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A review by megapolisomancy
Best Horror of the Year: Volume Ten by Rebecca Lloyd, Marc E. Fitch, Mira Grant, S.P. Mikowski, Kaaron Warren, A.C. Wise, Inna Effres, David Erik Nelson, Carole Johnstone, Stephen Gallagher, Brian Hodge, Carmen Maria Machado, Orrin Grey, Kelly Robson, Sarah Read, Mark Morris, Tim Major, John Langan, Philip Fracassi, Rich Larson
4.0
Datlow's selections for the best horror stories from 2017. Has a great introduction and overview of the field for the year, and as always she mostly favors atmosphere and tone over gore and shock (thank god).
Better You Believe • Carole Johnstone
You ever have one of those days where you and your husband run a mountain-climbing business and things go horribly wrong on the descent from Annapurna? Johnstone's ruminations on psychology and the couple's relationship and the uncanny nature of the inhospitable heights pay off, but the story falters in conveying the physicality of the action (in terms of blocking and mechanics). It might have been intentional, though.
Liquid Air • Inna Effress
You ever have one of those days where you go to get a neon sign repaired and strike up a rapport with the craftsman, and meanwhile your husband has totally lost touch with reality and spends his days making and cozying up to terrifying dolls? Hazy and oneiric, and I can't claim to have made much (any?) sense of it. Fun to read if that's your thing, though, and it is indeed my thing, aside from some rather off-the-wall metaphors and similes, for which I find I have less and less patience.
Holiday Romance • Mark Morris
You ever have one of those days where you return to the beachside site of a meaningful teenage trip with your parents as your marriage dissolves and you're a real sad sack and then pieces of a human body start showing up on the shore, and the police insist after a DNA test that they're yours? Rainy, moody, restrained and Aickmanesque (until it isn't), also put me in mind of Peter Straub's absolutely fantastic "Ballad of Ballard and Sandrine." Cell phones, the bane of the modern horror story, are dismissed with the remark that our protagonist always refused to buy one. Morris is a new name to me and I look forward to finding more of his work.
Furtherest • Kaaron Warren
You ever have one of those days where you, uh, return to the beachside site of your childhood family vacations, which also happens to be the scene of some mysterious suicides and some wacky neighbors? Survivor guilt and off-putting mannequins and escalating creepiness go a long way, although I thought this one could have used some trimming, being a bit TOO much of a slow burn, but still an enjoyable read.
Where's the Harm? • Rebecca Lloyd
You ever have one of those days where you return, not to a beach, but to your childhood home so that you and your brother can prepare it for sale after your parents have passed, and the two of you have never really gotten along, and he gets sidetracked with some mysterious women in the nearby woods? A sylvan retelling of C. L. Moore's "Shambleau" with some family drama tossed in the mix, rather awkwardly told.
Whatever Comes After Calcutta • David Erik Nelson
You ever have one of those days where you're driving through Ohio on a mission of revenge with a mysterious head wound and you come across a group of MAGA sovereign citizen types holding a witch trial? Funnier than I typically like my horror to be, but it works, with a very dry approach to some zany happenings. Alienation and apathy gives way to a lesser (maybe?) evil. A truly odd and engaging sui generis story.
A Human Stain • Kelly Robson
You ever have one of those days where you're a decadent wastrel haunting the cafes of Paris until a friend lures you to a remote Bavarian estate with the promise of summer employment as an English tutor and then you stumble onto a dark family secret? Like a Djuna Barnes character wandering into a Lovecraft story ("The Rats in the Walls," particularly), but Robson is a vastly subtler author than HPL (who isn't) - here subtle hints slowly build to entirely-unsubtle gore, we get some thoughts on the old ways versus the new and relationships both sexual and familial. A rich story, such that I didn't exactly follow everything that was going on (the wires and the teeth?), but I'm eager to reread this to trace them out.
