The Year's Best Fantasy & Horror: Fifteenth Annual Collection (Year's Best Fantasy and Horror)

Rating:
Summary: Snnorrrrre Snnnorrrreeeee
Review: For some reason, the folks at Amazon keep posting my reviews for this series in the wrong place, so expecting that to happen again this time, let me clarify: The review is covering the FOURTEENTH edition.

Years ago, I made the mistake of taking "The Year's Best" title seriously, and rushed out and bought all the books in the series I could get my hands on. That turned out to be a BIG mistake, as Editors Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling seem to have very different ideas from me about what makes a good story. Luckily, this is the last volume I was unfortunate enough to purchase.

I'll skip the usual complaints this time out. I won't rant about the overlong year-in-review segments. I won't mention the fact that Windling's Fantasy selections monopolixe the book. I won't utter a word about Windling's bizarre penchant for poetry and rehashed versions of older-than-dirt fairy-tales. I'll concentrate on the stories that were actually readable.

Charles de Lint contributes another Newford story, "Granny Weather"; As usual, it's a good read.
Ramsey Campbell offers up two creepy little gems, "No Strings", and "No Story In It".
Jack Dann's "Marilyn" turns a young boy's sexual fantasy into a waking nightmare.
Glen Hirschberg's "Mr. Dark's Carnival" is a great haunted house tale.
Ian Rodwell & Steve Duffy's "The Penny Drops" is waaayyy too long, but the knockout ending makes the suffering worthwhile.
Bret Lott's "The Train, The Lake, The Bridge" could almost be a true story, and it's all the creepier for that.
Jonathan Carroll's "The Heidelberg Cylinder" is a hilariously bizarre tale that needs to be read to be appreciated.
Jack Ketchum contributes "Gone", a short but excellent halloween tale.
Paul J. McAuley's "Bone Orchards" is a follow up to his tale from the previous Year's collection, "Naming The Dead"; It's a real treat, and I'd love to see more with the main character.

Search out the aforementioned Authors, by all means; Just don't waste your money on this stankass series....unless you have MUCH more patience than me.

Rating:
Summary: Tedious, Overblown, Pretentious, Overwritten......
Review: I really can't be bothered doing my usual story-by-story review, since most of the stories stunk. I'm not a big Fantasy fan, so my distaste for the Fantasy side of the book shouldn't be a big surprise. I'll just reiterate my usual complaint about Fantasy Editor Terri Windling's half (More like 2/3rd's..) of the book: Waaaaayyy too much Fantasy, to the point where the Horror stories get short shrift. Ellen Datlow's Horror selections also leave a lot to be desired, as the truly distinctive voices of modern Horror fiction, like Bentley Little, Jack Ketchum, Edward Lee, Richard Laymon, et al, continue to not be represented, while told-by-rote Victorian-era wannabes dominate the book.

(My original review was much longer, and I did single out particular stories/Authors for praise, and recommended some of the individual anthologies, but the review-censorship gang at Amazon saw fit to chop off four whole paragraphs of my review! Thanks, @ssholes!)

Rating:
Summary: Another Year, Another Snooze-Fest....
Review: Made it through another one!!! Once again, Fantasy Editor Terri Windling runs roughshod over Horror Editor Ellen Datlow- Windling weighs in with 26 stories, Datlow with 19. (Datlow continues to beat the drum for awful-poetry lovers everywhere, with no less than EIGHT poems...Yuck.)

As usual, the book opens with Windling's interminably long overview on The Year in Fantasy, which is really no more than a list of every book that's come out that year, along with her rambling on and on about "Magical Realism" for what seems like 5000 pages. I read one page, skimmed the rest, didn't miss a thing.

On to Datlow's Year in Horror- Slightly more interesting, but still WAAY too long. Skimmed once again...

Edward Bryant's Horror and Fantasy in the Media overview is interesting reading, but it seems as if Bryant just throws every movie he's seen into the mix. Does "In the Company of Men" really qualify as Fantasy or Horror...? Seth Johnson's Year in Comic Books overview is very interesting, and considering how much Windling drones on, I don't think it would kill them to let Johnson have a few more pages than he does.

