Haunted Legends (2010) edited by Ellen Datlow and Nick Mamatas

Haunted Legends (2010) edited by Ellen Datlow and Nick Mamatas, containing the following stories:

Knickerbocker Holiday by Richard Bowes
That Girl by Kaaron Warren
Akbar by Kit Reed 
The Spring Heel by Steven Pirie
As Red as Red by Caitlín R. Kiernan 
Tin Cans by Ekaterina Sedia
Shoebox Train Wreck by John Mantooth
Fifteen Panels Depicting the Sadness of the Baku and the Jotai by Catherynne M. Valente
La Llorona by Carolyn Turgeon
Face Like a Monkey by Carrie Laben 
Down Atsion Road by Jeffrey Ford
Return to Mariabronn by Gary A. Braunbeck
Following Double-Face Woman by Erzebet YellowBoy
Oaks Park by M. K. Hobson
For Those in Peril on the Sea by Stephen Dedman
The Foxes by Lily Hoang
The Redfield Girls by Laird Barron
Between Heaven and Hull by Pat Cadigan
Chucky Comes to Liverpool by Ramsey Campbell
The Folding Man by Joe R. Lansdale 


An interesting idea for an anthology -- writers riff on personal, local, urban or even culture-wide legends -- yields mixed results. Many of the stories float away on New Weird tropes that include lack of closure, excessive cuteness, and excessive (indeed, obsessively so) obscurity. The best stories here offer up their legends, no matter how odd or obscure, straightforwardly. Some of the less successful stories remind one of Henry James' old dictum -- "Write a dream, lose a reader."

I inadvertently applied a 'Test to Destruction' protocol on this anthology as I set it aside for three months. Coming back to it, I soon discovered that I'd already read more stories than I believed: many of them had simply vanished from memory until I encountered them again. That's not an endorsement.

As to the good...

• "The Folding Man" by Joe R. Lansdale is brilliant, weird, gory, and absolutely of a piece with Lansdale's often brilliant, weird, and gory writing career. 
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• "Chucky Comes to Liverpool" by Ramsey Campbell takes on censorship in a riff on real-world events in his native Liverpool. 
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• "The Redfield Girls" by Laird Barron is a subtle and disturbing tale of a real lake in Washington State, with real events mixed in with the fictional ones. Caitlin Kiernan, Gary Braunbeck, and Jeffrey Ford also do commendable work here. 
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• "For Those in Peril on the Sea" by Stephen Dedman misses by that much -- that much being a developed ending rather than a sudden shift into a coy truncation of the story. 

For two bucks, Haunted Legends was a good buy. At full price, though, the book should be avoided -- the best stories are all available in other, better collections and anthologies now. Lightly recommended.

Lovecraft Unbound: 20 Stories (2008): edited by Ellen Datlow.

Lovecraft Unbound: 20 Stories (2008): edited by Ellen Datlow.


I think this anthology, which consists of 16 new stories and 4 reprints, is the award-winning, veteran editor Datlow's finest anthology. It's not all killer, but there is no filler. Many of the stories that first appeared in this anthology have already been anthologized several more times since Lovecraft Unbound appeared in 2008. Highly recommended overall.

