Amy's Reviews > The Best Horror of the Year Volume Twelve

Rating: 4½ stars.

It's a big claim to say a book contains the best horror of a year (in this case, 2019), but if anything could approach that, it'd be this book. This was an absolutely fantastic collection of short stories. I loved many of them and there weren't any that I completely disliked, which is hard to say with any anthology! Some of these stories definitely stretch the definition of horror, more being moody or dark, but that's always going to be subjective so I'm not going to complain about it.

If I had to pick favourites, The Puppet Motel by Gemma Files and The Butcher’s Table by Nathan Ballingrud were particular stand outs. I already wanted to read Wounds, Ballingrud's anthology that Butcher’s Table is from, but now I'm racing out to.

There were no big lows, and enough highs that I'm rounding up to five stars. If the rest of Datlow's Best Horror of the Year books can match this one in quality, I'm definitely starting a collection.