The Best Horror of the Year Volume 4 [Paperback]

Book Info: Genre: Anthology: Horror Reading Level: Adult

Disclosure: I received a free eGalley - eBook uncorrected proof/ARC - in exchange for an honest review.

Synopsis: The first three volumes of The Best Horror of the Year from Nightshade books have been widely praised for their quality, variety, and comprehensiveness.

Now, for the fourth consecutive year, editor Ellen Datlow, winner of multiple Hugo, Bram Stoker, and World Fantasy awards, has explored the entirety of the diverse horror market, distilling it into the fourth anthology in the series and providing an overview of the year in terror. With tales from Laird Barron, Stephen King, John Langan, Peter Straub, and many others, and featuring Datlow's comprehensive overview of the year in horror, now, more than ever, The Best Horror of the Year provides the petrifying horror fiction readers have come to expect-and enjoy.

Fear is the oldest human emotion. The most primal. We like to think we're civilized. We tell ourselves we're not afraid. And every year, we skim our fingers across nightmares, desperately pitting our courage against shivering dread.

A paraplegic millionaire hires a priest to exorcise his pain; a failing marriage is put to the ultimate test; hunters become the hunted as a small group of men ventures deep into a forest; a psychic struggles for her life on national television; a soldier strikes a grisly bargain with his sister's killer; ravens answer a child's wish for magic; two mercenaries accept a strangely simplistic assignment; a desperate woman in an occupied land makes a terrible choice...

What scares you? What frightens you? Horror wears new faces in these carefully selected stories. The details may change. But the fear remains.

Table of Contents:
The Little Green God of Agony - Stephen King: A paraplegic millionaire hires a priest to exorcise his pain
Stay - Leah Bobet - can a woman with no medicine stop Raven and keep a wendigo human?
The Moraine - Simon Bestwick - a failing marriage is put to the ultimate test
Blackwood's Baby - Laird Barron - hunters become the hunted as a small group of men ventures deep into a forest.
Looker - David Nickle - a young man at a party meets a girl with extraordinary eyes
The Show - Priya Sharma - a psychic struggles for her life on national television
Mulberry Boys - Margo Lanagan - villagers produce silk for a living, but what price have the villagers paid for this income?
Roots and All - Brian Hodge - a soldier strikes a grisly bargain with his sister's killer
Final Girl Theory - A. C. Wise - a film made 40 years ago fascinates a man, and when he thinks he sees one of the actresses on the street he follows her home, because he has to know: was it real?
Omphalos - Livia Llewellyn - family togetherness was never meant to be like this.
Dermot - Simon Bestwick - the Special Projects department of a police station requires the help of Dermot to locate the creatures that prey on the town; but is his help worth the price they pay him for it?
Black Feathers - Alison J. Littlewood - ravens answer a child's wish for magic
Final Verse - Chet Williamson - to what extreme would you go in order to find the answer to a long-held question?
In the Absence of Murdock - Terry Lamsley - where did Murdock go and why has no one seen him in days?
You Become the Neighborhood - Glen Hirshberg - mother and daughter reminisce about the event that drove the mother mad, and about the events that led up to it.
In Paris, In the Mouth of Kronos - John Langan - two mercenaries accept a strangely simplistic assignment
Little Pig - Anna Taborska - a desperate woman in an occupied land makes a terrible choice
The Ballad of Ballard and Sandrine - Peter Straub - love and pain and pleasure and surrealism

My Thoughts: Stephen King is still the master - by the end of his story, "Little Green God of Agony," I was actually tensed up and waiting for a blow - maybe because I've dealt with pain for years now, I don`t know, but wow that story got to me. "The Moraine" is a creepy story that is enough to make you nervous about walking over rocks ever again. "Blackwoods Baby," about hunting an enormous stag, was incredibly disturbing. "The Show" was another weird one, with a woman acquiring a spirit guide in a very strange way. "Roots and All" was about the price one needs to pay - which is inevitably a steep one, as is "Little Pig". Omphalos was extremely disturbing, and highly strange.

I enjoyed the fact that the tales of the Native peoples of the extreme northern areas of North America, the tribes called Dene or Inuit, were incorporated into "Stay." Of course, the wendigo myth is common to many tribes across North America, but it was still refreshing to see these native peoples in a new light - we hear very little about them in mainstream media. There is the smallest hint of medicine in the tale "Black Feathers," as well - it also features Raven and emphasizes that you should be careful what you wish for... because you just might get it. Then, "In Paris in the Mouth of Kronos" we get a hint of the Greek gods, to balance things, while "The Ballad of Ballard and Sandrine" gives us a touch of Amazonia.

