Another yearly round-up
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darkling_talesWell, since January is fast running out I suppose I'd better post my thoughts on 2010's Best Horror of the Year vols 1&2, edited by Ellen Datlow. Datlow, like Jones, is an editor who's been on the scene for decades now. Some of her previous collections are terrific (the mixed-bag anthology The Dark), some less so (her collection of non-sanguinary vampire stories Blood is not Enough was disappointingly dry and bloodless, if you'll forgive the atrocious pun.) And, unlike some editors I could mention, you never know what you're going to get with a Datlow anthology. So I was quite excited when I embarked on reading these two volumes. They certainly look nice - good-quality paper and bindings, with stylish illustrations based on old woodcuts, far removed from the satanic moles and exploding heads marring too many horror collections! But what's inside?
I'm afraid Vol. 1 (see here for a list of contents)isn't brilliant. Many of the contributing authors are clearly after that capital-L "literary" status, which means stories couched in oblique English that are high on depression, alienation, spiritual death and relationship angst, but low on actual frightening bits and at times maddeningly lacking in resolution or original ideas. Obviously prioritizing characters and a vague "mood" over plot isn't always a bad thing, but when you've got a dozen writers trying to be Joyce Carol Oates or Robert Aickman in one collection it does get a bit on the boring side. Daniel Kaysen's "The Rising River" and Laird Barron's "The Lagerstatte" are both typical of this kind of story.
And there are a handful of tales in this book that are just real stinkers: "If Angels Fight" by Richard Bowes is a juiceless, tedious examination of metempsychosis among wealthy urban Americans which dies with a whimper, while "Girl in Pieces" by Graham Edwards is a lumpen, hyperactive stab at a parallel-universe Raymond Chandler yarn that is clearly begging to have the word "romp" attached to it by eager reviewers. I hate the word "romp" as applied to fiction and I hated this story, which could've been written by an ADHD ten-year-old if it wasn't for the lumbering lechery that clings like a used condom to the depiction of the tale's designated crumpet-in-chief. Horrible stuff. Meanwhile, "Dress Circle" by Miranda Semionowicz is a feminist study of the bleeding obvious (i.e. the dictates of fashion can be oppressive to women) that fails to achieve its intended dream-like atmosphere, and Euan Harvey's "Harry and the Monkey" is best described as "heartwarming horror", which should leave you in no doubt of how much it sucked.
But it's not all bad. The opening story, "Cargo" by E. Michael Lewis, is a creepy number about an American army airman who has to convey a cargo of childrens' coffins away from the scene of a mass slaughter. The horrors on display here are real and convincing and portrayed without excessively self-analytical verbiage - Lewis' writing reminds me a bit of Peter Straub's ghost stories based around the Vietnam war, in which the reactions of the characters are at least as important as the real-life horrors they encounter. "The Hodag" is a straight-up monster story about a hairy creature haunting the Canadian woods, and it captures the atmosphere of sunlit copses and shady places rather well. In fact this collection is unusually well-served where hairy beast stories are concerned, since it also features two good (and unconventional) werewolf stories, "Loup-Garou" by R.B. Russell and "The Clay Party" by Steve Duffy. "Loup-Garou" is an odd story about the mysteries of cinema and memory which (appropriately enough given its theme) is most enjoyable in retrospect, after it's been macerating in your brain for a few days. Here is the weird, ethereal atmosphere so many of the authors in this collection are striving for, evoked in deceptively simple language. The Duffy story is one of his horrific adventure tales set in 19th-century America and has shades of a Robert Louis Stevenson novel about it. It's not Duffy at his best but even his worst is better than most peoples' best, so that's not really a problem! And he has single-handedly invented the "pioneer horror" genre, which must be worth something.
But for sheer black bottomless horror the last tale in the collection, "The Narrows" by Simon Bestwick, takes the prize. It's a long story told by a teacher in a Manchester secondary school. After Manchester is wiped off the map by a nuclear attack brought on by the Tories (who else?) our hero has to shepherd a small gang of surviving children and teachers into the only place of safety he can think of: a network of underground canals and tunnels which can be accessed via a disused quarry mouth. It's dark, it's cold, the torches are running out of juice, and everyone's families are dead, but it soon transpires that a) something is already peopling the maze of lightless passages the party must explore and b) the dead families were the lucky ones. Yes, I've complained about the current surfeit of end-of-the-world horror stories lately, but "The Narrows" is the real deal - a suffocating, totally appalling trip into a Hell of man's own making which is at times so sad and frightening that it's almost impossible to finish, but avoids that whiny, deflating, cliched quality so characteristic of lesser apocalyptic fiction. Bestwick's contribution is definitely the stand-out story of this collection, and I will be keeping an eye open for more of his work in the future as he is one to watch!
Overall, however, Best Horror of the Year Vo. 1 was a disappointment, only too representative of the more dismaying current trends in horror fiction. And of the few good stories, only a couple are real "discoveries" on Datlow's part, since the Russell and Duffy tales were both lifted from a Wordsworth werewolf anthology. C minus, can do better!
