Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Sixteenth Edition [Hardcover]

Ellen Datlow (Editor), Terri Windling (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 29, 2003 | Series: Year's Best Fantasy & Horror

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 and Terri Windling continue their 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 magical 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, new Year's Best sections on comics, by Charles Vess, and on anime and manga, by Joan D. Vinge, and a long list of Honorable Mentions, making this an indispensable reference as well as the best reading available in fantasy and horror.

The critically acclaimed and award-winning tradition continues with another stunning collection, including stories by Kelly Link, Kim Newman, Corey Marks, Eric Schaller, M. Shayne Bell, Helga M. Novak, Terry Dowling, Michael Libling, Zoran Zivkovic, Bentley Little, Carlton Mellick III, Brian Hodge, Conrad Williams, Tom Disch, Melissa Hardy, Joel Lane, Nicholas Royle, Tracina Jackson-Adams, Karen Joy Fowler, Jackie Bartley, Peter Dickerman, Ramsey Campbell, Adam Roberts, Robert Phillips, Jay Russell, Luis Alberto Urrea, Margaret Lloyd, Stephen Gallagher, Robin McKinley, Haruki Murakami, Theodora Goss, Kathy Koja, Lucy Taylor, Elizabeth Hand, Kevin Brickmeier, Sharon McCartney, Susan Power, Don Tumasonis, Nan Fry.

Rounding out the volume are the editors' invaluable overviews of the year in fantasy and horror, Year's Best sections on comics, by Charles Vess, and on anime and manga, by Joan D. Vinge, and a long list of Honorable Mentions, making this an indispensable reference as well as the best reading available in fantasy and horror.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A highlight of any year's fantastic fiction yield is Datlow and Windling's picks of the previous year's top tales. This 16th incarnation of their award-winning anthology series shows fantasy and horror fiction alive, well and accessible in an impressively broad array of venues ranging from literary journals to genre publications, on-line markets and even a rock music tour book. The 49 selections (which also include poetry and an essay) are as refreshingly impossible to pigeonhole as their sources. Melissa Hardy's "Aquer," a wry behind-the-scenes look at a saint's canonization, is a perfect balance of supernatural mystery and dubious demystification. Conrad Williams's "The Machine," whose characters are caught up in the inexorable natural processes of its seaside setting, is one of several stories whose surreal symbolism blurs the boundaries between horror and fantasy. "The Least Trumps" by Elizabeth Hand, centered on a female tattoo artist's shaky grip on reality, translates the iconography of tarot cards and the reader's relationship to the written word into a luminous fantasy on the interpenetration of life and art. Don Tumasonis's "The Prospect Cards" is a brilliant narrative puzzle, related as a fragmented travel diary written on the backs of old postcards, in which the missing passages cleverly suggest a horror that defies description. Five writers are represented by two selections apiece; that might have given the impression of a dwindling talent pool were the contents not so delectably varied in theme and approach, and divided judiciously between well-known writers and new names.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

The latest in this annual series is a diverse collection of fiction and poetry. The usual suspects are here--Neil Gaiman, Bentley Little, Ramsey Campbell--and so are nongenre authors, such as Haruki Murakami, Karen Joy Fowler, and Kevin Brockmeier. The stories constitute an entertaining, eerie mixture of creepiness and suspense. In Gaiman's "Feeders and Eaters," a man runs into an old colleague, who tells him about his housemate, an old woman with odd dietary needs. Melissa Hardy's "Aquero" is the tale of a young woman's beatification; the narrative alternates between several different examinations of her buried body and the testimony of a nun who objects to the canonization. In Eric Schaller's creepy "The Assistant to Dr. Jacob," a policeman asks a man to recollect his childhood mentor, whose interest in rosebushes was not the innocent hobby the narrator recalls. Several of the poems included cleverly retell fairy tales, and, of course, the volume also reviews the year in horror and fantasy in all media. Kristine Huntley
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 672 pages
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press; First Edition edition (August 29, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312314248
• ISBN-13: 978-0312314248
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.6 x 2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,618,399 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Very good, February 11, 2005

By 

N. Batz "Book Junkie" - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Sixteenth Edition (Paperback)

I've enjoyed the majority of the stories in this compilation. Granted, there have been a few that really didn't inspire much interest but others have stirred my interest in searching down that specific author's work to read more because I like the flow of words.

This is the first one I had gotten and as it interested me so much, I've gotten the most current edition to read.

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars WTF?, June 25, 2011

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Jean Clayton - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Sixteenth Annual Collection (Year's Best Fantasy & Horror) (Kindle Edition)

It's been ten minutes on my Kindle and I still have not got to the first story. There is no table of contents you can click on and get to the stories and just when I think I am done with the authors foolishness more comes up. I will write more later when and if I actually get to read a story

4 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars strong anthology, August 11, 2003

By 

Harriet Klausner - See all my reviews
(#1 Hall OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Sixteenth Edition (Paperback)

As usual, this annual anthology serves up some of the best work, although this time around, the emphasi is more on orror than fantasy this year. The tales represent a wide panorama of the genres. Most of which are quite strong and a few are tremndous with one particular tale, "The Hunter's Wife," an incredible five star plus treat. Editors Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling also include their usual insightful analysis of the year. Especially interesting besides the obvious trend analysis that make for fascinating reading notably when compared to earlier editions of this tome is the recognition of comic books as a legitimate form of fantasy.

Overall this edition is a strong anthology that holds up against its illustrious history. Readers will enjoy savoring this collection over several weeks (this reviewer read 2-3 stories a night).

Harriet Klausner