Shadows & Moonshine was a new collection of thirteen stories by Joan Aiken, while Vivian Vande Velde’s Being Dead collected seven stories about ghosts and the undead.
R. L. Stine’s The Haunting Hour featured ten stories, each illustrated by a different artist, including John Jude Palencar and Art Spiegelman. Spiegelman and Franqoise Mouly edited Little Lit: Strange Stories for Strange Kids, a graphic anthology of sixteen stories by such authors as Jules Feiffer and Maurice Sendak.
Brian Lumley’s The Whisperer and Other Voices collected eight reprint stories, plus the short Cthulhu Mythos novel ‘The Return of the Deep Ones’ and a new introduction by the author.
Published in trade paperback by Serpent’s Tail, The Devil in Me was the latest collection from Christopher Fowler, containing twelve stories and a new foreword by the author. From the same imprint came a welcome reissue of Fowler’s 1998 collection Personal Demons in a matching edition.
M. John Harrison’s Travel Arrangements collected fourteen stories, and Ed Gorman’s The Dark Fantastic collected seventeen stories with notes by the author and an introduction by Bentley Little.
Faithless: Tales of Transgression collected twenty-one stories (one original) by Joyce Carol Oates. Meanwhile, the author’s psychological Gothic novella Beasts was published as a trade paperback by Carroll & Graf.
Harper Collins produced a special sampler for the UK edition of Peter Straub’s collection Magic Terror containing the story ‘The Ghost Village’.
The second of Dorchester Publishing’s hardcover Leisure titles, The Museum of Horrors was presented by The Horror Writers Association. Although perhaps not up to the quality of some of editor Dennis Etchison’s previous compilations, it was still one of the best anthologies of the year. Even though most of the eighteen original stories did not appear to fit into the loose ‘theme’ of the book, and a few were surprisingly similar to each other, it still boasted some memorable contributions from Joyce Carol Oates, Ramsey Campbell, Peter Atkins, Tom Piccirilli, Joel Lane, Conrad Williams, Charles L. Grant, Lisa Morton, S. P. Somtow and a stunning but annoyingly incomplete tale by Peter Straub. It was all the more a shame that such a fine volume and its editor became embroiled in a totally unnecessary controversy publicized through the HWA itself.
Although subtitled Extreme Visions of Speculative Fiction, editor Al Sarrantonio’s massive new anthology Redshift actually contained some excellent dark fantasy stories amongst its thirty all-new contributions by Dan Simmons, Ursula K. Le Guin, Michael Moorcock, Thomas M. Disch, Stephen Baxter, David Morrell, Elizabeth Hand, Michael Marshall Smith, Gene Wolfe and the editor himself (who was also responsible for yet another self-congratulatory introduction).
Edited by P. N. Elrod (and probably an uncredited Martin H. Greenberg), Dracula in London contained sixteen stories about the vampire count living in some very peculiar interpretations of the city by Tanya Huff, Fred Saberhagen, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Nancy Kilpatrick and others, including a collaboration between the editor and actor Nigel Bennett.
Vampires: Encounters with the Undead was a huge, 600-page hardcover from Black Dog & c Leventhal Publishers, edited and with commentary by the erudite David J. Skal. Along with classic short stories by J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Bram Stoker, M. R. James, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Bloch, Fritz Leiber, Richard Matheson, David J. Schow, Kim Newman, Caitlin R. Kiernan and others, this value-for-money volume also contained articles, essays and extracts, all profusely illustrated with film stills and artwork.
Lords of Night: Tales of Vampire Love contained three romance novellas by Janice Bennett, Sara Blayne and Monique Ellis.
Hammer horror star Ingrid Pitt graced the cover and contributed the introduction and an original story to The Mammoth Book of Vampire Stories By Women, an anthology of thirty-three stories (fourteen original) and one poem edited by Stephen Jones with illustrations by Randy Broecker. Other contributors included Anne Rice, Poppy Z. Brite, Tanith Lee, Lisa Tuttle, Connie Willis and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro.
Mike Ashley’s excellent The Mammoth Book of Fantasy reprinted twenty-three classic tales by Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Fritz Leiber, Tanith Lee, Harlan Ellison, A. Merritt and many others.
Published in hardcover by The British Library, Meddling with Ghosts: Stories in the Tradition of M. R. James was a handsome reprint anthology selected and introduced by Ramsey Campbell. Among the sixteen authors included were J. Sheridan Le Fanu, F. Marion Crawford, Sabine Baring-Gould, Fritz Leiber, L. T. C. Rolt, A. N. L. Munby, T. E. D. Klein, Sheila Hodgson, Terry Lamsley and Campbell himself. Rosemary Pardoe also contributed a useful guide to writers who followed in James’s literary footsteps.
Edited by Don Hutchinson, Wild Things Live There: The Best of Northern Frights reprinted sixteen stories from the Canadian anthology series by Nancy Kilpatrick, Nalo Hopkins and others.
Into the Mummy’s Tomb, edited with a long introduction by John Richard Stephens, contained fifteen reprint stories, two excerpts and an abridgement by such authors as Louisa May Alcott, Tennessee Williams, H. P. Lovecraft, Agatha Christie, Mark Twain, Sir H. Rider Haggard, Edgar Allan Poe, Ray Bradbury, Rudyard Kipling, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Elizabeth Peters, Sax Rohmer, Anne Rice and Bram Stoker.
Edited by Marvin Kaye, The Ultimate Halloween contained seventeen stories (five reprints) about the horror holiday by Esther Friesner, Ron Goulart and others. Isaac Asimov’s Halloween was edited by Gardner Dozois and Sheila Williams and reprinted ten stories from Asimov’s Science Fiction. Andy Duncan, Lawrence Watt-Evans, Howard Waldrop, Steven Utley and Ian R. MacLeod were amongst the authors included.
Winning Tales of the Supernatural edited by Joyce Booth O’Brien contained eleven ‘prize-winning’ stories, while Nor of Human edited by Geoffrey Maloney was an Australian anthology published by the Canberra SF Guild writers’ group.
Published in trade paperback by Polygon, Damage Land, an anthology of New Scottish Gothic Fiction edited and introduced by Alan Bissett, contained twenty stories (six reprints) and a bibliography.
The busy Martin H. Greenberg teamed up with John Heifers to edit the all-original Villains Victorious and The Mutant Files. The former contained fourteen stories of evil triumphant, the latter sixteen tales about the next step in human evolution. The contributors (many of whom were featured in both books) included Charles de Lint, Tanya Huff, Alan Dean Foster, Janet Berliner, David Bischoff, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Ed Gorman, Peter Crowther and Peter Tremayne (with a new Sherlock Holmes story).
Greenberg was joined by Brittany A. Koren for Single White Vampire Seeks Same, an anthology of twelve stories based on paranormal personal ads from such familiar names as Rusch, Crowther, Hoffman, de Lint and Huff (a ‘Henry Fitzroy’ vampire tale). With Jean Rabe, Greenberg also edited Historical Hauntings, featuring eighteen original stories by Andre Norton, Bruce Holland Rogers and others.