10 Years of Terror: 7 Standout Stories from The Best of the Best Horror of the Year
The Best Horror of the Year anthology series turned 10 this year, a decade of celebrating the darkest gems of the genre as selected by Hugo-winning editor Ellen Datlow, whose name, by this point, is almost synonymous with quality frights (in addition to her work on a whole stack of creepy standalone anthologies, she had a hand in the now-defunct annual The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror).
The Best of the Best Horror of the Year: 10 Years of Essential Short Horror Fiction
Paperback $17.99
The Best of the Best Horror of the Year: 10 Years of Essential Short Horror Fiction
Editor Ellen Datlow
In Stock Online
Paperback $17.99
This month, Night Shade Books celebrates that milestone with The Best of the Best Horror of the Year, a summing up of 10 years of terror that runs the gamut—stories of gruesome monsters, cerebral surrealism, twisted bloodletting, and existential dread—contributed by a murderer’s row of horror authors.
This month, Night Shade Books celebrates that milestone with The Best of the Best Horror of the Year, a summing up of 10 years of terror that runs the gamut—stories of gruesome monsters, cerebral surrealism, twisted bloodletting, and existential dread—contributed by a murderer’s row of horror authors.
Curating a list of standout stories from the collection might sound easy, with names like Neil Gaiman, John Langan, and Mira Grant within reach. But naming certain names is, well, expected, and horror isn’t about what’s expected. It’s about challenging expectations and upending context. I’ve written a lot about horror for this blog, so in recommending this retrospective as essential—and it is—I’m doing so only by mentioning authors I’ve never written about before. If you aren’t a denizen of the world of disturbing fiction, it’s more than likely these names are new to you, but they are definitely worth remembering. Certainly, the seven stories below are terribly unforgettable.
“Wingless Beasts”, by Lucy Taylor
This atmospheric story of monsters and terrible deeds done in the emptiness of Death Valley works slowly, its turns and reveals creeping in alongside a meditation on the loneliness of the desert environment as it draws all the plot elements together. Sharp-eyed readers might figure out what kind of story it truly is well before the narrator ventures into the dunes, but “Wingless Beasts” isn’t so much about the destination. It’s about the eerie locales surrounding the desert, and the way Death Valley figures into the story, its arid presence suffocating everything, as if the characters are carrying its spirit with them. It ends on a striking and terrifying image, revealing just enough about what’s really going on in the strange desolation of the valley, but not enough to destroys the mystique.
“Little America”, by Dan Chaon
The road trip across America is a singular experience. An eeriness and an unsettling sort of liminality stretch out time itself, turning every rest stop into an odd oasis, frozen in time and space. Few authors are able to capture this feeling, but Dan Chaon’s story about an older man and his younger companion on a road trip not only does so, but it the process weaponizes it. The feeling of unease becomes an odd sort of nostalgia, deepening with every new detail revealing exactly how wrong things have gone, not just between the two main characters, but with the whole world. It’s an unnerving work, shot through with tense moments and small power struggles, ever centered on two people, a car, and the ever-darkening country flashing by outside their windows.
“Allochthon”, by Livia Llewelyn
No other horror writer alive can go from 0 to 60 as fast as Livia Llewelyn— Furnace, her debut short story collection, made it on to the list of NPR’s top 100 horror books with very good reason. Beginning with an odd passage about H.P. Lovecraft about how land and nature can affect or even rule us, this story plunges headlong into a plot following a single event (a mining company picnic) as it loops over and over, each reoccurrence growing more and more deranged as the woman at its center slowly loses her grip on sanity. It’s an excellent use of malevolent geography— there’s a very real sense that the mine itself is causing the endless spiral, and the foreboding air is thick even before the madness kicks into high gear. And from there, it goes to the extreme; while it isn’t overly violent at first, the urgency and sheer roiling emotion of it means it is that muchmore disturbing when the blood does start to flow.
]ean2]”At The Riding School”, by Cody Goodfellow
Speaking of extremes, consider this horrifying slice of darkness. It’s not the details or the images that make “At The Riding School” so disturbing, it’s how commonplace the setting and scenario: in the middle of the night, a veterinarian is called in to deal with an emergency at a private stable. Granted, the details are disturbing too: half-human beasts, brutal deeds, psychosexual overtones, and unsettling implications that are more or less unprintable here (plus, that’s spoil the story). But it’s how normal everything seems that makes it all truly scary: the way the school’s Madame and her assistants treat the a monstrous situations as commonplace, turning an unsettling situation into one that is absolutely terrifying. It is well worth taking the journey into its unimaginable depths.
“Majorlena”, by Jane Jakeman
Another story that uses the isolation of a desert, though to a different effect, “Majorlena” grows more and more unusual as it goes along. A group soldiers is left stranded by an attack in enemy territory, and things slowly go more wrong from there. It’s a strange kind of ghost story, setting the scene with vivid details (bombed-out trucks that smell of caramelized sugar, the choppers circling overhead) and natural narration—things are off, but not entirely wrong. And then the horror does hit, like a bomb, suddenly and in defiance of explanations, leaving a crater in the form of a single, horrible image. You never get a good sense of what happened, or who or what caused it, but the feeling of dread it leave you with lingers, like the ringing in your ears after an explosion.
“No Matter Which Way We Turned”, by Brian Evenson
This quick story about an alien abductee and their family incorporates both disturbing body horror and pitch-dark humor. It’s almost a dark prose-poem, sketching out a few evocative scenes of a group of people trying to deal with the aftermath of an encounter with aliens, from trying to convince them to put the poor victim back together properly, to (for reasons) constructing a room with a hole in the roof. It’s simultaneously hilarious and horrifying in a very sick way, with an ending that manages to be all those things, and also a little sad, as the narrator speculates on the fallout from the aliens’ mistake.
“Nesters”, by Siobhan Carroll
This excellent blend of creature feature, haunted house tale, and dust bowl coming-of-age story follows a young woman who goes searching for her father after turns up missing on a nearby farmstead. Carroll keeps the mysteries at the heart of the thing swirling as densely as the dust storms surrounding the farm, bringing in government conspiracy, incoherent babbling akin to Lovecraftian black speech, and more weirdness yet. The joy comes in the way the details keep shifting, as each new element makes the situation more impenetrable. The horror of what’s going on within the mysterious farmhouse aside, the most disturbing images are the most mundane: those of people just trying to survive as the Dust Bowl takes their lives and livelihoods away from them.
What’s the scariest story you’ve ever read?