The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror : Fourteenth Annual Collection (Paperback)

~ Terri Windling (Editor), (Editor)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The 14th volume of the critically acclaimed Year's Best Fantasy and Horror anthology series is a 556-page behemoth combining 44 of the best stories and eight of the best poems from 2000. Editors Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling provide long, thorough, and insightful summaries of their fields, horror and fantasy, respectively. If that isn't enough, the anthology includes Edward Bryant's detailed and evenhanded "Fantasy and Horror in the Media: 2000," Seth Johnson's concise and knowledgeable "Comics: 2000," and James Frenkel's "Obituaries: 2000."

The stories and poems in this volume are as strong as the title claims; a few are very good, and most are excellent. The contributors include literary greats like John Crowley, Harlan Ellison, and Louise Erdrich; genre giants like Ramsey Campbell, Charles de Lint, and Tanith Lee; acclaimed young-adult authors like Francesca Lia Block and Jane Yolen; excellent foreign authors better known in their native countries, like Australia's Terry Dowling and Bolivia's Claudia Adria'zola; and terrific new talents like Susanna Clarke, Andy Duncan, and Kelly Link.

With a volume this massive, it is difficult to describe all the stories, or even representative examples of the many different subgenres. Here are summaries of two selections from each editor:

In Louise Erdrich's tragicomic tall tale "Le Mooz," a prideful Ojibwa woman wrecks her marriage after a moose hunt goes awry. In Kathe Koja's chilling and startling "At Eventide," a serial killer tracks down the woman artist who escaped him and sent him to prison. "The Man on the Ceiling," a metafiction by Steve Rasnic Tem and Melanie Tem, is a brilliant, moving, autobiographical exploration of the physical, emotional, and creative lives of two writers. In Susanna Clarke's witty, beautifully written fantasy of manners, "Mr. Simonelli or the Fairy Widower," a poor, handsome young priest learns his new parish overlaps Faerie, discovers a shocking ancestral secret, and makes covert marriage proposals to five beautiful sisters.

The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror is a great and generous collection, perfect for most, but not all, horror and/or fantasy fans. It includes both supernatural and nonsupernatural horror, but it doesn't have anything for the "splatterpunk" fan. Also, while the horror selections are drawn from both genre and nongenre publications, most of the fantasy selections are taken from nongenre magazines, anthologies, and other sources. If you want fantasy drawn largely or exclusively from genre sources, and particularly if you want only heroic/adventure/sword-and-sorcery fantasy, then you should skip the entire Year's Best Fantasy and Horror series. Those subgenres make no appearance in this volume, and have never had much of a presence in this series; it's as if only magic realism, fairy tales, and mythic/folkloric fantasy of a rather sensitive, measured, and grown-up sort need apply (even when it's young adult fiction). Also, extreme, graphic horror may be out of fashion, but its raw, adolescent energy will doubtless reappear in future volumes of The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror whenever great graphic-horror stories are published. --Cynthia Ward

From Publishers Weekly

The 48 stories and poems in this third annual collection encompass a wide variety of subjects and styles. Several pieces, such as Dan Daly's "Self-Portrait Mixed-Media on Pavement, 1988," are set in a recognizable time and place but offer a bracing--and sometimes shocking--twist, while others, like Tanith Lee's "White as Sin, Now," create realities far removed from our everyday world. The volume features work by such stalwarts of these genres as Edward Bryant, Jane Yolen and Lisa Tuttle. Of particular note are Joyce Carol Oates's chronicle of the debilitating physical and psychological effects of a nuclear-like holocaust in "Family"; James Powell's wry account of a murder investigation in Clowntown, where everyone looks literally as if they belong in a circus ("A Dirge for Clowntown"); Steven Millhauser's "The Illusionist," about a magician who conjures people into existence using the power of his mind; and Robert R. McCammon's terrifying version of the end of the world in "Something Passed By." Also included is a summation of the year's fictional and film works in fantasy and horror. Datlow is fiction editor at Omni magazine and Windling is a veteran fantasy editor.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 640 pages
• Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin; 1st edition (August 31, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312275447
• ISBN-13: 978-0312275440
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.1 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (26 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #885,574 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars pure magic, September 13, 2000

By A Customer

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

If you`ve read too much minimalist academic fiction, you`re in for a treat. These stories, both dark and light, and infused with magic and poetry, have been culled from sources as diverse as the New Yorker, the Iowa Review, and some very obscure zines. Established masters of their craft such as Ursula Leguin and N. Scott Momaday rub shoulders with intruiguing newcomers such as Linnet Taylor and Mary Sharratt. Kelly Link`s fabulous story "The Girl Detective" is not to be missed.

12 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Delightfully Wonderful, August 16, 2000

By A Customer

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

Every year the annual Year's Best Fantasy and Horror Collection keeps my eyes glued to a book. The Stories and magical and entertaining, written by some of today's best fantasy and horror writers. The stories range from Tolkienesque tales with magical creatures to more serious fiction stories. Many sparked my imagination And of course, quite a few frightened me to a point where I left nail prints in the binding. I recommend this book to fans of fantasy and/or horror or simply anybody looking for a good read.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fabulous Anthology, October 20, 2000

By	Fosky Bob "human" (Vacaville, CA USA) - See all my reviews

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

What a beautiful, fabulous anthology. Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling have turned out another of their elegant and amazing collections.

This anthology starts off fast with another of Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea stories, but it's the second one, Ian MacLeod's 'The Chop Girl' that starts the anthology off with a bang. MacLeod's story is creepy, eerie, spooky, and thoroughly delightful. The anthology never loses steam. Nearly every story is wonderful.

Excellent stories by Charles de Lint, Gemma Files, Jeffrey Ford (be sure to check out his books here on Amazon. They're fabulous!), Tim Lebbon, Steven Millhauser, Paul McAuley, Michael Marshall Smith, Kim Newman, and on and on.

What makes this anthology so special is the breadth of sources that Datlow and Windling draw from. They have a few stories from the usual suspects, F&SF, Realms of Fantasy, Asimov's and so on, but the amount of stories, really good stories, that they grab from tiny obscure publications that probably less than 3,000 people read is astounding. In my mind this makes this series of anthologies infinitely more valuable than their SF counterparts.

I highly recommend this volume.