a mysterious mud-splattered station wagon that lured its victims to their doom, was available as an e-book in September. It also included a teaser excerpt from the author’s novel 11/22/63.

The Ghost Story Megapack from Wildside Press was a cheap e-book compilation of twenty-five out-of-copyright stories by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Bram Stoker, Rudyard Kipling, E. F. Benson, Wilkie Collins and others. The publisher also offered various other electronic “Megapacks”, including The Horror Megapack.

Available exclusively on Kindle, The Odd Ghosts was a collection of eight original stories by Maynard Sims (L. H. Maynard and M. P. N. Sims).

Edited by Jeani Rector, The Horror Zine was published online every month, and produced a special Joe R. Lansdale issue in October.

Trevor Denyer’s Midnight Street was available as a PDF download for a suggested donation, while editor Joe Vaz’s Something Wicked magazine became a digital-only publication starting with issue #11.

After interviewing a psychic on his show, a radio presenter was menaced as he attempted to solve the mystery of a missing girl in Ramsey Campbell’s paranoid chiller Ghosts Know, available from PS Publishing.

For fans of the author’s earlier work, PS also reprinted Campbell’s first book as the properly titled The Inhabitant of the Lake & Other Unwelcome Tenants. First published in 1964 by Arkham House, each of the ten Lovecraftian stories was beautifully illustrated by Randy Broecker, and the collection also contained the original versions of seven stories, notes on the first drafts, reproduced correspondence between the author and August Derleth, and an extensive and entertaining Afterword explaining how the book came about.

Ian R. MacLeod’s Wake Up and Dream was set in an alternate Hollywood of 1940 and involved one-time actor and unlicensed private eye Clark Gable and the mystery of a device that changed the world of entertainment forever.

Edited by Conrad Williams, Gutshot: Weird West Stories was an anthology of twenty original tales by Michael Moorcock, Thomas Tessier, Joe R. Lansdale, Christopher Fowler, Peter Atkins, Adam Nevill, Joel Lane and other dangerous desperados.

PS published two short story collections by Christopher Fowler back-to-back in a single volume in the style of an old Ace Double. Red Gloves: Devilry contained fourteen stories (three original) comprising “The London Horrors”, while Red Gloves: Infernal featured thirteen tales (two original) of “The World Horrors”.

Carol Emshwiller’s In the Time of War and Other Stories of Conflict/Master of the Road to Nowhere and Other Tales of the Fantastic followed the same double format, with covers by Ed Emshwiller and Introductions by Ursula K. Le Guin and Phyllis Eisenstein, respectively.

Edited with an Introduction by Stephen Jones, Scream Quietly: The Best of Charles L. Grant collected thirty-two stories by the late writer of “quiet horror”, along with a Foreword by Stephen King, commentary by Peter Straub, Kim Newman, Thomas F. Monteleone and Nancy Holder, an interview with the author by Nancy Kilpatrick, and interior illustrations by Andrew Smith. Former Weird Tales artist Jon Arfstrom painted the stunning cover art.

After being widowed at no less than three previous publishers, Mark Morris’ collection Long Shadows, Nightmare Light finally saw publication from PS with an Introduction by Christopher Golden. It contained fifteen stories (two original).

James Lovegrove’s second collection, Diversifications, contained sixteen reprint stories and an Afterword by the author, while The Butterfly Man and Other Stories was a retrospective collection of eighteen horror stories (five original) by Paul Kane with another Introduction by Christopher Golden. The author’s first accepted story from 1998 was included as a special bonus.

As part of its ongoing “PS Showcase” series, The Emperor’s Toy Chest collected fifteen stories (four original) by Tobias Seamon, and Dark Dreams, Pale Horses contained six stories (three original) by Rio Youers with an Introduction by Brian Keene.

PS also published new novels by Chaz Brenchley (Rotten Row) and Lavie Tidhar (Osama: A Novel), along with James Cooper’s horror novella Terra Damnata.

Most PS books were available as 100 signed copies and also in a non-jacketed trade edition.

Graced with an attractive dust-wrapper painting by the legendary Ed Emshwiller, The New and Perfect Man was volume 24/25 of PostScripts edited by Peter Crowther and Nick Gevers. The always-eclectic hardcover anthology contained twenty-eight stories by Carol Emshwiller, Michael Kelly, Ramsey Campbell, Thomas Tessier, T. M. Wright, Christopher Fowler, Rio Youers, Jay Lake and many others.

The titular rock band was menaced by a deranged Afghanistan war veteran and other forces of darkness in Robert McCammon’s The Five, while The Hunter from the Woods was a collection of six linked stories featuring the secret agent protagonist of the author’s 1989 wartime werewolf novel The Wolf’s Hour. Both books were available in signed and also traycased ($250.00) editions from Subterranean Press.

Baal was a reprint of McCammon’s first novel, originally published in 1978, with a 1988 Afterword by the author. It was available in a 1,000-copy signed edition and a traycased, leather-bound deluxe edition of fifty-two copies ($250.00).

Set 150 years after the world ended, a clan of subterranean survivors had to evade the eponymous vampire-creatures while crossing a radioactive wasteland in The Fly-by-Nights by Brian Lumley. The novel was available from Subterranean Press in both a trade edition and a 250-copy deluxe edition with a different dust-jacket, illustrated by Bob Eggleton.

Limited to 750 copies from Subterranean, Mortality Bridge was a deal-with-the-Devil novel by Steven R. Boyett.

Edited by publisher William Schafer, Subterranean: Tales of Dark Fantasy 2 contained eleven original stories by Joe Hill, Kelley Armstrong, Norman Partridge, Caítlin R. Kiernan and others. A signed and slipcased edition ($150.00) came with extra illustrations and a chapbook by Joe R. Lansdale.

Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlín Kiernan (Volume One) collected twenty-six stories (one a collaboration with Poppy Z. Brite), dating from 1993–2004, most of which had been significantly revised. It was also available in a 600-copy signed edition with sixteen pages of illustrations by various artists and an extra chapbook.

Forever Azathoth collected sixteen Lovecraftian stories (one original) by Peter Cannon and was published in a signed edition of 350 copies, while Amberjack contained twelve stories and thirteen poems by Terry Dowling, with an Introduction by Jack Vance. It was published in a signed edition limited to 750 copies.

Grimscribe: His Lives and Work was a revised and “definitive” edition of Thomas Ligotti’s 1991 collection of fourteen stories, which was also available in a signed leatherbound edition.

Subterranean also reissued The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard, illustrated by Greg Staples, as both a limited slipcased edition ($150.00) and a fifty-copy leatherbound deluxe edition ($400.00).

With an Introduction by Norman Partridge, Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper contained Robert Bloch’s classic story along with the novel The Night of the Ripper, the Star Trek teleplay Wolf in the Fold, and Bloch’s Foreword to the anthology Ripper!.

The Juniper Tree and Other Blue Rose Stories contained four loosely connected stories by Peter Straub, plus an interview with the author by Bill Sheehan. It was available in a regular hardcover edition and as a 250-copy leatherbound, signed edition.

The Ballad of Ballard and Sandrine was a surreal novella from the same author, published in a deluxe hardcover edition by Subterranean Press at the very end of the year.

Cemetery Dance Publications re-issued Stephen King’s collection Full Dark, No Stars in a two-colour edition illustrated by Jill Bauman, Glenn Chadbourne, Vincent Chong and Alan M. Clark. It was published in a slipcased edition ($75.00), a leather-bound traycased edition signed by the author ($360.00) and a fifty-two copy traycased lettered edition signed by King and the artists ($1,500.00).

King and CD also teamed up for a special 25th anniversary edition of the author’s novel It. The exclusive oversized deluxe edition include the complete text, a new Afterword by the author, nearly thirty interior illustrations by Alan M. Clark and Erin Wells, and a wrap-around dust-jacket painting by Glem Orbik.

The author and publisher also issued The Secretary of Dreams (Volume Two) as an exclusive slipcased edition in a very limited print-run. Not available in stores, the hardcover collected more of King’s classic tales, illustrated by Glenn Chadbourne.

The Century’s Best Horror Fiction was published by Cemetery Dance in two huge volumes, covering the years 1901–1950 and 1951–2000. Editor John Pelan selected one representative story for every year of the twentieth century.

As if Pelan’s volumes were not enough of a treat for horror fans, CD also brought out The Horror Hall of Fame: The Stoker Winners edited with an Introduction by Joe R. Lansdale. Covering the first decade of the HWA’s annual award, which began in 1988, the volume featured contributions from George R. R. Martin, Alan Rodgers, Elizabeth Massie, David B. Silva, Nancy Holder, David Morrell, Robert Bloch, Thomas Ligotti, Harlan Ellison and others, including the editor himself. Each story was illustrated by the busy Glenn Chadbourne.

Edited by Kelly Laymon, Steve Gerlach and Richard Chizmar, Laymon’s Terms was a large anthology of forty tribute stories and forty-five appreciations to the late Richard Laymon, along with various pieces by Laymon from his own files, including six stories and four poems. It was available in trade edition ($50.00), a 400-copy slipcased edition signed by most of the contributors ($150.00) and a fifty-two copy lettered and traycased edition ($400.00).

Illustrated by Vincent Chong, Jay Bonansinga’s futuristic Lovecraftian novelette The Miniaturist was the eighth volume in the “Cemetery Dance Signature” series, limited to a 550-copy signed edition and twenty-six traycased, leatherbound lettered copies.

Picking the Bones collected seventeen stories (three original) by Brian Hodge, while the long-delayed Stories from the Plague Years collected nine long stories (two original) by Michael Marano, illustrated by Gabrielle Faust. John Shirley supplied the Introduction.

Kin was a serial killer novel by Kealan Patrick Burke, available in an edition of 750 signed copies, and CD also reprinted Simon Clark’s 1997 novel King Blood and Edward Lee’s 2008 novel Bride of the Impaler in 1,000-copy signed editions and limited traycased, leatherbound editions.

Cemetery Dance also issued an omnibus of William Peter Blatty’s novels The Exorcist and Legion, illustrated by Keith Minnion and featuring an interview with the author by Brian Freeman. The book was available in a 750-copy signed edition and a lettered, traycased and leatherbound edition of fifty-two copies ($400.00).

Richard Matheson’s Nightmare at 20,000 Feet from Gauntlet Press collected the original story along with scripts for the Twilight Zone TV version and the movie adaptation, illustrated with storyboards and photos. Contributors included William Shatner, Richard Donner, Carol Serling and Richard Christian Matheson, amongst others, and the book was available in a bewildering number of different editions, ranging from $50.00 up to a signed deluxe version priced at $1,000.00.

Dawn to Dust included two unproduced screenplays, two drafts of a teleplay and a previously unpublished short story by Ray Bradbury, along with various ephemeral material and an Introduction by the author. Edited with a Preface by Donn Albright, the book was available in three states, with the lettered and traycased edition ($250.00) also containing unused sketches and fragments from The Illustrated Man.

Also from Gauntlet, J. N. Williamson’s Illustrated Masques, edited by Mort Castle and David Campiti, presented graphic adaptations of eight stories that originally appeared in the late Williamson’s Masques anthologies by Stephen King, Robert R. McCammon, Robert Weinberg, F. Paul Wilson, Paul Dale Anderson, Wayne Allen Sallee and two by co-editor Castle, who also supplied a Preface. A fifty-two copy lettered and signed edition cost $1,500.00.

Earthling Publications produced The Very Best of Best New Horror: A Twenty-Year Celebration edited by Stephen Jones in 300 numbered copies signed by the editor, and a 200-copy slip-cased edition ($250.00) signed by all the contributors, including Stephen King, Peter Straub, Harlan Ellison, Clive Barker, Neil Gaiman and Joe Hill.

Peter Crowther’s By Wizard Oak was a Halloween novel from Earthling with an Introduction by Rick Hautala.

From new imprint Flying Fox Publishers, Portents, edited with an Introduction by Al Sarrantonio, was inspired by the “quiet horror” of Charles L. Grant’s Shadows series. The anthology was limited to 1,000 numbered hardcovers and featured nineteen original stories by Joe R. Lansdale, Gene Wolfe, Kim Newman, Brian Keene, Elizabeth Massie, Ramsey Campbell, Steve Rasnic Tem, Joyce Carol Oates, Christopher Fowler and others, along with a Foreword by Stephen Jones.

John Hornor Jacobs’ debut novel Southern Gods, from Night Shade Books, involved the search for a legendary bluesman, Ramblin’ John Hastur, whose music reputedly sent men mad and caused the dead to rise.

Jonathan Wood’s No Hero was another debut novel, about an Oxford police detective recruited to battle tentacled Lovecraftian horrors.

On the same theme, editor Ross E. Lockhart’s The Book of Cthulhu collected twenty-seven tales (two original) by Ramsey Campbell, David Drake, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Thomas Ligotti, Joe R. Lansdale, Cherie Priest, Bruce Sterling, Gene Wolfe and other, more surprising, contributors to the Mythos.

The Panama Laugh was a zombie novel by Thomas S. Roche, while J. M. Lassen edited the YA anthology Z: Zombie Stories containing eleven stories (one original) by Kelly Link, Nina Kiriki Hoffman and Scott Nicholson, amongst others.

The Miscellaneous Fictions of Clark Ashton Smith from Night Shade collected eighteen peripheral stories (two original), a poem and a play, along with a Foreword by editors Scott Connors and Ron Hilger and an essay by Donald Sidney-Fryer.

Published by Tartarus Press, Reggie Oliver’s fifth collection, Mrs Midnight and Other Stories, quickly sold out of its 400-copy hardcover printing. The book contained thirteen stories (four original) and also included some delightful heading illustrations by the author.

Michael Reynier made a fine debut with his collection Five Degrees of Latitude, which contained five novellas written in the classic tradition, while Frankenstein’s Prescription by Tim Lees was an impressive novel about the search for eternal life that also involved Mary Shelley’s sympathetic creature.

Also from Tartarus, Dark Entries, Powers of Darkness and Cold Hand in Mine reprinted the stories by Robert Aickman (1914–81), while We Are the Dark was a reprint of the 1964 collection of collaborations between Aickman and Elizabeth Jane Howard. The new edition was officially launched at the Halifax Ghost Story Festival.

From Side Real Press, Delicate Toxins: An Anthology Inspired by Hanns Heinz Ewers was a beautifully-crafted hardcover edited and introduced by John Hirschhorn-Smith. It contained eighteen original tales inspired by the German author of “strange” fiction (1871–1943) by such writers as Richard Gavin, R. B. Russell, Mark Valentine, Reggie Oliver, Michael Chislett, Mark Samuels and Thana Niveau. Limited to 350 numbered copies and priced at a very reasonable £30.00, copies purchased directly from the publisher came with a unique signed bookplate.

Paul Kane’s Shadow Writer from MHB Press was a beautifully-produced volume containing the contents of the author’s first two collections, Alone (In the Dark) (2001) and Touching the Flame (2002), along with four previously uncollected tales (two original), poetry, a graphic novel script, story notes and an Introduction by Simon Clark. The special signed edition was limited to a 150-copy numbered Collector’s Edition, a seventy-five copy Deluxe Edition numbered in roman numerals, and twenty-six copies lettered A — Z.

