Best New Horror 1

The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror #1

by Robert McCammon (Editor)

A showcase of outstanding samples of the horror genre encompasses the contributions of Thomas Ligotti, Karl Edward Wagner, Ramsey Campbell, Ian Watson, Thomas Tissier, Stephen Gallagher, Brian Lumley, Kim Newman, and many others

Genres: Horror, Anthologies, Short Stories, Fiction, Fantasy, Young Adult, 20th Century

390 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 1990

About the author

Pseudonyms: Robert R. McCammon; Robert Rick McCammon

Robert McCammon was a full-time horror writer for many years. Among his many popular novels were the classics Boy's Life and Swan Song. After taking a hiatus for his family, he returned to writing with an interest in historical fiction.

His newest book, Leviathan, is the tenth and final book in the Matthew Corbett series. It was published in trade hardcover (Lividian Publications), ebook (Open Road), and audiobook (Audible) formats on December 3, 2024.

McCammon resides in Birmingham, Alabama.

Reviews

[Sleepy Boy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not a bad collection of horror short stories and novella's. I admit I am spoiled by Ellen Datlow's keen eye with her selections for the other collection of Horror I read on the regular.

This compilation was a bit more hit or miss than other offerings I found. It started out very strong but just fizzled about 3/4's of the way through to the end.

Not bad, not great, still enjoyable as a whole.

[Shawn]

Some placeholder reviews, as while this entire collection hasn't been gotten to yet in my exhaustive reading schematic, I reading a handful of Robert Westall and Ian Watson stories, and this volume happens to contain pieces by both. So I read them.

"The Last Day of Miss Dorinda Molyneux" by Robert Westall - a school-outing to an ancient church leads to the release of something old and unwholesome from a crypt, a tattered something which leaves insulting graffiti scrawled on the various tombs in it's own dead tissue and which menaces the children. Another solidly told Westall piece (love the double cross title) with a creepy, sinister threat and his usual adroit handling of children characters.

Ian Watson's "The Eye Of The Ayatollah" is an sf/horror tale involving Muslim extremists, the Fatwa against Salman Rushdie, and a missing eye replaced with a circuitized glass one that connects the owner to a surveillance satellite. Not really my thing, although I appreciated that the story's aim was about human nature/religious tolerance and NOT about the whizz-bang sf stuff. Horror was minimal, however.

[Lucian Poll · Rating 4 out of 5]

The long-running reprint anthology series Best New Horror was launched in 1990 with this book, edited by Stephen Jones and Ramsey Campbell. It followed the launch of Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling’s successful series Demons & Dreams: The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror a few years earlier, and, in much the same vein, aimed to present a comprehensive overview of the horror genre during the previous year.

This inaugural volume sets the mould for all subsequent entries in the series. It opens with a short summary of the book, movie, magazine and comic book releases during the previous year, as well as an appraisal of the health of the horror genre. (These summaries would soon lengthen with each successive book in the series, sufficient to consistently earn negative reviews from some readers miffed at having 60-80 pages “stolen” from the book they’d just bought. Personally, I don’t mind these summaries, though I agree they make for rather dry reading. I tend to skim over them to reach Jones’s closing comments, which are always worth a read.) This is followed by the main attraction: a line-up of the best horror stories published during the previous year – twenty on this occasion. To round off the book there is a necrology to remember those we lost from the realms of horror fiction, film and all the media in between.

I’ll ignore the opening and closing sections of the book and focus instead on the stories. That’s why we’re here, after all. As any seasoned reader knows, short story anthologies can be something of a curate’s egg, but there are a number of stories here which make Best New Horror worth a read and just about secures a 4/5 score.

These stories were all published in 1989 and run as follows:

Pin - Robert R McCammon (3/5 – McCammon takes us inside the mind of Joey Shatterley as he psyches himself up to give the world exactly what for in the only way he knows how… by shooting up a local McDonalds. Tsk, nutters, eh? But before he can proceed with this most vital work Joey must first prove himself ready. For that he needs a pin and a certain part of his anatomy… and a whole lot of nerve. A short, sharp shock to open proceedings. Icky, but a bit by-the-numbers.)

