Narrators: Geoff Harding, Robby McNab, Steve Hodson + others
The Mammoth Book of Best New horror Series Book 14

Lovers of bone-crunching visceral horrors and prose that pulses with
inventive morbidity, beware: Jones's selection of 20 choice cuts from
the previous year's fear fiction is more kindly predisposed to subtle
stories informed by the genre's classic tradition. Some are period
chillers, such as Paul McAuley's novella, "Dr. Pretorius and the Lost
Temple," a well-told Victorian penny dreadful involving psychic
detection, Roman remains, subterranean survivals and occult experiments
to create life. Jay Russell's "Hides" features Robert Louis Stevenson
in a tale of recrudescent horrors that linger in Donner's Pass.
In "Ill Met by Daylight," Basil Copper pays tribute to the fiction of
turn-of-the-century ghost story master M.R. James. Both China Mieville,
in "Details," and Caitlin R. Kiernan, in "Nor the Demons Down Under
the Sea," obliquely invoke the Cthulhu Mythos in stories that put
a modern spin on Lovecraft's cosmic terrors. Neil Gaiman's "October in
the Chair" is a delicate dark fantasy homage to Ray Bradbury's Halloween
Gothic. Even stories that don't explicitly reference horror's hallowed
icons show the impact of their lessons in tasteful restraint, among them
Don Tumasonis's "The Wretched Thicket of Thorn," which conjures an
awesome monster that's all the more frightening for never being shown
directly. In his indispensable overview of horror in 2002, Jones speaks
of "the diversity of taste and erudition that binds our community."
This volume, like volumes past, exuberantly celebrates that diversity.

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