Monday, January 23, 2012

TOC - “The Best Horror of the Year 4” edited by Ellen Datlow & “The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2012” edited by Paula Guran

Stephen Jones“The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror” and Ellen Datlow’s “The Best Horror of the Year”, “The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror” before that, are the two yearly anthologies that will find a home in my personal library as long as they would be published. Recently, another such anthology sneaked its way in, Paula Guran’s “The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror”, because both 2010 and 2011 editions proved to be very good and truly rewarding. 2012 will not differ much in this case, I am eagerly waiting for all these three collections of stories to be published so I can bring one copy of each into my humble collection of such anthologies (I wish I had all of them, but it is not the case at the moment). Two of these anthologies, Ellen Datlow’s “The Best Horror of the Year 4” and Paula Guran’s “The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2012” announced their final line-ups this month, on Ellen Datlow’s blog and Prime Books’ website respectively. Both feature authors I am familiar with and I am looking forward to read and writers that unknown to me but who I am very curious to meet through their fiction. Here are the two tables of contents with the specification that I am waiting for the cover artworks of these two anthologies since the previous years proved to be excellent in this aspect as well.

“The Best Horror of the Year 4” edited by Ellen Datlow

“The Little Green God of Agony” by Stephen King (A Book of Horrors)
“Stay” by Leah Bobet (Chilling Tales)
“The Moraine” by Simon Bestwick (Terror Tales of the Lake District)
“Blackwood’s Baby” by Laird Barron (Ghosts by Gaslight)
“Looker” by David Nickle (Chilling Tales)
“The Show” by Priya Sharma (Box of Delights)
“Mulberry Boys” by Margo Lanagan (Blood and Other Cravings)
“Roots and All” by Brian Hodge (A Book of Horrors)
“Final Girl Theory” by A. C. Wise (Chizine #48)
“Omphalos” by Livia Llewellyn (Engines of Desire)
“Dermot” by Simon Bestwick (Black Static 24)
“Black Feathers” by Alison Littlewood (Black Static 22)
“Final Verse” by Chet Williamson (F&SF May/June)
“In the Absence of Murdock” by Terry Lamsley (House of Fear)
“You Become the Neighborhood” by Glen Hirshberg (The Janus Tree and Other Stories)
“In Paris, In the Mouth of Kronos” by John Langan (Supernatural Noir)
“Little Pig” by Anna Taborska (The Eighth Black Book of Horror)
“The Ballad of Ballard and Sandrine” by Peter Straub (Conjunctions 56)

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“The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2012” edited by Paula Guran

“Hair” by Joan Aiken (The Monkey’s Wedding & Other Stories / F&SF July/August)
“Rakshashi” by Kelley Armstrong (The Monster’s Corner: Through Inhuman Eyes)
“Walls of Paper, Soft as Skin” by Adam Callaway (Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Issue #73, July 14, 2011)
“The Lake” by Tananarive Due (The Monster’s Corner: Through Inhuman Eyes)
“Tell Me I’ll See You Again” by Dennis Etchison (A Book of Horrors)
“King Death” Paul Finch (King Death)
“The Last Triangle” by Jeffrey Ford (Supernatural Noir)
“ Near Zennor” by Elizabeth Hand (A Book of Horrors)
“Crossroads” by Laura Anne Gilman (Fantasy Magazine, Aug 2011)
“After-Words” by Glen Hirshberg (The Janus Tree and Other Stories)
“Rocket Man” by Stephen Graham Jones (Stymie, Vol. 4. Issue 1, Spring & Summer 2011)
“The Colliers’ Venus (1893)” by Caitlin R. Kiernan (Naked City: New Tales of Urban Fantasy)
“Catastrophic Disruption of the Head” by Margo Lanagan (The Wilful Eye: Tales from the Tower, Vol. 1)
“The Bleeding Shadow” by Joe R. Lansdale (Down These Strange Streets)
“Why Light?” by Tanith Lee (Teeth)
“Conservation of Shadows” by Yoon Ha Lee (Clarkesworld, August 2011)
“ A Tangle of Green Men” by Charles de Lint (Welcome to Bordertown)
“After the Apocalypse” by Maureen McHugh (After the Apocalypse)
“Lord Dunsany’s Teapot” by Naomi Novak (The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities)
“Mysteries of the Old Quarter” by Paul Park (Ghosts by Gaslight)
“ Vampire Lake” by Norman Partridge (Subterranean: Tales of Dark Fantasy 2)
“A Journey of Only Two Paces” by Tim Powers (The Bible Repairman and Other Stories)
“Four Legs in the Morning” by Norman Prentiss (Four Legs in the Morning)
“The Fox Maiden” by Priya Sharma (On Spec, Summer 2011)
“Time and Tide” by Alan Peter Ryan (F&SF, Sept/Oct 2011)
“Sun Falls” by Angela Slatter (Dead Red Heart)
“Still” by Tia V. Travis (Portents)
“Objects in Dreams May Be Closer Than They Appear” by Lisa Tuttle (House of Fear)
“The Bread We Eat in Dreams” by Catherynne M. Valente (Apex Magazine, Issue 30, November 2011)
“All You Can Do Is Breathe” by Kaaron Warren (Blood & Other Cravings)
“Josh” by Gene Wolfe (Portents)

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