Clark also supplied the Introduction to Paul Kane’s third collection of the year, The Adventures of Dalton Quayle from Mundania Press, which contained seven comedic reprints featuring the eponymous psychic investigator.

Rumours of the Marvellous collected fourteen stories (one original) by Peter Atkins, with an Introduction by Glen Hirshberg. It was published by Alchemy Press/Airgedlámh in a signed and numbered hardcover edition of just 250 copies.

From Screaming Dreams, Hunter’s Moon was a debut novella by Charlotte Bond, about four university friends who discovered that dark forces awaited them on holiday in a quiet French village.

Everyone’s Just So So Special was a collection of twenty-one tales “of the comic and the macabre” (fourteen original) by Robert Shearman, published in teeny-tiny type by Big Finish Productions.

Published in pocket-size by Borderlands Press, A Little Gold Book of Ghastly Stuff collected obscure fiction, introductions, essays, speeches and poetry by Neil Gaiman.

Edited by D. F. Lewis, The Horror Anthology of Horror Anthologies from Megazanthus Press was a clever idea for an anthology, even though not all of the twenty original stories stuck strictly to the theme. Contributors included Rhys Hughes, Joel Lane, E. Michael Lewis, Mike O’Driscoll, Reggie Oliver, Mark Valentine and D. P. Watt.

Published in an edition of just 100 copies to coincide with a special exhibition of artist John Martin’s work at London’s Tate Britain gallery, Pandemonium: Stories of the Apocalypse was edited by Anne C. Perry and Jared Shurin and contained eighteen original stories by Lauren Beukes, Jon Courtney Grimwood, Lou Morgan, Jonathan Oliver and others, along with an Introduction by Tom Hunter. The hardcover was sold exclusively through Tate Britain, although an e-book edition was also available.

The revived Sarob Press issued Mark Nicholls’ collection of classical ghost stories, Dark Shadows Fall, while Flame & Other Enigmatic Tales contained four short stories (one reprint) and two novellas by the conjoined Maynard Sims, illustrated by Paul Lowe.

From Small Beer Press, The Monkey’s Wedding and Other Stories was a posthumous collection of nineteen delightful stories (seven original) by Joan Aiken (1924–2004), mostly written in the 1950s and 1960s. The book also included a 1995 Introduction by the author and a new piece by her daughter, Lizza Aiken.

Maureen F. McHugh’s After the Apocalypse: Stories collected nine contemporary tales (three original).

Edited by Eduardo Jiménez Mayo and Chris N. Brown for Small Beer, Three Messages and a Warning: Contemporary Mexican Short Stories of the Fantastic contained thirty-four quite short tales with an Introduction by Bruce Sterling.

Published in trade paperback by Two Ravens Press (“the most remote literary publisher in the UK”, situated on the Isle of Lewis, in the Outer Hebrides), Murmurations: An Anthology of Uncanny Stories About Birds was edited by Nicholas Royle and contained thirty stories (sixteen original) by, among others, Joel Lane, Russell Hoban, Tom Fletcher, Jack Trevor Story, Mark Valentine, Conrad Williams, R. B. Russell, Michael Kelly, Daphne du Maurier, and the editor himself. Featuring a Foreword by Angelica Michelis, all royalties and fees were donated to The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.

Bite Sized Horror: The Obverse Quarterly: Book One was edited with an Introduction by Johnny Mains for Obverse Books. The slim anthology featured original stories by Reggie Oliver, Paul Kane, David A. Riley, Marie O’Regan, Conrad Williams and the editor himself.

Herbert van Thal’s “lost” 1933 collection Child Performer was reprinted by Noose & Gibbet Publishing as The Mask and Other Stories. The author’s only collection of short stories, written when he was in his twenties, the slender hardback was bulked out with a new Introduction by Johnny Mains, van Thals’ 1945 essay “Recipe for Reading” (originally written for his two godsons), and various Introductions by the author. The 100-copy edition sold out in under a month.

The stated ethos of new imprint Dark Minds Press was to publish projects that were “produced to the best standards of production achievable”. Unfortunately, the anthology Dark Minds: An Anthology of Dark Fiction, “selected and prepared for publication” by Ross Warren, featured far too many basic design and typographical errors. Gary McMahon and Stephen Bacon were the best-known of the twelve contributors, while Will Jacques contributed some squiggly interior art.

David J. Howe’s Telos Publishing imprint issued a collection of his own writings, Talespinning, that included short stories (five original), a pair of unfinished novels, two 100-word Doctor Who drabbles and a couple of DVD scripts.

From the same imprint, Zombies in New York and Other Bloody Jottings collected thirteen stories (ten original) and six poems (five original) by Sam Stone, along with a Foreword by Graham Masterton, and half-page Afterword by actor Frazer Hines, and copious commentary by the author. Russell Morgan supplied the interior art.

The Bible Repairman and Other Stories from Tachyon Publications collected six ghostly stories by Tim Powers, including a sequel novella to The Stress of Her Regard.

Edited with an Introduction by Joe R. Lansdale, Crucified Dreams: Tales of Urban Horror included nineteen reprint stories by Stephen King, Harlan Ellison, Lucius Shepard, Michael Bishop, Joe Haldeman, Lewis Shiner, Norman Partridge and the editor himself.

Lansdale was also co-editor of The Urban Fantasy Anthology with Peter S. Beagle. It contained twenty reprint stories broken down into “Mythic Fiction”, “Paranormal Romance” and “Noir Fantasy” by, amongst others, Charles de Lint, Neil Gaiman, Kelley Armstrong, Suzy McKee Charnas, Thomas M. Disch, Holly Black, Tim Powers and the two editors. The book also included new Introductions by Beagle, Lansdale, de Lint and Paula Guran.

Also from Tachyon, Kafkaesque: Stories Inspired by Franz Kafka edited with an Introduction by John Kessel and James Patrick Kelly contained seventeen reprint stories by Kafka, J. G. Ballard, Jorge Luis Borges, Carol Emshwiller, Damon Knight, Rudy Rucker and others, along with a comic strip illustrated by Robert Crumb.

From Centipede Press, Deadfall Hotel was a new novel by Steve Rasnic Tem about a haunted hotel, illustrated by John Kenn Martensen. Limited to 300 signed copies, the book also included an Afterword by the author and a new short story.

Published as part of the imprint’s oversized “Masters of the Weird Tale” series, Old Time Weird Tales & Quality Horror Stories collected thirty-eight stories and novellas by Karl Edward Wagner. Edited with an Introduction by Stephen Jones, the massive tome also included reprint pieces by Peter Straub, David Drake and the late author, along with a new Afterword by Laird Barron. The book was illustrated in colour by J. K. Potter and also featured many rare photographs.

In the same series, Henry Kuttner collected twenty-nine horror and supernatural tales by the pulp author with an Introduction by editors Stefan Dziemianowicz and Robert Morrish. Once again, J. K. Potter supplied the frontispiece and endpapers artwork. Both books were limited to 200 signed copies ($295.00 apiece).

Haffner Press’ Terror in the House: The Early Kuttner Volume One collected author’s first forty stories, most of them taken from the pages of Weird Tales and such “shudder pulps” as Thrilling Mystery and Spicy Mystery. Edited by Stephen Haffner, the hefty hardcover included a Preface by Richard Matheson and an Introduction by Gary G. Roberts Ph.D.

The Corn Maiden and Other Nightmares from Mysterious Press contained seven macabre tales by Joyce Carol Oates, mostly reprinted from non-genre sources.

Edited by Bill Breedlove and John Everson, Swallowed by the Cracks from Dark Arts Books featured sixteen original and reprint stories about “the spaces between” by Lee Thomas, Gary McMahon, S. G. Browne and Michael Marshall Smith.

The indefatigable Joe Morey continued to produce a range of attractive trade paperback under his Dark Regions Press imprint. William Ollie’s Fifteen Minutes concerned a centuries-old ring that had the power to transform its wearer, while Pitch from the same author was a Halloween novel set in the 1960s.

Something deadly came out of the ocean near a quaint fishing village in Shaun Jeffrey’s Fangtooth.

Nightingale Songs was a third collection from Canadian writer Simon Strantzas, containing twelve stories (four original) along with an Introduction by John Langan, while The Gaki and Other Hungry Spirits collected seventeen stories (six original) by Stephen Mark Rainey.

A huge seismic disturbance in North Korea had global consequences for a biomedical engineer in Michael McBride’s novella Blindspot, and a woman continued to suffer from a childhood trauma in Paul Melniczek’s novella The Watching.

The Engines of Sacrifice contained four new Lovecraftian novellas by James Chambers, and W. H. Pugmire’s Gathered Dust and Others collected eighteen Lovecraft-inspired stories (four original) and an Introduction by editor Jeffrey Thomas.

Beautiful Hell was another entry in Thomas’ own demonic “Hades” series, reprinted from a 2007 volume. A twenty-six copy leatherbound and slipcased edition quickly sold out.

The Invasion and The Valley formed a “Dark Regions Double” by William Meikle, and the publisher also issued the authorised pastiche Sherlock Holmes: Revenant by the same author in a special signed and numbered trade paperback edition, limited to just 125 copies.

From companion imprint Ghost House, Meikle’s Carnacki: Heaven and Hell was a collection of ten original stories based on the character originally created by an uncredited William Hope Hodgson, nicely illustrated by Wayne Miller.

Most Dark Regions/Ghost House titles were available in various print editions as well as ebook format.

Edited by Jason V. Brock and William F. Nolan, The Devil’s Coattails: More Dispatches from the Dark Frontier was a followup to the co-editors’ previous anthology, The Bleeding Edge, also from Cycatrix Press. The heavily-illustrated volume contained new fiction, poetry and a even a teleplay by Ramsey Campbell, the late Dan O’Bannon, John Shirley, Melanie Tem, the late Norman Corwin, Steve Rasnic Tem, Richard Christian Matheson, Earl Hammer Jr., Nancy Kilpatrick, Marc Scott Zicree, Gary A. Braunbeck and others, including both editors. Limited to 500 trade hardcovers, there was also a fifty-two copy signed and lettered edition for $194.95.

Jeffrey Thomas’ Blood Society from Necro Publications was about an immortal criminal.

For Aeon Press Books, John Kenny edited Box of Delights, and anthology of sixteen original stories that included Steve Rasnic Tem, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Mike Resnick and Don D’Ammassa.

Edited by Adam Bradley for Morpheus Tales, 13 Tales of Dark Fiction included contributions from, amongst others, Eric S. Brown, Joseph D’Lacey, Gary Fry, Andrew Hook, Shaun Jeffrey and Gary McMahon.

The ubiquitous McMahon also had a new collection of stories out from Gary Fry’s Gray Friar Press, limited to 100 signed hardcover copies. I Know Where You Live: Tales of Modern Unease contained sixteen stories (two reprints) along with a Foreword and story notes by the author.

A group of TV ghost-hunters investigated an abandoned summer house in David L. Golemon’s The Supernaturals from Seven Realms Publishing.

Vampires: The Recent Undead from Prime Books was an anthology edited with an Introduction by Paula Guran. It collected twenty-five stories from the first decade of the twenty-first century by Charlaine Harris, Kim Newman, Michael Marshall Smith and others.

For the same imprint, Guran also edited Halloween, which contained thirty stories and three poems by Peter Straub, Ray Bradbury, Esther M. Friesner and others, and New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird, which featured twenty-seven stories by, amongst others, Neil Gaiman, Michael Marshall Smith and Caitlín R. Kiernan.

Edited by John Langan and Paul Tremblay, Creatures: Thirty Years of Monsters contained twenty-six stories by Clive Barker, Joe R. Lansdale, Kelly Link and others.

The cleverly-titled Bewere the Night, edited by Ekaterina Sedia for Prime, contained twenty-nine stories about shape-shifters (seventeen original).

Limited to just 100 copies from Moshassuck Press, Lovecraft’s Pillow and Other Strange Stories collected seventeen tales (seven original) by Kenneth W. Faig, Jr., most of then taken from amateur press association publications.

From gaming-related imprint Chaosium, Cthulhu’s Dark Cults edited by David Conyers contained ten stories (one reprint) inspired by H. P. Lovecraft’s Mythos.

Lois Gresh’s collection Eldritch Evolutions from the same publisher contained twenty-six Lovecraftian stories (nine original) with an Introduction by Robert Weinberg.

Age-old horrors returned to the small town of Parr’s Landing in Michael Rowe’s 1970s-set horror novel Enter, Night, published by Canada’s ChiZine Publications.

From the same imprint, a despondent man made his way across an unsettling American landscape in Tom Piccirilli’s novella Every Shallow Cut, while a wealthy industrialist attempted to create a perfect community amongst a race of shape-shifters in David Nickle’s Eutopia: A Novel of Terrible Optimism.

A Rope of Thorns was the second novel in Gemma Files’ “Hexslinger” weird Western series.

Most ChiZine books were available in signed hardcover editions only by pre-order.

Chilling Tales, somewhat obliquely subtitled Evil Did I Dwell: Lewd I Did Live, was the first in an original horror anthology series edited with an Introduction by Michael Kelly and published in trade paperback by Canadian imprint Edge Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing. The eighteen contributors included Richard Gavin, Barbara Roden, Simon Strantzas, Nancy Kilpatrick, David Nickle, Brett Alexander Savory, Sandra Kasturi, Gemma Files and others, while the cover was by the distinctly non-Canadian Les Edwards.

Gaslight Arcanum: Uncanny Tales of Sherlock Holmes was the third in a series of supernatural Sherlockian anthologies edited by J. R. Campbell and Charles Prepolec. It contained twelve stories (one reprint) by Stephen Volk, Christopher Fowler, Fred Saberhagen, Simon Kurt Unsworth, Simon Clark, Paul Kane, Tony Richards, Kim Newman and others, with artwork by Dave Elsey, Mike Mignola and Luke Eidenschink.

Edited by Nancy Kilpatrick, Evolve Two: Vampire Stories of the Future Undead contained twenty-two new stories about how bloodsuckers and humans might co-exist after a future apocalypse. Contributors included Kelley Armstrong, William Meikle, John Shirley, Bev Vincent, Thomas Roche, Tanith Lee and Sandra Kasturi.

From Edge’s Hades Publications imprint, Rigor Amortis was an anthology of zombie erotica edited by Jaym Gates and Erika Holt which featured thirty-three stories and two poems, while Those Who Fight Monsters: Tales of Occult Detectives edited by Justin Gustainis contained fourteen “urban fantasy” stories by Carrie Vaughn, Tanya Huff, Lilith Saintcrow, Simon R. Green, T. A. Pratt and others, including the editor.

From PS Publishing’s poetry imprint, Stanza Press, A Woman of Mars: The Poems of an Early Homesteader collected thirty-three poems about the red planet by Australian writer Helen Patrice. It was limited to 300 hardcovers signed by the poet and illustrator Bob Eggleton.

Blood Wallah and Other Poems from Dark Regions Press collected forty-three poems (fifteen original) by Robert Borski, illustrated by Marge Simon.

From Australian PoD imprint P’rea Press, The Land of Bad Dreams edited by Charles Lovecraft featured twenty-eight poems by Kyla Lee Ward, who also supplied the black and white illustrations.

