IN FEBRUARY 2006, French conglomerate Lagardere bought the Time Warner Book Group for $537.5 million and became the third largest book publisher in the world (after Pearson and McGraw Hill). Lagardere is the parent company of publisher Hachette Livre, which already owned Orion/Gollancz and Hodder Headline in the UK. The acquisition meant that they also took control of the Warner Books, Warner Aspect, Little Brown and Mysterious Press imprints in the US, and Orbit and Atom in the UK. The various imprints were subsequently renamed Hachette Book Group USA and Little Brown Book Group.

Following the death of their founder in 2005, Byron Preiss Visual Publications and iBooks, Inc. voluntarily filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy and closed down all operations at the end of February. It was announced that the companies did not have sufficient resources to continue operations. They were subsequently put up for public auction, with the back catalogue, copyrights and author agreements included amongst the assets. The companies were acquired by J. Boylston & Company, who placed an initial bid of $125,000 and planned to continue publishing titles under the Byron Preiss imprints.

American Marketing Services, which owned Publishers Group West, declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy on December 26th with debts of $200 million. AMS was the largest book distributor in America, with more than 150 clients including Carroll & Graf, Dark Horse Comics, McSweeney’s, RE/Search, Thunder’s Mouth Press and Underwood Books.

HMV acquired Britain’s Ottakar’s bookshop chain for £62.9 million, and pulped several million pounds of stock in the process. The 141 stores were subsequently rebranded as Waterstone’s.

Mr Alton Verm of Conroe, Texas, was outraged when he saw the book his fifteen-year-old daughter brought home from the local high school. “It’s just all kinds of filth,” Verm complained. “I want to get the book taken out of the class.” To that end, he filed a “Request for Reconsideration of Instructional Materials” with the Conroe Independent School District. The book he so vehemently objected to was Ray Bradbury’s classic Fahrenheit 451, which is all about a near-future society where books are banned. Of course, Verm didn’t know that – he admitted that he hadn’t actually read it.

In September, the Rt Reverend David Gillett, the Bishop of Bolton, accused retailers of creating a “climate of fear” by selling traditional Halloween merchandise. Writing to Britain’s five biggest supermarket chains, he urged them to rethink the way they marketed the pagan holiday: “I share the view of many Christians that large retailers are increasingly keen to commercialise Halloween celebrations in a way that pressurises parents to purchase goods that promote the dark, negative side of Halloween and could encourage anti-social behaviour,” he said. “I am worried that Halloween has the potential to trivialise the realities of evil in the world and that occult practices should not be condoned, even if they are only being presented in a caricatured, light-hearted form.”

It was estimated that Britain now spends $120 million on Halloween. Analysts say that the UK is fast catching up with America, where it costs the average family around $120.00 to buy Halloween accessories, in an industry that is worth nearly $9 billion a year. Although some critics decried the growing “Americanisation” of Halloween, in the UK it is the third most profitable event for retailers after Christmas and Easter, with the seven days before October 31st now the second busiest shopping week of the year.

In June, author J. K. Rowling was voted Britain’s greatest living writer in an online survey for The Book Magazine. She received almost three times as many votes as the second-placed author, Terry Pratchett. Also down the list were Phillip Pullman (#6), Iain Banks (#14), Alasdair Gray (#19), Neil Gaiman (joint #21), J.G. Ballard (joint #28), Peter Ackroyd (joint #28), Diana Wynne Jones (#36) and Michael Moorcock (#44).

By the end of 2006, Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Deadly Hallows was already topping the Amazon best-seller list, despite not being published for another six months. Not content with that, the “adult edition” of Rowling’s latest magical opus was firmly established in the #2 slot. However, that did not stop shares in Rowling’s British publisher, Bloomsbury, crashing after a shock profits warning that wiped £73 million off the company’s value. Bloomsbury blamed poor retail sales during the run-up to Christmas.

According to the American Library Association, Rowling’s Harry Potter series topped the list of the “most-challenged” books in the 21st century with the highest number of written complaints to US schools and libraries asking for them to be removed. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck only made #4 on that particular Top 10 of shame.

J. K. Rowling teamed up with fellow authors Stephen King and John Irving over August 1st and 2nd at New York City’s Radio City Music Hall for a benefit appearance in aid of The Haven Foundation and Doctors Without Borders. The trio read from their work and answered questions in front of the 6,000-strong audiences.

In Stephen King’s novel Cell, which the author dedicated to Richard Matheson and George Romero, people using their cell phones were turned into rampaging zombies by a mysterious electronic virus known as the Pulse. With 1.8 million copies in circulation in America, Scribner promoted the book with downloadable ringtones featuring King’s voice and a mass text-messaging campaign. The first two chapters were excerpted in the January 27th issue of Entertainment Weekly, and when the book was released in the UK in February, The Times newspaper included an extract from the novel in the format of a newsprint supplement.

King’s second novel of the year, Lisey’s Story, explored many of the author’s familiar themes as widow Lisey Landon discovered that she may have been receiving messages from her murdered author husband while strangers attempted to force her to hand over his papers. The novel debuted at #1 in the US and, for the first time in a decade, King made a promotional visit to the UK in November to promote the book.

In his occasional “The Pop of King” column in Entertainment Weekly, King discussed such diverse subjects as network morning TV, the Oscars, United 93, Britney Spears, dieting, HBO’s The Wire and audio books. The author also listed Dispatch as one of the Top 10 Books of 2006 and described its author Bentley Little as “the horror poet of ordinary things”.

Little’s The Burning was an original mass-market novel about four disparate people across American whose lives converged in a series of ever weirder supernatural manifestations.

A landscape gardener set out to rescue his kidnapped wife and learn about his own dysfunctional past in The Husband, a psychological thriller by Dean Koontz. Also from Koontz, Brother Odd was the third in the “Odd Thomas” series with an initial US print-run of 650,000 copies.

James Herbert’s The Secret of Crickley Hall was a haunted house tale about a couple who moved into a remote building after the strange disappearance of their young son.

With a first printing of 1.5 million copies from Bantam, Thomas Harris’ lazy prequel Hannibal Rising took the reader back to Hannibal Lecter’s roots as a war orphan in Eastern Europe. The book was written simultaneously with the screenplay for the 2007 film version.

Farewell Summer, Ray Bradbury’s long-awaited sequel to Dandelion Wine, was once again set in Green Town, Illinois, during an idyllic summer that refused to end. Much of the book had been part of the earlier title’s original manuscript.

The Southern Gothic Candles Burning, about a strange girl with acute hearing and a supernatural family mystery, was begun by Michael McDowell before his untimely death in 1999 and completed by Tabitha King.

When an ancient Egyptian tomb went on display in New York, people started eviscerating each other and only framed FBI agent Aloysius Pendergast could solve the mystery in The Book of the Dead by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child.

Robin Cook’s latest medical thriller, Crisis, featured Dr Laurie Montgomery and Dr Jack Stapleton investigating the dangers of “concierge medicine”.

Parish vicar Merrily Watkins aided her daughter’s investigation of the spirit of a dead drug-dealer and help protect the local ley lines in The Remains of an Altar by Phil Rickman, while Caitlín R. Kiernan’s Daughter of Hounds involved a strange, yellow-eyed child and a woman who worked for a race of subterranean creatures.

A new communicator with the dead confronted invading aliens in Brian Lumley’s Necroscope: The Touch, and a number of broken objects found in a summer house exerted a strange influence in John Saul’s In the Dark of the Night.

After coming out of a period of writer’s block, Shaun Hutson’s latest was titled Dying Words and involved a contemporary murder mystery linked with a 13th-century philosopher reputed to have travelled to Hell.

The first volume in the “Sissy Sawyer” series, Graham Masterton’s Touchy and Feely was about a fortune-teller with psychic powers. Cowboys for Christ was Robin Hardy’s sequel-of-sorts to The Wicker Man, set in another pagan Scottish community.

The UK’s Headline imprint reissued the late Richard Laymon’s novels in “Richard Laymon Collection” omnibus paperback editions, with The Beast House Trilogy, The Woods Are Dark/Out Are the Lights, Beware!/Dark Mountain, Flesh/Resurrection Dreams, Funland/The Stake, Tell Us/One Rainy Night, Night Show/Allhallows Eve and Alarums/Blood Games.

A new independent paperback imprint, Abaddon Books, was launched in Britain in August 2006. Simon Spurrier’s The Culled was the first volume in “The Afterblight Chronicles”. set in a world ravaged by a biological apocalypse, while Sniper Elite: Spear of Destiny by Jaspre Bark was inspired by the World War II video game. The “Tombs of the Dead” series was devoted to zombie fiction and kicked off with Matthew Sprange’s Death Hulk, an historical nautical adventure involving a warship crewed by the walking dead.

On the eve of his wedding, a reluctant attorney teamed up with Jack Frost to prevent two realities encroaching on each other in Christopher Golden’s The Myth Hunters, the first volume in “The Veil” trilogy. Golden also teamed up with actress Amber Benson for Ghosts of Albion: Witchery, based on the BBC animated Internet serial.

A serial killer apparently had a change of heart in Tom Piccirilli’s The Dead Letters, and a former convict returned home to face his past and make peace with the dead in the same author’s Headstone City.

A town remembered for a series of serial killings thirty years earlier was forced to confront a new evil in Jonathan Maberry’s Ghost Road Blues, the first book in a trilogy.

In Scott Nicholson’s lively horror novel The Farm, a North Carolina town was menaced by the ghost of a murdered preacher and beset with blood-drinking goats, while a dead family didn’t like their home being renovated in Deborah LeBlanc’s A House Divided.

Simon Clark’s The Tower was about five young people house-sitting an empty edifice, and London Under Midnight involved a reporter investigating a vampiric menace that emerged from the River Thames. The author also made a short film, Secret Realms, Haunted Places, about locations around England that had inspired his work.

While the crumbling building was being renovated after standing empty for forty years, the ghosts of Pittsburgh’s George Washington High School refused to stay buried in The Night School, and the refurbishment of an old opera house resulted in the haunting of a theatre company in Stage Fright, both by Michael Paine (John Michael Curlovich).

Jeff VanderMeer’s Shriek: An Afterword was once again set in Ambergris and looked at the world of publishing in that legendary city.

A widow and her small child moved into a haunted house in Gayle Wilson’s Bogeyman, and yet another small town was consumed by an ancient evil in Joseph Laudati’s In Darkness It Dwells.

A murder in a remote village was linked to another committed in the summer of 1969 in Piece of My Heart, Peter Robinson’s 16th novel featuring Chief Inspector Banks.

The cast of a reality TV show was deposited on an island with real demons in Surviving Demon Island by Jaci Burton, Mexican vegetation turned lethal in Scott Smith’s The Ruins, and an investigator discovered an underground world in The Water Wolf by Thomas Sullivan.

A woman’s search for her daughter’s killer became a self-destructive obsession in The Mother by Australian musician Brett McBean.

The nightmares of a number of murder victims were linked in In Dreams by Shane Christopher (Matthew J. Costello), and a reporter shared a psychic link with her murdered twin in Kindred Spirit by John Passarella.

T. J. MacGregor’s Cold as Death was the fifth book in the “Tango Key” series, featuring psychic Mira Morales. A diver was warned of evil by the image of a dead woman in Heather Graham’s The Vision, while an investigation into missing tourists led to rumours of vampires in the same author’s paranormal romance Kiss of Darkness.

Near-future necromancer Dante Valentine found she was Working for the Devil in Lilith Saintcrow’s dark fantasy. The character returned in Dead Man Walking.

A man who disappeared during World War II reappeared thirty years later looking exactly the same in Frank Cavallo’s The Lucifer Messiah.

A woman suspected that her boyfriend was evil in The Boyfriend from Hell by Avery Corman, and another woman’s boyfriend wouldn’t stay dead in D. V. Bernard’s humorous How to Kill Your Boyfriend (In Ten Easy Steps).

A book had the power to release a great evil in Mr Twilight by Michael Reaves and Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff. Robert Masello’s Bestiary was about a cursed manuscript and was a sequel to the author’s The Vigil, while Alhazred: Author of the Necronomicon by Donald Tyson was an “autobiography” of the mad Arab created by H. P. Lovecraft.

A mystical rock caused terrifying visions in Pete Earley’s supernatural thriller The Apocalypse Stone.

MaxBrooks’ World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie Warwas a post-holocaust novel presented in the form of a non-fiction book.

A hypochondriac San Francisco storeowner discovered that he had been given the job of Death’s assistant in Christopher Moore’s adult comedy A Dirty Job. The same author’s vampire comedy, You Suck: A Love Story, was a sequel to Bloodsucking Fiends and included characters from other works.

Dorchester Publishing’s Leisure imprint continued to churn out numerous paperback originals as apocalyptic flood waters awakened a breed of monstrous worms in Brian Keene’s fun disaster novel The Conqueror Worms.

Tim Lebbon’s Berserk was about zombies, and women in a sleepy Buckinghamshire village gave birth to spidery monsters in Sarah Pinborough’s third novel, Breeding Ground.

A woman had the power to make other people’s dreams and fears corporeal in Tim Waggoner’s Pandora Drive, and something nasty arrived in the small town of Ptolemy in the same author’s Darkness Wakes.

Al Sarrantonio’s Horrorween was part of the author’s ongoing “Orangefield” series, the reanimated dead were used as servants in Simon Clark’s Death’s Domain, and the Five Night Warriors entered the nightmares of expectant mothers in Night Wars, the fourth volume in the series by Graham Masterton.

Something hungry and evil waited in a subterranean well beneath the cellar of an old house in Shelter by L. H. Maynard and M. P. N. Sims, and other titles from the imprint included The Loveliest Dead by Ray Garton, Smiling Wolf by Philip Carlo, and Deathbringer by Brian Smith.

Leisure reissued Jack Ketchum’s Off Season in “The Author’s Uncut, Uncensored Version!”, along with “Winter Child”, a cut section from the novel She Wakes. J. F. Gonzalez’s Survivor and The Beloved were other reissues, as were The Immaculate by Mark Morris, Wolf Trap by W. D. Gagliani, Live Girls by Ray Garton and Slither by Edward Lee. Douglas Clegg’s The Attraction was an omnibus of two previously-published novels.

From Harlequin Books/Silhouette’s Nocturne imprint, a woman who could talk to ghosts was stalked by a witch-hunting killer in Lisa Childs’ Haunted, a paranormal romance in the “Witch Hunt” series.

The Daughter of the Flames and The Daughter of the Blood were the first two paranormal romances in “The Gifted” trilogy by Nancy Holder, featuring psychic Isabella “Izzy” DeMarco, while Dangerous Tides was the latest volume in the “Drake Sisters” paranormal romance series by the prolific Christine Feehan.

With reportedly six million copies of her “Anita Blake” books in print, Micah, the 13th volume and first mass-market original in Laurell K. Hamilton’s vampire series since 1998, went straight to #1 in the US with a first printing of more than 400,000 copies. The next volume in the series, Danse Macabre, returned to the hardcover format as Anita thought she might be pregnant. It also went to #1 with a 250,000-copy first printing that quickly sold out.

Set in third century Rome, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s 19th century historical novel about vampire Ragoczy Germain Sanctus-Franciscus was entitled Roman Dusk.

Proven Guilty was the eighth volume in Jim Butcher’s “Dresden Files” and involved wizard PI Harry Dresden in a war between the Faeries and the vampires of the Red Court.

TV director Tony Foster had to halt a Demonic Convergence with the help of his friend, vampire Henry Fitzroy, in Tanya Huff’s Smoke and Ashes, the third in the humorous dark fantasy series. Meanwhile, Huff’s earlier “Vicki Nelson” books were repackaged by DAW Books as a three-volume series, The Blood Books, each containing two novels apiece.

No Dominion was the second volume in Charlie Huston’s series about hardboiled vampire PI Joe Pitt. A private investigator who was half-human, half-elf had a vampire as her first client in Even Vampires Get the Blues by Katie MacAlister (aka Katie Maxwell), and a series of murders in a small town were blamed on vampires in Pale Immortal by Anne Frasier.

Navajo Nightwalker police officer Lee Nez returned in David Thurlo and Aimee Thurlo’s Surrogate Evil, the fourth volume in the vampire mystery series.

B. H. Fingerman’s Bottomfeeder was about a loser vampire in a dead-end job, and a man was recruited to hunt vampires in Graham Masterton’s Descendant.

Barbara Hambly’s Renfield: Slave of Dracula retold the story of the Count’s fly-eating servant.

Whereas once vampires were used as figures of fear in literature, they are now more likely to be depicted as humorous characters or, even worse, potential romantic partners in numerous paperback originals (“vampromcoms”?) apparently aimed at middle-class housewives and undiscerning supermarket shoppers.

Reminiscent of the boom-and-bust horror cycle of the 1980s, vampire romances and – even more bizarrely – vampire/werewolf romances swamped the market in 2006. Not only were these volumes mostly aimed at people who read outside the horror genre, but the majority were written by authors (often under multiple pseudonyms) who had no other interest in horror. However, there was no denying that there was a huge audience for these types of books.

Telepathic waitress Sookie Stackhouse had to recover a bracelet belonging to the vampire Queen of Louisiana in Definitely Dead, the sixth in the humorous Southern Gothic series by Charlaine Harris.

An undead woman opened a vampire dating agency in Manhattan in Kimberly Raye’s Dead End Dating, while Undead and Unpopular was the fifth book in Maryjanice Davidson’s humorous “Betsy the Vampire Queen” series.

The Damned was the latest volume in the “Vampire Huntress Legends” series by L. A. Banks (Leslie Esdale Banks) and included a limited edition poster inside the back cover of the hardback edition. Banks also edited Vegas Bites, an anthology of four stories by J. M. Jeffries, Seressia Glass, Natalie Dunbar and the editor, set in a casino run by vampires, werewolves and other creatures.

An undead casino owner became involved in politics in Erin McCarthy’s High Stakes, the latest volume in the humorous “Vegas Vampires” series, while a female security guard at a Las Vegas concert encountered her former vampire boyfriend in Cameron Dean’s Passionate Thirst, the first book in the “Candace Steele Vampire Killer” series. It was followed by Luscious Craving and Eternal Hunger.

In Kerrelyn Sparks’ Vamps and the City, two CIA vampire hunters became involved in a reality TV show, and a female FBI agent had a vampire lover in Caridad Piniero’s Death Calls.

Mario Acevedo’s comedy debut novel, The Nymphos of Rocky Flats introduced Latino vampire investigator Felix Gomez, while Happy Hour at Casa Dracula by Marta Acosta involved a Latina finding love amongst a family of bloodsuckers.

Traitor to the Blood was the fourth volume in Barb Hendee and J. C. Hendee’s “Noble Dead” series, while both Desire Calls and Death Calls by Caridad Piñeiro featured women involved with vampires.

In Touch the Dark, the first in a new series by newcomer Karen Chance, necroscope Cassie Palmer was forced to rely on the protection of a dangerously seductive master vampire.

A bounty hunter became involved with vampires in Hunting the Hunter, the first in a series by Shiloh Walker, and after being left for dead, bounty hunter Anna Strong tracked down the vampires that transformed her in The Becoming by Jeanne C. Stein.

Blood Ties Book One: The Turning was the first in a new series by Jennifer Armintrout about a vampire doctor.

A woman discovered that she had a new destiny in Alexandra Ivy’s vampire romance When Darkness Comes, the first book in the “Guardians of Eternity” trilogy, and a succubus worked as an exotic dancer in Jackie Kessler’s Hell’s Belles, the first in another trilogy.

Lover Eternal and Lover Awakened were the first two volumes in the “Black Dagger Brotherhood” vampire romance series by J. R. Ward (Jessica Bird).

A biochemist pursued by the undead was helped by a vampire hunter in Seduced by the Night, the second book in the “Night Slayer” series by Robin T. Popp, while Past Redemption by Savannah Russe (Charles Trantino) was the second book in “The Dark-wing Chronicles”.

The Devil’s Knight and Dark Angel were the second and third volumes, respectively, in the “Bound in Darkness” Medieval vampire romance series by Lucy Blue (Jayel Wylie).

Nora Roberts’ Dance of the Gods and Valley of Silence were the second and third books in the author’s vampire “Circle” trilogy, and I Only Have Fangs for You by Kathy Love was the third in the series about vampire brothers.

Prince of Twilight was the latest title in the “Wings in the Night” series by Maggie Shayne, and Dark Demon and Dark Celebration were the next two novels in the “Carpathian” series by Christine Feehan, whose Conspiracy Game was the fourth in the “GhostWalkers” series.