On to the stories themselves....There are a LOT of stories that are bad, if not downright AWFUL, in this book, and most of them go on MUCH too long. Among the Awful/Overlong are: The meandering, pointless "The Skull of Charlotte Corday", "It Had To Be You", which would have been cute if had been 20 pages shorter; Charles Grant's head-scratching yawn-a-thon "Riding the Black", ... "In the Fields" was so bad I actually had to skip to the next story; I also couldn't finish Peter S. Beagle's "The Last Song of Sirit Byar"- It seemed like the song had no end.....

It's not ALL bad, though. Standout stories include "Gulliver at Home", which tells of Lemuel Gulliver's time at home between voyages; "I Am Infinite; I Contain Multitudes" has one of the nastiest scenes I've ever read, and packs a hell of a punch; Nicholas Royle's "Mbo" delivers a nasty spin on the Dracula legend; Gary A. Braunbeck's "Safe" is a moving tale of the aftermath of a gruesome mass-murder; "El Castillo De La Perseverancia" is THE weirdest story I've ever read...Mexican Wrestlers vs. Aztec monsters! It's like a Santos movie in print! "Residuals" tells the hidden history of Alien-abduction in America, and Michael Chabon delivers a ripping good H. P. Lovecraft pastiche "In the Black Mill". Christopher Fowler's "Spanky's Back!" is good sick fun, and Stephen Laws' "The Crawl" presents a far-fetched tale of road-rage that still manages to evoke a chill.

While there ARE some worthwhile reads here, the book is more pain than pleasure to read. Proceed at your own risk!

Rating:
Summary: Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 15
Review: Overall, I enjoyed many of the stories in this anthology. I normally skip the poetry, so I don't have any real comments on them. Many of the stories did seem to slant toward the literary side of the spectrum, with the fantastic elements only subtley present. Still plenty of good stuff here for almost any taste.

Rating:
Summary: Worth every penny!
Review: The reader from Baltimore -- whose review appears on this page -- seems to have read a different book than the rest of us. I consider this volume the best one yet in this terrific series. But then -- since the Baltimore reader is complaining about inclusion of fiction originally published in the New Yorker -- I suppose he/she prefers fantasy and horror with a less literary bent. This is definitely not an anthology for those who aren't interested in savouring fine prose or exploring the unusual places where "genre" and "mainstream" fiction meet. If you want unchallenging, predictable horror and fantasy then give this volume a miss -- but if you love dazzling writing of all different sorts -- defying the very notion of what is "genre" and what is "mainstream" -- then this is the collection for you. There are brilliant stories and poems here -- in an incredibly ecclectic mix. I hope someone is paying Datlow and Windling very very well so that they continue to provide this amazing annual volume for years to come.

Rating:
Summary: I Love This Series!
Review: These two fabulous editors have done it again, bringing together the best fantasy and horror fiction of 2000 in one magnificent volume. What I enjoyed most about this anthology was the sheer variety, in authors, stories, and publications. Many of the stories and poems in this volume were originally published in hard-to-find anthologies or literary journals, and I wouldn't have been able to enjoy them had they not put them in this book. "The Heidelberg Cylinder" by Jonathan Carroll is one example, first published as a hardcover chapbook in a limited print run of only 1000, and which sold out almost immediately. "Granny Weather" by Charles de Lint is another, first appearing in Imagination Fully Dilated, Volume II. "Ship, Sea, Mountain, Sky" by newlyweds Gavin J. Grant and Kelly Link is yet another, first appearing in Altair #6/7. I also greatly enjoyed "Greedy Choke Puppy" by Nalo Hopkinson, "The Pottawatomie Giant" by Andy Duncan and "Instructions" by Neil Gaiman. This anthology runs the entire gamut of the fantasy and horror genres, from urban fantasy to Carribean folklore to magical realism, and it is the best representation of the field today.

Rating:
Summary: Fabulous Anthology
Review: What a beautiful, fabulous anthology. Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling have turned out another of their elegant and amazing collections.

This anthology starts off fast with another of Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea stories, but it's the second one, Ian MacLeod's 'The Chop Girl' that starts the anthology off with a bang. MacLeod's story is creepy, eerie, spooky, and thoroughly delightful. The anthology never loses steam. Nearly every story is wonderful.

