The Best of the Best Horror of the Year

by Ellen Datlow

  I look away from Nick and back at the summit. The low moon throws light and shadow against the rock, the snow, the ridges and fissures, the pillars and gullies. I think of Jakub and Acke and all the others who’ll be left on this mountain, frozen in time and in place; disappeared, or dragged away from the path to become a landmark, a trig point, a cautionary tale. I think of Pasang and Chongba and the Slovaks trapped inside the Death Zone with no fixed lines, and an avalanche and collapsed serac between them and Camp IV. They may as well be on that moon.

  And I think of them all sitting around that stone altar, laughing and eating. Smearing grey sampa flour on their faces; the promise that they would live to see each other become old and grey. Mountain says no.

  Because the view from the other side of the mirror can so often look the same. Even when you know exactly what it feels like to fall, to be alone. Even when you know—as you look up out of silent blue dark into howling white light and life; as the air prickles against your skin like blunted pins—that it’s already too late. Like a slow-suffocating nightmare inside thick, heavy curtains. A leaving that never feels like going anywhere at all. To be gone, but not gone.

  They can’t hold us both. They can’t save us both.

  And they didn’t.

  The shocking agony of plunging into that silent blue dark, Felix’s weight pulling me down faster, harder, the snapped rope showering snow. To feel it coming, to know. A breath, barely long enough to scream, but stretching out into infinity.

  Denial: a mountain climber’s best and worst friend. Better to believe. Except we never do—those of us already on the other side of that coin, that mirror. Because then there really is no going back at all.

  Nick still howls even as the wind picks up again and the night gets colder. But he’ll come back. He’ll always come back. Because this is where Nick lives. Not in our shitty Catford maisonette. Not even in base camps or trekking lodges. Only up here, in the clouds and violent snowstorms and hurricane-force winds; on the rock faces and ice fields and stony summits; in the gullies and crevasses, the ridges and jet winds and dancing tails of white snow. Up here, where people can’t survive; where we start dying faster the moment we start to climb. This is Nick’s home.

  And mine. Because what I told Pasang will always be true. I think of Acke shouting stay with me to the stone, the snow, the sky. I am here because Nick needs me to be here. And so I stay. I will always walk beside him. It’s the only reason I’ve ever climbed any mountain at all.

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  Nathan Ballingrud is the author of North American Lake Monsters, The Visible Filth, and the forthcoming The Atlas of Hell. Several of his stories are in development for film and TV. He has twice won the Shirley Jackson Award. He lives somewhere in the mountains of North Carolina.

  Laird Barron spent his early years in Alaska. He is the author of several books, including The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All, Swift to Chase, and Blood Standard. His work has also appeared in many magazines and anthologies. Barron currently resides in the Rondout Valley, writing stories about the evil that men do.

  Simon Bestwick is the author of four story collections, a chapbook, Angels Of The Silences, and five novels, most recently Devil’s Highway and The Feast Of All Souls. His work has been published in Black Static and Great Jones Street, podcast on Pseudopod and Tales to Terrify, and reprinted in The Best of the Best Horror of the Year. His novelette, Breakwater, was published by Tor.com in 2018.

  A new collection and a new novel, Wolf’s Hill, are both in progress. Until recently, his hobbies included avoiding gainful employment, but this ended in failure and he now has a job again. Any and all assistance in escaping this dreadful fate would be most welcome. He lives on the Wirral with the long-suffering author Cate Gardner, and uses far too many semicolons.

  Ramsey Campbell is Great Britain’s most respected living horror writer. He has been given more awards than any other writer in the field, including the Grand Master Award of the World Horror Convention, the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Horror Writers Association, the Living Legend Award of the International Horror Guild, and the World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2015, he was made an Honorary Fellow of Liverpool John Moores University for outstanding services to literature. Among his novels are The Face That Must Die, Incarnate, Midnight Sun, The Count of Eleven, Silent Children, The Darkest Part of the Woods, The Overnight, Secret Story, The Grin of the Dark, Thieving Fear, Creatures of the Pool, The Seven Days of Cain, Ghosts Know, The Kind Folk, Think Yourself Lucky, and Thirteen Days by Sunset Beach.