• "The Crevasse" by Nathan Ballingrud and Dale Bailey: Antarctic setting recalls HPL's At the Mountains of Madness, but this effective and low-key (in a supernatural sense) story also riffs on "Who Goes There?," the basis for The Thing movies.
• "The Office of Doom" by Richard Bowes: Never order the Necronomicon on an Inter-Library Loan. Just don't.
• "Sincerely, Petrified" by Anna Tambour: Elliptical tale of fictional myths attached to... The Petrified Forest? Yes. Unusual and very enjoyable.
• "The Din of Celestial Birds" (1997) by Brian Evenson: Interesting but a bit too murky for my tastes.
• "The Tenderness of Jackals" by Amanda Downum: Writers really get entranced by the idea of making HPL's ghouls into a fully realized society. Not a bad story, but crippled by those tricky ghouls, who have frustrated many a writer.
• "Sight Unseen" by Joel Lane: Moody, low-key riff on HPL's "The Shadow Out of Time."
• "Cold Water Survival" by Holly Phillips: Very science fictiony and of-the-moment as Global Warming releases monsters. Nebulous, Swiss-Army-Knife monsters when it comes to their skill-sets, which are too vast and ill-defined to allow me to suspend disbelief beyond page 3.
• "Come Lurk with Me and Be My Love" by William Browning Spencer: Another entry in Spencer's often serio-comic explorations of Lovecraftian themes and variations as seen in the terrific novels Resume with Monsters and Irrational Fears.
• "Houses Under the Sea" (2006) by Caitlin R. Kiernan: A solid mix of first-person narration and pseudo-documentary collage dissipates with the big reveal, which is amazingly underwhelming.
• "Machines of Concrete Light and Dark" by Michael Cisco: Creepy bit of philosophical horror; slight but solid.
• "Leng" by Marc Laidlaw: Skirts the very edge of parody in its visit to Lovecraft's famous, infamous Plateau of Leng, which is not a place you want to visit. Hold the mushrooms.
• "In the Black Mill" (1997) by Michael Chabon: Chabon's story hammers on obvious parody during its first half, which is rife with winky, coy,  obvious shout-outs to various Lovecraftian names and places (a woman named Brown-Jenkin? Really?). The spell of HPL seems to overcome Chabon in the second half, as the story suddenly plays everything straight -- but the parody undoes any ability to take the story seriously while also being obvious and awfully thudding in its humour.
• "One Day, Soon" by Lavie Tidhar: Oblique, mysterious bit of cosmic horror involving a forbidden book.
• "Commencement" (2001) by Joyce Carol Oates: Deceptively light-hearted narration darkens throughout in a story that feels an awful lot like Oates doing a riff on Thomas Ligotti, who does this particular sort of thing better.
• "Vernon, Driving" by Simon Kurt Unsworth: Relationship horror with a sorrowful cosmic twist.
• "The Recruiter" by Michael Shea: Light black comedy with serious undertones ties in to several other Shea stories involving Lovecraftian beings.
• "Marya Nox" by Gemma Files: Files nails the documentary aspect of Lovecraftian horror while offering an interesting geopolitical setting for a tale of a buried church that should have remained buried.
• "Mongoose" by Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette: Unusual space opera plays with Lovecraftian names while being tonally and thematically so far from HPL that the story (one of a series) could probably do without its space-traevling Arkhamites and reconfigured Hounds of Tindalos (now complete with Linnaean taxonomy -- Pseudocanis tindalosi).
• "Catch Hell" by Laird Barron: Oddly, one of Barron's least cosmic, least Lovecraftian stories. Good for Barron would be great for almost anyone else.
• "That of Which We Speak When We Speak of the Unspeakable" by Nick Mamatas: Low-key, purposefully mundane slice-of-life from the days after the Great Old Ones rose to destroy humanity and reclaim Earth. 

The Best Horror of the Year Volume 4 (2011): edited by Ellen Datlow

The Best Horror of the Year Volume 4 (2011): edited by Ellen Datlow, containing the following stories: The Little Green God of Agony by Stephen King; Stay by Leah Bobet; The Moraine by Simon Bestwick; Blackwood's Baby by Laird Barron; Looker by David Nickle; The Show by Priya Sharma; Mulberry Boys by Margo Lanagan; Roots And All by Brian Hodge; Final Girl Theory by A. C. Wise; Omphalos by Livia Llewellyn; Dermot by Simon Bestwick; Black Feathers by Alison Littlewood; The Final Verse by Chet Williamson; In the Absence of Murdock by Terry Lamsley; You Become the Neighborhood by Glen Hirshberg; In Paris, in the Mouth of Kronos by John Langan; Little Pig by Anna Taborska; and The Ballad of Ballard and Sandrine by Peter Straub (all stories 2011):

Ellen Datlow's Best Horror anthologies tend towards an area of the horror axis in which weirdness and relationship problems are the highest values. It's not my favourite area of horror, but if it's yours, you may find Datlow's anthologies more rewarding than I do.

Certainly nothing here is badly written. The entries from Glen Hirshberg and Laird Barron are typically excellent. I like how Hirschberg lays out the long-term psychological effects of a brush with the supernatural, while Barron's world of muscular protagonists faced with an enormity of perverse, hidden horrors always gives me a kick. "Blackwood's Baby" seems like the sort of fever dream Hemingway might have had after getting punched in the mouth by Cthulhu.

The John Langan story is also good, though the ending is telegraphed all the way back to the title. Stephen King's story seems to be included solely to get King's name on the cover -- it's a curiously limp affair in which one can call all the plot points several pages before they occur and be right every time.

Peter Straub's story disappoints in a much different way. It's weird and creepy for awhile, but the eponymous couple's peculiar sexual fetish, once revealed, acts to distance one from any investment in the narrative's outcome. The ending comes several paragraphs too late, as a third-party explanation of what we've just read blunts whatever horror remained in what we'd previously read. Chet Williamson's otherwise excellent "The Final Verse" also has a problematic ending, as it veers into a sort of jokey, EC-Comics nihilism that doesn't fit the rest of the story.

