Year's Best Fantasy & Horror 2008

Ellen Datlow´s Twenty First Annual Collection - Review

Nov 25, 2008 Lynne Jamneck

Ellen Datlow is one of the most respected editors working in horror and genre fiction today, and it is not difficult to see why.

Year's Best Fantasy & Horror (St. Martin's Griffin) has now surpassed its 20th edition with this, the latest in a fine line of speculative anthologies. Datlow, along with Gavin Grant and Kelly Link—respected writers in the speculative and fantasy genres—have compiled a hefty 440-page collection of stories that will follow on in the reader's mind long after they have read them.

The horror part of the anthology (selected by Datlow) is not necessarily the monster-bloodletting, choking-scream, sweaty-palm variety. While this might be a bad thing for traditional horror lovers, the horror is still present, only in a different form.

The subject of child abuse occurs more than once in the anthology, possibly with most striking effect in Lisa Tuttle's Closet Dreams. Stories such as these makes the reader think about the true nature of horror; are the bogeymen we imagine in our own heads more frightening than what we do to one another in the real world?

Alternatively, there are more straightforward supernatural chillers included too, such as Terry Dowling's award-winning Toother, and Paul Walther's Splitfoot, the likes of is chilling in how it chooses to convey that most of us will still choose a rational explanation when a very unreasonable situation stares us in the face.

The fantasy selection (selected by Grant and Link) provides a healthy range of sub-categories within the genre. Urban fantasy is represented in the always terrific work of Karen Joy Fowler (The Last Worders), and Karen Russell's magic realist tale Vampires In The Lemon Grove gets extra points for telling a refreshing and wholly original story about the lament of those undead creatures we love to love.

There is even a blending or archaeology and folklore in Lucy Kemnitzer's The Boulder, at heart a mystery tale spun within a fantasy framework. Noteworthy contributions from other authors include works by Holly Black, Joyce Carol Oates, Garth Nix, Elizabeth Hand, Eileen Gunn and Liz Williams. For the scholarly inclined there is a healthy summation preceding the fiction, which sums up the previous year in film, books, magazines and other media in both genres.

The stories collected here may pose as fantastical, but they are at their core stories about the dreams and fears we face daily in our own lives. They revise not only the traditions of the literary culture which shaped them, but at the same time challenge and invite the reader to see the grains of ingrained in each offering.

The copyright of the article Year's Best Fantasy & Horror 2008 in Literary Culture is owned by Lynne Jamneck. Permission to republish Year's Best Fantasy & Horror 2008 in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

F&H 2008