Reviews

Best New Horror #30 by Christopher Harman, Reggie Oliver, Stephen Jones, Alison Littlewood, Daniel McGachey, James Wade, Ken MacKenzie, Rosalie Parker, Kim Newman, Brian Hodge, Ramsey Campbell, Simon Kurt Unsworth, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Mark Samuels, Thana Niveau, Peter Bell, Michael Chislett, Rio Youers, John Langan, Michael Marshall Smith, Tracy Fahey, Graham Masterton, Damien Angelica Walters, Nicholas Royle

alexauthorshay's review

3.0

I haven't read one of these before so I wasn't really sure what to expect. It's a brick of a book, but the first 1/5 is all the new things that have come out related to horror in the past year--though things like The Incredibles 2 were listed in here and I don't really understand why. I skimmed this for some novels that sounded interesting, but it covers everything from movies to music to video games. The last 1/5 is then a listing of all the people in the horror field in some way who have passed in the previous year. So only 3/5 is actually stories, and there are 20 of them, making the stories on the slightly longer side but manageable.

I'm a little disappointed because I was hoping for more unique stuff. Many of these stories played on typical things you would find in horror books, though mainly hauntings and ghost related things. I found it very hardcore in the sense that these stories followed the standard/generic genre pretty much to a T, offering nothing I haven't seen before and nothing all that inspiring or off-putting either. The only thing that really stood out to me was a graveyard in one story that was so full they had to bury bodies on top of each other and the graves were thus so shallow that heavy rains washed bones into the streets. That's (shockingly) about as grim as it gets in the whole book.