Paul Magrs’ comedic novel Never the Bride was set in a seaside town full of monsters.
Actor and scriptwriter Mark Gatiss’ The Devil in Amber was a Boy’s Own pastiche novel that involved the search by two-fisted hero Lucifer Box for the final fragment of an ancient papyrus that could raise Beelzebub. Tess Gerritsen’s The Mephisto Club was about a detective investigating a group who were attempting to prove that Satan walked the Earth.
Matthew Pearl’s The Poe Shadow dealt with the mystery of Edgar Allan Poe’s lost final hours before his death in 1849. Meanwhile, Louis Bayard’s thriller The Pale Blue Eye explored Poe’s life as a cadet at West Point in the 1830s.
A Shot in the Dark, from Hesperus Press’ classy Classics series, collected fifteen stories by “Saki” (H. H. Munro), along with a Foreword by Jeremy Dyson and an historical Introduction by Adam Newell.
From Strider Nolan Media, the first volume of Horror’s Classic Masters Remastered edited by Kurt S. Michaels featured twenty-one tales by W. W. Jacobs, William Hope Hodgson, M. R. James, Ambrose Bierce, Edgar Allan Poe, Bram Stoker, Robert Louis Stevenson, Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne and H. G. Wells, along with a very brief Foreword by Hollywood film producer J. C. Spink.
Dover Publications reissued Gaslit Nightmares edited by Hugh Lamb, first published in 1988, with sixteen selected stories by Barry Pain, Bernard Capes, Robert W. Chambers, Charles Dickens, Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman, Richard Marsh and Jerome K. Jerome, amongst others.
Tales to Freeze the Blood: More Great Ghost Stories, selected by R. Chetwynd-Hayes and Stephen Jones, contained a further twenty-four stories culled from The Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories. Authors included Ambrose Bierce, Sydney J. Bounds, Guy de Maupassant, F. Marion Crawford, J. Sheridan Le Fanu, M. R. James, Tony Richards, Steve Rasnic Tern and Chetwynd-Hayes himself.
Also edited by Jones, H. P. Lovecraft’s Book of the Supernaturaclass="underline" 20 Classic Tales of the Macabre Chosen by the Master of Horror Himself featured Washington Irving, Robert Louis Stevenson, Guy de Maupassant, Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce, Henry James, F. Marion Crawford, Rudyard Kipling, Lafcadio Hearn, Bram Stoker, H. R. Wakefield, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, William Hope Hodgson, Arthur Machen and many others, along with a Foreword on writing weird fiction by Lovecraft and original illustrations by Randy Broecker.
The Complete Chronicles of Conan: Centenary Edition collected all Robert E. Howard’s stories about the mighty barbarian in a single, leather-bound hardcover. Edited with an extensive Afterword by Stephen Jones, the more than 900-page volume was illustrated throughout by Les Edwards. Continuing the series originally started by Wandering Star, Kulclass="underline" Exile of Atlantis from Del Rey contained twelve stories and fragments by Howard, all taken from the author’s original manuscripts. The trade paperback was illustrated by Justin Sweet, who also supplied the Foreword.
September 13th was designated “Roald Dahl Day” for children in the UK. It would have been the author’s 90th birthday.
Lemony Snicket (Daniel Handler) finally wrapped up his “Series of Unfortunate Events” after thirteen volumes with the aptly-titled The End, in which the Baudelaire siblings and evil Count Olaf encountered a group of white-robed islanders named after nautical literary figures.
Christopher Golden and Ford Lytle Gilmore’s The Hollow: Mischief was the third volume about teenagers living in a cursed town. It was followed by The Hollow: Enemies.
In Scott Westerfield’s Midnighters 3: Blue Moon, the final volume in the trilogy, the five members of the eponymous group had to prevent the secret hour spilling over into the real world.
Graham Joyce’s Do the Creepy Thing was about a teenage girl’s decision to live with a cursed bracelet. A boy who could talk to ghosts made contact with a missing cheerleader in Dead Connection by Charlie Price, and a group of college students tried to stop a demon that fed on emotions in Nina Kiriki Hoffman’s Spirits That Walk in Shadow.
Nancy Holder’s Pretty Little Devils was a young adult novel about a clique of girls, while cheerleaders found themselves being stalked at summer camp in Laura Kasischke’s Boy Heaven.
Dead teenagers were trapped in the eponymous world of Neal Shusterman’s Everlost, a boy kept receiving strange calls on his Hell Phone by William Sleator, and a monstrous dog terrorised a village for centuries in Janet Lee Carey’s The Beast of Noor.
Slawter and Bec were the third and forth books, respectively, in “The Demonata” series by Darren Shan (Darren O’Shaughnessy). A stand-alone novel, Koyasan, was written by Shan for World Book Day 2006.
A trio of Victorian teenagers discovered that a factory owner was reanimating the dead in Justin Richards’ The Death Collector, while the same author’s The Invisible Detective: Ghost Soldiers was the third in the series set in the 1930s. A ghost led a teenager back to the 1940 bombing on London in Edward Bloor’s London Calling.
Three children became lost in an attic of universe proportions in Garry Kilworth’s Attica, a teenager killed in a steamship tragedy returned as a ghost in T. K. Welsh’s The Unresolved, and David Levithan’s novella Marly’s Ghost was a contemporary Valentine’s Day retelling of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.
Mirroring their popularity amongst romance readers, vampire novels also continued to do well with the young adult audience.
The Last Days was a loose sequel to Scott Westerfield’s Peeps, set in a world ravaged by a vampire-parasite plague, while Vampirates: Tide of Terror was the second book in Justin Somper’s post-apocalyptic series.
Vampire Plagues: Outbreak and Vampire Plagues: Extermination were the latest titles in the series published under the byline “Sebastian Rook”. Vampire Beach: Bloodlust and Vampire Beach: Initiation were the first two volumes in a new YA series published by the pseudonymous “Alex Duval”.
A sixteen-year-old college student discovered that she was living with some odd housemates in Glass House, the first volume in “The Morganville Vampires” series by Rachel Caine (Roxanne Longstreet Conrad).
A popular girl at school was turned into a vampire in Serena Robar’s Braced2Bite and Fangs4Freaks, the first two books in a new series.
Teenage vampire twins wanted revenge on a girl’s undead boyfriend in Vampireville, the third in the series by Ellen Schreiber. A girl was accidentally bitten by her twin’s vampire boyfriend in Mari Mancusi’s Boys That Bite. The sequel, Stake That!, was about a vampire slayer who would rather be undead herself.
A teenager discovered vampires living amongst New York high society in Melissa de la Cruz’s Blue Bloods, New Moon was the second book in the trilogy by Stephanie Meyer, and mass-murderer Countess Bathory was the subject of Alisa M. Libby’s The Blood Confession.
Issued as a handsome-looking hardcover by Californian imprint Medusa Press, with a Foreword by publisher Frank Chigas, Left in the Dark: The Supernatural Tales of John Gordon collected a career-spanning thirty stories (one original) by the acclaimed British author. It was published in a limited edition of 450 copies and a deluxe signed edition of 50 copies.