Tall Dark & Dead was a humorous novel by Tate Hallaway (Lyda Morehouse) which involved a witch attracted to a vampire alchemist. Kathryn Smith’s Be Mine Tonight combined vampires with the legend of the Holy Grail, while The Vampire’s Seduction by Raven Hart featured a playboy bloodsucker confronting an ancient enemy.

A female PI discovered that her former fiancé had become a vampire and was accused of murder in Jenna Black’s Watchers in the Night. Stolen computer files were at the heart of Susan Sizemore’s vampire romance Master of Darkness, and a bloodsucker fell in love with a police officer in the same author’s Primal Heat.

Just One Sip featured three vampire romance stories by Katie MacAlister, Jennifer Ashley and Minda Webber, while Love at First Bite contained original tales from Sherrilyn Kenyon, Susan Squires, Ronda Thompson and L. A. Barks.

Originally published in different form as an e-book in 2001, The Hunter’s Prey: Erotic Tales of Texas Vampires contained eleven stories by Diane Whiteside. From the same author, Bond of Blood was the first novel in the “Texas Vampires” trilogy.

Blood Red was an erotic Regency vampire romance by Sharon Page, and The Burning by Susan Squires was an erotic vampire novel set in early 19th-century England that featured psychic Ann Van Helsing.

Meanwhile, Dracula found himself in a lesbian Europe in Wendy Swanscombe’s erotic novel Fresh Flesh. Edited by Bianca de Moss, Blood Sisters: Lesbian Vampire Stories contained eighteen original stories.

Michael Schiefelbein’s Vampire Transgression was the third book in the gay “Victor Decimus” series, while David Thomas Lord’s Bound in Flesh was another erotic gay vampire novel, the sequel to Bound in Blood.

Dark Side of the Moon was the ninth volume and first hardcover in Sherrilyn Kenyon’s series about vampiric Dark-Hunters and shape-changing Were-Hunters. Seattle reporter Susan Michaels adopted a cat that turned out to be an immortal hybrid, being hunted by both supernatural factions.

A vampire fell in love with another werecat in Nina Bangs’ A Taste of Darkness. Michele Bardsley’s humorous I’m the Vampire, That’s Why featured a vampiric single mother and a crazed werewolf, and Riley Jenson was a hybrid vampire/werewolf working for a government investigation agency in Keri Arthur’s Full Moon Rising.

Kresley Cole’s A Hunger Like No Other and No Rest for the Wicked were the first two volumes in the “Immortals After Dark” series about a valkyrie assassin’s romantic trysts with werewolves and vampires.

Touch of Evil by C. T. Adams and Cathy Clamp was the first volume in a new dark fantasy romance series involving vampires, werewolves and a psychic heroine.

Jan Underwood’s Day Shift Werewolf won the 28th Annual International 3-Day Novel Contest and also featured other image-challenged monsters.

Lori Handeland’s Crescent Moon, Midnight Moon and Rising Moon were all werewolf or other monster romances in the “Night-creatures” series, set in and around New Orleans.

Through a letter reputedly written by Jack the Ripper, pregnant werewolf Elena Michaels unwittingly unleashed a Victorian serial killer and a pair of zombie thugs into the modern world in Broken by Kelley Armstrong.

Late night radio host and celebrity werewolf Kitty Norville took on a Senate committee investigating the paranormal in Kitty Goes to Washington by Carrie Vaughn. The book also included a related story.

A werewolf and a werefox teamed up in Christine Warren’s Wolf at the Door, first in the “Others” series, while Gina Farago’s Ivy Cole and the Moon, about the eponymous female werewolf vigilante, was also the first in a series.

A new governess discovered the secret of Wolfram Castle in Donna Lea Simpson’s Awaiting the Moon, and a deadly legend had to be prevented from coming true in the sequel, Awaiting the Night.

A werewolf helped a woman who was turned into a were-jaguar by a serial killer in Howling Moon by C. T. Adams and Cathy Clamp. A Native American shape-changer was unable to kill his victim in Lindsay McKenna’s Unforgiven, and witchy PI Rachel had to deal with a werewolf problem in A Fistful of Charms, the latest book in the humorous series by Kim Harrison (Dawn Cook).

A werewolf pretended to be a dog while investigating a murder in Master of Wolves, the third book in the romantic trilogy by Angela Knight.

Ronda Thompson’s The Untamed One and The Cursed One were the second and third books, respectively, in the “Wild Wulfs of London” Regency romance series.

Shadow of the Moon was yet another werewolf romance, written by Rebecca York (Ruth Glick), whose earlier novels Witching Moon and Crimson Moon were reprinted in the omnibus Moon Swept.

Wolf Tales III was the third volume in the erotic werewolf series about the “Chanku” by Kate Douglas, and Dead and Loving It collected four humorous werewolf romances by Mary Jane Davidson, including one related to the author’s “Betsy the Vampire Queen” series. Three of the stories were originally published as e-books.

Diane Setterfield’s debut novel, The Thirteenth Tale, sparked an international bidding war amongst publishers. Days after the teacher-turned-first-time-novelist submitted the manuscript to an agent, it sold for £800,000 in the UK and a further $1 million in the US. A literary ghost story-within-a-story, the book went straight to #1 in America as the result of a major marketing campaign.

Following a global disaster, New York City was overrun by cannibal zombies in David Wellington’s debut Monster Island. The first in a trilogy about the walking dead, originally serialised on the author’s web site, it was followed by Monster Nation, which was set in California and looked back to when the dead first began to rise.

Sarah Langan’s debut novel The Keeper came with glowing quotes from Ramsey Campbell, Douglas E. Winter, Tim Lebbon, Kelly Link and Jack Ketchum. It was about yet another haunted house in Maine.

The Harrowing by screenwriter Alexandra Sokoloff was set in a college over Thanksgiving break and involved the discovery of an old Ouija board and a tragedy that happened more than eighty-five years earlier.

Set in an alternate London, Mike Carey’s first novel The Devil You Know introduced hardboiled exorcist Felix Castor. After dying for two minutes, small-time private investigator Harper Blaine returned to life with the power to see beyond the veil in Kat Richardson’s Greywalker.

Dead City by Joe McKinney was about a virus that reanimated the dead of Texas as cannibal zombies.

Gordon Dahlquist’s heavily promoted first novel, The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters, bought by its US publisher for a seven-figure sum, was a Victorian murder mystery set in a world where magic worked. Paul Malmont’s The Chinese Death Cloud Peril was a tribute to the old pulp magazine heroes as authors Walter Gibson, Lester Dent and L. Ron Hubbard investigated the horrifying poisoning of H. P. Lovecraft.

A boy who thought he had superpowers was actually possessed by a demon in Sam Enthoven’s YA debut, The Black Tattoo.

Michael Cox’s Victorian murder mystery, The Meaning of Night, was written in just over a year while the author suffered a severe illness and the threat of blindness. The book followed the exploits of murderer Edward Glyver, who set out to convince himself that his acts of vengeance were justified.

Paul Magrs’ comedic novel Never the Bride was set in a seaside town full of monsters.

Actor and scriptwriter Mark Gatiss’ The Devil in Amber was a Boy’s Own pastiche novel that involved the search by two-fisted hero Lucifer Box for the final fragment of an ancient papyrus that could raise Beelzebub. Tess Gerritsen’s The Mephisto Club was about a detective investigating a group who were attempting to prove that Satan walked the Earth.

Matthew Pearl’s The Poe Shadow dealt with the mystery of Edgar Allan Poe’s lost final hours before his death in 1849. Meanwhile, Louis Bayard’s thriller The Pale Blue Eye explored Poe’s life as a cadet at West Point in the 1830s.

A Shot in the Dark, from Hesperus Press’ classy Classics series, collected fifteen stories by “Saki” (H. H. Munro), along with a Foreword by Jeremy Dyson and an historical Introduction by Adam Newell.

From Strider Nolan Media, the first volume of Horror’s Classic Masters Remastered edited by Kurt S. Michaels featured twenty-one tales by W. W. Jacobs, William Hope Hodgson, M. R. James, Ambrose Bierce, Edgar Allan Poe, Bram Stoker, Robert Louis Stevenson, Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne and H. G. Wells, along with a very brief Foreword by Hollywood film producer J. C. Spink.

Dover Publications reissued Gaslit Nightmares edited by Hugh Lamb, first published in 1988, with sixteen selected stories by Barry Pain, Bernard Capes, Robert W. Chambers, Charles Dickens, Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman, Richard Marsh and Jerome K. Jerome, amongst others.

Tales to Freeze the Blood: More Great Ghost Stories, selected by R. Chetwynd-Hayes and Stephen Jones, contained a further twenty-four stories culled from The Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories. Authors included Ambrose Bierce, Sydney J. Bounds, Guy de Maupassant, F. Marion Crawford, J. Sheridan Le Fanu, M. R. James, Tony Richards, Steve Rasnic Tern and Chetwynd-Hayes himself.

Also edited by Jones, H. P. Lovecraft’s Book of the Supernatural: 20 Classic Tales of the Macabre Chosen by the Master of Horror Himself featured Washington Irving, Robert Louis Stevenson, Guy de Maupassant, Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce, Henry James, F. Marion Crawford, Rudyard Kipling, Lafcadio Hearn, Bram Stoker, H. R. Wakefield, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, William Hope Hodgson, Arthur Machen and many others, along with a Foreword on writing weird fiction by Lovecraft and original illustrations by Randy Broecker.

The Complete Chronicles of Conan: Centenary Edition collected all Robert E. Howard’s stories about the mighty barbarian in a single, leather-bound hardcover. Edited with an extensive Afterword by Stephen Jones, the more than 900-page volume was illustrated throughout by Les Edwards. Continuing the series originally started by Wandering Star, Kull: Exile of Atlantis from Del Rey contained twelve stories and fragments by Howard, all taken from the author’s original manuscripts. The trade paperback was illustrated by Justin Sweet, who also supplied the Foreword.

September 13th was designated “Roald Dahl Day” for children in the UK. It would have been the author’s 90th birthday.

Lemony Snicket (Daniel Handler) finally wrapped up his “Series of Unfortunate Events” after thirteen volumes with the aptly-titled The End, in which the Baudelaire siblings and evil Count Olaf encountered a group of white-robed islanders named after nautical literary figures.

Christopher Golden and Ford Lytle Gilmore’s The Hollow: Mischief was the third volume about teenagers living in a cursed town. It was followed by The Hollow: Enemies.

In Scott Westerfield’s Midnighters 3: Blue Moon, the final volume in the trilogy, the five members of the eponymous group had to prevent the secret hour spilling over into the real world.

Graham Joyce’s Do the Creepy Thing was about a teenage girl’s decision to live with a cursed bracelet. A boy who could talk to ghosts made contact with a missing cheerleader in Dead Connection by Charlie Price, and a group of college students tried to stop a demon that fed on emotions in Nina Kiriki Hoffman’s Spirits That Walk in Shadow.

Nancy Holder’s Pretty Little Devils was a young adult novel about a clique of girls, while cheerleaders found themselves being stalked at summer camp in Laura Kasischke’s Boy Heaven.

Dead teenagers were trapped in the eponymous world of Neal Shusterman’s Everlost, a boy kept receiving strange calls on his Hell Phone by William Sleator, and a monstrous dog terrorised a village for centuries in Janet Lee Carey’s The Beast of Noor.

Slawter and Bec were the third and forth books, respectively, in “The Demonata” series by Darren Shan (Darren O’Shaughnessy). A stand-alone novel, Koyasan, was written by Shan for World Book Day 2006.

A trio of Victorian teenagers discovered that a factory owner was reanimating the dead in Justin Richards’ The Death Collector, while the same author’s The Invisible Detective: Ghost Soldiers was the third in the series set in the 1930s. A ghost led a teenager back to the 1940 bombing on London in Edward Bloor’s London Calling.

Three children became lost in an attic of universe proportions in Garry Kilworth’s Attica, a teenager killed in a steamship tragedy returned as a ghost in T. K. Welsh’s The Unresolved, and David Levithan’s novella Marly’s Ghost was a contemporary Valentine’s Day retelling of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.

Mirroring their popularity amongst romance readers, vampire novels also continued to do well with the young adult audience.

The Last Days was a loose sequel to Scott Westerfield’s Peeps, set in a world ravaged by a vampire-parasite plague, while Vampirates: Tide of Terror was the second book in Justin Somper’s post-apocalyptic series.

Vampire Plagues: Outbreak and Vampire Plagues: Extermination were the latest titles in the series published under the byline “Sebastian Rook”. Vampire Beach: Bloodlust and Vampire Beach: Initiation were the first two volumes in a new YA series published by the pseudonymous “Alex Duval”.

A sixteen-year-old college student discovered that she was living with some odd housemates in Glass House, the first volume in “The Morganville Vampires” series by Rachel Caine (Roxanne Longstreet Conrad).

A popular girl at school was turned into a vampire in Serena Robar’s Braced2Bite and Fangs4Freaks, the first two books in a new series.

Teenage vampire twins wanted revenge on a girl’s undead boyfriend in Vampireville, the third in the series by Ellen Schreiber. A girl was accidentally bitten by her twin’s vampire boyfriend in Mari Mancusi’s Boys That Bite. The sequel, Stake That!, was about a vampire slayer who would rather be undead herself.

A teenager discovered vampires living amongst New York high society in Melissa de la Cruz’s Blue Bloods, New Moon was the second book in the trilogy by Stephanie Meyer, and mass-murderer Countess Bathory was the subject of Alisa M. Libby’s The Blood Confession.

Issued as a handsome-looking hardcover by Californian imprint Medusa Press, with a Foreword by publisher Frank Chigas, Left in the Dark: The Supernatural Tales of John Gordon collected a career-spanning thirty stories (one original) by the acclaimed British author. It was published in a limited edition of 450 copies and a deluxe signed edition of 50 copies.

All Hallows’ Eve: 13 Stories was an impressive collection of all-new tales by Edgar Award-winning author Vivian Vande Velde, each set on Halloween night and aimed at ages twelve and up.

Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders contained twenty-seven previously uncollected stories and poems (one original) by Neil Gaiman. The contents of the US and UK editions differed slightly.

Collected Stories contained fifty-one previously published tales for adults by Roald Dahl.

From Serpent’s Tail, Mortality collected twenty short stories (one original and two only previously available electronically) by Nicholas Royle.

Laurell K. Hamilton’s Strange Candy collected fourteen stories, including a new “Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter” tale, while Saffron and Brimstone: Strange Stories contained eight stories (one original) by Elizabeth Hand, along with an Afterword by the author.

Twisted Tales presented fourteen original stories by Brandon Massey.

Alone on the Darkside: Echoes from the Shadows of Horror was the fourth in the series of original paperback anthologies edited by John Pelan. It featured sixteen all-new stories by Brian Hodge, Eddy C. Bertin, Mark Samuels, Glen Hirshberg, David Riley, Gerard Houarner, Lucy Taylor and Paul Finch, amongst others.

Edited by Iain Sinclair, London: City of Disappearances was a literary anthology that featured contributions from J. G. Ballard, Michael Moorcock, Will Self, Marina Warner and Nicholas Royle.

Ghosts in Baker Street edited by Martin H. Greenberg, Jon Lellenberg and Daniel Stashower included ten supernatural mystery stories featuring Sherlock Holmes. There was also an Introduction by “Dr Watson” and non-fiction pieces from Barbara Roden, Loren D. Estleman and Caleb Carr.

Edited by Brandon Massey, Dark Dreams II: Voices from the Other Side was an original anthology of seventeen stories by black authors.

Despite any publisher and author’s profits being donated to the Save the Children Tsunami Relief Fund, Elemental, edited by Steven Savile and Alethea Kontis, was published almost a year-and-a-half after the tragedy in the Indian Ocean and appeared woefully redundant. Among those authors who donated their work for free were Brian Aldiss, David Drake, Joe Haldeman, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Larry Niven and Michael Marshall Smith.

Edited by P. N. Elrod, My Big Fat Supernatural Wedding contained nine stories by such writers as Charlene Harris, Jim Butcher, Esther Friesner, Sherrilyn Kenyon and the editor herself.

Mysteria presented four paranormal romances set in a demon-haunted town in Colorado by Maryjanice Davidson, Susan Grant, P. C. Cast and Gena Showalter. Hell With the Ladies collected three linked stories about the sons of Satan by Julie Kenner, Kathleen O’Reilly and Dee Davis.

Dates from Hell contained four otherworldly tales of paranormal trysts by Kim Harrison (Dawn Cook), Lynsay Sands, Kelley Armstrong and Lori Handeland featuring werewolves, demon lovers and the romantically challenged undead. Yet another paranormal romance volume, Dark Dreamers featured a reprint “Carpathian” story by Christine Feehan and a new “Dirk & Steele” novella by Marjorie M. Liu.

Triptych of Terror included three gay horror stories by Michael Rowe, David Thomas Lord and John Michael Curlovich.

The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror: Nineteenth Annual Collection edited by Ellen Datlow and Kelly Link & Gavin J. Grant contained thirty-five stories, five poems and various end-of-the-year essays by the two sets of editors, Edward Bryant, Charles Vess, Joan D. Vinge, Charles de Lint and James Frenkel.

Edited by Stephen Jones, The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror Volume Seventeen contained twenty-two stories and novellas, along with the usual overview of the year, Necrology and list of Useful Addresses.

The two volumes overlapped with a number of authors but by just three stories, from Glen Hirshberg, Adam L. G. Nevill, and China Miéville, Emma Bircham and Max Schäfer.

2006 saw an explosion of “Year’s Best” anthologies, with the busy Jason Strahan editing two titles from Night Shade Books and another for The Science Fiction Book Club. There were also at least five different titles from Prime Books/Wildside Press. The latter’s output included Horror: The Best of the Year: 2006 Edition edited by John Gregory Betancourt and Sean Wallace. It contained fifteen stories and a short Introduction by the editors, along with contributions from Clive Barker, Ramsey Campbell, Joe R. Lansdale, Jack Cady, Michael Marshall Smith, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Joe Hill, Jeff VanderMeer, Laird Barron, Holly Philips, M. Rickert and David Niall Wilson.

From Wildside’s new romance imprint, Juno Books, Best New Paranormal Romance edited by Paula Guran featured twelve stories by Jane Yolen, Elizabeth Hand, Elizabeth Bear and others.

Dark Corners was the first collection from scriptwriter Stephen Volk (TV’s Ghostwatch and Afterlife). Available through print-on-demand imprint Gray Friar Press, it contained fifteen stories (three new) and an original screenplay, along with an Introduction by Tim Lebbon and an Afterword by the author.

From the same publisher, John Llewellyn Probert’s linked collection The Faculty of Terror was a homage to the old Amicus anthology movies with an Introduction by Paul Finch and an interview with the author by Gary McMahon.

T. M. Wright’s short novel A Spider on My Tongue, a sequel to A Manhattan Ghost Story, was available as a print-on-demand volume from Nyx Books.

Midnight Library/Eibon Books’ Book of Legion by “Victor Heck” (David Nordhaus) was a print-on-demand novel about the eponymous body-hopping demon’s attempts to create a Hell on Earth.

When Darkness Falls from Midnight Library collected fourteen stories (one original) by J. F. Gonzalez with an Introduction and notes by the author. Ten original linked stories by Angeline Hawkes were collected in The Commandments, an on-demand trade paperback from Nocturne Press.

The Fungal Stain and Other Dreams from Hippocampus Press collected fifteen Lovecraftian stories (eight original) by W. H. Pugmire, while Straight to Darkness: Lairs of the Hidden Gods Volume Three from Kurodahan Press, was a Lovecraftian anthology of seven stories and one article edited by Ken Asamatsu and originally published in Japan in 2002. Robert M. Price supplied a new Introduction.

Time Intertwined released by Kerlak Publishing was an anthology of fourteen stories (one reprint) edited with a Forward [sic] by Mark Fitzgerald. From the same imprint, Dark Chances was the second book in Allan Gilbreath’s vampire “Galen Saga”.

Aegri Somnia was an on-demand anthology of twelve stories dealing with nightmares from Apex Publications. It was edited by Jason Sizemore and Gill Ainsworth and included contributions from Scott Nicholson, Christopher Rowe and Lavie Tidhar, amongst others.

