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For twenty years this award-winning compilation has been the nonpareil benchmark against which all other annual fantasy and horror collections are judged. Directed first by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling and for the past four years by Datlow and Kelly Link & Gavin J. Grant, it consistently presents the strangest, the funniest, the darkest, the sharpest, the most original—in short, the best fantasy and horror. The current collection, marking a score of years, offers more than forty stories and poems from almost as many sources. Summations of the field by the editors are complemented by articles by Edward Bryant, Charles de Lint and Jeff VanderMeer highlighting the best of the fantastic in, respectively, media, music and comics as well as honorable mentions—notable works that didn’t quite make the cut but are nonetheless worthy of attention. The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: 20th Annual Collection is a cornucopia of fantastic delights, an unparalleled resource and indispensable reference that captures the unique excitement and beauty of the fantastic in all its gloriously diverse forms, from the lightest fantasy to the darkest horror.
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By Blue Tyson
A very impressive volume, this year. Well ahead of the last couple, and has multiple excellent to outstanding pieces - Houser, Savory, Fountain, Rosenbaum and Pratt. I didn't except to come across a book in this series I would rate this highly (3.76 story average). So very well done for avoiding too many lame or dull stories this year.
The introduction again cracks the ton in pagecount, perhaps the only annoying bit there is the huge run on list of horror novels by Datlow that is rather hard to read. If you dump the useless music roundup, probably have space to put that into columns. Or eliminate the publishers, not many people are going to go and look up the publisher first, book second, and then perhaps it could be more readable. Or replicate it readably on the internet. Whichever. A minor quibble though for such a huge pile of useful info on the books that have come out over the year.
The state of horror focused webzines must be pretty bad, too, as I think Datlow only mentions ChiZine as far as I can see for electronic publications that specialise. Lastshortstory I think mentioned this as well, though.
Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 20 : Pol Pot's Beautiful Daughter - Geoff Ryman
Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 20 : First Kisses From Beyond the Grave - Nik Houser
Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 20 : The Last to be Found - Christopher Harman
Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 20 : Fourteen Experiments in Postal Delivery - John Schoffstall
Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 20 : The Night Whiskey - Jeffrey Ford
Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 20 : In the House of the Seven Librarians - Ellen Klages
Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 20 : Drowning Palmer - Sarah Monette
Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 20 : Landfill - Joyce Carol Oates
Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 20 : Another Word for Map is Faith - Christopher Rowe
Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 20 : Lionflower Hedge - Ira Sher
Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 20 : A Fearful Symmetry - Minsoo Kang
Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 20 : Messages - Brett Alexander Savory
Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 20 : The Box - Stephen Gallagher
Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 20 : Halfway House - Frances Hardinge
Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 20 : La Fee Verte - Delia Sherman
Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 20 : Father Muerte and the Flesh - Lee Battersby
Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 20 : Winkie - Margo Lanagan
Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 20 : Dog Person - Scott Nicholson
Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 20 : The Extraordinary Limits of Darkness - Simon Clark
Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 20 : Cup and Table - Tim Pratt
Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 20 : The Churring - Nicholas Royle
Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 20 : Dead Sea Fruit - Kaaron Warren
Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 20 : Directions - Caleb Wilson
Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 20 : La Profonde - Terry Dowling
Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 20 : Journey into the Kingdom - M. Rickert
Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 20 : The Good Ones Are Already Taken - Ben Fountain
Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 20 : A Pig's Whisper - Margo Lanagan
Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 20 : 31/10 - Stephen Volk
Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 20 : Sob in the Silence - Gene Wolfe
Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 20 : Femaville - Paul Di Filippo
Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 20 : A Siege of Cranes - Benjamin Rosenbaum
Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 20 : The Lineaments of Gratified Desire - Ysabeau Wilce
Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 20 : Raphael - Stephen Graham Jones
Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 20 : The Muldoon - Glen Hirshberg
Surfeit of spirits.
3 out of 5
Purgatory High School.
4.5 out of 5
Hide and seek problems.
4 out of 5
Skiless and bitchy.
3.5 out of 5
Death booze corpse recall putdown getaway.
4 out of 5
Taxonomically sheltered upbringing.
4 out of 5
Pool mystery reunion.
4 out of 5
Fraternity rubbish.
3.5 out of 5
Religiously correct landscaping writ large.
3 out of 5
Mum, planted.
3 out of 5
Korean army abused ghost girl.
4 out of 5
Fugue god manuscript end Judgement.
4.5 out of 5
Copter simulation shadowy restraint.
4 out of 5
Butterfly piecemeal.
2.5 out of 5
Prostituting France future.
3.5 out of 5
Pope painting revenge.
4 out of 5
Like a wee infant? No problem, got piles of dead ones over here. Help yourself.
3.5 out of 5
Can't live without her, even with bacon.
4 out of 5
Native train sport haunting.
4 out of 5
Should I stay or should I go now?
If I go then fire and rubble
And if I stay it will be trouble
5 out of 5
Movie nightbird radiation.
4 out of 5
Tastes like ash.