In "You Become the Neighborhood," I was amused by references to a wolf spider spinning a web over the apartment door every night, and the people living there carefully knocking down the web each morning so they could get out of the house. There are a lot of overly ambitious spiders around my neck of the woods and this sort of thing happens all the time.

Straub is one of my favorite authors, but the story of his in this anthology really bothered me. I liked it, don't get me wrong - it's typical Straub, in that it's dreamlike, surreal and haunting. However, it is also inconsistent. The character Sandrine's age changes constantly. She is born in 1957, is 15 in 1969, is 19 in 1976, is 25 in 1982 and is 49 in 1997. Ballard is described as being both 44 and 38 in 1982.

I haven't commented on every single story, but that doesn't mean they weren't all good - in many cases, there's just no way to comment on them without spoiling the story - which is a real problem when reviewing an anthology.

The introduction was really long - 12% of the book - but very interesting. I ended up with a long list of books that I need to check out now (oops - like I needed more books to read!)

Ellen Datlow accused me of being overly snarky the last time I reviewed one of these things, so this year, I'm starting off by saying something nice: It's good to see that Datlow's back. Small presses have a reputation for unsteadiness, and last year, there were ominous Internet rumblings and grumblings about Night Shade Books. But Night Shade is still publishing, the books are still rolling out, and Datlow is still performing her invaluable service to horror fans. Though my notion of "best" may run contrary to hers at times, Datlow captures a snapshot every year of where the genre is at and where it might be headed, making her annuals required reading for those in their fright minds.

Datlow went big name hunting in 2011 and bagged two titans for her bookends. Volume 4 kicks off with horror's most popular author and ends with arguably its best.

As bad as he can be, Stephen King is a difficult author to consign to the Dean Koontz Memorial Slagheap of Authors I Used to Give a Crap About. Despite his flirtations with lazy, going-through-the-motions hackery, King has left himself open to an inspiration that strikes less often these days, but when it does, he becomes fully engaged and tackles that idea like the pre-jillionaire hungry young author who became such a phenomenon. That's why I keep buying Stephen King books: That young man is still lurking somewhere in the shadows of the brand name, and he's the one I come to see. The inspiration for "The Little Green God of Agony," King's first "Best Horror" entry, may have come from his personal experiences with a broken body and knitting bones. The sixth-richest man in the world is looking for a shortcut through the pain of physical rehab to recovery from a plane crash that left him shattered. He summons the Rev. Rideout (think Tom Noonan) to his bedside. Rideout is no mere faith healer. He doesn't heal, "I expel." He casts out the demon god that feeds on hurt. And on a dark and stormy night (natch), the Rev. Rideout sets about a rather unique exorcism. "The Little Green God of Agony" isn't likely to ever make the Classic Top 10 Stephen King Short Stories, but it's a refreshingly concise, lightly comic flexing of muscles King doesn't always use anymore.

At the opposite end of the book and in contrast to King's sturdy simplicity is Peter Straub's intricate puzzler "The Ballad of Ballard and Sandrine." A pair of decadent lovers cruise languidly along the Amazon on a yacht of impossible dimensions, moving forward and back through different decades, tended to by an invisible crew of pygmies who speak in birdsong. Since Straub started hanging around those New Weird delinquents, his short fiction has taken a turn for the peculiar, the dream-like. "The Ballad of Ballard and Sandrine" is as likely to inspire consternation as admiration. Honestly, I'm not sure what to make of it myself. But few authors can offer readers a sensory experience equal to the luxury of sinking into Straub's plush prose. So I'm happy to go along if he wants to indulge his inner Aikman (or maybe, as the title might indicate, he's channeling J.G. Ballard). I was three or four pages short of the ending of "The Ballad" when I had to report to work, but Straub had me so ensnared in the tangles of his nefariously strange story that I kept sneaking a paragraph here and there throughout my shift until I finished.