The Stories We Tell About Ghosts • A. C. Wise
You ever have one of those days where you're 12 and a little bitter over having to look out for your sickly younger brother while you and your friends play Ghost Hunt on your phones (think Pokemon Go) and, just as those apps blur the line between reality and game, the line between folk tales and reality also gets hazy and then your brother is gone? Writing about children is a dicey proposition, but Wise nails it (as she is wont to do). Likewise child abuse and domestic violence. A great, melancholy work.
Endoskeletal • Sarah Read
You ever have one of those days where you're an American researcher and you're working with Swiss academics who consider you an interloper as you all study newly exposed Alpine cave drawings and then you find a deeper, more mysterious cave and take no precautions whatsoever in dealing with its contents? There was an interesting kernel here with the paralleling of the protagonist's abnormal height (and associated lifelong self-consciousness) and the bone mutations she unwittingly unleashes, but I never got a clear picture of what was actually happening with said mutations, and even less of what the monster's deal was.
West of Matamoros, North of Hell • Brian Hodge
You ever have one of those days where you and your bandmates return to your native Mexico for a photo shoot that makes light of things it shouldn't and then run afoul of a cartel and Santa Muerte and MS-13 and Tezcatlipoca all at once? A great protagonist and an interesting reflection on the "stain" of bloodlust running from Aztec ritual sacrifices through Spanish colonialism to the cartels (at Rancho Santa Elena, specifically, site of a real-world horror), although large sections of this story were bloated with seemingly-endless descriptions of torture and gore. I can admit that it would a difficult to write a rumination on violence without including the violence.
Alligator Point • S. P. Miskowski
You ever have one of those days where you've fled your abusive husband and holed up in a rundown campground in Georgia along with your two rather bratty daughters? Maybe it isn't so hard to write a rumination on violence without including the violence. A nicely dark, downtrodden story, but, unless I missed something, not one that I would classify as horror.
Dark Warm Heart • Rich Larson
You ever have one of those days where your husband, a linguist, has just returned from a research trip he left on right after you got married, and you're pregnant, and he's changed, and because this involves the arctic it turns out to be a wendigo story? While the horror elements here are on the stock side, the love story/sacrifice powering the ending are quite effective.
There and Back Again • Carmen Maria Machado
You ever have one of those days where you're a monster, and your mom feeds you people she's seduced, and once she's gone you have no choice but to continue in her footsteps? Beautiful, evocative flash fiction about predation and revenge and loneliness and agency. I haven't figured out what it has to do with the Hobbit yet (if anything).
Shepherd's Business • Stephen Gallagher
You ever have one of those days where it's shortly after WW2 and you're a veteran, newly posted to a small island as the local GP, and there's a man dying in the hospital, and his loyal dog hanging around outside, and a recent stillbirth, and everything is clearly building to a horrific climax? A frustrating one - well-written and -constructed (presented as the doctor's recollections years later), and the domestic dramas of the island come to life convincingly, but then the rather Blochian climax just kind of deflated it- not a joke, per se, so much as just making clear that everything else existing in the story was just set dressing.
You Can Stay All Day • Seanan McGuire/Mira Grant
You ever have one of those days where there's a zombie apocalypse, and you're a zookeeper, but no, there aren't zombie animals, just zombie zookeepers? I don't know, zombies aren't my thing and this rests on the old "humans are weird, but animals make sense" trope and I just read a story by Priya Sharma that covered similar ground much more compellingly. Too much of this was the protagonist figuring out what was going on when it was clear to the reader from jump.
Harvest Song, Gathering Song • A. C. Wise
You ever have one of those days where you and several other veterans of the American invasions of the Middle East go on a mysterious mission to the arctic to find magical honey? I was thrown by this incongruous setup but, as mentioned above, Wise can be trusted to nail whatever she's reaching for, and this blossoms into a story of horror both cosmic and banal and altogether beautiful and sublime outside of time and space. Like "The Stories We Tell About Ghosts," concerned with the intersecting of multiple stories, suggesting a wider world beyond the specific confines of this narrative. I have to mention that it reminded me of the Futurama episode "The Sting," one of my all-time favorite things.