Edited by Kevin L. Donihe, Bare Bone #9 from Raw Dog Screaming Press contained fiction and poetry by Gary Fry, Andrew Humphrey, Paul Finch, Tim Curran, C. J. Henderson, James S. Dorr, Amy Grech and others.

Although its quarterly schedule was reportedly cut in half by Cosmos Books/Wildside Press, the twelfth volume of Philip Harbottle’s Fantasy Adventures did finally appear with cover art by Sydney Jordan and new stories from veterans Sydney J. Bounds, Brian Ball, Eric Brown, John Glasby and Philip E. High. The remainder of the issue was filled out with John Russell Fearn’s “I Spy”, a short SF novel from 1954, and a reprint story by E. C. Tubb.

From Paul Miller’s Earthling Publications, American Morons collected seven superior stories (two original) by Glen Hirshberg. There was also a signed edition of 150 copies and a twenty-six-copy traycased lettered edition.

World of Hurt was a 50,000-word short novel about the battle between Good and Evil by Brian Hodge, handsomely presented in hardcover by Earthling with a Foreword by Stephen Jones and an Introduction by Brian Keene. It was available in a 500-copy signed numbered edition.

Set in the Kansas Dust Bowl during the 1930s Depression, a young girl and an escaped convict battled a plague of vampiric creatures in Bloodstained Oz, a short novel by Christopher Golden and James A. Moore. With an Introduction by Ray Garton and illustrations by Glenn Chadbourne, the book was also available in both numbered and lettered editions.

Conrad Williams’ novel The Unblemished was the second book in Earthling’s Halloween series. With an Introduction by Jeff VanderMeer and an Afterword by the author, it was published in 500 numbered and 15 lettered hardcover copies.

Fine Cuts from Peter Crowther’s prolific PS Publishing imprint collected twelve superior reprint stories by Dennis Etchison set in and around Hollywood, along with a new Preface by the author and an Introduction by Peter Atkins.

Fourteen stories (two original) by Steven Utley, along with an Introduction by Howard Waldrop, were collected in Where or When, and Jack Dann provided the Introduction to Past Magic, which contained eleven stories (including an excised chapter from The House of Storms) and a new Preface by Ian R. MacLeod.

Moby Jack and Other Tall Tales collected twenty-one reprint stories spanning all genres by Garry Kilworth, with an Introduction by Robert Holdstock. Impossible Stories assembled five of Yugoslavian writer Zoran Živković’s linked narrative cycles, totalling twenty-nine stories in all. Paul Di Filippo provided the Introduction, and there was an Afterword by Tamar Yellin.

A young woman travelled through a dream landscape in Richard Calder’s novel Babylon, introduced by K. J. Bishop.

Each PS hardcover was published in a 500-copy numbered trade edition signed by the author and a 200-copy slipcased edition signed by all contributors.

With an Introduction by Mark Morris, Mark Samuels’ The Face of Twilight from PS Publishing was a bizarre novella set in London that blurred the living with the dead.

Two individuals apparently shared the same apartment with a highly intelligent parrot in T. M. Wright’s I Am the Bird, introduced by Ramsey Campbell, and David Herter’s novella On the Overgrown Path involved real-life opera composer Leoš Janáček investigating a mysterious murder in an obscure mountain village. John Clute supplied the Introduction.

PS novellas were published in 500 numbered paperback editions signed by the author, and 300 numbered hardcover copies signed by all the contributors.

Produced as a “special publication for PostScripts subscribers”, Christmas Inn by Gene Wolfe was an odd holiday fable about a group of enigmatic strangers that involved seances, ghosts and a mysterious child. A signed hardcover was sent by PS to all hardcover subscribers to its magazine, with an additional 200 copies available for sale.

Fifteen years after the previous volume appeared, Gauntlet Press published Masques V as a handsome signed and numbered hardcover limited to 500 copies. Edited by the late J. N. Williamson with Gary A. Braunbeck, the anthology featured twenty-nine stories (one reprint), along with an Introduction and overly-enthusiastic story notes by Williamson and dust-jacket artwork by Clive Barker. The impressive line-up of contributors included Poppy Z. Brite, Richard Matheson, Ray Russell, Mort Castle, Barry Hoffman, Tom Piccirilli, John Maclay, Thomas F. Monteleone, Richard Christian Matheson, William F. Nolan, Ed Gorman, Ray Bradbury, and both editors. The lettered edition only also featured original drafts of the Bradbury and R. C. Matheson stories while, as a premium for those who ordered the book directly from the publisher, Masques V: Further Stories was an attractive chapbook with cover art by Barker. It contained more new fiction from Braunbeck, Hoffman, Castle and Tim Waggoner, and was limited to just 552 copies.

Bloodlines: Richard Matheson’s Dracula, I Am Legend and Other Vampire Stories was edited by Mark Dawidziak and included appreciations by Ray Bradbury, John Carpenter, Mick Garris, Richard Christian Matheson, Steve Niles, Rockne S. O’Bannon and Frank Spotnitz. It was published in a signed edition of 500 copies.

Also from Gauntlet, Harbingers was the tenth volume in F. Paul Wilson’s “Repairman Jack” series.

The Lost District and Other Stories was a major retrospective collection of twenty-four stories (five original) by Joel Lane, published by Night Shade Books in trade paperback. Dark Mondays contained nine offbeat tales (six original) by Californian writer Kage Baker. It was published in both trade and limited hardcover editions, the latter containing an extra new story.

The Ghost Pirates and Other Revenants of the Sea was the third volume in Night Shade’s “The Collected Stories of William Hope Hodgson”.

A West Virginia town found itself cut off from the rest of the world and invaded by creatures from another dimension in Stephen Mark Rainey’s novel The Nightmare Frontier. It was available for Halloween from Sarob Press in a limited hardcover edition and as a deluxe signed and slipcased edition signed by the author and cover artist Chad Savage.

In Lee Thomas’ novel Damage, something evil emerged into the suburban community of Pierce Valley. It was also published in hardcover by Sarob in a limited edition and a deluxe slipcased edition signed by Thomas and artist Paul Lowe.

Edited by Alison L. R. Davies with a Foreword by Stephen Jones and a frontispiece illustration by Clive Barker, Shrouded in Darkness: Tales of Terror was an anthology produced by Telos Publishing to raise money for DebRA, a British charity working on behalf of people with the genetic skin blistering condition Epidermolysis Bullosa (EB). The attractive trade paperback contained twenty-three stories by Neil Gaiman, Ramsey Campbell, Michael Marshall Smith, Poppy Z. Brite, Christopher Fowler, Tim Lebbon, Charles de Lint, Graham Masterton, Mark Samuels and Peter Crowther, amongst others, along with original tales from Justina Robson, Darren Shan, Paul Finch, James Lovegrove, Dawn Knox, Steve Lockley and Paul Lewis, Debbie Bennett, Simon Clark, publisher David J. Howe, and the editor herself. A signed, limited edition was also announced.

In Dominic McDonagh’s debut novella Pretty Young Things, one of a group of predatory lesbian vampires set out to rescue a former boyfriend from her fellow bloodsuckers. Joseph Nassie’s novella More Than Life Itself was about choice and consequences, as one desperate man was prepared to do anything to save his dying four-year-old daughter.

Also from Telos, A Manhattan Ghost Story was a reprint of T. M. Wright’s superior 1984 supernatural novel.

Available from Cemetery Dance Publications, Stephen King’s The Secretary of Dreams was a collection of six classic stories illustrated in varying styles by Glenn Chadbourne.

Dark Harvest was a short novel by Norman Partridge set on Halloween night in 1963, when the boys of a Midwestern town were pitted against the October Boy, a legendary creature with a Jack O’Lantern face.

Basic Black: Tales of Appropriate Fear was a twenty-year retrospective of Terry Dowling’s work from CD Publications, while Destination Unknown contained two stories and a novella about automobiles by Gary A. Braunbeck.

Havoc Swims Jaded collected thirteen short stories by David J. Schow (including a collaboration with Craig Spector), along with an Introduction by Bertrand Nightenhelser and a usual idiosyncratic Afterword by the author. Published by Subterranean Press, the special numbered edition was limited to 150 copies signed by Schow and artist Frank Dietz. Water Music was a special chapbook produced to accompany the limited edition. It contained Schow’s eponymous “Hellboy” story, a brief Afterword, and a fascinating article on the author’s Creature from the Black Lagoon fanzine, The Black Lagoon Bugle.

Made Ready & Cupboard Love collected two stories by Terry Lamsley, illustrated by Glenn Chadbourne. It was limited to a 500-copy signed edition and a twenty-six copy lettered edition.

Reassuring Tales contained ten stories, including a film treatment, by T. E. D. Klein, along with an Introduction by the author. There was also a signed edition of 600 copies and a twenty-six-copy lettered, leather-bound and slipcased edition.

Published by Subterranean as an attractive hardcover illustrated by Ted Naifeh, Alabaster collected all five stories featuring Caitlín R. Kiernan’s albino heroine Dancy Flammarion, including the original tale “Bainbridge” and a new Author’s Preface.

Joe R. Lansdale edited Retro-Pulp Tales, an anthology of pre-1960s style stories by such authors as F. Paul Wilson, Chet Williamson, Tim Lebbon, Kim Newman, Al Sarrantonio, Norman Partridge and Alex Irvine. A 1985 short story by Lansdale was the inspiration for Joe R. Lansdale’s Lords of the Razor edited by Bill Sheehan and William Schafer. The titular tale kicked off the anthology, followed by twelve contributions from Chet Williamson, Thomas Tessier, Bradley Denton, Gary A. Braunbeck and Elizabeth Massie, amongst others, including an original story from Lansdale to also close the book. It was limited to a 500-copy signed and slipcased edition, and a leatherbound, lettered and traycased edition of twenty-six copies.

Edited by Kealan Patrick Burke, Night Visions 12 was the latest volume in the long-running anthology series and included a total of eight stories by Simon Clark, Mark Morris and P. D. Cacek. It was also available in a signed edition of 250 copies.

The twentieth anniversary edition of Brian Lumley’s vampire novel Necroscope included an original Introduction by the author plus five full-colour and multiple black and white interior illustrations by Bob Eggleton. The book was available in both signed hardcover and deluxe slipcased editions. Lumley’s Screaming Science Fiction: Horrors from Outer Space, also from Subterranean, collected nine stories (one original) along with a new Foreword by the author and more interior illustrations from Eggleton. A 1,500-copy signed edition was available, along with a twenty-six lettered traycased edition.

Kim Newman’s The Man from the Diogenes Club was an attractive trade paperback from MonkeyBrain Books that collected eight tales (including an original novella) about outlandish psychic investigator Richard Jeperson and the secret organisation he answered to. For American readers, there was a very useful guide to the names and terms used in the stories.

Co-published by MonkeyBrain and the Fandom Association of Central Texas (FACT) to tie-in with the 2006 World Fantasy Convention, Cross Plains Universe: Texans Celebrate Robert E. Howard was edited by Scott A. Cupp and Joe R. Lansdale. The trade paperback collected twenty-one original stories by Ardath Mayhar, Bradley Denton, Gene Wolfe, Howard Waldrop, Chris Roberson, Neil Barrett, Jr, Michael Moorcock and others.

From Golden Gryphon Press with a Foreword by Howard Waldrop, Black Pockets and Other Dark Thoughts collected nineteen horror stories (one original) by George Zebrowski, who also contributed an Afterword. All the stories differed from their original appearances, and two were significantly revised.

From the same imprint, Charles Stross’ Lovecraftian spy novel The Jennifer Morgue was a sequel to The Atrocity Archives and featured nerdy CIA demon expert Bob Howard.

Jack Ketchum’s 1991 novel Offspring, the sequel to Off Season, was reissued by The Overlook Connection Press in a trade paperback edition, a 1,000-copy signed edition, a 100-copy slipcased edition, and a fifty-two-copy boxed and leather-bound lettered edition. This “definitive” version contained the author’s preferred text, a revised Afterword and a reprint article.

And Hell Followed With Them was an attractive hardcover anthology from Solitude Publications featuring a novella each by Geoff Cooper, Brian Knight, Tim Lebbon and Brian Keene, with impressive cover art by Chad Savage. It was available in signed hardcover editions of 500 numbered copies and twenty-six lettered.

Michael Cadnum’s Can’t Catch Me and Other Twice-Told Tales from San Francisco’s Tachyon Publications collected eighteen stories (two original) that were described as “fairy tales for the tough-minded”. From the same imprint, Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology edited by James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel contained fifteen mostly reprint stories by Carol Emshwiller, Bruce Sterling, Kelly Link, Jonathan Lethem, Jeff VanderMeer, Karen Joy Fowler, Jeffrey Ford, Michael Chadbon, Howard Waldrop and others.

Available from Sean Wright’s Crowswing Books, Clinically Dead and Other Tales of the Supernatural was a hardcover collection of ten stories (two original) by David A. Sutton with an Introduction by Stephen Jones and an Afterword by Joel Lane. It was limited to 250 signed copies and a thirty-copy slipcased edition. Also from Crow-swing, The Impelled and Other Head Trips collected eighteen stories (six original) by Gary Fry, along with an Introduction by Ramsey Campbell and an Afterword by the author.

She Loves Monsters was an impressive novella from Simon Clark about the search for a legendary lost movie. Featuring an Introduction by Paul Finch, it was published by Necessary Evil Press in a hardcover edition of 450 signed and numbered copies and twenty-six signed and lettered copies.

Gary McMahon’s Rough Cut, a short novel about another fabled lost film and one man’s journey into his own family’s darkness, was published by Pendragon Press. From the same imprint, At the Molehills of Madness was a collection of twenty-five previously published stories by Rhys Hughes, dating from 1991 – 2003. The book also included a very brief Foreword and Afterword by the author, and a signed stickered edition was available of the first 100 pre-ordered copies.

Edited by Christopher C. Teague, Choices was an anthology of six novellas by Andrew Humphrey, Stephen Volk, Paul Finch, Gary Fry, Eric Brown and Richard Wright, also available from Pendragon Press.

Mirror Mere collected seventeen stories (five original) by Marie O’Regan. Published by Rainfall Books, it had an Introduction by Paul Kane, whose own collection of two novellas and a story, Signs of Life, was reissued by the same imprint with an Introduction by Stephen Gallagher and illustrations by Ian Simmons.

Also from Rainfall, Terror Tales Issue #3 edited by John B. Ford and Paul Kane collected sixteen stories (seven original) from Stephen Laws, Richard Christian Matheson, Simon Clark, Peter Straub, Chaz Brenchley, Joel Lane, Conrad Williams, Mark Samuels, Allen Ashley and others.

Jon Farmer’s iconoclastic study of history and popular culture from Savoy, Sieg Heil: Monographers, was packed with photographs and artwork.

“Hosted” by Ramsey Campbell, Read by Dawn Volume 1 was the first in an annual new anthology series published by Adèle Hartley’s Bloody Books imprint from Beautiful Books. Along with a reprint by Campbell, it contained twenty-six original stories by David McGillveray, Lavie Tidhar, Andrew J. Wilson, Stephanie Bedwell-Grime, David Turnbull, John Llewellyn Probert and others. From the same imprint, Classic Tales of Horror Volume 1 contained stories by M. R. James, Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce, Mary Shelley and Charles Dickens.

Ramsey Campbell’s classic 1979 serial killer novel The Face That Must Die was reissued as a trade paperback by Millipede Press with an original Introduction by Poppy Z. Bright, a new Afterword by the author, and the J. K. Potter illustrations from the 1983 Scream/Press edition. A 300-copy signed hardcover was also available.

From the same imprint, Theodore Sturgeon’s Some of Your Blood contained the short 1961 novel, an associated story and a new Introduction by Steve Rasnic Tern, who signed the limited edition along with cover artist Harry O. Morris. Fredric Brown’s Here Comes a Candle was originally published in 1950. Millipede’s new edition included an extra story and essay by Brown, plus an Introduction by Bill Pronzini, who signed the limited hardcover.

Thomas Ligotti introduced Roland Topor’s surreal 1964 novel The Tenant, which included four related stories and a gallery of art by the author. Ridley Scott supplied a Foreword to William Hjorts-berg’s Falling Angel, which also included an Introduction by James Crumley, and Jonathan Lethem introduced John Franklin Bardin’s obscure crime thriller The Deadly Percheron, also featuring the first chapters of a previously unpublished novel by Bardin. As with the other titles from Millipede Press, it was released in both trade paperback and signed hardcover editions.

From Chicago’s Twilight Tales, My Lolita Complex and Other Tales of Sex and Violence reprinted nine collaborations (including “Buffy” and “Hellboy” stories) between Max Allan Collins and Matthew V. Clemens, while Ex Cathedra collected eleven stories (four original) by Rebecca Maines (aka “Pamela D. Hodgson”) in an edition of 200 copies.

Edited by Myna Wallin and Halli Villegas, In the Dark: Stories from the Supernatural was an anthology of twenty-five stories (three reprints) and five poems (one reprint) from Canada’s Tightrope Books. Authors included Gemma Files and Brett Alexander Savory.

Produced by Spectre Library in a 200-copy limited edition, The Surgeon of Souls collected twelve stories about Dr Ivan Brodsky by Victor Rousseau. All but one was previously published in Weird Tales, but Mike Ashley’s well-researched Introduction revealed prior publication details about several of them.

From Ash-Tree Press, Jessie Douglas Kerruish’s classic 1922 werewolf mystery The Undying Monster was available in a new edition with an Introduction by Jack Adrian, limited to 500 copies.

Gothic Press founder Gary William Crawford was the author of Mysteries of Von Domarus and Other Stories, a collection of five tales.

Small Beer Press reissued Howard Waldrop’s 1986 collection Howard Who? as a square paperback with the original Introduction by George R. R. Martin. From the same imprint, Alan DeNiro’s debut collection Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead contained sixteen offbeat stories (three original).

Edited by James Ambuehl for Elder Signs Press/Dimensions Books, Hardboiled Cthulhu was an anthology of twenty-one Lovecraftian mystery stories (five reprints) and a poem from Richard A. Lupoff, Robert M. Price, J. F. Gonzalez and others. Arkham Tales: Legends of the Haunted City edited by William Jones featured seventeen stories based on the Lovecraftian Call of Cthulhu role-playing game.

Government bio-engineered ticks got loose in the Ozark Mountains and started killing people in the humorous novel Tick Hill by Billy (William R.) Eakin, published by Yard Dog Press.

Available from Dark Arts Books, Candy in the Dumpster: New and Used Stories featured twelve stories (six reprints) by Martin Mundt, John Everson, Bill Breedlove and Jay Bonansinga, with an Introduction by Mort Castle.

Edited by Ron Shiflet, Hell’s Hangman: Horror in the Old West was an original anthology from Tenoka Press featuring twenty-two “weird Western” stories, including one by the editor.

Then Comes the Child by husband and wife team Christopher Fulbright and Angeline Hawkes was a voodoo novella from Florida’s Carnifax Press.

Steve Deighan’s A Dead Calmness was a self-published collection of fourteen stories (six reprints) with an Introduction by the author. From the same writer, Things from the Past collected five stories and was available from Hadesgate Publications.

Also from Hadesgate, Tiny Terrors Volume 1 was a small volume of five stories, some of which were introduced by Guy N. Smith. Garry Charles’ Heaven’s Falling: Redemption was the second volume in the author’s Biblical fantasy series, from the same imprint.

Afterlife Battlefield was the third novel from “Johnny Ostentatious”, about what really happened to people who committed suicide. It was published in trade paperback by Active Bladder.

New Wyrd: A Wyrdsmith’s Anthology collected nine stories (one reprint) from the Minneapolis/St Paul writers’ group with an Introduction by Naomi Kritzer. It was limited to 250 numbered copies.

Selected from the Horror World website by editor Nanci Kalanta, Eulogies: A Horror World Yearbook 2005 featured thirteen stories by Tom Piccirilli, Elizabeth Massie, Michael Laimo, Christopher Golden, Gary Braunbeck, Rick Hautala, Jack Ketchum and others. It also included six essays by Matthew Warner, interviews with Piccirilli, Golden, F. Paul Wilson, Douglas Clegg, John Skipp and David Morrell, plus brief Q&As with the contributors.

Horror Library Volume 1 from Texas’ Cutting Block Press was edited with a Foreword by R. J. Cavender and contained thirty stories, including one by the editor. From the same imprint and edited by Frank J. Hutton, Butcher Shop Quartet: Four Bold Stories to Disturb the Adventurous Mind featured original tales by Boyd E. Harris, Clinton Green, Michael Stone and A. T. Andreas.

