999: New Stories of Horror and Suspense

Rating:
Summary: Good exposure to lesser know writers
Review: This is a very good book with a lot of different writers across the horror spectrum. I want to read more Joyce Carol Oates after this reading.

Rating:
Summary: Great!
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Read it for "Elsewhere."
Review: Unlike some of the others, I thought Stephen King and Joyce Carol Oates' stories were beneath their usual genius, but I loved "Rio Grande Gothic" and "Mad Dog Summer." However, it amazes me that fewer people have singled out the return of William Peter Blatty with "Elsewhere." The story is arguably the best in the "999" collection, as several characters (including the flamboyant Terence Dare) wander through a haunted mansion in search of spirits. Doesn't sound too original, I know, but we are in the hands of the master of "The Exorcist." "Elsewhere" shines.

Rating:
Summary: Read it for "Elsewhere."
Review: Unlike some of the others, I thought Stephen King and Joyce Carol Oates' stories were beneath their usual genius, but I loved "Rio Grande Gothic" and "Mad Dog Summer." However, it amazes me that fewer people have singled out the return of William Peter Blatty with "Elsewhere." The story is arguably the best in the "999" collection, as several characters (including the flamboyant Terence Dare) wander through a haunted mansion in search of spirits. Doesn't sound too original, I know, but we are in the hands of the master of "The Exorcist." "Elsewhere" shines.

Rating:
Summary: Chills during summer!
Review: `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.