The House on Cemetery Street - Cherry Wilder (5/5 – Lucy and Joachim are teenage siblings returning to Germany from America shortly after the end of the Second World War. They arrive at their old house and reacquaint themselves with the family elders they had left behind. They are a proud lot despite the relative poverty, tragedy and guilt that had befallen their lives. When Lucy starts seeing a dark-clothed figure among the tombstones of the neighbouring graveyard, it triggers a series of other visions and bizarre noises throughout the house. It seems the house wants rid of its darkest secret. This story takes a while getting there, but the ending will stick in your mind for a long time to come. Probably the best story in the book.)

The Horn - Stephen Gallagher (4/5 – Three stranded drivers hunker down in an abandoned roadside recovery hut, sheltering as best they can against an increasingly bitter snowstorm. The snow is thigh-deep outside and rising, the wind is merciless and visibility is almost zero. The phone is out, and the electricity supply soon follows suit. It becomes obvious they cannot remain in the hut, and so one of them agrees to venture out to a jack-knifed road train further up the motorway. From there he will sound a horn for the others to follow. If only it was that simple. I loved reading Gallagher’s stuff when I was in my teens – around the same time that his TV mini-series Chimera was successfully scaring the bejabbers out of me – and he remains immensely readable nearly thirty years on. Good gory fun!)

Breaking Up - Alex Quiroba (4/5 – In this dark and sexually-charged story we closely follow Max Griffin, who is dumped by his girlfriend, Nancy, and whose mind immediately starts to unravel, taking him further and further down a succession of rabbit holes before snapping him back to reality: he slashes Nancy’s throat and watches her struggle to stem the bleeding; he takes his car for a spin and crashes and burns; he attends a porno theatre and unwillingly becomes the main attraction… all ridiculous flights of fantasy, of course. Right? There have been a fair few stories with unreliable main characters or narrators over the years, but this is one of the better ones, helped somewhat by its short running time – it’s in and out before its Cormac-McCarthy-wannabe lack of punctuation begins to annoy.)

It Helps If You Sing - Ramsey Campbell (3/5 – From the window of his high-rise flat an old man called Bright observes the neighbouring blocks and how they are growing increasingly dark, as if fewer and fewer people are living there. He hears the muffled strains of a hymn here and there, always the same one, playing at different times of the day, sometimes overlapping. When Bright arrives home one day to find two androgynous religious zealots waiting for him by his front door it seems he’s about to discover the truth for himself. This was a disappointing show, sadly. Though there were some nice touches in places, the story was slight and came across as having been written after Campbell had closed the door on the umpteenth Jehovah’s Witness that week.)

Closed Circuit - Laurence Staig (4/5 – In a twisted future (at least from the perspective of 1989) Mrs Anderson and her two young children park up at the Consumer Comfort Shopping Mall in order to get some shopping done. Once inside they find other shoppers in the mall fervently keen – some might say insanely keen – on doing likewise. When the high-pressure selling gets a bit too much for the kids to handle, Mrs Anderson tries to hustle them away without buying anything, which proves a mite trickier than it sounds. There’s a strong whiff of The Twilight Zone about this story… no bad thing in my eyes. Hmm, an inescapable nightmare set in an endlessly huge building… I can’t imagine for a second why this one resonated with me!)

Carnal House - Steve Rasnic Tem (4/5 – Another dark and sexually-charged story which sees a man called Gene receive a phone call from Ruth, an old friend from college. She wants Gene to come over, which he does, like he does every time Ruth calls, leaving his seriously-ill junkie girlfriend, Jennie, once more to fester in front of the TV. Ruth is forever hungry for Gene to make love to her, not for his affection but simply to feel something… it’s been such a long time since she’s felt anything at all. When I first read this I wasn’t overly impressed. I generally like SRT’s work – even when he goes full-weird – but something about this didn’t click. I can only imagine I was tired or not quite paying attention, because the story was noticeably better upon a second read.)