PS Publishing also launched its first issue of the “PS Quickies” chapbook series with Ramsey Campbell’s original short story Holding the Light.

Hector Douglas Makes a Sale was another slim chapbook from PS that contained a missing section from Ian R. MacLeod’s alternate-world novel Wake Up and Dream, the reasons for which were explained by the author in an extensive Afterword.

From Nicholas Royle’s chapbook imprint Nightjar Press came Remains by Ga Pickin, Sullom Hill by Christopher Kenworthy, Lexicon by Christopher Burns and Field by Tom Fletcher. Each title was limited to 200 signed and numbered copies.

Simon Marshall-Jones’ similar Spectral Press imprint was launched with the chapbook What They Hear in the Dark, a haunted house story by Gary McMahon. It was followed by King Death by Paul Finch, Nowhere Hall by Cate Gardner and Abolisher of Roses by Gary Fry. Each slim volume was limited to only 100 signed and numbered copies apiece.

From Bedabbled’s B! imprint, Three Demonic Tales by Michel Parry contained two reprints (originally published in the 1970s under the pseudonym “Roland Caine”) and an original story. It was limited to just fifty signed copies.

Mysterious Islands was a selection of nautical nightmares (including H. P. Lovecraft’s “Call of Cthulhu”) and other horrors by artist Gary Gianni. The chapbook was limited to 1,000 signed and numbered copies from Flesk Publications.

There was a touch of the memento mori hanging over The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, which put out its usual six bumper issues featuring fiction by Kate Wilhelm, Albert E. Cowdrey, Richard A. Lupoff, Alan Dean Foster, Paul Di Filippo, Chet Williamson, Don Webb, Scott Bradfield, Steve Saylor, Peter S. Beagle, Esther M. Friesner, Geoff Ryman, Sarah Langan, M. Rickert, Tim Sullivan, and the deceased Joan Aiken, Alan Peter Ryan and Evangeline Walton, among others.

David Langford, Paul Di Filippo, Paul Dellinger and the late F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre contributed to the “Curiosities” column, and editor Gordon Van Gelder wrote a fascinating editorial in the May/June issue about the strange life and even stranger death of “Froggy” MacIntyre.

A free Kindle version of F&SF was also launched that included various columns and a sample short story.

Andy Cox’s Black Static turned out six colourful issues with the usual news, reviews and opinion columns by Peter Tennant, Tony Lee, Stephen Volk, Christopher Fowler and Mike O’Driscoll. Maura McHugh, James Cooper, Simon Kurt Unsworth, Joel Lane, Simon Bestwick, Ramsey Campbell, Alison Littlewood, Christopher Fowler, Gary McMahon and Andrew Hook were amongst those who contributed stories, and there were interviews with Angela Slatter, Steven Pirie, Tim Lees, Tom Fletcher, Kaaron Warren and D. F. Lewis.

Black Static’s sister SF publication, Interzone, also produced six attractive-looking issues.

The two issues of the magazine that continued to call itself Weird Tales was filled with the usual whimsical nonsense, along with interviews with writer Caitlín R. Kiernan, Angry Robot publisher Marc Gascoigne and artist Carrie Ann Baade.

Thankfully, in August, editor Ann VanderMeer announced in a surprisingly self-congratulatory press release that publisher John Betancourt of Wildside Press was selling the magazine to author/editor Marvin Kaye. However, as a result of the change in ownership, VanderMeer — who had been reading fiction for the magazine for five years — and her all-female management staff would be let go.

The new owners of Weird Tales, Nth Dimension Media, Inc., brought out a special electronic issue in time for the 2011 World Fantasy Convention that featured stories by Meg Opperman, Jean Paiva, Parke Godwin, Tanith Lee and Christian Endres.

The second annual issue of editor Michael Kelly’s Shadows & Tall Trees from Undertow Publications retained its trade paperback format with eight original stories of “quiet, literary horror” by Steve Rasnic Tem, Ian Rogers, Alison J. Littlewood and others.

The first perfect-bound issue of David Memmott’s ambitious literary journal Phantom Drift: A Journal of New Fabulism included eleven stories (one reprint), eight poems, two essays and two artist features. Contributors included Brian Evenson and Ray Vukcevich.

For the third time in recent years, it was announced that Realms of Fantasy magazine was being closed down, with the October edition being the final issue from the current publisher. Meanwhile, editor John Joseph Adams purchased both Fantasy and Lightspeed magazines from Prime Books and announced plans to combine them into a single ebook.

The April issue of Suspense Magazine included an interview with Jack Ketchum.

Issue #117 of Granta: The Magazine of New Writing was a special devoted to “Horror” that included contributions from Paul Auster, Don DeLillo, Will Self and Stephen King.

In the first issue of the year, King announced that he was giving up his column “The Pop of King” in Entertainment Weekly after seven years. However, the author did contribute a “Summer Reading List” to the magazine’s special June issue that featured Robert McCammon’s The Five, Graham Joyce’s The Silent Land and Michael Koryta’s The Cypress House, and he was back in December with a list of the year’s “Pop Culture Favourites” that included Justin Evans’ ghost novel The White Devil.

The 28 October edition of the magazine also featured an exclusive excerpt from the author’s new novel, 11/22/63.

Canada’s Rue Morgue produced eleven high-quality issues featuring interviews with filmmakers John Waters, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Tom Holland and Guillermo Del Toro, veteran actress Carla Laemmle, singer Alice Cooper, authors Michael Louis Calvillo, John Shirley and John Landis, and editors Ellen Datlow, Christopher Golden and S. T. Joshi.

The bumper 14th Anniversary Halloween Issue celebrated twenty-five years of The Fly with interviews with director David Cronenberg and cast and crew members of both the original trilogy and the remake.

The May/June issue of the revived Famous Monsters of Filmland was a H. P. Lovecraft special, featuring articles on the author and the movie adaptations. Bob Eggleton produced covers for that issue and the following one, a special Japanese monsters (Kaiju) edition, which confusingly resurrected the Monster World logo on one version of the magazine. The artist also contributed an article about his connection with Godzilla.

The six issues of Tim Lucas’ Video WatcHDog included an overview of the Friday the 13th series, a tribute to French director Jean Rollin, an extensive look at the career of actor Eddie Constantine and interviews with actresses June Lockhart and Mimsy Farmer, along with all the usual reviews and columns.

To celebrate the opening of the British Library’s science fiction exhibition “Out of This World”, the Guardian newspaper’s Review section on 14 May was a “SF Special Issue”, in which some of the world’s leading SF writers were asked to choose their favourite author or novel in the genre. Russell Hoban chose H. P. Lovecraft, Liz Jensen picked The Day of the Triffids and China Miéville went for The Island of Doctor Moreau. The supplement also included a “My Hero” piece on Gene Wolfe by Neil Gaiman.

In January, Locus celebrated its 600th issue with a special feature on digital publishing that featured contributions from Neil Gaiman, Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross, amongst others. That same month, the magazine launched a new digital edition, which was initially offered free to overseas subscribers.

Throughout the year Locus featured interviews with Robert J. Sawyer, Gene Wolfe, Oscar-winning artist Shaun Tan, Jay Lake, Margo Lanagan, Geoff Ryman, Andy Duncan, Charles Stross, Gemma Files and a lot of new writers that most readers had probably never heard of.

Now published by Centipede Press, the first edition of Allen K’s Inhuman Magazine for a couple of years was a bumper one. Issue No. 5 included twenty-three stories (five reprints) and three poems by, amongst others, Donald R. Burleson, David Gerrold, Cody Goodfellow, Barry N. Malzberg, James A. Moore, Lisa Morton, Darrell Schweitzer, Michael Shea and Tim Waggoner. Although, as usual, editor Allen Koszwoski illustrated all the stories, there was also a Lovecraftian art gallery featuring work by Dave Carson, Jill Bauman, Bob Eggleton, Randy Broecker and others.

Centipede also brought out the second issue of The Weird Fiction Review edited by S. T. Joshi. The annual trade paperback journal included eight stories (by Caitlín R. Kiernan, Simon Strantzas, Donald R. Burleson and others), seven poems, six essays and an artist’s gallery by Alexander Binder.

With its two 2011 issues, Rosemary Pardoe’s The Ghosts & Scholars M. R. James Newsletter reached its twentieth edition. Contents included Jamesian fiction from Christopher Harman and C. E. Ward, articles by Mark Valentine and the editor, plus news, letters and reviews, along with the first publication of a 1888 supernatural poem by M. R. James.

David Longhorn’s Supernatural Tales reached its twentieth issue with six stories by Daniel Mills, Katherine Haynes, Michael Chislett and others, along with a brief reviews section.

Published both online and in print, the four issues of Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction featured some impressive stories along with the book reviews. Edited by Stephen Theaker and John Greenwood, contributors included Rhys Hughes, Alison Littlewood, Maura McHugh and Daniel Mills.

The August issue of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet included fiction by Carol Emshwiller and an obscure reprint by the late Joan Aiken.

The three issues of Hildy Silverman’s Space and Time: The Magazine of Fantasy, Horror, and Science Fiction included fiction and poetry by Adam Corbin Fusco, Michael Kelly, Don Webb, Josepha Sherman, Don D’Ammassa, Kim Antieau, Forrest Aguirre, Darrell Schweitzer, Kurt Newton, James S. Dorr and others, along with interviews with Ben Bova and Harry Turtledove, and some excellent black and white illustrations.

The four attractive-looking issues Terry Martin’s Murky Depths: The Quarterly Anthology of Graphically Dark Speculative Fiction featured a number of comic strips (including continuing series by Richard Calder and Lavie Tidhar), plus short stories and artist interviews.

The four issues of Morpheus Tales were packed with the usual fan fiction, while the fortieth edition of Ireland’s perfect-bound Albedo One was a bumper 100-page issue that included twelve stories and interviews with James Patrick Kelly and the late Colin Harvey.

After a bonus-sized 65,000-word issue #13, the following edition marked the final publication of R. Scott McCoy’s Necrotic Tissue: The Horror Writers’ Magazine from Stygian Publications. It featured the usual mix of fiction and 100-word shorts, along with an interview with writer John P. McCann.

The two issues of James R. Beach’s Dark Discoveries included interviews with Sir Christopher Lee, Bruce Campbell, F. Paul Wilson and Allen Koszowski; articles on the Weird Tales artists, giallo cinema and the history of splatterpunk, and fiction and poetry from Gene O’Neill, Joe R. Lansdale, Nick Mamatas, Edward Lee and the late Richard Laymon, among others.

The Winter issue of Machenalia: The Newsletter of The Friends of Arthur Machen was a thin one, mostly devoted to a 2010 Australian stage production of The Great God Pan.

Issues #18 and #19 of The Paperback Fanatic included interviews with authors Basil Copper and David Case, fascinating articles by Ramsey Campbell (on Solomon Kane), Lionel Fanthorpe, Bill Pronzini and Graham Andrews (on J. G. Ballard’s US editions), a tribute to artist Jeff Jones, and an always-lively letter column.

The second issue of Martin Jones’ Bedabbled!, devoted to British horror and cult cinema, was a “Cult of Satan” edition that included informative articles on such films as Virgin Witch, Satan’s Slave, The Devil’s Men and Nothing But the Night, along with interviews with director Norman J. Warren and film-maker/ anthologist Michel Parry.

The delayed Winter 2010 BFS Journal, published by The British Fantasy Society, turned out to be a somewhat haphazard hardcover omnibus of New Horizons, Prism and Dark Horizons, edited by Andrew Hook, David A. Riley, and Sam Stone and Ian Hunter, respectively. Along with fourteen stories and six poems, the book also contained columns by Ramsey Campbell, Mark Morris, John Llewellyn Probert (on R. Chetwynd-Hayes) and Mike Barrett (on Fritz Leiber), plus interviews with Mark Samuels and Kari Spelling.

The subsequent four issues settled down as a trade paperback, with Peter Coleborn replacing Sam Stone as editor of Dark Horizons. Fiction and poetry authors included Allen Ashley, Mike Chinn, Sam Stone, Michael Kelly, Storm Constantine and Joel Lane; Rod Rees, Mary Danby, Jo Fletcher and Peter Crowther were interviewed, and Mike Barrett contributed a fascinating series of articles on lesser-known Arkham House writers.

However, with the Winter 2011/2012 edition it was all change again, as Lou Morgan replaced David Riley and New Horizons was dropped from the now fully-integrated line-up.

Amongst his many other responsibilities to the Society, Chairman David J. Howe not only served as Editorial Consultant on the above editions of the BFS Journal, but he also found time to edit a huge celebratory anthology, Full Fathom Forty: British Fantasy Society 40th Anniversary. Boasting a Cthulhu cover by Bob Eggleton, the nearly 500-page volume featured forty stories (thirteen original) by, among others, Conrad Williams, Christopher Fowler, Jasper Kent, Robert Shearman, Paul Finch, Stephen Gallagher, Simon Clark, Kim Newman, Ramsey Campbell, Graham Masterton, Stephen Laws, Sam Stone and Jonathan Carroll.

Midnight Echo was an attractive-looking magazine put out by the Australian Horror Writers Association. Edited by Leigh Blackmore, the perfect-bound fifth issue included numerous short stories and poetry by Terry Dowling, Rick Kennett, Bryce Stevens, Charles Lovecraft, Kyla Ward and others, along with interviews with Jeff Lindsay and Chris Mars.

Patrick McAleer’s The Writing Family of Stephen King: A Critical Study of the Fiction of Tabitha King, Joe Hill and Owen King from McFarland & Co looked at the literary careers of the author’s wife and two sons.

From the same imprint, Rocky Wood’s A Literary Stephen King Companion was a handy guide to the best-selling author’s fiction and films, including entries about the characters and settings.

In Becoming Ray Bradbury from the University of Illinois Press, Jonathan R. Eller took a look at the author’s early life through to 1953. The biographical study also included sixteen pages of photos.

Edited with an Introduction by Phil and Sarah Stokes, Clive Barker: The Painter, the Creature, and the Father of Lies: 30 Years of Non-Fiction Writings from Earthling Publications collected Barker’s articles, introductions, reviews and artwork, along with a new Foreword by the author. As well as a trade hardcover, it was also available in a signed, slipcased leather-bound edition of 250 copies ($125.00), and a twenty-six copy traycased lettered edition containing an original sketch by Barker ($750.00).

Published by the Stokes themselves, Beneath the Surface of Clive Barker’s Abarat Volume 1 was a handsome, full-colour illustrated guide to the book series that included a glossary and an interview with the author.

“It’s easy to be smart, later” was one of the many epithetical sayings quoted in bugf#ck: The Useless Wit & Wisdom of Harlan Ellison®, a delightful pocket-sized hardcover from Edgeworks Abbey/Spectrum Fantastic Arts, edited by Arnie Fenner.

Nested Scrolls: A Writer’s Life was a typically idiosyncratic memoir by “transrealism” writer/software designer Rudy Rucker. Along with the trade edition, it was also available from PS Publishing in 100 signed and slipcased copies that came with a CD-Rom containing thirteen sets of book-writing notes in a one million-word file entitled Twenty Years of Writing.

