Stephen Jones (creator) – Zombie Apocalypse! Endgame

It’s approaching ….

Stephen Jones (creator) – Zombie Apocalypse! Endgame  (Robinson, Oct. 2014)

Cover: Joe Roberts

Ramsey Campbell – Ramsey’s Ruminations : Moreby In The Media
Stephen Baxter – 1897-1946: Todt Chemie-AG
Jo Fletcher – Our World In Their Hands
Jo Fletcher – Lost Boys
Stephen Baxter – 2005: Obituary Of Barry pound
Stephen Baxter – 1849: Joseph Bonomi #1: The Mourning Rings
Stephen Baxter – 1878: Joseph Bonomi 2: The Return Of Mobius
Jo Fletcher – The World’s Great Mysteries!
Gary McMahon – Bits And Pieces
Michael Marshall Smith – Wethaz
Brian Hodge – Lady Cecilia
Stephen Baxter – 1504: Leonardo Da Vinci: The Testament Of Giovanni
Michael Marshall Smith – Downcount
Stephen Baxter – Tom Lehrer and Morbius
Lou Morgan – Diary Entry #4
Stephen Baxter – Sympathy For The Deathless
Michael Marshall Smith – Endnotes
Paul Kane – He Is Legend
Stephen Baxter – The Two Morebys
Stephen Baxter – 1851: Herman Melville
Brian Hodge – The Return Of The Seven
Nancy Kilpatrick – Family
John Llewellyn Probert – The Three Messiahs
Alison Littlewood – Zombie VS. Zombi
Peter Crowther – Dead Inside
Angela Slatter – Red Dust, White Earth
Paul McAuley – The Return Of The Kings
Peter Atkins – Z.O.A.
Michael Marshall Smith – Appetite
Pat Cadigan – Rocky III
Thana Niveau – Vile Earth, To Earth Resign
Peter Crowther – An Interwiew With Bernie Maughmstein
Conrad Williams – Horizon Deep
Lisa Morton – Kevin Needs To Talk About Us
Stephen Baxter – The Three Morebys
Michael Marshall Smith – Things Future
Stephen Jones – Last Rites
Kim Newman – Zombie Apocalypse! Title Song

Blurb:
IS THIS THE END . . . OR JUST THE BEGINNING? Human Reanimation Virus (HRV) has spread around the globe and most of the major cities have fallen or been destroyed. As a new race of intelligent zombies rise to power, the remaining pockets of human resistance make a last, desperate stand in the ruins of a world on the brink of unimaginable change. With the final pieces of the epic puzzle falling into place, a centuries-old Endgame is revealed through interconnected emails, articles, reports, diaries and eyewitness accounts, as past and future hang in the balance. In this third and final volume of the original best-selling Zombie Apocalypse! trilogy, Thomas Moreby’s plan for world domination is finally revealed in all its mad glory, as the very fabric of time and space is ripped apart and history itself is about to be changed forever . . .

Stephen Jones – The Very Best of Best New Horror

Stephen Jones (ed.) – The Very Best of Best New Horror (Robinson, March 2010)

Joe Roberts

Stephen Jones – Foreword
Ramsey Campbell – Introduction: Bettering The Best

Brian Lumley – No Sharks In The Med
Michael Marshall Smith – The Man Who Drew Cats
Ramsey Campbell – The Same In Any Language
Christopher Fowler – Norman Wisdom And The Angel Of Death
Harlan Ellison – Mefisto In Onyx
Paul J. McAuley – The Temptation Of Dr. Stein
Neil Gaiman – Queen Of Knives
Terry Lamsley – The Break
Caitlín R Kiernan – Emptiness Spoke Eloquent
Peter Straub – Mr. Clubb And Mr. Cuff
Tim Lebbon – White
Kim Newman – The Other Side Of Midnight: Anno Dracula 1981
Elizabeth Hand – Cleopatra Brimstone
Joe Hill – 20th Century Ghost
Mark Samuels – The White Hands
Lisa Tuttle – My Death
Clive Barker – Haeckel’s Tale
Glen Hirshberg – Devil’s Smile
Simon Kurt Unsworth – The Church On The Island
Stephen King – The New York Times At Special Bargain Rates.

Index To Twenty Years Of Best New Horror

Blurb:

For the past twenty years the annual Best New Horror series has been the major showcase for superior short stories and novellas of horror and dark fantasy. Edited by Stephen Jones, the World Fantasy Award, British Fantasy Award and International Horror Guild Award-winning series has published more than 450 stories by around 200 of the genre’s most famous and acclaimed authors, as well as those newcomers who are just starting out on their careers. To celebrate the anthology’s twentieth anniversary, the editor has selected from each volume one story that he considers to be the “best” for reasons explained in his historical introduction to each tale. As a result, some of horror’s biggest names are represented, including Stephen King, Clive Barker, Peter Straub, Harlan Ellison, Brian Lumley and Neil Gaiman, along with newer writers such as Joe Hill, Glen Hirshberg, Mark Samuels and Terry Lamsley. With a unique Introduction by Ramsey Campbell, and an indispensable Index detailing the entire contents of the series over all twenty volumes, The Very Best of Best New Horror is a tribute to the world’s premier annual anthology of contemporary horror fiction.