It's no surprise that one of the best stories in the book is by Laird Barron. The testosterone runs thick in "Blackwood's Baby," a Hemingwayesque horror that gathers a group of hunters (including a redneck Texan named Briggs!) in a lodge in Washington state. The men, predators all and dangerous to more than game animals, have come to hunt a mythical stag, "the king of the wood." As horror readers know from experience, the dark legends are true, the woods are cursed and there's something out there on cloven foot that's a lot more threatening than a deer. It's a story of classic campfire chills and another success for Barron in an extensive winning streak that many authors would sacrifice their right typing finger to have.

Brian Hodge's "Roots and All" begins in an autumn glow of nostalgia, accumulating note-perfect details of a bittersweet return to a childhood homestead. The softly melancholic tone works with the expertly evoked bucolic setting to leave the reader that much more vulnerable when the story starts taking nasty twists. A combat veteran witnesses the effects of meth and strip mining on the community he once loved and learns the fate of his sister who vanished eight years before. I think Hodge and Laird Barron must have gone camping in the same woods together.

One of the secondary purposes of Datlow's annuals is to spotlight a lot of new names, some of whom could have used a little more time on the vine, and others who bear further investigation. Simon Bestwick had a pretty good story called "The Narrows" in a previous volume, and he scores two slots this year. "The Moraine" has a feuding couple lost on a mountain in a whiteout fog with a monster. It couldn't get much more basic than that, but Bestwick tells his well-worn tale with an enthusiasm that's infectious, energetically mixing bits from "Tremors," "The Ruins" and "The Mist." Originality is great, but sometimes you just want an old-fashioned, suspenseful, gory monster stomp. Bestwick's second serving, "Dermot," is about an odd, unsettling little man (named Dermot, oddly enough) and a special police unit whose members dread his calling. I'll be picking up more of Bestwick's fiction. Also soon to join my to-read pile is David Nickle on the basis of "Looker," his tale of multi-eyed voyeurism.

In A.C. Wise's "Final Girl Theory," "'Kaleidoscope' isn't a movie, it's an infection, whispered from mouth to mouth in the dark." This is the third "Best Horror" volume in a row to feature a story about an evil cult film. The mini-trend started with Gemma Files' "each thing i show you is a piece of my death," and it probably shouldn't continue until someone writes a story that tops, or at least equals, that. "Final Girl Theory" isn't bad, but it feels like a slight variation on an overly familiar rerun.

"The angry expression has vanished. But there are tears." Those tears make their first appearance on the second page, the fifth paragraph of "You Become the Neighborhood" by Glen Hirshberg, horror's very own Eeyore. This triggers the urge to weep on Page 3. Followed by a teeth-rattling moaning fit on Pages 6 and 7. A full-fledged crying jag erupts on Page 9. "Then you started crying. ... And you cried some more. And I started crying." Glen Hirshberg is fully in his element: supernatural soap opera in which there's rarely much scaring but always plenty of sobbing. Hirshberg is capable of some fine writing ("Her long-fingered hands have curled up at her sides like smacked daddy longlegs." "Her husband ... was pretty much just a pool to pour morphine in."), but it gets difficult to pick out the good bits because he insists on slathering Natalie Portman-level histrionics all over everything like great undigestible gobs of lugubrious peanut butter. And the thing is, Hirshberg's stories just aren't that sad. He tells us they're sad by going blub-blub-blub every other paragraph. But that's not sad. That's just maudlin and tiresome. "My tears surprise me. I'm not even sure what they're for." It's as if Hirshberg's own character is speaking to him from the page, telling him to go blow his nose and man up.

John Langan has made it into almost every volume of "Best Horror." (Last year, he got in twice.) His stories have been interesting and ambitious but somewhat flawed in one way or another. He pretty much nails it in "In Paris, in the Mouth of Kronos." Two disgraced former soldiers have a reunion with a truly spooky spook they first encountered doing wetwork in a bloodstained underground prison in Afghanistan. Now, in the City of Light, there's a certain hotel corridor that remains stubbornly in the darkness. I've enjoyed watching Langan develop and improve as a writer over the past three years. I'll have to start actively seeking out his name in anthologies.