From Tartarus Press, Time, A Falconer: A Study of Sarban was Mark Valentine’s biography of the writer (a pseudonym for career diplomat John William Wall), limited to 400 copies.

Lest You Should Suffer Nightmares: A Biography of Herbert van Thal was an expanded version of Johnny Mains’ Afterword to his 2010 anthology Back From the Dead. The slim hardcover also included a selection of letter reproductions, a van Thal checklist, an article reprinted from SFX, and reminiscences by various contributors to the Pan Book of Horror Stories series, including Conrad Hill, David A. Riley, David Case and John Burke. It was published by Screaming Dreams in an edition of just 100 copies signed by the author and Les Edwards, who did the stunning cover portrait.

Massimo Berruti’s Dim-Remembered Stories: A Critical Study of R. H. Barlow from Hippocampus Press looked at the career of the troubled young man who became H. P. Lovecraft’s literary executor, with a Foreword by S. T. Joshi.

With David E. Schultz, Joshi also edited An Epicure in the Terrible: A Centennial Anthology of Essays in Honor of H. P. Lovecraft for the same PoD imprint. Some of the thirteen essays had been updated.

Also from Hippocampus, A Monster of Voices: Speaking for H. P. Lovecraft collected thirteen essays and a poem by Robert H. Waugh.

Edited by S. T. Joshi, Encyclopedia of the Vampire: The Living Dead in Myth, Legend, and Popular Culture from Greenwood/ABC–CLIO contained numerous critical essays on authors, characters and vampires in literature and the media by Stefan Dziemianowicz, Paula Guran, Melissa Mia Hall, Stephen Jones, John Langan, Barbara Roden, Christopher Roden, Brian Stableford, Bev Vincent and many others, as well as a general bibliography.

Joshi also supplied the Foreword for Scarecrow Press’ 21st-Century Gothic: Great Gothic Novels Since 2000 edited by English professor Danel Olson. The book contained fifty-three essays by, amongst others, Steve Rasnic Tem, Nancy A. Collins, Adam L. G. Nevill, Don D’Ammassa, Lisa Tuttle, Robert Hood, Darrell Schweitzer, Nicholas Royle, Lucy Taylor, Graham Joyce and Reggie Oliver, along with extensive appendices.

Zombies! An Illustrated History of the Undead was put together by former Rue Morgue editor Jovanka Vuckovic and covered the walking dead (“undead” refers to vampires) in films and fiction.

The Sookie Stackhouse Companion included a new novella by Charlaine Harris, various lists, synopses and trivia, and an exclusive interview with True Blood creator Alan Ball, while Vampire Academy: The Ultimate Guide was an in-depth look at the YA series by Michelle Rowen and Richelle Mead.

Edited by Jamey Heit, Vader, Voldemort and Other Villains: Essays on Evil in Popular Culture was published by McFarland & Co.

From the same publisher, Seduced by Twilight: The Allure and Contradictory Messages of the Popular Saga was a look at Stephenie Meyer’s anaemic YA series by Natalie Wilson. Theorizing Twilight: Critical Essays on What’s at Stake in a Post-Vampire World, also edited by Wilson with Maggie Parke, explored the influence of Meyer’s books and films on popular culture in fifteen essays.

Stephenie Meyer’s The Twilight Saga: The Official Illustrated Guide was aimed at the young adult market and included illustrations by various artists along with an extensive interview with the author.

Cory Doctorow, Jules Feiffer, Stephen King and Tabitha King were among the fourteen authors who contributed stories to The Chronicles of Harris Burdick, based around the illustrations of Chris Van Allsburg. Lemony Snicket supplied the Introduction.

Written by Adam-Troy Castro, V is for Vampire: An Illustrated Alphabet of the Undead was embellished with two-colour illustrations by Johnny Atomic. The same team was also responsible for Z is for Zombie.

Edited by Arnie Fenner and Cathy Fenner, Spectrum 18: The Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art from Underwood Books collected work from more than 300 artists, including Grand Master Award recipient Ralph McQuarrie.

Chamber of Chills Volume One was the first in the sumptuous “Harvey Horrors Collected Works” series from PS Artbooks. Collecting seven full-colour reprints of the 1950s pre-Code horror comic, with a gonzo Foreword by Joe Hill and an informative article by Peter Normanton on the career of artist Al Avison, the book came in three states: a bookshop edition, a slipcased edition with a print signed by Hill, and a twenty-six copy deluxe lettered traycased edition (£249.99) that included a print signed by both Hill and artist Glenn Chadbourne.

It was followed by Witches Tales Volume One, with an Introduction by Ramsey Campbell and art print by Bryan Talbot, and Tomb of Terror Volume One with an Introduction by Stephen Jones and art print by Randy Broecker.

As if that wasn’t enough, PS Artbooks also launched a series of glorious full-colour reprints of such ACG (American Comics Group) titles as Adventures Into the Unknown, with an Introduction by Barry Forshaw, and Forbidden Worlds, with an Introduction by Stan Nicholls. Artists Glenn Chadbourne and Edward Miller, respectively, contributed a “re-imagined” covers to each volume.

DC Comics: The Art of Modern Mythmaking from Taschen Books celebrated the comics publisher’s seventy-fifth anniversary and featured more than 2,000 images over more than 700 pages.

After almost a decade, Steve Niles’ 30 Days of Night became a regular monthly comic from IDW.

Joe R. Lansdale scripted the four-part 30 Days of Night: Night, Again and a four-part contemporary version of H. P. Lovecraft’s The Dunwich Horror, while the writer teamed up with his son John L. Lansdale for the three-part Robert Bloch’s That Hellbound Train, all from IDW.

Clive Barker and Christopher Monfette went back to the beginning for their new Hellraiser comic from BOOM! Studios, while Dark Shadows from Dynamite did the same for the 1960s TV series.

It Came from Beneath the Sea. Again from Bluewater was a sequel to the 1955 Ray Harryhausen movie, and BOOM!’s Planet of the Apes picked up from where the last film in the original series, Battle for the Planet of the Apes, left off.

Let Me In was a prequel series to the Hammer version of John Ajvide Lindqvist’s vampire novel, while The Thing: The Northman Nightmare was a prequel to the recent movie prequel, both from Dark Horse. The Strain from the same publisher was adapted from the trilogy of novels by Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan.

John Saul Presents The Blackstone Chronicles from Bluewater was based on the author’s serialised novel, and The Martian Chronicles and Something Wicked This Way Comes were graphic adaptations of Ray Bradbury’s books by Dennis Calero and Ron Wimberly, respectively, with new Introductions by the author.

Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter: Circus of the Damned Book 1: The Charmer and Book 2: The Ingenue each collected five issues of the Marvel comic book based on the novel by Laurell K. Hamilton, adapted by Jess Ruffner and illustrated by Ron Lim.

Illustrated by Alberto Dose, Killing the Cobra: Chinatown Trollop was a vampire mystery from IDW, based on the “PI Felix Gomez” series by Mario Acevedo, who contributed a new story to the graphic novel.

For all those who wanted their walking dead in four colours, they could choose from Daybreak, Battle for the Planet of the Living Dead, Fail of the Dead, iZombie: Dead to the World, Marvel Zombies Supreme, Night of the Living Dead: Death Valley, Zombie Chuck and many other zombie comics titles too numerous to mention.

In September, DC Comics completely rebooted its most popular titles, including Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman, restarting the numbering with issue #1. It was hoped that the younger, more human characters would appeal to a greater number of casual readers.

In March, a near-mint copy of Marvel’s Amazing Fantasy #15 — featuring the first appearance of Spider-Man in 1962 — sold for a record $1.1 million (£680,000) in an online auction.

The following month, a 9.6 copy of Marvel’s X-Men #1 sold for $200,000 (£123,184) in a private sale conducted by Metropolis Comics/ComicConnect.com. The transaction set a new price record for 1963 debut issue.

A year-and-a-half after a previous edition of Action Comics #1 (June 1938) — which featured the first appearance of Superman — sold at auction for a reported $1.5 million (£950,000), another copy went under the hammer in November and broke that record, selling for $2.2 million (£1.4 million). The issue, which belonged to Hollywood actor Nicolas Cage, had been stolen in a 2000 burglary from a storage locker and was only recovered in April. The name of the buyer of the “mint” condition comic was not revealed.

The year’s clutch of movie tie-in editions included Conan by Michael A. Stackpole, Transformers: Dark of the Moon by Peter David and Cowboys and Aliens by Joan D. Vinge.

Sarah Blakley-Cartwright wrote the young adult tie-in to Red Riding Hood, which came with an Introduction from the film’s director, Catherine Hardwicke. The book was published without the final chapter, which only became available after the release of the movie.

Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark: Blackwood’s Guide to Dangerous Fairies, credited to Guillermo del Toro and Christopher Golden, was an epistolary prequel to the movie, set 100 years earlier. Troy Nixey supplied the illustrations.

Conan the Barbarian was a collection of six of Robert E. Howard’s original stories with a tie-in cover to the disappointing movie, while Susan Hill’s slim 1983 novel The Woman in Black was reissued in a tie-in edition to the forthcoming Hammer production.

The revived Hammer Films announced that it had done a deal with Random House UK to publish novelisations and new books based on the classic films under the Arrow Books imprint.

The first two titles to be released were Francis Cottam’s novelisation of the Hilary Swank thriller The Resident and a re-issue of The Witches (aka The Devil’s Own) by “Peter Curtis” (Nora Lofts). Cyril Frankel, director of the 1966 movie version, contributed a new Foreword to the latter.

The series properly kicked off later in the year with Guy Adams’ novelisation of Kronos (with a Foreword by writer/ director Brian Clemens), Shaun Hutson’s Twins of Evil (with a Foreword by director John Hough) and K. A. John’s Wake Wood.

More mystifying were re-issues of Graham Masterton’s The Pariah, Family Portrait and Mirror, also published under the Hammer banner.

Enjoying its first US publication from DreamHaven Books, Creature from the Black Lagoon was an official hardcover reprint of the super-rare 1954 British movie tie-in by “Vargo Statten” (John Russell Fearn) which came with a new Introduction by David J. Schow, and Afterword about the author by Philip Harbottle, a selection of uncommon production and behind-the-scenes stills, and a cover painting by Bob Eggleton. The 250-copy Limited Edition was signed by actress Julie Adams and stuntman/swimmer Ricou Browning.

TV show tie-ins included Warehouse 13: A Touch of Fever by Greg Cox, and Supernatural: One Year Gone by Rebecca Dessertine and Supernatural: Night Terror by John Passarella. The Walking Dead: Rise of the Governor was credited to the comic series creator Robert Kirkman and Jay Bonansinga.

The Coming of the Terraphiles was a Doctor Who tie-in by none other than Michael Moorcock, while Paul Finch authored Doctor Who: Hunter’s Moon.

To tie-in to the spin-off series, Sarah Pinborough wrote Torchwood: Long Time Dead, while Torchwood: The Man Who Sold the World was by Guy Adams.

Tim Waggoner teamed up with Jason Hawes and Grant Wilson, the stars of the Syfy reality TV show Ghost Hunters, for the novel Ghost Trackers.

Mark Morris’ Dead Island and B. K. Evenson’s Dead Space: Martyr were both based on the video games. The tie-in to the post-apocalyptic Rage was written by Matthew Costello, who also contributed to the development of the video game it was based upon.

Arkham Horror: Dance of the Damned was the first volume in Alan Bligh’s “Lord of Nightmares” trilogy, a gaming tie-in inspired by the work of H. P. Lovecraft. From the same author, Arkham Horror: Ghouls of the Miskatonic was the first book in the “Dark Waters” series.

Nightmare Movies: Horror on Screen Since the 1960s was a welcome reissue of Kim Newman’s encyclopaedic 1988 volume, totally re-written, revised and updated.

Covering much of the same ground, Jason Zinoman’s Shock Value looked at the genre filmmakers of the 1960s and 1970s.

Bob McCabe’s Harry Potter: Page to Screen weighed in at a hefty 540 pages.

The first volume in the “Deep Focus” series of film criticism books from Counterpoints/Soft Skull Press was They Live, a look at the 1988 John Carpenter film by Jonathan Lethem.

Triumph of the Walking Dead: Robert Kirkman’s Zombie Epic on Page and Screen was an unauthorised guide to the comic book and TV series, edited with an Introduction by James Lowder. The book included fifteen essays by Lisa Morton, Kim Paffenroth and Jay Bonansinga, amongst others, along with a Foreword by Joe R. Lansdale.

Supernatural: Bobby Singer’s Guide to Hunting was a tie-in to the TV series by David Reed.

The Gothic Imagination: Conversations on Fantasy, Horror, and Science Fiction in the Media featured interviews between John C. Tibbetts and such writers as Stephen King, Ray Bradbury, Gahan Wilson, Robert Bloch, Ramsey Campbell, Brian Aldiss and others.

Attendance figures at the US box-office hit a sixteen-year-low in 2011, with a drop of approximately 3.6 per cent on revenues from the previous year. The reason for this could be that films are available on an increasing number of platforms, which no longer means that you have to go to your neighbourhood movie theatre to see them.

History also has a tendency to repeat itself, so it was no surprise that the 3-D “revolution” in films and TV looked ready to stall in 2011 — just like it had done previously in the 1930s, 1950s and 1980s. At the cinema, audiences proved reluctant to pay extra just for the (often shoddy) 3-D experience, while 3-D television sets were still prohibitively expensive for most people, not helped by a lack of product to show on them.

Still, that didn’t stop Warner Bros. from releasing the eighth movie in the Harry Potter series in 3-D, the first to be shown in the process. Despite the final film in the franchise being something of a disappointment after the solid storytelling of the previous entries, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 smashed all records before it, clocking up the highest-grossing opening weekend ever ($168.55 million) in July, beating The Dark Knight, Spider-Man 3, The Twilight Saga: New Moon and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest. The film went on to pass the $200 million point in just five days, and achieved a world-wide take of $900 million ten days after that.

In the UK, the film broke box-office records by taking £23 million over its opening weekend, beating the previous entry’s £18.32 million, and the eight Harry Potter movies are now officially the highest-grossing film franchise ever.

“Inspired” by Tim Powers’ superior novel, Rob Marshall’s 3-D Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, the entertaining fourth instalment in the Disney franchise, involved zombified sailors and murderous mermaids as Johnny Depp’s increasingly silly pirate Jack Sparrow joined Ian McShane’s sorcerous Blackbeard and his duplicitous daughter (Penélope Cruz) in a race to find the fabled Fountain of Youth.

Matt Damon’s New York politician was warned by Terence Stamp’s mysterious man in black that his life was destined along a different path in The Adjustment Bureau, based on a story by Philip K. Dick.

Dick could just as well have been the inspiration for Neil Burger’s Limitless, in which Robert De Niro’s ruthless businessman wanted the secret of the “smart pill” that allowed Bradley Cooper’s struggling novelist to access the unused areas of his brain.

Jake Gyllenhaal found himself living two separate lives in Duncan Jones’ Source Code, which bore more than a passing resemblance to Deja Vu (2006), while Justin Timberlake was living on borrowed time in the near-futuristic In Time. The latter movie was briefly the subject of a lawsuit by Harlan Ellison, who claimed that the film infringed upon his story “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman”.

