A Little Bit Horror, Volume 5: A collection of four short stories

A Safe Girl to Love. A Taste of Honey. A Treasury of Short Stories: A Walk in My World: International Short Stories about Youth. Alone With The Horrors. Stories of the Miraculous by Great Modern Writers. Barbara the Slut and Other People. Best of the South: Bloodchild and Other Stories. Bobcat and Other Stories. Books of Blood, Volumes Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Cities I Never Lived In. Civilwarland in Bad Decline. Classic Yiddish Stories of S. Abramovitsh, Sholem Aleichem, and I. Collected stories of Wallace Stegne.

Cowboys Are My Weakness. Cries For Help, Various. Death Dines at 8: A Short Story Anthology. New Science Fiction and Fantasy. Enormous Changes at the Last Moment. Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned. Everything That Rises Must Converge. Falling In Love With Hominids. Favorite Short Stories by H. Favorite Short Stories from Bret Harte. Favorite Short Stories from Jack London. Favorite Short Stories from Mark Twain. Favorite Short Stories from Mary E. Full Dark, No Stars. Further Adventures in the Restless Universe. Ghosts and Grisly Things. How This Night is Different. How to Leave Hialeah.

How We Are Hungry. Hundreds of Great Ghost Stories. New Tales of Terror and the Supernatural. Irish Girls Are Back in Town. Lady with the Dog and Other Stories. Short Stories about Lawyers and the Law. Little Black Book of Stories. Lost in the Funhouse.

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3. Practical Design of Ships and Other Floating Structures: Eighth International Symposium - PRADS 2001 (2 Volume set).
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Masterpieces of Terror and the Unknown. The Complete Short Stories. More Stories We Tell: Mothers, Tell Your Daughters. Murder Is My Business. My True Love Gave to Me: Mystery Writers of America presents vengeance. New and Selected Stories. Night at the Fiestas. Gothic Stories by Women. Nightmare at 20, Feet: Nine Favorite Short Stories. Five Stories of Music and Nightfall. A Life in Stories. North American Lake Monsters. Not the End of the World. Pale Horse, Pale Rider. An Anthology of Urban Fantasy. Peace in the House: Tales from a Yiddish Kitchen. Science fiction hall of fame.

A Celebration of the Short Story: An Anthology of the Shortest Stories. Short Stories by Latin American Women: The Magic and the Real. Short Fiction and Illusions. Speaking with the Angel: Stories from Other Places. Tales of the Jazz Age. Ten Favorite Short Stories. That Glimpse of Truth. The art of the story: The Barrens and Others. The Bazaar of Bad Dreams. The Best American short stories of the eighties. The best of the best. Volume 2, 20 years of the best short science fiction novels. The Birthday of the World. The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty.

The complete poems and stories of Edgar Allan Poe. The Dark Side of Guy de Maupassant: A Selection and Translation. The Dream Life of Astronauts. The Essential Tales of Chekhov. The Female of the Species: Tales of Mystery and Suspense. The Girl in the Flammable Skirt. The Great Short Works. The Heaven of Animals. The Ladies of Grace Adieu. The Life to Come and Other Stories. The Loss of All Lost Things. The Magic of Blood. The Mammoth Book of Zombies. The Metamorphosis and Other Stories. The most of P. The New Space Opera.

The Night in Question. The Norton Book of Science Fiction: North American Science Fiction, The Oxford book of American short stories. The Oxford book of English short stories. The Oxford book of Jewish stories. The Oxford Book of Travel Stories. The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories. The Penguin book of Irish Fiction. I have not read previous volumes in the "Best Horror of the Year" series, but I'd say the quality of the selections and editor Ellen Datlow's encyclopedic coverage of the year in horror short fiction everything published, not just in this collection , including honorable mentions, makes this a definite buy for any serious horror fan.

Let's rate each of these on the creepy-meter: Oatmeal is scarier 2. Might scare a kid 3. Had a few creepy moments 4. Note that 5 is really, really hard to achieve for me, in writing — I just don't scare easily. When I was a kid, horror stories would give me nightmares, but not a lot makes me want to turn the lights up nowadays.