Trisha Telep – Love Bites: Vampire Romance 2

Trisha Telep (ed.) – Love Bites: The Mammoth Book of Vampire Romance 2 (Robinson, 2009)

Cover design: JoeRoberts.co.uk

Jordan Summers – Paris After Dark
Deborah Cooke – Coven Of Mercy
Karen MacInerney – Cirque De La Nuit
Caitlin Kittredge – Perdition
Dina James – Deliver Us From Evil
Camille Bacon-Smith – Blood And Thyme
Rosemary Laurey – Into The Mists Forever
Patti O’Shea – Blood Feud
Angie Fox – Love Bites
Caitlin Kiernan – Flotsam
Jamie Leigh Hansen – The Murder King’s Woman
Carole Nelson Douglas Butterfly Kisses
Diane Whiteside – Crimson Kisses
Jaye Wells – Vampsploitation
Stacia Kane – Trust Me
Jennifer Ashley – The Scotsman And The Vamp
Justine Musk – I Need More You
Jennifer St. Giles – Point Of No Return
Dawn Cook [Kim Harrison] – With Friends Like These
Nancy Holder – Blood Gothic
Larissa Ione – Eternity Embraced
Jeanne Stein – The Ghost Of Leadville
Tiffany Trent – The Vampire, The Witch, And The Yenko
Ann Aguirre – Circle Unbroken
Devon Monk – Skein Of Sunlight

Blurb:
A wonderful variety of compellingly original vampire stories, many of them wholly unexpected, from award-winning, New York Times bestselling authors. There are typical vampires who would be right at home in a horror story or a gothic romance; historical vampires; contemporary, gritty, urban vampires; fang-in-cheek comedy; boy-meets-girl sweetheart stories (if a little bloodier!); and erotic tales of inhuman passions and midnight pleasures. Look out, too, for stand-alone stories relating to existing series and characters of contributing authors, or stories which develop more fully characters who have only walk-on parts in those authors’ longer fiction. Includes writing by big-name authors such as Jennifer Ashley, Kim Harrison writing as Dawn Cook, Caitlin Kittredge, Diane Whiteside and Eileen Wilks.

Much better cover! i’m almost certain it’s a Joe Roberts job – Mammoth Book Of Vampire Romance certainly was and he’s been responsible for many of the best Robinsons in recent years. Nancy Holder’s Blood Gothic first appeared in Stephen Jones’ Mammoth Book Of Vampires (Robinson, 1992) via Charles L. Grant’s Shadows 8.

Paul Bibeau – Sundays With Vlad

Paul Bibeau – Sundays With Vlad (Constable, 2008)

Cover design and illustration by JoeRoberts.co.uk

From Pennsylvania to Transylvania. One Man’s Quest to Live in the World of the Undead

MEET COUNT DRACULA AND ALL HIS CRAZY CHILDREN

As if visiting the dentally challenged lord of the night’s castle weren’t enough, vampire enthusiast Paul Bibeau digs through Bram Stoker’s original manuscript, meets with the president of the Dracula Fan Club and even marches in the Transylvania Day Parade as a giant garlic bulb – all part of his quest to reach the stone-cold heart of vampiredom.

From the moment his older sister jumped him, baring her glow-in-the-dark vampire fangs, Paul Bibeau was hooked. You could say this traumatic childhood experience scarred him for life – he began to develop an ever-deepening obsession with the Undead. Years later, his fixation led him to revise his honeymoon plans, persuading his unsuspecting wife to take a trip to Wallachia, Romania and the legendary lair of Dracula – the towering castle of Vlad the Impaler.

Clutching his guidebook like a bible, Bibeau sets off on an alarming but comic journey into the dark history of his hero.

Wasn’t sure where to put this on the forum as it’s tagged ‘Travel’, but it features a Dracula obsessive, reflects on the Ceausescu and ‘the Prez’  tyrannies and hauls in several vampire scene *ahem* “personalities” for interrogation (if they’re anything like the one’s of my acquaintance, the challenge is to get them to talk about something, ANYTHING other than themselves for ten seconds), so I guess it warrants a plug on Vault and besides, I like the retro cover a lot!

Three chapters in , and it all becomes clear. Mr. Bibeau’s travelogue is the latest in a fairly recent tradition that includes Rosemary Guiley’s Vampires Among Us, Norine Dresser’s American Vampires, MS Carol Page’s incendiary Blood Lust, Tony Thorpe’s Children Of The Night, Arlene ‘Bite Me!’ Russo’s *ahem* “disappointing” Vampire Nation and Kathleen Ramsland’s Piercing The Darkness – books which purport to make sense of the vampire subculture and often provide details of the author’s expeditions to Transylvania, New York, Whitby and (for the more adventurous) a fetish club.

