The Best of the Best Horror of the Year: 10 Years of Essential Short Horror Fiction

The Best of the Best Horror of the Year: 10 Years of Essential Short Horror Fiction

The Best of the Best Horror of the Year: 10 Years of Essential Short Horror Fiction

The Best of the Best Horror of the Year: 10 Years of Essential Short Horror Fiction

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Overview

Here is the best of the best horror—from Laird Barron, Neil Gaiman, Peter Straub, and many more!

For more than three decades, Ellen Datlow has been at the center of horror. Bringing you the most frightening and terrifying stories, Datlow always has her finger on the pulse of what horror readers crave. In this anniversary edition, Datlow brings back her favorite stories of the series’ last decade in a special edition encompassing highlights from each edition of the work.

Encompassed in the pages of The Best Horror of the Year have been such illustrious writers as: Neil Gaiman, Kim Newman, Stephen King, Linda Nagat, Laird Barron, Margo Lanagan, And many others

With each passing year, science, technology, and the march of time shine light into the craggy corners of the universe, making the fears of an earlier generation seem quaint. But this light creates its own shadows. The Best Horror of the Year chronicles these shifting shadows. It is a catalog of terror, fear, and unpleasantness as articulated by today’s most challenging and exciting writers. And in this anniversary edition, we share the most important stories which have been covered in the last decade of horror writing.

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

IntroductionEllen Datlow
Lowland Sea—Suzy McKee Charnas
Wingless Beasts—Lucy Taylor
The Nimble Men—Glen Hirshberg
Little America—Dan Chaon
Black and White Sky—Tanith Lee
The Monster Makers—Steve Rasnic Tem
Stephen Graham Jones
In a Cavern, in a Canyon—Laird Barron
Allochthon—Livia Llewellyn
Shepherds’ Business—Stephen Gallagher
Down to a Sunless Sea—Neil Gaiman
The Man from the Peak—Adam Golaski
In Paris, In the Mouth of Kronos—John Langan
The Moraine—Simon Bestwick
At the Riding School—Cody Goodfellow
Cargo—E.Michael Lewis
Tender as Teeth—Stephanie Crawford & Duane Swierczynski
Wild Acre—Nathan Ballingrud
The Callers—Ramsey Campbell
This Stagnant Breath of Change—Brian Hodge
Grave Goods—Gemma Files
The Ballad of Ballard and Sandrine—Peter Straub
Majorlena—Jane Jakeman
The Days of Our Lives—Adam L. G. Nevill
You Can Stay All Day—Mira Grant
No Matter Which Way We Turned—Brian Evenson
Nesters—Siobhan Carroll
Better You Believe—Carole Johnstone

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781597809832
Publisher: Night Shade
Publication date: 10/02/2018
Series: Best Horror of the Year Series
Pages: 432
Sales rank: 625,252
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

Ellen Datlow has been editing science fiction, fantasy, and horror short fiction for more than thirty years. She was the fiction editor of Omni magazine and Sci Fiction and has edited more than fifty anthologies. Datlow has also won lifetime achievement awards from three prominent genre organizations, and currently acquires short fiction for Tor.com.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

LOWLAND SEA

SUZY MCKEE CHARNAS

Miriam had been to Cannes twice before. The rush and glamour of the film festival had not long held her attention (she did not care for movies and knew the real nature of the people who made them too well for that magic to work), but from the windows of their festival hotel she could look out over the sea and daydream about sailing home, one boat against the inbound tide from northern Africa.

This was a foolish dream; no one went to Africa now — no one could be paid enough to go, not while the Red Sweat raged there (the film festival itself had been postponed this year til the end of summer on account of the epidemic). She'd read that vessels wallowing in from the south laden with refugees were regularly shot apart well offshore by European military boats, and the beaches were not only still closed but were closely patrolled for lucky swimmers, who were also disposed of on the spot.

Just foolish, really, not even a dream that her imagination could support beyond its opening scene. Supposing that she could survive long enough to actually make it home (and she knew she was a champion survivor), nothing would be left of her village, just as nothing, or very close to nothing, was left to her of her childhood self. It was eight years since she had been taken.