Bruce Boston’s writings were collected in Flashing in the Dark: Forty Short Fictions, a thin volume from Sam’s Dot Publishing, while Shades Fantastic was a volume of poetry from the same author, issued by Gromagon Press.

Twilight’s Last Gleaming was the first volume in Mike Philbin’s self-published and uncensored “Writing as Hertzan Chimera” series, from Chimericana Books. For Christmas, Philbin also edited Chimeraworld #4: Twenty Three Tales of Traffic Mayhem.

A paperback original from Hellhound Books Publishing, Damned Nation edited by Robert N. Lee and David T. Wilbanks contained twenty-two stories about “Hell on Earth” by Weston Ochse, Tom Piccirilli, Poppy Z. Brite, William F. Nolan, Gerard Houarner, James S. Dorr, Bev Vincent and others.

As a Christmas “present” for subscribers, Hill House Publishers produced a special signed and numbered edition of Ray Bradbury’s 1973 story “The Wish”, limited to 250 copies with a new Afterword by the author. A lettered edition of the small hardcover book was also available in a fifty-two-copy edition. As an added “thank you” to subscribers of the forthcoming The Martian Chronicles: The Definitive Edition, a signed fifty-copy edition of Bradbury’s 1950 memoir “How I Wrote My Book” was produced by Hill House in matching format. The book included both a clean text version of the work as well as reproductions of the actual manuscript pages.

The Rolling Darkness Revue once again toured a number of bookstores in southern California during the run-up to Halloween, entertaining audiences with its unique blend of music and fiction. Joining founding members Peter Atkins and Glen Hirshberg in guest spots were Clay McLeod Chapman, Dennis Etchison, Aimee Bender, Lisa Morton and Norman Partridge. All but Bender had stories in the chapbook At the Sign of the Snowman’s Skull (Etchison’s contribution was the only reprint), issued by Earthling Publications to tie in with the 2006 performances. Other merchandising available at the various venues included a signed, limited edition CD of readings and music from the 2005 tour, a new T-shirt design, and a special “Snowman’s Skull” shot glass.

From Gauntlet Press’ Edge Books imprint, Love Hurts and Other Short Stories collected seven original tales and an Introduction by Barry Hoffman, with a cover illustration by Harry O. Morris.

Attractively produced by DreamHaven Books, Strange Birds included two original stories by Gene Wolfe, inspired by the paintings and sculptures of Lisa Snellings-Clark. It was limited to 1,000 copies, and was the first in a projected series by various authors based on Snellings-Clark’s artwork.

Down in the Fog-Shrouded City by Alex Irvine was the tenth volume in the Wormhole Contemporary Chapbooks series. With an Introduction by James Patrick Kelly and cover and interior art by Steve Rasnic Tern, it was limited to 750 numbered booklets, 250 numbered hardcovers and fifty-two lettered editions signed by the author.

Absinthe was a stylish-looking chapbook from Bloodletting Press that contained an original story each by Jack Ketchum and Tim Lebbon. It was limited to 500 signed and numbered copies along with a fifty-two copy deluxe lettered edition.

From California’s Tropism Press, Show and Tell and Other Stories was a collection of six offbeat stories (one original) by Greg van Eekhout. Jenn Reese’ Tales of the Chinese Zodiac appeared from the same imprint.

Foreigners and Other Familiar Faces was a chapbook collection of nine unusual stories (three original) by Mark Rich, published by Small Beer Press.

Edited with an Introduction by Jonathan Reitan and James R. Beach, Northwest Horrors: Stories Presented by the Northwest Horror Professionals was a slim anthology of ten stories (three original) by Elizabeth Engstrom, Bruce Holland Rogers, John Pelan, W. H. Pugmire and others.

Tales from the Black Dog was published by the Minneapolis/St Paul writers’ critique group The Wyrdsmiths. It contained eight stories (one reprint) from various members and an Introduction by founder Lyda Morehouse. Also hailing from St Paul, Velocity Press’ Rabid Transit: Long Voyages Great Lies edited by Christopher Barzak, Alan DeNiro and Kristin Livdahl featured six original travel stories from F. Brett Cox, Geoffrey H. Goodwin, Alice Kim, Meghan McCarron, David J. Schwartz and Heather Shaw.

Poems That Go Splat from Naked Snake Press showcased the work of Brian Rosenberger.

With its sixth issue, PS Publishing’s PostScripts: The A to Z of Fantastic Fiction changed to illustrated boards for its 150-copy signed hardcover edition. As usual, the title published four quarterly issues in 2006 with stories by Rhys Hughes, Stephen Baxter, Garry Kilworth, Conrad Williams, Stephen Volk, Jack Dann, T. M. Wright, Jay Lake, Michael Swanwick, Gene Wolfe, Darrell Schweitzer, Tony Richards, K. W. Jeter, Darren Speegle, Lavie Tidhar and John Grant, amongst others, interviews with Elizabeth Hand and Howard Waldrop, and guest editorials from Steven Erikson, Lucius Shepard, Terry Bisson and Jeff VanderMeer. Issue #6 also featured a fascinating article by Mike Ashley about stage magician Harry Houdini (Ehrich Weiss).

The three issues of Richard Chizmar and Robert Morrish’s Cemetery Dance Magazine included contributions from Eric Brown, Tony Richards, Tim Waggoner, Lisa Morton, Simon R. Green, Ed Gorman, Darren Speegle, Gene O’Neill, Peter Atkins, Stephen Mark Rainey, Scott Nicholson, and Michael A. Arnzen and Mark McLaughlin. Neil Gaiman and Tim Lebbon were among those interviewed, and there were the usual columns by Bev Vincent, Thomas F. Monteleone, Paula Guran, Michael Marano and John Pelan. Issue #56 of Cemetery Dance was billed as a “Glen Hirshberg Special” and included a new short story, a novel excerpt and a fun article by Hirshberg, along with an interview with the author and an extended review of his latest collection, American Morons.

Possibly the best-looking of the “publisher’s magazines”, William Schafer’s Subterranean featured fiction by Norman Partridge, Poppy Z. Brite, David Prill, David J. Schow, Jay Lake, Lewis Shiner, Orson Scott Card, Stephen Gallagher and Tad Williams, amongst others.

Another publisher to launch its own magazine title was Prime Books, an imprint of Wildside Press. Edited by Nick Mamatas and limited to 1,500 copies given away at World Fantasy convention 2006, the dull-looking “issue zero” of Phantom featured fiction from F. Brett Cox, Darren Speegle, Sarah Langan and Laird Barron, along with an interview with Stewart O’Nan.

Also now published by Wildside Press in association with Terminus Publishing Co, Weird Tales benefited from some excellent cover art by Rowena Morrell and Les Edwards. Fiction and verse was supplied by Parke Godwin, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, William F. Nolan, Gregory Frost, Tony Richards, Fitz-James O’Brien, Tanith Lee, Holly Phillips, Jay Lake, Brian Stableford, Richard Lupoff, Tina and Tony Rath, Robert Weinberg, George Barr, Jill Bauman, Darrell Schweitzer and Bruce Boston. Issue #341 featured an article celebrating Robert E. Howard’s centenary, while a John Shirley “special author feature” in #342 included an interview with the writer.

In December, Wildside publisher John Betancourt fired the entire editorial team of Weird Tales. Stephen H. Segal was brought in to handle day-to-day operations while the magazine looked for a new fiction editor. Betancourt also announced that the magazine would be getting a new logo and interior design in 2007.

Also from Wildside, the third issue of H. P. Lovecraft’s Magazine of Horror finally made a much-belated appearance. It featured a “Spotlight on Brian Lumley” that included two stories (one original), an interview by Darrell Schweitzer and an overview of the author’s career by Stephen Jones. More decidedly non-Lovecraftian fiction was supplied by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Andrew J. Wilson, Lynne Jamneck and the late Earl Godwin, amongst others, along with review and opinion columns by editor Marvin Kaye, Craig Shaw Gardner, Peter Cannon and Ian McDowell.

Meanwhile, the second issue of the magazine was released as a “collector’s edition” trade paperback with extra fiction not included in the newsprint version.

Although Gordon Van Gelder’s The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction tended to rely on too many of the same names, there were still some very fine stories by Terry Bisson, Claudia O’Keefe, Gene Wolfe, Charles Coleman Finlay, Steven Utley, Laird Barron, Gardner Dozois, Christopher Rowe, Peter S. Beagle, Geoff Ryman, Carol Emshwiller, Scott Bradfield and Susanna Clarke, amongst others. Harlan Ellison set a challenge in the September issue with a story outline about Lady Luck that was picked up by Tananarive Due, Michael Kandel and Michael Libling. The same issue also reprinted a selection of letters between the late James Tiptree Jr (Alice B. Sheldon) and Ursula K. Le Guin.

As usual, regular FSF columnists included Charles de Lint, Elizabeth Hand, Kathi Maio, Michelle West, Paul Di Filippo, Robert K. J. Killheffer, James Sallis and Lucius Shepard, while the “Curiosities” page, recommending obscure books, featured contributions from Bud Webster, F. Gwynplaine Maclntyre, Gregory J. Coster, Michael Swanwick, Dennis Lien, Bud Webster, Thomas Marcinko, Paul Di Filippo and David Langford.

Fourteen months after going “on hiatus”, Amazing Stories was finally cancelled by Paizo Publishing after it was unable to increase circulation and attract media advertising. As a result, rights in the title reverted to Wizards of the Coast.

The third issue of Allen K’s Inhuman Magazine expanded the rota of artists working on the title and included new and reprint fiction from Michael Shea, Gerard Houarner, Melanie Tern, Tina L. Jens, Edward Bryant Jr., Kevin J. Anderson, Michael Resnick and others.

James R. Beach’s Dark Discoveries featured interviews with Elizabeth Massie, Douglas Winter, J. F. Gonzalez, Stephen Mark Rainey and Brian Knight, along with fiction from Gerard Houarner, Kealan Patrick Burke and Ken Goldman, plus a tribute to J. N. Williamson.

The four issues of Jason B. Sizemore’s impressive-looking magazine Apex Science Fiction & Horror Digest included fiction from Ben Bova, Robert Dunbar, Amy Grech, William F. Nolan, Michael Laimo, Tom Piccirilli and Lavie Tidhar, interviews with Neil Gaiman, Robert Rankin, Sherrilyn Kenyon, Poppy Z. Brite, Kage Baker, Michael Laimo, Tim Powers, Tom Piccirilli and Kelly Link, plus various articles and reviews.

Patrick and Honna Swenson’s Talebones: Fiction on the Dark Edge got a reprieve after the editors decided to close it down after almost eleven years due to financial difficulties and a dwindling subscriber base. Following an online plea, the magazine added 120 new subscribers, with more promised, and several extra pages of paid advertising. As a result, the title would survive for at least another year. The two issues published in 2006 contained stories and poetry by Charles Coleman Finlay, James Van Pelt, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Don D’Ammassa and Mark Rich. The editors decided to drop the interview section following Ken Rand’s talk with Louise Marley in issue #32.

Christopher M. Cevasco’s twice-yearly Paradox: The Magazine of Historical and Speculative Fiction featured fiction and poetry by Lisa Jensen, Adam Stemple, Jane Yolen, Darrell Schweitzer and Sarah Monette, amongst others.

Published bi-monthly by TTA Press, Interzone: Science Fiction & Fantasy included fiction by F. Gwynplaine Maclntyre, Richard Calder, Paul Di Filippo and Jay Lake, plus interviews with Terry Pratchett (twice!), Gerry Anderson, K. J. Bishop, Steven Erickson and Christopher Priest, along with all the regular news and review columns. Also from TTA, Crimewave Nine: Transgressions contained twelve new stories by Scott Nicholson, John Shirley and others.

Despite still advertising subscriptions, TTA Press’ previously announced horror magazine Black Static (formerly The 3rd Alternative) failed once again to appear in 2006.

Edited by Trevor Denyer, Midnight Street: Journeys Into Darkness included fiction by Paul Finch, Gary Couzens, Rhys Hughes and Peter Tennant, along with interviews with authors Deborah LeBlanc, Ralph Robert Moore and “B” movie actress Lilith Stabs. Tony Richards was the featured author in issue #6, Gary Fry in #7, and L. H. Maynard and M. P. N. Sims were showcased in #8.

The fourth annual issue of Adam Golaski and Jeff Paris’ perfect-bound New Genre contained four stories by Jan Wildt, Paul A. Gilster, Christopher Harman and Don Tumasonis.

The December issue of Realms of Fantasy featured an exclusive interview with Laurell K. Hamilton, while the Winter issue of Joseph W. Dickerson’s Aberrant Dreams included fiction by, and an interview with, Gerald W. Page.

Dave Lindschmidt’s glossy City Slab included stories by Jack Ketchum and Sonya Taffe, interviews with Ketchum, Bill Moseley and Ray Garton, and articles about film directors Dario Argento and Takashi Miike.

Edited by Doyle Eldon Wilmoth Jr. and published by SpecFic-World, Rogue Worlds was another magazine featuring horror fiction and poetry, while the twentieth anniversary issue of Eric M. Hei-deman’s perfect-bound Tales of the Unanticipated #27 was a special “Monsters Issue”.

From Elder Sign Press, William Jones’ Dark Wisdom: The Magazine of Dark Fiction took on a more professional appearance with full colour covers and fiction and poetry from John Shirley, Paul Finch, Gerard Houarner, Bruce Boston, Jay Caselberg, Scott Nicholson, James S. Dorr, William C. Dietz, Stephen Mark Rainey, Gene O’Neill and others. Each issue also featured a graphic tale and a serial.

Issue #23 of Cthulhu Sex Magazine, described as “the magazine for connoisseurs of sensual horror”, included a portfolio of illustrators featured on the www.spookyART.com website, including co-founders Chad Savage and Alan M. Clark, Jill Bauman, Alex McVey, Jason Beam, Dan Ouellette, Robert Morris and John Schwegel.

With still no sign of their long-promised tome on Italian director Mario Bava, Tim and Donna Lucas managed to get just five issues of Video Watchdog out in 2006. Despite too much obvious “filler” material, there were still interesting articles on the making of Amityville 3-D, Edgar Wallace’s involvement in the original King Kong, and a look at the films of low budget director Del Tenney. While Joe Dante bowed out with his long-running review column, Ramsey Campbell joined the magazine with “Ramsey’s Rambles”.

Canada’s Rue Morgue magazine turned out eleven glossy issues in 2006. Along with all the usual movie, DVD, book and music coverage, issues also featured interviews with Roger Corman, Clive Barker, Wes Craven, Jean Rollin, Lina Romay, Stuart Gordon, Jeffrey Combs, Basil Gogos, David Seltzer, Richard Donner, Peter Straub, Adrienne Barbeau, Takashi Miike, Pete Walker, R. Lee Ermey, Ingrid Pitt, Ramsey Campbell, the late Billy Van, Elvira, Bob Clark and John Saxon. The 9th Anniversary Halloween Issue was a tribute to late Italian director Lucio Fulci and also included “The Connoisseur’s Guide to 50 Alternative Horror Books”.

The annual Rue Morgue Festival of Fear, held over three days in September in Toronto included special guests Alice Cooper, Guillermo del Toro, Jeffrey Combs, Linda Blair, Roddy Piper, Ben Chapman, Michael Berryman and others.

HorrorHound was a new glossy magazine out of Cincinnati, Ohio, which was devoted to movies, comic books, video games, model kits, DVDs and gore.

Charles N. Brown’s newszine Locus entered its 40th year of publication with interviews with, amongst others, Geoff Ryman, S. M. Stirling, Dave Duncan, the inevitable Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, Jay Lake, Betsy Wollheim, Peter Straub, China Miéville,, and Joe Hill (who was outed by Variety in early 2006 as Joseph Hillstrom King, the son of Stephen and Tabitha King). The May issue looked at “Young Adult Fiction” with essays by Ursula K. Le Guin, Garth Nix, Graham Joyce and others, while the July issue’s “Special Horror Section” featured commentary from Edward Bryant, Ellen Datlow and bookseller Alan Beatts.

Prism: The Newsletter of the British Fantasy Society had an erratic schedule under the editorship of Jenny Barber. Despite this, each issue was packed with publishing and media news, and there was a brief interview with David Sutton.

Under editors Marie O’Regan and the busy Barber, the BFS’ journal Dark Horizons was a messy mixture of short stories and non-fiction, including book and media reviews that would have been better suited in Prism. The two issues published in 2006 featured new and reprint fiction from Mark Chadbourn, Debbie Bennett, John Howard, Lavie Tidhar, Mark Morris, Ramsey Campbell, Tim Lebbon and others, along with interviews with Neil Gaiman and independent film-maker Jeff Brookshire.

Edited with an Afterword by the ubiquitous Paul Kane and Marie O’Regan, and featuring a “heartfelt” Introduction by Stephen Jones, The British Fantasy Society: A Celebration was an attractive trade paperback anthology of twenty horror, fantasy and SF stories (six original) with contributions from Christopher Fowler, Clive Barker, Michael Marshall Smith, John Connolly, Ramsey Campbell, Kim Newman, Peter Straub, Neil Gaiman, Brian Aldiss, Richard Christian Matheson, Robert Silverberg, Stephen Gallagher and others. All profits from the book went to the Society and the “Black Dust” Nqabakazula Charity Project in South Africa.

BFS members were also treated to a special edition of Cinema Macabre edited by Mark Morris. This trade paperback version replaced the J. K. Potter cover art on the PS Publishing edition with a new painting by Les Edwards, and Jonathan Ross’ Introduction was dropped in favour of one by Marie O’Regan and Paul Kane.

From the Ghost Story Society, All Hallows contained fiction by Stephen Volk and others along with an interview with Australian author John Harwood, plus the usual reviews, columns and articles by Ramsey Campbell, Roger Dobson, Reggie Oliver and Gary McMahon.

Edited by Gwilym Games, Machenalia was the newsletter of The Friends of Arthur Machen. Along with plenty of Machen-related news, each issue also contained reviews of other genre material.

The tenth issue of David Longhorn’s annual Supernatural Tales was another bumper volume featuring contributions from Don Tumasonis, Gary McMahon, Andrew Darlington, Lynda E. Rucker, Tina Rath and Michael Chislett, amongst others. Whispers of Wickedness included an interview with author Steven Pirie.

The two issues of John Benson’s Not One of Us contained stories and poems by Sonya Taaffe and others. Change was the latest in a series of annual, variously-titled publications from the same publisher. A trade paperback anthology edited by Benson, The Best of Not One of Us, was published by Prime Books/Wildside Press and included fifteen stories that originally appeared in the magazine.

Gavin J. Grant and Kelly Link’s Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet and Heather Shaw and Tim Pratt’s Flytrap featured the usual mixture of slipstream fiction, poetry and articles.

The October issue of The New York Review of Science Fiction included interviews with Thomas Ligotti and Peter Straub, and the Winter issue of The Bulletin of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America featured an introductory essay by Bud Webster on Donald A. Wollheim’s classic horror anthologies The Macabre Reader and More Macabre.

Published by Writer’s Digest in association with “The Horror Writers of America” [sic], Mort Castle’s guide On Writing Horror: Revised Edition contained forty-four essays (twenty-four original and the others mostly revised) on how to write horror with a Foreword by Stanley Wiater and an Afterword by Harlan Ellison.

Dorothy Hoobler and Thomas Hoobler’s The Monsters: Mary Shelley & the Curse of Frankenstein looked at the origins of Mary Shelley’s influential novel.

Edited by Scott Connors for print-on-demand publisher Hippocampus Press, The Freedom of Fantastic Things: Selected Criticism on the Writings of Clark Ashton Smith collected twenty-six critical essays (five original) by Brian Stableford, S. T. Joshi, James Blish, Donald Sidney-Fryer and others on the author’s work, along with a gathering of contemporary reviews.

H. P. Lovecraft’s Collected Essays Volume 3: Science and Collected Essays Volume 4: Travel were also available from Hippocampus, edited with notes and an Introduction by S. T. Joshi. From the same imprint came Lovecraft’s New York Circle: The Kalem Club 1924–1927, edited by Kirk Mara Hart and Joshi, with a Preface by Peter Cannon and an Introduction by Mara Kirk Hart.

In December, a number of original Lovecraft letters and manuscripts were auctioned at Sotheby’s. Among the items was an autographed manuscript of “The Shunned House” that sold for $45,000.