Volume 2 (contents here)was much more to my taste. Apocalyptic fiction looms trendily large, but the opening story, "Lowland Sea" by Suzy McKee Charnas, is a cut above the usual by virtue of its eviscerating political commentary about Westerners' attitudes to the third world. Another trend of 2009/10 seems to be Arctic horror, and there are two good polar stories here, Nathan Balingrud's adventure story "The Crevasse", which has just a touch of the Cthulhus about it, and Glen Hirschberg's "The Nimble Men", which harnesses the beaty and terror of the aurora borealis.
But two of the stories here actually made me unwilling to turn out my bedside light! The first is "Everything I Show You is a Piece of my Death" by Gemma Files and Stephen J. Barringer, a piece of media-horror about an evil videotape showing a man doing something very creepy in real-time - though the concepts of "real" and "time" don't mean so much by the end of the story! It is written as a motley sequence of e-mails, adverts, police interview transcripts and the like, a format I always enjoy when it's done well. Indeed I can think of few stories where the medium is so intimately related to the message. And not a trace of Ringu-style cliche either...Even better is "The Lion's Den" by Steve Duffy, a splendid return to top form which equals his great early story "Our Lady of the Flowers" (perhaps ditching the Jack London/Stevenson tropes was a good idea...) Set in a zoo and featuring teleporting lions, it works as a frightening paranormal horror story but expands into something much bigger, with terrifying implications for the human race. It will probably appeal to animal rights enthusiasts too, though God knows a love of animals won't prevent this story from frightening you!
Also worth a mention is the profoundly exotic "Strappado" (also involving videotape and grisly ends!) by Laird Barron, which is much better than his contribution to Volume 1! And Reggie Oliver's "Mrs. Midnight", a frankly bonkers tale, will appeal to those with an interest in old music-hall acts and weird Victorian science (though as an animal-lover I found it a bit hard to stomach myself.) I've already praised "The Lammas Worm" by Nina Allan in my review of Strange Stories 3, but I was happy to re-read it here, and John Langan's "Technicolour" is something I thought I'd never see: a story about a passage in Edgar Allan Poe's life that's actually good and scary and free of steampunk bollocks.
There are some clunkers as well, of course. "Wendigo" by Micaela Morrissette is an example of that most dreary of subgenres, food horror, and has nothing to do with the Native American myth that I could see. "The End of Everything" by Steve Eller is typical bad apocalypse fiction with an uninspiring serial killer thrown in, and "The Gaze Dogs of Nine Waterfall " by Kaaron Warren is a hopelessly crude story relying entirely on animal cruelty for its emotional charge, which is just lazy if you ask me. But on the whole, this is a quality collection.
So there you have it - for my money, you'd do best buying Volume 2 and leaving Volume 1 well alone this year. It's a shame Datlow felt the need to stretch to two volumes and didn't just put out one anthology composed of the best stories of both volumes, as that would've been terrific!
I'm afraid Vol. 1 (see here for a list of contents)isn't brilliant. Many of the contributing authors are clearly after that capital-L "literary" status, which means stories couched in oblique English that are high on depression, alienation, spiritual death and relationship angst, but low on actual frightening bits and at times maddeningly lacking in resolution or original ideas. Obviously prioritizing characters and a vague "mood" over plot isn't always a bad thing, but when you've got a dozen writers trying to be Joyce Carol Oates or Robert Aickman in one collection it does get a bit on the boring side. Daniel Kaysen's "The Rising River" and Laird Barron's "The Lagerstatte" are both typical of this kind of story.
And there are a handful of tales in this book that are just real stinkers: "If Angels Fight" by Richard Bowes is a juiceless, tedious examination of metempsychosis among wealthy urban Americans which dies with a whimper, while "Girl in Pieces" by Graham Edwards is a lumpen, hyperactive stab at a parallel-universe Raymond Chandler yarn that is clearly begging to have the word "romp" attached to it by eager reviewers. I hate the word "romp" as applied to fiction and I hated this story, which could've been written by an ADHD ten-year-old if it wasn't for the lumbering lechery that clings like a used condom to the depiction of the tale's designated crumpet-in-chief. Horrible stuff. Meanwhile, "Dress Circle" by Miranda Semionowicz is a feminist study of the bleeding obvious (i.e. the dictates of fashion can be oppressive to women) that fails to achieve its intended dream-like atmosphere, and Euan Harvey's "Harry and the Monkey" is best described as "heartwarming horror", which should leave you in no doubt of how much it sucked.