  He is presently working on a trilogy, The Three Births of Daoloth—the first volume, The Searching Dead, was published in 2016, followed by Born to the Dark, and The Way of the Worm will appear in 2018. Needing Ghosts, The Last Revelation of Gla’aki, The Pretence, and The Booking are novellas.

  His collections include Waking Nightmares, Alone with the Horrors, Ghosts and Grisly Things, Told by the Dead, Just Behind You, Holes for Faces, and Limericks of the Alarming and Phantasmal. His nonfiction is collected as Ramsey Campbell, Probably. His novels The Nameless and Pact of the Fathers have been filmed in Spain, where a film of The Influence is in production. He is the President of the Society of Fantastic Films.

  Ramsey Campbell lives on Merseyside with his wife Jenny. His pleasures include classical music, good food and wine, and whatever’s in that pipe. His website is ramseycampbell.com.

  Siobhan Carroll is an associate professor of English at the University of Delaware. When not plotting world domination, she studies nineteenth-century board games, polar exploration, and the history of geo-engineering. For more fiction by Siobhan Carroll, visit voncarr-siobhan-carroll.blogspot.com/p/fiction-poetry.html.

  Dan Chaon’s most recent book is Ill Will, a national bestseller, named one of the best books of 2017 by the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and Publishers Weekly. Other works include the short story collection Stay Awake (2012), a finalist for the Story Prize; the national bestseller Await Your Reply, and Among the Missing, a finalist for the National Book Award.

  Chaon’s fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize Anthologies, and The O. Henry Prize Stories.

  He has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award in Fiction, the Shirley Jackson Award, and was the recipient of an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

  Chaon lives in Cleveland.

  Suzy McKee Charnas has been publishing long- and short-form fantasy and SF since 1974, as well as YA fiction, nonfiction, and (so far) one play script that has had productions on both coasts. She is best known for her four-book feminist-futurist series, The Holdfast Chronicles, and for The Vampire Tapestry, a cult classic. Her work has won her a Hugo, a Nebula, a Gigamesh, and a Mythopeic award for YA fantasy.

  Born in NYC, she has lived in New Mexico with her husband and various dogs and cats since 1970.

  Stephanie Crawford works as a full-time editor in Las Vegas. When not writing about film or embellishing strange events for even stranger fictional stories, she co-hosts The Screamcast podcast and is currently collaborating on two scripts.

  Brian Evenson is the author of over a dozen books of fiction, most recently the story collection A Collapse of Horses and the novella The Warren. He has been a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award three times. His novel Last Days won the American Library Association’s award for Best Horror Novel of 2009. His novel The Open Curtain was a finalist for an Edgar Award and an International Horror Guild Award. He is the recipient of three O. Henry Prizes, as well as an NEA fellowship and a Guggenheim fellowship. He lives in Valencia, California, and works at CalArts.

  Award-winning horror author Gemma Files has also been a film critic, teacher, and screenwriter. She is probably best known for her Weird Western Hexslinger series: A Book of Tongues, A Rope of Thorns, and A Tree of Bones, and has published three collections of short fiction: Kissing Carri
on, The Worm in Every Heart, and Spectral Evidence as well as two chapbooks of poetry.

  Her book, We Will All Go Down Together: Stories About the Five-Family Coven, was published in 2014. Her most recent novel, Experimental Film, won the 2015 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel and the 2015 Sunburst Award for Best Novel (Adult).

  Her fourth collection of stories, Drawn Up From Deep Places, will be out in November 2018.

  Neil Gaiman is the Newbery Medal–winning author of The Graveyard Book and a New York Times bestselling author. Several of his books, including Coraline, have been made into major motion pictures. American Gods has been made into an ongoing series for television. He is also famous for writing the Sandman graphic novel series and numerous other books and comics for adult, young adult, and younger readers.

  He has won the Hugo, Nebula, Mythopoeic, and World Fantasy awards, among others. He is also the author of many short stories and poems.

