Download PDF The Best Horror of the Year eBook Ellen Datlow
Download PDF The Best Horror of the Year eBook Ellen Datlow
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The Best Horror of the Year eBook Ellen Datlow Reviews
- "The Best Horror of the Year" makes its welcome ninth appearance in a volume beefier than last year's annual, which was slightly puny in the page count. Not returning is Laird Barron, breaking a remarkable string of consecutive "Best Horror" performances. Barron's "Triumvirate of Terror" compatriots, Nathan Ballingrud and John Langan, are also no-shows. I expect all three writers are brewing something mind-blowing for their inexorable return to these pages. Despite their absence, editor Ellen Datlow practically guarantees at least three stars from me by including a new Peter Straub story and a hefty double-dose of Brian Hodge.
Datlow's opening Summation of the past year's novels is encouraging. She runs off a list of several books to be added to the must-read list. I hope "Hex" is as compelling as she makes it sound. But "Best Horror" is focused on superior short work. Among 2016's notables, for better or worse
The Grapes of Wrath glow a Colour out of Space in the opening "Nesters." When author Siobhan Carroll describes strange visitors as too pale and too well fed, the vampire bell might go off, but it's a false alarm. No, this is our persistent old pal Mr. Lovecraft back once again. The story's Dust Bowl setting and Irish immigrant narrative voice give the formula a few tweaks. Otherwise, Carroll regrettably confines herself to following that formula, and soon enough, characters are reciting the inevitable, untenable tongue-twisters of jumbled alphabet and apostrophe.
The precipitous drop into the fragmented perspective that opens "The Process Is A Process All Its Own" is likely to perplex readers, but in a few pages, the story reveals itself as something altogether more prosaic We're in the mind of another serial killer. What lifts "The Process" beyond the hackneyed ranks of standard psycho slaughters is Peter Straub's shimmering prose. "Often, he felt other," Straub writes of the "dark, disturbing criminal sociopath" at the center of "The Process." Straub's creative process ensures that sense of the alien, that unsettling otherness. Protagonist Tilly Hayward has a kind of synesthesia (whether real or delusional is up to us as readers) in which he can smell words. "He could already catch the meat-sack stench of 'please' and 'mercy' as they slid through the girl's sweetheart lips." Tilly describes words as "blue collar guys." Sometimes. But Straub's words are the elegant elite -- glittering, masterfully ornamented confections that offer a wealth of mysteries to be plumbed upon multiple readings. They are beautiful even as they incite disgust and dread. The clinical description of Tilly's methodical cleanup process is the most chilling single paragraph in the book.
"The Bad Hour" gets off to a good start. An Iraq War veteran searches for a sandbox buddy through a picturesque autumn countryside in Vermont (complete with pumpkin harvest) until she comes across the classic horror setting of the secluded New England town spurning outsiders and harboring secrets. This is all genre boilerplate, but it's effective up to the point when author Christopher Golden goes full-on pedantic, trying to lay down the "rules" of his supernatural threat and doing more damage with each poorly planned detail. It's like one of those "X Files" episodes that's fully committed to a bad premise and only digs itself deeper into a hole the more Mulder and Scully try to explain. You know what's scary? The unexplainable.
Brian Hodge may be getting tired of shouldering the label "underrated." It's certainly not an accurate one among his regular readers, who rate him very highly indeed. Underread might be a tad closer to the mark. We just want more people reading along with us. Hodge has been at this a long while, steadily improving since his already impressive beginnings in "The Horror Show" and the Dell/Abyss days. Yet Hodge isn't as well-known as some of us think he deserves to be, and we've been wondering What's delaying the rest of you? He's like the Michael K. Williams of horror writers. He may not have all the honors and prizes and recognition that are due him, but fans cheer when they hear Omar's comin'. Datlow knows how good Hodge is and devotes a sizable chunk of this volume to him. She must rate him pretty highly.
The first of his stories is "It's All the Same Road in the End." The Brothers Pine, Clarence and Young Will, have been on this road trip for so long, it's all become a blur "Another stop, another chance for the truth" in their quest for their grandfather Willard Chambers, who disappeared more than 50 years ago. The brothers pass around a photo that captures something off, something wrong, something that unnerves would-be witnesses. There's also a tape recording on an old Walkman that some listeners can't even finish before yanking the headphones off. Grandpa Willard was a songcatcher, Marlboro Man as musicologist, preserving the tuneful heritage of various cultures. Somewhere out in Dust Bowl territory, in search of folk songs to record, Willard was lost. Now the Pine Brothers follow an unearthly siren call that probably resembles blind idiot piping.
Scientists in Gemma Files' "Grave Goods" uncover a prehistoric pit in Canada's coniferous old growth and have to wade through a sodden mess of rain, mud, mucus and rancid racial and gender politics. Similarly, the reader finds himself bogged in a morass of eye-blurring archaeological info dumps (Files mansplains Chris Golden under the table), muddled action and groan-inducing dialog ("Hey, don't denigrate my spirituality"). Files has been writing good stories for so long that she should be past the point of producing something this erratic and amateurish.
The traditional British ghost story gets another airing in C.E. Ward's "The House of Wonders." Or maybe it's not the traditional British ghost; maybe it's another traditional revenant, whose frequent, fanged anthology appearances tend to annoy me. Or maybe it's someone/thing altogether different (though still traditional). The ambiguity carries the story quite a ways, despite Ward's maddening habit of inserting "of course" into every other sentence.
