The Dark: Ghost Stories

by Ellen Datlow (Editor), Jeffrey Ford (Contribution by), Tanith Lee (Contribution by), Terry Dowling (Contribution by), Mike O'Driscoll (Contribution by)

Overview

This award-winning horror anthology is the "yardstick by which future ghost fiction will be measured"—featuring Tanith Lee, Joyce Carol Oates, and others (Publishers Weekly, starred review).
Award-winning anthologist Ellen Datlow—praised by William Gibson as "the genre's sharpest assembler of strange, dark fictions"—is determined to prove that ghost stories still possess the power to chill modern readers to the marrow. So she reached out to a list of varied and talented authors and invited them to scare the heck out of her.
The resulting anthology redefines the ghost story, venturing beyond the accustomed tropes and into horror's true realm: the unknown. The Dark takes a nuanced and disquieting look at the tormented and unquiet dead; the darkness in us, the living; and the sometimes tenuous boundary between the two.
Under the covers of The Dark, you will find a gathering of sixteen unique ghost stories, deftly penned by authors versed in the argot of the damned, including Ramsey Campbell, Jeffrey Ford, Glen Hirshberg, Kelly Link, Sharyn McCrumb, Lucius Shepard, and Gahan Wilson. This is the stuff nightmares are made of.
Winner of the International Horror Guild Award for Best Anthology of the Year

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781504088749
Publisher:	Open Road Media
Publication date:	11/14/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	378
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Ellen Datlow has been editing science fiction, fantasy, and horror short fiction for four decades. She currently acquires short stories and novellas for Tor.com and Nightfire. She has edited numerous anthologies for adults, young adults, and children, including The Best Horror of the Year annual series, When Things Get Dark:Stories Inspired by Shirley Jackson, Body Shocks, and Screams from the Dark: 19 Tales of Monsters and the Monstrous. She's won multiple Locus, Hugo, Bram Stoker, International Horror Guild, Shirley Jackson, and World Fantasy Awards. Datlow was recipient of the 2007 Karl Edward Wagner Award, given at the British Fantasy Convention for outstanding contribution to the genre, and was honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award given by the Horror Writers Association in acknowledgment of superior achievement over an entire career. She was honored with the World Fantasy Life Achievement Award at the 2014 World Fantasy Convention.
She runs the Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series in the East Village, New York City, with Matthew Kressel.
 
 
Ellen Datlow was editor of Sci Fiction, the multi award- winning fiction area of scifi.com, for almost six years. Previously, she was fiction editor of Omni for over seventeen years. She has won the World Fantasy Award seven times, two Bram Stoker Awards, the International Horror Guild Award, the 2002 and 2005 Hugo Award, and the 2005 Locus Award, for her work as an editor. Sci Fiction won the 2005 Hugo Award for Best Website. Datlow and Windling are the co-editors of over eleven original anthologies and of seventeen volumes of The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror.

Jeffrey Ford is the author of the novels The Physiognomy, Memoranda, The Beyond, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, the Edgar Award–winning The Girl in the Glass, The Cosmology of the Wider World, The Shadow Year, and The Twilight Pariah, and his collections include The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant, The Empire of Ice Cream, The Drowned Life, Crackpot Palace, and A Natural History of Hell. He lives near Columbus, Ohio, and teaches writing at Ohio Wesleyan University.

Blake’s 7 and various BBC radio plays. After winning the 1980 British Fantasy Award for her novel Death’s Master, endless awards followed. She was named a World Horror Grand Master in 2009 and honored with the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement in 2013. Lee was married to artist and writer John Kaiine.
Locus magazine. The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror series featured more horror stories by Dowling in its twenty-one–year run than any other writer. Dowling is author of Basic Black: Tales of Appropriate Fear (International Horror Guild Award for Best Collection, 2007), An Intimate Knowledge of the Night, Blackwater Days, and The Night Shop: Tales for the Lonely Hours. He can be found at www.terrydowling.com.
 
Black Static, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Interzone, Crime Wave and anthologies including Best New Horror, and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. O’Driscoll has published several collections of stories, including Unbecoming, The Dream Operator, and Eyepennies, which was the first of a series of standalone novellas. His story, “Sounds Like,” was adapted by Brad Anderson for an episode of the mid-noughts horror anthology show, Masters of Horror.
 
Playboy and The New Yorker, were gathered in over twenty book collections through the years. He wrote and illustrated a number of children’s books, mystery novels, several anthologies, and a collection of his own short stories.
Wilson was honored with the Horror Writer’s Association’s Life Achievement Award in 1992 and the 2004 Life Achievement Award given by the World Fantasy Convention. He died in 2019.
 

Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Medal of Humanities, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the 2019 Jerusalem Prize, and has been several times nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys; Blonde, which was nominated for the National Book Award; and the New York Times bestseller The Falls, which won the 2005 Prix Femina. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.

Valley of Lights, Down River, The Spirit Box, Nightmare, With Angel, and The Authentic William James, which features Sebastian Becker, Special Investigator to the Lord Chancellor’s Visitor in Lunacy.
 
The Expanse under the pseudonym James S. A. Corey. He has also written novels under his own name and as M. L. N. Hanover.
 
The Oxford Companion to English Literature as “Britain’s most respected living horror writer,” and the Washington Post names his work as “one of the monumental accomplishments of modern popular fiction.” The two volumes of Phantasmagorical Stories offer a sixty-year retrospective of his short fiction. The Village Killings collects his novellas, and Ramsey’s Rambles his film reviews. Campbell’s latest novel is The Lonely Lands.
 
New York Times bestsellers The Ballad of Tom Dooley and The Ballad of Frankie Silver. Ghost Riders won the Wilma Dykeman Award for Literature from the East Tennessee Historical Society and the Audie Award for Best Recorded Book.
Named a Virginia Woman of History by the Library of Virginia and a Woman of the Arts by the Daughters of the American Revolution, McCrumb was awarded a merit award by the West Virginia Library Association in 2017 and the Mary Hobson Prize for Arts & Letters in 2014. Her books have been named New York Times and Los Angeles Times Notable Books.
 
New York Times–bestselling author Charles L. Grant published in many different genres: science fiction, historical romance, gothic, suspense, fantasy, and horror. However, he is primarily known for his dark fantasy novels and short stories, many of them set in his beloved New Jersey. Grant edited a number of anthologies, including the Shadows series, and also created Oxrun Station, a small and very spooky town in Connecticut. Grant died in 2006.
 
The Cipher, Skin, Under the Poppy, and Dark Factory.
 
Lucius Shepard was born in Lynchburg, Virginia, grew up in Daytona, Florida, and lived the last years of his life in Portland, Oregon. His short fiction won the Nebula Award, the Hugo Award, the International Horror Guild Award, the National Magazine Award, the Locus Award, the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, and the World Fantasy Award. He died in 2014.
White Cat, Black Dog. She is the owner of the bookstore Book Moon in Easthampton, Massachusetts, and the cofounder, with her husband Gavin J. Grant, of Small Beer Press. Together they publish the zine Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. You can find her on Twitter @haszombiesinit.
 
The Snowman’s Children, Infinity Dreams, The Book of Bunk, and the Motherless Children trilogy. He is also the author of five widely praised story collections: The Two Sams, American Morons, The Janus Tree, The Ones Who Are Waving, and Tell Me When I Disappear. Hirshberg is a three-time International Horror Guild Award winner and five-time World Fantasy Award finalist. Hirshberg won the Shirley Jackson Award for the novelette, “The Janus Tree.” His Substack is at glenhirshberg.substack.com. He lives with his family and cats in the Pacific Northwest.