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Title: Best Horror of the Year 1
ISBN: 1597801615
Author:
Ellen Datlow
Publicate Date: 2009-10-15
Publish: 2009-10-15
List Price: $14.95
Average Customer Rating: 3.5
Format: Paperback
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Amazon Lowest New Price: $9.74
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1: A fine and varied collection that is, of course, not for everyone
It's important to start with what this volume is not. It's not a collection of a particular type of horror story; Datlow's taste, while tending toward the subtle over the blatant, is wide-ranging, and includes stories traditional and modern (to the extent that these labels are useful), long and short, serious and comic. Some are closer to dark fantasy than "horror" as some readers narrowly define it. This book is also not necessarily cued to your specific tastes. Datlow has not magically reached into your head and selected nineteen stories and two poems that you are guaranteed to love. Cover copy notwithstanding, Ellen Datlow does not know what scares you personally. To say that a book is "not for everyone" is often a form of back-handed criticism, but here it's just a fact.
With that out of the way, I can say what this book is: a collection of fine stories displaying the scope of the modern horror story. I can't say that I unreservedly admired all of the stories here, but I respected each one's craft. A new anthology edited by Datlow is a guaranteed purchase for me, and the reason I keep coming back is that I never find a story whose appeal utterly baffles me. Sometimes I don't find them as successful as they might be, but I never think "What the heck was ~that~ doing in this book?"
I'll highlight a few stories I particularly admired. Margaret Ronald's "When the Gentlemen Go By" is a brief, chilling story about a small town and the price it pays for its happiness. Again, traditional-sounding stuff, but the story's structure allows it to build to maximum effect, and there are a number of chilling moments along the way. It's also an interesting contrast with "The Hodag," a very different but equally effective small-town horror story elsewhere in the volume. "The Rising River," by Daniel Kaysen, is a sharply-styled, twisty little story about a girl who can talk to ghosts, or can she? Graham Edwards' "Girl in Pieces" is a mystery/science fiction/fantasy/horror hybrid. It's also a comedy. It sounds too busy to work, but in fact the noir-derived prose style makes it all fit together nicely.
In addition to the stories and poems, the volume also includes Datlow's summation of the year in horror publishing, an eminently useful list of novels, collections, anthologies, magazines, and other outlets for horror prose. With a genre that's so dependent on small presses, this essay is a much-needed annual resource for finding works you may have missed.
This is the kind of book you might want to look over before buying if you're not familiar with the editor's taste. Horror is (and should be) a broad church, so it's worth looking at some of the stories, and the editor's recommendations of other books in the summation, to get a sense of whether it's right for you. If it is, you're in for some excellent tales.
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2: Really Disappointed
I love horror anthologies...stories that make the hair on my neck stand up. That's not what this book was. While there were some good stories within, I wouldn't consider any of them to be "horror". I think they were all attempts at psychological thrillers, but I just found most of them to be annoying and uninteresting. It seemed every story came with a "twist" at the end, but they were twists that usually fell flat. I was disappointed and chances are I will not read Volume 2.
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3: The Best Horror of the Year Volume 1
It's hard to encapsulate any short story collection; the contents of the short story compendium are, by design, as eclectic as possible, offering a multitude of different voices, styles, and tales.
In a horror collection, these disparate stories are unified in only one aspect: their desire to chill the bones of the reader. With that goal in mind, the results of //The Best Horror of the Year, Volume One// are hit and miss. While those that miss are disappointing, those that hit do so with remarkable effectiveness.
Euan Harvey's Harry and the Monkey is a surprisingly engaging tale featuring a father's spur-of-the-moment distraction for his infant son, crossing paths with a neighborhood urban legend that could mean disaster for his young family. The power of the imagination and the power of paranoid suspicion will leave you questioning the line between fantasy and reality.
Joe R. Lansdale's short short story "It Washed Up" delivers a marvelously tongue-in-cheek twist on both the classic monster and the legend of the Pied Piper, as something rises from the depths with an agenda all its own.
Daniel Lemoal's "Beach Head" is a particularly off-putting segment. When three smugglers awake to find themselves buried up to their necks on the shoreline, they discover that the rising tide is the least of the horrors they'll experience.
Simon Bestwick's "The Narrows" presents a fairly unique view on the end of the world, detailing the last few moments of normal life at a school before plunging us into the desperate and frenzied struggle for survival, as a group of teachers and students descend into the tunnels beneath the city in search of a safe haven. Their harrowing journey is as claustrophobic and tense for the reader as it is for the characters.
A dark memory of childhood, the haunting loss of a loved one, the invasion of a mysterious stranger, unexplained disappearances, the hobgoblins of the mind, the collapse of society, the certainty of death, the slow growth of insanity in a former friend, the unknown that lurks just behind the veil of civilized life... many of the classic horror story tropes are featured, with varying degrees of success.
In the end, Ellen Datlow has put together another impressively diverse group of stories and storytellers for this collection, and even the most discerning horror aficionado should find at least one worthwhile tale within.
Reviewed by Glenn Dallas
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4: Assorted Nightmares
I admit, I was someone who picked through Datlow's long-running Year's Best Fantasy & Horror and tried to single out the horror stories, so this collection, with its bias toward pure horror, was made for me. This is an excellent collection, full of fine stories by a surprisingly unconventional list of authors--in fact some of my favorites were by authors new to me. Don't let the lack of familiar names stop you for a minute. There's a strong streak of surreal stories that are nightmares from start to finish, but they are balanced by stories completely grounded in the quotidian, where the horror comes as an eruption or an infestation overtaking normalcy. In short, it is a well balanced anthology, and the cumulative effect is powerful. I'm looking forward to volume 2.
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5: Also disappointed
I agree with those who were disappointed by this. Out of 21 stories, there were 3 or four that I felt were worth the time to read, one of them only 2 pages long. Most seemed to be "Twilight Zone" style fantasy, with some mildly strange occurances, but not much very intense or new. Maybe if this was billed as "Best Fantasy" it would be closer, but still not great. Too bad.
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