michael lambe's scrapbook

Over the past few years I’ve gotten into the habit of buying The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror as December approaches. It’s a great big fat hunk of a book, about 40 stories and poems, and lots of chewy meat and potatoes in there. I always enjoy it. It’s reliably really good. So I thought I’d do the same just before last Christmas. Didn’t work out that way though. There was no Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror in 2009. And after a bit of internet research I discovered only this: after 21 years of compiling and winning awards the editorial team behind it were “on hiatus”. No reasons given as to why… What a pity.

However, I also discovered that Ellen Datlow, one member of the aforementioned award winning editorial team, had gone it alone and started her own new series with The Best Horror of the Year Volume One. A slimmer volume this one, only 21 stories and poems, and the fantasy element seemingly ditched… “Well, why not?” I thought, “Now’s the perfect time to read it!” I like a bit of spine-spooking tingliness in the dark corner of the year… So I ordered it. And over the winter break I read it through. And I enjoyed it (mostly) too. There’s a lot of fine crafted and deeply absorbing stories in there. Some absolute gems in fact. It’s a good compilation. I just have one teeny tiny (and perhaps pedantic) quibble about it and that’s about the use of the word Horror. A fair percentage of the stories didn’t strike me as being particularly scary,  – or even trying to be particularly scary.  A horror story in order to be a horror story should do more than just evoke a vaguely creepy atmosphere, it ought to evoke feelings of shock, or fear, or foreboding, or revulsion – it ought to horrify you. But a fair few of the stories in this collection didn’t really do that at all. At best they might be described as Dark Fantasy… but not Horror.  They were still good though mind you – they just didn’t inspire the level of dread that I was expecting from the cover title. It is a pedantic point though because I found only one story in the collection disatisfying, most of them praiseworthy and there were maybe three in there that were absolute classics of the genre.

Steve Duffy’s The Clay Party, describing a misguided journey into the wilderness (and into madness) has a Lovecraftian feel to it, though the horror in this tale comes from the vile actions of men and not monsters (in fact the monsters are alright). R. B. Russell’s story Loup-garou is perfect. Starting with a seemingly mundane tale of a run-of-the-mill guy  going to see an old movie, by the end of the story everything has been turned on it’s head in shocking disorientation. Memory, identity, reality… nothing seems certain. Genius. And my favorite in the collection Adam Golaski’s The Man from the Peak, in a sense is an old story, but told so well. It lulls you in, then gradually dreamily and  subtly creeps you out, and finally brings you face to face  with – pure unadulterated bloody HORROR in the truest sense of the word. That one story alone is worth buying the collection for. It’s gruesome yet… DELICIOUS!

Buy The Best Horror of the Year Volume One from amazon.co.jp, amazon.com, and amazon.co.uk.
Buy The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror from amazon.co.jp, amazon.com, and amazon.co.uk.