So a 4 is pretty creepy in my estimation. Nikishi by Lucy Taylor: No real surprises, but still gruesome and written like Lovecraft if Lovecraft had style. A diamond thief, Africa, hyenas. A sloping, muscular beast with furrowed lips and seething, tarry eyes, it angled languidly down the duneface, its brown and black fur hackled high, its hot gaze raw and lurid. O Little America by Dan Chaon: Skeeery feral children in a post-apocalyptic world. A good demonstration of the short story form: Breeze and Peter on their doomed road trip, but almost none of it gets explained. Yet the reader can use his imagination to fill in the blanks.

Another tale in the same vein as Nikishi. This time it's a Japanese hitman taking a girl he met to an onsen hot spring resort , tended by a creepy old woman and an even creepier dog. It gets even creepier. A violent little Japanese ghost story. Japanese fairy tales, like Western ones, come in the modern Disneyfied versions, and the original "weird and scary and people die" versions.

This story was a World Fantasy Award nominee. O Mantis Wives by Kij Johnson. I've only read a few of Kij Johnson's stories, but she sure brings the creepy. This was a sort of prose-poetry series of essays about, erm, marital relations between mantises. An intriguing idea that was kind of hinted at in Mira Grant's Newsflesh series: This is the story about one of the virally-infected who is cured and brought back to her senses, and then has to live with what she did while she was one of the walking dead. Not really very scary, but still a decent story.

O The Callers , by Ramsey Campbell. One of those stories that would make a great Twilight Zone episode. A thirteen-year-old boy, stuck with his grandparents, goes walking around town at night, crosses some other teens who want to beat him up, so he takes refuge in the bingo hall where his grandmother is playing bingo with a bunch of other old ladies. Poor lad is naturally creeped out by the sea of moldering perfume and saggy tits, but it gets worse.

Second one was a little bit twisted at the end. First one was just But I am not big on poetry, so maybe I just didn't get it. O Mariners' Round , by Terry Dowling. Three childhood friends are reunited twenty-five years after an eventful night. They find out one of them is a manipulative, vengeful bastard, and is obsessed with a carousel.

The carousel is the "magic" part of the story, and there is something spooky about the carousel lore and the Coleridge references is anything creepier than The Rime of the Ancient Mariner? The ending is just abrupt, though. As if on cue, three proximity floods switched on, ghost-lighting the whole macabre display. Now glass eyes glittered in the time-struck faces, teeth gnashed, flashed off-white and worn silver, tongues lolled, mouths silently screamed.

Old mirrors gave the barest glints and gleams, ancient brightwork showed in swatches, snatches, hints of fraught primary colours that had not been visible before. The great squid impaled on its brass pole rolled a baleful eye, watched him approach, move past. Three mermaids offered scarred breasts, mouths flecked with old enamel. O Nanny Grey , by Gemma Files. A properly creepy very proper old English monster, and the "haunted house" was atmospheric.

I'm kind of detecting a theme here, though — that's three stories in this collection so far that are basically about an amoral bastard who hooks up with a hot chick, tries to betray her, and gets eaten. Not that this is a new theme in horror. I guess one might say that Kij Johnson's Mantis Wives , above, also fits the theme in this volume, since so far it's the men who always die after getting laid Notwithstanding the familiar plot, it wasn't bad.

And when she looked up, eyes pleasantly crinkled, she smiled so wide that Bill could see how her teeth were packed together far too numerously for most human beings, bright as little red eyes in the wet darkness of her mouth. This starts out as more of a contemporary fantasy short story than a horror story. A pre-teen girl named Charlene "Cherry" is taken on as an apprentice by Mr. Hollis, who can do real magic. Although it seems the story may be heading into Lolita territory Cherry, as she develops into adolescence, makes the predictable teen-girl play for an older man, and Mr.

Hollis actually gives her Lolita to read it seems mostly innocent. There are hints, though, that this magic, though it's just moving things around and suspending matter and small transformations, is darker than it seems. And then the ending. I was hoping from the title that this would be a Godzilla story, but that wouldn't really be appropriate for a true horror anthology, would it?

Nope, it's about a serial killer, in an obvious allegorical tale about living with violence and codependence. Not a bad story, but nothing really shocking and obvious point was obvious. This is a haunted house story. A couple of paranormal investigators with psychic powers, working for a secret paranormal-investigators-with-psychic-powers agency, goes into an evil house that kills people.