Charles Addams: A Cartoonist’s Life was a biography by Linda H. Davis.

From McFarland Publishing, Allen A. Debus’ Dinosaurs in Fantastic Fiction: A Thematic Survey included Forewords by Donald F. Glut and Mark F. Berry.

Published by Greenwood Press/Praeger, Legends of Blood: The Vampire in History and Myth by Wayne Bartlett and Flavia Idriceanu looked at the undead in myths, literature and film.

Don D’Ammassa’s Encyclopedia of Fantasy and Horror Fiction was a guide to the major authors and their works.

Published in a signed edition limited to 500 copies, John Clute’s The Darkening Garden: A Short Lexicon of Horror contained a selection of terms defined for a proposed encyclopaedia on horror fiction, illustrated by thirty artists. The artwork was also available as thirty postcards, limited to 300 sets.

Translated from the Russian by Adam Bromfield and published in a movie tie-in edition, Sergei Lukyanenko’s 1998 novel Night Watch (Nochnol Dozor) was the first in a trilogy about the epic battle between the creatures of Light and Dark.

Other tie-in novels of the year included V for Vendetta by Steve Moore, Superman Returns by Marv Wolfman and Snakes on a Plane by Christa Faust.

From BL Publishing/Black Flame, Final Destination 3 was also written by Faust. It was joined by novelisations for Final Destination by Natasha Rhodes and Final Destination 2 by Nancy A. Collins and Rhodes, while the spin-off title Final Destination: Looks Could Kill was written by Collins alone.

Dark Horse Comics’ DH Press launched its paperback series of licensed Universal Monsters novels with Dracula: Asylum by Paul Witcover, Frankenstein: The Shadow of Frankenstein by Stefan Petrucha and Creature from the Black Lagoon: Time’s Black Lagoon by Paul Di Filippo.

Other tie-in books based on older film properties included The Toxic Avenger by Lloyd Kaufman and Adam Jahnke, Jason X: To the Third Power by Nancy Kilpatrick, Friday the 13th: The Jason Strain by the busy Christa Faust, Friday the 13th: Carnival of Maniacs by Stephen Hand, A Nightmare on Elm Street: The Dream Dealers by Jeffrey Thomas, A Nightmare on Elm Street: Perchance to Dream by Natasha Rhodes, Predator: Forever Midnight by John Shirley and Aliens: DNA War by Diane Carey.

Although Buffy the Vampire the Slayer only lived on in TV reruns, the novelisations continued apace with Buffy the Vampire Slayer: After Image by Pierce Askegren, Carnival of Souls by Nancy Holder, Blackout by Keith R. A. deCandido, Portal Through Time by Alice Henderson, Bad Bargain by Diana G. Gallagher and Go Ask Malice, which was told in diary form by Joseph Robert Levy.

The Power of Three may also have reached the end of its television run, but the Halliwell sisters continued their witchy ways in Charmed: As Puck Would Have It by Paul Ruditis and Charmed: Light of the World by Scott Ciencin.

At least Lost: Signs of Life by Frank Thompson was based on a show that was still running, and BBC Books issued new novelisations to tie in to the exploits of David Tennant’s Doctor Who and his companion, Rose. The ghosts from a sunken navy ship flooded London in The Feast of the Drowned by Stephen Cole. A 2,000-year-old statue of Rose led to an adventure in Ancient Rome in Jac Rayner’s The Stone Rose, and the duo searched for a key to eternal life on another planet in The Resurrection Casket by Justin Richards.

The exploits of the tenth Doctor and Rose continued in The Price of Paradise, The Art of Destruction and The Nightmare of Black Island, while the seventh Doctor and Ace were featured in Andrew Cartmel’s Doctor Who: Atom Bomb Blues.

Based on the classic Gothic daytime soap opera, Dark Shadows: The Salem Branch was written by actress Lara Parker.

Games Workshop issued a profit warning following the end of the Lord of the Rings sales boom. Sales for the six months to November 2006 were down by £2.3 million and full year profits were expected to be below forecasts.

World of Darkness: Chicago: Three Shades of Darkness collected three novellas based on White Wolf’s role-playing game, and Nick Kyme’s Necromunda: Back from the Dead was based on another role-playing game.

30 Days of Night: Rumors of the Undead by Steve Niles and Jeff Mariotte was a novel based on the vampire graphic series created by Niles.

John Shirley was busy novelising John Constantine: Hellblazer with War Lord and Subterranean, and he still found time to turn out Batman: Dead White. Alex Irvine took over with Batman: Inferno, while Infinite Crisis by Greg Cox was based on the acclaimed DC Comics graphic serial.

Tim Lebbon’s Hellboy: Unnatural Selection and young adult writer Thomas E. Sniegoski’s Hellboy: The God Machine were both based on the comic series created by Mike Mignola.

Wolverine: Road of Bones was an X-Men spin-off by David Alan Mack, and Durham Red: Black Dawn by Peter J. Evans was based on the vampire character from 2000 AD comic.

Editor Mark Morris asked fifty contributors to write about their favourite horror films in Cinema Macabre, from PS Publishing. The results ranged from Nosferatu (1922) to The Sixth Sense (1999) and included essays by Basil Copper, Stephen Jones, Neil Gaiman, Peter Atkins, Jo Fletcher, Stephen Gallagher, Lisa Turtle, Mark Samuels, Thomas Tessier, Christopher Fowler, Kim Newman, Joel Lane, Simon Pegg, Michael Marshall Smith, Tim Lebbon, Muriel Gray, Peter Crowther, Paul McAuley, Terry Lamsley, Ramsey Campbell, Douglas E. Winter and the editor, along with an Introduction by UK TV personality Jonathan Ross. It was published in an edition of 500 trade hardcovers signed by Morris and a 200-copy slipcased edition signed by all fifty-two contributors.

Although Monsters: A Celebration of the Classics from Universal Studios featured a “Fearword” by Forrest J. Ackerman and contributions from a number of luminaries including John Landis, Stephen Sommers, Gloria Stuart and Ben Chapman, the minimalist text and unimaginative photo layouts didn’t do their subjects justice.

Published by Telos as a hefty trade paperback, Zombiemania: 80 Movies to Die For included in-depth reviews by Dr Arnold T. Blumberg and Andrew Hershberger, along with a brief history of zombie cinema, a title index of more than 500 films, and a Afterword by zombie actor Mark Donovan.

Night Shade Books reissued Andrew Migliore and John Strysik’s wide-ranging 1995 study Lurker in the Lobby: A Guide to the Cinema of H. P. Lovecraft in a handsomely redesigned and updated edition with a Preface by S. T. Joshi.

Andy Murray’s Into the Unknown: The Fantastic Life of Nigel Kneale from Headpress was the first full biography of the British author and screenwriter (who died a few months after it was published).

The Winston Effect: The Art and History of Stan Winston Studio by Jody Duncan was a huge volume from Titan Books detailing the behind-the-scenes secrets of the make-up maestro’s extensive work in the cinema. James Cameron contributed a brief Foreword, and there was also a short notation from the late Fay Wray. Equally hefty was Titan’s Crystal Lake Memories: The Complete History of Friday the 13 th by Peter M. Bracke, which included everything any fan of Jason Voorhees needed to know about the “slasher” film series.

From the same publisher, Denis Meikle’s The Ring Companion looked at the Japanese film cycle about a cursed videotape and the novels that inspired it.

Celebrating its subject’s 80th birthday, Alan Silver and James Ursini’s Roger Corman: Metaphysics on a Shoestring looked at each of the director’s films, with commentary by Corman himself.

Terry Pratchett’s Hogfather: The Illustrated Screenplay included the shooting script by director Vadim Jean and Pratchett, who also contributed separate Forewords.

From Baylor University Press, Kim Paffenroth’s study Gospel of the Living Dead: George Romero’s Visions of Hell on Earth looked at the Christian imagery in the director’s series of zombie movies.

In Irwin Allen Television Productions, 1964–1970: A Critical History from McFarland, Jon Abbott discussed the disaster movie producer’s successful TV output, including such shows as Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Lost in Space, The Time Tunnel and Land of the Giants.

The Hellraiser Films and Their Legacy by Paul Kane covered Clive Barker’s seminal 1980s movie and its sequels and spin-offs, with a Foreword by Pinhead himself, actor Doug Bradley.

Also from McFarland, Michael Klossner’s Prehistoric Humans in Film and Television looked at nearly 600 dramas, comedies and documentaries made between 1905 and 2004.

Vampire fans could choose from Matthew Pateman’s study The Aesthetics of Culture in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Tim Kane’s The Changing Vampire of Film and Television and Lyndon W. Joslin’s updated 1999 study Count Dracula Goes to the Movies: Stoker’s Novel Adapted, 1922–2003. Also of interest was James Bernard, Composer to Count Dracula: A Critical Biography by David Huckvale.

Cover Story: The Art of John Picacio was an impressive full-colour showcase of the award-winning artist’s work, published in hardcover by MonkeyBrain Books with an Introduction by Michael Moorcock and an interview with Picacio by Joseph McCabe.

Best known for his many Doc Savage paperback covers, James Bama: American Realist looked at these and much more of the artist’s work. Brian M. Kane wrote the text, and there was an Introduction by Harlan Ellison and a Foreword by Len Leone.

The subtitle of Steve Starger and J. David Spurlock’s Wally’s World: The Brilliant Life and Tragic Death of Wally Wood, the World’s Second-Best Comic Book Artist pretty much summed up the life of its subject. A deluxe hardcover edition included an extra sixteen-page portfolio.

Amphigorey Again collected a number of previously unpublished illustrations and unfinished work by the late Edward Gorey.

Origins: The Art of John Jude Palencar featured more than 100 paintings and drawings by the artist with a Foreword by Christopher Paolini and an Afterword by Arnie Fenner, who edited the volume with his wife Cathy.

As usual, the Fenners also edited Spectrum 13: The Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art, which contained more than 400 pieces of art by some 300 different artists. Among those represented were Michael Whelan, Bob Eggleton, Brom, Leo and Diane Dillon, Donato Giancola, Adam Rex, Todd Lockwood and Thomas S. Kuebler, along with a profile of Grand Master Award winner Jeffrey Jones.

Ray Bradbury’s classic story The Homecoming was issued as a picture book, profusely illustrated by Dave McKean.

The Illustrated Dracula featured artwork by Jae Lee, and included Bram Stoker’s missing chapter, “Dracula’s Guest”, plus various non-fiction appendices by Marvin Kaye.

Frankenstein Makes a Sandwich and Other Stories You’re Sure to Like, Because They’re All About Monsters, and Some of Them Are Also About Food. You Like Food, Don’t You? Well, All Right Then was the full title of Adam Rex’s beautifully illustrated children’s book featuring poems about all the classic creatures.

Mommy?, written by Arthur Yorinks with art by Maurice Sendak, was a pop-up picture book about a little boy searching for his missing mother who encountered many of the classic monsters.

Poet Laura Leuck teamed up with artist Gris Grimly for Santa Claws, a frighteningly festive tale about two boys at Christmas.

From Fantagraphics Books, Beasts! was subtitled A Pictorial Schedule of Traditional Hidden Creatures. Conceived, designed and edited by Jacob Covey, the attractively-produced hardcover volume collected artwork from ninety of the best visual artists from the worlds of comics, skate graphics, rock posters, animation, children’s books, and commercial and fine art.

London’s Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children, which still holds the copyright to J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan in the EU, protested at the publication of Lost Girls, an erotic graphic novel by Alan Moore and artist Melinda Gebbie featuring the sexually explicit adventures of Alice from Alice in Wonderland, Wendy from Peter Pan and Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz on the eve of the First World War.

The hospital, which was bequeathed the rights to his books by Barrie, claimed that Moore’s title would need their permission or license to publish. In response, the author told the BBC that “It wasn’t our intention to try to provoke a ban”. Lost Girls was subsequently issued as a three-volume deluxe hardcover set in the US by Top Shelf Productions. When pre-orders exceeded the 10,000-copy first printing, the book went into a second edition before publication. However, following discussions between the publisher and Great Ormond Street Hospital, publication of the book in the European Union was delayed until 2008, when the Peter Pan copyright expires.

Avatar’s George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead comics series launched with a special introductory issue, “Back from the Grave”, written by original creators Romero and John Russo and set in 1968, prior to events in the first movie. The launch edition was available in six variant editions with alternate covers by artists Jacen Burrows (“Regular” and “Splatter”), Sebastian Fiumara (“Rotting”), Juan Jose Ryp (“Terror”) and Tim Vigil (“Gore”). A special “Foil” edition came packaged with a poster signed by Romero and was limited to just 600 copies.

Many of Marvel’s superheroes turned up as the walking dead in writer Robert Kirkman’s Marvel Zombies five-issue series, with gruesome covers echoing classic comic book images of old.

Dark Horse Comics’ Universal Monsters: Cavalcade of Horror contained reprint graphic versions of Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy and The Creature from the Black Lagoon, along with a new painted cover by Eric Powell.

The Dark Horse Book of Monsters featured a new “Hellboy” story by Mike Mignola, Kurt Busiek and Keith Giffen presented a tribute to Jack Kirby’s creature comics of the 1960s, while Garry Gianni illustrated William Hope Hodgson’s “A Tropical Terror”.

IDW Publishing adapted Clive Barker’s The Great and Secret Show as a twelve-part series. Designed as a homage to the old Warren comics magazines, IDW’s Doomed featured graphic adaptations of stories by, amongst others, David J. Schow, Robert Bloch, Richard Matheson and F. Paul Wilson.

Reprinted by Headpress as a large format paperback, The Complete Saga of the Victims by “Archaic” Alan Heweston and Suso Rego originally appeared in the early 1970s in the Skyward horror comic Scream. A tale of two sexy women kidnapped and tortured by all kinds of monsters, the graphic novel included the previously unpublished sixth episode.

The “Best Sellers Illustrated” series featured Bram Stoker’s Dracula’s Guest illustrated by Dick Giordano and Edgar Allan Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue illustrated by Frank Brunner.

Also available was a young adult graphic adaptation of Dracula, written by Gary Reed and illustrated by Becky Cloonan.

Disney’s exuberant if self-indulgent sequel Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest smashed Spider-Man 2’s opening record of $114.8 million in America with a three-day take of $132 million. It went straight to the #1 slot on both sides of the Atlantic, became the second-fastest movie to ever pass the $400 million mark (forty-five days) and was the top-grossing film of the year in the UK with a box-office take of almost £52 million. The film also became the fastest-selling DVD ever in the UK as, during the run-up to Christmas, one in four DVDs sold was a copy of Dead Man’s Chest.

Despite their success with the Pirates sequel, Walt Disney announced that they would cut 650 studio jobs to concentrate on creating blockbuster franchises over more adult subjects. Film output would be reduced from around eighteen titles a year to a dozen, with about ten being released under the Disney name and those under the Touchstone banner being cut back to two or three releases a year.

James Wong’s silly but stylish Final Destination 3 was held off the top spot by the long-delayed remake of The Pink Panther in America and Disney’s animated Chicken Little in the UK. Following the premise of the earlier entries, a group of teens who survived a roller-coaster disaster discovered in various gruesome ways that they couldn’t cheat Death (the voice of Tony Todd). The DVD release included a new interactive feature that let the viewer change the course of the plot. (So much for the auteur theory.)

Jonathan Liebesman’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning (from a story co-written by David J. Schow) was a pointless 1960s-set prequel to the equally misguided 2003 remake, in which audiences learned how young Thomas Hewitt (Andrew Bryniarski) ended up as the chainsaw-wielding cannibal called “Leatherface”.

Co-scripted by Wes Craven and starring Kristen Bell (TV’s Veronica Mars), Jim Sonzero’s Pulse was another J-horror remake (Kairo) about a cursed website that released ghosts. Original Ju-On director Takashi Shimizu continued to recycle the same old tired J-horror clichés in The Grudge 2, which was once again irritatingly related out of sequence. As a local journalist, Edison Chen easily acted his American co-stars, the bland Amber Tamblyn and a returning Sarah Michelle Gellar, off the screen.

Gellar also turned up as the star of The Return, in which she travelled to a small Texas town that seemed to hold the key to her strange hallucinations.

Although a remake of John Carpenter’s The Fog (1979) would seem redundant to most people, director Rupert Wainwright at least managed to include some atmospherically ghostly sequences in a tame tale of a cursed town and its murderous history.

Another unnecessary remake was Black Christmas, based on the superior and innovative 1975 slasher film of the same name. At least French director Alexandre Aja’s reworking of The Hills Have Eyes brought some social commentary and a stylish veneer to producer Wes Craven’s 1977 shocker about a murderous mutant family preying on tourists in the New Mexico desert. The film opened at #1 in the UK.

Simon West’s remake of the 1979 film When a Stranger Calls opened at #1 in the US. Camilla Belle played the babysitter who realised that a series of threatening phone calls were coming from inside the house she was in.

Starring Liev Schreiber and Julia Stiles as the concerned parents, John Moore’s The Omen was a pointless remake of the 1976 box-office smash and opened in the US on 6.6.06. Mia Farrow played the sinister nanny who hanged herself in front of Devil-child Damien (Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick). The DVD included unrated extended scenes and an alternate ending.

Nicolas Cage starred as the duped cop in Neil LaBute’s totally unnecessary remake of the 1973 classic The Wicker Man, which was relocated from Scotland to America, with Christopher Lee’s pagan worshippers replaced by Ellen Burstyn’s feminist beekeepers.

With its troubled production profiled in detail on HBO’s hugely entertaining Project Greenlight more than a year earlier, John Gulager’s monster-fest Feast finally received a three-week limited run at midnight showings in September before being dumped by Dimension onto DVD.

Another group of luckless victims were put through a series of gory tests by Tobin Bell’s dying madman in Lionsgate’s Saw III, which enjoyed the biggest opening of the series to date, debuting in the #1 slot with $33.6 million.

“Presented by” Quentin Tarantino, Eli Roth’s gratuitous and unpleasant Hostel had the interesting premise of a pair of American backpackers who discovered that an entire Slovakian town was involved in torturing and mutilating unsuspecting tourists. Apparently the Slovakian authorities were outraged at the film, along with more-discerning movie-goers. An “unrated” version released on DVD included no less than four commentary tracks featuring the director.

Fledgling distributor Fox Atomic’s similarly-themed Turistas (aka Paradise Lost), directed by John Stockwell, in which Brazilian party-goers were sliced and diced by a mad surgeon (Miguel Lunardi), barely managed to register at the box-office with a $3.6 million opening weekend.

Jeroen Krabbe’s eccentric film-maker assembled a group of disposable actors in Bernard Rose’s Snuff Movie, while Brett Leonard’s Feed was a pseudo-snuff film about a cyber investigator (Patrick Thompson) who uncovered a S&M world where men obsessed with overweight women bet on whether they could feed them to death.

World Wrestling Entertainment presented Gregory Dark’s See No Evil, starring WWE wrestler “Kane” (Glen Jacobs) as a bald-headed psycho gruesomely dispatching teenagers in a creepy old hotel.

David Slade’s Hard Candy played with audience perceptions of predator and victim when teenager Hayley (Ellen Page) hooked up with an older fashion photographer (Patrick Wilson) she met on the Internet.

Taking the splatter genre to its obvious comedy conclusion, Christopher Smith’s Severance had a group of sales executives from a multinational weapons corporation being butchered one-by-one during a team-building exercise in the Eastern European backwoods.

Kate Beckinsale returned as leather-clad vampire werewolf-hunter Selene in her husband Len Wiseman’s stylish-looking but confusing adventure Underworld: Evolution. Although not screened for US critics, it opened at #1 for a week before quickly dropping out of the box-office charts on both sides of the Atlantic. At least Sir Derek Jacobi and Bill Nighy added a touch of class to the cast. Along similar lines, Milla Jovovich donned a rubber suit to save mankind from a bio-engineered virus that turned humans into vampires in Kurt Wimmer’s Ultraviolet.

Kristanna Loken played a half-human, half-vampire “dhampir” in Uwe Boll’s third video game adaptation BloodRayne, which also starred Billy Zane, Michael Madsen, Meatloaf, Udo Kier, Michelle Rodriguez and Sir Ben Kingsley. It opened in the US with a gross of just $1.6 million.

In Ti West’s low budget The Roost, a group of teens on their way to a wedding were attacked by vampire bats whose bite transformed their victims into bloodsuckers, while Frostbite was a Swedish vampire movie set in a hospital.