  For more information: www.neilgaiman.com/

  Stephen Gallagher is a Stoker and World Fantasy Award nominee, winner of British Fantasy and International Horror Guild Awards for his short fiction, and is the author of fifteen novels including Valley of Lights, Down River, Rain, and Nightmare, With Angel. He’s the creator of Sebastian Becker, Special Investigator to the Lord Chancellor’s Visitor in Lunacy, in a series of novels that includes The Kingdom of Bones, The Bedlam Detective, and The Authentic William James.

  Adam Golaski is the author of Color Plates and Worse Than Myself. His poetry, essays, artwork, and fiction has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Bennington Review, Vestiges, The Lifted Brow, Always Crashing, and McSweeney’s. For more work, visit Little Stories (online).

  Cody Goodfellow has written seven solo novels and three with New York Times bestselling author John Skipp. Two of his short fiction collections, Silent Weapons For Quiet Wars and All-Monster Action, received the Wonderland Book Award. He wrote and co-produced the short films Stay At Home Dad and Clowntown: An Honest Mis-Stake. He recently played an Amish farmer in a Days Inn commercial, and has appeared in the background on numerous TV programs, as well as videos by Anthrax and Beck. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

  Glen Hirshberg’s stories have earned him three International Horror Guild Awards and the Shirley Jackson Award. His collections include The Two Sams, American Morons, The Janus Tree, and The Ones Who Are Waving. He is also the author of five novels: The Snowman’s Children, The Book of Bunk, and the Motherless Children trilogy (Motherless Child, Good Girls, and Nothing to Devour). With Peter Atkins and Dennis Etchison, he co-founded the Rolling Darkness Revue, a touring ghost story performance project. On his own, he founded the CREW program, through which he trains his most passionate students and sends them into the surrounding community to run extended creative writing camps for children with limited access to artistic instruction or formal outlets for expression. He writes and teaches in the Los Angeles area, where he lives with his family and cats.

  Brian Hodge is one of those people who always has to be making something. So far, he’s made thirteen novels, around 130 shorter works, and five full-length collections.

  He’ll have three new books out in 2018 and early 2019: The Immaculate Void, a novel of cosmic horror; A Song of Eagles, a grimdark fantasy; and Skidding Into Oblivion, his next collection.

  He lives in Colorado, where he also likes to make music and photographs and trains in Krav Maga and kickboxing.

  Connect through his web site (brianhodge.net), Twitter (@BHodgeAuthor), or Facebook (facebook.com/brianhodgewriter).

  Jane Jakeman is a British author who has published crime and ghost stories in Supernatural Tales, Ghosts and Scholars, and All Hallows, some of which were reprinted in the collection A Bracelet of Bright Hair. She is a regular reviewer of Islamic books for The Art Newspaper and has travelled widely in the Middle East. Jane lives in Oxford, UK, with her Egyptologist husband and two small black cats.

  Carole Johnstone is a British Fantasy Award–winning Scottish writer, currently enjoying splendid isolation on the Atlantic coast of the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. Her short fiction has been published widely and has been reprinted in Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year and Salt Publishing’s Best British Fantasy series.

  Her debut short story collection, The Bright Day is Done, and her novella, Cold Turkey, were both shortlisted for a 2015 British Fantasy Award.

  Stephen Graham Jones is the author of sixteen novels and six story collections. His recent novella Mapping the Interior won the Bram Stoker Award and the This is Horror Award. He lives and teaches in Boulder, Colorado.

  John Langan is the author of two novels: The Fisherman and House of Windows, and three collections: The Wide, Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies, Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters, and Sefira and Other Betrayals.

  With Paul Tremblay, he co-edited Creatures: Thirty Years of Monsters. One of the founders of the Shirley Jackson Awards, he serves on its Advisory Board. Currently, he reviews horror and dark fantasy for Locus magazine. He lives in New York’s Hudson Valley with his wife and younger son.