Excellent stories by Charles de Lint, Gemma Files, Jeffrey Ford (be sure to check out his books here on Amazon. They're fabulous!), Tim Lebbon, Steven Millhauser, Paul McAuley, Michael Marshall Smith, Kim Newman, and on and on.

What makes this anthology so special is the breadth of sources that Datlow and Windling draw from. They have a few stories from the usual suspects, F&SF, Realms of Fantasy, Asimov's and so on, but the amount of stories, really good stories, that they grab from tiny obscure publications that probably less than 3,000 people read is astounding. In my mind this makes this series of anthologies infinitely more valuable than their SF counterparts.

I highly recommend this volume.

Rating:
Summary: 3rd Edition
Review: Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, Third Edition; ISBN 031204450X

Third in the long-running annual series, the Third Edition is a collection of the "best" fantastical short stories published in 1989. The whole series is consistently high-quality [even if it deos suffer a bit from cronyism], and this edition is no exception. This volume also contains Windling's summation of fantasy in books and publishing, Datlow's summation of horror, and Edward Bryant's summation of fantasy and horror in film for the year 1989. Windling's customary synopses for her "baker's dozen" list of top fantasy novels are, in this edition, extremely short. My favorites from this year are Michael Swanwick's "The Edge of the World," and Steven Millhouser's "The Illusionist." The stinker for this year: "Yore Skin's Jes's Soft'n Purty... He Said (Page 243)" by Chet Williamson. I found it to be wrongheaded, pointless, and in extremely poor taste. I understand that it was written in the style of an early 20th century pulp western, but a poorly-written story is still a poorly-written story, no matter how clever the writer thinks he's being. I also think had the protagonist been a woman, for example, instead of a homosexual man, this story would never have made it out of the editors' slush pile.

Complete list of included writers and their works: Michael Swanwick, "The Edge of the World"; Fred Chappell, "The Adder"; Nancy Etchemendy, "Cat in Glass"; Rory Harper, "Monsters, Tearing Off My Face"; Joyce Carol Oates, "Family"; James Powell, "A Dirge for Clowntown"; Delia Sherman, "Miss Carstairs and the Merman"; Reginald Bretnor, "Unknown Things"; Bruce Boston & Robert Frazier, "Return to the Mutant Rainforest"; Tatyana Tolstaya, "Date With A Bird"; Joseph A. Citro, "Them Bald-headed Snays"; Edward Bryant, "A Sad Last Love at the Diner of the Damned"; Michael Moorcock, "Hanging the Fool"; Leif Enger, "Hansel's Finger"; Garry Kilworth, "Dogfaerie"; Emma Bull, "A Bird That Whistles"; Lisa Tuttle, "The Walled Garden"; Scott Baker, "Varicose Worms"; Leszek Kolakowski, "The War with Things"; Jane Yolen, "The Faery Flag", Zhaxi Dawa, "Souls Tied to the Knots on a Leather Cord"; Steven Millhouser, "The Illusionist"; Charles DeLint, "Timeskip", Robert R. McCammon, "Something Passed By", Dan Daly, "Self Portrait, Mixed Media on Pavement, 1988"; Michael de Larrabeiti, "The Plane Tree and the Fountain"; Tanith Lee, "White as Sin, Now"; Pat Cadigan, "The Power and the Passion"; Midori Snyder, "Jack Straw"; J.N. Williamson, "The Sudd"; Jonathan Carroll, "Mr. Fiddlehead"; Dan Simmons, "Shave and a Haircut, Two Bites"; Andrew Stephenson, "Cinema Altere"; Gary A. Braunbeck, "Matters of Family"; Jane Yolen, "Beauty and the Beast: An Anniversary"; Joan Aiken, "Find Me"; James P. Blaylock, "Unidentified Objects"; Ramsey Campbell, "Meeting the Author"; Gwyneth Jones, "The Lovers"; Chet Williamson, "Yore Skin's Jes's Soft'n Purty... He Said. (Page 243)"; Bruce Sterling, "Dori Bangs"; Joe R. Lansdale, "The Steel Valentine"; John Shirley, "Equilibrium"; Joe Haldeman, "Time Lapse"; Garry Kilworth, "White Noise"; Robley Wilson, "Terrible Kisses"; Greg Bear, "Sleepside Story"