Twitch Technicolor - Kim Newman (3/5 – Michaelis Monte is an artist who makes a living remixing old movies for his clients, not only colourising them but outright altering entire scenes, updating them with gore enough for modern audiences, even editing in actors who were never in the film to begin with. The wonders of future-modern technology! Monte has been losing staff (and rivals) hand over fist, often in gruesome ways ironic to the movie they were working on. He hasn’t given much thought to why this would be. Perhaps he should. As will often be noted during his appearances in the Best New Horror series, Newman has an oceans-deep knowledge of everything cinema, which is rivalled perhaps only by his enthusiasm for the medium. It’s not for nothing that he co-edits the Necrology section in each book with Jones. But sometimes this can be his undoing, and this, for me, was one of those times. Perhaps the story read better back in 1989 than it does today.)

Lizaveta - Gregory Frost (3/5 – In the searing heat and amid the brutal pogroms of early-twentieth-century Russia, Lizaveta Ostrov tells a soldier a disturbing tale of her life before becoming a whore. Lizaveta had once been a schoolteacher, and had taken up a post in a small village near the Kazakh border. Her predecessor had done a poor job of educating the children of the village, and had mysteriously left without a word. Given the baleful presence of one particular child in her class, perhaps Lizaveta should have done the same. The build-up of this story is really good, and rather reminded me of one of the stories-within-a-story found in Peter Straub’s Ghost Story, but Frost throws it away at the end. It’s almost as if he couldn’t wait to finish it. A shame.)

Snow Cancellations - Donald R Burleson (4/5 – Jamie listens to the radio as he watches the snow fall outside. He’s nine years old and he’s waiting to see whether school will be cancelled that morning – which obviously happens. When his mother fails to secure a sitter for him, Jamie is entrusted to look after the house while she’s at work. Jamie calls his schoolfriend, Kevin, and together they listen as the snowstorm claims one place after another. A fun read.)

Archway - Nicholas Royle (3/5 – In this unrelenting misery-fest we follow a near-destitute Bella as she loses her job and, not long after that, her marbles. She repeatedly hears laughter from all angles, sees cracks in her walls that seep pure blackness into the room, and, in pretty much every other sentence, she glimpses a menacing figure wearing a grinning white triangular mask. Not the best form to go tackling a labyrinthine social security system then. This seemed less a horror story than a rant about how shitty life was on the breadline in late-80s Britain, and the ending was nasty purely for the sake of it. Not great. Thankfully, Royle’s subsequent entries in the Best New Horror series greatly improve on this first appearance.)

The Strange Design of Master Rignolo - Thomas Ligotti (3/5 – Messrs Nolon and Grissul meet one night at a park bench. Grissul is keen to show Nolon a most peculiar and unearthly thing he’s seen in a nearby field. Nolon, on the other hand, is more keen to take Rignolo up on a rare invitation to view the reality-bending artworks the master artist has spent so long perfecting. Little do they suspect the two may be linked. I love reading Ligotti’s work. The dreamlike quality of his writing and the impasto-thick atmosphere he builds; the offbeat characters he creates and the utterly odd situations he places them in – they all mark Ligotti as a true one-off, but this rather slight story left me wanting to like it more than I did.)

...To Feel Another’s Woe - Chet Williamson (3/5 – Adams is an actor auditioning for a production of A Streetcar Named Desire. While he and his fellow New Yorker luvvies await being called, he is warned to stay clear of a fellow hopeful, Sheila Remarque. It seems while her star shines ever-brighter, her previous squeezes have all come away from their relationships with her a shadow of their former selves. This was okay, offering a decent sense of the actor scene, but this deliberately bloodless vampire story didn’t stick in my mind for long, even after a second read.)

The Last Day of Miss Dorinda Molyneaux - Robert Westall (5/5 – Geoff Ashden is an antiques dealer who also sits on the board of a local school. When the upper-crust Miss Molyneaux applies for the job of teaching the notorious class 4C, Geoff casts the deciding vote to hire her, mainly because he fancies her. Miss Molyneaux soon has class 4C wrapped around her little finger with her practical, unvarnished teaching style. When a school outing to a largely abandoned church results in some unusual graffiti, the schoolchildren are immediately blamed, but the unsettling sight of a bald-headed man loitering in the background suggests all may not be what it seems. Westall was a celebrated children’s author back in the day and it’s no surprise that the schoolchildren here get all the best lines. The Last Day… is genuinely funny, it’s scary when it needs to be, and it closes with the best line I’ve read in years. This is a superb read.)

