The Best of the Best Horror of the Year

by Ellen Datlow

  Engines of Desire: Tales of Love and Other Horrors by Livia Llewellyn (Lethe Press) was a powerful debut collection of ten stories published between 2005 and 2010, with one knockout original novelette, reprinted in the Best Horror of the Year Volume Four. Llewellyn is ferocious and unflinching as she creates flawed characters facing the dark in the world outside and in themselves. Furnace (Word Horde) was the author’s second collection, featuring fourteen stories, one new. She’s in the forefront of contemporary writers excelling in the horror short form. Psychosexual, provocative, sharp, complex.

  Mrs Midnight and Other Stories by Reggie Oliver (Tartarus Press) was the topnotch fifth collection of horror and weird stories, with four of the thirteen stories published for the first time. Featuring spot illustrations by the author. It was one of the best collections published in 2012.

  Red Gloves by Christopher Fowler (PS Publishing) was an excellent double volume of twenty-five stories celebrating the author’s twenty-fifth anniversary writing horror. Fowler is both prolific and versatile, a winning combination. The first volume contains London stories, the second is made up of “world” stories. Several are original to the volume and one of them was a new Bryant and May story.

  Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan (Volume One) (Subterranean Press) was, at 600 pages, a very generous helping of this excellent writer’s short fiction output between 1993 and 2004. A must-have for fans of Kiernan’s dark fictions. Her background in geology and vertebrate paleontology infuse her science fiction work, as well as her Lovecraftian influenced stories.

  Remember Why You Fear Me was Robert Shearman’s (ChiZine Publications) fourth collection of stories and the only one he categorizes as “horror” (although many of his earlier tales are dark). This volume includes twenty-one stories, ten of them new. Enjoy the feast. Before he won the World Fantasy Award in 2008 for Tiny Deaths, his first collection, he was best known as the Doctor Who writer who reintroduced the Daleks into the series. In addition to this new collection, Shearman posted a series of stories on his blog starting in 2011—some reprints, most published for the first time. The idea was, in his own words: “I wrote a book of short stories, called Everyone’s Just So So Special. And to celebrate its release, I proposed that everyone who bought the one hundred special leatherbound editions would receive an entirely unique story of their own, featuring their name, of at least 500 words in length. And to prove that the stories really were unique, I’d post them all online, for all the world to see. The problem is, they’re not 500 words. They’re a bit longer than that. But, hey, I like a challenge.” I don’t believe Shearman finished his task, but what he did write is still up there, in 2018. Enjoy what comes out of this guy’s brain at: justsosospecial.com

  The Terrible Changes by Joel Lane (Ex Occidente Press) is an excellent collection. It contains fourteen stories, twelve previously uncollected, two published for the first time. Lane’s foreword described his evolution as a writer of weird fiction and the stories range over his up till then twenty-five-year career. Where Furnaces Burn, also by Lane (PS Publishing), was a consistently terrific collection by a writer often named in the same breath as Conrad Williams, whose new collection I mention below. The twenty-three reprints and three original stories in the Lane volume are never less than very good, and always readable. Lane died in 2013; these two collections were published in 2009 and 2012 respectively.

  Born with Teeth by Conrad Williams (PS Publishing) was another excellent volume of short fiction by this author. It has seventeen diverse horror stories originally published between 1997 and 2012 in various magazines and anthologies, including one excellent new story, which was reprinted in the Best of the Year Volume Six.

  Windeye by Brian Evenson (Coffee House Press) presented twenty-five dark and sometimes weird stories by a writer who has been consistently praised by the mainstream, despite the fact that he mostly writes horror fiction. He’s one of the few writers in the field today whose work, even in a very few pages, can pack a punch and not seem gimmicky doing so.

  North American Lake Monsters by Nathan Ballingrud (Small Beer Press) was the author’s first collection. Some of the nine stories are almost mainstream, I guess you could say mainstream in sensibility, but there’s always a touch of the weird in them. Since publishing his first story in Scifiction in 2003, I’ve been astounded by his range. The one original story is a knockout, and was reprinted in the Best Horror of the Year.

