It was estimated that Britain now spends $120 million on Halloween. Analysts say that the UK is fast catching up with America, where it costs the average family around $120.00 to buy Halloween accessories, in an industry that is worth nearly $9 billion a year. Although some critics decried the growing “Americanisation” of Halloween, in the UK it is the third most profitable event for retailers after Christmas and Easter, with the seven days before October 31st now the second busiest shopping week of the year.
In June, author J. K. Rowling was voted Britain’s greatest living writer in an online survey for The Book Magazine. She received almost three times as many votes as the second-placed author, Terry Pratchett. Also down the list were Phillip Pullman (#6), Iain Banks (#14), Alasdair Gray (#19), Neil Gaiman (joint #21), J.G. Ballard (joint #28), Peter Ackroyd (joint #28), Diana Wynne Jones (#36) and Michael Moorcock (#44).
By the end of 2006, Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Deadly Hallows was already topping the Amazon best-seller list, despite not being published for another six months. Not content with that, the “adult edition” of Rowling’s latest magical opus was firmly established in the #2 slot. However, that did not stop shares in Rowling’s British publisher, Bloomsbury, crashing after a shock profits warning that wiped £73 million off the company’s value. Bloomsbury blamed poor retail sales during the run-up to Christmas.
According to the American Library Association, Rowling’s Harry Potter series topped the list of the “most-challenged” books in the 21st century with the highest number of written complaints to US schools and libraries asking for them to be removed. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck only made #4 on that particular Top 10 of shame.
J. K. Rowling teamed up with fellow authors Stephen King and John Irving over August 1st and 2nd at New York City’s Radio City Music Hall for a benefit appearance in aid of The Haven Foundation and Doctors Without Borders. The trio read from their work and answered questions in front of the 6,000-strong audiences.
In Stephen King’s novel Cell, which the author dedicated to Richard Matheson and George Romero, people using their cell phones were turned into rampaging zombies by a mysterious electronic virus known as the Pulse. With 1.8 million copies in circulation in America, Scribner promoted the book with downloadable ringtones featuring King’s voice and a mass text-messaging campaign. The first two chapters were excerpted in the January 27th issue of Entertainment Weekly, and when the book was released in the UK in February, The Times newspaper included an extract from the novel in the format of a newsprint supplement.
King’s second novel of the year, Lisey’s Story, explored many of the author’s familiar themes as widow Lisey Landon discovered that she may have been receiving messages from her murdered author husband while strangers attempted to force her to hand over his papers. The novel debuted at #1 in the US and, for the first time in a decade, King made a promotional visit to the UK in November to promote the book.
In his occasional “The Pop of King” column in Entertainment Weekly, King discussed such diverse subjects as network morning TV, the Oscars, United 93, Britney Spears, dieting, HBO’s The Wire and audio books. The author also listed Dispatch as one of the Top 10 Books of 2006 and described its author Bentley Little as “the horror poet of ordinary things”.
Little’s The Burning was an original mass-market novel about four disparate people across American whose lives converged in a series of ever weirder supernatural manifestations.
A landscape gardener set out to rescue his kidnapped wife and learn about his own dysfunctional past in The Husband, a psychological thriller by Dean Koontz. Also from Koontz, Brother Odd was the third in the “Odd Thomas” series with an initial US print-run of 650,000 copies.
James Herbert’s The Secret of Crickley Hall was a haunted house tale about a couple who moved into a remote building after the strange disappearance of their young son.
With a first printing of 1.5 million copies from Bantam, Thomas Harris’ lazy prequel Hannibal Rising took the reader back to Hannibal Lecter’s roots as a war orphan in Eastern Europe. The book was written simultaneously with the screenplay for the 2007 film version.
Farewell Summer, Ray Bradbury’s long-awaited sequel to Dandelion Wine, was once again set in Green Town, Illinois, during an idyllic summer that refused to end. Much of the book had been part of the earlier title’s original manuscript.
The Southern Gothic Candles Burning, about a strange girl with acute hearing and a supernatural family mystery, was begun by Michael McDowell before his untimely death in 1999 and completed by Tabitha King.
When an ancient Egyptian tomb went on display in New York, people started eviscerating each other and only framed FBI agent Aloysius Pendergast could solve the mystery in The Book of the Dead by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child.
Robin Cook’s latest medical thriller, Crisis, featured Dr Laurie Montgomery and Dr Jack Stapleton investigating the dangers of “concierge medicine”.
Parish vicar Merrily Watkins aided her daughter’s investigation of the spirit of a dead drug-dealer and help protect the local ley lines in The Remains of an Altar by Phil Rickman, while Caitlín R. Kiernan’s Daughter of Hounds involved a strange, yellow-eyed child and a woman who worked for a race of subterranean creatures.
A new communicator with the dead confronted invading aliens in Brian Lumley’s Necroscope: The Touch, and a number of broken objects found in a summer house exerted a strange influence in John Saul’s In the Dark of the Night.
After coming out of a period of writer’s block, Shaun Hutson’s latest was titled Dying Words and involved a contemporary murder mystery linked with a 13th-century philosopher reputed to have travelled to Hell.
The first volume in the “Sissy Sawyer” series, Graham Masterton’s Touchy and Feely was about a fortune-teller with psychic powers. Cowboys for Christ was Robin Hardy’s sequel-of-sorts to The Wicker Man, set in another pagan Scottish community.
The UK’s Headline imprint reissued the late Richard Laymon’s novels in “Richard Laymon Collection” omnibus paperback editions, with The Beast House Trilogy, The Woods Are Dark/Out Are the Lights, Beware!/Dark Mountain, Flesh/Resurrection Dreams, Funland/The Stake, Tell Us/One Rainy Night, Night Show/Allhallows Eve and Alarums/Blood Games.
A new independent paperback imprint, Abaddon Books, was launched in Britain in August 2006. Simon Spurrier’s The Culled was the first volume in “The Afterblight Chronicles”. set in a world ravaged by a biological apocalypse, while Sniper Elite: Spear of Destiny by Jaspre Bark was inspired by the World War II video game. The “Tombs of the Dead” series was devoted to zombie fiction and kicked off with Matthew Sprange’s Death Hulk, an historical nautical adventure involving a warship crewed by the walking dead.