Shawn's Reviews > The Best Horror of the Year: Volume Two

Another season, another few horror fiction anthologies...

Short version - a solid read. Should be something here for all tastes.

Longer version - so, keeping to my usual review pattern, I'll be structuring this from least-impressive stories to most impressive. In general, this is what you'd expect from the yearly Datlow - a solid collection of good to great stories with only a few clunkers (accounting for taste). This early on in the series, there's no indication of foot-finding, in that Datlow seems to have a good grasp on what she likes and doesn't like. The "Summation 2009" serves the same purpose as Jones' "Year In" overviews from MBOTBNH, and although I like Datlow's laying out of plots a bit more, she got better at it in later years. Still, a few books stood out as worth taking a look at.

And now the reviews:

As per my recent assessment regarding my own critical skills, I decided not to finish a story here as it just was not doing it for me. "Wendigo" by Micaela Morrissette rebuffed my efforts with its overly ornamented story freighted with rich/overripe language. Somewhat better, "Mrs. Midnight" Reggie Oliver started promisingly with a celebrity talent judge helping to publicize the restoration of a Victorian-era theater/music hall and stumbling into a connection between its original devastating fire, an animal act, and the Ripper murders. Connections which still seem to manifest in contemporary times. As much as I like Oliver's work, I'll say I was kind of surprised that a story of this caliber ended up in a year's best: it's a perfectly fine, if familiar, story but I found a lot of the writing (outside of a well-chosen and executed narrative "voice") clumsy and kind of pedestrian.

Next up we have the "solid but flawed" stories: "The End Of Everything" by Steve Eller tells us about a serial killer's ennui post-zombie apocalypse, with no one to kill and predators who seem disinterested in him. Well-written but passive. Dale Bailey & Nathan Ballingrud's "The Crevasse" starts out excitingly with Antarctic dog sledders on a mission of mercy suddenly faced with the surprise appearance of the titular threat. Unfortunately, the "survival horror" aspect quickly disappears and is replaced towards some vague "weird tale" gesture towards "Mountains Of Madness"/buried city resonance which felt kind of tacked on and is generally unresolved. A shame because the opening is strong and the writing solid. Similarly, "The Lion's Den" by Steve Duffy has a catchy opening (a mystery involving the lion exhibit as a small, community zoo witnessed by the staff) which then advances into a series off odd changes in the day to day routine of the place, culminating in a death and mutilation. Less "horror qua horror" than a "twilight zone" type story (even with the mutilation and death) this lacks an immediate threat (everything happens to other people than the narrator) and has something like a distanced, J.G. Ballard-vibe. I liked it but wanted to like it more. Kaaron Warren's "The Gaze Dogs of Nine Waterfall" has a set-up which would normally have turned me off (a poacher of rare dogs is hired to supply some elusive "vampire dogs" - a known quantity in this world—which she tracks down in a remote part of Fiji. But the confrontation doesn't go as planned). It says something positive about the writing that I decided to stick with this dark-fantasy set-up, and I give it credit for never straying too far into its presumptions about the world the story is set in, instead opting for the psychological/symbolic resonance of the dogs. The ending was not fully satisfying but as a whole, the story was accomplished.

Next are all the good, solid stories:
"each thing i show you is a piece of my death" by Gemma Files & Stephen J. Barringer has an attempt to make an experimental "exquisite corpse" film, composed of numerous short bits sent in by anonymous filmmakers, "infected" by a mysterious suicide/snuff film from long ago. At which point the ghoulish figure in the original film begins replicating out into the background of other films. Itself composed as a collage of internet postings, text messages & police reports, this is a grim little addition to the "horror keeps pace with technology" subgenre that has been running since, well, forever. The Aurora Borealis hides a dangerous threat for the crew of an airliner making a short stop for deicing at a lonely airfield in Glen Hirshberg's "The Nimble Men" (I bought and presented a reading of this story for the Pseudopod podcast, available for free here - THE NIMBLE MEN). This is another TWILIGHT ZONE type story but the threat is more immediate, and thus more engaging, than "The Lion's Den"). Norman Prentiss' "In The Porches Of My Ears" starts prosaically, as a movie-going couple find their enjoyment somewhat interrupted by a woman sitting near them who narrates the entire plot to her blind companion, and continues in this vein as an interesting modern conté cruel with a slight genre touch. Nice. On the other end of the spectrum, "Lonegan's Luck" by Stephen Graham Jones mixes an Old West setting, a traveling medicine/snake-oil salesman, and zombies into a heady, sinister, nihilistic brew. I especially liked the well-handled ending.

Continuing with the good: "Lotophagi" is set in an isolated sustainable/"hippie" community in the Pacific Northwest, as the only survivor of a mass disappearance tells his tale. Edward Morris' interesting busted-focus narrative by the drug-fractured survivor is hard to track at times but engagingly authentic. Carole Johnstone's "Dead Loss", about the crew of a North Atlantic trawler who catch some ancient, living things in their dredge net, is a straight-up and effective monster story. Current rising star Laird Barron is represented here with "Strappado", a grim, nasty little thing about wealthy hedonist yuppies slumming in a third world country, the exclusive & isolated premiere of an "art installation" by a notorious, Banksy-styled "outrage artist", and warehouse location and some large drums of caustic acid. The fictional equivalent of torture porn with the details nicely elided. Meanwhile a traveling crew of circus performers rescue a strange, abandoned young girl from the roadside, and she gradually insinuates herself into their troupe in "The Lammas Worm" by Nina Allen, which works as something of a cross of urban horror and folk horror. There's a bit of clumsy, coincidental plot exposition but overall the setting and social milieu of traveling performers makes this an engaging read. The book closes, as it opened (more on that in a second) with a riff on Poe's "The Masque Of The Red Death" in John Langan's "Technicolor" as a college professor's lecture on the symbolism behind one of Poe's most famous stories, and its connection to an occult text/memoir from the Napoleonic era AND the famed writer's own mysterious last days/death all turns out badly for his students. Again, solid work.

Finally, there were two excellent pieces here, imho. "What Happens When You Wake Up In The Night" by Michael Marshall Smith, in which a child awakes to discover his familiar bedroom mysteriously transformed, was so good I bought it for a reading on Pseudopod (which can be heard HERE - WHAT HAPPENS). And this anthology opens with the first of two ("Technicolor" being the second) selections from Datlow's own edited anthology of Poe tributes. Like "Technicolor", Suzy McKee Charnas' "Lowland Sea" also engages "The Masque Of The Red Death" but here transforms and transplants it to modern times as an arrogant filmmaker, ensconced in the hills over Cannes in his private villa, tries to wait out a virulent plague from Africa which is ravaging its way across the Mediterranean. Really solid tale of smug wealth and even more prescient than ever.

And that's it.