The Best Horror of the Year Volume 1 [Paperback]

This is the third year I've picked up Ellen Datlow's Best of the Year--the first year in which the book is solely dedicated to dark fiction (and soley edited by Datlow--previous incarnations split 50/50 fantasy and horror). As with any anthology, some pieces didn't work for me. I didn't finish "If Angels Fight" by Richard Bowes. Not my style, a little slow. But there is variety in this collection, truly a "year's best" with no outright clunkers.

Some of my favorites include:

"Beach Head" by Daniel LeMoal--the first piece since god-knows-when that inspired a physical fear response from page one. The set up: three smugglers with hands tied are buried to their neck on a sandy beach. It only goes creepier from there. While the prose isn't always razor sharp, the effect is. I felt like I was suffocating while I read.

"The Hodag" by Trent Hergenrader affected me in a different, more nostalgic way. It is a tale that spans decades, and the narrator's chilling realization in the final paragraphs is more frightening than the Hodag itself. "The Hodag" is the kind of story I would write if I could write better. It's a goal.

"The Lagerstatte" by Laird Barron...man, I hope to write 1/10th as well as Mr. Barron some day. The premise of "The Lagerstatte" is a little familiar, but his skill with language paints said premise with a deftness rivaling any short fiction author today.

As a reader, this is the type of horror literature I like to see: high quality, thoughtful prose, solid character development, and dark without leaning on schlock and gore. As a fledgling author, the stories in this book provide a model, a goal for my own work. "Here's how you do it." Best Horror of the Year is smart writing, regardless of genre.

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.

Indie outfit Night Shade Books swooped to the rescue after bigger publisher St. Martin's scuttled Ellen Datlow's long-running annual anthology of the best horror fiction. Although it's good to have the venerable editor still at work culling the good stuff, the inaugural volume of this series reboot is wobbly on its newborn feet. It's not that the stories are particularly objectionable. But for the most part, they're not exceptional either. What makes them the "best" horror of 2008? They're not scary or unsettling. They're not thought-provoking. They don't push boundaries. They don't even go for the easy grossout. I suppose "Adequate Horror of the Year" wouldn't sell very well, but it would be a more accurate title.

Datlow starts the book with her traditional summary of the previous year. Kudos to her for doing it with far less whining and far fewer typos than her fellow editor Gardner Dozois in his science fiction "best of" annuals.

The Table of Contents features a list of mostly unfamiliar names. The most prominent participant is probably Joe Lansdale who turns in a two-page scrap, a piffle, likely one of his "popcorn dreams" (Lansdale transcribes the nightmares he always has after eating popcorn). Even among that goofy company, "It Washed Up" is lightweight, and I suspect it was included more for marquee value than merit.

Among the rest of the crew: Richard Bowes writes his standard dreary story of how gay and haunted he is. Steve Duffy's "The Clay Party" adds a few twists to that wheezy cliche of the predator stalking the helpless woman only to find out in the shocking twist ending that she's really a vampire/werewolf/insert theme-anthology monster here. And guess what? It's still a wheezy cliche.

William Browning Spencer's "Penguins of the Apocalypse," about an alcoholic wrestling with literal demons, is one of the two stories that could legitimately lay claim to the title "best of the year." I wish Browning was as prolific as his fellow Texas raconteur Lansdale. His stories are frequently funny but carry a poisonous sting in the tail. He writes sentences like Tom Waits writes lyrics: "This wasn't a Saturday-night kind of bar. This was more the sort of bar you went to because you had gone to it the day before."

E. Michael Lewis, Trent Hergenrader and Adam Golaski turn in the kind of solid B-horror that Leisure should be publishing more of instead of printing glorified fan fiction.

Glen Hirshberg is one of the overrated new voices in the genre. He's written some good stories (and some better than good), but he has a stylistic quirk that absolutely bugs the hell out of me, and I'm surprised no editor has called him on this: the weeping. His characters bust out weeping at the slightest provocation. They weep and they weep and they weep and they weep. "Weep" must be Hirshberg's favorite word in the dictionary. "But Will, it seems, just wants to weep some more." Well, of course he does: He's a character in a Glen Hirshberg story. I swear, the pages were soggy.

Ever since I stumbled across Laird Barron's "Hallucigenia" a few years back, I've been on the lookout for more work by this amazingly assured newcomer. That novella accomplished two incredibly difficult feats: It did something new with well-used Lovecraftian tropes, and it gave me a serious case of the willies. Barron's entry here "The Lagerstatte," about grief and ghosts, isn't as effective as "Hallucigenia," but it showcases the author's potential to become one of the most important new talents in horror and suspense since the Dell Abyss days introduced Kathe Koja and Brian Hodge.

Daniel LeMoal shows promise, Margo Lanagan gives good gore, and Graham Edwards' "Girl in Pieces" is memorable for all the WRONG reasons.

So that's a total of two outstanding stories rising to the top of a sea of so-so. I won't make any silly declarations about horror being dead as a genre coz these things go in cycles (I hope), but 2008 apparently was not the year for it to shamble out of the crypt where it's been snoozing. And what's the deal with the naked zombie on the book cover, waving his tweeter at you? Nobody likes to see that.