Review by Booklist Review
Jones' annual is a yearly treat for fans. Contributors to this edition include Neil Gaiman, David J. Schow, and Ramsey Campbell. Gaiman's October in the Chair opens with the months of the year personified and sitting in the woods telling stories. October regales the group with the tale of a boy who runs away from home and finds a ghostly friend. In Stephen Gallagher's Little Dead Girl Singing, a man takes a young relative to a singing competition and is struck by a talented but seemingly emotionless competitor and her family. Kim Newman's Egyptian Avenue involves a group of Egyptologists puzzling over a set of mummies and wondering how they are related to recent supernatural unrest; what they discover is a crime in the past and a very real danger to the present. The collection also includes the usual roundup of horror news and publications from the past year and a tribute to horror greats who have passed on. --Kristine Huntley Copyright 2003 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Carroll & Graf's Mammoth Horror series is remarkable not only for presenting an outstanding selection of the best in horror and dark fantasy every year, but for doing so during a decade that has not been kind to the genre. As Jones points out in his introduction to this 10th volume, "the erosion of the mid-list and the cancellation of genre imprints" have resulted in the "all-but-collapse of the commercial field." Despite the decline, this multiple-award-winning anthology includes a wealth of fine offerings from both new and established authors. As usual, the volume includes a catch-all essay about horror in the past year. This time, more than a third of the hefty volume is devoted to two novellasÄyet the space is well used. The first, Peter Straub's brilliant revenge story "Mr. Clubb and Mr. Cuff" (inspired by Herman Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener"), has won both Bram Stoker and International Horror Guild awards. The second, "The Boss in the Wall," is a posthumous work of old-fashioned horror from Avram Davidson (completed by his former wife Grania Davis). From the Hollywood noir of Dennis Etchison's "Inside the Cackle Factory" to the starkly eerie "The Dead Boy at Your Window" by Bruce Holland Rogers to the elegant "A Victorian Ghost Story" by Kim Newman, these tales evoke the grand tradition of horror while attesting to its lively and innovative future. Indispensable reading for horror lovers, this anthology and its predecessors must also be credited with having a hand in keeping horror itself alive. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
From David L. Schow's tale of grisly encounters with the walking dead ("Dying Words") to Kim Newman's superb reworking of the most famous of vampire stories ("Coppola's Dracula"), the 19 tales in this collection exhibit the broad range of styles and topics broached by horror writers in 1997. The addition of an introductory essay recapping the state of the genre places the stories in perspective. Contributors include such veterans of dark fantasy as Pat Cadigan, Thomas Ligotti, Ramsey Campbell, Gwyneth Jones, and Stephen Laws. A good selection for libraries where anthologies enjoy a wide circulation. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Jones again shows that horror can be as richly felt and well-written as mainstream fiction. The present overview of the past year's output brings back many familiar names (Ramsey Campbell, Thomas Ligotti, etc.) as well as lesser knowns, and it offers the terrific yearly necrology (written with Kim Newman) of writers, artists, performers, and technicians who made significant contributions to the horror, science fiction, and fantasy genres during their lifetimes and died in 1997. Also included are addresses of organizations, booksellers, and other sources of market information. No less valuable is Jones's long and thorough introduction, which covers both sides of the Atlantic. There's news about horror fiction (one third of it in 1997 was for young adults), about Stephen King (who went from Viking to Simon & Schuster for a profit-sharing deal that could net him 50'75 percent royalties), and about the likes of Dean Koontz, John Saul, and even Bram Stoker, on his Dracula centenary. As for the readings, a standout piece is David J. Schow's ``Dying Words,'' about a nettled horror author driving himself sick as a victim of his own ``shitty writing'' on a zombie book. With the volume opening on a note like that, could the final story, Douglas E. Winter's ``The Zombies of Madison County,'' possibly fail? (After all, it's about what happens to character/writer Douglas E. Winter when writing too many zombie stories turns him into . . . .) Definitely not to be missed is Kim Newman's fabulous pastiche, ``Coppola's Dracula'' (the opening of Newman's forthcoming novel Johnny Alucard), about the ``good movie'' Coppola might have made of Dracula (hey, Kim, some of us like that movie), serving also as a follow-up to Newman's Fellini takeoff, Judgment of Tears (British title: Dracula Cha Cha Cha). Enough delectable storytelling to raise the dead for a nightcap of print.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