  Tanith Lee passed away in 2015. By then she had written nearly one hundred books and over three hundred short stories, in addition to radio plays and TV scripts. Her genre-crossing included fantasy, SF, horror, young adult, historical, detective, and contemporary fiction, and often combinations of all of them. Her more recent publications included the Lionwolf Trilogy: Cast a Bright Shadow, Here in Cold Hell, and No Flame but Mine, and three Piratica novels for young adults. Her short fiction was most recently collected in Redder Than Blood, The Weird Tales of Tanith Lee, and Tanith by Choice: The Best of Tanith Lee.

  In 2009, Lee was named Grandmaster by the World Horror Convention and given the Life Achievement Award by the World Fantasy Convention in 2013.

  E. Michael Lewis is an aviation and ghost story enthusiast who studied creative writing at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma. His short stories appear in The Horror Anthology of Horror Anthologies, Exotic Gothic 4, and Savage Beasts.

  He is a lifelong native of the Pacific Northwest, the father of two sons, and the chief attendant of two cats, who are also brothers.

  He can be found on Facebook and Twitter at @EMichaelLewis, and at his website emichaellewis.com.

  Livia Llewellyn is a writer of horror, dark fantasy, and erotica, whose fiction has appeared in Subterranean, Apex magazine, Postscripts, Nightmare magazine, as well as in numerous anthologies.

  Her first collection, Engines of Desire: Tales of Love & Other Horrors, was published in 2011, and received two Shirley Jackson Award nominations, for Best Collection and Best Novelette (for “Omphalos”). Her second collection, Furnace, was published in 2016. The title story “Furnace” was nominated for the 2013 Shirley Jackson Award. You can find her online at liviallewellyn.com.

  Seanan McGuire (who has written this story under the name Mira Grant) lives, works, and occasionally falls into swamps in the Pacific Northwest, where she is coming to an understanding with the local frogs. She has written a ridiculous number of novels and even more short stories. Keep up with her at seananmcguire.com. On moonlit nights, when the stars are right, you just might find her falling into a swamp near you.

  Adam L.G. Nevill was born in Birmingham, England, in 1969 and grew up in England and New Zealand. He is the author of the horror novels: Banquet for the Damned, Apartment 16, The Ritual, Last Days, House of Small Shadows, No One Gets Out Alive, Lost Girl, and Under a Watchful Eye.

  His novels, The Ritual, Last Days, and No One Gets Out Alive were the winners of the August Derleth Award for Best Horror Novel. The Ritual and Last Days were also awarded Best in Category: Horror, by R.U.S.A. Several of his novels are in development for film and television, and in 2016 Imaginarium adapted The Ritual into a feature film.

  His short fiction has been collected in Some Will Not Sleep, which won the British Fantasy Award: Best Collection and Hasty for the Dark.

  Adam also offers fr
ee books to readers of horror: Cries from the Crypt, downloadable from his website, and Before You Sleep and Before You Wake, available from major online retailers.

  He lives in Devon, England. More information about the author and his books is available at: adamlgnevill.com

  Peter Straub is the author of seventeen novels, which have been translated into more than twenty languages. They include Ghost Story, Koko, Mr. X, In the Night Room, and two collaborations with Stephen King, The Talisman and Black House. He has written two volumes of poetry and two collections of short fiction, and edited the Library of America’s edition of H. P. Lovecraft’s Tales and two-volume anthology, American Fantastic Tales. He has won the British Fantasy Award, ten Bram Stoker Awards, two International Horror Guild Awards, and four World Fantasy Awards. In 1998, he was named Grand Master at the World Horror Convention. In 2006, he was given the HWA’s Life Achievement Award. In 2008, he was given the Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award by Poets & Writers. At the World Fantasy Convention in 2010, he was given the WFC’s Life Achievement Award.

  Duane Swierczynski is the two-time Edgar-nominated author of ten novels including Revolver, Canary, and the Shamus Award–winning Charlie Hardie series, many of which are in development for film/TV. A native Philadelphian, he now lives in Los Angeles with his wife and children.

  Lucy Taylor is an award-winning author of horror and dark fantasy. She has published seven novels, six collections, and over a hundred short stories. Her work has been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, Russian, German, and Chinese.