Gwyneth Paltrow was the first victim of a viral epidemic in Stephen Soderbergh’s Contagion, an all-star version of the kind of disaster films regularly churned out by the Syfy channel. Made for a fraction of that film’s budget, Perfect Sense featured Eva Green and Ewan McGregor’s characters falling in love as a world-wide epidemic robbed people of their sensory perceptions.

2011 was certainly the year for alien invasions at the cinema. Based on a comic book, Jon Favreau’s $163 million Cowboys & Aliens was executive produced by Steven Spielberg but it failed to deliver the thrills, despite teaming Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford against alien invaders in the Wild West.

J. J. Abrams’ $50 million homage to producer Spielberg, Super 8, was a summer movie about a group of school friends who witnessed a spectacular train crash and became involved with an escaped extraterrestrial who just wanted to go home.

Aaron Eckhart’s military veteran led a platoon of soldiers and some jittery camerawork against an alien invasion in the noisy Battle: Los Angeles, while a group of young people were trapped in a Moscow invaded by aliens through the power supply in The Darkest Hour.

British sci-fi nerds Simon Pegg and Nick Frost picked up the eponymous alien escapee (voiced by a potty-mouthed Seth Rogen) in Greg Mottola’s likeable comedy Paul, which also featured Jason Bateman, Jane Lynch, Blythe Danner and Sigourney Weaver.

Nick Frost also turned up as a laid-back drug dealer in Joe Cornish’s inventive Attack the Block, which mixed its laughs with scares as toothy alien balls of fur met their match at the hands of a gang of urban teenagers on a South London estate.

Shia LaBeouf’s hapless hero Sam Witwicky teamed up with Victoria’s Secret model Rosie Huntington-Whiteley to battle the evil Decepticons in Michael Bay’s 3-D second sequel,Transformers: Dark of the Moon. Patrick Dempsey, Frances McDormand, John Turturro, John Malkovich, Buzz Aldrin and Leonard Nimoy (as the voice of “Sentinel Prime”) were lost amongst the special effects mayhem.

Hugh Jackman’s washed-up fighter trained a boxing robot in Shawn Levy’s Real Steel, based on the story by Richard Matheson, and five scantily-clad women used their fantasies to escape from a mental institution in Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch.

In Dominic Sena’s ludicrously entertaining Season of the Witch, a pair of disillusioned fourteenth century Crusaders (Nicolas Cage and Ron Perlman) were forced by Christopher Lee’s plague-ridden Cardinal to escort a suspected witch (Claire Foy) to a remote monastery. After being attacked by wolves and zombie monks, they discovered an even greater evil awaited them at their destination.

Cage also starred as a vengeful escapee from Hell on the trail of an evil satanic cult leader in Patrick Lussier’s 3-D Drive Angry, which, despite the non-stop action, flopped at the box-office.

Based on another graphic novel series, Paul Bettany’s futuristic vampire-hunter had to rescue his kidnapped niece in the 3-D Priest, while Anthony Hopkins’ ageing exorcist teamed up with a young priest (Colin O’Donoghue) to banish a demon possessing a pregnant Italian teenager in The Rite.

Director Guy Ritchie and actors Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law were reunited for Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, a sequel to the 2009 film, as the Great Detective tried to prevent a devious Professor Moriarty (Jared Harris) from starting the First World War.

After eleven years, Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox and David Arquette returned for Wes Craven’s Scr4am, which updated its scares for a new generation who couldn’t care less. Despite featuring TV heroines Anna Paquin, Kristen Bell and Hayden Panettiere, it became the lowest grossing entry yet in the spoof slasher series.

Tony Todd returned to the series as a creepy coroner in Final Destination 5, in which the survivors of a bridge collapse met their graphic demises in gore-drenched 3-D.

Colin Farrell was the vampire that moved-in next door in the surprisingly good 3-D remake of the 1985 comedy-horror film Fright Night, which also featured David Tennant in the original Roddy McDowall role.

Rebecca De Mornay’s mad matriarch dominated her sadistic sons in Mother’s Day, a remake of the 1980 slasher film of the same name, while Leighton Meester’s crazed stalker put a kitten in a clothes dryer just to make her point in The Roommate, a risible PG-13 rip-off of Single White Female (1992).

A belated prequel to Tim Burton’s 2001 remake, Rupert Wyatt’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes was a surprise box-office hit, opening at #1 in America.

Paul W. S. Anderson directed a silly 3-D steampunk version of The Three Musketeers starring his wife, Milla Jovovich, who criticised Summit Entertainment on Twitter for failing to market the movie properly.

Mary Elizabeth Winstead was part of a Norwegian team that discovered something under the Antarctic ice in The Thing, a belated and pointless prequel/remake of John Carpenter’s 1982 movie (which itself was a remake).

Meanwhile, Carpenter himself directed The Ward, in which Amber Heard’s teenage pyromaniac ended up in a spooky 1960s insane asylum.

Husband and wife stars Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz refused to promote the final cut of Jim Sheridan’s Dream House, which gave away all its surprises in the trailer and quickly sank without trace on both sides of the Atlantic.

In America, Hammer’s psychological thriller The Resident went directly to DVD, despite starring Hilary Swank, Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Christopher Lee. At least it received a negligible cinema release in the UK, as did the pagan thriller Wake Wood, another Hammer production that had been sitting on the shelf for a few years.

Co-scripted by Stephen Volk and director Nick Murphy, The Awakening was an atmospheric low-budget period ghost film set in a haunted boarding school.

Given its slightly more than $1 million budget, James Wan’s Insidious turned out to be one of the most profitable films of the year, taking more than $53 million at the US box-office. Produced by the team behind the terrible Paranormal Activity franchise and written and directed by the creators of the Saw series, it was an intentionally old-fashioned ghost story about parents fighting for the soul of their son.

Two sisters discovered footage of themselves from 1988 that proved they had always been a magnet for the supernatural in Paranormal Activity 3. Made for just $5 million, the prequel opened in the US at #1 with a gross of $52.6 million — the biggest horror film and best October opening ever.

Shark Night 3D served up college co-eds as chum, while a group of foxhunters became the hunted in Blooded. Apollo 18 was another “found footage” flick, this time set on the Moon.

A brother and sister wandered around a forest investigating the paranormal in the Spanish-made Atrocious, while the Norwegian Troll Hunter was like The Blair Witch Project with giant furry trolls.

Guillermo Del Toro produced Julia’s Eyes, Guillem Morales’ Spanish supernatural thriller in which Belén Rueda’s Hitchcockian heroine investigated the death of her blind twin sister. Del Toro also produced and co-scripted Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, a loose remake of a 1973 TV movie, about an old manor house haunted by little evil critters.

Pedro Almodóvar’s The Skin I Live In starred Antonio Banderas as an obsessed plastic surgeon in an art house homage to Georges Franju’s Les yeux sans visage (aka Eyes Without a Face).

Gustavo Hernández’s Spanish thriller The Silent House played out in real time and was based on a true murder mystery that happened in 1940s Uruguay.

Louise Bourgoin was the female Indiana Jones battling mad scientists, dinosaurs and reanimated Egyptian mummies in Luc Besson’s comic book-inspired The Extraordinary Adventures of Adele Blanc-Sec.

Kirsten Dunst and Alexander Skarsgård were unlucky enough to schedule their nuptials for the same day as a rogue planet was about to crash into the Earth in Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, which debuted in America on video-on-demand.

Mike Cahill’s Another Earth was another indie feature, in which a woman (Brit Marling) won a trip to an identical planet orbiting her own world.

The Dead was a low budget zombie film shot in Africa, and the bargain budget zombie apocalypse continued in the British-made The World of the Dead: The Zombie Diaries.

The horror comedy Dylan Dog: Dead of Night, which starred Brandon Routh as a paranormal investigator, took under $1 million during its opening week in the US.

A pair of assassins discovered that there was more to their latest job than they expected in Ben Wheatley’s Kill List. Tucker & Dale vs. Evil was a low budget spoof on backwoods slasher films, while Jason Bateman and Ryan Reynolds swapped bodies in the comedy The Change-Up.

More tragedy than Greek, Theseus (future “Superman” Henry Cavill) led his Olympian chums against Mickey Rourke’s evil King Hyperion in Tarsem Singh’s overblown Immortals, released in “epic 3-D”.

Your Highness was a witless fantasy spoof that somehow managed to feature James Franco, Natalie Portman and Charles Dance in its cast.

Despite Jason Momoa’s solid Hyborian warrior, and Ron Perlman as his father, the 3-D Conan the Barbarian was a disappointing origin story of Robert E. Howard’s sword-wielding hero.

Audiences were colour-blind to the 3-D The Green Hornet, in which Seth Rogen’s mugging millionaire became a crime-fighter with the aid of Jay Chou’s far more intelligent Kato, and Ryan Reynolds made a lightweight Green Lantern in Martin Campbell’s disappointing origin story of the DC Comics superhero.

James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender played the younger incarnations of Professor X and Magneto, respectively, in Matthew Vaughn’s better-than-expected “preboot” of the Marvel Comics franchise, X-Men: First Class.

Marvel continued to build towards its multi-hero Avengers epic in 2012 with the release of Kenneth Branagh’s mighty 3-D Thor, which introduced the planet Asgard’s God of Thunder (Chris Hemsworth), exiled to Earth by his father Odin (Anthony Hopkins). Meanwhile, Chris Evans’ wartime weakling became Captain America: The First Avenger in Joe Johnston’s nicely old-fashioned 3-D adventure, which pitted the all-American hero against Nazi villain the Red Skull (Hugo Weaving).

Comedian Rainn Wilson became low-rent hero “The Crimson Bolt” in Super, which also featured Ellen Page, Liv Tyler, Kevin Bacon and Nathan Fillion.

Based on Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2005 novel about teenage cloning, Never Let Me Go starred Carey Mulligan, Andrew Garfield and Keira Knightley, while Alex Pettyfer’s stranded alien might just as well have been another Twilight vampire in the teen romance I Am Number Four, produced by Michael Bay.

The less said about Bill Condon’s The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn — Part 1 the better, as Bella and Edward got married, moped around and had a vampire baby.

Directed by Catherine Hardwicke, who was responsible for the first Twilight movie, Red Riding Hood put a werewolf spin on the same basic premise.

A young Parisian orphan (Asa Butterfield) befriended forgotten cinema pioneer Georges Méliès (Ben Kingsley) in Hugo, Martin Scorsese’s 3-D paean to the movies, which also featured Sacha Baron Cohen, Ray Winstone, Emily Mortimer, Jude Law, Richard Griffiths and Christopher Lee.

Maybe because it was released in “4-D Aroma-scope”, but Robert Rodriguez’s Spy Kids: All the Time in the World was a box-office stinker.

Despite being directed by Steven Spielberg, the 3-D motion-capture used in The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn just made the comic strip characters look creepy.

One of the biggest box-office bombs of the year was Walt Disney’s Mars Needs Moms. Estimated to have cost around $150 million, the 3-D motion-capture comedy took just $6.9 million in the US during its opening weekend. However, Hoodwinked Too!: Hood vs. Evil actually had the worst opening ever for a 3-D movie, grossing just $4.1 million at 1,500 movie theatres.

At the Orange British Academy Film Awards on 13 February, director Tim Burton presented eighty-eight-year-old Sir Christopher Lee with the Academy Fellowship — the highest accolade given out by BAFTA for contribution to film. Previous recipients included Alfred Hitchcock, Steven Spielberg, Charlie Chaplin, Elizabeth Taylor and Sean Connery.

The 83rd Annual Academy Awards were announced in Hollywood on 27 February. Natalie Portman won the Best Actress award for her portrayal of a crazed ballet dancer in Black Swan, and Toy Story 3 picked up the awards for Best Animated Feature Film and Original Song (“We Belong Together”). Inception scooped up a quartet of technical awards for Cinematography, Sound Mixing, Sound Editing and Visual Effects. The Art Direction and Costume Design awards went to Alice in Wonderland, and The Wolfman was the winner of Best Makeup. Co-directed by Australian genre artist Shaun Tan, The Lost Thing won for Best Short Film, Animated.

The highlight of the evening was when ninety-four-year-old Hollywood legend Kirk Douglas presented the award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role.

On 12 November, Honorary Academy Awards for lifetime achievement were presented to actor James Earl Jones (the voice of “Darth Vader” in the Star Wars movies) and veteran make-up artist Dick Smith (The Exorcist).

Before Warner Bros. began pulling all eight Potter DVDs from retail shelves at the end of December in preparation for future upgrades, the Blu-ray release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 included an in-depth conversation between J. K. Rowling and Daniel Radcliffe, along with an interactive option. The Potter franchise has already generated around $51 billion for the studio’s Home Entertainment division — on top of the $7 billion earned during the films’ theatrical release.

Following complaints in the press by Dutch director Tom Six, in October, the British Board of Film Classification lifted its ban on The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence), giving the controversial body-horror movie an “18” certificate on DVD after two-and-a-half minutes were cut from the original running time.

Scott Spiegel’s Hostel: Part III found its natural home after being released directly to DVD, as did Victor Garcia’s Mexican-set Hellraiser: Revelation, the ninth film in the franchise and the first not to feature Doug Bradley as “Pinhead”.

Danny Trejo, Ving Rhames and the busy Sean Bean starred in Death Race 2, a DVD prequel to the 2008 remake.

A couple were trapped in their island home by a washed-up soldier in Carl Tibbetts’ debut Retreat which, despite starring Thandie Newton, Cillian Murphy and Jamie Bell, also went straight to DVD.

Released on DVD as an “After Dark Original”, The Task was about a reality TV show recorded on a haunted prison ship.

Skin Eating Jungle Vampires from Chemical Burn Entertainment had all the quality of a bad home video. The same was true of The Stone: No Soul Unturned and the terrifically titled (but ultimately disappointing) Fast Zombies with Guns, from the same distributor.

Survivors of a terrorist bomb attack had to also escape the walking dead in Zombie Undead.

The Blu-ray of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986) featured more than fifty minutes of “newly discovered” scenes never included in the finished film.

The Complete 50th Anniversary Collection of the 1960s TV series The Avengers was issued by Optimum as a limited edition thirty-nine disc set that featured every episode digitally restored and more than thirty hours of bonus material.

The Complete Sherlock Holmes Collection was a five-disc Blu-ray set containing all fourteen of Basil Rathbone’s Holmes films, dating from 1939–46.

Guillermo del Toro, John Landis and Roger Corman were among those who were commenting on the horrors of the past on the DVD compilation Trailers from Hell! Volume 2.

1980s stars Kristy Swanson, D. B. Sweeney and Robert Davi turned up in the entertaining Syfy channel movie Swamp Shark, John Schneider was slumming in Super Shark, and Robert Picardo had a cameo in Mega Shark vs Crocosaurus.

Syfy also revived the careers of 1980s pop rivals Deborah (Debbie) Gibson and Tiffany, who teamed up for Mary Lambert’s Mega Python vs. Gatoroid, which also featured former Monkee Micky Dolenz as himself.