No Sharks In The Med - Brian Lumley (3/5 – Geoff and Gwen are newlyweds holidaying in coastal Greece. They are driven from the airport by a man called Spiros, who is less-than-shy in his affections for Gwen. As the holiday progresses, so too do Spiros’s attempts to wangle himself into Gwen’s pants. When a drunken confrontation sees Spiros go too far, he apologies and offers the newlyweds a trip out on his boat to a small secluded island a few miles from the shore. Nothing wrong with that, right? This comparatively lengthy tale could have made a half-decent mid-80’s Tales of the Unexpected, but I struggle to call it horror.)

Mort au Monde - D. F. Lewis (2/5 – David wakes in a state of confusion to find the door to his room open and a sense of searing red eyes watching him. His beloved Marianne sleeps a few occupied rooms further down the hall, and when David checks in on her, her red eyes and a disturbing grunt from elsewhere in the room send him scurrying back to bed. Perhaps the intervening rooms are no longer as quite occupied as he first believed. Lewis was a highly prolific writer at the time, mainly writing hundreds (and hundreds) of moody ambiguous shorts like this. Though this was well-written, I can’t count myself a fan. I have to be in the right frame of mind for things like this, and that doesn’t come around very often.)

Blanca - Thomas Tessier (4/5 – A burnt-out American travel writer arrives in the titular (fictitious) region with the express intention to kick back and relax with a Maigret novel or two. This is a region with a heavy police presence, mostly plain-clothed, but he’s comfortable with that. He makes the acquaintance of a local man, Basma, a Lebanese immigrant, who shows him around town. That night our man experiences a vivid dream in which he looks out from his hotel room and witnesses an indiscriminate round-up of terrified citizens by soldiers on horseback. The next night he witnesses the same scene, only fully awake. Is he experiencing a series of timeslips, or is something more sinister going on? This was another story that left me a little flat the first time around but improved on a second read.)

The Eye of the Ayatollah - Ian Watson (3/5 – The Muslim world is in uproar. Death to the Satan-author, they cry, wherever he is hiding! Immediately following the chaotic funeral of the Ayatollah, an injured soldier, Ali, is shocked to find he carries the cleric’s eyeball in his hand, optic nerve and all. Even weirder, the eye is still infused with life. It seems the eye of the Ayatollah retains a keen desire to hunt out the Satan-author. This story was published shortly after the genuinely chaotic funeral of the Ayatollah Khomeini and does a good job of conveying the carnage that took place. From then on, however, the story gets a bit too silly to be taken seriously. Perhaps this read better back in 1989 amid the hullaballoo surrounding the publication of The Satanic Verses, but in 2019 it’s a little jarring.))

At First Just Ghostly - Karl Edward Wagner (4/5 – Cody Lennox is a best-selling horror author who is visiting Britain partially to attend a writer’s convention, but mainly to drink himself into oblivion. Lennox soon catches up with a few fellow professionals, who ably assist him in this regard. But during this, his latest visit to Blighty, things take a very peculiar turn. Lennox finds calling cards dotted around the place, his luck is in time and again on the fruit machines, and it seems a whole other, seemingly supernatural, side of London seeks his acquaintance – not least a legendary figure calling himself Kane. This novella was nominated for a Stoker award back in the day, and it’s not hard to see why. There is a broad seam of humour running throughout this story which makes it immensely readable. Though this was a Kane story, you don’t need to be too familiar with the character to enjoy it. (I hadn’t read any of Wagner’s Kane stories before this.) The one thing that held the story back is something it genuinely cannot help. Lennox is a thinly-veiled version of Wagner himself, and shares the author’s prodigious capacity for drink. Wagner died five years after this was published, due largely to complications brought about by his alcohol consumption. He was 48 years old. It’s hard to read a character express concern about Lennox’s wellbeing in this story and not feel this was the author’s inner voice speaking. Such a shame.)