Bad years; until Victor had bought her. Her clan tattoos had caught his attention. Later, he had had them reproduced, in make-up, for his film, Hearts of Light (it was about African child-soldiers rallied by a brave, warm-hearted American adventurer — played by Victor himself — against Islamic terrorists).

She understood that he had been seduced by the righteous outlawry of buying a slave in the modern world — to free her, of course; it made him feel bold and virtuous. In fact, Victor was accustomed to buying people. Just since Miriam had known him, he had paid two Russian women to carry babies for him because his fourth wife was barren. He already had children but, edging toward sixty, he wanted new evidence of his potency.

Miriam was not surprised. Her own father had no doubt used the money he had been paid for her to buy yet another young wife to warm his cooling bed; that was a man's way. He was probably dead now or living in a refugee camp somewhere, along with all the sisters and brothers and aunties from his compound: wars, the Red Sweat, and fighting over the scraps would leave little behind.

She held no grudge: she had come to realize that her father had done her a favor by selling her. She had seen a young cousin driven away for witchcraft by his own father, after a newborn baby brother had sickened and died. A desperate family could thus be quickly rid of a mouth they could not feed.

Better still, Miriam had not yet undergone the ordeal of female circumcision when she was taken away. At first she had feared that it was for this reason that the men who bought her kept selling her on to others. But she had learned that this was just luck, in all its perverse strangeness, pressing her life into some sort of shape. Not a very good shape after her departure from home, but then good luck came again in the person of Victor, whose bed she had warmed til he grew tired of her. Then he hired her to care for his new babies, Kevin and Leif.

Twins were unlucky back home: there, one or both would immediately have been put out in the bush to die. But this, like so many other things, was different for all but the poorest of whites.

They were pretty babies; Kevin was a little fussy but full of lively energy and alertness that Miriam rejoiced to see. Victor's actress wife, Cameron, had no use for the boys (they were not hers, after all, not as these people reckoned such things). She had gladly left to Miriam the job of tending to them.

Not long afterward Victor had bought Krista, an Eastern European girl, who doted extravagantly on the two little boys and quickly took over their care. Victor hated to turn people out of his household (he thought of himself as a magnanimous man), so his chief assistant, Bulgarian Bob, found a way to keep Miriam on. He gave her a neat little digital camera with which to keep a snapshot record of Victor's home life: she was to be a sort of documentarian of the domestic. It was Bulgarian Bob (as opposed to French Bob, Victor's head driver) who had noticed her interest in taking pictures during an early shoot of the twins.

B. Bob was like that: he noticed things, and he attended to them.

Miriam felt blessed. She knew herself to be plain next to the diet-sculpted, spa-pampered, surgery-perfected women in Victor's household, so she could hardly count on beauty to secure protection; nor had she any outstanding talent of the kind that these people valued. But with a camera like this Canon G9, you needed no special gift to take attractive family snapshots. It was certainly better than, say, becoming someone's lowly third wife, or being bonded for life to a wrinkled shrine-priest back home.

Krista said that B. Bob had been a gangster in Prague. This was certainly possible. Some men had a magic that could change them from any one thing into anything else: the magic was money. Victor's money had changed Miriam's status from that of an illegal slave to, of all wonderful things, that of a naturalized citizen of the U.S.A. (although whether her new papers could stand serious scrutiny she hoped never to have to find out). Thus she was cut off from her roots, floating in Victor's world.

Better not to think of that, though; better not to think painful thoughts.

Krista understood this (she understood a great deal without a lot of palaver). Yet Krista obstinately maintained a little shrine made of old photos, letters, and trinkets that she set up in a private corner wherever Victor's household went. Despite a grim period in Dutch and Belgian brothels, she retained a sweet naiveté. Miriam hoped that no bad luck would rub off on Krista from attending to the twins. Krista was an east European, which seemed to render a female person more than normally vulnerable to ill fortune.

