Once again, multi-award-winning editors Stephen Jones and David Sutton take you on a terrifying journey into the dark heart of modern horror fiction.

Firmly established as the world's premier horror anthology series, this latest volume is twice the size, presenting almost a quarter of a million words of new fiction by some of the hottest names and most talented newcomers in the field. Contributors to Dark Terrors 5 include Peter Straub, Poppy Z. Brite, Ramsey Campbell, Mick Garris — Stephen King's director of choice — Gwyneth Jones, Michael Marshall Smith, Kim Newman, Gahan Wilson, Christopher Fowler and many, many more.

Anyone who has ever read a story about the legendary Holmes and Watson has heard of Professor Moriarty and Sebastian Moran. But now Kim Newman sheds light on the secret history of "Basher" Moran and the "Napoleon of Crime" and how they came together to solve the unsolvable and even change the course of history itself…all in the name of profit and, sometimes, occasional sheer bloody-mindedness.

Two British writers add their own bizarre spin to a familiar American tale. Veteran Asimov’s author Paul J. McAuley’s most recent story for us, “Second Skin,” was published in our April 1997 issue. Kim Newman, who is making his first appearance j in our pages, is the author of a large number of fiction and nonfiction books, short stories, and articles.

Some of his most recent and best known works are The Bloody Red Baron (Carroll & Graf/Avon, 1995), Anno Dracula (Carroll & Graf/Avon, 1992), and with Stephen Jones, Horror: 100 Best Books (Carroll & Graf, 1992).

Mr. Newman and Mr. McAuley are also the co-editors of In Dreams (Gollancz, 1992), an anthology of stories about popular music/culture.

An anthology of stories

Following the huge success of the previous BBM collections comes the latest batch of stories from the UK's top-flight crime writers. Alongside an "Inspector Morse" story from Colin Dexter and a "Rumpole" tale from John Mortimer, is Jake Arnott's first short story and a wealth of exclusive stories from some of Britain's most exciting up-and-coming young crime writers. An ideal present for anyone who has ever enjoyed a good murder-mystery, "The Best British Mysteries 2006" will cause many sleepless nights of avid page turning!

Every short story in this wonderfully varied collection has one thing in common: each features some alteration in history, some divergence from historical reality, which results in a world very different from the one we know today. As well as original stories specially commissioned from bestselling writers such as James Morrow, Stephen Baxter and Ken MacLeod, there are genre classics such as Kim Stanley Robinson’s story of how World War II atomic bomber the Enola Gay, having crashed on a training flight, is replaced by the Lucky Strike with profoundly different consequences.