Customer Reviews

The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror: The Year's Best Terror Tales

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I've read at least a dozen of The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror series and I must say this is far and above most of them. Editor Stephen Jones has picked a fine crop in this edition (number 17). With 2 stories from usual contributor Ramsey Campbell "The Decorations" amazed me while the other story "The Winner" seemed anything but, wondering if Jones couldn't have found a better story to close the volume with.
Clive Barker turns in an excellent short in "Haeckels Tale" and Adam L.G. Nevill "Where Angels Come In" along with "I Live With You and You Don't Know It" by Carol Emshwiller are also excellent tales. "Gulls" by Tim Pratt is just a perfect horror short and "Pinkie" by Elizabeth Massie featuring a talking pig that becomes a little too domesticated had me laughing out loud and scared at the same time. "Best New Horror" by Joe Hill was both absurdly offbeat and spooky and "The Other Family" by Roberta Lannes reminded me of that old UPN series "Nowhere Man" which I also enjoyed. "Sickhouse Hospitality" and "Time Was" were also well done.
The dogs of the set are "Black and Green and Gold" absolutely boring and "The Taint" along with "le Peau Verte" was just tedious. Overall a good read if you like horror anthologies.

Carol Emshwiller's "I Live With You and You Don't Know It" was just tedious and irritating. It could have been good, and the writing was good, but it doesn't help when you want to punch the main character for their irrational actions. It's like reading a serial stalker going through their routine and not being punished for wrecking someone's else life. It's just unsatisfying and depressing without being interesting or frightening.

Peter Atkins "Cubist's Attorney" was good, otherwordly, and reads like something from a DC Vertigo comic, even if the protagonist was somewhat oblivious. It was short and didn't stretch itself on a surreal premise for too long.

Liz Williams' "All Fish and Dracula" was just awful, mainly because it's about a totally absurd premise out a really terrible pun or punchline to a joke, more belonging to a Goosebumps book or a Saturday morning cartoon than a professional horror story. "Lets see, the dead come back on Halloween, supposedly. Therefore all those dead fish and whales are coming back also!" Oh and they're vampire fish or something. It doesn't make sense in the slightest, so you can't take it seriously. Also the comment about the goth/vampire subculture was unnecessary.

Elizabeth Massie's "Pinkie" started out with an absurd premise, one which I almost stopped reading in parts, but totally redeemed itself in the last few pages. I recommend it now.

Mark Samuels'" Glyhotech" is one of my favorites: subtle, surreal, and comedic in a horrific way. I wish more stories were like this: start off slow and normal and eventually conclude with the end of the world in a mundane setting.

Holly Phillips' "One of the Hungry Ones" was the second worst of the lot. Maybe it's just me, but the characters and their actions were just irritating in the extreme. I got no complaints about the writing itself, just reading about obnoxious characters dressing up in silly masks and drinking wine, and saying pretentious dialogue is irritating without being scary in the slightest. It's not scary, it's just Goths LARPing. "A true name three times spoken. You're ours now, Sadie." Who knew it was THAT easy to magically enslave someone! Just say their name three times! God, that line was stupid and ruined the whole story for me. Maybe I just don't want to read about twits that get drunk, dress up, and stay out all night because those people are quite common in real life. And the protagonist is just oblivious and lets things happen to her, a passive protagonist is often a boring protagonist.

Gahan Wilson's story "The Outermost Borough" is excellent as always. The story reminds me of a humorous version of Lovecraft's "Pickman's Model", where an artist draws from his horrific life. It's comedic and subtle. A favorite.

Glen Hirshberg's "American Morons" was good, and scary in the very realness of the threat. Everyone traveling in a foreign country can relate to the fears presented in this story.

While Terry Lamsley's "Sickhouse Hospitality" was confusing in its conclusion, the nightmarish atmosphere it presented makes it one of my favorites in the lot, mainly because I myself have had nightmares like this so it resounded with me.

Joe Hill's "Best New Horror" is just meta and I enjoyed it immensely as will any fan of these anthologies. An editor for horror stories tracks down an obscure author and then winds up in a horror story himself and knows all the cliches and how to avoid them. Genius.

I think "Time Was" is my favorite. Based on a Twilight Zone premise, a man comes back to a reality where he was never born and noone recognizes him. I wish more stories had this level of realism and character development. It was the most memorable of the stories.