Brian Krause and C. Thomas Howell battled arachnids from Afghanistan in Jim Wynorski’s dire Camel Spiders; Robert Patrick was involved in a civil war on Mars in the videogame-based Red Faction: Origins, and Lance Henriksen made a brief appearance in Scream of the Banshee.

A giant monster nearly destroyed the entire planet in Behemoth, a mutated root system threatened to tear apart the Earth in The Terror Beneath (aka Seeds of Destruction), and a proofreader and an archaeologist teamed up to prevent the end of the world in Doomsday Prophecy.

A volcano under Yellowstone Park exploded in a Super Eruption, while Stacy Keach’s mad meteorologist used a weather weapon to destroy his enemies in Storm War.

Danny Glover’s obsessed Captain Ahab wanted revenge on a Great White. er, Dragon, in the Syfy “original” movie Age of the Dragons, a medieval reworking of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick.

H. G. Wells was no doubt spinning in his grave as mutated monsters travelled back in time in Morlocks, and Ray Harryhausen would have been equally disappointed by the bargain-basement Sinbad and the Minotaur.

Meanwhile, an unrecognisable Richard Grieco played the evil Loki in Almighty Thor, another cheap knock-off from The Asylum, who would also have you believe that its low budget alien invasion movie Battle of Los Angeles was in no way similar to the bigger budget Battle: Los Angeles.

Alien bacteria animated an eighteen-foot golem in Iron Invader (aka Metal Shifters), and alien technology created a terrorist weapon in Cold Fusion.

The Syfy’s channel’s two-part Neverland was yet another version of the Peter Pan story, with Rhys Ifans as the future Captain Hook, Anna Friel as his pirate lover, and Keira Knightley as the voice of a CGI Tinkerbell.

A modern-day Dorothy Gale (Paulie Rojas) discovered that the best-selling books she had written were based on her suppressed childhood memories in Syfy’s two-part The Witches of Oz. The supporting cast included Billy Boyd, Lance Henriksen, Jeffrey Combs, Mia Sara, Sean Astin and Christopher Lloyd.

Pierce Brosnan’s best-selling novelist investigated the death of his wife (Annabeth Gish) in Mick Garris’ two-part, four-hour supernatural mini-series of Stephen King’s Bag of Bones on A&E, which also featured genre veteran William Schallert.

Based on a comic book, the unfortunately titled Steve Niles’ Remains was yet another reworking of Night of the Living Dead and was the first original movie produced by the Chiller cable TV channel.

Housewife Halloween movies included Lifetime’s Possessing Piper Rose starring Rebecca Romijin, and Hallmark’s The Good Witch’s Family starring Catherine Bell. Martin Mull’s titular phantom attempted to scare away a family who moved into his house in Oliver’s Ghost for the same network.

Eddie Izzard portrayed a mysterious stranger who turned up on Christmas Eve in the BBC-TV movie Lost Christmas, while The Borrowers was yet another version of Mary Norton’s classic children’s books. It featured Christopher Eccleston, Victoria Wood and Stephen Fry, and was also broadcast by the BBC at Christmas.

Lifetime’s unauthorised biopic Magic Beyond Words: The J. K. Rowling Story featured Poppy Montgomery as the struggling young Harry Potter writer and proved, if there was any doubt, just how boring being an author really is.

For the first time since its 2005 revival, the BBC’s Doctor Who totally lost the plot (literally) under new show-runner Steven Moffat. Matt Smith’s increasingly annoying time traveller faced his “final” days as he and his various companions bumbled their way through thirteen episodes that culminated in a ludicrously complicated finale that totally failed to deliver a satisfying conclusion to the season’s multiple plots.

Neil Gaiman, Mark Gattis and Toby Whithouse scripted episodes, and guest stars included Frances Barber, Hugh Bonneville, Lily Cole, James Corden, Ian McNeice, Simon Callow, Mark Gattis, David Walliams, and Alex Kingston as the no-longer-enigmatic River Song.

As usual, the Christmas special, The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe, was also a disappointment, as the Doctor whisked a wartime widow (the excellent Claire Skinner) and her two children off to a Narnia-like winter wonderland filled with menace. Guest stars Bill Bailey, Arabella Weir and Alexander Armstrong were completely wasted, thanks to Moffat’s lacklustre script.

Earlier in the year, viewers of the children’s show Blue Peter took part in a competition to design a new version of the central console of the TARDIS.

Despite an injection of cash from America’s Starz network, the BBC’s ten-part mini-series Torchwood: Miracle Day, in which the usually immortal Captain Jack Harkness (John Barrowman) was the last man in the world who could die, was ultimately disappointing, despite solid support from series regular Eve Myles and new team members Mekhl Phifer and Alexa Havins. The impressive list of US guest-stars included Bill Pullman (as a creepy paedophile-murder), Lauren Ambrose, Wayne Knight, C. Thomas Howell, Ernie Hudson, John de Lancie, Nana Visitor and Frances Fisher.

Angela Pleasence popped up as a psychic bag lady, Peter Bowles played an old newspaper editor, and the intrepid reporter adopted an alien daughter in the BBC’s fifth and sadly final series of The Sarah Jane Adventures, which only ran for three two-part episodes in October due to the death of its star, Elisabeth Sladen.

Although ostensibly aimed at young adults, BBC 3’s six-part The Fades was one of the best and darkest supernatural shows of the year as teenage outsider Paul (Ian de Caestecker) discovered that he was really one of a group of “Angelics” that could see the cannibalistic dead, who were returning in corporeal form to wreak revenge upon the living and bring about an apocalyptic future. Daniel Kaluuya as Paul’s geeky friend Mac managed to keep the tone of Jack Thorne’s superior series from getting too dark.

At the beginning of February British TV came up with not just one, but two haunted house series. Based on an unproduced 2008 pilot for an American show called The Oaks, ITV’s Marchlands was about three families living in the same rambling old house in 1968, 1987 and 2010, who were all connected by the restless spirit of a drowned eight-year-old girl. Atmospherically told over five one-hour episodes, the increasingly spooky series featured Jodie Whittaker, Alex Kingston, Dean Andrews, Denis Lawson and Anne Reid amongst its impressive ensemble cast.

Less impressive was Bedlam, the first original drama commission from cable TV channel Sky Living, in which no horror cliché was left unturned by its three soap opera creators. Over six episodes, former mental illness patient Jed Harper (Theo James), who could see ghosts and how they died, and his only likeable flatmate Ryan McAllister (Pop Idol winner Will Young) investigated multiple hauntings in Bedlam Heights, a creepy apartment block converted from an old insane asylum. Coincidentally, the first episode also involved the vengeful ghost of a drowning victim.

Neither show was as outright ludicrous as FX’s thirteen-part American Horror Story, but what would you expect from the people who brought you Nip/Tuck and Glee? Connie Britton, Dylan McDermot and Taissa Farmiga were the dysfunctional Harmon family who moved into an old Los Angeles mansion, only to discover that it was not only haunted by the world’s most dysfunctional ghosts, but that they had also inherited the neighbour from hell (a scene-stealing Jessica Lange). A two-part Halloween episode introduced Zachary Quinto and Teddy Sears as a deceased gay couple, Mena Suvari guest-starred as the 1940s “The Black Dahlia” murder victim, and pretty much everybody ended up dead (if not gone) at the end.

The second season of Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton’s gruesome six-part comedy horror series Psychoville from the BBC saw the return of embittered clown Mr Jelly (Shearsmith) and Imelda Staunton’s mysterious company director Grace Andrews, and the introduction of obsessive librarian Jeremy Goode (Shearsmith again), who was haunted by a Silent Singer (also Shearsmith). Christopher Biggins and American director John Landis both had cameos in the second episode.

More soap opera than science fiction, the BBC’s eight-part Outcasts followed the trials and tribulations of a group of bickering Earth settlers trying to build a new future on a distant planet called Carpathia. Unfortunately, despite an ensemble cast that included Liam Cunningham, Hermoine Norris, Daniel Mays, Eric Mabius and Jamie Bamber (whose character was killed-off in the first episode), not only was the show a dull reworking of the 1994–95 series Earth 2, but the central mystery also owed much to Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles. The series was quickly moved to another time-slot because of disappointing viewing figures.

Despite occasional flashes of welcome humour, the third season of the BBC’s Being Human was a grim affair as vampire Mitchell (Aidan Turner) rescued ghost Annie (Lenora Crichlow) from Purgatory and was forced to face the consequences of his bloody massacre of a passenger train in the previous series.

While werewolves George (Russell Tovey) and Nina (Sinead Keenan) found themselves expecting a baby, unexpected visitors dropping by the housemates’ new Barry Island home included teenage vampire Adam (Craig Roberts), who was really forty-six years old; party-loving zombie girl Sasha (Alexandra Roach); werewolf traveller McNair (Robson Green) and his son Tom (Michael Socha); stressed-out social worker Wendy (Nicola Walker); persistent policewoman Nancy Reid (Erin Richards), and mysteriously resurrected vampire Herrick (Jason Watkins), who claimed to have lost his memory.

An eight-part spin-off show, Becoming Human, was available on the BBC website (and subsequently edited-together as a TV special). It involved schoolboy vampire Adam (Roberts again) teaming up with a werewolf (Leila Mimmack) and a human (Josh Brown) to solve a mystery.

Relocated to Boston, an American version of Being Human starred Sam Witwer as vampire Aidan, Meaghan Rath as ghost Sally and Sam Huntington as werewolf Josh. The first season aired over thirteen episodes on the Syfy channel.

In the second season of Syfy’s Haven, loosely based on a Stephen King story, all the main protagonists discovered that there were secrets in their past they never knew about.

Bi-sexual succubus Bo (Anna Silk) learned to work with the Fae, despite the new Ash (Vincent Walsh), while werewolf detective Dyson (Kris Holden-Ried) sacrificed his ability to love in the second season of Syfy’s Lost Girl.

The third season of the channel’s enjoyable Warehouse 13 saw the return of Jaime Murray’s terrific H. G. Wells, while Eureka’s Douglas Fargo (Neil Grayson) made a return visit to the Warehouse, which was apparently destroyed in the season finale. Kate Mulgrew, Anthony Michael Hall and Aaron Ashmore joined the cast as semi-regulars.

The third series of Syfy’s Sanctuary ended with the inhabitants from Hidden Earth coming to the surface, and the fourth season kicked off with Dr Helen Magnus (Amanda Tapping) travelling back in time to Victorian London to prevent Adam Worth from changing history. In the two-part finale, Magnus put her long-term plans for the Sanctuary network into action, as Caleb (Gil Bellows) plotted to turn the human race into Abnormals.

Syfy’s likeable Eureka (aka A Town Called Eureka) ended its fourth season with an accidental spaceship launch, but it was back three months later with a Christmas special in which everyone was turned into cartoon characters.

Based on the series of dark and gory high fantasy novels by George R. R. Martin, HBO’s terrific ten-part Game of Thrones was, quite simply, one of the year’s best TV dramas in any genre. The superlative cast included Sean Bean (whose lead character was surprisingly killed off in the penultimate episode), a scene-stealing Peter Dinklage, Mark Addy, Lena Headey and Jason Momoa.

With its fourth season, HBO’s True Blood finally inherited the mantle of 1960s daytime soap opera Dark Shadows as Sookie (Anna Paquin) returned from fairyland to find that Fiona Shaw’s possessed witch had cast a spell over Eric (Alexander Skarsgård), causing him to lose much of his memory.

In a major departure from the original books, a leading character was surprisingly killed off by Skarsgård’s vampire, and the season finale featured the shocking deaths of three, or possibly four, other major characters. Veterans William Schallert and Katherine Helmond turned up in nice cameos.

The sixth season of Showtime’s Dexter jumped ahead a year as Michael C. Hall’s killer-with-a-code encountered a pair of religious “Doomsday Killers” (Edward James Olmos and Colin Hanks), a reformed Brother Sam (rapper-actor Mos Def), a septuagenarian serial killer (veteran Ronny Cox) and his own dead brother (Christian Camargo).

With its delayed fourth and fifth seasons filmed in Ireland, ITV’s always bonkers Primeval returned in January for seven episodes as Connor (Andrew-Lee Potts) and Abby (Hannah Spearitt) escaped the Cretaceous Period only to find that the ARC (Anomaly Research Centre) had been rebuilt and was now controlled by mysterious magnate Philip Burton (Alexander Siddig), who had his own secret agenda. Despite the introduction of a new team of dinosaur-hunters, previous cast members Lucy Brown and Jason Flemyng returned for an episode apiece.

The series was back with a further six shows in May, and included an episode in which a velociraptor was accidentally sent back to 1868 London, where it gave rise to the legend of “Spring-heeled Jack”.

There were more CGI dinosaurs in Fox’s much-delayed Terra Nova, executive produced by Steven Spielberg, in which the annoying Shannon family (led by Jason O’Mara and Shelley Conn) travelled back from a dystopian future to 85 million years in the past to make a new life for themselves in what was basically a thirteen-part reworking of Land of the Lost with added rebel factions and conspiracy sub-plots.

Not content with boring audiences rigid with the family values of Terra Nova, Steven Spielberg also executive produced TNT’s tedious War of the Worlds-inspired Falling Skies, in which a history professor (E.R.’s Noah Wyle) and a rag-tag group of resistance fighters mostly talked their way through yet another alien invasion of Earth.

If Terra Nova and Falling Skies could make dinosaurs and alien invasions dull, then AMC’s increasingly pointless The Walking Dead was guilty of doing the same thing with zombies, as the ever-dwindling band of survivors (led by Andrew Lincoln’s cuckold Sheriff) took refuge on a seemingly-tranquil rural farm until they went and looked at what was kept in the barn. It was perhaps no surprise that creator and executive producer Frank Darabont stepped down as showrunner after just a few episodes into the second season.

Despite its lethargic pacing, the show still managed to rank as the top-rated cable TV drama amongst young adults in the US, with average viewing numbers of nine million.

Sam (Jared Padalecki) returned from Hell without a soul, and angel Castiel (Misha Collins) went off the rails in the disappointing sixth series of The CW’s Supernatural. In the best episode of the season, Sam and Dean (Jensen Ackles) were transported to an alternate reality, where they were actors in a TV series called. Supernatural.

The seventh season kicked off with the brothers trying to find a way to stop a power-mad Castiel, and Buffy cast members Charisma Carpenter and James Marsters turned up as a pair of bickering married witches.

The third season of The CW’s unwatchably awful The Vampire Diaries was joined by the equally turgid teen witch series, The Secret Circle, also based on a bunch of books by L. J.Smith and executive produced by Kevin Williamson. At least Natasha Henstridge was on hand in the latter show to chew up the scenery as a scheming older witch.

Looking as if it was filmed on a $5.00-per-episode budget, Brighter in Darkness was an amateurish half-hour gay vampire soap opera filmed in and around Wales that ran for eight interminable episodes on a cut-price UK cable TV channel.

Michael Emerson’s billionaire scientist and Jim Caviezel’s former CIA hitman teamed up to prevent crimes before they happened with the help of a handy gizmo in CBS’ Person of Interest, executive produced by J. J. Abrams.

NBC’s Grimm featured David Giuntoli as a homicide detective, the descendant of the eponymous clan of supernatural hunters, who discovered that the fairy tales were based on fact. Silas Weir Mitchell’s reluctant werewolf sidekick was the best thing about the show.