Bad News - Richard Laymon (5/5 – When Paul retrieves his morning paper and leaves it lying on the coffee table, the last thing he expects is for a disgusting creature to worm its way out from the folds and to chase him all round the house trying to eat him and his family. For as much as Laymon divides opinion among the horror community – I’m in the “like” camp, for my sins – I’m sure everyone can get behind this one. It’s funny, the horror starts almost immediately, it escalates rapidly and it never, ever lets up! As a closer to the book, this is an absolute scream.)

[Rebecca Mann · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of horror short stories from 1989. As with all anthologies there were stories I really enjoyed and others that were not so good, but overall I was happy with this collection.

[John Wiswell · Rating 2 out of 5]

I picked this up as an experiment, to see what was popular in Horror twenty years ago. Alas, from the introduction this volume is depressing: King, Gaiman, Koontz and Barker remain the giants they were then, while none of the rising stars listed have actually risen to titanic stature today. Further depressing is the general quality of the stories within.

Deciding to flip through it out of order, I read Donald Burlesson’s “Snow Cancellations” first and got the wrong impressions. That story is a simple but striking tale about two children listening to school cancellations over the radio. Their parents are away, they’re home alone, and gradually the eerie announcer begins announcing other things are cancelled – like the mill where Dad works. One looks out his window, and the mill is gone. It’s slightly surreal and pulled off with a great tone of foreboding that is never too heavy for what’s going on or what’s coming. It had been a long time since I’d read a story that just told a story, and the charm was strong.

But almost none of the other stories either try to do this or do it well. The theme of inescapable of oppression seems to have replaced any actual fear in all but the above, “Blanca,” “No Sharks in the Med,” "The Last Day of Miss Dorinda Molyneaux," and “Bad News.” Of the few stories that manage to do anything worthwhile, “Bad News” is the boldest, tossing some murderous little creature at us within pages and forcing a family to fight it to death to the close. It’s the complete reverse of more than half of the stories in the volume (and about half their length), creating tension through action, where its counterparts take far too long to do anything, and more often than not explain the novelty away when they should be expressing it.

I’m all for Literary Horror, but the sub-genre is not a blank check that bails authors out of having to tell a good story. “Closed Circuit” essentially exists as an anti-consumerist diatribe with no redeeming entertainment value, and several others spend more time talking about mundane life or hard times in Euro-Russia than in conveying their actual premises. Something like "Twitch Technicolor," a thinly veiled and sometimes humorous attack on updating classic films, loses much of its charm in this kind of company. The presence of something like Brian Lumley’s “No Sharks in the Med,” which deftly mixes the fear of suspicion with insight into how people judge one another, only makes the shortcomings of all the other stories more disappointing. As a time capsule of Horror twenty years ago, the collection’s greatest accomplishment is showing that confusing horrible situations for Horror is not merely a modern mistake.

[DeAnna Knippling · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fun read - nothing that really planted itself firmly in mind; nothing that completely missed. Most of the stories were of the "quietly horrible" type, rather than blood-and-guts, but there were a few of the latter. The final story, "Bad News" by Richard Laymon, was especially suspenseful in the latter type. My favorite was "...To Feel Another's Woe," by Chet Williamson, the theater story. "Ah," said I, "I see how he could do that."

[Kevin · Rating 4 out of 5]

The covers on the imported editions of this series are awesome!

[Graham · Rating 4 out of 5]

Something of a short review, this one, given that I'd previously read THE GIANT BOOK OF BEST NEW HORROR and many of the stories collected here are shared with that anthology; I didn't revisit any of them, but there are some gems included, particularly the works by Burleson, Tessier, Westall and Gallagher, all of which I wholeheartedly recommend.

Onto the new stuff, beginning with Cherry Wilder's THE HOUSE ON CEMETERY STREET. I found this one quite highbrow and difficult to read, and oddly depressing; nothing much here to satisfy the cravings of a horror-lover. Alex Quiroba's BREAKING UP is also a disappointment, a crudely explicit story of psychological breakdown which wins points for brevity if nothing else.

Ramsey Campbell's IT HELPS IF YOU SING is more fun, the story of a man visited by the dreaded religious visitors. The run-down apartment block setting adds to the sense of social decay. CLOSED CIRCUIT, by Lawrence Steig, is something quite different, a dystopian shopping mall fable that plays out as a pleasing satire of consumerism. Kim Newman's TWITCH TECHNICOLOR allows the author to take revenge on those companies who spend their time re-editing and colourising old classic movies.