  The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All by Laird Barron (Night Shade) was Barron’s third collection, and has eight stories originally published between 2010 and 2012, plus one new one. Barron’s writing might be described as an amalgam of Lovecraftian themes and paranoia with the language and characterizations of tough men laid low (sometimes by women) of Lucius Shepard. Critics talk about Thomas Ligotti as an inheritor of Lovecraft’s mantle, and that might be, but Barron at his best has pushed cosmic horror through to the twenty-first century. With an introduction by Norman Partridge. The one new story was reprinted in the Best Horror of the Year Volume Six. Swift to Chase (JournalStone) was the author’s fourth collection, featuring twelve stories and novellas, one new. Barron’s short fiction ranges from horror and sword and sorcery to noir and dystopic, never moving too far from the dark dark core he writes about so well.

  Everything You Need by Michael Marshall Smith (Earthling Publications) was a welcome new collection of seventeen stories by one of the contemporary masters of the form. Smith’s range is extraordinary, roaming equally smoothly among horror, dark fantasy, science fiction, and mainstream. There were three new stories, one of them mainstream and heartbreaking.

  The Bright Day is Done by Carole Johnstone (Gray Friar Press) was a terrific debut, with seventeen stories by a British writer whose work has been published in Black Static, Interzone, and a host of anthologies including The Best Horror of the Year and The Best British Fantasy. Five of the stories and novelettes are new. A must read.

  Night Music: Nocturnes Volume 2 by John Connolly (Atria Books/Emily Bestler Books) was an excellent second collection of thirteen supernatural tales by the Irish author of crime novels that are often imbued with the uncanny. There were five new stories and one, “Razorshins,” originally published in Black Static several months before the collection’s publication, is especially good.

  Probably Monsters by Ray Cluley (ChiZine Publications) was a strong debut by a writer who has been getting increasing and well-deserved attention in Great Britain (one story won the British Fantasy Award). The twenty stories showcase his broad range, with three new stories, one of which was reprinted in the Best Horror of the Year Volume Eight.

  Interior Darkness by Peter Straub (Doubleday) was a compilation of sixteen stories and novellas published over twenty-five years, and culled from this master stylist’s three collections. Three of the stories and novellas were previously uncollected.

  Ragman & Other Family Curses by Rebecca Lloyd (Egaeus Press, Keynote Edition I) was a limited edition mini-hardcover collection of four impressive new novelettes. “Ragman” and “For Two Songs” are both disconcertingly horrific. The former was reprinted in Best Horror of the Year Volume Nine. Seven Strange Stories (Tartarus Press) was the author’s excellent fourth collection of eerie dark stories and novellas. Two are reprints.

  Phantasms: Twelve Eerie Tales by Peter Bell (Sarob Press) was an excellent selection of seven reprints and five new stories by a formidable writer of ghostly tales.

  She Said Destroy by Nadia Bulkin (Word Horde) was a smart, powerful debut collection with thirteen stories of horror and weird fiction, one of them new. Three of them were nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award.

  The Night Shop: Tales for the Lonely Hours by Terry Dowling (Cemetery Dance) was the Australian, multi-award-winning author’s fourth horror collection and it’s a terrific sampling of his work, with eighteen disturbing stories, three of them new. It showcases Dowling at the top of his game.

  The Unorthodox Dr. Draper and Other Stor
ies by William Browning Spencer (Subterranean Press) collected ten years’ worth of Spencer’s most recent stories, between 2007 and 2017, which includes nine stories and one poem. His work is surreal, funny, horrific, and very well written.

  Working on The Best Horror of the Year for so long has given me a fierce appreciation of the richness inherent in the term “horror.” The stories I’ve chosen during the past ten years are those I’ve read and reread with continuing enjoyment. Because that’s how I choose what goes into the anthology—I read the ones I’ve marked for special attention multiple times until I bring the word count of the anthology down to my annual limit. So, you can imagine just how many times I’ve reread the stories that made the final cut of this volume.