Miriam had helped Krista to fit in with the others who surrounded Victor — the coaches, personal shoppers, arrangers, designers, bodyguards, publicists, therapists, drivers, cooks, secretaries, and hangers-on of all kinds. He was like a paramount chief with a great crowd of praise singers paid to flatter him, outshouting similar mobs attending everyone significant in the film world. This world was little different from the worlds of Africa and Arabia that Miriam had known, although at first it had seemed frighteningly strange — so shiny, so fast-moving and raucous! But when you came right down to it here were the same swaggering, self-indulgent older men fighting off their younger competitors, and the same pretty girls they all sniffed after; and the lesser court folk, of course, including almost-invisible functionaries like Krista and Miriam.

One day, Miriam planned to leave. Her carefully tended savings were nothing compared to the fortunes these shiny people hoarded, wasted, and squabbled over; but she had almost enough for a quiet, comfortable life in some quiet, comfortable place. She knew how to live modestly and thought she might even sell some of her photographs once she left Victor's orbit.

It wasn't as if she yearned to run to one of the handsome African men she saw selling knockoff designer handbags and watches on the sidewalks of great European cities. Sometimes, at the sound of a familiar language from home, she imagined joining them — but those were poor men, always on the run from the local law. She could not give such a man power over her and her savings.

Not that having money made the world perfect: Miriam was a realist, like any survivor. She found it funny that, even for Victor's followers with their light minds and heavy pockets, contentment was not to be bought. Success itself eluded them, since they continually redefined it as that which they had not yet achieved.

Victor, for instance: the one thing he longed for but could not attain was praise for his film — his first effort as an actor-director.

"They hate me!" he cried, crushing another bad review and flinging it across the front room of their hotel suite, "because I have the balls to tackle grim reality! All they want is sex, explosions, and the new Brad Pitt! Anything but truth, they can't stand truth!" Of course they couldn't stand it. No one could. Truth was the desperate lives of most ordinary people, lives often too hard to be borne; mere images on a screen could not make that an attractive spectacle. Miriam had known boys back home who thought they were "Rambo". Some had become killers, some had been become the killed: doped-up boys, slung about with guns and bullet-belts like carved fetish figures draped in strings of shells. Their short lives were not in the movies or like the movies.

On this subject as many others, however, Miriam kept her opinions to herself.

Hearts of Light was scorned at Cannes. Victor's current wife, Cameron, fled in tears from his sulks and rages. She stayed away for days, drowning her unhappiness at parties and pools and receptions.

Wealth, however, did have certain indispensable uses. Some years before Miriam had joined his household, Victor had bought the one thing that turned out to be essential: a white-walled mansion called La Bastide, set high on the side of a French valley only a day's drive from Cannes. This was to be his retreat from the chaos and crushing boredom of the cinema world, a place where he could recharge his creative energies (so said B. Bob).

When news came that three Sudanese had been found dead in Calabria, their skins crusted with a cracked glaze of blood, Victor had his six rented Mercedes loaded up with petrol and provisions. They drove out of Cannes before the next dawn. It had been hot on the Mediterranean shore. Inland was worse. Stubby planes droned across the sky trailing plumes of retardant and water that they dropped on fires in the hills.

Victor stood in the sunny courtyard of La Bastide and told everyone how lucky they were to have gotten away to this refuge before the road from Cannes became clogged with people fleeing the unnerving proximity of the Red Sweat.

"There's room for all of us here," he said (Miriam snapped pictures of his confident stance and broad, chiefly gestures). "Better yet, we're prepared and we're safe. These walls are thick and strong. I've got a rack of guns downstairs, and we know how to use them. We have plenty of food, and all the water we could want: a spring in the bedrock underneath us feeds sweet, clean water into a well right here inside the walls. And since I didn't have to store water, we have lots more of everything else!"

Oh, the drama; already, Miriam told Krista, he was making the movie of all this in his head.