Fairy tale characters inhabited two different worlds in ABC’s Once Upon a Time, which debuted with an impressive 12.8 million viewers and became the highest-rated new drama amongst adults in the US.

Meanwhile, the parallel universes merged in the fourth season of Fox’s underrated Fringe, where for a while it seemed as if Peter Bishop (Joshua Jackson) had never existed.

Xander Berkeley played a mysterious patron who sat in a diner and helped people solve their problems in Hulu’s five-part series The Booth at the End, which was also available as webisodes.

MTV’s reboot of the 1980s movie franchise Teen Wolf was an entertaining and edgy twelve-part series aimed at young adults. Tyler Posey’s likeable high school student Scott McCall found himself turning into a werewolf just as he discovered that the girl of his dreams (Crystal Reed) came from a long line of werewolf hunters. Unfortunately, the show premiered in a graveyard slot in the US.

Death Valley was a spoof mockumentary series on MTV about the LAPD’s Undead Task Force dealing with criminal vampires, werewolves, zombies and other supernatural creatures while being trailed around by a camera crew.

Stoner metalhead Todd Smith (Alex House) and his high school friends continued to search for the Satantic book of spells in the half-hour Fear Net comedy series Todd & the Book of Pure Evil.

A supposedly dead cop (David Lyons) donned the superhero outfit and teamed up with an investigative blogger named Orwell (Summer Glau) to bring down her father’s evil corporate company in NBC’s enjoyable superhero series The Cape, which ran for only ten episodes.

Over at Syfy, Glau also guest-starred on the eleven-part Alphas, a dropped ABC pilot in which David Strathairn’s scientist was the leader of a group of five ordinary people with extraordinary abilities who battled to save the world from a secret terrorist organisation called Red Flag.

In the third series of the E4’s eight-part Misfits, the gang of super-powered young offenders decided to change their powers and had to deal with an alternate reality involving time-travelling Nazis. Meanwhile Seth (Matthew McNulty) used his resurrection power to bring his former girlfriend back from the grave as a bloodthirsty zombie, and the gang ended up encountering a fake medium who had the power to call their fallen foes back from the dead.

ABC Family’s The Nine Lives of Chloe King was about a sixteen-year-old girl (Syler Samuels) who found out that she was descended from an ancient race of half-humans with feline powers.

Following an hour-long opener, Nickelodeon’s House of Anubis was shown in forty-five daily ten-minute instalments and involved a group of eight students investigating mysterious disappearances at an English boarding school. It averaged almost three million viewers in the US and was also available online.

In the six-part The Sparticle Mystery, a group of children discovered that everybody on Earth over the age of fifteen had been transported to a parallel dimension when an experiment went wrong.

Nathaniel Parker joined the fourth season of the BBC’s increasingly impressive Merlin as Arthur’s duplicitous uncle, Agravaine. The thirteen-part series featured Lancelot (Santiago Cabrera) sacrificing himself and then returning from the dead; the discovery of the last remaining dragon’s egg; an encounter with a vampire-like Lamia; the possessive spirit of murdered Druid child; the introduction of Tristan and Isolde, and an epic two-part finale in which the evil Morgana (Katie McGrath) led a full-on assault upon Camelot.

Eva Green’s far sexier “Morgan” also took over Arthur’s fabled city in the otherwise redundant ten-part Starz series Camelot, which also featured Joseph Fiennes as an older and dirtier version of Merlin.

The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror XXII on Fox included lame spoofs of Dexter and Avatar, while Mike Judge’s animated Beavis and Butt-Head returned to MTV in October with an episode in which the two stupid-smart buffoons poked fun at the Twilight movies as the dumb duo tried to get themselves bitten by a werewolf so they could attract girls.

Liam Neeson and Peter Mayhew voiced their characters Qui-Gon Jinn and Chewbacca, respectively, in different episodes of the Cartoon Network’s Star Wars: The Clone Wars.

Wolverine and Iron Man both got anime makeovers, while 1980s cartoon Thundercats was revived for a new generation of potential toy consumers.

James Roday and Dulé Hill’s comedy investigators went undercover as Tom Cruise’s Lestat and William Marshall’s Blacula, respectively, in a vampire-themed Halloween episode of USA Network’s Psych, while Castle (Nathan Fillion) and Beckett (Stana Katic) investigated the death of a TV ghost-hunter in a supposedly haunted mansion in the Halloween episode of ABC’s Castle.

The recent publication of Bram Stoker’s Dracula resulted in a number of apparent vampire attacks at an exclusive girl’s school in a fourth season episode of Canada’s Murdoch Mysteries. In another episode, the uptight detective (Yannick Bisson) investigated what seemed to be a case of demonic possession.

For its special Super Bowl episode in February, Fox’s Glee included a performance of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”, complete with a zombie football team.

In January, ABC’s V reboot returned for ten episodes before it was finally put out of everybody’s misery. Original star Marc Singer turned up in the final episode while Jane Badler, who reprised her role as the evil “Diana” from the original 1983 show, turned out to be alien leader Anna’s (Morena Baccarin) estranged mother.

Medium finally also reached the end of its seven-year run on NBC in January. The final episode flash-forwarded forty years into the future.

Chuck played out its fifth and final season on the same network, as Zachery Levi’s character created his own spy agency. Mark Hamill guest-starred in the first episode.

The CW’s Smallville ended after ten seasons with a satisfying two-part finale that finally saw the return of Michael Rosenbaum’s Lex Luthor.

The Syfy channel finally aired the remaining nine episodes of its overblown Battlestar Galactica prequel, Caprica, which ended on a virtual reality teaser for a second series that never happened.

NBC’s meandering The Event was also justifiably cancelled, as was Syfy’s SGU Stargate Universe after only two seasons.

As part of Turner Classic Movies’s “Lost and Found” series, in April the station showcased a rare print of the 1976 Spanish film The Mysterious House of Dr C (aka Dr Coppelius), while two months later the “Drive-In Double Features” series presented a number of 1950s “Monsters, Mutants and Martians”. In August, the channel programmed a day of Lon Chaney, Sr. films, including The Monster, Mockery, The Unknown, West of Zanzibar and both the silent and sound versions of The Unholy Three.

On October 3, TCM premiered A Night at the Movies: The Horrors of Stephen King, an hour-long documentary in which the author traced the history of the genre through personal recollections and film clips.

Appropriately, director John Carpenter was the TCM’s Guest Programmer for the month, and his picks included The Thing from Another World, It! The Terror from Beyond Space and The Curse of Frankenstein.

Rex Appeal was an hour-long BBC4 documentary about dinosaurs in the movies.

William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, Nichelle Michols, Billy Mumy, Angela Carter and Marta Kristen were amongst those who recalled the golden age of TV science fiction and the sometimes rivalry between Rod Serling, Gene Roddenberry and Irwin Allen in an episode of PBS’ Pioneers of Television.

Ridley Scott executive produced the Science channel’s eight-part Prophets of Science Fiction docu-series, which began its run with an episode about Mary Shelley (played by Mara King in the re-enactments).

Broadcast by BBC3 from Kirkstall Abbey on 19 March, Frankenstein’s Wedding: Live in Leeds was a muddled musical retelling of Shelley’s classic novel. Andrew Gower played Dr Victor Frankenstein, while David Harewood was his sympathetic Creature.

During the summer, actress Joanna Lumley joined an online petition of those opposed to BBC Radio 4 controller Gwyneth Williams’ plans to cut the broadcaster’s short story output in favour of more news coverage.

To tie-in with the launch of the mini-series Torchwood: Miracle Day in July, Radio 4’s Afternoon Play presented Torchwood: The Lost Files. Broadcast in three forty-five minute episodes, John Barrowman, Eve Myles, Gareth David-Lloyd and Kai Owen recreated their original TV roles alongside Martin Jarvis, Juliet Mills and Rosalind Ayres.

All the Dark Corners featured three spooky tales by Andrew Readman, Paul Cornell and Rosemary Kay and was broadcast over three successive days in the Afternoon Play slot, while The Shining Guest was written and narrated by Paul Evans and used real-life sound recordings to tell the story of a puzzling ancient corpse discovered in the Welsh hills. It was produced by the same team that created The Ditch in 2010.

Other editions of the Afternoon Play featured Kim Newman’s Cry Babies, about busy couple’s genetically enhanced daughter; Sally Griffiths’ Haunted, in which a professional illusionist and a spiritualist medium teamed up for a television show with unexpected results, and A Time to Dance, directed by Julian Simpson, in which a mysterious plague affected London’s South Bank.

Joan Aiken’s Black Hearts of Battersea was adapted over two days in the same slot at Christmas.

Julian Simpson’s Bad Memories for Radio 4’s The Friday Play slot involved the macabre disappearance of a family from their remote country home in 2004, and the discovery six years later in the cellar of five bodies apparently dating back to 1926. The hour-long drama made use of digital audio files to unlock the key to the time-travel mystery.

David Robb starred as Professor Challenger in Chris Harrald’s two-part dramatisation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World as part of the radio station’s Classic Serial series.

Wilkie Collins’ 1868 macabre mystery The Moonstone was adapted into four one-hour episodes on Radio 4 starring Kenneth Cranham, Eleanor Bron and Bill Paterson, and Cranham also portrayed carnival owner Mr Dark in Diana Griffiths’ hour-long adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, broadcast as The Saturday Play on 29 October.

The following month, Robert Powell starred in an hour-long adaptation of Alan Garner’s The Weirdstone of Brisingamen in the same slot.

The crew of a spaceship retrieving a valuable ore from an abandoned mining operation on a mysterious planet encountered an intelligent life form in Mike Walker’s hour-long The Saturday Play: Landfall.

Radio 4’s Weird Tales returned for four new episodes, while Beasts on the Lawn: Saki 2011 featured updated dramatisations of five stories by Edwardian author Saki (H. H. Munro), set in a gated community and linked by security guard Clovis (Pippa Haywood).

Filmed twice by director George Slulzer, The Vanishing was an hour-long radio dramatisation in July of Tim Krabbe’s The Golden Egg, about a man attempting to discover what happened to his missing girlfriend.

Dramatised by Brian Sibley in six one-hour episodes to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of Mervyn Peake, The History of Titus Groan encompassed the entire Gormenghast trilogy and the epilogue written by his widow, with a cast that included David Warner, Miranda Richardson, Tamsin Greig and William Gaunt.

As part of the morning fifteen-minute Woman’s Hour Drama slot, Kiss Kiss presented five macabre stories by Roald Dahl, dramatised by Stephen Sheridan. Each episode starred Charles Dance, supported by a cast that included Celia Imrie, Ronald Pickup and John Baddeley.

In May, The Doll: Short Stories by Daphne du Maurier featured abridged readings of three stories by the author of The Birds, while Summer Ghosts in August presented readings of three fifteen-minute spooky tales set in daylight written by Sophie Hannah, Louise Welsh and Adam Thorpe.

David Tennant returned to Radio 4’s Book at Bedtime with A Night with a Vampire 2, for which he read fifteen minute adaptations of “The Lady of the House of Love” by Angela Carter, “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes” by Fritz Leiber, “Bewitched” by Edith Wharton, “Drink My Blood” by Richard Matheson and “A Lot of Mince Pies” by Robert Swindells.

In the same slot, Derek Jacobi read Anthony Horowitz’s Sherlock Holmes pastiche The House of Silk over ten nights in early November. Meanwhile, James Fleet played Inspector Lestrade, who introduced four half-hour episodes of The Rivals, featuring other fictional detectives of the period. The weekly series kicked off with an adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” starring Andrew Scott as C. Auguste Dupin.

In April, BBC Radio 7 was re-branded BBC Radio 4 Extra. Jonathan Morris’ four-part Doctor Who: Cobwebs reunited fifth Doctor Peter Davison with companions Turlough, Tegan and Nyssa in an abandoned gene-tech facility, and their adventures continued in Stephen Cole’s Doctor Who: The Whispering Forest and Marc Platt’s Doctor Who: The Cradle of the Snake.

Meanwhile, Doctor Who: The Hornet’s Nest featured fourth Doctor Tom Baker in three two-part adventures (“The Stuff of Nightmares”, “The Dead Shoes” and “The Circus of Doom”) scripted by Paul Magrs.

The Horror at Bly was Neville Teller’s response to Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw, while actor Richard Coyle read H. P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness over five half-hour episodes on successive nights in June.

Don Webb’s four-part dramatisation of Elidor updated Alan Garner’s 1965 novel for a new audience of younger listeners.

In mid-September, Radio 4 Extra broadcast half-hour productions of “The Captain of the Polestar” by Arthur Conan Doyle, “Olalia” by Robert Louis Stevenson and “The Brownie of the Black Haggs” by James Hogg under the umbrella title The Darker Side of the Border.

Mark Gattis returned to introduce new half-hour episodes of The Man in Black on the same station in October, including “Lights Out” by Christopher Golden and Amber Benson.

Radio 4 Extra celebrated Halloween with a selection of Gothic tales from the archive that included an adaptation of Loren D. Estleman’s Sherlock Holmes v Dracula, a reading of Oscar Wilde’s The Canterville Ghost, a reading of Tanya Huff’s “Quid Pro Quo” as part of A Short History of Vampires, and a forty-five minute adaptation of Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla starring Anne-Marie Duff, Celia Imrie, David Warner and Brana Bajic in the title role.

Each evening during the same week, Haunting Women presented five fifteen-minute supernatural tales by Dermot Bolger, while Benjamin Whitrow read Ghost Stories by M. R. James.

Christopher Lee’s Fireside Tales was a fifteen-minute series broadcast over Christmas in which the veteran actor read Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat”, Jerome K. Jerome’s “The Man of Science”, E. Nesbit’s “John Charrington’s Wedding”, Ambrose Bierce’s “The Man and the Snake” and W. W. Jacobs’ “The Monkey’s Paw”.

In October, BBC Radio 3’s Opera on 3 broadcast Opera North’s new version of Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades, featuring soprano Dame Josephine Barstow as the mysterious old Countess.

BBC Radio 2 celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of the musical Phantom of the Opera with The Phantom Phenomenon in November. Lyricist Don Black talked to composer Andrew Lloyd Webber and others about their involvement in the longest-running Broadway musical of all time, which is estimated to have grossed $5.6 billion to date around the world.

Described as a “historical-shtetl-magic-realist-feminist-musical audio drama”, The Witches of Lublin premiered on New York radio stations WBAI and WNYC in April. Co-scripted and introduced by Ellen Kushner, the broadcast included Neil Gaiman amongst the voice cast.

Broadcast on Radio 4 in February, The Priest, the Badger and the Little Green Men from Mars was Rob Alexander’s half-hour profile of prolific genre writer-turned-reverend [Robert] Lionel Fanthorpe, who contributed readings from his own work.

Comedy broadcaster Natalie Haynes investigated the modern fascination with blood-drinkers and the walking dead in Radio 4’s half-hour Vampires v Zombies, while in the two-part Cat Women of the Moon on the same station, novelist Sarah Hook looked at how the SF genre pushes the boundaries of sex with the help of China Miéville, Iain Banks, Nicola Griffith and Robert Winston.