The creepy Countess Elizabeth Bathory used a bootleg version of a video game to select her victims in the surprisingly effective Stay Alive, featuring Frankie Muniz (TV’s Malcolm in the Middle). The “unrated director’s cut” on DVD was fifteen minutes longer than the soft PG-13 version briefly released in movie theatres.

A woman (Radha Mitchell) searched for her sick daughter in the zombie-haunted town of Silent Hill. Christophe Gans’ confusing adaptation of the video game opened at #1 in the US. Sean Bean played hapless husbands in both Silent Hill and The Dark, John Fawcett’s low budget chiller in which another mother (Maria Bello) searched for her missing daughter after staying at a creepy Welsh house, where a religious cult once committed mass suicide.

Jeff Broadstreet’s Night of the Living Dead 3D, featuring Sid Haig, was a long way from George Romero’s original series.

Demi Moore played a successful novelist who moved to a remote Scottish village where she was apparently haunted by the ghost of her recently-deceased young son in Craig Rosenberg’s curiously old-fashioned British thriller Half Light. In Hadi Hajaig’s overly ambitious Puritan, Nick Moran starred as a washed-up paranormal investigator involved in a Gothic mystery in modern Whitechapel.

David Payne’s Keeker was about a group of students in a creepily deserted desert motel menaced by mutilated ghosts and the titular monster, while Renny Harlin’s The Covenant was based on Aron Coleite’s graphic novel about teenage warlocks and flopped at the box-office.

Lucky McKee’s long-delayed second feature The Woods, featuring Bruce Campbell, finally saw the light of day, and something nasty lurked on a deserted island in Michael J. Bassett’s survivalist horror Wilderness, featuring ubiquitous Brit actor Sean Pertwee overseeing a group of violent young offenders who were killed off by a crazed psycho.

David Zucker’s uneven comedy Scary Movie 4 spoofed The Grudge, Saw, The Village and, er . . . Brokeback Mountain. Pamela Anderson, Charlie Sheen, Cloris Leachman, Shaquille O’Neal and Dr. Phil turned up in embarrassing cameos. Incredibly, it opened at #1 in the US and #2 in the UK in April.

Despite a huge, Internet-fuelled publicity build-up, David R. Ellis’ entertaining Snakes on a Plane didn’t quite live up to the pre-release hype as Samuel L. Jackson’s tough-talking FBI agent had to contend with . . . a plane full of 400 deadly snakes. Although it opened in both the US and UK at #1, not screening the film for critics prior to release apparently harmed its chances at the box-office.

Director Joon-ho Bong’s clever and amusing The Host (Gwoemul) had a giant mutant fish creature created by toxic waste storing its human victims in Seoul’s sewers. It was a huge box-office hit in its native Korea. Su-chang Kong’s R-Point was a Korean production about a cursed island and the spirits of the dead soldiers who were trapped there.

In Marc Forster’s clever metaphysical fantasy Stranger Than Fiction, Will Ferrell’s lonely tax inspector Harold Crick discovered that he was a character about to be killed off in author Emma Thompson’s latest novel. Ewan McGregor’s psychiatrist found his life beginning to merge with Ryan Gosling’s suicidal art student in Forster’s other release of the year, the hopelessly pretentious Stay.

Rival Victorian illusionists Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman attempted to destroy each other with real magic in Christopher Nolan’s flashback-driven The Prestige, based on the novel by Christopher Priest. Meanwhile, Edward Norton’s turn-of-the-century magician used his powers to free the woman he loved in Neil Burger’s The Illusionist, which also starred Paul Giamatti.

M. Night Shyamalan’s overly complicated fable Lady in the Water featured Giamatti’s apartment complex loner protecting Bryce Dallas Howard’s mysterious mermaid from toothy creatures from another dimension.

Guillermo del Toro had far more success creating an alternate reality in his sumptuous Pan’s Labyrinth. Set in Franco’s civil war-ravaged Spain of 1944, the young Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) discovered that she was really a princess and must complete three tasks to return to her magical underground kingdom.

Despite being directed by Dave McKean and scripted by Neil Gaiman, MirrorMask was a dull combination of live action and digital animation as sulky young circus girl Helena (Stephanie Leonidas) found herself transported into a bizarre fantasy world. Meanwhile, the Brothers Quay looked at the links between creativity and madness in their surreal feature The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes.

Filmed during a break in the making of The Brothers Grimm, Terry Gilliam’s Tideland was an odd Southern Gothic about a lonely little girl (Jodelle Ferland) growing up in an old derelict house and her encounters with the bizarre locals.

Darren Aronofsky’s long-in-development The Fountain, which starred Hugh Jackman as three different characters in history searching for immortality and love with the writer-director’s real-life partner Rachel Weisz, died at the box-office, despite wasting $18 million before it was ever made.

Hans Horn’s Adrift was about a group of old friends on a luxury yacht who all dived overboard before they realised that they had forgotten to lower the ladder, leaving them stranded in open sea. A toxic terrorist attack on Los Angeles looked at the human fallout in a city under siege in Chris Gorak’s impressive directorial debut Right at Your Door.

Sissy Spacek and Donald Sutherland starred in Courtney Solomon’s An American Haunting, a not-really ghost story set in the early 19th century and “based on true events”, while a student (Sandra Hüller) thought she was possessed by the Devil in Requiem.

Rock musicians Jack Black and Kyle Gass were on the trail of a mythical Satanic guitar plectrum in the uneven comedy Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny.

For film-goers who thought they had seen it all before, Denzel Washington’s ATF agent used advanced digital surveillance to “travel back through time” to prevent a terrorist bombing in Tony Scott’s high-concept SF thriller Déjà Vu, which also featured Val Kilmer and Jim Caviezel. Keanu Reeves’ architect and Sandra Bullock’s doctor exchanged letters through time in Alejandro Agresti’s romantic drama The Lake House.

Nathan Fillion was the likeable small town sheriff who had to contend with a killer alien plague that turned the townsfolk into zombies in Slither, writer/director James Gunn’s inventive and entertaining tribute to 1950s SF movies. Made on a pathetically low budget, Jake West’s dire SF/comedy Evil Aliens, about extraterrestrial rapists in Wales, somehow managed to get a (mercifully brief) theatrical release in the UK.

Alfonso Cuarón’s impressive Children of Men, based on a novel by P. D. James, was set in a dystopian near-future where women could no longer give birth. Clive Owen’s reluctant hero had to deliver the last pregnant woman to safety with the help of Michael Caine’s aging hippie. The film opened at #1 in the UK in September.

Utilising a rotoscoped animation process, Richard Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly was based on the novel by Philip K. Dick and starred two-dimensional representations of Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr., Woody Harrelson and Winona Ryder. Along the same lines, Christian Volckman’s animated French film Renaissance was shot in motion-captured black and white and featured a tough detective (voiced by Daniel Craig) searching for a missing geneticist in a dystopian Paris of the near-future.

Scripted by Larry and Andy Wachowski and based on Alan Moore’s cult graphic novel (he asked for his name to be taken off the credits, as usual), Natalie Portman and Hugo Weaving starred as the political revolutionaries in James McTeigue’s delayed V for Vendetta, set in a near-future Britain controlled by John Hurt’s totalitarian dictator. It opened at #1 in the US with a lower-than-expected gross.

When Bryan Singer pulled out to revive another comic book franchise, Brett Ratner took over at the helm of the third and possibly final entry in the mutant superhero franchise, X-Men: The Last Stand. With a war between the mutants triggered by the discovery of a “cure” for their powers, this flashy but bland sequel featured former footballer Vinnie Jones as the brutish Juggernaut and a surprisingly good Kelsey Grammer as Beast.

Despite technically being a semi-sequel to Richard Donner’s 1978 film, Singer’s Superman Returns was unable to match the heights of that movie, with newcomer Brandon Routh failing to fill Christopher Reeve’s tights as the Man of Steel and Kevin Spacey apparently content to simply channel Gene Hackman’s Lex Luthor. The less said about Kate Bosworth’s insipid Lois Lane the better, but at least the late Marlon Brando was back as Jor-El in an extended cameo. In the US, the film dropped 58% at the box-office in its second week.

Shown theatrically in Beverly Hills for one night only in November to benefit The Christopher Reeve Foundation, original director Donner’s cut of Superman II (1980) was finally destined for DVD release.

Ben Affleck portrayed former Superman actor George Reeves, found dead under suspicious circumstances in 1959, in Allen Coulter’s period mystery Hollywoodland.

Ivan Reitman’s harmless chick-flick comedy, My Super Ex-Girlfriend, starred Uma Thurman as the jealous superhero girlfriend unwisely dumped by Luke Wilson. Meanwhile, Bollywood’s own superhero adventure, Krrish, earned an Indian record of £8.3 million in its first week of release. Featuring a masked singing and dancing hero (Hrithik Roshan) saving the world from a mad scientist, around one-third of the film’s takings came from overseas, mostly in the UK and US.

Based on Patrick Süskind’s best-selling novel, Ben Whishaw played the Parisian serial killer with heightened olfactory sense in German director Tom Tykwer’s Perfume: The Story of a Murderer.

Olivia Bonamy and Michaël Cohen were the married couple menaced by feral schoolchildren in their remote Romanian mansion in the French production lls (Them), supposedly based on a true story.

A blonde angel (Rie Rasmussen) gave a man (Jamel Debbouze) contemplating suicide his life back in Luc Besson’s pretentious Angel-A, while Virginia Madsen played a mysterious blonde who may or may not have been the Angel of Death in Robert Altman’s final film, A Prairie Home Companion. Penelope Cruz was haunted by the ghost of her dead mother (Carmen Maura) in Pedro Almodovar’s offbeat family drama Volver.

Over a weekend in November, Freestyle Releasing/After Dark Films offered a “horror fest” of independent films under the umbrella title 8 Films to Die For, plus Snoop Dogg’s Hood of Horror, starring Snoop Dog, Danny Trejo and Jason Alexander, which quickly came and went.

The same month, cinemagoers got a sneak preview of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix when the first trailer was released with the animated Happy Feet.

Gerard Butler, Sarah Polley and Stellan Skarsgård starred in the mythological saga of Beowulf & Grendel, while Eragon was based on the successful young adult fantasy book series and featured some nice-looking CGI dragons and shameless scene-stealing by Jeremy Irons and John Malkovich, who obviously realised how terrible the script was.

Based on the popular series of YA novels by Anthony Horowitz, Stormbreaker (aka Alex Rider: Operation Stormbreaker) introduced the teenage super-spy (Alex Pettyfer) battling Mickey Rourke’s crazed computer genius, and two thirteen-year-old friends discovered a teen mermaid (Sara Paxton) in Aquamarine.

Veterans Dick Van Dyke and Mickey Rooney added a much-needed touch of class to the Ben Stiller fantasy/comedy Night at the Museum, also featuring Robin Williams, Owen Wilson and Ricky Gervais. It stayed in the #1 slot for two weeks at Christmas.

Adam Sandler’s office workaholic discovered that he could take control of his life with a universal remote invented by Christopher Walken’s crazy scientist in Frank Coraci’s crass comedy Click.

John Favreau’s children’s adventure Zathura: A Space Adventure was a SF follow-up to Jumanji and also based on a book by Chris Van Allsburg, while Charlotte’s Web was based on E. B. White’s classic children’s novel and starred Dakota Fanning as the girl befriended by the titular spider (voiced by Julia Roberts).

Tim Allen’s deputy DA found himself transforming into a were-pooch in Brian Robbins’ contemporary remake of Walt Disney’s The Shaggy Dog, while Allen’s Santa had to prevent Jack Frost (a mugging Martin Short) from hijacking Christmas in Michael Lembeck’s The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause, also from Disney. The busy Allen also turned up as Captain Zoom, who (along with Chevy Chase and Courtney Cox) instructed four children with special powers how to be accepted in the dire superhero comedy Zoom.

Britain’s Aardman Studios eschewed its usual claymation technique for computer graphics with DreamWorks’ derivative mouse-out-of-water adventure Flushed Away, featuring the voices of Hugh Jackman, Kate Winslet and Sir Ian McKellen, and the likeable rodent Scrat and his prehistoric friends from the original were forced to flee the melting polar ice caps in the cartoon comedy sequel Ice Age 2: The Meltdown. Garfield: A Tale of Two Kitties was a reworking of The Prince and the Pauper as the fat ginger cat (a CGI creation voiced by Bill Murray) was accidentally switched with an upper-crust British feline.

Featuring the voices of Julia Roberts, Nicolas Cage and Meryl Streep, John A. Davis’ children’s animated adventure The Ant Bully was produced by Tom Hanks and released in some Imax theatres in very impressive 3-D. Ricardo Montalban replaced the late Marlon Brando as the voice of the Head of the Ant Council, while genre artist Bob Eggleton worked on the film’s designs.

Also shown in selected venues in 3-D, Gil Kenan’s Monster House was a disappointing motion-capture animated children’s adventure in which a trio of children found themselves trapped in a living house that ate anyone who ventured inside. Robert Zemeckis and Steven Spielberg were executive producers.

Tim Burton’s classic The Nightmare Before Christmas was reissued for the Holiday Season in Disney Digital 3-D.

Although the original King Kong (1933) never won a single Oscar, Peter Jackson’s overlong and self-indulgent remake picked up no less than three (Visual Effects, Sound Mixing and Sound Editing) at the 78th Academy Awards, presented on March 5th in Hollywood. It was mostly a night for independent films, although Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit collected the award for Animated Feature, and The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe won for Make-up.

2006 became the year that we finally said “goodbye” to the VHS (“Vertical Helical Scan”) cassette. The revolutionary home entertainment format went the way of Sony’s Betamax tapes and laserdiscs when DVD, new high-definition formats and the emerging video game consoles finally replaced it after thirty years. When the studios stopped manufacturing the tapes, retailers were left with no choice but to pull the plug on the format.

Peter Jackson’s overblown King Kong remake became even more bloated with a three-disc “Deluxe Extended Edition” on DVD that included nearly forty minutes of deleted scenes, 230 new visual effects and a mind-numbing six hours of original special features. Thankfully, it was only available for a limited time.

Meanwhile, Jackson’s ongoing lawsuit against New Line Cinema over revenue disclosure from The Fellowship of the Ring resulted in further delays in green lighting the studio’s Lord of the Rings prequel, The Hobbit.

Warner Bros’ Hollywood Legends of Horror Collection was a three-disc DVD compilation of classic 1930s MGM horrors. Mark of the Vampire, The Mask of Fu Manchu, Doctor X, The Return of Doctor X, Mad Love and The Devil Doll featured commentaries by Kim Newman and Stephen Jones, Greg Mank, Scott McQueen, director Vincent Sherman and Steve Haberman.

Sony Pictures’ Icons of Horror: Boris Karloff was a two-disc collection containing Columbia Pictures’ The Black Room, The Man They Could Not Hang, Before I Hang and The Boogie Man Will Get You, all making their DVD debut. If that wasn’t enough, then Universal’s three-disc The Boris Karloff Collection bought together such disparate titles as Night Key, Tower of London (1939), The Climax (in Technicolor), The Strange Door and The Black Castle, all featuring the screen’s “Master of Horror”. Disappointingly, both sets were extremely light on extras.

The two-disc 75th Anniversary editions of Universal’s Frankenstein and Dracula contained all the familiar bonus features, along with two new documentaries about stars Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi and audio commentaries by Rudy Behlmer, Sir Christopher Frayling, David J. Skal and Steve Haberman.

Universal also finally released a long-awaited two-disc set of Inner Sanctum Mysteries: The Complete Collection, featuring all six films in the “B” movie series (1943–45) based on the old radio series and starring Lon Chaney, Jr.

Fox’s The Mr Moto Collection Vol.1 starred Peter Lorre as the inscrutable Japanese investigator in Thank You Mr Moto, Think Fast Mr Moto, Mr Moto Takes a Chance and Mysterious Mr Moto. Meanwhile, The Charlie Chan Collection Vol.1 featured Earl Derr Biggers’ Honolulu-based detective in Charlie Chan in London, Charlie Chan in Paris, Charlie Chan in Egypt and Charlie Chan in Shanghai, all starring Warner Oland. The set also included Fran Trece, the Spanish-language version of the “lost” entry in the series, Charlie Chan Carries On.

Anchor Bay Entertainment’s six-disc “Ultimate Collection of Video Nasties”, Box of the Banned 2, contained five hardcore horror films from the 1970s and ’80s (The Witch Who Came from the Sea, Contamination, Tenebrae, Don’t Go Near the Park and Evilspeak) along with David Gregory’s documentary Ban the Sadist Videos 2 and various other extras.

From Britain’s DD Home Entertainment, Hammer Horror: The Early Classics was a box set featuring The Quatermass Experiment, Quatermass 2, X The Unknown and Four Sided Triangle. Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense: The Complete Collection collected all thirteen feature-length episodes of the 1970s TV series, and The Peter Gushing Collection brought together The Abominable Snowman, Island of Terror, The Blood Beast Terror and Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell.

Released under the distributor’s “Classic Horror” label, Blood of the Vampire, Corridors of Blood and the obscure Daughter of Darkness all featured informative booklets written by Jonathan Rigby and Marcus Hearn.

Kim Newman and Stephen Jones contributed the booklets to the Network DVD releases of James Whale’s The Old Dark House, The Medusa Touch, and Hammer’s Countess Dracula, Hands of the Ripper and Twins of Evil, along with audio commentaries that also featured director Jack Gold and actresses Ingrid Pitt and Angharad Rees.

A two-disc special edition of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, starring Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, included three documentaries, a vintage featurette and an excerpt from The Andy Williams Show featuring Davis singing the title song.

The two-disc special edition of The Green Mile featured more than two hours of bonus material, including a new half-hour documentary, Stephen King: Storyteller, that included interviews with Frank Darabont, William Goldman, Tom Hanks, Stephen Jones, Lawrence Kasdan, Kim Newman, David J. Schow, Peter Straub, Bernie Wright-son and King himself.

Original cast members Anne Francis, Earl Holliman, Richard Anderson, Warren Stevens and Robby the Robot reunited in mid-November for a 50th Anniversary screening of MGM’s 1956 classic Forbidden Planet at the American Cinematheque’s Egyptian Theater in Hollywood. The remastered DVD also featured three documentary supplements plus outtakes and test scenes. Additionally, the two-disc tin set included The Invisible Boy and a 1958 episode of TV’s The Thin Man featuring Robby, along with collector’s cards and a 3.5-inch tall model of the screen’s most iconic robot.

New label Casa Negra Entertainment began releasing classic Mexican horror films in restored subtitled versions on DVD. Remastered and uncut, The Brainiac had never officially been released on DVD before, while “The Vampire Collection” showcased the classic El Vampiro and its sequel El Ataud del Vampiro on a two-disc set. A bonus on Black Pit ofDr MIMisterios de Ultratumba was the original English continuity script, while The Witch’s Mirror and The Curse of the Crying Woman both included the English-language dub tracks.

The first direct-to-DVD release from Warner Bros’ specialty horror division Raw Feed, John Shiban’s Rest Stop featured Jaimie Alexander menaced by yet another backwoods psycho.

Set in a world of murderous children, Clive Barker’s The Plague was actually co-written and directed by Hal Masonberg.

I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer was released directly to DVD, while the similarly-distributed The Tooth Fairy was scripted by TV veteran Stephen J. Cannell, amongst others.

From Retro Shock-O-Rama Cinema, Joe Sarno’s cult 1974 vampire film The Devil’s Plaything was released in a widescreen version with a new mini-documentary about the director and an insert booklet by Michael J. Bowen.

Bill Moseley, Tim Thomerson, Phil Fondacarro and Tommy Chong all made special appearances in Charles Band’s Evil Bong, and Monarch of the MoonlDestination Mars!, released on the Dark Horse Indie label, was a two-disc DVD set spoofing 1950s sci-fi films.

The Munsters Two-Movie Fright Vest paired Munster Go Home! with the TV movie The Munsters’ Revenge. From Paramount came a three-disc set, The Wild Wild West: The Complete First Season (1965–66), and a second volume of The Time Tunnel (1966–67) featuring fifteen episodes over four discs.

Superman: The 1948 and 1950 Theatrical Serial Collection from Warner Bros, was a four-disc DVD set that included all the chapters from both The Adventures of Superman and Atom Man vs. Superman (both starring Kirk Alyn as The Man of Steel).

When released on DVD in the UK, Point Pleasant: The Complete Series included five previously unaired episodes of the disappointing Fox series.