Nor was he the only one. As the others went off to the quarters B. Bob assigned them, trailing an excited hubbub through the cool, shadowed spaces of the house, those who had brought their camcorders dug them out and began filming on the spot. Victor encouraged them, saying that this adventure must be recorded, that it would be a triumph of photojournalism for the future.

Privately he told Miriam, "It's just to keep them busy. I depend on your stills to capture the reality of all this. We'll have an exhibition later, maybe even a book. You've got a good eye, Miriam; and you've had experience with crisis in your part of the world, right?"

"La Bastide" meant "the country house" but the place seemed more imposing than that, standing tall, pale, and alone on a crag above the valley. The outer walls were thick, with stout wooden doors and window-shutters as Victor had pointed out. He had had a wing added on to the back in matching stone. A small courtyard, the one containing the well, was enclosed by walls between the old and new buildings. Upstairs rooms had tall windows and sturdy iron balconies; those on the south side overlooked a French village three kilometers away down the valley.

Everyone had work to do — scripts to read, write, or revise, phone calls to make and take, deals to work out — but inevitably they drifted into the ground floor salon, the room with the biggest flat-screen TV. The TV stayed on. It showed raging wildfires. Any place could burn in summer, and it was summer most of the year now in southern Europe.

But most of the news was about the Red Sweat. Agitated people pointed and shouted, their expressions taut with urgency: "Looters came yesterday. Where are the police, the authorities?"

"We scour buildings for batteries, matches, canned goods."

"What can we do? They left us behind because we are old."

"We hear cats and dogs crying, shut in with no food or water. We let the cats out, but we are afraid of the dogs; packs already roam the streets."

Pictures showed bodies covered with crumpled sheets, curtains, bedspreads in many colors, laid out on sidewalks and in improvised morgues — the floors of school gyms, of churches, of automobile showrooms.

My God, they said, staring at the screen with wide eyes. Northern Italy now! So close!

Men carrying guns walked through deserted streets wearing bulky, outlandish protective clothing and face masks. Trucks loaded with relief supplies waited for roads to become passable; survivors mobbed the trucks when they arrived. Dead creatures washed up on shorelines, some human, some not. Men in robes, suits, turbans, military uniforms, talked and talked and talked into microphones, reassuring, begging, accusing, weeping.

All this had been building for months, of course, but everyone in Cannes had been too busy to pay much attention. Even now at La Bastide they seldom talked about the news. They talked about movies. It was easier.

Miriam watched TV a lot. Sometimes she took pictures of the screen images. The only thing that could make her look away was a shot of an uncovered body, dead or soon to be so, with a film of blood dulling the skin.

On Victor's orders, they all ate in the smaller salon, without a TV.

On the third night, Krista asked, "What will we eat when this is all gone?"

"I got boxes of that paté months ago." Bulgarian Bob smiled and stood back with his arms folded, like a waiter in a posh restaurant. "Don't worry, there's plenty more."

"My man," said Victor, digging into his smoked Norwegian salmon.

Next day, taking their breakfast coffee out on the terrace, they saw military vehicles grinding past on the roadway below. Relief convoys were being intercepted now, the news had said, attacked and looted.

"Don't worry, little Mi," B. Bob said, as she took snaps of the camouflage-painted trucks from the terrace. "Victor bought this place and fixed it up in the Iranian crisis. He thought we had more war coming. We're set for a year, two years."

Miriam grimaced. "Where food was stored in my country, that is where gunmen came to steal," she said.

B. Bob took her on a tour of the marvelous security at La Bastide, all controlled from a complicated computer console in the master suite: the heavy steel-mesh gates that could be slammed down, the metal window shutters, the ventilation ducts with their electrified outside grills.

"But if the electricity goes off?" she asked.

He smiled. "We have our own generators here."

After dinner that night Walter entertained them. Hired as Victor's Tae Kwan Do coach, he turned out to be a conservatory-trained baritone.

"No more opera," Victor said, waving away an aria. "Old country songs for an old country house. Give us some ballads, Walter!" Walter sang "Parsley Sage", "Barbara Ellen", and "The Golden Vanity".

