Hot Blood X was the tenth volume in the sexual horror series edited by Jeff Gelb and Michael Garrett. It included seventeen pieces of fiction (one reprint) from Ramsey Campbell, Graham Masterton, Lawrence Block, Nancy Holder, Melanie Tem, Brian Hodge, and Bentley Little, amongst others. Demon Sex edited by Amarantha Knight (Nancy Kilpatrick) contained eleven explicit horror stories (including one reprint by Neil Gaiman) from Thomas S. Roche, Edo van Belkom and Kilpatrick herself.

Lisa Tuttle edited Crossing the Border: Tales of Erotic Ambiguity, which included twenty-two stories (thirteen reprints). Although not really a horror book, it included stories by Poppy Z. Brite, Graham Joyce, Angela Carter, Joyce Carol Oates, Michael Blumlein, Nicholas Royle, Carol Emshwiller, Lucy Taylor, Neil Gaiman, Geoff Ryman and the editor.

The Ghost of Carmen Miranda and Other Spooky Gay and Lesbian Tales edited by Julie K. Trevelyan and Scott Brassart, contained twenty-three stories (five reprints).

Most horror readers also probably passed on Otto Penzler’s new crime anthology Murder for Revenge. If they did, they missed Peter Straub’s remarkable novella “Mr Clubb and Mr Cuff”, plus new stories by David Morrell, Joyce Carol Oates, Eric Lustbader, Lawrence Block and others.

The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: Eleventh Annual Collection,ably edited as usual by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, weighed-in at more than 500 pages and contained thirty-seven stories, nine poems, and summaries by the editors, James Frenkel, Edward Bryant and Seth Johnson, along with the usual pointless list of “Honorable Mentions”. The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror Volume Nine edited by Stephen Jones contained nineteen stories, only one of which (Stephen Laws’ “The Crawl”) overlapped with the Datlow/Windling volume.

Eternal Lovecraft: The Persistence of HPL In Popular Culture was edited by Jim Turner and published under his Golden Gryphon Press imprint. Described as ex-Arkham House editor Turner’s farewell to H. P. Lovecraft, the retrospective anthology was split into three sections that contained eighteen reprints from Stephen King, Fritz Leiber, Nancy A. Collins, T. E. D. Klein and Harlan Ellison, amongst others.