The Granfalloon • Orrin Grey
You ever have one of those days where an ex, now a professor, invites you to give a guest lecture on occult structures, and then you tag along with her and some students to break into a local condemned movie theater that just might be a psychomanteum? Focused, like Gemma Files's excellent Experimental Film, on early films breaching the liminal walls between our world and others, but where Files was looking at the film itself Grey is more interested in the audience and the built environment housing their viewing. Nicely moody (suffused with static and emptiness), but more understated than I expected. Probably deserves a reread.
Fail-Safe • Philip Fracassi
You ever have one of those days where you're 12, and your mom, like many others, is infected with something ("Like vampires or zombies, but real"), and your dad has built a special room to restrain her when the rage comes, with a variety of fail-safes to protect you from her? A very nice one, taking some familiar horror elements in an interesting direction and wrapping a coming-of-age story (which I usually hate!) into a Schrodinger's cat dilemma.
The Starry Crown • Marc E. Fitch
You ever have one of those days where you're a Yankee and you head to South Carolina to research a folk song and you encounter the remnants of citizens' councils and find that southern white Christianity is a cover for something (more) sinister? "Sticks" plus an indictment of racism plus folk horror plus an examination of a cultural artifact (song) should, in theory, be right up my alley. In practice it was underwhelming, clunky on both prose and structural levels all the way down to a truly groan-worthy ending.
Eqalussuaq • Tim Major
You ever have one of those days where you're finally reunited with your six-year-old after spending three months away in Baffin Bay as an audio engineer on a documentary, and as you examine your recordings details slowly unfold about your encounter there with a monstrous Greenland shark and the sounds that have followed you home? This kind of slow, after-the-fact unfolding, floating in and out of the past and present, always appeals to me, and when you combine that with the uncanny arctic depths and unsettling noises you have a real winning formula. Also tinnitus, just to make it really hit close to home.
Lost in the Dark • John Langan
You ever have one of those days where you're John Langan, author and professor at a real SUNY school, and you write a story narrated by John Langan, journalist and professor at a fictional SUNY school, who's interviewing an old student on the tenth anniversary of a cult classic horror movie she made, suspiciously reminiscent of the Blair Witch Project, perhaps fictional, a remake/reworking of a previous documentary she attempted to make, not fictional(?), and it's Halloween, and what is fiction, anyway? A chunk of this story is (fantastically) presented as the IMDB summary/discussion of the best scenes of the movie. Absolutely masterful.
Better You Believe • Carole Johnstone
You ever have one of those days where you and your husband run a mountain-climbing business and things go horribly wrong on the descent from Annapurna? Johnstone's ruminations on psychology and the couple's relationship and the uncanny nature of the inhospitable heights pay off, but the story falters in conveying the physicality of the action (in terms of blocking and mechanics). It might have been intentional, though.
Liquid Air • Inna Effress
You ever have one of those days where you go to get a neon sign repaired and strike up a rapport with the craftsman, and meanwhile your husband has totally lost touch with reality and spends his days making and cozying up to terrifying dolls? Hazy and oneiric, and I can't claim to have made much (any?) sense of it. Fun to read if that's your thing, though, and it is indeed my thing, aside from some rather off-the-wall metaphors and similes, for which I find I have less and less patience.
Holiday Romance • Mark Morris
You ever have one of those days where you return to the beachside site of a meaningful teenage trip with your parents as your marriage dissolves and you're a real sad sack and then pieces of a human body start showing up on the shore, and the police insist after a DNA test that they're yours? Rainy, moody, restrained and Aickmanesque (until it isn't), also put me in mind of Peter Straub's absolutely fantastic "Ballad of Ballard and Sandrine." Cell phones, the bane of the modern horror story, are dismissed with the remark that our protagonist always refused to buy one. Morris is a new name to me and I look forward to finding more of his work.
Furtherest • Kaaron Warren
You ever have one of those days where you, uh, return to the beachside site of your childhood family vacations, which also happens to be the scene of some mysterious suicides and some wacky neighbors? Survivor guilt and off-putting mannequins and escalating creepiness go a long way, although I thought this one could have used some trimming, being a bit TOO much of a slow burn, but still an enjoyable read.