Stylistically, the stories are well-written. Would I like more stories that are actually scary? Oh, yeah. I do like that Datlow includes a list of stories as 'Honourable Mentions' at the end of the volume. There's something weird and off-putting about it.  I could also probably go to the end of my days without reading another Bradburyesque story with the plot-engine removed, or another Weird Incest Tale. Weird Incest Tales: the worst fantasy magazine ever. Lightly recommended.

The 2009 Horror

The Best Horror of the Year Volume 2 (2009) edited by Ellen Datlow (2010) containing

*Lowland Sea by Suzy McKee Charnas
The End of Everything by Steve Eller
Mrs Midnight by Reggie Oliver
*each thing i show you is a piece of my death by Gemma Files and Stephen J. Barringer
*The Nimble Men by Glen Hirshberg
*What Happens When You Wake Up in the Night by Michael Marshall Smith
Wendigo by Micaela Morrissette
*In the Porches of My Ears by Norman Prentiss
Lonegan's Luck by Stephen Graham Jones
*The Crevasse by Nathan Ballingrud and Dale Bailey
The Lion's Den by Steve Duffy
Lotophagi by Edward Morris
The Gaze Dogs of Nine Waterfall by Kaaron Warren
Dead Loss by Carole Johnstone
*Strappado by Laird Barron
*The Lammas Worm by Nina Allan
*Technicolor by John Langan

Big, big improvement on the first volume of this series, with a lot more excellent stories and fewer boring ones. I've starred the high points, which run the gamut from near-future apocalypse ("Lowland Sea" by Suzy McKee Charnas) through a bad night at the movies ("In the Porches of My Ears" by Norman Prentiss) to, well, a bad night ("What Happens When You Wake Up in the Night" by Michael Marshall Smith).

The Toronto-set Gemma Files/Stephen J. Barringer story does a lovely job of combining both the structure and the content of new media with one of the oldest structures for a horror story (the epistolary format), while John Langan's story presents us with a mountingly dread-filled college classroom lecture on Poe. Recommended.

Sleepy, Hollow

The Best Horror of the Year Volume One (2008), edited by Ellen Datlow (2009) containing:

Cargo by E. Michael Lewis
If Angels Fight by Richard Bowes
The Clay Party by Steve Duffy
*Penguins of the Apocalypse by William Browning Spencer
*Esmeralda: The First Book Depository Story by Glen Hirshberg
The Hodag by Trent Hergenrader
Very Low-Flying Aircraft by Nicholas Royle
When the Gentlemen Go By by Margaret Ronald
*The Lagerstätte by Laird Barron
Harry and the Monkey by Euan Harvey
Dress Circle by Miranda Siemienowicz
The Rising River by Daniel Kaysen
Sweeney Among the Straight Razors by JoSelle Vanderhooft
Loup-garou by R. B. Russell
Girl in Pieces by Graham Edwards
It Washed Up by Joe R. Lansdale
The Thirteenth Hell by Mike Allen
The Goosle by Margo Lanagan
Beach Head by Daniel LeMoal
The Man from the Peak by Adam Golaski
The Narrows by Simon Bestwick

Being the most subjective of genres, horror lends itself to argument when 'best of' selections are made. What scares one person may make another person chortle. Based on my encounters with multiple-award-winner Ellen Datlow's horror and dark-fantasy editing, the two of us don't have particularly complementary tastes. The first volume of this 'Year's Best Horror' anthology series from Night Shade Books seems to me to be an awfully scattershot assortment of stories, with only three stories I'd pick myself for such an anthology (I've starred them, if you're interested).

On the bright side, the technical side of horror writing seems in good shape -- there's nothing badly written here. Some of the stories are dark fantasy stories that aren't particularly horrific; others use tired tropes to unnoteworthy effect; a few offer nothing in the way of endings or even adequate set-up, instead falling into the nouveau-tired school of artsy fragments possessed of a few startling images but nothing in the way of character, plot, or cumulative horrific effect. These last examples remind me of Henry James's 100+ years-old-advice to ghost-story writers: "Write a dream, lose a reader."

The inclusion of two poems doesn't really help things either, while "Beach Head" gets the Ramsey Campbell "In the Bag" award for mislabelling a horrific story with a jokey title. I note this while also noting that Campbell himself flagged himself for the "In the Bag" mistake in the introduction of one of his short-story collections.

One story -- "The Narrows" by Simon Bestwick -- is especially frustrating because it's basically two good stories smashed together to make one frustrating one, as Lovecraftian shenanigans and nuclear holocaust work together in a way that never coheres. The standout here is William Browning Spencer's "The Penguins of the Apocalypse", which uses an old (and unlikely) monster to startling, quirky effect. Spencer's horror novels and short stories generally show a mind attuned to absurdity as well as horror -- he's the closest thing the genre currently has to Philip K. Dick, and God bless him for it. Not recommended.