"The Taint" by Brian Lumley. Oh god, Brian Lumley. Look his Titus Crow books were good because campiness and exaggeration are what Lumley does best, but when he tries to write subtly he always fails. His characters are idiots who are going through the struggle of coming to a conclusion that the reader has already figured out by the first paragraph and is forced to watch them blather and speculate in the most irritating way. Anyone with even a basic knowledge of H.P. Lovecraft's Deep Ones knows where the story is going, and now has to read the characters struggling to come to that knowledge. His dialogue is cliche and reads like everyone is from 1920s England, and what is with all the exclamation points! "Everyone is excited! All the time!" I suppose. Older works of fiction can get away with sounding campy and using exclamation points, and some modern writers can write pull the style without silly, but Lumley can't: his characters just sound and act silly, like they are really bad actors in a made-for-TV movie of the "Lost World" or "Journey to the Center of the Earth". In some parts it looks Brian Lumley copied and pasted random phrases from a Lovecraft Lexicon. Normal people do not speak this way or use these terms!! They sound more like robots mindlessly quoting phrases of dialogue from Lovecraft without context. At one point a character talks about a library of unguarded books, books which he has not read, and yet he says he could steal these "forbidden" books. How did he know they were forbidden? For all he knew they were just old. Are any books forbidden now? This is the 20th century. See what I mean about using words in context? There are other ways to imply that things are mythos-related without using the standard Lovecraftian descriptions, but Lumley didn't even try and it's apparent in this case. This is all compounded by the fact that his story is longest of all of them.

The rest of the stories I had already read in other anthologies or just weren't memorable enough to comment on, so I'll say that they weren't bad or good, just kind of forgettable. No offense to those authors, they just didn't leave an impression.

So my advice is start out with a good, believable premise, have active protagonists that can grow over the course of the story, don't irritate the reader, start off slow and build to a climax that could be world-ending in its scope, and try to throw us for a loop in the end. And please don't pander to your largest division of your reader base by having stories about goths. The Silent Hill comics suffered due to that.

I really enjoy short horror anthologies, however the complaint I have about this book is that the first 78 pages consist of a nonsense essay called Horror in 2005. The last 89 pages or so are a necrology of writers and artists that died that year. I really didn't care for either. The stories were good, but I think i will avoid any others in this series because these two things seem to be a regular feature.

The volumes in the anthology series The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror I tend to liken to sandwiches, with some short stories wedged between a pair of non-fiction sections.

At the beginning of volume 17 (representing the year 2005) is a long chapter about the year in horror. Editor Stephen Jones provides an exhaustive (and somewhat exhausting) summary of almost all the books, movies, DVDs and other media that were even tangentially related to horror. Some items are well-described, but these tend to be ones by the bigger-name writers. Others are mentioned briefly in a single sentence; amusingly, one such throwaway item would, within a couple years, become a major phenomenon, namely Stephanie Meyers's Twilight.

On the other end of the book is a necrology, which provides an equally huge list of people who died in 2005 and were somehow linked to horror. There is also a brief section on horror organizations and publishers.

But just like the bread is less important than the meat in a sandwich, such is the case here, where the meat is a collection of short stories. Even for those only vaguely familiar with the genre will find some recognizable names, including David Morrell, Clive Barker, Brian Lumley and Ramsey Campbell. Many of the other writers are less well-known.

As in previous volumes, Jones (who is British) shows a definite bias towards authors from the U.K., which are represented out of proportion compared to their country's population. My guess is that there are more American horror writers because there are simply more Americans, but that's not what you'd see here.

More important than backgrounds, however, are the quality of the stories, and I have to say they are decent overall, with a couple bad ones and a couple great ones. I think there is less of an emphasis on humor than in the 2004 volume, which I feel is appropriate. Among the best are Glyphotech by Mark Samuels and Time Was by David Morrell. On the other end of the spectrum were duds like Caitlin Kiernan's almost unreadable La Peau Verte.

So Best New Horror #17 isn't perfect, but anthologies rarely are. What this book offers is a good look at the world of horror along with some stories that are mostly entertaining. If you are a die-hard horror fan (or a fan of some of the authors included), this is worth picking up.

This book is a must-have for horror lovers. It features a look back at the year in horror, and then offers up some of the creepiest tales to be had. Strongly recommended!