Where's the Harm? • Rebecca Lloyd
You ever have one of those days where you return, not to a beach, but to your childhood home so that you and your brother can prepare it for sale after your parents have passed, and the two of you have never really gotten along, and he gets sidetracked with some mysterious women in the nearby woods? A sylvan retelling of C. L. Moore's "Shambleau" with some family drama tossed in the mix, rather awkwardly told.
Whatever Comes After Calcutta • David Erik Nelson
You ever have one of those days where you're driving through Ohio on a mission of revenge with a mysterious head wound and you come across a group of MAGA sovereign citizen types holding a witch trial? Funnier than I typically like my horror to be, but it works, with a very dry approach to some zany happenings. Alienation and apathy gives way to a lesser (maybe?) evil. A truly odd and engaging sui generis story.
A Human Stain • Kelly Robson
You ever have one of those days where you're a decadent wastrel haunting the cafes of Paris until a friend lures you to a remote Bavarian estate with the promise of summer employment as an English tutor and then you stumble onto a dark family secret? Like a Djuna Barnes character wandering into a Lovecraft story ("The Rats in the Walls," particularly), but Robson is a vastly subtler author than HPL (who isn't) - here subtle hints slowly build to entirely-unsubtle gore, we get some thoughts on the old ways versus the new and relationships both sexual and familial. A rich story, such that I didn't exactly follow everything that was going on (the wires and the teeth?), but I'm eager to reread this to trace them out.
The Stories We Tell About Ghosts • A. C. Wise
You ever have one of those days where you're 12 and a little bitter over having to look out for your sickly younger brother while you and your friends play Ghost Hunt on your phones (think Pokemon Go) and, just as those apps blur the line between reality and game, the line between folk tales and reality also gets hazy and then your brother is gone? Writing about children is a dicey proposition, but Wise nails it (as she is wont to do). Likewise child abuse and domestic violence. A great, melancholy work.
Endoskeletal • Sarah Read
You ever have one of those days where you're an American researcher and you're working with Swiss academics who consider you an interloper as you all study newly exposed Alpine cave drawings and then you find a deeper, more mysterious cave and take no precautions whatsoever in dealing with its contents? There was an interesting kernel here with the paralleling of the protagonist's abnormal height (and associated lifelong self-consciousness) and the bone mutations she unwittingly unleashes, but I never got a clear picture of what was actually happening with said mutations, and even less of what the monster's deal was.
West of Matamoros, North of Hell • Brian Hodge
You ever have one of those days where you and your bandmates return to your native Mexico for a photo shoot that makes light of things it shouldn't and then run afoul of a cartel and Santa Muerte and MS-13 and Tezcatlipoca all at once? A great protagonist and an interesting reflection on the "stain" of bloodlust running from Aztec ritual sacrifices through Spanish colonialism to the cartels (at Rancho Santa Elena, specifically, site of a real-world horror), although large sections of this story were bloated with seemingly-endless descriptions of torture and gore. I can admit that it would a difficult to write a rumination on violence without including the violence.
Alligator Point • S. P. Miskowski
You ever have one of those days where you've fled your abusive husband and holed up in a rundown campground in Georgia along with your two rather bratty daughters? Maybe it isn't so hard to write a rumination on violence without including the violence. A nicely dark, downtrodden story, but, unless I missed something, not one that I would classify as horror.
Dark Warm Heart • Rich Larson
You ever have one of those days where your husband, a linguist, has just returned from a research trip he left on right after you got married, and you're pregnant, and he's changed, and because this involves the arctic it turns out to be a wendigo story? While the horror elements here are on the stock side, the love story/sacrifice powering the ending are quite effective.
There and Back Again • Carmen Maria Machado
You ever have one of those days where you're a monster, and your mom feeds you people she's seduced, and once she's gone you have no choice but to continue in her footsteps? Beautiful, evocative flash fiction about predation and revenge and loneliness and agency. I haven't figured out what it has to do with the Hobbit yet (if anything).
