Ellen Datlow (editor), The Best Horror of
the Year: Volume One (Night Shade Books, 2009)
Many Green Man Review readers are probably familiar with The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror series of annual anthologies, which were edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. While that series saw its last anthology, the twenty-first, published in 2008, Ellen Datlow has found a new publisher, Night Shade Books, to publish her horror "spin off," as she refers to it in the acknowledgements of the new anthology.
There is a lot to be excited about in regard to this new annual which will hopefully attract many new readers who, like myself, tend to be more interested in horror than fantasy. The quality and variety of stories, along with the depth and breadth of Datlow's summary of the year in review, makes The Best Horror of the Year informative as well as entertaining, and any horror fan who wishes to keep current with the state of the genre will want to have a copy.
As she did for The Year's Best of Fantasy and Horror, Datlow herself compiled a "Summation" of horror for the previous year of 2007-2008. This in-depth overview, which comes to more than thirty pages, covers a wide range of media, including awards, notable novels, short story collections, graphic novels, journals and magazines, Web zines, art, poetry, and scholarly nonfiction.
I consider myself a dedicated horror fan who tries to stay informed about what's new in the genre, but the truth seems to be that, even more than fantasy and science fiction, the best of horror often emerges from the small independent presses and the darkest margins of the Internet, and thus overviews such as these are a vital resource for catching works one may not have heard of. Horror as it exists in the mainstream is merely the tiniest tip of the iceberg, and anthologies such as The Best Horror of the Year shine a light on the less familiar but often more complex realms of horror.
One aspect of this obscured realm of horror is how it affects writers who may often find themselves left off of the popular mainstream lists. Compare The Best Horror of the Year to the British Fantasy Society's In Conversation: A Writer's Perspective: Volume One: Horror, edited by author James Cooper and out later this year, which caused outrage in the horror community when one writer noted that the anthology contained no female writers. Datlow compiled her overview long before this incident, but her perspective of the horror industry includes many women writers and artists. There are four stories by female writers, while the overview mentions, at my count, more than fifty female writers, editors, poets, and artists.
Diversity, complexity, and uniqueness are shared characteristics of all of these stories, making the entire volume a balm for any horror fan who has at times felt a sense of ennui at the sight of books featuring the same old names on the covers along with the same old illustrations of tough stoic men and naked screaming women. If anything most of these stories provide a refreshing reversal of that stereotype as, all in all, men spend more time screaming in these stories than do the women.
Take the first story, for example. "Cargo," by E. Michael Lewis follows Tech Sergeant Davis, a Loadmaster on the largest freighter and troop carrier in the Military Air Command, as he transports a macabre cargo back to the States from a place called Jonestown. Like many of the other stories in this anthology, "Cargo" is stark rather than gothic, understated rather than over-the-top, and psychological rather than gratuitously gruesome. Yet such stories prove to be even more haunting than the traditional ghost story, because it gives voice to the horrors which haunt us every day, the inexplicable violence of our local papers and the six o'clock news.
As I stated in a review of another recently-published book from Night Shade Books, John Langan's novel House of Windows, "as our culture transforms itself, so must the horror stories we tell." In light of that idea, it is intriguing to note that, while many horror stories of the past featured a protagonist driven insane after glimpsing some vision of a horrifying yet hidden metaphysical world, many of these stories concern people struggling to stay sane after being given some glimpse into some facet of the everyday physical world which suggests that it is the world, or the powers which manipulate it, which is mad, and that human beings are left to scuttle over the surface like so many insignificant ants.
One such story is Richard Bowes "If Angels Fight," in which a retired investigator is hired by the politically-connected Boston family of a childhood friend to track down the friend, who has been dead for decades. Bowes' elegant prose creates a story which captures the nostalgic wonder of a seemingly much simpler time in American culture but also a darkly disquieting portrait of a world where humans -- and world politics -- are incidental pawns in a much larger chess game.