The Collection by Bentley Little

Not very original, but fair execution. O Dead Song , by Jay Wilburn. A voice-over artist sits in a dark room narrating a historical retrospective of the musical trends and famous musicians who arose during the zombie apocalypse. There was a bit of dark and spooky in the tale, but mostly it read like an infodump for "Hastur Sings the Blues," minus the actual story. The dark side of the "Sleeping Beauty" tale has been explored often enough before, but this was pretty decent dark poetry. When my stocking tears, he bends to buss fresh bud of ankle flowering through the rip. O Bajazzle , by Margo Lanagan.

Don't Read These After Dark: A Horror Book List for Tweens

Okay, this one spiked the creepy-meter! Lanagan can write and while the story was surreal and gave just tantalizing hints of worldbuilding that made you want to know more, she drew me in with this really effed-up story. Yes, that's right, effed up. Basically it's just another lascivious schmuck with a lack of genre awareness if you ever suspect you are a character in a horror story, Do not have sex! Didn't quite hit nightmare-fuel territory, but I'm sure it will for some.

Do not read it if you are planning to have sex in the near future. O The Pike , by Conrad Williams. I have to admit, I It's about a guy with a nasty skin cancer who decides he doesn't want surgery, so he's reflecting on his working class childhood, learning to fish, trying to catch a dangerous pike, and there is also reminiscing about how he saw a man fall into the blades in a beef rendering plant. It was well-written and had suitably grotesque and violent imagery without being gory for the sake of being gory, but the story just did not hold together for me; I don't know what the author was trying to say.

Still the prose was lovely and elemental. Conrad Williams seems to be a writer who can write, but maybe this story was too literary for this collection. Almost killed my father. It was really quite lovely: Grandad had been on a boat as a child with his father, Tom, fishing for pike, when the pike rammed them.

His father and he both fell into the water. The pike rammed Tom in the face, scarfing down an eye. Grandad managed to pull himself back into the boat and splashed at the water with the paddle until he was sure the fish was gone. Other fishermen on the bank had been roused by the commotion and waded out to them. A spooky village in pre-World War II Italy inhabited by weird, alien peasants who have no interaction with their neighbors and who nobody has ever spoken to.

An American boy gets told a tale by his Italian friends about a crying baby that can be heard in the village, and the supposed "magic" the other boys have experienced. First they walk through the village, and get a mild fright but nothing really definitive. Then of course events conspire to bring the American boy back by himself, and things go full-Lovecraft.

A short-short story that was really more of blank verse poem. I am pretty sure there was a story here, but damned if I can figure out what it was. The way the room would shrink and blacken the way the room would dim the way the blood would pool and churn in the bath the way their names their real names would finally echo soft but true in tune like nothing else in this cruel circus called the world when they finally shut off the lights.

This is another back-to-basics very short story, very reminiscent of Lovecraft's Pickman's Model. It starts with the narrator finding an album of old photographs his father had taken of him as a child. He describes each one in turn: Ends with one of those "Oh no, you are not going through that door! O Wild Acre , by Nathan Ballingrud. At first encounter, this would seem to be just a werewolf story with an opening like any Hollywood monster movie: It's the aftermath that makes this story worth reading.

The survivor has to deal with survivor's guilt, the subsequent failure of his business, the foreclosures and hardships that befall the families of the men who died, and his own nightmares and inability to come to grips with a truth he can't even share with his wife. The monster is just the catalyst and it's really a character story. Not particularly scary, but very well-written.

O Final Exam , by Megan Arkenberg. This is an example of a story trying to impress with a clever structure rather than an original idea, and writing tricks like this are very hit or miss. In this case, let's say the author winged it. Written as a series of "multiple choice questions" addressing the simultaneous demise of the "examinee's" marriage and the apocalyptic rise of the Deep Ones in a wry manner that leads one to suspect perhaps most of the horror elements are products of a fragmented, delusional mind, it does end up delivering a semi-satisfying dollop of humorous horror.