I Was a Teenage Movie Maker collected all forty-one 16mm amateur movies made by Don Glut between 1953–69.

Anchor Bay’s Halloween: 25 Years of Terror was a two-disc tribute to the “slasher” movie franchise, featuring interviews with more than eighty celebrities, including John Carpenter, Jamie Lee Curtis, Clive Barker, Rob Zombie and many others.

Made without a grain of talent or humour, A. Susan Svehla’s dire Terror in the Tropics incorporated plenty of copyright-free footage of Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff and Lon Chaney, Jr into a distinctly amateur production about the reading of a will on eerie Fog Island. Many of the characters were named after old actors, and this even included dinosaur footage from the silent Lost World.

Fans of the old horror stars were much better served by The Witch’s Dungeon: 40 Years of Chills. Directed by Dennis Vincent and hosted by Zacherley the “Cool Ghoul”, the documentary traced the history of Cortlandt Hull’s Connecticut-based horror museum and the films and actors who inspired it with the help on-screen appearances by Christopher Lee, Sara Karloff, Ron Chaney, Bela Lugosi Jr, Dick Smith, Tom Savini, Caroline Munro, Forrest J Ackerman, Bob Burns, Ben Chapman, Ricou Browning and a host of others.

Written, produced and directed by Paul Davids, The Sci-Fi Boys was anothr feature-length documentary about many of the filmmakers and other creative people who were inspired and championed by Forrest J Ackerman’s Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine. Along with Ackerman himself, those interviewed included Rick Baker, Ray Bradbury, Bob Burns, Roger Corman, Donald F. Glut, Ray Harryhausen, Peter Jackson and John Landis.

In November, Forry Ackerman celebrated his 90th birthday with a party in Los Angeles. Among those attending were Ray Bradbury, Carla Laemmle, Anne Robinson, James Karen, Bobbi Bresse, George Clayton Johnson, David J. Skal, Peter Atkins and Dennis Etchison. Guests received a copy of Famous Monster of Filmland #90, a fac-simile magazine of the original manuscript pages of FM #1.

Jonathan English’s mythological fantasy adventure Minotaur featured guest turns by Tony Todd, Rutger Hauer and an unrecognisable Ingrid Pitt and was released directly to the Sci Fi Channel.

Also from those purveyors of fine flicks, Yancy Butler starred in Basilisk: The Serpent King, a reanimated Dean Cain battled infectious giant beetles carrying a zombie virus in Dead and Deader, and Michael Pare witnessed the battle between Komodo vs. Cobra on a desert island.

Tom Skerritt turned up in the self-descriptive Mammoth, about an alien-possessed museum exhibit (no, really), while Kraken: Tentacles of the Deep (aka Deadly Water), starring Victoria Pratt, Charlie O’Con-nell, Jack Scalia and a giant squid, won its title from an online publicity stunt. Spelunkers Christopher Atkins and Colm Meaney faced Romanian rock-eating rhinoceros beetles in Caved In: Prehistoric Terror.

Casper Van Dien and Lynda Carter found themselves up against some scary Latin American vampires in Slayer, and a prison guard (Jennifer Wiggins) battled a monster assassin working for the Russian mafia in Shapeshifter.

Room 6 was set in a creepy hospital and starred Jerry O’Connell, while Stacy Keach confronted evil ghosts on a deserted island penitentiary in Haunted Prison. Lance Henriksen encountered a big bloodthirsty backwoods creature in Abominable, and he reprised his role from the original film as a ghost in Pumpkinhead III: Ashes to Ashes (filmed back-to-back with a third sequel).

Tobe Hooper directed Mortuary, about an undertaker (Denise Crosby) who took over a creepy funeral home, and Emmanualle Vaugier’s special ops team blew flesh-eating zombies away in House of the Dead 2. Meanwhile, psychic siblings Charisma Carpenter and Eric Mabius wanted revenge on the evil that destroyed their hometown twenty years earlier in Voodoo Moon.

A slumming Ben Cross’ mad Nazi scientist created a device that transformed a World War II German soldier into a monstrous killing machine in David Mores’ cheap and cheerful SS Doomtrooper.

A scientific expedition to an unknown world encountered hungry mutants in Savage Planet starring Sean Patrick Flanery, and Jason Connery was the fleet-footed superhero of the Sci Fi Channel’s Stan Lee’s Lightspeed, which was gone in a Flash.

Dark Kingdom: The Dragon King starred Alicia Witt, Julian Sands and Max Von Sydow and was shown in two parts on Sci Fi Channel.

Directed by Mick Garris and scripted by the author himself, Stephen King’s Desperation found a group of typical King characters trapped in the eponymous Nevada desert town controlled by a demonic spirit and Ron Perlman’s psychotic cop. Unfortunately, ABC-TV scheduled its three-hour “movie event” opposite the penultimate episode of that season’s American Idol, with predictable results.

Noah Wyle returned as nerdy bookworm Flynn Carsen, protecting the world’s most treasured supernatural artefacts, in Jonathan Frakes’ The Librarian: Return to King Solomon’s Mines on TNT. This time he teamed up with a spirited archaeologist (Gabrielle Anwar) to find a stolen scroll that was said to reveal the location of the legendary diamond mines.

Casper Van Dien’s roguish archaeologist and Leonor Varela’s museum curator tried to beat Malcolm McDowell’s secret Hellfire Council to a collection of Ancient Egyptian tablets with supernatural powers in Hallmark’s The Curse of King Tut’s Tomb.

A widow’s daughter claimed she was murdered in a former life in the Lifetime Movie Network’s Past Tense starring Paula Trickey, and Julie Delpy and Justin Theroux discovered that their new home came with its own 250-year-old ghost in the same network’s The Legend of Lucy Keyes, which was “based on a true story”.

Peter Krause played homicide detective Joe Miller, searching for his missing daughter (Elle Fanning) through a mysterious motel room that was a gateway in time and space, in the three-part Sci Fi mini-series The Lost Room. Miller soon found himself embroiled in a secret war over long-lost objects that possessed extraordinary powers that dated back to a fateful day in May 1961. Julianna Margulies, Dennis Christopher and Kevin Pollak also starred.

Daryl Hannah played an unlikely insectoid alien queen planning world domination in Robert Leiberman’s ludicrous mini-series Final Days of Planet Earth, also from the Sci Fi Channel.

Created by Stephen Gallagher, who soon left the project due to ubiquitous “creative differences”, Granada’s Eleventh Hour was shown as four self-contained TV movies based around the concept of “science-gone-wrong”. Patrick Stewart starred as government trouble-shooter Professor Ian Hood who, with his Special Branch minder Rachel Young (Ashley Jensen), investigated such things as a European cloning conspiracy, a flesh-eating virus, a formula to predict the weather and spring water that could apparently cure cancer.

Gallagher was also set to script a TV movie of Dracula before the BBC announced its own version, shown at Christmas. Writer Stewart Harcourt’s attempt to do something different with Bram Stoker’s much-filmed novel resulted in Marc Warren’s laughably effeminate Count and David Suchet’s clearly potty Abraham Van Helsing.

As Las Vegas, the Hoover Dam and Mount Rushmore were destroyed over two nights, the North American continent was split in two by a massive earthquake in NBC’s by-the-numbers sequel 10.5: Apocalypse, starring Kim Delaney, Dean Cain and a slumming Frank Langella.

Ray Winstone did little more than walk through his performance as the sympathetic barber who cut the throats of his customers in David Moore’s BBC film of Sweeney Todd, shot on nicely atmospheric Romanian locations. Essie Davis was a nymphomaniac Mrs Lovett who turned the victims into pies, and David Warner played a blind policeman investigating the mysterious disappearances. The “Director’s Cut” was subsequently released on DVD with exclusive unseen footage.

Based on a story by Dennis Wheatley, The Haunted Airman was a short BBC film about a recuperating RAF pilot (Robert Pattinson) who was tormented by terrifying flashbacks. Julian Sands played his sinister doctor.

Number 13 was the latest M. R. James ghost story for Christmas. Greg Wise starred as the academic who discovered that his lodging house contained a ghostly room next to his own.

In Stuart Orme’s two-part Ghostboat, based on the novel by George E. Simpson, David Jason played the only survivor of a World War II submarine disaster who found he was still linked with the past when the haunted vessel mysteriously reappeared thirty-eight years later.

Ian Richardson provided the voice of Death who, with his reluctant assistant Albert (David Jason), had to save Christmas from Marc Warren’s psychotic Mr Teatime and the mysterious “Auditors” in Vadim Jean’s all-star holiday treat Terry Pratchett’s Hog-father, which was shown over two nights on Sky Television. Based on Pratchett’s 20th “Discworld” novel, the author contributed to the script and turned up in a cameo as a Toymaker.

For younger viewers, Pratchett’s time-travel adventure Johnny and the Bomb was adapted as a three-part children’s series starring Zoë Wanamaker, Frank Finlay and Keith Barron.

In Return to Halloweentown, the fourth instalment in the Disney franchise, Sara Paxton starred as teenage witch Marnie, who was on her way to Witch College with a little help from Grandma Aggie (Debbie Reynolds).

John Goodman starred as Saint Nick in NBC’s live-action remake of The Year Without a Santa Claus, based on the 1974 Rankin/Bass claymation original.

Re-Animated, the Cartoon Network’s first live-action movie, was about a young boy who received a brain transplant from the founder of a theme park. Fred Willard played the Walt Disney-like entrepreneur.

The animated Superman: Brainiac Attacks on the Cartoon Network pitted the Man of Steel against his two greatest enemies, Brainiac and Lex Luthor. The network also aired the superhero movies Teen Titans in Tokyo, Ultimate Avengers II and the Japan-set Hellboy: Sword of Storms (featuring the voices of Ron Perlman and Selma Blair).

BBC-TV’s revived Doctor Who series continued to be one of Britain’s most popular programmes. For the second, thirteen-part series, Scottish actor David Tennant took over as a dynamic incarnation of the Time Lord, who shared a more romantic relationship with his companion, Rose Tyler (Billie Piper). The better episodes involved a werewolf murder mystery surrounding Queen Victoria (Pauline Collins), the poignant return of former companions Sarah Jane Smith (Elisabeth Sladen) and the robot dog K-9, a two-part Cyberman invasion of London, a soul-sucking 1950s TV entity (Maureen Lip-man) and a Satanic creature trapped by the power of a black hole. In the epic two-part finale, an Earth besieged by ghosts and the destruction of the mysterious Torchwood Institute were only a prelude to an apocalyptic confrontation between the Cybermen and the Daleks as Rose made a decision that would change her life forever.

For the show’s Christmas special, “The Runaway Bride”, the Doctor teamed up with comedian Catherine Tate as a sarcastic bride who vanished from her wedding ceremony and ended up on the Tardis. Together they battled Sarah Parish’s impressive giant spider-queen.

Although the first episode of the “adult” Doctor Who spin-off series Torchwood broke the record for the biggest audience for a UK digital TV channel, Captain Jack Harkness (John Barrowman) and his Cardiff team of ludicrously bisexual paranormal investigators were never as entertaining as the show that spawned them.

Modern Manchester police detective Sam Tyler (John Simm) was knocked down by a car and apparently found himself transported back to a surprisingly un-PC 1973 in the BBC’s enjoyable and amusing eight-part series Life on Mars (named after the David Bowie song). While Tyler (and the viewers) tried to work out if he had actually travelled back in time or if it was all in his head, he also had to contend with his no-nonsense boss Gene Hunt (the excellent Philip Glenister) and a particularly creepy young girl off the television test card.

Less successful was the BBC’s feature-length remake of Fred Hoyle and James Elliot’s 1961 SF series A for Andromeda, shot on HD video and shown in March. Kelly Reilly starred as the eponymous new biological life form.

Also disappointing, Random Quest was an hour-long adaptation of the John Wyndham story (previously filmed for TV in 1969 and as Quest for Love in 1971). Following a laboratory accident, research scientist Colin Trafford (Samuel West) found himself in a parallel universe inhabiting the body of his namesake and living a very different life.

For those fans still missing Buffy and Angel, rapper Kirk “Sticky” Jones starred as the vengeance-seeking half-human, half-vampire “daywalker”, who teamed up with Jill Wagner’s undercover bloodsucker to defeat the sinister House of Chthon in Spike TV’s surprisingly engaging Blade: The Series, created by David Goyer and based on the Marvel Comics character.

The second, thirteen-episode season of Showtime Network’s anthology series Masters of Horror kicked off in October with Richard Christian Matheson’s loose adaptation of Ambrose Bierce’s “The Damned Thing”, directed by Tobe Hooper and starring Sean Patrick Flanery. The series also included hour-long episodes directed by John Landis, Ernest Dickerson, Brad Anderson, John Carpenter, Dario Argento, Joe Dante and creator Mick Garris, and featured George Wendt, Michael Ironside, Ron Perlman, Meat Loaf, Elliot Gould and Tony Todd among the guest stars.

Richard Christian Matheson also scripted “Battle Ground”, the first and probably best episode of TNT’s Nightmares & Dreamscapes, an hour-long anthology show filmed in Australia and based on eight of Stephen King’s lesser-known stories. The series continued through the Lovecraftian “Crouch End” (set in a very peculiar depiction of London), “Umney’s Last Case”, “The End of the Whole Mess”, “The Road Virus Heads North”, “The Fifth Quarter”, “Autopsy Room Four” and “You Know They’ve Got a Hell of a Band”. Guest stars included William Hurt, William H. Macy, Henry Thomas, Tom Berenger, Samantha Mathis, Richard Thomas and Steven Weber.

In Showtime Network’s blackly humorous Dexter, Miami police forensic expert and secret serial killer Dexter Morgan (Michael C. Hall) discovered that his sister’s new boyfriend was the Ice Truck Killer and that he had a familial connection to the mixed-up murderer. Although the season finale marginally failed to live up to the promise of the rest of the series, Dexter was still one of the best new shows on TV, based on Jeff Lindsay’s 2004 novel Darkly Dreaming Dexter.

In America, The CW was the network that was created out of the merger of The WB and UPN. Co-owners CBS and Time Warner launched the new channel in September with a $50 million promotional campaign.

In The CW’s Supernatural, Dean (Jensen Ackles) and Sam (Jared Padalecki) finally teamed up with their missing father John Winchester (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) to confront vampires and obtain a mystical gun that could destroy the demon that killed their mother. Not only did the boys have to deal with Reapers, a flesh-eating clown and the death of their father, but they also battled the ghost of America’s first serial killer, H. H. Holmes and encountered a seriously homicidal vampire-hunter. In a clever piece of stunt-casting that was guaranteed to turn heads, Linda Blair turned up as a sympathetic cop in an episode entitled “The Usual Suspects”.

In NBC’s Medium, the show’s executive producer, Kelsey Gram-mer, showed up as an urbane Death, Molly Ringwald played the victim of a stalker, and psychic Alison (Patricia Arquette) had an It’s a Wonderful Life moment in the second season finale when she discovered what her life would have been like if things had worked out differently. The show was back with a two-hour premiere in November, in which Alison’s dead ex-boyfriend (Arquette’s real-life husband Thomas Jane) turned up.

Following a near-fatal séance at the end of the first season, Lesley Sharp returned as morose medium Alison Mundy, haunted by the ghost of her dead mother (Amanda Lawrence) in a second, eight-part series of Afterlife, created by Stephen Volk.

Meanwhile, Melinda (Jennifer Love Hewitt) had to make peace with her mother to lay a ghost to rest in CBS-TV’s Ghost Whisperer. The first season ended with a plane crash and the death of series regular Andrea (Aisha Tyler). However, the character was back in the first show of the second series. Camryn Manheim joined the cast as Delia, and Jay Mohr played Rick Payne, a professor studying the supernatural.

The Dead Zone returned for its fifth and supposedly final season, filmed back-to-back with series four. In the season finale, Johnny (Anthony Michael Hall) discovered that vice president Greg Stillson (Sean Patrick Flanery), who was being controlled by evil mastermind Janus (Martin Donovan), was the target of an assassin. In a surprise announcement in September, the USA Network picked up the show for a sixth season.

Bill Paterson’s scientific investigator Douglas Monaghan was mostly missing from the six-part, third series of the BBC’s Sea of Souls, and it was left to his assistants Craig Stevenson (Iain Robertson) and psychic Justine McManus (Dawn Steele) to debunk the supernatural manifestations that kept cropping up all over Scotland. In the penultimate episode they encountered a genuine succubus who drained her victims of their life-force.

A group of dull characters discovered that they possessed superpowers and had to “save the cheerleader (Hayden Panettiere), save the world” in NBC-TV’s over-hyped Heroes. The show went on hiatus in December before returning with twenty-two new episodes in 2007.

CBS-TV’s gloomy post-apocalyptic drama Jericho, starring Skeet Ulrich and Gerald McRaney as an estranged son and father among the inhabitants of a Kansas town cut off by a nuclear attack on America, also took a mid-season break in December.

In ABC-TV’s meandering Lost, Ana Lucia (Michelle Rodriguez) and Libby (Cynthia Watros) were both shot dead before the two-hour second season finale in May and, when the series returned, the ruthless Mr Eko (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) was killed off by the show’s mysterious monster. While everybody else was still trying to uncover the secret of the island, a dithering Kate (Evangeline Lily) still couldn’t make up her mind between doctor Jack (Matthew Fox) and bad boy Sawyer (Josh Holloway). To avoid repeats, the show went on hiatus for two months in December to make way for the confusing Day Break, in which Taye Diggs’ disgraced LAPD detective kept reliving the same bad day over and over again (now where have we seen that before?).

Meanwhile, Hurley’s cursed lottery numbers from Lost turned up on a fortune cookie message in the January 25th episode of UPN’s Veronica Mars and appeared the same day on the cover of DC Comics’ Catwoman #51. Now that was really weird!

After five seasons, ABC’s Alias finally came to a two-hour end in May, as secret agent Sydney Bristow (Jennifer Garner) confronted a group of old foes and attempted to make some sense of the “Ram-baldi” prophecy.

The Sci Fi Channel’s Battlestar Galactica continued to be the best SF show on television, as the remaining humans escaped from slavery on New Caprica and raced their humanoid enemies the Cylons to find the way to Earth in a two-part, mid-season, cliff-hanger.

USA Network’s The 4400 returned for a third season of thirteen episodes in June, as Tippi Hedren guest starred in the two-hour opener. Government investigators Tom Baldwin (Joel Gretsch) and Diana Skouris (Jacqueline McKenzie) tried to foil Jordan Collier’s (Billy Campbell) plans for mankind, and baby Isabelle mysteriously transformed into a sexy twenty-year-old (Megalyn Echikunwoke).

Stargate SG-1 became TV’s longest-running SF series with its tenth and final series, which also saw the show celebrate its 200th episode (with a Wizard of Oz spoof and numerous in-jokes). Richard Dean Anderson reprised his role as Jack O’Neill in a number of episodes, including a two-part crossover episode with Stargate Atlantis. MGM announced that it would be making two Stargate SG-1 movies once the series was over.

Despite being an interesting variation on Invasion of the Body Snatchers, ABC’s Invasion was cancelled after its first season, without ever resolving its human-hybrid conspiracy.

After being marooned with his rebellious teenage daughter Zoë (Jordan Hinson) in the eponymous town of the Sci Fi Channel’s Eureka (aka A Town Called Eureka), Jack Carter (the likeable Colin Furguson) found himself the new sheriff of a top-secret community filled with geniuses. The first episode attracted an audience of 4.1 million in the US, the most for a series launch in the channel’s history.

Series eight of The WB’s Charmed saw the witchy Halliwell sisters working for Homeland Security with the help of teenage witch Billie (Kaley Cuoco). After 178 episodes, the series bowed out with an episode in which the Charmed Ones travelled back in time to save the world from the forces of evil and finally put their lives in order.

Paul Wesley’s eighteen-year-old orphan discovered that he was a Nephilim, the offspring of an angel and a mortal in the ABC Family limited-run series Fallen, while Matt Dallas learned that he was a teenage clone without a past or any emotions in the ABC Family show Kyle XY.

Over on The CW’s Smallville, which passed its 100th episode early in the year with the death of Clark’s adoptive father Jonathan Kent (John Schneider) from a heart attack (he returned as a ghost), a pregnant Lana (Kristen Kreuk) finally married Lex Luthor (Michael Rosenbaum), while Clark (Tom Welling) rounded up a group of escapees from the Phantom Zone. Meanwhile, Jimmy Olsen (Aaron Ashmore) was introduced, the Martian Manhunter briefly turned up, and semi-regular Oliver Queen/Green Arrow (Justin Hartley) rounded up past guest stars The Flash, Cyborg and Aquaman to form a nascent Justice League to investigate LuthorCorp’s mysterious “Project 33.1”.

