The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: Volume 4

by Paula Guran

Overview

The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror series returns with a splendidly startling fourth volume!

From paranormal plots to stories of the supernatural, tales of the unfamiliar have always fascinated us humans. To keep the tradition alive, fantasy aficionado Paula Guran has gathered the most delightfully disturbing work from some of today’s finest writers of the fantastique!

No two mysterious shadows are alike, and the same can be said for the books in this series. The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, Volume 4 contains more than three hundred pages of mystical fiction. Reader beware and indulge if you dare, because these chilling tales are sure to spook and surprise!

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781645060673
Publisher:	Pyr
Publication date:	10/24/2023
Pages:	306
Sales rank:	393,681
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Editor, anthologist, and reviewer Paula Guran was senior editor for Prime Books for seven years. Previously, she edited the Juno fantasy imprint from its small press inception through its incarnation as an imprint of Pocket Books. In addition to the annual Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror series and The Year’s Best Fantasy series, she’s edited over fifty other anthologies as well as many novels and single-author collections. The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, Volume Two was nominated for a World Fantasy Award in 2022. It was her third nomination for that award. Additionally she has been honored with two Stokers, two IHG Awards, and other nominations. Guran has contributed reviews, interviews, and articles to numerous professional publications.

Editorial Reviews

08/25/2023

This is a chilling collection of 21 recently published short stories that looms in the murky borderland between fantasy and horror, filled with tales of magic and myth, monsters and legends, and things that go bump in the night and fill the heart with dread. "Red Wet Grin" by Gemma Files offers a disturbing story that combines the classic horrors of possession and body snatching with the newer horrors of COVID and dying alone in a nursing home. "Challawa" by Usman T. Malik is a stand-out story that slides from historical fantasy straight into horror and tells the tale of a woman who returns to her home on the Indian subcontinent to research old stories, only to find herself reenacting a ritual to eject foreign invaders. Two of the most haunting fantasy stories are "The Voice of a Thousand Years" by Fawaz Al Matrouk, about an educated man in an age of religious repression who spends his final energies on a mechanical creature that will carry his legacy, and "The Woman Who Married the Minotaur" by Angela Slatter, featuring the mythic minotaur from the labyrinth. VERDICT Recommended for readers who love stories guaranteed to send a frisson of wonder or fear, or both, up their spines.—Marlene Harris

Library Journal