The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 10 [Anthology]

656 Pages·2016·2.16 MB·English

by  Jones Stephen

The Mammoth Book of
Best New Horror 10
Edited By Stephen Jones

Scanned & Proofed By MadMaxAU

CONTENTS

Introduction: Horror in 1998
THE EDITOR

Learning to Let Go
CHRISTOPHER FOWLER

The Wedding Present
NEIL GAIMAN

Adventures in Further Education
PETER ATKINS

Bondage
KATHE KOJA
The Keys to D’Espérance
CHAZ BRENCHLEY

The Song My Sister Sang
STEPHEN LAWS

A Victorian Ghost Story
KIM NEWMAN

The Dead Boy at Your Window
BRUCE HOLLAND ROGERS

Ra*e
RAMSEY CAMPBELL

Upstairs
LAWRENCE WATT-EVANS

Postcards from the King of Tides
CAITLIN R. KIERNAN

Everybody Goes
MICHAEL MARSHALL SMITH
Yellow and Red
TANITH LEE

What Slips Away
STEVE RASNIC TEM

Inside the Cackle Factory
DENNIS ETCHISON

The Specialist’s Hat
KELLY LINK

The Boss in the Wall: A Treatise on the House Devil
AVRAM DAVIDSON & GRANIA DAVIS

Objects of Desire in the Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear
HARLAN ELLISON

Mr Clubb and Mr Cuff
PETER STRAUB

Necrology: 1998
STEPHEN JONES & KIM NEWMAN

Useful Addresses

INTRODUCTION
Horror in 1998

Following a two-year decline in North America,a near-record
number of genre books appeared in 1998. The total for horror
titles was up slightly on the previous year, with around a quarter
of those books published in the young adult market and more
than 15 per cent of them featuring vampires.

However, the overall number of genre books published in
Britain fell to its lowest for nearly a decade. Horror titles were
down around 46 per cent on the previous year’s figures,
accounting for a mere 12 per cent of publishers’ genre output
(which was still 2 per cent above the share of the American
market).

A new study revealed that romance books continued to
lead all other genres in terms of book sales in America. The
industry was worth more than $1 billion annually and accounted
for nearly half of all mass-market paperbacks sold. Sales of
romance titles nearly equalled the sales of all the other genres
combined, including horror, science fiction, fantasy, mystery,
thrillers and westerns.

German-owned international media company Bertelsmann
AG, already owner of Bantam Doubleday Dell, purchased
Random House in May for an estimated $1.3 billion. This
resulted in a merger of the two publishers under the Random
House name.

With a base of thirty-five million book and music club
members worldwide, Bertelsmann announced an agreement
with bookselling giant Barnes & Noble, Inc. to establish a joint
venture with its Internet subsidiary, barnesandnoble.com. Under
the agreement, Bertelsmann reportedly paid $200 million for a
50 per cent stake in the on-line service and each party also
contributed $100 million capital. Launched in May1997,
barnesandnoble.com became one of the twenty-five fastest-
growing Web sites in the world, generating sales of $22 million
for the six months ending 1 August 1998.

Meanwhile, in November Bertelsmann separately launched
its own BooksOnline service in several European countries. The
service used its new collaboration with barnesandnoble.com to
offer customers worldwide the experience of shopping on-line
for books in multiple languages.

In another major deal, Barnes & Noble acquired distribution
giant Ingram Book Group for $200 million in cash and $400
million in stock, much to the consternation of many in the
publishing and bookselling world. The purchase put Barnes &
Noble in control of the primary distributor for its main on-line
competitor, Amazon.com, and for most of the small chains and
independent bookstores throughout the United States. The
American Booksellers Association issued an official statement in
which it considered the purchase to be “a devastating
development that threatens the viability of competition in the
book industry, and limits the diversity and availability of books
to consumers.”

In a separate case, the ABA and a number of independent
booksellers filed an anti-trust lawsuit in March in the US District
Court for Northern California, accusing Barnes & Noble and
Borders bookstore chains of violating anti-trust laws by using
their estimated combined annual buying power of $5 billion to
receive secret preferential treatment from publishers. B&N
chairman Len Riggio hit back with an open letter to the media
denying the ABA’s assertion that book superstores were
responsible for the decline in independents and stated that
there was no evidence of wrongdoing on the part of Barnes &
Noble.

