The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: 18th Annual Collection [Hardcover]

Ellen Datlow (Editor), Kelly Link (Editor), Gavin Grant (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 22, 2006

For more than a decade, readers have turned to The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror to find the most rewarding fantastic short stories. Ellen Datlow, Kelly Link, and Gavin Grant continue this critically acclaimed and award-winning tradition with another stunning collection of stories. The fiction and poetry here is culled from an exhaustive survey of the field, nearly four dozen stories ranging from fairy tales to gothic horror, from magic realism to dark tales in the Grand Guignol style. Rounding out the volume are the editors’ invaluable overviews of the year in fantasy and horror, and sections on comics, by Charles Vess; on anime and manga, by Joan D. Vinge; on media, by Ed Bryant; and on music, by Charles de Lint. With a long list of Honorable Mentions, this is an indispensable reference as well as the best reading available in fantasy and horror.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The 18th volume in Datlow's well-regarded series continues to take the pulse of contemporary fantastic literature with intriguing results, but without Terri Windling, Datlow's co-editor through volume 16, some of the fantasy selections, chosen by Small Beer publishers Link and Grant, fail to conjure the elusive magic all great fantasy needs. Luckily, Datlow's more seasoned eye has discovered enough chilling horror to make the anthology a must-buy. Culled from author collections, literary and trade magazines, anthologies and online sources, the 44 stories and poems reflect a distinctly global flavor and avoid traditional tropes and topics. The standouts include haunting selections from such well-known authors as Peter Straub (two prose selections), Alice Hoffman, Christopher Fowler, Chuck Palahniuk, China Miéville, John Farris, Douglas Clegg, Joyce Carol Oates, John Kessel and Gregory Maguire. Exceptional contributions from lesser-known talents include Mélanie Fazi's "The Cajun Knot," Shelley Jackson's "Here Is the Church," M. Rickert's "Cold Fires" and Terry Dowling's "Clownette." (Aug.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Anyone worried about original coeditor Terri Windling's replacement last year by Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant should chill now. Their second year aboard this annual excursion on the high-quality seas of fantasy, light and dark, shows no decline in quality or quirkiness from their maiden voyage, though with original coeditor Datlow still in service, fans needn't have worried. Here one still gratefully finds so extraordinarily well wrought an exercise in fantastic literary realism as Peter Straub's "Mr. Aickman's Air Rifle" (how well wrought? John O'Hara might envy the dialogue). Here is one of the most grotesque stories imaginable, Chuck Palahniuk's "Guts," which, Datlow remarks, "contains some rather graphic elements" (it's about a very private pastime of 13-year-old boys). John Kessel's weirdly jolly rural grunge fantasy, "The Baum Plan for Financial Independence," may be less surprising, but the book wouldn't be as good without it, or without Andy Duncan's exquisite essay in biographical fiction, "Zora and the Zombie," about Zora Neale Hurston's anthropological researches in Haiti. As usual, lots of excellent genre reading. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 608 pages
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press; First Edition edition (August 22, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312341938
• ISBN-13: 978-0312341930
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.6 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,680,022 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I've been an editor for over thirty years, first in book publishing, but mostly editing short stories for OMNI Magazine and webzine, EVENT HORIZON, a webzine, and SCIFICTION, the fiction area of SCIFI.COM. I now edit original and reprint anthologies. Born and bred New Yorker, although I travel a lot.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, September 15, 2005

By 

Vicki L. Plant (Little Rock, AR) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: 18th Annual Collection (Hardcover)

continues to provide an avenue to wonderful short stories in the fantasy and horror genre, along with excellent essays on what is going on in the field. I wish I had the time and resources to track down and read all of their recommendations. The series has not diminished with the departure of Terri Windling.

5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Year's Best Fantasy and Horror Eighteenth, September 14, 2005

By 

K. Freeman (Apple Valley, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Eighteenth Annual Collection (Year's Best Fantasy & Horror) (Paperback)

A modified editorial team created this eighteenth edition of the classic yearly anthology.

The recaps of the year's fiction and other media are still present, though a bit less inclusive than in the past. The stories that I thought were the strongest were by Gregory Maguire, Margo Lanagan, Stepan Chapman, Tanith Lee, Catherynne M. Valente, Conrad Williams and Elizabeth A. Lynn, with a particular mention for Laird Barron's creepy, poetic western "Bulldozer". The mix of new and established writers, visible in that list, adds interest. As in the past, the stories tend toward urban/modern-day settings, but a few do represent the historical and otherworld facets of the genre.

If any story in the anthology is controversial, it'll be the Chuck Palahniuk. I didn't like it -- I thought it read sort of like a grade schooler's gross-out combined with a careful reading of the Anatomy and Physiology Coloring Book -- but on the other hand, it does take something really gross to gross me out these days. And gross me out it did. Recommended for strong stomachs (heh) only.

On page 466 my story "The Elf Knight and Lady Isabelle" from the anthology CLOAKED IN SHADOW got an honorable mention.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Outstanding Quality and Variety of Stories! Not to be Missed!, September 23, 2005

By 

Simisola "Julie" (Bellevue, NE USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Eighteenth Annual Collection (Year's Best Fantasy & Horror) (Paperback)

I look forward to this collection every year, but I must admit this 18th annual collection was one of the best ever. I am a huge horror fan and usually just skip over the scifi stories, but began to read the scifi stories as well this time and to my great pleasure, really enjoyed these as well. For anyone who enjoys a good short story or good literature of any type I highly recommend this collection. Standout stories by Alice Hoffman, Joyce Carol Oates and the best short story by Peter Straub I've ever read will greatly please. Be warned though, some of these stories are not for the squeamish ("Guts" was very grotesque, but I've also never laughed so hard in my life, what a great story!) As always, I greatly enjoyed the summations at the beginning of the book - they always give me the names of new books and authors I haven't discovered yet to look into. The overall quality of the stories is far superior from any of the other "horror" collections out there today and this particular collection is not to be missed.