Eternal Lovecraft: The Persistence of HPL In Popular Culture was edited by Jim Turner and published under his Golden Gryphon Press imprint. Described as ex-Arkham House editor Turner’s farewell to H. P. Lovecraft, the retrospective anthology was split into three sections that contained eighteen reprints from Stephen King, Fritz Leiber, Nancy A. Collins, T. E. D. Klein and Harlan Ellison, amongst others.
Meanwhile, Arkham House itself returned to its dark fantasy roots with Flowers from the Moon and Other Lunacies by the late Robert Bloch, which contained twenty previously uncollected stories, mostly reprinted from Weird Tales and Strange Tales, edited and with an introduction by Robert M. Price. Also from Arkham, Peter Cannon edited Lovecraft Remembered, a collection of sixty-five reminiscences and other pieces about HPL by Robert Bloch, August Derleth, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith and others, many reprinted from obscure sources.
Canada’s Battered Silicon Dispatch Box revived Arkham’s Mycroft & Moran imprint to publish In Lovecraft’s Shadow, which collected all twenty-three of August Derleth’s original Cthulhu Mythos stories, along with three poems (one original) and an essay, illustrated by Stephen E. Fabian. The same imprint also issued Derleth’s The Final Adventures of Solar Pons, an original collection of early unpublished Sherlockian detective stories, comprising a novel, six stories (including two collaborations with Mack Reynolds) and a number of vignettes, edited by Peter Ruber.
Published by Fedogan & Bremer, A Coven of Vampires: The Collected Vampire Stories of Brian Lumley collected thirteen stories and a new foreword by the author. From the same imprint came Adam Niswander’s The Sand Dwellers, a Lovecraftian Cthulhu Mythos novel set in the mountains of the American southwest. Both books were available in trade hardcovers plus 100-copy signed and limited editions.
From Britain’s Pumpkin Books cameGhosts and Grisly Things, a collection of twenty of Ramsey Campbell’s uncollected stories (one original) in simultaneous hardcover and trade paperback format. Pumpkin also published the first UK trade paperback and first world hardcover of Dennis Etchison’s macabre murder mystery Double Edge, plus Nancy Kilpatrick’s “Power of the Blood” vampire trilogy in uniform trade paperback editions, comprising the original novel Reborn, along with reprints of the first two volumes, Child of the Night and Near Death.
The debut volume from Britain’s Wandering Star imprint was a superbly designed and produced collection, The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane by Robert E. Howard. Profusely illustrated in colour and black and white by Gary Gianni, the slipcased hardcover was published in a signed edition of 1,050 copies, 100 publisher’s copies, and 50 copies bound in goatskin. The book was accompanied by a CD recording of three Solomon Kane poems read by Paul Blake and a portfolio of Gianni’s full-page plates. Bowen Designs Inc. also offered a cold-cast bronze sculpture based on Howard’s sword-wielding puritan, designed by Gianni and sculpted by Randy Bowen.
Gauntlet Press issued a 40th anniversary edition of Ray Bradbury’s classic collection The October Country with the original illustrations and unpublished sketches by Joe Mugnaini, an introduction by Dennis Etchison, an afterword by Robert R. McCammon, and a previously unpublished preface by Bradbury, originally written for the 1955 printing. It was limited to a 500-copy slipcased edition, signed by all the writers.
Also from Gauntlet, Richard Matheson’s 1978 novel What Dreams May Come included a new introduction by the author, an introduction by Matthew R. Bradley, and an afterword by Douglas E. Winter. It was published in a 500-copy signed and slipcased edition, while a deluxe edition contained an additional afterword by Richard Christian Matheson.
The younger Matheson also contributed an afterword to Gauntlet publisher Barry Hoffman’s second novel,Eyes of Prey, a self-published sequel to his dark crime novel Hungry Eyes, in which that book’s female protagonist tracked down a woman with her own murderous agenda.
The cleverly titled Are You Loathsome Tonight? was a new collection of twelve short stories by Poppy Z. Brite, published by Gauntlet. It included an odd introduction by Peter Straub, an afterword by Caitlin R. Kiernan, and several distinctive photo-illustrations by J. K. Potter (including some bizarre portraits of the author). The 2,000-copy limited edition was signed by all the writers.
Cemetery Dance Publications had another busy year with the launch of a new series of hardcover novellas featuring full-colour dustjackets, interior illustrations, full-cloth binding and acid-free paper. Each book was signed by the author in an edition of 450 numbered copies and twenty-six lettered copies (bound in leather and traycased). The first six titles were The Wild by Richard Laymon, Spree by Lucy Taylor, 411 by Ray Garton, Untitled by Jack Ketchum, An Untitled Halloween Classic by William F. Nolan and Lynch by Nancy A. Collins.
Also from CD came Laymon’s The Midnight Tour and a reprint of his 1986 novel, The Beast House, both sequels to The Cellar and the third and second volumes respectively in the “Beast House Chronicles”. Both volumes featured a new introduction and the author’s preferred text, and were available in 400-copy signed and numbered editions and $175 deluxe lettered editions.
The Best of Cemetery Dance edited by Richard Chizmar was a massive retrospective volume, available in both trade and limited hardcover editions, containing sixty stories by such well-known names as Stephen King (with the terrible “Chattery Teeth”), Richard Laymon, Ramsey Campbell, Jack Ketchum, Poppy Z. Brite, Thomas Tessier, Hugh B. Cave, Richard Christian Matheson, Joe R. Lansdale, Nancy Collins, Peter Crowther, Norman Partridge and many others, along with interviews with Dean Koontz and the editor.
With an introduction by Tim Powers, writers such as Poppy Z. Brite, Ramsey Campbell, Douglas Clegg, Peter Crowther, Robert Devereaux, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Nancy Holder, Jack Ketchum, Ed Lee, Elizabeth Massie, Thomas F. Monteleone, Yvonne Navarro, Norman Partridge, Lucy Taylor, Steve Rasnic Tem and Melanie Tem, and F. Paul Wilson were among those who contributed twenty-eight stories (two reprints) based around the tipped-in artwork of Alan M. Clark for Imagination Fully Dilated, co-edited by Clark and Elizabeth Engstrom. Cemetery Dance published a limited edition hardcover, signed by all the contributors, for $75. A deluxe leatherbound and slipcased edition with extra art was also available for $195.
Clark and Engstrom also teamed up for The Alchemy of Love, a collection of eight stories and pieces of art with an introduction by Jack Ketchum, which was released in a signed 500-copy hardcover edition by Oregon’s Triple Tree Publishing.
Like Cemetery Dance Publications, Subterranean Press also launched its own series of short novels in hardcover format with Norman Partridge’s Wildest Dreams. Plainly labelled “A Horror Novel” on the cover, it was a hard-boiled mystery in which psychic hit-man Clay Saunders was hired by tattooed villainess Circe Whistler to kill her father so she could gain control of his infamous Satanic cult in San Francisco. It was followed by Joe R. Lansdale’s The Boar, which was written fifteen years ago (as Git Back, Satan) and had remained previously unpublished. The young adult adventure involved a fifteen-year-old boy’s hunt for a monstrous boar, called Old Satan, in the Texas of the Great Depression. The books were available in, respectively, 500-copy and 750-copy signed and numbered editions and twenty-six lettered copies.