Of the four volumes of "Best Horror," this is the best yet. 2011 was apparently a good year for the genre, and Volume 4 offers fiction that's scary, transgressive and pulsing with an energy that was missing from some of the earlier annuals. Some stories are boldly experimental; others are traditional without being stale. Even the odd clunker here and there isn't unreadably bad. But now that the praise is over with, I've got to end on a slightly nastier note. Night Shade Books may have smoothed out the bumps on its production side, but it needs to address some serious deficiencies in its editing. NSB either needs to invest in more copy editors or reduce the number of titles it publishes to lessen the burden on the editor(s) it already has. I understand that no editor is perfect. There's a good chance there's a mistake lurking somewhere in this review that I won't notice til after it's published. But sections of this book are positively swarming with errors, many of which are softball pitches to the alert proofreader: dropped words, misused words, sentence fragments, clumsy phrasing ("The categories are broken down into thirteen categories."), free-floating clauses ("Too stunned to scream, Pippa did it for him." "Sickened by this small, crushed life, her headache was suddenly much worse.") and various other impediments to readability. A character named Harris becomes Harrison a few paragraphs later. Another character vacillates from sentence to sentence between Jaime and Jamie. The mistakes continue right up through the ads at the back of the book for other Night Shade titles. Why is this sloppiness endemic to the horror genre? Are horror readers and writers so much less literate than those in other genres or the mainstream? I'm sure some critics think so; why give them the typos to reinforce their prejudices? And why insult the readers who demand better? Typo-free text isn't likely to automatically win the horror genre critical respect, but it would be a sign of self-respect, and that's where it all has to start.

This is Ellen Datlow's fourth time editing Best Horror of the Year for Night Shade Books. This edition is the best so far, combining potent, ambitious longer works by genre stars with a varied sampler of up and coming names. Eighteen stories (including several novellas) follow Datlow's lengthy introduction, a wide-ranging summary of the genre year touching on noteworthy novels, anthologies, collections, periodicals, awards and events. If the tasting menu of the year's finest short fiction weren't enough to make the volume an essential overview of all things noteworthy in the horror genre, this overview tips the balance. This makes an excellent introduction to talented new writers, as well as others more established who may yet be unfamiliar to a given reader.

For example, I knew David Nickel and Brian Hodge by name, but hadn't read their works, which turned out to constitute pleasant revelations. In Nickle's "Looker," a drunk man at a party finds a woman whose qualities go beyond the merely eye-pleasing. In "Roots and All," Hodge's character revisits a town where important childhood events occurred, some of which still echo in the present. Both stories exemplify Datlow's preference for character-driven horror, more haunting mood and troubling memory than blood and shrieking monsters. There are several more standouts:

"Blackwood's Baby," like many Laird Barron stories, takes place in rural Washington state, and expands upon Barron's personal, regional mythos. This novella tracks a 1930s expedition of diverse hunters seeking a beast of legend more dangerous than any of them anticipate. It's as powerful as any previous work by Barron, who lately can be counted upon to contribute at least one rich and potent tale to each year's best.

In Livia Llewellyn's "Omphalos," a girl caught in terrible surroundings must fight complex factors keeping her in place. Llewellyn specializes in the dark, raw-edge and harrowing. Her writing pulses with blood and seethes with emotion. Her "Engines of Desire" is among the best weird/dark collections of recent years, certainly one of the top debuts.

In John Langan's "In Paris, in the Mouth of Kronos," two fallen former agents try to claw their way back to gainful employment. They're hired to grab a "Mr. White," who may be a very different order of being from what they expect. Dark yet breezily entertaining, merging the grittiness of noir and spy thriller intrigue with a Lovecraftian hint of ancient forces lurking beneath the everyday world's seeming normalcy. Langan's a skilled writer, whose work Datlow often features. At times I've thought his work needed more of an edge. This has it.

"The Ballad of Ballard and Sandrine" by Peter Straub is a tour-de-force of tender yet bitter codependent romance conveyed in a disorienting balance of straight realism and twisted surrealism. In a series of encounters separated by wide gaps of time, the title characters (the much older Ballard is a mysterious "fixer" type employed by Sandrine's father) journey down the Amazon River on boats with ever-changing names. The couple, caught up in unfathomable events, exhibit a muted curiosity about their circumstances. At times they make experimental gestures seeking to understand the odd nature of the boat or its invisible crew. What knowledge they gain always seems to be lost, forgotten or clouded by the next interlude. The effect is weirdly disorienting, yet familiar. Don't we all forget lessons we've learned, ignore warning signs, and often repeat our mistakes? The growing surreality of Ballard and Sandrine's circumstances finally unfolds at least partially. Horrific and seemingly occult aspects are revealed, yet mystery remains. Straub may be the most cerebral of horror writers, and this is one of his best, boldest works.