Autumn 1999 and the honeymooning Paul and Anne Bibeau are being questioned by machine gun-toting guards at Bucharest airport. How did it come to this? Paul traces it back to his childhood and the day his big sister crawled from out of his dresser wearing glow-in-the-dark fangs. The experience sent him off on one and he’s never really come back.

He ain’t exactly Ripton Torn but I think many Vault people will recognise something of themselves in Mr. Bibeau. He was the weird kid at school, obsessed with all things monsters and the Leonard Nimoy hosted In Search Of “documentaries”: He’d ransack the local library for books on the supernatural (“factual”, preferably as he found horror fiction boring). A few years down the line he took the vampire in folklore for his independent study course and hosted a slide-show on his very topic in the same building. After college he took a job on a West Point (Virginia) newspaper, became an amateur ghost hunter and investigated unexplained phenomena, etc., etc. …. and then he proposed to a drop dead smart lawyer who looks nice in her business suits.

In the circumstances, a Honeymoon in Vlad country was inevitable

Peter Haining – Mammoth Book of Haunted House Stories

Peter Haining (ed.) – The Mammoth Book of Haunted House Stories (Robinson, 2007)

Cover: Joe Roberts

Elizabeth Albright & Ray Bradbury – The Haunted House

Peter Haining – Foreword: I Live In A Haunted House

Haunted Places: Stories Of Fact And Fiction

E. Bulwer Lytton – The Haunted and the Haunters
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu – An Authentic Narrative of a Haunted House
Algernon Blackwood – A Case of Eavesdropping
Virginia Woolf – A Haunted House
H. Russell Wakefield – Ghost Hunt
William F. Nolan – Dark Winner

Avenging Spirits: Tales Of Dangerous Elementals

Charlotte Riddell – The Old House in Vauxhall Walk
Ralph Adams Cram – No. 252 rue M. Le Prince
Mary Eleanor Freeman – The Southwest Chamber
W. W. Jacobs – The Toll-House
L. P. Hartley – Feet Foremost
Ian Watson – Happy Hour

Shadowy Corners: Accounts Of Restless Spirits

W. F. Harvey – The Ankardyne Pew
Louisa Baldwin – The Real and the Counterfeit
Richard Hughes – A Night at a Cottage…
Thorp McClusky – The Considerate Hosts
Basil Copper – The Grey House
Fay Weldon – Watching Me, Watching You

Phantom Lovers: Sex And The Supernatural

Richard Dehan – A Spirit Elopement
Herbert de Hamel – The House of Dust
A. E. Coppard – The Kisstruck Bogie
Norah Lofts – Mr. Edward
Robert Bloch – House of the Hatchet
Ramsey Campbell – Napier Court

Little Terrors: Ghosts And Children

M. R. James – Lost Hearts
Ellen Glasgow – The Shadowy Third
Hugh Walpole – A Little Ghost
Nigel Kneale – The Patter of Tiny Feet
Penelope Lively – Uninvited Ghosts

Psychic Phenomena: Signs From The Other Side

Arthur Conan Doyle – Playing with Fire
William Hope Hodgson – The Whistling Room
E. F. Benson – Bagnell Terrace
Joan Aiken – The Companion
James Herbert – Ghost Hunter
Ruth Rendell – Computer Séance

Houses Of Horror: Terror Visions Of The Stars

Gaston Leroux – In Letters of Fire
Bram Stoker – The Judge’s House
McKnight Malmar – The Storm
A.M. Burrage – The Waxwork
H.G. Wells – The Inexperienced Ghost
E.M. Delafield – Sophy Mason Comes Back
Stephen King – The Boogeyman

Peter Haining – Appendix: Haunted House Novels – A Listing

Expanded and with great new stories, this is the biggest and best anthology of ghostly hauntings ever. Over 40 tales of visitation by the undead – from vengeful and violent spirits, set on causing harm to innocent people tucked up in their homes, to rarer and more kindly ghosts, returning from the grave to reach out across the other side. Yet others entertain desires of a more sinister bent, including the erotic. This new edition includes a selection of favourite haunted house tales chosen by famous screen stars Boris Karloff, Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. Plus a top ranking list of contributors that includes Stephen King, Bram Stoker, Ruth Rendell, and James Herbert – all brought together by an anthologist who himself lives in a haunted house.

Something unspeakable lurks in a Connecticut apartment closet, in Stephen King’s ‘The Boogeyman’; An Irish castle holds something truly horrifying in wait, in ‘The Whistling Room’ by William Hope Hodgson; The lecherous old ghost of a Georgian country house eyes up his latest tenant, in Norah Lofts’ ‘Mr Edward’; An ancient mansion on a shelf of rock previously occupied by a doomed castle, in ‘In Letters of Fire’ by Gaston Le Roux; The hunter is hunted in James Herbert’s tale of nineteenth-century country mansion, ‘The Ghost Hunter’;

Psychic phenomena and poltergeists, avenging spirits and phantom lovers – curl up and read on, but never imagine you are safe from a visit…