  I often jokingly call myself a “pusher”—I am. A pusher of what I consider great short fiction. I want you the reader to love the stories that I as a reader love. I hope you’ll return to these stories over and over with the same enjoyment I have. And perhaps “push” them to your friends.

  LOWLAND SEA

  SUZY MCKEE CHARNAS

  Miriam had been to Cannes twice before. The rush and glamour of the film festival had not long held her attention (she did not care for movies and knew the real nature of the people who made them too well for that magic to work), but from the windows of their festival hotel she could look out over the sea and daydream about sailing home, one boat against the inbound tide from northern Africa.

  This was a foolish dream; no one went to Africa now—no one could be paid enough to go, not while the Red Sweat raged there (the film festival itself had been postponed this year til the end of summer on account of the epidemic). She’d read that vessels wallowing in from the south laden with refugees were regularly shot apart well offshore by European military boats, and the beaches were not only still closed but were closely patrolled for lucky swimmers, who were also disposed of on the spot.

  Just foolish, really, not even a dream that her imagination could support beyond its opening scene. Supposing that she could survive long enough to actually make it home (and she knew she was a champion survivor), nothing would be left of her village, just as nothing, or very close to nothing, was left to her of her childhood self. It was eight years since she had been taken.

  Bad years; until Victor had bought her. Her clan tattoos had caught his attention. Later, he had had them reproduced, in make-up, for his film, Hearts of Light (it was about African child-soldiers rallied by a brave, warm-hearted American adventurer—played by Victor himself—against Islamic terrorists).

  She understood that he had been seduced by the righteous outlawry of buying a slave in the modern world—to free her, of course; it made him feel bold and virtuous. In fact, Victor was accustomed to buying people. Just since Miriam had known him, he had paid two Russian women to carry babies for him because his fourth wife was barren. He already had children but, edging toward sixty, he wanted new evidence of his potency.

  Miriam was not surprised. Her own father had no doubt used the money he had been paid for her to buy yet another young wife to warm his cooling bed; that was a man’s way. He was probably dead now or living in a refugee camp somewhere, along with all the sisters and brothers and aunties from his compound: wars, the Red Sweat, and fighting over the scraps would leave little behind.

  She held no grudge: she had come to realize that her father had done her a favor by selling her. She had seen a young cousin driven away for witchcraft by his own father, after a newborn baby brother had sickened and died. A desperate family could thus be quickly rid of a mouth they could not feed.

  Better still, Miriam had not yet undergone the ordeal of female circumcision when she was taken away. At first she had feared that it was for this reason that the men who bought her kept selling her on to others. But she had learned that this was just luck, in all its perverse strangeness, pressing her life into some sort of shape. Not a very good shape after her departure from home, but then good luck came again in the person of Victor, whose bed she had warmed til he grew tired of her. Then he hired her to care for his new babies, Kevin and Leif.

  Twins were unlucky back home: there, one or both would immediately have been put out in the bush to die. But this, like so many other things, was different for all but the poorest of whites.

  They were pretty babies; Kevin was a little fussy but full of lively energy and alertness that Miriam rejoiced to see. Victor’s actress wife, Cameron, had no use for the boys (they were not hers, after all, not as these people reckoned such things). She had gladly left to Miriam the job of tending to them.

  Not long afterward Victor had bought Krista, an Eastern European girl, who doted extravagantly on the two little boys and quickly took over their care. Victor hated to turn people out of his household (he thought of himself as a magnanimous man), so his chief assistant, Bulgarian Bob, found a way to keep Miriam on. He gave her a neat little digital camera with which to keep a snapshot record of Victor’s home life: she was to be a sort of documentarian of the domestic. It was Bulgarian Bob (as opposed to French Bob, Victor’s head driver) who had noticed her interest in taking pictures during an early shoot of the twins.

  B. Bob was like that: he noticed things, and he attended to them.

  Miriam felt blessed. She knew herself to be plain next to the diet-sculpted, spa-pampered, surgery-perfected women in Victor’s household, so she could hardly count on beauty to secure protection; nor had she any outstanding talent of the kind that these people valued. But with a camera like this Canon G9, you needed no special gift to take attractive family snapshots. It was certainly better than, say, becoming someone’s lowly third wife, or being bonded for life to a wrinkled shrine-priest back home.

