If the essence of the horror tale is a confrontation with the alien, then what better way to express it than in stories that chronicle the unsettling experiences of characters traveling in unfamiliar lands. Anthologist supreme Jones (The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror
) mixes 20 stories old and new by some of horror's best and brightest, and the result is a travelogue of terror whose contents span the globe. In Basil Copper's elegant “The Cave,” a vacationer's walking tour in Austria leads him to a monster of legend. D. Lynn Smith's eerie “Charnel House” tells of an English woman whose quest for “spiritual revelation” in Egypt plunges her into occult mysteries. Ramsey Campbell mixes humor and horror in “Seeing the World,” wherein a man's neighbors bring something terrible back from their vacation in Italy. These and stories by Dennis Etchison, Glen Hirshberg, Clive Barker and others so effectively convey their themes that readers are advised not to bring this book with them on vacation. (July)
