The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 13
INTRODUCTION
Horror in 2001
Horror titles were up in America for the first time since the mid-1990s. However, the number of horror books published in Britain dropped to its lowest since the late 1980s and, according to The Bookseller, accounted for just 2. 4 per cent of the total books published.
In February, the Crown Books chain filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy again, having only emerged from bankruptcy protection in November 1999. Books-A-Million bought the inventory and property leases on a number of stores, while the remainder closed down. Crown was once the third-largest book retailer in America.
With the failure of its online bookselling business, Borders Group, Inc. turned over its website Borders. com to rival Amazon in April.
Meanwhile, according to a Gallup poll, two-thirds of Americans read ten books or fewer a year, and 13 per cent read no books at all. Even more disturbing is that more than half of adult Americans spend less that thirty minutes every day reading printed matter of any kind — and that includes newspapers and food labels!
Britain’s Bloomsbury Publishing announced a tenfold rise in profits in September, mostly due to the continuing success of the Harry Potter books. Pre-tax profits rose from £273,000 to £2. 85 million in the first six months of the year, and turnover was up 100 per cent at £22. 7 million.
* * * * With worldwide sales passing 100 million in May, Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling became the highest-paid female author in the world, earning a reported £45 million and bringing her estimated worth to around £220 million. She was invested as an Officer of the Order of the British Empire by Prince Charles in March, for her contributions to children’s literature.
However, young fans were disappointed to learn that there would be no new adventure of the boy wizard in 2001. Rowling broke a promise to produce a Harry Potter adventure every year for seven years because she was reportedly too busy with the movie version and supervising merchandising deals.
In Stephen King’s alien-contact novel Dreamcatcher, the survivors of a bizarre encounter twenty-five years earlier were reunited as adults on an annual hunting trip, where they came upon a disoriented stranger who gave birth to something with very sharp teeth.
Black House, King and Peter Straub’s much-anticipated sequel to their 1984 collaboration The Talisman, featured a grown-up Jack Sawyer on the trail of a child-eating serial killer known as ‘The Fisherman’. He was aided in his quest by blind DJ Henry Leyden and The Thunder Five, a group of Harley bikers. The novel also included references to a number of other King books, including ‘The Dark Tower’ sequence. The two authors were reportedly paid a $20 million advance, and the book went to the top of the bestseller list in the US with a first printing of two million copies. A one million-copy mass-market paperback reissue of The Talisman contained a teaser first chapter from Black House.