Hosted by The League of Gentlemen writer and actor Jeremy Dyson, The Unsettled Dust: The Strange Stories of Robert Aickman was a half-hour reappraisal of the author’s work, broadcast on Radio 4 in December.

The CD box set of Tales from Beyond the Pale: Season 1 was hosted by Larry Fessenden and included audio plays featuring Vincent D’Onofrio and Ron Perlman.

The “curse of Spider-Man” continued when actress T. V. Carpio, who took over the role of the evil Arachne after the original actress suffered a concussion, was forced to pull out of the $65 million Broadway show Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark in March following an injury sustained during an on-stage battle.

Following a series of accidents, multiple missed opening dates and a critical lambasting, controversial director and co-writer Julie Taymor was relieved of her day-to-day duties by producers the same month, and the troubled production shut down for more than three weeks as a new team was brought in to re-imagine the show. It finally opened in June to mostly unenthusiastic reviews.

Five months later, former director Taymor reportedly sued the producers of the show for $1 million compensation, claiming they had “violated her creative rights”.

Benedict Cumberbatch and Johnny Lee Miller alternated as Frankenstein and his Creature in Nick Dear’s new adaptation of Frankenstein for director Danny Boyle, which premiered at London’s National Theatre’s Olivier in February.

Anita Dobson and Greta Scacchi portrayed Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, respectively, during the making of the 1962 movie What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? in Anton Burge’s Bette and Joan, which opened at London’s Arts Theatre in May.

That same month, Terry Gilliam directed Hector Berlioz’s opera The Damnation of Faust at the Coliseum, while Arthur Darvill portrayed a melancholy Mephistopheles in Matthew Dunster’s revival of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus at Shakespeare’s Globe in June.

Adapted by Bruce Joel Rubin from his 1990 movie, Ghost The Musical opened in July at London’s Piccadilly Theatre.

Despite a much-hyped revamp in November 2010 and a subtle title change to Phantom: Love Never Dies, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical sequel still closed its London run at the end of August after just seventeen months. Although a Broadway transfer for the show was delayed, the new version received rave reviews when it opened in Melbourne, Australia, in the summer.

Meanwhile, Lloyd Webber’s production of The Wizard of Oz opened at the London Palladium in March. Michael Crawford starred in the titular role.

Following his stage success with Ghost Stories, the League of Gentlemen’s Jeremy Dyson adapted three classic tales for Roald Dahl’s Twisted Tales. Polly Findlay’s production ran for a month from the end of January at London’s Lyric Hammersmith theatre.

Actress Judi Bowker (who played “Mina” in the 1977 BBC version of Count Dracula) starred in Harry Meacher’s stage play Mist “After Dracula”, which ran for three nights at the end of February at the Rosslyn Hill Unitarian Chapel in London’s Hampstead area. Meacher himself portrayed Van Helsing in the play, which was set ten years after the Count’s death.

Based on his 1985 cult movie, Stuart Gordon directed Re-Animator The Musical, adapted from H. P. Lovecraft’s story. With music and lyrics by Mark Nutter and starring Graham Skipper as crazed medical student Herbert West, the critically-acclaimed stage show ran from March until August at The Steve Allen Theater in Los Angeles.

In July, The 2nd H. P. Lovecraft Festival was held at St. Marks Theater, New York City. Written and directed by Dan Bianchi, performance art company Radiotheatre! performed stage versions of “Reanimator” and “The Call of Cthulhu”.

Meanwhile, from its usual venue in Portland, Oregon, the H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival expanded to Los Angeles in September. Along with screenings of short films and rarities (including a new version of The Whisperer in Darkness), the event featured appearances by directors Roger Corman and Guillermo Del Toro and readings by Michael Shea, Cody Goodfellow and Jenna Pitman.

Alison Steadman, Hermione Norris, Robert Bathurst and Ruthie Henshall starred in a revival of Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit at London’s Apollo Theatre, while Michael Ball and Imelda Staunton were the stars of Jonathan Kent’s critically-acclaimed revival of Stephen Sondheim’s macabre musical Sweeney Todd, which made its debut at the Chichester Festival Theatre.

Ralph Fiennes starred as a tortured Prospero in Trevor Nunn’s sold-out revival of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, which ran at London’s Theatre Royal, Haymarket, over nine weeks in September and October. The production took more than £1 million in advance ticket sales.

In early summer, the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre staged an outdoor production of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies.

The Veil, playwright and director Conor McPherson’s first piece in five years, dealt with secrets and spiritualism in 1822 Ireland, while a revival of Alan Ayckbourn’s 1994 play Haunting Julia was said to have caused the show to be stopped six times after audience members collapsed at the Garrick Theatre in Lichfield.

The Caped Crusader battled his greatest foes, including the Joker, the Penguin, the Riddler and Catwoman in the musical extravaganza Batman Live, which kicked off a world arena tour at the O2 in London in August.

The following month, Somtow Sucharitkul’s ghost opera Opera Siam: Mae Naak premiered at the Bloomsbury Theatre.

In December, London’s Southwark Playhouse mounted a production of the late Diana Wynne Jones’ novel Howl’s Moving Castle, narrated by Stephen Fry.

Throughout the year, the organisers of 2.8 Hours Later transformed areas of British cities into giant urban chase games in which participants assumed the role of zombie attack survivors trying to reach a final sanctuary before they were “infected” by the walking dead.

John Carpenter and Steve Niles were brought in by Warner Bros. to work on the first-person shooter game F.E.A.R. 3, which featured the return of devil child Alma.

An idyllic getaway was overrun by an invasion of zombies in the survival game Dead Island, while Resident Evil: The Mercenaries 3D, released for the new Nintendo 3DS handset, was basically a reworking of episodes from previous games in the franchise.

Players of the challenging Dark Souls, an unofficial follow-up to the equally difficult Demon’s Souls, were among the dead trying to regain their mortal lives in a world where evil had triumphed.

In the near-future, a global conspiracy to create cyborgs was at the heart of Deus Ex: Human Revolution, while the eagerly awaited Dead Space 2 quickly became one of the most popular electronic games of the year.

Despite the success of the movie, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 was as disappointing as all the other games in the movie tie-in series. At least Captain America: Super Soldier was somewhat better.

The Caped Crusader attempted to bring order to the urban chaos that was Batman: Arkham City, an even better sequel to the excellent Arkham Asylum.

The successful Dead Space game franchise was reconfigured for mobile use on iPhone and iTouch, so that the touch-screen player could use their finger to slice off limbs, and Call of Duty: Black Ops Zombies was available as an app for download onto iPads and iPhones.

Featuring the voice of actor Benedict Cumberbatch, The Nightjar was a creepy SF game sponsored by Wrigley’s chewing gum for free download onto iPhone.

For fans of H. P. Lovecraft, the Cthulhu Waterglobe was inscribed with the author’s famous couplet from the Necronomicon, or you could create your own eldritch lore with the Lovecraftian Letters magnetic words, which came in a metal tin containing more than 500 pieces.

The first issue of 2011 by Britain’s Royal Mail, “FAB: The Genius of Gerry Anderson”, featured six stamps honouring the TV creator’s five decades of work with Supercar, Fireball XL5, Stingray, Thunderbirds, Captain Scarlet and Joe 90. The set also included the UK’s first-ever lenticular set that depicted the “4-3-2-1” opening sequence of Thunderbirds when the stamps were tilted back and forth.

In March, the Royal Mail issued a set of eight stamps celebrating “Magical Realms” with two images each from the Harry Potter movies, Terry Pratchett’s “Discworld” books, C. S. Lewis’ “Chronicles of Narnia” series and Arthurian Legend. The special presentation pack included an essay by Kim Newman about British magical fantasy.

In July, an insert poster for the 1936 Universal movie Werewolf of London sold for $47,800 (including 19.5 per cent Buyer’s Premium) at auction, and five months later, Orson Welles’ 1942 Oscar for Best Screenplay for Citizen Kane sold for $861,542 to an anonymous bidder.

Universal Studios added a “King Kong 360/3-D Ride” to its Hollywood amusement park. Created by Peter Jackson, the ride was promoted as the “world’s largest 3-D experience”.

Meanwhile, over at Disney World and Disneyland, a new 3-D Star Wars motion-simulator ride offered a different combination of more than fifty story elements, making every trip a unique experience.

An historic 1925 carousel in the George F. Johnson Recreation Park in Binghamton, New York, was refurbished in August with various scenes from The Twilight Zone painted by Cortlandt Hull. Rod Serling, the creator of the show, rode the same carousel as a boy and used it as the basis of a 1959 episode entitled “Walking Distance”.

The 2011 World Horror Convention was held in Austin, Texas, over 28 April–1 May. Guests of Honour were authors Jack Ketchum (Dallas Mayr), Joe Hill and Sarah Langan, ChiZine editors Brett Alexander Savory and Sandra Kasturi, British artist Vincent Chong, and media writer Steve Niles.

Brian Keene and bookseller Del Howison were Special Guests, and Joe R. Lansdale was Toastmaster. Jack Ketchum was given the convention’s Grand Master Award in a ceremony on the Friday night.

The winners of the Horror Writers of America 2010 Bram Stoker Awards for Superior Achievement were announced at the Stoker Awards Weekend in Uniondale, New York, on 19 June.

In a whole raft of announcements, the Silver Hammer Award for outstanding service to the HWA was presented to Angel Leigh McCoy, The President’s Richard Laymon Service Award went to Michael Colangelo, and Joe Morey of Dark Regions Press received the award for Specialty Press.

The Poetry Collection award went to Bruce Boston for Dark Matters, Gary A. Braunbeck’s To Each Their Darkness received Non-Fiction, and Stephen King’s Full Dark No Stars picked up Collection. The Anthology award was given to Haunted Legends edited by Ellen Datlow and Nick Mamatas, while Joe R. Lansdale’s story “The Folding Man” from the same book received the Short Fiction award. Long Fiction was given to Norman Prentiss for Invisible Fences, the First Novel award was a tie between Black and Orange by Benjamin Kane Ethridge and Castle of Los Angeles by Lisa Morton, and Peter Straub was presented with the Superior Achievement in a Novel award for A Dark Matter.

It had been previously announced that Ellen Datlow and veteran EC artist Al Feldstein each received Life Achievement Awards.

Celebrating the thirty-fifth British Fantasy Convention, FantasyCon 2011 was held in Brighton, England, over 30 September–2 October. Guests of Honour were Gwyneth Jones, John Ajvide Lindqvist, Peter Atkins and Joe Abercrombie. Brian Aldiss and Christopher Paolini were Special Guests and Sarah Pinborough was Mistress of Ceremonies.

The British Fantasy Awards were presented at a banquet on the Sunday afternoon. The awards for Best Film and Best Television went to Christopher Nolan’s Inception and the BBC’s Sherlock, respectively. Best Graphic Novel was At the Mountains of Madness: A Graphic Novel by I. N. J. Culbard, Best Magazine was Andy Cox’s Black Static, and the Best Small Press award went to Telos Publishing for the second year running.

Vincent Chong won Best Artist, and his book Altered Visions: The Art of Vincent Chong also picked up the Best Non-Fiction award. Back from the Dead: The Legacy of the Pan Book of Horror Stories edited by Johnny Mains was awarded Best Anthology, and Stephen King’s Full Dark, No Stars was announced Best Collection. Best Novella was presented to Humpty’s Bones by Simon Clark, while Sam Stone collected Best Short Story for “Fool’s Gold” (from The Bitten Word) and The August Derleth Award for Best Novel for Demon Dance, the third volume in the “Vampire Gene” series.

The Sydney J. Bounds Award for Best Newcomer went to Robert Jackson Bennett for his novel Mr Shivers, and Terry Pratchett was announced as the recipient of the Karl Edward Wagner Special Award.

Following the presentation of the awards, there was almost instant condemnation from many people in the audience who quickly realised that at least four of the winners were directly connected to the small press imprint run by the British Fantasy Society’s current Chairman/Awards Administrator/Co-Presenter (making it the most successful publisher in the forty-year history of the awards), while both the Best Short Story and Best Novel awards had gone to his partner.

While there was no evidence of any wrongdoing on anyone’s part, the subsequent online controversy, which also made the national press in Britain, resulted in the formation of an interim BFS committee and the entire voting process being made far more transparent in future.

Held in San Diego, California, over 26–30 October, World Fantasy Convention 2011 stuck rigorously to its somewhat watery theme of “Sailing on the Seas of Imagination”, thereby leaving Guests of Honour Jo Fletcher, Neil Gaiman, Parke Godwin, editor Shawna McCarthy and artist Ruth Sanderson, along with Toastmaster Connie Willis, a little becalmed.

As usual, the World Fantasy Award winners were announced at the banquet on the Sunday afternoon. The Special Award, Non-Professional Award went to Alisa Krasnostein for Twelfth Planet Press, and Marc Gascoigne received the Special Award, Professional for his Angry Robot imprint.

Best Artist was Kinuko Y. Craft, Karen Joy Fowler’s What I Didn’t See and Other Stories won Best Collection, and My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me edited by Kate Bernheimer was awarded Best Anthology.

The Best Short Story Award went to Joyce Carol Oates’ “Fossil-Figures” (from Stories: All-New Tales) and Elizabeth Hand’s “The Maiden Flight of McCauley’s Bellerophon” (from the same anthology) won Best Novella. In a surprisingly feminist list of winners, the Best Novel Award went to Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor, who subsequently complained about the award being in the form of a bust of H. P. Lovecraft, because she considered the author “a talented racist”. Her reaction was mostly based on a poem Lovecraft wrote almost a century earlier, when he was in his early twenties.

Peter S. Beagle and Angélica Gorodischer had previously been announced as the recipients of Life Achievement Awards for having demonstrated outstanding service to the fantasy field.

I’ve talked about integrity and the validity of awards in these pages before, and I don’t plan to go into the controversy surrounding the 2011 British Fantasy Awards any more than I have already done so elsewhere, other to say that I believe that people know when they really do or do not deserve to win an award, and they have to live with their actions — and the consequences of those actions — for the rest of their lives.

I’m not sure how worthwhile any award is if you know that you have actively campaigned to win it.

I would also not be surprised if many readers are now scratching their heads at some of the winners of the World Fantasy Awards above and asking themselves “Who?”

You may also have noticed that with this volume, the editorial matter is shorter than in recent editions of this series. This is because, according to my publishers (and a handful of “reviewers” on Amazon), the non-fiction elements are superfluous to the rest of the book, and they have ordered me to cut this material, despite the fact that it costs them nothing extra in editorial fees to include.

On a more positive note, I am delighted to announce that with this twenty-third volume, The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror has surpassed both Ellen Datlow’s The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror (twenty volumes) and Karl Edward Wagner’s The Year’s Best Horror Stories (twenty-two volumes) as the longest-running “Year’s Best” horror anthology series of all time!

We could not have done it without the authors, readers and booksellers who have continued to support these volumes for more than twenty years. Thank you all, and special thanks to Nick Robinson and my current editor, Duncan Proudfoot, for their continued belief in me and this series.

See you all in volume twenty-four!

The Editor

May, 2012

Загрузка...