The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: No.11 (Year's Best Fantasy & Horror) [Paperback]

If anyone wants to find out what's going on in the fiction of the fantastic and of terror, they need look no further than Year's Best Fantasy & Horror 11th Annual Collection. Ellen Datlow and Terry Windling should get some kind of exalted place in fictiondom for their method of selecting an eclectic group, not based on some bestselling names that no longer produce interesting prose or dazzling stories, but based purely on the stories and poems at hand.

The Charles de Lint and Stephen Laws stories stood out for me, too. Where else can you get this variety of great short fiction? I miss Karl Edward Wagner's Best Of collections also, but Datlow and Windling, as an editorial team, are number one in my book.

Don't hesitate. Grab this one while it's available. If you're a devoted reader of these genres, then you can do no better; if you're a writer, see what's getting noticed these days. There are a lot of talents here I'd never read before that really shine.

If this were just another run-of-the-mill anthology series, the disappointment would not be severe, but the combination of this series' wonderful past, its hefty price tag, and the relative difficulty of finding it in your local bookstore, result in an experience that woefully fails to meet the reader's expectations.

Gone are several of the names that have appeared in past issues, and that readers have come to expect: Michael Marshall Smith, Tanith Lee, etc. Certainly the editors are to be commended for attempting to introduce newer or lesser-known authors, but many of these are, judging from the works represented here and to put it as kindly as possible, better left unknown. And certain redoubtable (but assuredly over-exposed) names continue to appear: Jane Yolen, Ray Bradbury and Joyce Carol Oates, for instance. I was thrilled to see Kim Newman here, however, even in a co-authored piece, and that piece is, not surprisingly, the one standout in the collection.

Unlike past editions, this one does not contain any stories that absolutely grip your imagination and won't let go. Past editions had at least one such story, and often several!

This year, the editors seem to have favored oblique stories whose point is deliberately elusive or vague -- hey, I'm all for challenging your readers, but I sense the smell of ripoff here. The writers seem less subtle than lazy, and the stories, while sometimes well-written and charming in style, are vague, shallow exercises in fluff.

And what are the editors doing culling from the New Yorker, for heaven's sake? Not once but several times! I thought this was supposed to represent the best of non-mainstream fiction. On the other hand, some of the small-press and 'zine collections are so poor that perhaps you can hardly blame them -- except that they certainly have the resources to do better.

The good news: as usual, the opening "summations" are useful and enjoyable, always worth at least a fraction of the price of admission.

Spend your money on the previous editions and keep away from this one. Or, support a much-needed horror fanchise by buying ANY anthology edited by Stephen Jones. Datlow and Windling have lost their right to your hard-earned dough. END