Black Seas of Infinity: The Best of H. P. Lovecraftwas a collection of nineteen stories and three non-fiction pieces from the Science Fiction Book Club, edited by SFBC editor Andrew Wheeler.
Edited by S. T. Joshi, The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories was the second collection of H. P. Lovecraft’s fiction published as part of the prestigious Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics series. With David E. Schultz, Joshi also edited and annotated HPL’s The Shadow Out of Time, a trade paperback from Hippocampus Press that contained the restored text of the original manuscript (discovered in 1995), along with an early draft and notes.
The ubiquitous Mr Joshi also edited and introduced The Mark of the Beast and Other Horror Tales by Rudyard Kipling, a collection of seventeen stories from Dover, and The Three Impostors and Other Stories, the first volume of The Best Weird Tales of Arthur Machen from Chaosium. Along with three other classic stories, this trade paperback also included the complete text of Machen’s 1895 linked novel.
The Conan Chronicles Volume II: The Hour of the Dragon was the second omnibus volume in Gollancz’s Fantasy Master-works series collecting Robert E. Howard’s eight remaining Conan stories (including the title novel), edited with an afterword by Stephen Jones.
Richard Matheson’s The Incredible Shrinking Man was a reissue of the omnibus from Tor containing the eponymous short novel and nine classic short stories.
R. L. Stine’s young-adult series The Nightmare Room continued with They Call Me Creature, The Howler, Shadow Girl and Camp Nowhere, some of which may have been written by George Sheanshang.
A famous YA horror writer apparently inspired a school-based mystery in The Mysterious Matter of I. M. Fine by Diane Stanley.
Murder victims were found mysteriously incinerated in Burning Bones by Christopher Golden and Rick Hautala, seventh in the ‘Jenna Blake’ young-adult mystery/horror series.
Golden’s own Prowlers, Prowlers: Laws of Nature and Prowlers: Predator and Prey launched a new series about a group of teenagers investigating reports of werewolves.
Tartabull’s Throw was a time-travel novel about werewolf detective Cyrus Nygerski and the third in the series by Henry Garfield after the adult books Moondog and Room 13.
Dr Franklin’s Island by Ann Halam (aka Gwyneth Jones) involved a group of teenage plane-crash survivors who were genetically altered into shapeshifters. A giant bat attacked researchers in the Amazon in Paul Zindel’s Night of the Bat.
In Pete Johnson’s The Frighteners a new girl in school was befriended by a strange boy whose drawings had the power to call up the eponymous supernatural creatures. Dark Things II: Journey Into Tomorrow by Joséph F. Brown once again featured Jarrod, who had the ability to make what he imagined real.
Musician Chris Wooding’s The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray was a gaslight romance set in Victorian London and inspired by Gormenghast and H. P. Lovecraft.
Margaret Mahy’s The Riddle of the Frozen Phantom was ‘A Vanessa Hamilton Book’. In Eva Ibbotson’s comedic Dial-a-Ghost, the eponymous agency mixed up its hauntings, and a teenager believed that ghostly phenomena may have had something to do with the arrest of his father in Nick Manns’s Operating Codes.
A girl who didn’t realize she was dead looked after the children living in her house in The Ghost Sitter by Peni R. Griffin, while a young boy encountered a Civil War phantom in Ghost Soldier by Elaine Alphin. My Brother’s Ghost was a novelette by Allan Ahlberg.
A girl’s dreams seemed to hold the answer to her parents’ disappearance in Joséph Bruchac’s Skeleton Man, and a young girl attempted to help her missing friend in Jonathan Stroud’s The Leap.
Vampire Mountain was the fourth volume in The Saga of Darren Shan and the first in a three-part sequence. The character returned in Trials of Death. Eponymous schoolboy author Shan is a pseudonym for Darren O’Shaughnessy.
A young witch discovered that one of her classmates was a vampire in Amelia Atwater-Rhodes’s Shattered Mirror, while Witch Hill was a time-travel fantasy by Marcus Sedgwick. With the help of a strange sea captain, two children battled the Night Witches in Michael Molloy’s The Witch Trade.
Cate Tiernan’s Sweep 1: Book of Shadows, 2: The Coven, 3: Blood Witch, 4: Dark Magick, 5: Awakening, 6: Spellbound and 7: The Calling were the initial volumes in a packaged series about a teenager who discovered she was a witch.
Silver Raven Wolf’s Witches’ Night of Fear and Witches’ Key to Terror were the second and third volumes, respectively, in the Witches’ Chillers series of occult murder mysteries, from Llewellyn Publications.
Isobel Bird’s Circle of Three series about a trio of modern-day teenage witches included 1: So Mote it Be, 2: Merry Meet, 3: Second Sight, 4: What the Cards Said, 5: In the Dreaming, 6: Ring of Light, 7: Blue Moon, 8: The Five Paths, 9: Through the Veil, 10: Making the Saint, 11: The House of Winter and 12: Written in the Stars.
T*witches #1: The Power of Two by H. B. Gilmour and Randi Reisfeld was about twin sisters, separated at birth, who meet in a theme park and discover that they share strange powers. It was followed by 2: Building a Mystery and 3: Seeing is Deceiving from the same authors.
Australian Kim Wilkins’s Bloodlace was the first volume in a new young-adult psychic detective series featuring Gina Champion, who investigated a mystery based on a past murder set in a seaside suburb of Sydney.
Ninth Key and Darkest Hour by Jenny Carroll (aka Meggin Cabot) were two new titles in the ongoing series The Mediator, about a girl who talked to the dead.
From Headline Australia, Shades 1: Shadow Dance, 2: Night Beast, 3: Ancient Light and 4: Black Sun Rising was a young-adult horror adventure series by Robert Hood, about a group of teenagers trapped in a ghostlike existence who battled an invasion by creatures from the shadows.
Scholastic’s ‘Point Horror Unleashed’ continued with Celia Rees’s The Cunning Man, about the eponymous shipwrecker. Paul Stewart’s Fright Train involved a ride through Hell, and a young girl paid a high price for consulting The Bearwood Witch in Susan Price’s novel.
Hair Raiser by Graham Masterton and Fly-Blown by Philip Wooderson, the latter about intelligent mutated blowflies, both appeared as ‘Mutant Point Horror’ titles.
Decayed: 10 Years of Point Horror was an omnibus containing the novels Trick or Treat and April Fools by Richie Tankersley Cusick and Blood Sinister by Celia Rees.
Bruce Colville’s The Monsters of Morley Manor was significantly revised and expanded from its 1996 serialization.