Nolan on Bradbury, edited by S. T. Joshi (Hippocampus Press), provides an entertaining personal perspective on the late Ray Bradbury by his friend of sixty years, William F. Nolan. Included are twenty articles published between 1952 and 2013, eight stories by Nolan that were influenced by Bradbury, and several tributes to Bradbury.
H. P. Lovecraft in the Merrimack Valley by David Goudsward (Hippocampus Press) traces Lovecraft’s visits to coastal Massachusetts and New Hampshire from the 1920s on, analyzing the impact of those visits on his fiction. H. P. Lovecraft: Art, Artifact, and Reality by Steve J. Mariconda (Hippocampus Press) collects almost thirty years of articles and criticism about Lovecraft’s prose style, the literary sources of some of his work and how the Cthulhu Mythos developed as Lovecraft responded to the reactions of his readers and other writers to the tales as they were published.
Fear and Learning: Essays on the Pedagogy of Horror, edited by Aalya Ahmad and Sean Moreland (McFarland), collects new essays about the teaching of horror. These can be read and enjoyed by non-academics.
The Modern Literary Werewolf: A Critical Study of the Mutable Motif by Brent A. Stypczynski (McFarland) considers the treatment of werewolves in fiction by Jack Williamson, J. K. Rowling, Charlaine Harris, Charles deLint, and other writers.
Fractured Spirits: Hauntings at the Peoria State Hospital by Sylvia Shults (Dark Continents Publishing) is a historical overview of one of the premiere mental health facilities of the first half of the twentieth century. It was considered a model for the care of the mentally ill. This is an entertaining combination of nonfiction and fiction-history and ghostly reports.
Who Was Dracula?: Bram Stoker’s Trail of Blood by Jim Steinmeyer (Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin) explores Bram Stoker’s life for clues to the inspiration for one of the greatest fictional characters, going beyond the usual.
The Horror Show Guide: The Ultimate Frightfest of Movies by Mike Mayo (Visible Ink) features mini-reviews of over one thousand horror movies. There’s also an appendix of credits for each movie.
There are now three UK publishers regularly bringing out single author chapbook. This Is Horror published an excellent novelette by Pat Cadigan titled Chalk about the relationship between two girls who chafe against the restrictions of their parents. Also, Joseph D’Lacey’s Roadkill is a sf/ horror story taking place over a period of one hundred seconds as a man races a machine that’s fused with his body.
Nicholas Royle’s Nightjar Press continues its run of high quality horror with Elizabeth Stott’s creepy tale of a man, a woman, and a manikin in Touch Me with Your Cold, Hard Fingers; a weird, mysterious story called Getting Out There by M. John Harrison; and The Jungle, a weird tale by Conrad Williams.
Spectral Press’s Simon Marshall-Jones presented four chapbooks in 2013: Terry Grimwood’s Soul Masque, an effective dark fantasy about the war between Heaven and Hell and the humans caught up in the battle; Whitstable, a marvelous novella by Stephen Volk using the late Peter Cushing who, while in mourning for his beloved wife, attempts to help a young boy in need of a hero. A moving and apt homage to a movie legend, Creakers by Paul Kane is a haunting tale about a man who returns to his childhood home upon his mother’s death in order to prepare it for sale; Still Life by Tim Lebbon is a chilling sf/horror story about mysterious alien invaders who keep villages under their sway by giving a few turncoats special powers.
Milton’s Children by Jason V. Brock (Bad Moon Books) is an homage to King Kong and other lost world fictions, in which a crew of explorer-scientists end up on a mysterious island on which everything living is out to kill them.
Waiting for Mister Cool by Gerard Houarner (Crossroads Press) features the author’s ongoing character, Max, an assassin with an internal demon that when let loose destroys anyone around in graphically violent ways. In this novella, Max is sent by the US government to break up a cult.
The Rolling Darkness Revue 2013: The Imposter’s Monocle by Peter Atkins and Glen Hirshberg (Earthling Publications) is the chapbook created for the two authors’ annual autumn reading series. This year there is a playlet and three excellent stories by the authors. The wonderful cover art and design is by Deena Warner.
Astoria by S. P. Miskowski (Omnium Gathering) is about a woman who flees her hometown after a tragedy only to discover it’s not that easy to escape her past.
The Madman of Toserglope by Louis Marvick (Les Éditions de L’Oubli) is a beautiful oblong hardcover artifact of a book. A man visits a town in Saxony to research the life and the disappearance of a pianist possessed of an extra thumb. A strange tale filled with paranoia.
The Gist by Michael Marshall Smith (Subterranean Press) is a marvelous experiment in addition to an absorbing story. Smith wrote the story about a man hired by a dealer in old and lost books to extract the meaning of one such item. The story was then translated into French by Benoît Domis and re-translated from the French back into English by Nicholas Royle. Not a reader of French, I can’t judge how closely that version is to the original, but the slight alterations in the English translation are fascinating.
Love in the Time of Metal and Flesh by Jay Lake (Prime) takes place in San Francisco’s sexual underground and is about extreme body modification. Earthling Publications published two substantial hardcover chapbooks: The Bones of You by Gary McMahon is about a divorced father who moves next door to an abandoned house in the suburbs. The ghostly residue of the evil done in the house endangers both him and his daughter.
It Sustains by Mark Morris packs a wallop from its beginning, as a teen and his father leave their home, hoping to escape from personal trauma by moving away. Unfortunately, starting a new life is harder than they think. Morris ratchets up the suspense as the son begins to see unexplained images and becomes involved with some troublesome local boys.
Tyler’s Third Act by Mick Garris (CD) is number 12 in the signature book series of novella chapbooks. This one treads familiar territory by showing how awful the media is and how far both viewer and viewed are willing to go in the name of entertainment.
I Travel by Night by Robert McCammon (Subterranean Press) is about a Civil War soldier turned into a vampire during the Battle of Shiloh. For twenty-five years, he’s fought to retain his humanity and now he searches for the vampire who turned him to kill her and save himself.
Summer’s End by Lisa Morton (Journalstone) is about a woman hired as a consultant on an ancient text that might shed light on Samhain, the Celtic precursor to Halloween. But nasty things start happening around her.
Steampunk H. G. Wells illustrated by Zdenko Basic (RP Classics) is a beautifully illustrated omnibus of The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, and “The Country of the Blind.” The award-winning Croatian artist has illustrated a number of children’s classics.
The Resurrectionist by E. B. Hudspeth (Quirk) is a fascinating and imaginative fictional biography of a surgeon studying at The Philadelphia Academy of Medicine in the last 1870s who had some radical ideas about mythological creatures and their relationships to humanity, leading him to radical “creative” surgery exhibitions and finally to his mysterious disappearance. It’s also a compendium of the detailed anatomical illustrations the surgeon made of mythical creatures of those mythical creatures.