3 out of 5
Driving to Xu needs plenty of liquids.
4 out of 5
Disappearing trick.
3.5 out of 5
Rules for snogging. 1. Check for life. 2. Check if human
3 out of 5
Voodoo Green Beret.
4.5 out of 5
Low down dead puddin' thieves, Cuddlepie.
3.5 out of 5
Poltercast redux.
4 out of 5
Horrific writer's fate well deserved.
4 out of 5
Tsunami refugeee imagineering exodus.
4 out of 5
Witch girl's zombie baby scorched earth revenge.
4.5 out of 5
Hardhanded with Piggy.
3 out of 5
Witchy girls really won't float too long.
4 out of 5
Grandparent stranding smasher.
3.5 out of 5
By H. Bradstreet (South Portland, ME United States)
The Year's Best series is always a good purchase for the lover of fantasy and horror. Here you get to meet the freshest talent and to sample their wares. My only critique is the "Best Of" sections at the front of the book, which seem to get longer and longer each year. Not that this section isn't worth reading to get ideas, but it's taking up valuable short story space. However, if you are ever in a bookstore and needing a new flavor, I suggest picking up a copy of this book and looking around the store to see if any of their suggestions are in stock. It's my own version of a fiction treasure hunt.
By David Roy (Vancouver, BC)
With me not being much of a Horror fan, you wouldn't think I'd get much out of The Year's Best Fantasy & Horror: #20, edited by Ellen Datlow, Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant, with half of it being a genre that I really don't have any interest in. However, I really enjoyed last year's edition, with the Horror stories actually being more interesting than the fantasy ones. Sadly, this year the stories aren't quite as gripping, though I can't point to any that I didn't enjoy at least somewhat. It helps that quite a few of them are from one of my favorite anthologies from last year, Salon Fantastique (and thankfully, none of the bad ones in it are included).
As usual, the book begins with the state of the genre, written by all of the authors; Datlow covers the Horror side admirably, with the other two editors doing Fantasy. There's also a round up of media (by Edward Bryant), Comics & Graphic Novels (by Jeff VanderMeer), Music (Charles de Lint) and the past year's obituaries (by James Frenkel). This is a really nice overview of the year that was (2006, in this case), with all of these articles highlighting entries that you may have missed and wish to pick up.
Then we get to the stories. As usual, each story has a brief introduction by the editor(s) that picked it, so you can tell right away whether it falls into the Horror or Fantasy genre, though admittedly some of the lines are a bit mixed. Just because the story was originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction doesn't mean that Datlow won't pick it for her list.
The best story in this year's edition is "The Night Whiskey," by Jeffrey Ford (from Salon Fantastique) and it was also one of my favorites from that book as well. The story is about a drink so potent that it leaves people drunk enough to meet up with the dead for a night. It's only consumed once a year by a select (but different) group of people every year. But what happens when one of this year's drinkers brings the dead back with him? This story is powerful and emotional, yet also very quiet. Ford's prose is as good as usual, immersing the reader in this little town that he's created and the characters who are trying to deal with a truly abnormal situation. One of my favorites in the original anthology, it's also near the top this time as well.
While there aren't any truly awful stories in this collection (nor should there be in a "Best of" collection!), there are a few that just didn't do anything for me. Sadly, there were more of those this year than last. For the most part, though, The Year's Best Fantasy & Horror: #20 is an excellent read, full of "more than 250,000 words of the finest fantasy and horror." Unless you have a complete aversion to one of the genres, you'll probably find something in here that you like. If I can like a Horror story, some of you non-fans of Fantasy can give one our stories a try. Who knows? It may just grab you and suck you in.
David Roy
By Andrew Shaffer (Davenport, Iowa)
The short stories compiled here range from the hilarious "Fourteen Experiments in Postal Delivery" to the melancholy "Dog Person." While I picked up the "Year's Best" for the horror, I found the fantasy stories to be among the most interesting. The "fantasy" stories included are of the speculative variety and not the sword-and-sorcery variety--that's a plus for me, but it won't be everyone's cup of tea. One of my personal favorites here is Geoff Ryman's magical "Pol Pot's Beautiful Daughter," a story that reads like a Garcia Marquez/J-horror mash-up. And the supremely bizarro "Night Whiskey" by Jeffrey Ford is just too good to define.
Is every story going to please every reader? With such varied tastes, that's not a realistic assumption. There were a couple of stories I skimmed, but overall I found a lot of sparkling gems here. And even if there were no stories included, I would recommend this annual based on the year-in-fantasy and year-in-horror reviews that begin every volume.
By Suzako (New York, NY)
I have a yearly ritual of reading the Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. This year's collection is just as delightful and spooky as those past. I especially enjoyed M. Rickert's disquieting "Journey into the Kingdom", Tim Pratt's fun "Cup and Table" and the first story Geoff Ryman's dreamy "Pol Pot's Beautiful Daughter".
Of course, everyone will probably have different favorites and there are one or two stories I could have done without, but its a great survey of genre short fiction of 2006.
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