Not scary, not brilliant, but entertaining. At what point did you know—and I mean really know, in your gut, in the tautness of your heartstrings—that things had gone horribly wrong? IT had the same advice over and over again: Of course it never worked. He slammed the book shut and pulled the drawer so hard that it came off the slides. Here, he said, flinging the knife across the counter. It landed with its tongue-like blade pointed at your breast.

This was a rather dark story, but it wasn't quite horror despite the violent tone. A man meets a blind woman in a cafe, and as they talk, she learns that he lost his fingers in a very brutal manner, to her husband, who also happens to be responsible for her blindness. Her husband was not a nice man. There is an implied twist, but the horror is all off-screen and in the past. A decent short story but not a very substantive one. A woman who had an affair with a married man contemplates the figurative wreckage of her life amidst the literal wreckage of the unfinished houses he was building.

The author could not quite decide if she was going for a horrific tone or a literary one. Once again, we learn that McMansions are evil and bad things happen when you have sex. But this also was not really a horror story, except of a rather existential sort. O Well dang , I have hit the character limit for reviews. Looks like I went overboard with quoting excerpts.

Reviews of the last few stories will be continued in comments. Review continued in comments View all 16 comments. Nov 02, Shawn rated it liked it Shelves: This is my first Datlow "Best Of", so I'm interested in seeing if I can dope out similarities and differences between her and Stephen Jones. More on this at the end. The "Summation " that starts the volume is the analog of Jones' "Year In Horror" entry that starts his collections.

I found it as thorough and about as useful, in both the positive and negative readings of that statement. So, given all that, here we go - weakest to strongest: The only story I actively disliked was "The Word-Made Flesh" by Richard Gavin, which struck me as overblown and overwritten and too much like a special effects movie written on page - it's about a man who, thanks to his cousin, stumbles upon the ability to remake the world with language Didn't click for me.

Also not clicking for me was "The House On Ashley Avenue" by Ian Rogers - an extended riff on the time-honored trope "team of psychic investigators in a notorious haunted house" - in all honesty, it seemed more interested in taking potshots at "non-professional psychics" not even "fake psychics"!

A surprisingly weak inclusion for this anthology. Just "okay" stories were: Not bad but kind of pedestrian. Terry Dowling 's "Mariner's Round" has a fine opening with three delinquent Liverpudlian friends roaring through a night at the carnival, and I was rooting for the story as the three friends reunite as adults, featuring some wonderfully canny dialogue It almost seems like something that would work better as a longer piece with a stronger ending or a shorter piece with the extraneous details stripped out.

I actually thought "The Pike" - a story of a man with skin cancer exploring old buildings and fishing in a canal that runs through a desolate urban landscape - was well-written by Conrad Williams and very interesting if kind of depressing but I'm personally okay with depressing. Now, unless I'm wrong or missed something which is always possible I failed to see what element of this qualified it as "horror". Similarly, "This Circus The World" by Amber Sparks reads like an extremely abstract, near textual-Cubist work with snatches of image moments laid over and next to each other.

Hard to really see what the greater point of this was, aside from the obvious "punishment for straying" trope. I also thought the decision to provide information on the Sheela-Na-Gig luckily, I was an Anthropology major once upon a time and knew about them already through a clunky block of text at the story's climax to just be lazy and inelegant.

Yeah, it would have been hard to work it into the story - that's why writing is a job. Next up are the "good but somewhat weak" stories: Ballard approach, describing the varied poetic ways female mantises dispose of their husbands. These methods are at times anthropomorphized - the point of Kij Johnson 's piece is somewhat abstruse. Yes, the idea of "curable" zombies is problematic. But I'm always willing to read a good story, vetted for me by a good editor or a trustworthy slush reader shout out to the poor souls who slush for Pseudopod.

It's a good story, no doubt. I'm on the fence about a number of details - it seems rather judgmental in portraying the actions of a paparazzi-equivalent photojournalist in a situation where I'm sure most would consider the events unique and very newsworthy as a reason for scorn after the fact when a completely unlikely cure for being "dead", remember is invented. A boy visiting his grandparents escapes some young toughs by ducking into a sinister bingo hall, much to his dismay, in Ramsey Campbell 's "The Callers".

