A follow-up to the previous year’s impressive electronic anthology, Brainbox II: Son of Brainbox, edited with an introduction by Steve Eller, featured contributions from eighteen writers, including Brett A. Savory, Charlee Jacob, Brian A. Hopkins and Mort Castle. Another CD-ROM anthology was Lone Wolf Publications’ Extremes 3: Terror on the High Seas, edited by Brian A. Hopkins and illustrated by Thomas Arensberg.
The UK print-on-demand publisher House of Stratus, which reissued much of Brian Aldiss’s backlist along with many other titles, ceased trading in June and apparently went into administration in September. Booksellers had apparently complained of late deliveries and poor billing.
After the cancellation of Enigmatic Tales, editors L. H. Maynard and M. P. N. Sims pretty much recreated their magazine as the first two volumes of the trade paperback anthology series Darkness Rising Volume One: Night’s Soft Pains and Volume Two: Hideous Dreams, from Cosmos Books, an on-demand imprint of Wildside Press. Along with obscure reprints by Howard Jones and Huan Mee introduced by Hugh Lamb, the books included original stories, with notable work from Lynda E. Rucker and Donald Murphy.
Also from Cosmos, Similar Monsters was a decade-spanning collection of fifteen stories (five original) and an afterword by Steve Savile, while City of Saints and Madmen: The Book of Ambergris collected four novellas by Jeff VanderMeer with an introduction by Michael Moorcock.
Dan Clore’s The Unspeakable and Others was a collection of forty-seven Lovecraftian tales and non-fiction pieces, with an introduction by S. T. Joshi. Stephen Mark Rainey’s Balak from Wildside Press was a Lovecraftian novel involving a woman searching for her missing child.
Fluid Mosaic collected thirteen horror stories (one original) by Michael Arnzen. Gemini Rising, Downward to Darkness and Worse Things Waiting were substantially revised versions of Brian McNaughton’s novels Satan’s Love Child (1977), Satan’s Mistress (1978) and Satan’s Seductress (1979), while McNaughton’s Nasty Stories and Even More Nasty Stories collected twenty-five stories (eight original) and twenty-one stories (two original), respectively.
Strange Pleasures was an anthology of fourteen stories edited by Cosmos Books’ Sean Wallace and featuring contributions by Keith Brooke, Adrian Cole, Barrington Bayley, Maynard and Sims, John Grant and others.
Wallace also announced a new imprint, Prime Books, which would include a number of titles originally announced by Imaginary Worlds. These included books by Tim Lebbon, Jeff VanderMeer, Brett Savory and Michael Laimo. Subsequently, Jeff VanderMeer’s Ministry of Whimsy Press became a print-on-demand imprint of Prime.
Edo van Belkom’s Teeth from Meisha Merlin was an erotic police procedural about vagina dentata, introduced by Richard Laymon. From the same publisher, Lee Killough’s Blood Games was the third in the series featuring vampire detective Garreth Mikaelian.
David Nordhaus’s online imprint DarkTales launched the collections Dial Your Dreams & Other Nightmares by Robert Weinberg, Cold Comfort by Nancy Kilpatrick and the erotic Six-Inch Spikes by Edo van Belkom at the Seattle World Horror Convention. Later in the year, the publisher released the novels Soul Temple by Steven Lee Climer, A Flock of Crows is Called a Murder by James Viscosi, and the second volume in the Asylum anthology series, The Violent Ward, edited by Victor Heck and featuring stories by D. F. Lewis, James Dorr, Gerard Houarner and others.
Harlan was a new novel by David Whitman, while The Charm was the first book in the reissued ‘Shaman Cycle’ series of Southwestern supernatural thrillers by Adam Niswander. It was followed by The Serpent Slayers and The Hound Hunters, with more volumes in the projected thirteen-volume series due from DarkTales.
Harry Houdini and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle teamed up to battle dark magic in Harry R. Squires’s print-on-demand novel What Rough Beast.
Published in a signed and numbered 500-copy hardcover by Oregon’s IFD Publishing, Escaping Purgatory: Fables in Words and Pictures by Gary A. Braunbeck and Alan M. Clark contained seven thematically linked stories (five original) and a foreword by Peter Crowther, illustrated throughout by Clark. From the same imprint, Flaming Arrows was a collection of short-short stories by Bruce Holland Rogers, published in both trade paperback and hardcover, with an introduction by Kate Wilhelm. Set in a ridiculously huge typeface, the twenty-seven tales (many of them reprints) were illustrated by Jill Bauman and publisher Clark.
Edited by Elizabeth Engstrom, Imagination Fully Dilated Volume 2 contained twenty-nine stories by such authors as Ramsey Campbell, Poppy Z. Brite and Charles de Lint, based around Alan M. Clark’s artwork. With an introduction by Paula Guran, the hardcover was limited to 600 signed copies from IFD.
Independent Texas imprint Clockwork Storybook was founded in 2001 by a writers’ collective and published nine titles in its first year. These included the trade paperback collection Beneath the Skin and Other Stories, containing six original stories and a somewhat pretentious introduction by Matthew Sturges, and Chris Roberson’s Cybermancy Incorporated, a collection of two stories and two linked novellas introducing modern-day pulp hero Jon Bonaventure Carmody and his associates. The Clockwork Reader was a trade paperback sampler containing work by the above-mentioned authors, along with Mark Finn and Bill Willingham. Hundreds of short stories, novels and sample chapters were also available for free download on the publisher’s website.
William E. Rand’s Painted Demons was a collection of nine linked horror stories available from iUniverse/Writers Club Press. Rand’s That Way Madness Lies and Rita Dimitra’s The Blood Waltz were vampire novels from the same imprint.
Gus Smith’s Feather & Bone was a debut novel from British print-on-demand publisher Big Engine and involved an ancient spirit loose in a Northumberland farming community beset by BSE.
Edited by Forrest J. Ackerman, Rainbow Fantasia: 35 Spectrumatic Tales of Wonder from Sense of Wonder Press featured stories with colours in their titles by Ray Cummings, Robert W. Chambers and others.
From Subterranean Press, Douglas Clegg’s Naomi was originally published as an online serial novel. About a man pursuing a ghost into the underground world that exists beneath New York City, it was limited to 1,500 signed copies. Clegg’s other novel from Subterranean, Dark of the Eye, involved a woman whose healing powers made her a target for evil forces.
Joe Lansdale’s Zeppelins West was a wild parody of Westerns, alternate universes and pulp stories, involving a cast of historical characters, the Frankenstein Monster and Captain Nemo and his intellectual seal, Ned. Illustrated by Mark A. Nelson, it was available in a signed hardcover edition limited to 1,500 copies with full-colour endpapers.