Stephen Jones (Editor)

Narrators: Geoff Harding, Robby McNab, Steve Hodson + others


Lovers of bone-crunching visceral horrors and prose that pulses with inventive morbidity, beware: Jones's selection of 20 choice cuts from the previous year's fear fiction is more kindly predisposed to subtle stories informed by the genre's classic tradition. Some are period chillers, such as Paul McAuley's novella, "Dr. Pretorius and the Lost Temple," a well-told Victorian penny dreadful involving psychic detection, Roman remains, subterranean survivals and occult experiments to create life. Jay Russell's "Hides" features Robert Louis Stevenson in a tale of recrudescent horrors that linger in Donner's Pass. In "Ill Met by Daylight," Basil Copper pays tribute to the fiction of turn-of-the-century ghost story master M.R. James. Both China Mieville, in "Details," and Caitlin R. Kiernan, in "Nor the Demons Down Under the Sea," obliquely invoke the Cthulhu Mythos in stories that put a modern spin on Lovecraft's cosmic terrors. Neil Gaiman's "October in the Chair" is a delicate dark fantasy homage to Ray Bradbury's Halloween Gothic. Even stories that don't explicitly reference horror's hallowed icons show the impact of their lessons in tasteful restraint, among them Don Tumasonis's "The Wretched Thicket of Thorn," which conjures an awesome monster that's all the more frightening for never being shown directly. In his indispensable overview of horror in 2002, Jones speaks of "the diversity of taste and erudition that binds our community." This volume, like volumes past, exuberantly celebrates that diversity.