Ellen Datlow - Best Horror of the Year Volume One

I look forward to reading your comments, John. I must admit I haven't read or bought a "Best Horror" collection for many, many years - nor felt tempted to do so. The last couple I attempted I abandoned.

Ok here we go:

Cargo - E. Michael Lewis. Sergeant Davis takes care of the cargo on military aircraft. His latest mission is to fly with a crew to a place in Guyana called Jonestown that's been the scene of a huge tragedy and bring back a planeload of coffins. What he's not told is that the coffins are those of children. Soon the cargo hold is packed with little metal boxes and from the sound of the thumping noises coming from one of them it seems that even though the children are dead they still want to play...

You do need a story with some good horrific imagery to open an anthology I think and this one actually delivers the goods, plus there's a lovely scary atmosphere when Davis pauses in the flight hold because he think he can hear the children singing from their metal coffins. Doing this pulpstyle might have made for a more fun Dawn of the Dead style romp but this is still pretty good, and is only let down (for me, and probably only because I'm such a cynical bastard) by the end bit which is a 'dedication to all the families who lost loved ones at the Jonestown massacre etc etc' which feels to me like hitting you over the head with a mallet messagewise (surely that's obvious from the story? And if it isn't haven't you just a teensy weensy bit failed?) but also feels like the author is just emphasizing that this story is, like, you know, award worthy. God I'm horrible sometimes, aren't I? And I actually liked this one!

If Angels Fight - Richard Bowes. It couldn't last. Second story in and here we have the loooong tedious drawn out tale of an angel that can move from body to body and influence people in not at all scary ways in a not at all horror story. Awful. Avoid.

The Clay Party - Steve Duffy. And then the Duffster comes in and raises the quality bar with one of the best (in all aspects of the word) horror stories I've read in ages. Effortlessly combining the Wild West, cannibalism and werewolves in such a way that the whole thing reads just beautifully I have to take my hat off to the man for writing a story that's as horrific as it is touching. It puts Wordsworth's The Werewolf Pack at the top of my reading pile. well done

The Hodag - Trent Hergenrader. Mythical beast threatens hick American town. A well-written 'beastie kills the locals' story that builds nicely, and the monster itself is great.

Very Low-Flying Aircraft - Nicholas Royle. On Zanzibar bored air force pilots 'buzz' (ie fly very low to) the beach. On one such flight, trying to impress a couple of nurses, our pilot chums don't realise one of their colleagues has climbed onto a lorry and...you can guess the rest.

When the Gentlemen Go By - Margaret Ronald. The town of the Hollow enjoys health, wealth and prosperity but only at the expense of sacrificing the odd child now and then. One woman decides she's had enough and faces the evil 'gentlemen' in a pleasant enough 'mythical horror' tale.

Thanks for the tip about the Duffy story, which was indeed excellent. Or rather, excellent up until the final twist, which has a tacked-on feeling to it. And how exactly did Elizabeth manage to write that letter to her daughter?

Interesting review John. Regarding the worthy dedications in Lewis' Cargo - which is a clever premise and sounds rather good - there's a great link on how to win an Oscar here

www.mutantreviewers.com/rjg11.html

This applies to stories too of course and it seems surprisingly that Crabs might be a bit of a no go area if one wants that coveted award...

The Lagerstätte - Laird Barron. I think that Laird Barron writes beautifully and this tale is no exception. It also has some terrific ideas - "there exists a certain quality of grief so utterly profound, so tragically pure, that...it's the key to a kind of limbo". Unfortunately I also found that some of the tales in his debut collection 'The Imago Sequence' had endings that petered out rather than brought the ideas they were developing to a climax and sadly I found the same with this. I thought the fairly long tale of wife Danni coping with the deaths of her husband and child and getting involved in all kinds of strangeness deserved to have a punchier ending. Oh , and this story wins my award for "sentence in the book that tries ever so hard to be clever but shoots itself in the foot by actually being very silly indeed" with this one that ends : "...when she was young and vital and untouched by the twin melanomas of wisdom and grief."

Harry and the Monkey - Euan Harvey. Oh this is lovely - quite lovely. Four year old Harry has an imaginary monkey friend who saves him from predatory paedos on the streets of Bangkok. Heartwarming horror done really well - I was left with a little warm glow after this one.

Dress Circle - Miranda Siemienowicz. Self-indulgent random nightmare imagery stuff which if it works for you, fine but I'm swiftly moving onto:

The Rising River - Daniel Kaysen. A literary version of 'Spot the Loony'. I can't explain much more about the plot or it will give it away but I did like this one, and the twist is fun.

Sweeney Among the Straight Razors -JoSelle Vanderhooft. Poetry, so anything I say will be without the benefit of any experience or patience and consequently will probably be grossly unfair. In fact I tend to skip these as I never really get the point of them. Hey - at least I'm honest

Loup-garou - R.B. Russell. Lost French films, werewolves and weirdness from Ray. This is another goodie and if nothing else reading this anthology means I'm going to start The Werewolf Pack once I get my hands on it. Another one that's seriously recommended.

I think I'm in a very small minority of readers in finding the Imago Sequence a great let down. I'd read so many rave reviews, many from on-line friends with tastes that generally overlap with mine that perhaps my expectations were too high.

I'd agree that LB writes well, but I found this book mired in the Lumley/Fu Manchu approach to horror. Gloating great old ones explaining their aeons long plots of malice against humanity for me undermines the Lovecraftian approach to horror with its alien entities indifferent to the fate of that sideshow called humanity. (Not that anyone should be obliged to follow HPL, but almost all the praise I read saw LB an the new leader in Lovecraftian fiction).

I also found that a number of the stories seemed to be basically the same tale from a slightly different point of vies: a different set of hardmen type soon-to-be-victims, or sometimes reluctant associates of the thug types. The hardmen out of their depth angle was another element that was noted in many reviews, but it didn't work for me. This seemed like the typical Hollywood approach of establishing the ultra-touch credentials of the (ex?)marines e.g. at the start of Aliens or myriad other movies that just I never find convincing (Hollywood tough guys always look and sound like cartoons to me).

IIRC I thought the longer tales were generally better than the shorter ones and I might have made the mistake of reading the shorter tales first, skewing my appreciation of the collection.

On the whole the book read to me like superior gaming fiction. If I'd read these stories years back in an anthology of horror role playing inspired fiction I think I'd have been blown away and thought "this guy is too good to be writing in this sub-sub-genre", but reading the collection as a mainstream horror collection after months of very enthusiastic newsgroup posts and reviews from good friends I just couldn't see that the book lived up to the hype. Maybe if I'd picked the book up sooner before hearing so much praise...

Sorry. Laird seems like a very likable guy too.

- Chris