America’s Crown Books filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in
July after the new owner failed to find a buyer. This resulted in
the closure of 79 of the chain’s 174 stores. Having already
returned many books to publishers earlier in the year, Crown
was subsequently sued by its principal supplier, Ingram, who
claimed payment for $10 million in books. Ingram eventually
agreed to accept more returns and extend new credit to the
chain in exchange for “super-priority” status as an unsecured
creditor.

A £300 million agreement between Waterstones and
Dillons bookshop chains became the biggest-ever deal in British
book retailing, with the result that most of the Dillons branches
were re-branded to Waterstones. The move put the combined
200-plus stores in a good position to gain further market share
before potential rivals Borders could make substantial inroads
into the UK market.

In 1997 the publishing industry was watching HarperCollins
closely, amid the turmoil of restructuring, the cancellation of
numerous titles, and rumours of bankruptcy. A year later the
company reported that it had increased its operating profits by
200 per cent. While revenues stayed even at $737 million,
profits increased from $12 million to $37 million. According to
the annual report from parent company News Corp., the results
were due to “a more focused publishing programme, decreased
returns and some significant bestsellers.” Fourth-quarter results
for HarperCollins showed a $11 million operating profit,
compared to only $1 million in 1997. Headed by publishing
director John Silbersack, the HarperEntertainment imprint was
launched in the autumn to cover all the media tie-ins being put
out by HarperCollins.
America’s Leisure Books launched the Leisure Horror Book
Club with two September titles, Alone With the Dead by Robert
J. Randisi and The Halloween Man by Douglas Clegg.

French publisher Hachette Livre bought a 70 per cent
equity stake in Britain’s Orion Publishing Group and Macmillan
(owned by German publisher Holtzbrinck) made a hostile £7.3
million takeover bid for Cassell (which included the Gollancz and
Vista imprints). The Cassell Board of Directors had rejected the
offer of £1 per share (a 122 per cent premium over the public
valuation of 45 pence) when, in an unexpected move, Orion
outbid Macmillan with £1.23 per share and bought the
company.

Canadian publisher Commonwealth, who had entered into
“joint contracts” (aka vanity publishing) with an estimated
2,000 authors and had an annual budget of $6 million, declared
bankruptcy in March. With lawsuits threatened by disgruntled
writers and employees, publisher Don Phelan went into hiding,
only to resurface briefly to blame an “internal and external
conspiracy” for his problems, saying he would represent himself
in class action suits brought against the firm by its clients.

Despite an announcement in May that Stanislaus Tal’s TAL
Literary Agency had been sold to a company called Extreme
Entertainment, it later emerged that Tal represented few if any
authors and some royalties paid to the agency had never been
reported.

The American Congress passed the Copyright Term
Extension Act, adding a further twenty years to copyrights for
individuals, bringing the length of copyright in the US up to life
plus seventy years, and into line with the European copyright
law which was amended in 1995. After vigorous lobbying by the
Walt Disney Company (who was faced with losing its exclusive
copyright to Mickey Mouse in 2003), another twenty years was
added to the already existing seventy-five years of corporate
copyrights. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act also gave full
protection to work appearing on-line.

It was the summer of Stephen King. After his move in 1997 to
Simon & Schuster for a $2 million advance and nearly 50 per
cent of the profits, his big release for the year was the novel
Bag of Bones. It was about bestselling author Mike Noonan,
suffering from writer’s block following the unexpected death of
his wife and their unborn child, who found himself caught up in
a supernatural mystery centred around Dark Score Lake and a
town in the grip of a tyrannical millionaire. In America the book
had a first printing of 1,360,000 copies from Scribner, backed by
a $1 million promotional budget.

Despite his phenomenal popularity on both sides of the
Atlantic, the author had not appeared at a public event in
Britain for nearly fifteen years. To coincide with the publication
of the new book, King visited London in mid-August for a rare
promotional tour. Bottles of a special “King Lager” were
available during the UK launch party, produced especially for
the event by a London micro-brewery, and a commemorative
signed edition of Bag of Bones, limited to just 2,000 copies,
went on sale at London’s Royal Festival Hall when King was
interviewed by novelist and broadcaster Muriel Gray, read from
his work, and answered questions in front of a capacity
audience.

Books Etc. in association with Hodder & Stoughton gave
away a free trade paperback omnibus to coincide with the
publication of Bag of Bones. Only available from stores in the
London area, King etc. included a brief message from the author
plus extracts from twelve of his novels.

Just in time for Christmas, Donald M. Grant, Publisher, re-
released the first three books in King’s Dark Tower series,
packaged together at a suggested retail price of $110. This