Gregory Frost's LIZAVETA is the stand-out in this collection, an icily disturbing and thoroughly engrossing story boasting impeccable research. The setting is a crisis-torn Russia, where a soldier meets a prostitute who shares with him a strange rural story with far-reaching consequences. It's fresh, imaginative, and completely spellbinding. Nicholas Royle's ARCHWAY is a traditional ghost story about a young woman menaced by a bizarre spectre, with the backdrop of social decay making it very reminiscent of a Ramsey Campbell story.

THE STRANGE DESIGN OF MASTER RIGNOLO is by the unique Thomas Ligotti and as strange as they come; I can't really describe the plot as such, but the sense of weird cosmic horror is certainly present. Finally, Karl Edward Wagner's AT FIRST JUST GHOSTLY is also a lot of fun, a semi-autobiographical effort about a boozy genre writer attending a convention in London (sound familiar?) who becomes involved in a sinister battle between good and evil involving none other than Wagner's famed barbarian hero Kane.

[Neil Monk · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first in the long running series, dating all the way back to 1989. It isn't, alas, one of the stronger overall entries, but it's good to see a number of authors that wouldn't fall into the familiar troupe that populate the latter volumes in particular, such as Richard Laymon and Robert Westall.

Most reviewers will highlight Westall's "The Last Day of Miss Dorinda Molyneaux" as the best story and they are probably right, but I'm also very fond of "Pin' by Robert McCammon and 'Snow Cancellations' by Donald R Burleson.

In the words of Roy Walker - it's good, but it's not the one. The series would have much stronger volumes later on, but the range of stories is good here, and the standouts are enjoyable.

[Bibliophile · Rating 3 out of 5]

Oh dear, some of these stories have not aged well (No Sharks In the Med by Brian Lumley strikes me as particularly nasty). Some I just instantly forgot. Was looking forward to Karl Edward Wagner's "At First Just Ghostly"", only to realise it was a Kane story. Barbarians are not my cup of tea. The Ligotti one is good, but the best story by far is the marvellous "The Last Day of Miss Dorinda Molyneux" by Robert Westall. Deliciously frightening, funny and clever, it makes me want to read whatever he's written for adults.

[Titus Hjelm · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was on a shelf I haven't touched for a while. Bought in London back in my horror connoisseur days, when I thought I'd collect the whole lot, it took me years to actually read this. Many forgettable stories here, but overall a nice reminder that the short story is actually very effective vehicle for chills in the hands of a good writer. The casual sexism and racism grated, of course, but then again I'm happy to note that many good things have happened regarding those things in the last 30+ years.

[John · Rating 2 out of 5]

Let me begin by saying that I love short horror fiction. At least I normally do, that is. The stories contained here in this first volume of Best New Horror are long and dry and trudging through the majority of them was a task akin to slow torture. I found myself skimming through several stories just to be done with them. There are currently 29 (?) Volumes of the Best New Horror series out there; I hope to God they are better than this first volume.

[Ronald Wilcox · Rating 4 out of 5]

First in a series of annual anthologies of horror stories, published in 1990.

I actually thought over all this was an enjoyable collection of short stories. None were horrifying but most had good writing and were interesting.

Although 30 years old now, none of the stories were frightfully outdated.

A few standouts:
The Horn
Lizaveta
No Sharks in the Med (my personal favorite)

[Chuck McKenzie · Rating 5 out of 5]

The entire run of Stephen Jone's annual 'Best New Horror' anthologies (early volumes entitled 'The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror') offers great reading, with each of the 31 individual volumes giving a great snapshot of the state of horror fiction Internationally for that particular year. Any fan of modern horror fiction will find it well worth the effort to track down copies of these books.

[Christopher Stanley · Rating 5 out of 5]

I realise I'm a little late to this series, which ended in 2019 after 31 volumes, but this was a superb and diverse collection of horror, and I'm looking forward to reading volume 2. Highly recommended.

[Jason · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some decent stories

[Eightwaysanta · Rating 3 out of 5]

really hard to rate, anthologies but the stories seemed to average out to a 3, some good, some just ok. a few were standouts. Overall a bit disappointed was expecting more.

