The Best of the Best Horror of the Year: 10 Years of Essential Short Horror Fiction

Ellen Datlow
The Best of the Best Horror of the Year: 10 Years of Essential Short Horror Fiction Cover

The Best of the Best Horror of the Year: 10 Years of Essential Short Horror Fiction

charlesdee
1/15/2019
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It turns out that I am a finicky consumer of contemporary horror. Although I have found authors I like, many of them fall into the "literary horror" category, those authors whose publishers go out of their way to distance them from the genre ghetto. (The authors usually seem much less concerned about this than their publishers.) When it comes to more traditional horror, I have learned that short stories are more likely to please than novels, and that the "best of" annuals edited by Ellen Datlow are a dependable resource for getting to know both new authors and old hands at the game. This new publication ups the games by choosing the "best of the best" from the past ten anthologies.

In her introduction, Datlow prepares the reader for the familiar tropes of zombies, vampires, serial killers, and werewolves, but she makes the point that they are there because horror writers keep finding new twists. Nathan Ballingrud's "Wild Acre" combines werewolves and the recession of 2008. Siobhan Carrol's "Nesters" places a variation of Lovecraft's "The Color out of Space" in the Oklahoma dust bowl of the Great Depression. There are a few more coincidental crossovers to popular culture. In "The Moraine" by Simon Bestwick, a young couple gets trapped in what could be a version of Tremors without the gags. The post-zombie apocalypse narrative in Stephanie Crawford's and Duane Swierczynski's "Tender as Teeth" has cropped up in several feature films. Suzy McKee Charnas's "The Lowland Sea" recasts "The Masque of the Red Death" at the Cannes Film Festival. It's a perfect match.

My nomination for the best of the "best of the best" is Adam L.G. Nevill's "The Days of Our Lives." I couldn't tell you the plot because it barely has one, and the back story remains vague. The characters survive in a perpetual state of drudgery, danger, murder, and panic. As they title implies, they are just doing what they have to do, and it is a nightmare.