But it's not all bad. The opening story, "Cargo" by E. Michael Lewis, is a creepy number about an American army airman who has to convey a cargo of childrens' coffins away from the scene of a mass slaughter. The horrors on display here are real and convincing and portrayed without excessively self-analytical verbiage - Lewis' writing reminds me a bit of Peter Straub's ghost stories based around the Vietnam war, in which the reactions of the characters are at least as important as the real-life horrors they encounter. "The Hodag" is a straight-up monster story about a hairy creature haunting the Canadian woods, and it captures the atmosphere of sunlit copses and shady places rather well. In fact this collection is unusually well-served where hairy beast stories are concerned, since it also features two good (and unconventional) werewolf stories, "Loup-Garou" by R.B. Russell and "The Clay Party" by Steve Duffy. "Loup-Garou" is an odd story about the mysteries of cinema and memory which (appropriately enough given its theme) is most enjoyable in retrospect, after it's been macerating in your brain for a few days. Here is the weird, ethereal atmosphere so many of the authors in this collection are striving for, evoked in deceptively simple language. The Duffy story is one of his horrific adventure tales set in 19th-century America and has shades of a Robert Louis Stevenson novel about it. It's not Duffy at his best but even his worst is better than most peoples' best, so that's not really a problem! And he has single-handedly invented the "pioneer horror" genre, which must be worth something.
But for sheer black bottomless horror the last tale in the collection, "The Narrows" by Simon Bestwick, takes the prize. It's a long story told by a teacher in a Manchester secondary school. After Manchester is wiped off the map by a nuclear attack brought on by the Tories (who else?) our hero has to shepherd a small gang of surviving children and teachers into the only place of safety he can think of: a network of underground canals and tunnels which can be accessed via a disused quarry mouth. It's dark, it's cold, the torches are running out of juice, and everyone's families are dead, but it soon transpires that a) something is already peopling the maze of lightless passages the party must explore and b) the dead families were the lucky ones. Yes, I've complained about the current surfeit of end-of-the-world horror stories lately, but "The Narrows" is the real deal - a suffocating, totally appalling trip into a Hell of man's own making which is at times so sad and frightening that it's almost impossible to finish, but avoids that whiny, deflating, cliched quality so characteristic of lesser apocalyptic fiction. Bestwick's contribution is definitely the stand-out story of this collection, and I will be keeping an eye open for more of his work in the future as he is one to watch!
Overall, however, Best Horror of the Year Vo. 1 was a disappointment, only too representative of the more dismaying current trends in horror fiction. And of the few good stories, only a couple are real "discoveries" on Datlow's part, since the Russell and Duffy tales were both lifted from a Wordsworth werewolf anthology. C minus, can do better!
Volume 2 (contents here)was much more to my taste. Apocalyptic fiction looms trendily large, but the opening story, "Lowland Sea" by Suzy McKee Charnas, is a cut above the usual by virtue of its eviscerating political commentary about Westerners' attitudes to the third world. Another trend of 2009/10 seems to be Arctic horror, and there are two good polar stories here, Nathan Balingrud's adventure story "The Crevasse", which has just a touch of the Cthulhus about it, and Glen Hirschberg's "The Nimble Men", which harnesses the beaty and terror of the aurora borealis.
But two of the stories here actually made me unwilling to turn out my bedside light! The first is "Everything I Show You is a Piece of my Death" by Gemma Files and Stephen J. Barringer, a piece of media-horror about an evil videotape showing a man doing something very creepy in real-time - though the concepts of "real" and "time" don't mean so much by the end of the story! It is written as a motley sequence of e-mails, adverts, police interview transcripts and the like, a format I always enjoy when it's done well. Indeed I can think of few stories where the medium is so intimately related to the message. And not a trace of Ringu-style cliche either...Even better is "The Lion's Den" by Steve Duffy, a splendid return to top form which equals his great early story "Our Lady of the Flowers" (perhaps ditching the Jack London/Stevenson tropes was a good idea...) Set in a zoo and featuring teleporting lions, it works as a frightening paranormal horror story but expands into something much bigger, with terrifying implications for the human race. It will probably appeal to animal rights enthusiasts too, though God knows a love of animals won't prevent this story from frightening you!
Also worth a mention is the profoundly exotic "Strappado" (also involving videotape and grisly ends!) by Laird Barron, which is much better than his contribution to Volume 1! And Reggie Oliver's "Mrs. Midnight", a frankly bonkers tale, will appeal to those with an interest in old music-hall acts and weird Victorian science (though as an animal-lover I found it a bit hard to stomach myself.) I've already praised "The Lammas Worm" by Nina Allan in my review of Strange Stories 3, but I was happy to re-read it here, and John Langan's "Technicolour" is something I thought I'd never see: a story about a passage in Edgar Allan Poe's life that's actually good and scary and free of steampunk bollocks.
There are some clunkers as well, of course. "Wendigo" by Micaela Morrissette is an example of that most dreary of subgenres, food horror, and has nothing to do with the Native American myth that I could see. "The End of Everything" by Steve Eller is typical bad apocalypse fiction with an uninspiring serial killer thrown in, and "The Gaze Dogs of Nine Waterfall " by Kaaron Warren is a hopelessly crude story relying entirely on animal cruelty for its emotional charge, which is just lazy if you ask me. But on the whole, this is a quality collection.
So there you have it - for my money, you'd do best buying Volume 2 and leaving Volume 1 well alone this year. It's a shame Datlow felt the need to stretch to two volumes and didn't just put out one anthology composed of the best stories of both volumes, as that would've been terrific!
