Darkness surrounds us. We can find darkness anywhere: in a strange green stone etched with mysterious symbols; at a small town's annual picnic; in a ghostly house that is easy to enter but not so easy to leave; behind the dumpster in the alley where a harpy lives; in The Nowhere, a place where car keys, toys, people disappear to; among Polar explorers; and, most definitely, within ourselves. Darkness flies from mysterious crates; surrounds children whose nightlights have vanished; and flickers between us at the movie theater. Darkness crawls from the past and is waiting in our future; and there's always a chance that Halloween really is a door opening directly into endless shadow. Welcome to the dark. You may never want to leave. This inaugural volume of the year's best dark fantasy and horror features more than 500 pages of dark tales from some of today's finest writers of the fantastique. Chosen from a variety of sources, these stories are as eclectic and varied as the genre itself.
The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2010
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Anthologist and editor Guran has collected 39 thrilling and frightening horror stories published in 2009. While some of the authors will be familiar to readers outside the genre—Joe R. Lansdale, Kelley Armstrong, Peter Straub, Ramsey Campbell—most of the contributors may be new to those who haven’t kept up to date on their urban-fantasy and horror writers. Although they are all technically in the same genre, the stories are quite diverse, from Straub’s quirky “Variations on a Theme from Seinfeld” to Armstrong’s eerie “Haunted House” to Lansdale’s creepy and sad “Torn Away.” Fans of horror and dark fantasy—the latter, Guran explains, defies easy definition, but you know it when you feel it—should welcome this collection with open arms. This is the first edition of this anthology, but if the editor can maintain the same high quality in years to come, it is certain to join the several crime and SF year’s-best collections as a staple in the genre-fiction world. --David Pitt
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Spectacular Collection,
By Danielle D. Smith "Author of "Black Dog &... (San Diego, CA.) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2010 (Paperback)
This anthology arrived only a few days ago, and since I librated it from its packaging I have been unable to put it down. There is such rich variety here--variety of style, craft, and even humor--that an avid horror and/or dark fantasy reader will have soemthing to hook them at the turn of every page. So many themes are touched on--monsters, vampires, post apocalyptic plagues...you name it, this book has it. As an author, I look to my favorite books for inspiration...and the tales in this (sometimes) macabre and ultimately fascinating tome will provide me inspirational "meat" to chew for quite a while!
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Strong & Eclectic Collection,
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This review is from: The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2010 (Paperback)
There is something for everyone in this eclectic collection. I am not a fan of the pure fantasy genre but was pleasantly surprised by a few. I bought the book for some chills and thrills and those were abundant. Lastly, a few of the entries represented solid fiction. So do not get caught up in the book's title as the entries expand on its definition. Among my favorites:- The Horrid Glory of Its Wings, an interesting tale plunking a harpy in the present day - Lowland Sea, an apocalyptic chiller set in the south of France with an arguably fair outcome - Monsters, an homage to some of Stephen King's boyhood stories - Frost Mountain Picnic Massacre, a creative thriller that reminded me of Shirley Jackson's The Lottery - A Haunted House of Her Own, a straightforward ghost story with a twist - The Wide, Carnivorous Sky, a fresh take on the vampire tale with Afghan war vets - Torn Away, a story of man living and running forever The roughly forty tales will entertain and are a great value especially if purchased for your Kindle.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2010,
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This review is from: The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2010 (Paperback)
This is the third "best horror of 2009" anthology I've read. In March of last year there was Ellen Datlow's The Best Horror of the Year: Volume Two, the new home for the horror half of the venerable Year's Best Fantasy and Horror series. Then last November there was (The Mammoth Book of) Best New Horror 21, edited by Stephen Jones. Between them these two veteran editors have produced 44 annual best-ofs for dark fiction. Given their experience and judgment, one might consider a third such annual anthology unnecessary or overkill. If so, one would be wrong.In the first place, I'm not at all sure that there could ever be too many best-of series for speculative fiction. Too much great horror, fantasy, and science fiction appears only in expensive limited editions, obscure magazines, or markets not traditionally associated with those genres. Inexpensive, widely