Dorchester Publishing launched its Leisure hardcover line with Douglas Clegg’s The Infinte, yet another haunted-house novel involving a ghost hunter and psychic investigators.
Broadcaster Muriel Gray’s third horror novel, The Ancient, came with a recommendation from Stephen King. It involved the raising of a demon amongst the piles of garbage in Lima and a supertanker loaded with terrifying trash.
The Fury and the Terror was John Farris’s long-awaited sequel to The Fury, involving a young psychic and a government mind-control conspiracy. It was ‘The Most Dangerous Game’ time again in John Saul’s The Manhattan Hunt Club, as a secret society hunted human prey in the tunnels beneath New York.
Graham Joyce’s impressive Smoking Poppy was set in a spirit-haunted Thailand and involved a father’s search for his wayward daughter. Whole Wide World by Paul McAuley was a murder mystery and conspiracy thriller set in a future London monitored by a computer surveillance system.
In Simon R. Green’s Drinking Midnight Wine, bookseller Toby Dexter followed a mysterious woman through a door in a wall that was not there into a world of magic and monsters. Green’s 1994 novel Shadows Fall, about the eponymous supernatural haven threatened by a serial killer, received a welcome paperback reissue from Gollancz.
Robin Cook’s Shock was another medical thriller from the author of Coma.
Alan Dean Foster’s Interlopers involved archaeologist Cody Westcott investigating the cause of random acts of evil, while a man learned he was to be possessed by demons in Richard Calder’s Impakto.
A Crown of Lights and The Cure of Souls were the third and fourth volumes, respectively, in Phil Rickman’s series featuring female exorcist Merrily Watkins.
The prolific Christopher Golden’sStraight on ‘Til Morning was a reworking of the Peter Pan story, as a teenager’s girlfriend was stolen away to a nightmare Neverland. An illustrated version was also available from CD Publishing, limited to 1,000 signed copies and a lettered edition.
Past the Size of Dreaming was Nina Kiriki Hoffman’s sequel to A Red Heart of Memories, about a haunted house in a small Oregon town, and Evil Whispers by Owl Goingback was set in Florida’s backwater lagoons.
The Hauntings of Hood Canal by Jack Cady took place along the eponymous waterway in Washington State and involved the disappearance of a number of vehicles into its murky depths.
The Leisure imprint continued to churn out attractive-looking paperbacks every month: The Lost by Jack Ketchum (aka Dallas Mayr) and Wire Mesh Mothers by Elizabeth Massie were both non-supernatural horror novels, as was Mary Ann Mitchell’s Ambrosial Flesh, about a devout cannibal.
Gerald Houarner’s The Beast That Was Max featured a demon-possessed assassin, while The Evil Returns by veteran Hugh B. Cave involved voodoo in Haiti. Tom Piccirilli’s A Lower Deep featured a satanic coven, and a man discovered that his memories were not his own in Affinty by J. N. Williamson.
A living edifice built over a murder site was the location for House of Pain by Sephra Giron, and a writer found evil on his doorstep in Donald K. Beman’s Dead Love, also from Leisure.
Jeffrey E. Barlough’s The House in High Wood, which mixed Dickens, Lovecraft and Poe in its tale of a 19th century haunted manor, was the second volume in the ‘Western Lights’ series about an alternate England. In Gregory Maguire’s ghost story Lost, a writer searching for her cousin in London invoked the spirits of Jack the Ripper and Dickens’s Scrooge.
Sherlock Holmes and the Terror Out of Time was a Lovecraftian novella featuring Conan Doyle’s consulting detective and H. G. Wells’s Professor Challenger, from Gryphon Books. Randall Silvis’s On Night’s Shore was a ‘Thomas Dunne’ mystery featuring Edgar Allan Poe.
A couple moved into a bizarre community in Bentley Little’s The Association, and a woman had a premonition about her own death in Fear Itself by Barrett Schumacher.
A contemporary murder was linked to ancient Egyptian magic in The Alchemist by Donna Byrd, while an archaeological team in the Amazon jungle discovered The Altar Stone by Robert Hackman.
Bone Walker was the third volume in Kathleen O’Neal Gear and W. Michael Gear’s anthropological ‘Anasazi Mysteries’, and genetically engineered chimpanzees went wild in the same authors’ Dark Inheritance. There were more biomedical experiments gone awry in Alan Nayes’s Gargoyles.
A dark god was reborn in Los Angeles in D. A. Stern’s Black Dawn, and the dead were reborn on an alternate Earth in Eugene Byrne’s Things Unborn.
The restoration of a haunted house in Maine awakened past nightmares in The White Room by A. J. Matthews (aka Rick Hautala). Will Kingdom’s second suspense novel, Mean Spirit, involved four people trapped in a Victorian neo-Gothic castle in the Malvern Hills, menaced by a psychopathic killer and voices from beyond the grave.
Tananarive Due’s The Living Blood was a sequel to the author’s My Soul to Keep and involved a race of African immortals, and an immortal killer menaced a small mountain community in Tamara Thome’s Eternity.
The Burning Times by Jeanne Kalogridis (aka J. M. Dillard) was an historical horror novel about witchcraft and the Inquisition. A man’s girlfriend disappeared in front of his eyes in T. J. MacGregor’sVanished, and the owner of a successful construction business discovered that his past was about to come back and haunt him in Lucy Taylor’s Nailed.
An executed serial killer returned to possess a married woman on the brink of death in the paperback original Ghost Killer by Scott Chandler (aka Chandler Scott McMillin).
Scottish writer Anne Perry’sCome Armageddon was a sequel to Tathea and continued the battle between Good and Evil as the great and final war approached. Australian author Kim Wilkins’s Angel of Ruin was based on Milton’s Paradise Lost, and featured that writer’s daughters and their collective relationships with a dark angel they had conjured up.
The Family: Special Effects Book 1 by Kevin McCarthy and David Silva was the first volume in a new series packaged by Tekno Books for DAW. Full Moon Bloody Moon was the second in the horror/mystery series by Lee Driver (aka Sandra D. Tooley) featuring hero Chase Dagger.
Fool Moon and Grave Peril were the second and third books, respectively, in Jim Butcher’s series ‘The Dresden Files’ as Chicago’s only professional wizard and paranormal investigator discovered that werewolves turned up in different guises and something was stirring up the city’s ghosts.