New Horror Books

[bendk]

And I like the title of this one.

[Brendan Moody]

I recently read Teeth: Vampire Tales, a YA vampire anthology edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. "Vampire" and "YA" may make you think Twilight, but fortunately there's no comparison. My review, which opens with a marginally-relevant Thomas Ligotti quote, is here.

[starrysothoth]

Quote Originally Posted by Brendan Moody

I recently read Teeth: Vampire Tales, a YA vampire anthology edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. "Vampire" and "YA" may make you think Twilight, but fortunately there's no comparison. My review, which opens with a marginally-relevant Thomas Ligotti quote, is here.

This sounds interesting. Vampires are back in popular culture, and in a big way thanks to the whole Twilight saga and other media.

I keep wondering if this will infuse the literary horror niche with a new wave of interested members. I'll give it a few more years before I draw any conclusions, since many of the Twilight fans are fairly young, and the journey into serious weird horror can be a lengthy one once the doorway is kicked down, usually by an author like Lovecraft, Poe, Machen, Le Fanu, etc.

[bendk]

This looks like a fun read. Great cover art too!





Synopsis

Imagine there was a supernatural chiller that Hammer Films never made. A grand epic produced at the studio’s peak, which played like a cross between the Dracula and Frankenstein films and Dr Terror’s House Of Horrors…
Four passengers meet on a train journey through Eastern Europe during the First World War, and face a mystery that must be solved if they are to survive. As the ‘Arkangel’ races through the war-torn countryside, they must find out:
What is in the casket that everyone is so afraid of?
What is the tragic secret of the veiled Red Countess who travels with them?
Why is their fellow passenger the army brigadier so feared by his own men?
And what exactly is the devilish secret of the Arkangel itself?

Bizarre creatures, satanic rites, terrified passengers and the romance of travelling by train, all in a classically styled horror novel.




And this one could be interesting. Massie, who has written a few good first person crazies, teams up with Alan M. Clark of The Pain Doctors infamy.






D.D. Murphry has a way with words—or is it that words have their way with him? Work the clues alongside this unlikely sleuth to reveal an underground cabal of letters, a conspiracy of meaning, right below the surface of the everyday world.
Murphry is both hero and villain, an unforgettable personality who will have you cringing while you laugh and rooting for his every misguided plan. This is a clever tale told with a dexterity that allows for a gritty, noir feel, insight into the frailty of the human mind and the ability to see the absurdity in it all.

[Freyasfire]

I am curious about this, even though I haven't read much Brian Hodge before, and still have one of his previous collections, Lies & Ugliness, still awaiting to be read on my shelves.



Table of Contents:
With Acknowledgments To Sun Tzu
If I Should Wake Before I Die
The Passion of the Beast
De Fortuna
The Firebrand Symphony
Brushed In Blackest Silence
Pull
An Ounce Of Prevention Is Worth A Pound Of Flesh
And They Will Come In The Hour of Our Greatest Need
Re: Your Application of 5/5
Where the Black Stars Fall
When the Silence Gets Too Loud
Guardian
Hate the Sinner, Love the Sin
A Good Dead Man Is Hard To Find
Our Turn Too Will One Day Come
When the Bough Doesn't Break

From the Cemetery Dance website:

Quote

Picking the Bones by Brian Hodge About the Book: Dying is easy. Living is hard. Step back, back into the world of 1996… "Dark fiction so numbing cold and cutting edge you better hold onto your ass with your free hand … There are no simple ‘entertainments' or cheap grabs for the throat to be found here. Hodge is deadly serious about presenting a world where the worst punishment is the mere fact that you are aware you will probably live to see another day." So wrote critic Stanley Wiater about Brian Hodge's renowned first short fiction collection, The Convulsion Factory. Three collections later, nothing has changed. Well … maybe one or two trifling entertainments. A couple of cheap grabs for some body part or another. But that's about it. There are still plenty of fates worse than death.

[njhorror]

I've read Brian Hodge's work and like it very much.

I'd preordered this at a time when I had to be very selective for financial reasons. You might want to read Lies and Ugliness first to see if he's your cup of tea.



That Fowler book looks great!

[bendk]

ICE CORES: essays on Lovecraft's novella At the Mountains of Madness.

With a new short story "The Floaters of the Barrens", being an immediate sequel to At the Mountains of Madness.

100 pages, 18,000 words. Well illustrated. A new 6" x 9" perfect-bound paperback.

CONTENTS:

'Antarktos' by H.P. Lovecraft (Sonnet XV of Fungi from Yuggoth).

"The Floaters of the Barrens" (new short story).

On the writing and early publication history of Mountains.

A survey of the literary precursors and prequels of Mountains.

A survey of the literary and media sequels to Mountains.

The current events of October 1929—Spring 1931, in relation to Lovecraft and his work.

On the visual inspirations for Mountains.

Aspects of the science in Lovecraft's Mountains.

"The white madness": some extracts from real-life accounts of madness and death on polar expeditions (nine pages).

Research bibliography (52 items of scholarly and research interest).

[Brendan Moody]

At the end of June from Obverse Books, Bite Sized Horror, a mini-anthology edited by Johnny Mains, and featuring stories by Mains, Paul Kane, Marie O'Regan, David A. Riley, Conrad Williams, and Reggie Oliver. I read an advance copy of this one, and thought it was pretty enjoyable.