This last made Miriam's eyes smart. It told of a young cabin boy who volunteered to swim from an outgunned warship to the enemy vessel and sink it, single-handed, with an augur; but his Captain would not let him back on board afterward. Rather than hole that ship too and so drown not just the evil Captain but his own innocent shipmates, the cabin boy drowned himself: "he sank into the lowland, low and lonesome, sank into the lowland sea."

Victor applauded. "Great, Walter, thanks! You're off the hook now, that's enough gloom and doom. Tragedy tomorrow — comedy tonight!"

They followed him into the library, which had been fitted out with a big movie screen and computers with game consoles. They settled down to watch Marx Brothers movies and old romantic comedies from the extensive film library of La Bastide. The bodyguards stayed up late, playing computer games full of mayhem. They grinned for Miriam's camera lens.

In the hot and hazy afternoon next day, a green mini-Hummer appeared on the highway. Miriam and Krista, bored by a general discussion about which gangster movie had the most swear words, were sitting on the terrace painting each other's toenails. The Hummer turned off the roadway, came up the hill, and stopped at La Bastide's front gates. A man in jeans, sandals, and a white shirt stepped out on the driver's side.

It was Paul, a writer hired to ghost Victor's autobiography. The hot, cindery wind billowed his sleeve as he raised a hand to shade his eyes.

"Hi, girls!" he called. "We made it! We actually had to go off-road, you wouldn't believe the traffic around the larger towns! Where's Victor?"

Bulgarian Bob came up beside them and stood looking down.

"Hey, Paul," he said. "Victor's sleeping; big party last night. What can we do for you?" "Open the gates, of course! We've been driving for hours!"

"From Cannes?"

"Of course from Cannes!" cried Paul heartily. "Some Peruvian genius won the Palme D'Or, can you believe it? But maybe you haven't heard — the jury made a special prize for Hearts of Light. We have the trophy with us — Cammie's been holding it all the way from Cannes."

Cameron jumped out of the car and held up something bulky wrapped in a towel. She wore party clothes: a sparkly green dress and chunky sandals that laced high on her plump calves. Miriam's own thin, straight legs shook a little with the relief of being up here, on the terrace, and not down there at the gates.

Bulgarian Bob put his big hand gently over the lens of her camera. "Not this," he murmured.

Cameron waved energetically and called B. Bob's name, and Miriam's, and even Krista's (everyone knew that she hated Krista).

(Continues…)


Excerpted from "The Best of the Best Horror of the Year"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Ellen Datlow.
Excerpted by permission of Start Publishing LLC.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Table of Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Introduction—Ellen Datlow

Lowland Sea—Suzy McKee Charnas

Wingless Beasts—Lucy Taylor

The Nimble Men—Glen Hirshberg

Little America—Dan Chaon

Black and White Sky—Tanith Lee

The Monster Makers—Steve Rasnic Tem

Chapter Six—Stephen Graham Jones

In a Cavern, in a Canyon—Laird Barron

Allochthon—Livia Llewellyn

Shepherds’ Business—Stephen Gallagher

Down to a Sunless Sea—Neil Gaiman

The Man from the Peak—Adam Golaski

In Paris, In the Mouth of Kronos—John Langan

The Moraine—Simon Bestwick

At the Riding School—Cody Goodfellow

Cargo—E.Michael Lewis

Tender as Teeth—Stephanie Crawford & Duane Swierczynski

Wild Acre—Nathan Ballingrud

The Callers—Ramsey Campbell

This Stagnant Breath of Change—Brian Hodge

Grave Goods—Gemma Files

The Ballad of Ballard and Sandrine—Peter Straub

Majorlena—Jane Jakeman

The Days of Our Lives—Adam L. G. Nevill

You Can Stay All Day—Mira Grant

No Matter Which Way We Turned—Brian Evenson

Nesters—Siobhan Carroll

Better You Believe—Carole Johnstone

About the Authors

Acknowledgment of Copyright

About the Editor

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