available reprint anthologies make this material available to readers who otherwise might never see it. I first encountered virtually every contemporary horror writer I now admire in the pages of one or another best-of. The more such books are published, the wider the range of reprinted material will be, and that's good for writers and readers alike. In the second place, The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror: 2010 Edition distinguishes itself from its fellow best-ofs in a couple important ways. I'll let editor Paula Guran tell you about it herself, in this quote from the acknowledgments: "The scope and intent of The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 2010 [sic] is unique. As the publisher allowed me a considerable number of pages to fill, I was able to select some longer works that, in a thinner book, might not have been afforded the space. And, with such a broad theme, I was able to select stories that do not fit anthologies more tightly constrained by definitions. Thanks to Sean Wallace of Prime Books for the lack of boundaries." And the volume's page count is indeed considerable: 575 large trade paperback pages, all of them, except for an introduction and the back matter, devoted to fiction. For this particular year, Guran's volume includes about as much fiction as Datlow and Jones combined. That's 39 stories, including three novellas. Even though I had previously read over a quarter of those stories on original publication and/or in other best-ofs, there were still 28 pieces completely new to me. But enough about quantity; it's that other thing that really matters. Fortunately, Guran hits a home run here as well. Part of the fun of a best-of is seeing excellent stories you've already read get the recognition they deserve. Here, for the second or third time, I read such great tales as Suzy McKee Charnas's "Lowland Sea," Michael Shea's "Copping Squid," Barbara Roden's "The Brink of Eternity," Catherynne M. Valente's "A Delicate Architecture," and Norman Prentiss's "In the Porches of My Ears." There are some stories so good that seeing them in a table of contents is an added incentive to buy the book, even if I already own the piece in question in some other format, and all five of these fit that bill. And I was equally impressed by many of the pieces that were new to me. In particular, I got a kick out of the three novellas. Jones usually includes only one novella a year in Best New Horror, and they're even rarer in Datlow, so Guran's triple threat was a nice change of pace. I'd especially been looking forward to the novella "Sea-Hearts" by the indescribably brilliant Margo Lanagan, and it didn't disappoint. This reworking of the selkie legend, which won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novella, showcases all of Lanagan's virtues: her ability to modify elements of fantasy and legend in fascinating, dark ways, her insight into harrowing psychological experiences, and the strange, poetic diction that makes her language a joy to encounter. To begin a Lanagan story is to be dropped into a strange, shifting world where the rules have changed and even the most familiar things can become mysterious, but if you persevere you'll find the radiant humanity that defines and enriches all her work. The other two novellas were equally fascinating in their diverse ways. John Langan's "The Wide, Carnivorous Sky" reinvigorates the vampire by turning it into a force of nature and tying its existence into the traumatic experience of injured Iraq War veterans, while "Halloween Town," by Lucius Shepard, begins with a town hidden in the shadows of an immense gorge and a man who becomes intelligent and jaded after being hit in the head with a rivet, and only gets more surprising, funny, and thoughtful from there. As for the shorter works, I especially want to mention Stewart O'Nan's "Monsters," a story that captures the horror of a very real situation by telling it straightforwardly, avoiding excess and melodrama; Stephen Graham Jones's "The Ones Who Got Away," a spooky tale of memory and regret, elevated by the slightly disjointed language in which it's narrated; and Maura McHugh's "Vic," which is that great rarity, a story told subtly enough that you might well miss its chilling point on first reading. Naturally, there were a few stories I thought were adequate but not exceptional, including one I'm not going to name that I've now read three times in various anthologies, always vainly hoping that I'll like it better this time around. But the nice thing about an anthology this size is that I can find six of its stories underwhelming and still be a fan of the other 33. And the volume's wide scope means that you can go from a retold fairy tale to a ghost story to a doppelganger to a vampire to a deal with the devil to a story that isn't supernatural at all. For the reasonable price of $20 US, The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror: 2010 Edition offers an excellent overview of where dark fiction went in 2009. Here's hoping this series, unlike other recent attempts at a new horror best-of, will have some staying power. It certainly deserves to.
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