[bendk]

Coming September 2011

Ia! Ia! Cthulhu Fhtagn!

First described by visionary author H. P. Lovecraft, the Cthulhu mythos encompass a pantheon of truly existential cosmic horror: Eldritch, uncaring, alien god-things, beyond mankind's deepest imaginings, drawing ever nearer, insatiably hungry, until one day, when the stars are right....

As that dread day, hinted at within the moldering pages of the fabled Necronomicon, draws nigh, tales of the Great Old Ones: Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, Hastur, Azathoth, Nyarlathotep, and the weird cults that worship them have cross-pollinated, drawing authors and other dreamers to imagine the strange dark aeons ahead, when the dead-but-dreaming gods return.

Now, intrepid anthologist Ross E. Lockhart has delved deep into the Cthulhu canon, selecting from myriad mind-wracking tomes the best sanity-shattering stories of cosmic terror. Featuring fiction by many of today's masters of the menacing, macabre, and monstrous, The Book of Cthulhu goes where no collection of Cthulhu mythos tales has before: to the very edge of madness... and beyond!

Do you dare open The Book of Cthulhu? Do you dare heed the call?

Table of Contents

Caitlin R. Kiernan - Andromeda among the Stones
Ramsey Campbell - The Tugging
Charles Stross - A Colder War
Bruce Sterling - The Unthinkable
Silvia Moreno-Garcia - Flash Frame
W. H. Pugmire - Some Buried Memory
Molly Tanzer - The Infernal History of the Ivybridge Twins
Michael Shea - Fat Face
Elizabeth Bear - Shoggoths in Bloom
T. E. D. Klein - Black Man With A Horn
David Drake - Than Curse the Darkness
Charles R. Saunders - Jeroboam Henley's Debt
Thomas Ligotti - Nethescurial
Kage Baker - Calamari Curls
Edward Morris - Jihad over Innsmouth
Cherie Priest - Bad Sushi
John Hornor Jacobs - The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife
Brian McNaughton - The Doom that Came to Innsmouth
Ann K. Schwader - Lost Stars
Steve Duffy - The Oram County Whoosit
Joe R. Lansdale - The Crawling Sky
Brian Lumley - The Fairground Horror
Tim Pratt - Cinderlands
Gene Wolfe - Lord of the Land
Joseph S. Pulver, Sr. - To Live and Die in Arkham
John Langan - The Shallows
Laird Barron - The Men from Porlock


Trade Paperback
978-1-59780-232-1
400 Pages - $15.99

[bendk]

I can't remember if these have been posted before or not. (My memory is shot)



Halloween edited by Paula Guran

Type: Trade Paperback
Pages: 576
Size: 6" X 9"
ISBN: 9781607012832
Publication Date: September 27, 2011
Price: $14.95


[This book is not yet published.]

Shivers and spirits...the mystical and macabre...our darkest fears and sweetest fantasies...the fun and frivolity of tricks, treats, festivities, and masquerades. Halloween is a holiday filled with both delight and dread, beloved by youngsters and adults alike. Celebrate the most magical season of the year with this sensational treasury of seasonal tales—spooky, suspenseful, terrifying, or teasing—harvested from a multitude of master storytellers.





Contributors in Alphabetical Order:

1. The October Game by Ray Bradbury
2. Tessellations by Gary Braunbeck
3. Memories by Peter Crowther
4. Universal Soldier by Charles de Lint
5. Auntie Elspeth's Halloween Story (or The Gourd, The Bad, And The Ugly) by Esther Friesner
6. Struwwelpeter by Glen Hirshberg
7. Pranks by Nina Kiriki Hoffman
8. By the Book by Nancy Holder
9. The Sticks by Charlee Jacob
10. Riding Bitch by K.W. Jeter
11. On the Reef by Caitlin R. Kiernan
12. Memories of el Dia de los Muertos by Nancy Kilpatrick
13. The Great Pumpkin Arrives at Last by Sarah Langan
14. On a Dark October by Joe R. Lansdale
15. Conversations in a Dead Language by Thomas Ligotti
16. Hallowe’en in a Suburb by H.P. Lovecraft (poem)
17. Pumpkin Night by Gary McMahon
18. The Halloween Man by William F. Nolan
19. Monsters by Stewart O’Nan
20. Three Doors by Norman Partridge
21. Ulalume by Edgar Allan Poe (poem)
22. Night Out by Tina Rath
23. Hornets by Al Sarrantonio
24. Tamlane by Sir Walter Scott (poem)
25. Mask Game by John Shirley
26. Pork Pie Hat by Peter Straub
27. Halloween Street by Steve Rasnic Tem
28. Tricks & Treats: One Night on Halloween Street by Steve Rasnic Tem
29. The November Game by F. Paul Wilson
30. Sugar Skulls by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

Southern Gods
by John Hornor Jacobs

This book has been getting good reviews on Amazon.

A chilling Southern Gothic thriller set in 1951 Arkansas and Tennessee, follows hired muscle Bull Ingram as he tries to track down Ramblin' John Hastur, a mysterious blues man whose dark music -- broadcast at ever-shifting frequencies by a phantom radio station --is said to make living men insane and dead men rise.