Familial friction lays the basis for Christopher Burns' "The Numbers" as an undependable brother visits the family farm uninvited for breakfast. The discomfort builds until the story takes a wrenching, unpleasant turn (I mean that as a compliment) and proceeds toward its inevitable ending coldly and efficiently. The tale seems quite simple -- especially considering how often we hear real-life variations of it -- but if it was really that simple, everyone would be writing it. Though Burns isn't working at Peter Straub's level, both authors illustrate the same principle Good writing elevates even the most basic plot. "Shotgun Joe" Biden might like this one.
Old age addles the thinking of a junk shop owner who presides over scary mirrors in Rebecca Lloyd's overlong and haphazardly edited "Ragman." After a few years of progressive improvement, the copy editing slipped a notch in "Best Horror" Volume Nine. Make no mistake The rules of language matter. The improper execution of those rules affects readability ("Where did I put what Dad?"), and of far less importance, it irritates online reviewers who work as professional editors in their day job. "Ragman" lacks not only key commas but entire words. Internal logic and common sense go missing as well. There's an old joke about the family that lacks the self-preservational smarts to move out of the haunted house when the faucets start spewing blood. When the narrator of "Ragman" witnesses an ominous black stinky creature trying to climb out of a mirror, she retreats to her cot and duvet where "I felt the huge solemnity of how each of us is alone on Earth," then she goes to work attaching price tags to the items in "the bric-a-brac outhouse." (Though it's certainly no fault of Lloyd's, the word "outhouse" has a significantly different meaning on this side of the Atlantic.)
Gary McMahon's "What's Out There?" is likely to be especially upsetting to animal lovers. It should elicit dazzling mental special fx sequences along the lines of pre-CGI greats Rick Baker or Rob Bottin. I don't really have a critique, just a question In England, do cats really beat up foxes?
Ray Cluley's "The Castellmarch Man" reminds me why I sometimes envy the British. Though we have the Constitution and real football, they have near-constant gloomy weather and gothic castles all over the place. Cluley's geocaching couple are enjoying the Welsh countryside, and I was enjoying the story and atmosphere. Then, much like he did in "Bones of Crow" in "Best Horror" Volume Six, Cluley takes a detour into the daffy. Deep in the dark innards of a castle, his protagonists are set upon by a randy refugee from Disney's "Pinocchio." Perhaps it's not entirely fair to blame Cluley for essentially being faithful to folklore, but it's a bit frustrating to invest as a reader in a story -- and this is a fairly lengthy story -- and be rewarded for it by an ending this silly. The buildup did make me want to revisit Wales though, so the tourism bureau might want to send Cluley a nice note.
In Brian Hodge's second story, "On These Blackened Shores of Time," a father endlessly replays "four seconds of eternity" in his mind -- the time it took to register the sudden loss of his son in a calamity millions of years in the making, down a seemingly bottomless pit that opens in suburbia. Just when you think Old Man Lovecraft has been stripmined to the dried-out (but obstinately omnipresent) bones, along comes Hodge with a string of superb Mythos reworkings (that's reworkings, not rehashes, this is key). I assume his next collection will assemble this sequence of cosmic horror. Everyone should buy a copy. If Hodge becomes disgustingly successful, he won't have to hear about how underrated he is, and those of us who have been reading since "Dark Advent" can shrug and wrinkle our noses and smugly say, "Eh, his early stuff was better."
Hodge and Straub push the highs of Volume Nine higher, but the lows ... are pretty low. The past couple of volumes established a baseline of quality that was solid but a little safe. This volume takes more risks, but at times, that means it dares to fail. Steady but safe, or daring but uneven? I'm not sure which is better.
Next year will mark a decade that Ellen Datlow has been bringing us this incarnation of "Best Horror." I don't know whether Night Shade Books plans anything special to mark the anniversary, but I hope all of Datlow's contributors will do her the honor of making her job especially arduous by overwhelming her with exceptional work and making Volume Ten the best yet.
Maybe someone could even coax Thomas Ligotti out of hiding. - Be aware that this is not a collection of short stories but an anthology of all horror writings out there. Not what i expected at all.
- Like most such anthologies, it's a bit of a mixed bag, but with more strong stories than weak ones . As a long-time fan of H. P. Lovecraft and M. R. James, I was especially delighted by Siobhan Carroll's "Nesters" ("The Colour Out of Space" meets "The Grapes of Wrath"); and two by the very gifted Brian Hodge "It's All the Same Road in the End" (obviously influenced by the "Supernatural" tv program), and "On These Blackest Shores of Time" (a Pennsylvania coal mine disaster reveals a structure and force more ancient than the coal that encases it).
A special treat, because M. R. James references are much less common than Lovecraft's, was C. E. Ward's "The House of Wonders" (a penny arcade peepshow from the 1890s reveals a very Jamesian take on Jack the Ripper).
All in all this was a very enjoyable experience; highly recommended to anyone who enjoys the genre. - Most stories seemed like the author tried to start a book, got writers block, and slapped an ending on hoping to sell a short story.
- Any anthology edited by Ellen Datlow is a winner ...I should know, I have most of them and have re-read many short stories contained between their covers. Vol. 9 THE BEST HORROR OF THE YEAR is no exception. How perfect (in the middle of one of the coldest winters in New England in decades) to curl up with stories guaranteed to make you shiver from something besides the weather. Highly recommended.
- This was the first compilation book I've read. I normally go for history, politics, and biographies. That being said, I really enjoyed this book. A few stories didn't grab me but those that did really grabbed me. I liked it so much I've purchased 3 more compilation books. Highly recommended!
- Benchmark horror as usual. A superb anthology, possibly the best of these yet.
- Im a horror fan, what can I say.
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