Customer Reviews

The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2010

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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!

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.

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.

"Best"? "Horror"? "Dark Fantasy"? How did these words appear on the same book cover? If this is the best that today's "current" crop of alleged horror writers can squeeze out... Woe! "Dark Fantasy": Does that mean stories that drone on and on, are not at all frightening, or even interesting, and just stop? "Horror": How can a story have the title 'Monsters' and not have ANY monsters in it? Oh. And let's not omit the Editor's pithy and wise comments at the end of each story, telling us how "un-hip" we are if we didn't pick up on how "terrifying" the story had been. I attempted to slog through a few other offerings but was just not interested. As Dorothy Parker once said in a famous review: "This book should not be put down lightly. It should be thrown with great force."

I loved this collection, although it does start off a little slow, with "The Horrid Glory of It's Wings" which I thought kind of slapped the reader in the face with the phrase "a harpy" over and over again rather than actually describing the creature: the real-world aspects of the story are much darker and more disturbing. "The Lowland Sea" is also another "everything is crap and everyone sucks" story, but I love a good Poe tribute so I enjoyed it. "Copping Squid" was random enough to make me actually read HP Lovecraft for the first time (as it turns out, there's A LOT of "lovecraftian" stuff in this collection, for better or worse) although I didn't really think much of the story. "Monsters"...well, check out some of the other reviews. Knowing what to expect I actually did like it, but it fits better in Paula Guran's "Halloween" collection than it does here. From here the collection really picks up in pace and quality, with the much better Poe-reference "The Brink of Eternity" followed by my absolute favorite from the whole collection, "The Frost Mountain Picnic Massacre", which I read as a dark satire rather than a literal horror story. I don't usually like Margo Lanagan's work, mostly because her characters are usually pretty flat and everyone is selfishly evil and bitter, but "Sea Hearts" was a refreshing change of pace. There were a few I could've skipped in here - "The Coldest Girl in Coldtown" which, while I realize was attempting to skewer cheesy vampire-romance drivel like Twilight and True Blood, was still too reminiscent of it for my taste, and "Strange Scenes from an Unfinished Film", which felt like Strange Scenes from an Unfinished Idea. The same goes for "Variations on a Theme from Seinfeld". "A Delicate Architecture" was fantastic, "The Wide Carnivorous Sky" was a little amateurish but still fun, "Leng" made good use of a an obscure, real setting and a creepy real-life phenomena (ie, cordyceps fungi, which parasitize insects and alter their behavior to favor the fungus) and "In The Porches of My Ears" which managed to be quite unsettling despite nothing really "horrific" happening. "The Bone's Prayer" and "The Long Cold Goodbye" didn't do much for me, but I got the feeling something about them might be going over my head. I had fun reading "Halloween Town", which I would call "weird for the sake of weird", but I couldn't shake the disturbing idea that both Ms. Guran and Lucius Shepard have no idea what kind of plant walnuts come from (In the story, the town's main business is gathering walnuts from a large pond, and yet there is one tree somewhere that is described as "the only tree in town"; of course there's also a forest described at the beginning, so maybe the "only tree in town" comment is really the outlier...either way, this one feels pretty raw, editing-wise).

Unlike some reviewers I actually like reading the editor's comments at the end, sometimes to get an idea of why they included a particular story or to explain something I may have missed, but it seems kind of random which stories she comments on in detail and which she just says, "wasn't that creepy?" or, literally, "You didn't really expect me to comment on this story, did you?" I can see why this format wasn't kept for the 2011 edition. Overall, a great collection with some very unusual works that was definitely worth the $4.95 I paid to get it on Kindle.

The Horrid Glory of its Wing: Depressing magical realism. You could just replace the harpy with anything else and you would get the same unsatisfying, rambling tale. When did depressing become horror? And why a Harpy? Out of anything in the whole world, why a harpy? ** of *****.

Lowland Sea: Read it before in another anthology. Authentic horror, blatant ripoff of Masque of the Red Death, but a good description of a world under a plague, ruined only by the fact that ALL of the characters in the novel are without any redeeming value and are 1-dimensional stereotypes. You'd think that the end of the world would bring a little solidarity in human being, but no; even in the end everyone is a fearful, lying, drug-abusing, back-stabbing, hate-filled scoundrel. Every last one of them. If you don't have a slightly-likable character there is nothing to like in the story. Even the woman that is supposed to be the main character is just motivated by murderous, psychotic, pointless revenge by the end. *** out of *****.