Shepherd's Business • Stephen Gallagher
You ever have one of those days where it's shortly after WW2 and you're a veteran, newly posted to a small island as the local GP, and there's a man dying in the hospital, and his loyal dog hanging around outside, and a recent stillbirth, and everything is clearly building to a horrific climax? A frustrating one - well-written and -constructed (presented as the doctor's recollections years later), and the domestic dramas of the island come to life convincingly, but then the rather Blochian climax just kind of deflated it- not a joke, per se, so much as just making clear that everything else existing in the story was just set dressing.
You Can Stay All Day • Seanan McGuire/Mira Grant
You ever have one of those days where there's a zombie apocalypse, and you're a zookeeper, but no, there aren't zombie animals, just zombie zookeepers? I don't know, zombies aren't my thing and this rests on the old "humans are weird, but animals make sense" trope and I just read a story by Priya Sharma that covered similar ground much more compellingly. Too much of this was the protagonist figuring out what was going on when it was clear to the reader from jump.
Harvest Song, Gathering Song • A. C. Wise
You ever have one of those days where you and several other veterans of the American invasions of the Middle East go on a mysterious mission to the arctic to find magical honey? I was thrown by this incongruous setup but, as mentioned above, Wise can be trusted to nail whatever she's reaching for, and this blossoms into a story of horror both cosmic and banal and altogether beautiful and sublime outside of time and space. Like "The Stories We Tell About Ghosts," concerned with the intersecting of multiple stories, suggesting a wider world beyond the specific confines of this narrative. I have to mention that it reminded me of the Futurama episode "The Sting," one of my all-time favorite things.
The Granfalloon • Orrin Grey
You ever have one of those days where an ex, now a professor, invites you to give a guest lecture on occult structures, and then you tag along with her and some students to break into a local condemned movie theater that just might be a psychomanteum? Focused, like Gemma Files's excellent Experimental Film, on early films breaching the liminal walls between our world and others, but where Files was looking at the film itself Grey is more interested in the audience and the built environment housing their viewing. Nicely moody (suffused with static and emptiness), but more understated than I expected. Probably deserves a reread.
Fail-Safe • Philip Fracassi
You ever have one of those days where you're 12, and your mom, like many others, is infected with something ("Like vampires or zombies, but real"), and your dad has built a special room to restrain her when the rage comes, with a variety of fail-safes to protect you from her? A very nice one, taking some familiar horror elements in an interesting direction and wrapping a coming-of-age story (which I usually hate!) into a Schrodinger's cat dilemma.
The Starry Crown • Marc E. Fitch
You ever have one of those days where you're a Yankee and you head to South Carolina to research a folk song and you encounter the remnants of citizens' councils and find that southern white Christianity is a cover for something (more) sinister? "Sticks" plus an indictment of racism plus folk horror plus an examination of a cultural artifact (song) should, in theory, be right up my alley. In practice it was underwhelming, clunky on both prose and structural levels all the way down to a truly groan-worthy ending.
Eqalussuaq • Tim Major
You ever have one of those days where you're finally reunited with your six-year-old after spending three months away in Baffin Bay as an audio engineer on a documentary, and as you examine your recordings details slowly unfold about your encounter there with a monstrous Greenland shark and the sounds that have followed you home? This kind of slow, after-the-fact unfolding, floating in and out of the past and present, always appeals to me, and when you combine that with the uncanny arctic depths and unsettling noises you have a real winning formula. Also tinnitus, just to make it really hit close to home.
Lost in the Dark • John Langan
You ever have one of those days where you're John Langan, author and professor at a real SUNY school, and you write a story narrated by John Langan, journalist and professor at a fictional SUNY school, who's interviewing an old student on the tenth anniversary of a cult classic horror movie she made, suspiciously reminiscent of the Blair Witch Project, perhaps fictional, a remake/reworking of a previous documentary she attempted to make, not fictional(?), and it's Halloween, and what is fiction, anyway? A chunk of this story is (fantastically) presented as the IMDB summary/discussion of the best scenes of the movie. Absolutely masterful.