  Krista said that B. Bob had been a gangster in Prague. This was certainly possible. Some men had a magic that could change them from any one thing into anything else: the magic was money. Victor’s money had changed Miriam’s status from that of an illegal slave to, of all wonderful things, that of a naturalized citizen of the U.S.A. (although whether her new papers could stand serious scrutiny she hoped never to have to find out). Thus she was cut off from her roots, floating in Victor’s world.

  Better not to think of that, though; better not to think painful thoughts.

  Krista understood this (she understood a great deal without a lot of palaver). Yet Krista obstinately maintained a little shrine made of old photos, letters, and trinkets that she set up in a private corner wherever Victor’s household went. Despite a grim period in Dutch and Belgian brothels, she retained a sweet naiveté. Miriam hoped that no bad luck would rub off on Krista from attending to the twins. Krista was an east European, which seemed to render a female person more than normally vulnerable to ill fortune.

  Miriam had helped Krista to fit in with the others who surrounded Victor—the coaches, personal shoppers, arrangers, designers, bodyguards, publicists, therapists, drivers, cooks, secretaries, and hangers-on of all kinds. He was like a paramount chief with a great crowd of praise singers paid to flatter him, outshouting similar mobs attending everyone significant in the film world. This world was little different from the worlds of Africa and Arabia that Miriam had known, although at first it had seemed frighteningly strange—so shiny, so fast-moving and raucous! But when you came right down to it here were the same swaggering, self-indulgent older men fighting off their younger competitors, and the same pretty girls they all sniffed after; and the lesser court folk, of course, including almost-invisible functionaries like Krista and Miriam.

  One day, Miriam planned to leave. Her carefully tended savings were nothing compared to the fortunes these shiny people hoarded, wasted, and squabbled over; but she had almost enough for a quiet, comfortable life in some quiet, comfortable place. She knew how to live modestly and thought she might even sell some of her photographs once she left Victor’s orbit.

  It wasn’t as if she yearned to run to one of the handsome African men she saw selling knock-off designer handbags and watches on the sidewalks of g
reat European cities. Sometimes, at the sound of a familiar language from home, she imagined joining them—but those were poor men, always on the run from the local law. She could not give such a man power over her and her savings.

  Not that having money made the world perfect: Miriam was a realist, like any survivor. She found it funny that, even for Victor’s followers with their light minds and heavy pockets, contentment was not to be bought. Success itself eluded them, since they continually redefined it as that which they had not yet achieved.

  Victor, for instance: the one thing he longed for but could not attain was praise for his film—his first effort as an actor-director.

  “They hate me!” he cried, crushing another bad review and flinging it across the front room of their hotel suite, “because I have the balls to tackle grim reality! All they want is sex, explosions, and the new Brad Pitt! Anything but truth, they can’t stand truth!”

  Of course they couldn’t stand it. No one could. Truth was the desperate lives of most ordinary people, lives often too hard to be borne; mere images on a screen could not make that an attractive spectacle. Miriam had known boys back home who thought they were “Rambo”. Some had become killers, some had been become the killed: doped-up boys, slung about with guns and bullet-belts like carved fetish figures draped in strings of shells. Their short lives were not in the movies or like the movies.

  On this subject as many others, however, Miriam kept her opinions to herself.

  Hearts of Light was scorned at Cannes. Victor’s current wife, Cameron, fled in tears from his sulks and rages. She stayed away for days, drowning her unhappiness at parties and pools and receptions.

  Wealth, however, did have certain indispensable uses. Some years before Miriam had joined his household, Victor had bought the one thing that turned out to be essential: a white-walled mansion called La Bastide, set high on the side of a French valley only a day’s drive from Cannes. This was to be his retreat from the chaos and crushing boredom of the cinema world, a place where he could recharge his creative energies (so said B. Bob).