The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror : Fourteenth Annual Edition

For more than a decade, readers have turned to The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror to find the most rewarding fantastic short stories. The critically acclaimed and award-winning tradition continues with another stunning collection, including stories by Jack Cady, Ramsey Campbell, Susanna Clarke, Jack Dann, Terry Dowling, Dennis Etchison, Greer Gilman, Nalo Hopkinson, Kelly Link, Kathe Koja, Paul J. McAuley, Delia Sherman. Rounding out the volume are the editors' invaluable overviews of the year in fantasy and horror, and a long list of Honorable Mentions, making this an indispensable reference as well as the best reading available in fantasy and horror.

From Publishers Weekly

There are other annual "best" collections of fantasy and horror combined, but this long-running series of short fiction and poetry, with exhaustive summations of both fields for the year 2000, tops them all. Editors Datlow and Windling have scoured not only magazines and anthologies devoted to these genres but also general and small-press publications. So a handful of mainstream authors pop up (Louise Erdrich, Stewart O'Nan, etc.), along with a host of American and British writers familiar to genre fans (Ramsey Campbell, Harlan Ellison, Tanith Lee, Neil Gaiman, etc.). If few of the more than 50 eclectic stories and poems are outstanding, they are all worthy. More sketches than tales are Steve Resnic Tem and Melanie Tem's fantastical "The Man on the Ceiling" and Greer Gilman's poetic "Jack Daw's Pack." Jack Dann's "Marilyn" proves the film star should be given a moratorium. Fine folk tales by Erdrich, Claudia Barbosa Nogueira and Nalo Hopkinson demonstrate the value of brevity. Jack Ketchum is painfully and unusually poignant in a brief story of loss, "Gone," while Campbell satirically points up the inadequacies of specialty publishers in "No Story in It." And the late Howard Wandrei's tale of jealousy and revenge, "George Is All Right," is as creepy as they come. This anthology is an essential volume for anyone who values quality in fantasy and horror today. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

The fourteenth in this annual series is, compared with some of its predecessors and its editors' other collaborations, uninspired. Among its 150,000 words of fiction are good Harlan Ellison, Ramsey Campbell, Charles de Lint, and Esther Friesner stories and some respectable efforts by lesser-known writers, but the rest is notably less good. This last may be the result of too many stories focused on a particular situation: the odd person or place amid the mundane urban environment, whose oddness and identity normal folk come to realize too late. De Lint is, if not the inventor, a master of that setup in psychological fantasy, as his story demonstrates. But there aren't enough of his peers to fill a volume this big without turning it into more of a theme anthology than it already is or, given that it is ostensibly an annual overview of fantasy and horror, should be. It is still recommendable, but look out for other anthologies covering other corners of its field. Roland GreenCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About the Author

Ellen Datlow is the acclaimed editor of such anthologies as Sirens and other Daemon Lovers (with Terri Windling), Lethal Kisses, Off Limits, and Endangered Species, and has won the World Fantasy Award six times. She lives in New York City and currently edits fiction for SCIFI.COM.Terri Windling won the Mythopoeic Award for her first adult novel, The Wood Wife. She has edited numerous books and anthologies, including The Essential Bordertown and Silver Birch, Blood Moon, the most recent in a series of contemporary fairy tale anthologies, edited with Ellen Datlow. Honored six times with the World Fantasy Award, she divides her time between Devon, England, and Tucson, Arizona.

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