As usual with Campbell, the writing is top-notch but I have to admit I found the central conceit of this piece more goofy than threatening - extra points though for the subtle May Day details, the typically lame mainstream movie the boy intends to see that bit actually made me laugh out loud and the disturbing intimations of granny-sex if not sacrifice. Shirley Jackson 's source work is such a monument one would expect such subsequent filigree no Theodora fan-fic after-the-fact, Jacksonites?

I really wanted to like Nathan Ballingrud 's story from the opening, which has a very strong, Richard Matheson -like set-up of a building contractor and his pals staking out at an isolated job site overnight to catch vandals. Things go badly and only the contractor survives. Now, here's the thing, this is an excellent story about survivor guilt and how making it through acts of terrible violence can destroy the individual's life slowly here exacerbated by encroaching poverty and the recurrence of anger.

Great stuff, expertly drawn Raymond Carver -esque, prosaic sketches of a life going south. Oh, you can tease out a hint here or there of the vague conceit that this is an abstracted exploration of the "Werewolf Curse" trope, I guess, but the story never commits to a recurrence of that fantastic element at all.

Now that's very "adult" and "genre-busting" and what-have-you but it seriously made me question the story as "horror". I'm not a genre Nazi, I have pretty nuanced and subtle definitions of genres and sub-genres and how they interact but this is a good example of some of the potential flaws I see in the Lit Horror approach - as a story it just seems to want to tell a straight Lit story and uses the fantastic element as a prompt towards that end, and to add a little extra cachet, when it could just have easily been a story that started with a bear attack, been just as good if not better, and never have been included here.

As I said, a very good story, but I have problems with it as an example of a valid approach to the genre.

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As a variant of that same problem, there's "Final Exam" which features a heavier horror element mass appearance of "things from the sea" coinciding with a woman's disintegrating marriage but here the author decides to tell the story in the form of a multiple choice quiz including the answers. Clever - and that's both a positive comment and the problem for me - I give Megan Arkenberg credit for actually trying to generate some fear with the creatures in amongst all the relationship detailing but the over-considered, nearly cutesy "hey-look-at-me" framing choice of the quiz makes everything too distanced and reminded me of similar problems I have with Kelly Link 's calculated tweeness.

Well, another example is "Dead Song", set after the zombie apocalypse as we listen to a voice-over artist record his narration for a documentary about musical movements during and post Z-Apoc. The central concept, while inventive, is "too clever for its own good" in my book, and the setting is just an excuse for not giving us a story, just the idea wrapped in exposition - you might think, "how do they make that into a horror story?

Anyway, po-mo horror like this really brings me down Anyway, Barron seems the complete antithesis of the calculated Lit Horror approach - instead he's a full-blooded modern pulp author, Robert E. Howard to the currently more fashionable H.

Lovecraft pulp fiction model. It's manly man prose and a yard wide, generally well-considered and adventurous. Sure, occasionally the language gets just a bit overripe but then that's pulp in a nutshell and I like the old Decadent writers who engaged similar tactics so how can I complain? Barron does a good job lacing enough horror into the dark fantasy even with all the burly, proactive characters that this effectively walks the razor line between the two genres pretty deftly.

Being pulp-derived, you also have to expect to swallow two shots of willing suspension of disbelief for every one generally prescribed for genre fiction here, it's not enough that we get The Wild Hunt and random occult scholars, but the friend's island retreat just happens to have been founded by a warlock - 'cause just 'cause. It's all big screen panoramic effects, very visual and it's interesting to me to contrast this with my dislike of the same approach in the earlier mentioned "The Word-Made Flesh" - certainly, the overall tone of the prose has something to do with it.

Anyway, not my usual fare but just fine as an occasional rich cheesecake for dessert. Next up are all the stories I found unconditionally "good": Another pulpy tale here is "Nikishi" by Lucy Taylor which has a diamond thief washed ashore on the African Coast and details his attempts to connive his way out of the desperate situation while being stumped by the local demons. Gemma Files undoes so many of the problems I mentioned earlier as having with Kelly Link's work by managing a level of control of tone and detail in her fiction.

