Mark Ramsden’s kinky characters Matt and Sasha became involved with animal-rights fanatics, a midwinter neo-Nazi festival and a satanic cult known as the Black Order in The Sacred Blood, the author’s S&M sequel to The Dungeonmaster’s Apprentice, also published by Serpent’s Tail.
Vampires were as popular as ever in 2001. An Interpol agent was on the trail of the undead Miriam Blaylock in The Last Vampire, Whitley Strieber’s long-awaited sequel to The Hunger.
Necroscope: Avengers was the third and final volume in Brian Lumley’s E-Branch trilogy, in which Ben Trask’s team of talented psychics, including necroscope Jake Cutter, pursued three powerful Wamphyri lords who had joined forces.
Narcissus in Chains was the tenth volume in Laurell K. Hamilton’s popular ‘Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter’ series, once again given a classy-looking hardcover release in America. This time a changed Anita had to call on both her rival vampire and werewolf lovers to search for a kinky were-leopard who had disappeared from the eponymous S&M club. An excerpt from the novel appeared in the paperback anthology of ‘paranormal romance’,Out of this World, which also included original novellas by J. D. Robb, Susan Krinard and Maggie Shayne.
A Feast in Exile was Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s latest novel of Saint-Germain, this time set in 15th-century India. Karen Taylor’s The Vampire Vivienne featured vampire Deidre Griffin and her ex-cop husband in the fifth in the ‘Vampire Legacy’ series, and P. D. Cacek’s Night Players was the second book featuring new vampire Allison Garrett.
Laws of the Blood: Companions was the third volume in Susan Sizemore’s paperback series. This time undead ‘Enforcer of Enforcers’ Istvan and his unwilling companion, Chicago homicide detective Selena Crawford, uncovered a more serious motive behind the murder of a vampire.
Mick Farren’s More Than Mortal was a follow-up to his novels The Time of Feasting and Darklost in the series of ‘Victor Renquist’ Lovecraftian/vampire thrillers.
Set in 1899 London, a doctor investigated a series of apparent vampire murders in Sam Siciliano’s Darkness. The London Vampire Panic was the sixth in the series by Michael Romkey, set in Victorian Europe, and P. N. Elrod’s Quincey Morris, Vampire was yet another sequel to Stoker’s Dracula.
Stephen Gresham’s In the Blood was a Southern Gothic about a cursed family of vampires. Clairvoyant cocktail waitress Sookie Stackhouse discovered that her new boyfriend was a bloodsucker suspected of murder in Charlaine Harris’s (aka Charlaine Harris Schulz) Southern Vampire Mystery Dead Until Dark.
Psychologist Meghann O’Neill encountered a vampire in Crimson Kiss by Trisha Baker, while James M. Thompson’s Night Blood featured a vampire doctor infected with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD).
A senior in high school who fell prey to the family curse of vampirism and a billionaire industrialist fighting his own battle with mortality confronted each other in Billie Sue Mosiman’s Red Moon Rising, packaged by Tekno Books.
A woman working in a health resort discovered that her employers were vampires in Tamara Thorne’s Candle Bay, and Australian author Stephen Dedman’s Shadows Bite was a martial-arts mystery set in Los Angeles involving vampires, demons and the Yakuza.
Bound in Blood was a gay erotic novel by David Thomas Lord about a nineteenth-century vampire in modern New York. Vampire Vow by Michael Schiefelbein was another gay vampire novel.
A book critic in Venice investigated vampires and werewolves in Shannon Drake’s Deep Midnight.
Alice Borchardt’s The Wolf King was the third volume in the historical werewolf series by Anne Rice’s sister, while a man in Saxon times became involved with a trio of shapechanging siblings in Susan Price’s The Wolf-Sisters.
Gillian Bradshaw’s medieval thriller The Wolf Hunt contained elements of lycanthropy and was based on ‘Lai de Bisclavret’ by Marie de France. Bitten was a debut novel by Kelly Armstrong, about the first female werewolf.
In Sarah A. Hoyt’s debut novel, Ill Met by Moonlight, a young Will Shakespeare was drawn into a realm of elves and faeries in pursuit of his missing family. The book’s prologue and first two chapters were self-published as a chapbook sampler.
A vengeful spirit haunted a modern housing development in Wringland by newcomer Sally Spedding. The Music of Razors marked the debut horror novel of Cameron Rogers (aka Penguin Australia children’s editor Dmetri Kakmi). It was a coming-of-age story involving a fallen angel and the tools it fashioned from bones.
In Jonathan Carroll’s The Wooden Sea, the seventeen-year-old self of middle-aged Chief of Police Frannie McCabe turned up and told him that he had lived his life all wrong, just before he got a glimpse of the day he was going to die.
Jeremy Dronfield’s The Alchemist’s Apprentice was about the eponymous bestselling novel written by Madagascar Rhodes, which nobody appears to remember having read.
Jay Russell’s offbeat detective Marty Burns returned in Greed & Stuff, a novel set in the Los Angeles TV industry and involving a classic noir film, The Devil on Sunday.
Steve Aylett’s comedic Only an Alligator was the first book set in the demonic city of Accomplice, situated one step to the left of reality.
A new trade paperback edition of Bram Stoker’s Dracula from Random House included an introduction by Peter Straub, plus various review extracts and a reading guide.
The Library of Classic Horror was an instant-remainder hardcover featuring the complete novels Dracula, Frankenstein, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and The Island of Dr Moreau along with two other stories by Robert Louis Stevenson and six by Edgar Allan Poe.
Published as a slightly updated trade paperback in Dover’s Thrift Editions series, A Bottomless Grave and Other Victorian Tales of Terror was a welcome reprint of editor Hugh Lamb’s superior 1977 anthology Victorian Nightmares, featuring twenty-one stories by Ambrose Bierce, Guy de Maupassant, Richard Marsh, Erckmann-Chatrian, Guy Boothby and others.
The Collected Ghost Stories of E. F. Benson was a new edition of the 1992 volume edited by Richard Dalby that contained fifty-four tales, an essay by the author, and an introduction by Joan Aiken.
From Dutch publisher Coppens & Frenks, The House on the Borderland was a limited edition of William Hope Hodgson’s 1908 novel, with a new introduction by Brian Stableford.
La Bas: A Journey Into the Self was a new translation of the 1891 literary black-magic novel by French ‘décadent’ writer Joris-Karl Huysmans, published by Dedalus with an introduction by Brendan King and an afterword and chronology by Robert Irwin. From the same imprint, Geoffrey Farrington’s The Revenants was a revised edition of the author’s 1983 vampire novel with a new introduction by Kim Newman.