The Best Horror of the Year. Volume 4

The new series is designed as pocket-sized, square hardcover volumes as lovingly produced as the usual, larger books. The first in the new format is Sleeping Beauty III, Memorial Photography: The Children. Dr. Burns provides a preface about his own history of collecting memorial photography and in a fascinating introduction explains why the new technology of photography became so popular for memorializing the dead, especially children in the 1900s. The photographs are annotated with information about the kind of technology used. Some of the photographs are of dead children posed with a surviving sibling, held by one of its parents, or perhaps most pitiably, tiny and alone and dressed in finery in a coffin or crib. The practice has begun to take hold once more in the twenty-first century as some contemporary families pose with their stillborn or newly dead children. Disturbing all, but with a quiet beauty.

The second volume is Shooting Soldiers: Civil War Medical Photography by R. B. Bontecou. Bontecou was a military surgeon who recorded and photographed soldiers with amputated limbs and others with minor bullet wounds. The book itself is as much a mediation on war and suffering (focusing on the Civil War, just two years before Joseph Lister announced his discovery of antiseptic surgical principles and almost twenty years before Robert Koch described the germ theory of disease). Some of the photos are accompanied by detailed case histories of the soldier, and those are perhaps the most interesting.

The Monstrous Book of Monsters by Libby Hamilton illustrated by Jonny Duddle and Aleksei Bitskoff (Templar/Candlewick) is the popup book to enchant or perhaps entice your favorite child into the world of horror. Something has taken a bite out of the cover. Inside is a spread on how to spot monsters (watch out for sunglasses hiding strange eyes or hair hiding an extra eye), another about infestations at home, (watch out for critters in the toilet or the oven). I love popup books and this one is icky and has gooey things and is almost as good as my old favorite Fungus the Bogyman.

Deborah Turbeville, the Fashion Pictures (Rizzoli) is a gorgeous and disturbing coffee table book of photographs by one of the major photographers of the last forty years. She’s best known as a fashion photographer for the American, Italian, and Russian Vogue and other magazines but her work encompasses much more than fashion photography. She was in the fore-front of the idea that what’s important in a fashion shoot, isn’t the clothing per se but the lifestyle hinted at by the photographs. In Turbeville’s eye this lifestyle is sumptuous and decadent — and often very creepy. One of her most famous fashion spreads is a series taken of bathing suit models photographed in an abandoned New York City bathhouse that looks like an insane asylum for abused women. Another spread is of several ruined “Camilles” lethargically lounging among the many rooms of a mansion. A series of photographs taken in the woods of Normandy looks like a vignette on the horrors of war as beautiful dead-eyed women wait — for death? For liberation? Each series of photographs tells an enigmatic story.

Zombies!: An Illustrated History of the Undead by Jovanka Vuckovic (St. Martin’s Press) is a marvelously entertaining overview of the phenomenon, lavishly illustrated with movie stills, movie posters, and book covers. The book starts with the origins of the zombie and mentions zombies in books, graphic novels, and video games, and on film and television and record albums.

V is for Vampire by Adam-Troy Castro, illustrated by Johnny Atomic (HarperCollins) is a sardonic alphabet including X: X Marks the Spot Between the Second and Third Shirt Button (for hitting the vampiric heart). Clever and fun.

The Authentic Animal: Inside the Odd and Obsessive World of Taxidermy by Dave Madden (St. Martin’s Press) begins his breezily entertaining book with the story of how the father of modern taxidermy, Carl Akeley, came to his calling — by stuffing a neighbor’s dead canary in 1876. Akeley’s obsession led to his crowning achievement: The Akeley Hall of African Mammals at the American Museum of Natural History.