Here, in "Nanny Grey", we have the classic "hunter is the hunted" trope, as a ruffie-dosing sleaze-thief takes the wrong mark back home, with some effective filigree of history, background and speech patterns. Perhaps a bit too willing, in the climax, to put concrete explanatory words to the pictures, but still, a good read. Grim, understated, it takes a similar tactic to "Wild Acres" but is so wholly non-fantastic the repercussions of a vicious acid attack on a young woman that it felt like something from Akashic's NOIR CITY anthologies.

Maybe a little too understated for a horror anthology, but The recent financial sacrifice of the Celtic Tiger on the altar of international commerce all of the benefits, none of the risks when you've bought whole nations - now fuck you, peasant, and bring me more champagne while I purchase your democracy underlays Priya Sharma 's "Ballad Of Boomtown" - where a woman waits in her "new home" in an abandoned rural housing development left to weed and ruin when the economy went belly-up , waits for the retribution she knows is coming from the old magic in the hills, a retribution deserved for personal and symbolic failings.

Effectively creepy, heartfelt and honest. Nevill opens with a tense scene of three sibling children hiding from an awful monster that may have already killed their parents. In a sense, nothing new here but a well-handled monster story and extra points for sustaining such a tense opening for so long small demerits for a familiar payoff with little invention.

Not what you're expecting. It's got an ambiguous ending fitting with the modern urban setting and I found it nicely unsettling. I liked Lucy A. Nicely understated, this had that Matheson-vibe I like so much, a real-world scenario briefly sketched. I found two stories in this collection absolutely excellent. The writing is sharp and flowing and the details are all wonderful - very observant modern fantasy writing until the end is reached and the truth of what fuels magic is revealed.

Equally good, and just as likely to get an acquisition query from me was Bruce McAllister 's "The Crying Child" about a young boy, his missing dog, and a harrowing night spent in a isolated village in Northern Italy. So, in the end, I believe I can see similarities and differences in Jones and Datlow's approaches. Jones likes reliable structures and always has time for a quiet ghost story while Datlow seems to have a penchant for experimentation and the poetic - thus, Datlow can be less stuffy but more prone to featuring stories that get stuck out on their own limbs, while Jones can keep delivering the same familiar goods, for good or ill.

Both seem to have a higher tolerance for dark fantasy than I do again, as I've said many times before, not that I hate dark fantasy at all I just think that it dilutes the strength of horror anthology when too much of it appears. More to come, I'm sure View all 8 comments. Aug 20, Nancy Oakes rated it liked it Shelves: Each time I read one of these Best Horror of the Year anthologies put together by Ellen Datlow,I realize that horror is indeed in the eye of the Beholder. After reading 5, I'm going to roll with that observation. For me, horror is something that sends that little shiver or frisson of fear up my spine as I'm reading, and out of the 28 stories that made up this book, that happened with eight.

That's not to say that this book was bad -- au contraire -- there were some incredibly well-written stori Each time I read one of these Best Horror of the Year anthologies put together by Ellen Datlow,I realize that horror is indeed in the eye of the Beholder.

That's not to say that this book was bad -- au contraire -- there were some incredibly well-written stories that fell nicely into the weird zone, even if they didn't scare. There were five of those that I liked. Then there were two that started out quite freaky and fizzled due to endings that were just kind of not worthy of the rest of the story. The leftovers, all 13 of them, either weren't to my taste or just didn't scare, period. In a nutshell or, you can click here to see a very long review delineating each and every story in the book and my reactions here are the best of the bunch: They were also incredibly weird on the good side: I read them to discover new authors, and in that sense, this book is a success.

This installment 5 of Datlow's Best Horror of the Year is one you have to judge for yourself in terms of what you consider horror or not. Jun 14, Tarl rated it really liked it Shelves: I purchased this anthology because I had heard that Ellen Datlow was one of the best editors for horror anthologies. I had previously read Lovecraft Unbound and Supernatural Noir so I already knew that she could throw together a good anthology. But I did wonder if she could do the same with general horror stories.

The answer is yes, yes she can. This collection contains a number of haunting stories that both haunted me as well as made me question the reality around me. A vast majority of the tale I purchased this anthology because I had heard that Ellen Datlow was one of the best editors for horror anthologies. A vast majority of the tales contained within were above average, making this anthology a pleasure to read, one I found myself coming back to again and again each bus ride home and each dark shrouded night in bed.

