The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror

Starred review from August 16, 2021
The stellar lineup of 30 stories selected by Guran for this annual “best-of” volume attest to the imaginative breadth of dark fantastic fiction written in 2020. Victor Lavalle’s “Recognition” is a ghost story set in contemporary Manhattan during the Covid-19 pandemic. By contrast, Alix E. Harrow’s “The Sycamore and The Sybil” and Alison Littlewood’s “Swanskin” approach their explorations of gender roles through traditional fairy and folktales. Elizabeth Bear mixes the whimsical with the weird in “On Safari in R’lyeh and Carcosa with Gun and Camera,” while Brian Evenson’s “The Thickening” and Elizabeth Hand’s “The Owl Count” end with nightmarish thunderclaps of genuinely unsettling horror. The familiar weird fiction themes of the haunted house and the vampire get creative makeovers in John Wiswell’s “Open House on Haunted Hill” and Craig Laurance Gidney’s “Desiccant,” respectively, while A.C. Wise’s “To Sail the Black” and Elaine Cuyegkeng’s “The Genetic Alchemist’s Daughter” probe the relatively underexplored dark side of science fiction. There’s not a story in the mix that doesn’t merit the appellation of “best,” and the diversity of the selections bodes well for future annuals.

August 25, 2023

This is a chilling collection of 21 recently published short stories that looms in the murky borderland between fantasy and horror, filled with tales of magic and myth, monsters and legends, and things that go bump in the night and fill the heart with dread. "Red Wet Grin" by Gemma Files offers a disturbing story that combines the classic horrors of possession and body snatching with the newer horrors of COVID and dying alone in a nursing home. "Challawa" by Usman T. Malik is a stand-out story that slides from historical fantasy straight into horror and tells the tale of a woman who returns to her home on the Indian subcontinent to research old stories, only to find herself reenacting a ritual to eject foreign invaders. Two of the most haunting fantasy stories are "The Voice of a Thousand Years" by Fawaz Al Matrouk, about an educated man in an age of religious repression who spends his final energies on a mechanical creature that will carry his legacy, and "The Woman Who Married the Minotaur" by Angela Slatter, featuring the mythic minotaur from the labyrinth. VERDICT Recommended for readers who love stories guaranteed to send a frisson of wonder or fear, or both, up their spines.--Marlene Harris

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