Copping Squid: Ahhh. Finally something resembling horror. Even if it is a kind of cheap cthulhu-reference-laden mess, I'll take it for attempt at actual horror. The descriptions actually sounded like something I could enjoy reading. ***** out of *****. It gets an extra star for standing out amongst all these others.

Monsters: I'm sorry? What's this story doing here? There wasn't anything horrific about it. I read up until the last paragraph waiting for something to happen, something, anything outside of a Halloween Haunted House setup, but then it just ended. It's not even a well-written story, it's just a description of people getting ready for halloween and they cram it full of references to halloween. * out ***** (I can't give it a -1 star, though I would if I could) I want to write a formal complaint for false advertising for the inclusion of this story in this collection. Just kidding.

Brink of Eternity: A good tale. Nothing scary about it. Involved. But I just wouldn't want to read it here. *** out of *****. Gets demoted a star for being miscategorized, but is a good story.

Frost Mountain Picnic: Just kind of forgettable. Picnic keeps happening every year and accidents happen without explanation and yet people are for some reason compelled to keep going even when they want nothing in the world not to do. It didn't make any sense at all, but the subtle horror in such a mundane setting gives it an extra star. *** our *****.

Sea-Hearts: Haven't finished it yet. I skipped ahead because of the length of the story and the incomprehensible dialogue. I'll get back to you on it.

A Haunted House of Her Own: Simplistic, not scary, not clever, and not anything like a Twilight Zone episode like the editor claims. Too much dialogue, and not even very interesting dialogue. The worst Twilight Zone episodes were less predictable than this story was. This story belongs to a Goosebumps book if it didn't include things like a murder. ** out *****. Gets demoted a star for being compared to the Twilight Zone.

Headstone in your pocket. Ah. Finally something horrifying. I won't spoil anything. **** out of *****.

The Coldest Girl in Coldtown: Sigh, another vampire story? Vampires aren't scary anymore, especially when you don't even try to make them scary. Just throwing them into a story doesn't automatically make something a horror story. Enough with the vampires. You'd be more original throwing in a half-baked zombie apocalypse tale than this boring, implausible scenario of a vampire ghetto. ** out of *****. Rating based on my exasperation of the subject. If your a reader that like vampire tales, then by all means read this story. I wanted to skip it the moment I discovered what it was going to be about.

Wide Carnivorous Sky: Gave the monster too many powers, so it comes off as a villain sue. ***

More to come.

A mostly dull and uninteresting collection of short stories. There are exceptions. Seth Fried's "Frost Mountain Picnic Massacre" is one I won't soon forget. As for the rest, I gave up about 3/4 through the book.

Hoping for a replacement for The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror anthologies edited by Kelly Link and Ellen Datlow, I ordered this anthology online. I'd say that less than half of the stories are good and only a very few are great. The dealbreaker for me, however, is that editor Paula Guran ends each story with a pithy aside. These comments absolutely ruined the book for me. I have a feeling the editor knew her little editorials were annoying because she took a moment to remind the reader they don't have to read her remarks in her preface! IMHO, unless you have something to say that absolutely adds to a readers experience, don't write anything at all. Her petite editorials made me feel like she was trying to convince me her choices were good, that the stories were weird, haunting, inspiring. Instead, she convinced me they can't stand alone.
Such a disappointment when compared to Datlow and Link's classy, effortless anthologies, but not a total waste of time.

I was rather excited when I purchased this book seeking a replacement series for the Years Best Horror and Fantasy. Boy was I ever disappointed; having read the other reviews, guess I missed something. I trudged throught the book hoping to find one story that I truly enjoyed. The one by Ramsey Campbell was good but it was read elsewhere. All in all this book was the waste of a good twenty dollar bill (since I bought it at a book store). I did finish the book and instead of placing it on the self, it went in the box to go to the thrift store, maybe the next reader will enjoy more than I did.