[Daniel Suhajda · Rating 2 out of 5]

Meh. A few good ones. Mostly just ok with a couple of stinkers.

[Edward · Rating 4 out of 5]

I expect anthologies to be a mixed bag, like a box of assorted chocolates, with some short stories being better than others. The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror #1 edited by Stephen Jones and Ramsey Campbell was no exception. That said, compared to other horror anthologies, this one for me would be like the orange cream dark chocolate in the box of assorted chocolates—-not exactly my favorite, but one I could still talk myself into eating even when it is one of the few remaining choices.

Continuing on with the box of assorted chocolate analogy, this horror anthology still has its share of top-notch peanut butter cups and caramel cream milk chocolates. For me, those would be:

“The Last Day of Miss Dorinda Molyneaux” by Robert Westall. Chaperoned by the storyteller and teacher Miss Dorinda Molyneaux, a group of school children go on a field trip to an abandoned church that leads to odd inexplicable supernatural occurrences. Spine-tingling a la MR James while at the same time such a delight to read, the author successfully mixes horror with laugh-out-loud humor.

“Snow Cancellations” by Donald R Burleson
In what could very well be a “Twilight Zone” episode, a heavy snowfall leads to school closures, leaving Jamie at home all alone when very strange things begin to happen one by one.

“Bad News” by Richard Laymon
Reminiscent of Richard Matheson’s “Prey” (the inspiration behind the made-for-TV movie “Trilogy of Terror”), Paul struggles to fight off a rodent-like creature dead set determined to go after him. This was a bit predictable, but still fun and entertaining to read.

This being the inaugural edition in what is a total of 31 annual editions, I expect that the subsequent ones will pick up momentum—-or at least I certainly hope so, as I have practically the entire series.

[J · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this to be a delightful read, plenty of the stories were delightfully creepy and the few that weren't were short enough that it didn't feel like a waste of time to have read them. My favorite story of the bunch was probably "At First Just Ghostly" by Karl Edward Wagner but I was also partial to "The House on Cemetery Street" by Cherry Wilder though the latter was dull right up until the end.

[Greg Kerestan · Rating 4 out of 5]

In high school, I started shopping at outlet bookstores during vacations in Ocean City, Maryland. Those Delmarva strip malls and outlets usually carried obscure British anthologies like these, and they never failed to contain at least one truly memorable story. Confession: I've told "The Horn" as a spooky campfire story a few times, passing it off as my own invention. (Hey, don't judge: ALL spooky campfire stories are supposed to be original, but none actually are.)

[Andre · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a joy! I can now see why Best New Horror (or Mammoth Book of Best New Horror) has since seen 25 more installments since this amazing first collection of short stories. You can pick this up for only a couple of dollars on Amazon or Kobo and I can highly recommend it to any lover of old-time classic horror. Richard Laymon, Stephen Gallagher, Brian Lumley, Robert McCammon, Kim Newman and many others have a place in this anthology. Do yourself a favor and pick it up. Best

[Chere · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first book in the annual series, Best New Horror is quite entertaining for fans of the genre. The anthology contains not only the usual forms of horror (ghost stories, creatures, etc.), but also the more subtle and the more real kinds. Although not all of the stories made a big impact on me, the book as a whole is a good and worthwhile read.

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

First of many retrospective, annual volumes, of old veterans and newbies. Must be reputable, series reprinted with Night Shade Press. Starts with Robert R. McCammon's "Pin" which I do not recommend for the squeamish. Readers may find duds, others okay, and some brilliant gems.

[Rob Sharp · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was hit and miss, more misses than hits to be honest. One of the book narrators was absolutely awful and ruined whichever story she was narrating. That said, the reading ( and content ) of the first story, Pin, was excellent.

[bluetyson]

Best New Horror (Mammoth Book of Best New Horror) by Stephen Jones (1991)

[Xhell Collins · Rating 5 out of 5]

I cant read it.

[Normand Kosztko · Rating 2 out of 5]

not very good 2/5

[Jenny · Rating 3 out of 5]

An okay collection. Hit and a miss mix of stories. The hits are definitley worth reading the book for.