Best New Horror #30

The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror #30

by Stephen Jones

In this latest edition of the world's longest-running annual showcase of horror and dark fantasy you will find cutting edge stories by such authors as Ramsey Campbell, Caitlin R. Kiernan, Alison Littlewood, Graham Masterton, Michael Marshall Smith, Damien Angelica Walters, Reggie Oliver, and Thana Niveau, amongst many others. You'll also find the usual Introduction: Horror in 2018 and a Necrology of those who have left us.

Contents:
The House - Peter Bell.
Smiling Man - Simon Kurt Unsworth.
Holiday Reading - Rosalie Parker.
Resonant Evil - Graham Masterton.
Redriff - Michael Chislett.
The Blink - Nicholas Royle.
The Deep Sea Swell - John Langan.
Sisters Rise - Christopher Harman.
The Run of the Town - Ramsey Campbell.
The Marvellous Talking Machine - Alison Littlewood.
Who's Got the Button? - James Wade.
The Typewriter - Rio Youers.
The Keepers of the Lighthouse - Ken Mackenzie.
The Hungry Grass - Tracy Fahey.
Ghostly Studies, Dr. Grace, and The Diodati Society - Daniel McGachey.
It Never Looks Like Drowning - Damien Angelica Walters.
The Window of Erich Zann - Michael Marshall Smith.
Posterity - Mark Samuels.
Octoberland - Thana Niveau.
Porson's Piece - Reggie Oliver.
He Sings of Salt and Wormwood - Brian Hodge.
Virginia Story - Caitlin R. Kiernan.
The Virgin Mary Well - Peter Bell.
Necrology - Stephen Jones & Kim Newman.

Genres: Horror, Short Stories, Anthologies

452 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 1, 2020

About the author

Stephen Jones is an eighteen-time winner of the British Fantasy Award.

Reviews

[alexander shay · Rating 3 out of 5]

I haven't read one of these before so I wasn't really sure what to expect. It's a brick of a book, but the first 1/5 is all the new things that have come out related to horror in the past year--though things like The Incredibles 2 were listed in here and I don't really understand why. I skimmed this for some novels that sounded interesting, but it covers everything from movies to music to video games. The last 1/5 is then a listing of all the people in the horror field in some way who have passed in the previous year. So only 3/5 is actually stories, and there are 20 of them, making the stories on the slightly longer side but manageable.

I'm a little disappointed because I was hoping for more unique stuff. Many of these stories played on typical things you would find in horror books, though mainly hauntings and ghost related things. I found it very hardcore in the sense that these stories followed the standard/generic genre pretty much to a T, offering nothing I haven't seen before and nothing all that inspiring or off-putting either. The only thing that really stood out to me was a graveyard in one story that was so full they had to bury bodies on top of each other and the graves were thus so shallow that heavy rains washed bones into the streets. That's (shockingly) about as grim as it gets in the whole book.

[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.

[Vermillion · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this volume to be mostly bland and disappointing.