999: New Stories of Horror and Suspense

There were some really good reads, a few snoozers, and one that really should have had a big trigger warning on the first page (I don’t even want to write why). There are so many stories from all different aspects of horror that everyone can find something to love in it. Monsters, paranormal, gore, life and death, psychological, etc etc. I gave a copy of it to a friend who is also into horror as a Christmas present, but I warned her ahead of time of That story. Definitely worth a read.

Some of the stories aren't that good but some are ok.

I've been a long time horror and suspense lover. These stories are so good, there was not one I didn;t like. A big book full of big chills. Five stars and then some!

Opinion: Short story collections are usually filler reading for me. Read a story in between properly long novels. This book I just read straight through for various reasons. It opens with a good old zombie story that is not my cup of tea, but is well done, "Amerikanski Dead at the Moscow Morgue" by Kim Newman. "The Ruins of Contracoeur" by Joyce Carol Oates is one of my favorites. Its a story of a disgraced judge and his family being forced to move in a family inherited mansion out in the country, far from the political world of Washington. The kids have started seeing people without faces prowling around the grounds and children from the neighborhood are suddenly being murdered by a madman. "The Owl and the Pussycat" by Thomas M. Disch is also excellent and slightly suspenseful but not very horrific if you know what I mean. I really like the way this story was unfolded (and I cannot really describe it without giving things away). Another story that I found excellent was "The Grave" by P. D. Cacek. Its a story about a very wierd, psychotic school librarian, her relationship with her mother, and something she found on the way home from school one day, done with enough of realism to make it extremely creepy. "Itinerary" by Tim Powers was interesting but I did not follow it very well. I got lost in the details of this ghostly time-travel story, possibly as a result of my being tired when reading that story. "The Rio Grande Gothic" by David Morrell and "Angie" by Ed Gorman are two more great stories. "Rio Grande is about a cop who gets a little too curious about a certain intersection in Santa Fe where shoes keep appearing in the middle of the road. This was one of the longer stories but was very good. I don't know what to say about "Angie" other than I liked it and that is a little frightening. "The Tree Is My Hat" by Gene Wolfe was the first Wolfe story of any kind I have read. His story was just so-so to me...but in an interesting way. "Hemophage" left me wanting more. This story by Steven Spruill fits between 2 books of a trilogy and it feels like it. I really liked the everyman way that vampires are dealt with. "Rehearsals" by Thomas F. Monteleone was a pretty good about a blue collar worker who never made much of himself and the dreams he had as a youth. What happens to him when he gets a job at a theater as a janitor is pretty cool although not terribly scary. One of my favoritre stories in the collection was the last story "Elsewhere" by William Peter Blatty (The Exocist guy). A realtor gets a very big incentive to sell a dormant house with a haunted reputation. She gathers up some "experts" on hauntings and a writer to spend some nights in the house and prove it isn't so she can sell it. The character interaction is pretty good here, and even more so after the punch is delivered near the end. This story brought to mind a recent movie. So much so that I wonder if the movie got the idea from this story. Neil Gaiman and Stephen King have stori

This massive volume (and his new Redshift), will put Al Sarrantonio on the list of all time great speculative fiction editors. Al's strength is his ability to serve up story after story (by THE cutting edge authors of today no less) that represent the best of what horror and suspense has to offer. Diverse favorites like Powers, Gaiman, Disch, and King mingle with odd-balls like MM Smith and Lansdale to create this destine to be classic anthology. Highly Recomended

`You felt as if you were bleeding to death, only inside your head...' This excellent description of feeling uncomfortable comes early on in the new Stephen King story to be found in this horror anthology. In the story, the narrator is viewing a particularly horrible painting, which is going to have a particularly horrible effect on his life. But it's also an appropriate description of how a good horror story should make a reader feel: threatened, in danger, in a quiet way. Reading horror is different to watching it at the movies - it's easy to feel scared in a dark cinema. A bit harder, though, to do it through a book. 999, a collection of previously-unpublished work in the horror genre, does it - and does it many times. The anthology contains a short novel from William Peter Blatty, author of the famed scary novel The Exorcist; novellas by David Morrell (creator of the Rambo books and also a fine horror writer) and Joyce Carol Oates; and more than two dozen shorter pieces - including an effort from Stephen King, The Road Virus Heads North. Many readers will turn to the King story first, and they won't be disappointed. It's short, sharp and shocking, and will frighten even the most sceptical realist. In the story, bestselling horror novelist Richard Kinnell buys a painting at a yard sale. It shows a deathly figure driving a car, and it's theme of horror and death appeals to Kinnell. From the moment he buys the picture, Kinnell is doomed. The reader knows this, but it's a tribute to King's skill at the macabre that over twenty pages of steadily-mounting paranoia and suspense pass before the bloody conclusion is reached. Once done with King readers will turn to the less well-known authors here, hoping that standards aren't too bad. For example, the first story in 999 is by Kim Newman, an writer of moderately prominent vampire tales. Newman's story, Amerikanski Dead at the Moscow Morgue, is almost as good as King's. It is set in a gruesome Moscow of the near-future and has American citizens from all walks of life wandering around the Russian capital as zombies, with an appetite for fresh human flesh. The atmosphere of freezing fear in a chaotic Moscow is brilliantly conveyed in the story, and the horror of how the zombies have to be dealt with chills the bones. Most of the other stories in 999 are of a similarly high standard - they will provide chills of fear and horror in a hot Perth summer. The apocalyptic theme to many of the stories is summed up in the book's title. 999 is a contraction of the year of its publication, but it is also 666 - the Number of the Beast and the figure that heralds the End of Days.

There doesn't need to be a "Best of" collection this year. This is it! Contrary to what the professional reviewers (with their biases and political opinions) have been saying, the King story is pretty damn scary. And Kim Newman's piece is overrated--I had to force myself to finish. Almost everything kicks ass, though. The high point for me was Bentley Little's "The THeater," an original unclassifiable piece that creeped me out in a way nothing has done for a long time,

This is without a doubt the best horror anthology in quite some time. Reviewers will probably single out the trendies for praise (Kim Newman, Neil Gaiman) and will probably knock the two big names (Stephen King and William Peter Blatty)not without some justification. But the real standout for me was Bentley Little's "The Theater," a creepy story whose images stayed with me for days afterward. If this is where horror's going in the new millenium, I can't wait.