Hyperdrive was a six-part BBC comedy series set aboard the spaceship HMS Camden Lock, whose crew (led by Nick Frost) had a mission to promote British interests across the galaxy. In an attempt to impress a couple of Goth girls, Howard (Julian Barratt) and Vince (Noel Fielding) accidentally summoned the most evil demon known to man in a second season episode of the BBC comedy series The Mighty Boosh.

The team went searching for a woman who disappeared after an exorcism in an episode of CBS’ Without a Trace. A series of bombings in Seattle were linked to a sci-fi novel set in an apocalyptic future controlled by robots in an episode of the same network’s Criminal Minds, and Roger Daltrey guest-starred in an episode of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation that paid homage to the classic slasher films of the 1980s.

Not content with its usual lunacy, Bad Girls: A Christmas Special added the supernatural to the final episode of the long-running British women’s prison drama, as the ghost of Larkhill’s supposedly escaped inmate Natalie Buxton (Dannielle Brent) put the frights on G Wing while her rotting body blocked the prison sewers.

Fan-of-the-show Peter Straub played a blind retired police officer on the March 27th episode of the daytime soap opera One Life to Live.

Inspired by the book by Michael Lawrence, the BBC’s Young Dracula was a fourteen-part children’s comedy in which single father Count Dracula (Keith-Lee Castle) couldn’t understand why his son Vlad (Gerran Howell) wanted to turn his back on blood-drinking and become a normal London teenager, much to the disgust of Vlad’s older sister, Ingrid (Clare Thomas).

Filmed in New Zealand, Maddigan’s Quest was based on Margaret Mahy’s book and was set in a post-apocalyptic world.

The animated Zombie Hotel was about eight-year-old twins, Fungus and Maggot, and their dead parents Rictus and Funerella.

An episode of The CW’s animated series The Batman featured new Superman actor Brandon Routh as the villainous Everywhere Man, who used quantum technology to duplicate himself.

Ghostly DC Comics characters Deadman, Mr Terrific, Stargirl and the Shining Knight all turned up in episodes of the animated Justice League Unlimited. After five seasons, the show ended with a two-part episode in which Lex Luthor and the Legion of Doom attempted to reanimate Brainiac.

Fox’s seventeenth annual The Simpsons: Treehouse of Horror featured the guest voices of Dr Phil, Richard Lewis and Fran Drescher. The Halloween episode’s three tales of terror included Homer being transformed into a man-eating blob by a meteorite, Springfield’s own version of the Golem, and a spoof on Orson Welles’ infamous War of the Worlds radio broadcast featuring aliens Kang and Kodos.

Mario Bava: Maestro of the Macabre was the title of a documentary that aired on IFC in September. John Carpenter, Joe Dante and Tim Burton were amongst those who paid tribute to the influential Italian director and cinematographer. Over on the History Channel, Vampire Secrets looked at vampire mythology and its influence on Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Going to Pieces: The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film was a Starz documentary on Friday the 13th in October, and Bravo celebrated Halloween with the two-hour Even Scarier Movie Moments. Meanwhile, there was a two-day Munsters Marathon on TV Land, the Sci Fi Channel programmed 13 Days of Halloween, ABC Family went with 13 Nights of Halloween, and AMC offered up Monster fest X, a ten-day non-stop monster movie marathon to celebrate the horror-day season.

Michael Sheen portrayed the author in the BBC dramatised profile H. G. Wells: War with the World, while Jonathan Ross, Lord Hattersley and astronomer Patrick Moore contributed to the documentary H. G. Wells and Me.

Dennis Wheatley: A Letter to Posterity was an hour-long documentary about the bestselling writer whose work has now fallen out of favour.

The Martians and Us was a three-part BBC series exploring the roots of British science fiction. Contributors included Brian W. Aldiss, Arthur C. Clarke, Doris Lessing, Ian M. Banks, Margaret Atwood, Will Self and Kim Newman. Over six episodes, The Cult of . . . looked at the history of cult TV shows Adam Adamant Lives!, Doomwatch, Star Cops, Survivors, Blakes 7 and Tripods.

Transylvania Babylon presented an entertaining selection of clips of big and small screen Draculas from the past.

The third season finale of the Sci Fi Channel’s “reality” show Ghost Hunters featured a visit to Colorado’s Stanley Hotel, the real-life inspiration for Stephen King’s Overlook in The Shining.

Spike TV broadcast the Spike Scream Awards 2006 in October, “hosted by the women of Grindhouse” (Rosario Dawson, Rose McGowan and Marley Shelton). For some reason it also featured a special tribute to Ozzy Osbourne.

In early December, BBC Radio 3 broadcast Weird Tales – The Strange Life of H. P. Lovecraft. Geoff Ward, professor of literature at Dundee University presented the forty-five minute show about the influential author with contributions from Neil Gaiman, S. T. Joshi, Kelly Link, Peter Straub and China Miéville.

Playwright and poet Lemn Sissay traced Poe the Poet for Radio 3’s Twenty Minutes programme, while actor Kerry Shale read from some of Edgar Allan’s better-known verse.

BBC Radio 4’s Confessions of a Crap Artist was a half-hour documentary about Philip K. Dick’s reported encounter with God in 1974, while writer Francis Spufford looked at the history of British science fiction in the four-part series Imagining Albion: The Great British Future.

Terry Pratchett’s “Discworld” novel Small Gods was dramatised in four parts on Radio 4. Thea von Harbou’s classic SF novel Metropolis was adapted for the hour-long Friday Play in March, and Ian McKellen narrated a dramatisation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight for the Afternoon Play at Christmas.

Toronto’s Princess of Wales Theatre became the first venue in the world to mount the epic three-and-a-half hour stage production of The Lord of the Rings. Matthew Warchus and Shaun McKenna squeezed J. R. R. Tolkien’s trilogy into a three-act structure with stunning special effects and a score by A. R. Rahman and the Finnish musical group Vårttinå. Touted as the most expensive production in theatre history, the show reportedly cost more than $23 million.

Despite being nominated for two Tony Awards, Elton John and Bernie Taupin’s lavish stage musical of Anne Rice’s Lestat closed on Broadway in May, after just thirty-three preview and thirty-nine regular performances. Directed by Robert Jess Roth, Hugh Panaro was cast as the titular vampire.

It was announced in February that Andrew Lloyd Webber’s stage musical The Woman in White, based on the Gothic novel by Wilkie Collins, was to end its Broadway run after only two months at New York’s Marquis Theatre. Although it was playing to less than capacity audiences, producers blamed illness amongst the cast. Meanwhile, the original production in London’s West End starring Ruthie Henshall closed after nineteen months to make way for the Monty Python musical Spamalot.

There was more success for Sir Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera which, in the previous month, became the longest-running show in Broadway history when it notched up performance #7,486. Since the show opened in London in 1986, it had been seen by more than 80 million people worldwide.

Having started out in a small club in Toronto in 2003, Evil Dead: The Musical finally arrived in New York City as an Off Broadway show in time for Halloween. Inspired by Sam Raimi’s 1980s cult horror films, audience members in the front two rows of the theatre at the World Stages complex ended up nightly drenched in fake blood.

In Los Angeles, the Gangbusters Theatre Company presented the official world stage premiere of George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. Running from October through December at The Stella Adler Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard, the poorly-reviewed production starred Mancini Graves as the zombie-battling Ben and was produced and directed by Christian Levatino. Free beer was offered to all adult patrons.

A short drive across town at the Lex Theatre, Theatre East’s They’re Not Zombies, written and directed by Leif Gantvoort, covered much the same ground with more humour. Many of the characters were named after people connected with the original Romero movie. Adding to the LA zombiefest, Zombies! was an improv show put on by The Acme Comedy Theatre.

Over April and May, South Pasadena’s Freemont Centre Theatre presented a limited engagement of Ray Bradbury’s The Machineries of Joy. Directed by Alan Neal Hubbs and presented by Ray Bradbury’s Pandemonium Theatre Company, the production featured stage versions of “I Will Arise and Go Now”, “The Machineries of Joy”, “The Finnegan” and “The Parrot Who Met Papa”, the latter three being world premieres.

The Dorothy Chandler Pavilion hosted the world premiere in May of the LAOpera’s production of Grendel, directed by Julie Taylor. A darkly comic exploration of the Beowulf legend told from the monster’s point of view, the production ran for just seven performances and used projections, puppetry and masks to tell the epic tale.

Presented by the Improbable theatre company and the National Theatre of Scotland, The Wolves in the Walls: A Musical Pandemonium, based on the illustrated children’s book by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean, enjoyed limited runs in Glasgow and London in April.

The Children’s Society’s 125th Anniversary was celebrated at London’s Royal Albert Hall on October 22nd with two fundraising performances of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s musical Into the Woods, featuring Anita Dobson, Vinnie Jones and many others stars of stage and screen.

For the first time ever, Jeff Wayne performed his Musical Version of War of the Worlds with a live orchestra across the UK in April. The shows also included special guest Justin Hayward and the long-dead Richard Burton in both sight and sound as “The Journalist”.

Jonathan Kent’s Glyndebourne on Tour’s production of The Turn of the Screw updated Benjamin Britten’s opera to the 1950s and introduced a suggestion of paedophilia to the classic ghost story.

Nintendo’s Wii console was the new must-have gadget of 2006, especially after Sony delayed the European launch of its new PlayStation 3 until the following spring. The Wii controller, shaped like a television remote, interacted with a sensor bar placed in front of the TV that translated the player’s motion into movement on the screen.

Meanwhile, Johnny Depp voiced the disappointing Pirates of the Caribbean: Legend of Jack Sparrow spin-off video game, and Monster House was based on the animated film and obviously aimed at younger children.

At least Stubbs the Zombie in Rebel Without a Pulse allowed the player to actually become a zombie and turn the inhabitants of a small American town into an army of the walking dead.

Although the film was not due for release until 2007, Gentle Giant offered six-inch busts of “Harry Potter”, “Draco Malfoy” and “Cho Chang”, based on the characters in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

The third “Now Playing” series included a seven-inch figure of the Werewolf from Dog Soldiers, while Shaun (from Shaun of the Dead), Chucky (from Child’s Play) and Sebastian “The King” Haff (from Bubba Ho-Tep) were all part of the fourth “Cult Classics” series.

NECA’s “The Cult Classics Hall of Fame” included limited edition figures of The Crow, Freddy Krueger, Jason Vorhees and the ever-popular Pinhead.

McFarlane Toys acquired the licensing rights to the 1992 movie Bram Stoker’s Dracula and issued a two-pack of deluxe action figures depicting Dracula in his incarnations as a bat and a wolf as part of the “Movie Maniacs” series.

From Factory X, the replica of Rupert Giles’ Vampyr Book from Buffy the Vampire Slayer opened up to reveal a hidden storage area. The six-inch tall Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Übervamp Bust was sculpted by Gabriel Marquez and limited to 2,000 hand-numbered pieces.

“Black Widow” and “Bonejangles” statues from Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride were each available with certificates of authenticity.

Fantastik Plastiks’ Mad Monster Party Vinyl Figures depicted Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster, Werewolf and the Zombie Bellhop from the 1966 Rankin/Bass animated puppet movie. Each figure, based on the original design by Jack Harris, was packaged in a colourful tube and limited to 1,500 pieces each.

“Herman Munster” and “Grandpa Munster” were caricatured in Electric Tiki’s Tooned-Up Television Series, based on original designs by Tracy Mark Lee. The eleven-inch high polystone maquettes came with hand-numbered certificates of authenticity.

Hawthorne Village offered The Munsters Halloween Village with sculptures of “1313 Mockingbird Lane” (with a free Herman Munster figurine), “Lily’s Inn” and “Grandpa’s Touch of Transylvania Hotel”.

Artbox’s set of 72 Frankenstein Cards featured images from the 1931 Universal movie. “Monster Sketch” cards, depicting Frankenstein’s creation through the eyes of various artists, and “Monster-Glo” cards were randomly inserted into packs.

Comic Images’ Godzilla King of the Monsters Cards were released to celebrate the Big G’s 50th anniversary, and included randomly inserted sketch cards illustrated by Bob Eggleton, Matt Harris and others.

Fay Wray, in a classic pose from King Kong, was one of four famous “Canadians in Hollywood” (the others being Mary Pickford, Lorne Greene and John Candy) who were immortalised on a stamp by Canada Post.

San Francisco was the popular location for World Horror Convention 2006, held over May llth-14th. Despite an impressive line-up of guests that included international authors Kim Newman and Koji Suzuki, publisher John Pelan, artist Brom, actor Bill Moseley and Toastmaster Peter Straub, mismanagement led to some problems after the event. Ray Garton was announced as the somewhat premature recipient of the Grand Master Award.

The 19th annual Horror Writers Association Bram Stoker Awards were presented at a banquet at an airport hotel in Newark, New Jersey, on June 17th.

The Novel award was a tie between David Morrell’s Creepers and Charlee Jacob’s Dread of the Beast. First Novel went to Weston Ochse’s Scarecrow Gods, Short Fiction was awarded to Gary A. Braunbeck’s “We Now Pause for Station Identification”, and Joe Hill’s “Best New Horror” was awarded Long Fiction. Del Howison and Jeff Gelb’s Dark Delicacies won the anthology award, and Hill made it a popular double when he also received the Collection award for 20th Century Ghosts. Horror: Another 100 Best Books edited by Stephen Jones and Kim Newman won in the Non-Fiction category, and Michael A. Arnzen’s Freakcidents and Charlee Jacob’s Sineater tied for the Poetry award. The HWA Life Achievement Award went to Peter Straub, Necessary Evil Press was the recipient of the Specialty Press Award, and the Richard Laymon President’s Award went to Lisa Morton for her services to the HWA.

British FantasyCon XXX was held in Nottingham over September 22nd-24th. The impressive line-up of Guests of Honour included Clive Barker, Ramsey Campbell, Neil Gaiman, Raymond E. Feist and Juliet E. McKenna, while David J. Howe was Master of Ceremonies.

The August Derleth Award for Best Novel went to Neil Gaiman’s Anansi Boys. Best Novella was Stuart Young’s “The Mask Behind the Face”, and Joe Hill’s “Best New Horror” repeated its Stoker success, collecting the award for Best Short Fiction. The author also continued his winning streak by picking up the Best Collection award for 20th Century Ghosts. The Elastic Book of Numbers edited by Allan Ashley won for Best Anthology, Peter Crowther’s PS Publishing picked up the Best Small Press award, and Les Edwards was once again voted Best Artist. Clive Barker presented The Karl Edward Wagner Award for Special Achievement to Stephen Jones, and all the winners were present to accept their statuettes. A Special BFS Committee Founders Award was given to Keith Walker, Rosemary Pardoe, Phil Spencer and David A. Sutton.

World Fantasy Convention 2006, celebrating the “Robert E. Howard Centennial”, was held in Austin, Texas, over November 2nd-5th. Authors Glen Cook, Dave Duncan and “Robin Hobb” (Megan Lindholm) were Guests of Honor. Editor GoH was the legendary Glenn Lord, Artist GoH was John Jude Palencar, and Gary Gianni was billed as Robert E. Howard Artist Guest.

The eleventh International Horror Guild Awards (now apparently referred to as the “Iggys”) were presented on the Thursday evening at World Fantasy, hosted by artist John Picacio.

Chelsea Quinn Yarbro became the first woman honoured with the IHG Living Legend Award, which was presented by Suzy McKee Charnas. Brett Easton Ellis’ Lunar Park won the Novel award, Short Fiction went to “There’s a Hole in the Sky” by Rick Bowes (SciFiction), Mid-Length Fiction went to “La Peau Verte” by Caitlín R. Kiernan (To Charles Fort, with Love) and Long Fiction was awarded to “Kiss of the Mudman” by Gary Braunbeck (Home Before Dark). PS Publishing had a double success when Joe Hill’s 20th Century Ghosts received the award for Collection and Peter Crowther’s PostScripts won for Periodical. Memories by Enki Bilal received the Illustrated Narrative award, Non-Fiction went to editors S. T. Joshi and Stefan Dziemianowicz’s comprehensive three-volume Supernatural Literature of the World: An Encyclopedia, and Clive Barker’s “Exhibition: Visions of Heaven and Hell (and Then Some)” at Los Angeles’ Bert Green Fine Art gallery was the somewhat odd choice for the Art award.

In fact, the 2006 IHG Awards were surrounded by controversy, but we will return to that a little later . . .

Three days later in Austin, Toastmaster Bradley Denton hosted the 2006 World Fantasy Awards presentation following a crowded banquet on the Sunday afternoon. The Special Award, Non-Professional went to David J. Howe and Stephen Walker for their publishing imprint Telos Books, and the Special Award, Professional was somewhat controversially presented to Sean Wallace for Prime Books. James Jean won for Artist, Bruce Holland Rogers’ The Keyhole Opera was awarded Collection, and The Fair Folk edited by Marvin Kaye collected Anthology. George Saunders’ story “CommComm” (from The New Yorker) collected the award for Short Fiction, Joe Hill rounded out an incredible year when his “Voluntary Committal” won for Novella, and Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore was deemed the winner in the Novel category. Life Achievement Awards were announced for artist Stephen Fabian and writer John Crowley. Only one of the winners was actually present.

More observant readers may have noticed that no anthology winner was listed in the International Horror Guild Awards above. This was not an oversight.

I’ve talked about awards in these pages before, and they continue to be a thorny subject. Although most general readers will be unaware of the situation, in 2006 there was a brief flurry of controversy in the horror field over a decision by the IHG judges to not even nominate the minimum three titles required in the “Anthology” category.

For a year that produced many new and notable anthologies, not to mention the two annual “Year’s Best” horror volumes, it seemed inexplicable to many people working in the genre that the panel of IHG judges were apparently unable to come up with at least three titles first published in the year 2005 worthy of a nomination. Obviously, this did not seem to have been a problem for any other major awards in the field.

As a result, around seventy people (including myself and other previous and multiple IHG winners) put our names to an “Open Letter” to the administrators condemning their decision and pointing out that their failure to acknowledge any anthology titles was not only blinkered, but sent entirely the wrong message to not only readers of the genre, but also to publishers.

The anthologies market is already depressed enough. Why should any publisher support future anthology projects if one of the major awards in the field could not find anything even worthwhile to nominate out of a year’s worth of titles? Arguably, 2005 may not have been the best of years, but it was certainly far from the worst . . .

As we had intended, our open letter stirred up discussion within the field. However, what none of us who put our names to the statement expected was the vehemence that it would provoke.

Within hours of its posting, message boards were buzzing with people discussing the pros and cons of the letter. I soon started receiving e-mails attacking me personally. Over the following weeks I was threatened and insulted, and I know that others received similar treatment.

However, I’m delighted to say that these kinds of bullying tactics ultimately failed. Only one person who signed the letter subsequently asked to have his name removed. Many more contacted us and asked if they could have their names added.

In the end, the IHG judges claimed that they didn’t really consider “reprint” anthologies (an odd statement, given that such information appears nowhere in their rules and, in the past, I have won the IHG Award for this very anthology series). Perhaps even more telling was the excuse by another judge that the panel did not receive enough free copies of anthologies to make an informed decision.

What the IHG judges and administrator had failed to take into account was that it is the job of the panel to track down individual titles and then discuss the subjective merits of those books amongst themselves.

Even more importantly, it is not in the judges’ remit to compare one year’s output of books with that of any earlier years. In this particular case, they should have nominated whichever anthology titles they collectively felt were the best of those published in 2005. If they then decided that none of these titles ultimately deserved the final award, then so be it. But to simply say that not one single book – and the genuine contributions made by the authors, editors and publishers involved – was worth acknowledging not only harmed people’s perception of the genre, but it is also diminished an award that is supposed to be all about recognising “achievement” in the field of horror and dark fantasy.

At the very least, our protest raised some important issues, and I hope that such a decision will not be taken so lightly again.

For me, personally, it was a nasty, spiteful and disheartening time that exposed the dark and malicious underbelly of the genre I love and work in. Am I glad I got involved? Sure. Given the harassment that I had to put up with, would I do it again? You betcha!

The Editor

May, 2007