"The Clay Party" by Steve Duffy is a much more straightforward horror tale in which a group of Western pioneers becomes trapped in the mountains during the winter, only to discover that there is more than one kind of monster amongst them.
"Penguins of the Apocalypse" by William Browning Spencer is, despite the silly title, a gritty story about a divorced alcoholic who attracts the attention of a supernatural being who wants to help him solve all his problems . . . whether the man wants his help or not.
Glen Hirshberg's "Esmeralda" is a near-future tale which takes up the idea that the death of print books is inevitable, and poses the possibility that the books may exact their own revenge when they die.
In "The Hodag" by Trent Hergenrader, a man reminisces about a series of disturbing murders during his Depression-era childhood in the North Woods of Wisconsin, while Nicholas Royle's "Very Low-Flying Aircraft" is set on a Royal Air Force base on Zanzibar during World War II.
"When the Gentlemen Go By" by Margaret Ronald is a dark fantasy loosely based upon a poem by Rudyard Kipling from his book Puck of Pook's Hill, in which those who hear a strange noise in the night are best advised to pretend they heard nothing.
Laird Barron's "The Lagerstatte" follows Danni, an entymologist who is desperately trying to rebuild a life after the deaths of her husband and son while coping with her guilt and depression. This is the standout piece of the anthology with everything about Barron's writing -- characterization, plotting, imagery, the language itself -- contributing to the dark beauty of this story. While Barron has included one or two Lovecraftian touches to the tale, it is the portrayal of Danni's guilt and despair which creates a very real sense of horror in this story.
"Harry and the Monkey" by Euan Harvey is set in Thailand and combines an urban legend with the classic weird monkey tale (monkeys in horror stories are never a good thing), wile "Dress Circle" by Miranda Siemienowicz offers an example of the new weird with its disjointed fragmentary images evoking the demented plotting of nightmare.
Daniel Kaysen's "The Rising River" offers a very dark Christmas ghost story in which the protagonist attempts to tell her new roommate why she doesn't want to go home for the holiday, "Sweeney among the Straight Razors" by JoSelle Vanderhooft is a poetic meditation upon history's most infamous barber, and "Loup-garou" by R. B. Russell describes a man's fascination with an obscure werewolf movie.
Graham Edwards's "Girl in Pieces" is a SF-myth-noir mash-up about a P.I. investigating the murder of a young woman after a golem claims he was framed for the murder. This is a delightfully witty and funny story and provides a much-welcome sense of B movie humor to the collection.
There's one thing everyone agrees on: whatever a soul is, it's what a golem ain't got. Except here's this golem, big as life, says he's just like me. Bigger collar size maybe. Thing is, if this golem thinks he's different, maybe they'll all start thinking they're different. Thinking they don't want to do the crappy jobs any more. Thinking they've got rights. Who knows-maybe they do. But if all the golems in the city start thinking that.. .that's a whole heap of angry clay to have on the loose. pp. 223-4
Joe R. Lansdale's "It Washed Up" is a brief but lyrical piece, and "The Thirteenth Hell" by Mike Allen is a short poem.
Margo Lanagan's "The Goosle" is a very dark and disturbing retelling of Hansel and Gretel in which a cannibalistic witch is not the most horrible predator of lost children, and "Beach Head" by Daniel LeMoal reads like a "Twilight Zone" episode as produced by the makers of the "Saw" franchise, with three smugglers desperately trying to escape from an isolated beach.
"The Man from the Peak" by Adam Golaski involves a mysterious guest at a party (like monkeys, not a good thing), while the final story in the anthology is "The Narrows" by Simon Bestwick, which starts out as a Wyndhamesque post-apocalyptic story which slowly morphs into a Lovecraftian weird tale.
Closing the book are two sections, "Honorable Mentions" and "About the Authors," this last providing ample means for readers to locate more stories by the authors in the anthology.
The Best Horror of the Year: Volume One may be purchased from Night Shade Books.