As with all anthologies, there were stories that stuck out more than others, be they good or bad, and it will be those that I look at here. There is a certain relationship between Peter and Mr. Breeze that is as creepy as it is heart warming. I wasn't a fan of the ending, I thought it was a bit too abrupt for the build up of the rest of the story. Still, a wonderful tale that was handled well. This story will stick with me for a very long time, the premise was solid, as was the ending. This duo of writers handled Carson and Justine perfectly, and they played off each other well. All in all a beautiful story that kept me glued to the pages and lit my imagination.

Dowling managed to blend his story around enough historic pointers as to give his story the taste of realism, however it wasn't enough for me and I found myself quickly losing interest in this tale. I really enjoyed this story a lot. One of the creepier stories in this anthology and well worth the read.

The relationship between the characters is both realistic and beautiful in its own way. This was a wonderful story to read and I will likely read it again in the future. Worth reading just for how Wilburn handled the story. Very well done, and very enjoyable. Most of the horror factor was the degrading of the main character's life due to a wolf-like creature. The ending was nicely fatalistic, but all in all this story just didn't contain the power or horror payoffs that the rest of this anthology had.

Arkenberg gets a pat on the back and a high five for coming up with this unique presentation for a story, one that continued to go on after I thought it would end. The horror elements are wonderfully done and extremely captivating. If you were to read one story out of this entire collection, this would be the one I would recommend. Nothing in this tale went the way it felt it should go, and the ending I found to be flat. Massey created a nice creepy atmosphere, unfortunately she doesn't seem to do anything with it, or it's so subtle I missed it.

The relationship between the main character and Betty was one that was both beautifully disturbing and full of sexual tension that had nothing to do with sex and everything to do with need. A very good read and one I will read again. Stunning and beautiful language, haunting and visceral imagery, and absolutely amazing storytelling. The only complaint I have about this story is the predictability of the ending. As I was going through the above stories, I found myself wanting to write good things about each and every one of the stories.

I had to restrict myself only to the stories that really touched me and even then it was hard to choose. This is an anthology filled with tales that will stick with you and I highly recommend it to anyone who loves horror or is interested in reading horror stories. Get it, you won't be disappointed! Oct 17, Jonathan Briggs rated it it was ok.

For a while there, this book didn't look like it was going to happen. Night Shade Books finally sank under the weight of long-running problems afflicting the publisher. But like Big Auto and the banks, Night Shade got a bailout deal that ensured the publication of Ellen Datlow's indispensable anthology. I'll forgo the standard finger-pointing where Night Shade's management is concerned. The important thing is that the books got out, and hopefully, the right people got their paychecks. Volume 5 of "The Best Horror of the Year" was a couple of months late, but perhaps that's for the best.

Readers might be more receptive to horror stories closer to Halloween. So how has Datlow complemented my favorite season this year? The lead-off story in an anthology is an important spot. I'd think an editor would want to reserve the space for a particularly strong entry to immediately snag the reader. There's nothing especially wrong with Lucy Taylor's "Nikishi" as cheezy horror goes, but despite an exotic twist in locale and terminology, it's wolfman boilerplate with a shock ending that's shocking only in that I was surprised there are writers still trying to get away with such a tired-out twist.

Not a promising start to a collection of the best stories of Dan Chaon's "Little America" might have been a better kickoff story. It was something about the way he described the barren, ghostly places of the Badlands. In "Little America," Chaon hits the road again, putting us in a Cadillac alongside an armed madman with "cheerful children's-program eyes" and his young captive, which "used to be a real boy. Another author with serious literary chops is Jeffrey Ford, a master fantasist who has done much of the heavy lifting in dragging that genre out of the Middle Earth Ages.

He's guaranteed to pull a fast one on any reader expecting the conventional. In "A Natural History of Autumn," a couple embark on a field trip to a farmhouse in search of the true spirit of autumn. They find the wicked core of their pastoral adventure in an amorous dog? The story's not so much horrific as deeply strange. A hustler in London out for a quick shag, a cheap doss and any stray valuables worth stealing meets a strange little girl and her "Nanny Grey" in Gemma Files' return to these pages.