The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2014

This is my first time reading a volume of The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror and I'm hooked. Editor Paula Guran has assembled several spooky tales from across the span of the genre--whether it be ghost stories, vampires, werewolves, or sword-and-sorcery fantasy, this collection has it. While some of the stories are just okay, more than enough of them were terrific.

Possibly the most horrific story is "Blue Amber," by David J. Schow, which starts when police are called to investigate a human skin attached to a barbed-wire fence. They find themselves confronted by body-snatching insectoid beings. It reads like an episode of The Outer Limits, and it's not a coincidence, as Schow has written a book about that show. "In the movies, monsters who upset the status quo were always defeated by something ordinary and obvious, usually discovered by accident--seawater, dog whistles, paprika, Slim Whitman music. In movies, the salvational curative was always set up in the first act as a throwaway, sure to encore later with deeper meaning."

Another of my favorites is "Phosphorous" by Veronica Schanoes, about a nineteenth-century girl working in match factory. It's based on history--these girls frequently came down with cancer of the jaw. The girl in this story is helped by Irish grandmother, who has some magic that may reverse the sickness. For you werewolf fans, I highly recommend "To Die for Moonlight," by Sarah Monette, in which a librarian finds himself in a household with a family of the "cursed." Monette knows how to write an opening sentence: "I cut her head off before I buried her." Who can resist continuing to read a story that starts like that?

A story that will be popular with old film buffs is "The Creature Recants," which is a very clever piece that imagines that the star of The Creature from the Black Lagoon was an actual fish-man caught in the Amazon, not a guy in a rubber suit: "To think, he'd once been the king of his little world--the vast, dark lagoon, overhung with the boughs of enormous trees, and the mighty Amazon itself, where anacondas slithered through the algae-clotted water, caiman slid into the flood without a splash, their tails lashing, and catfish the size of Chevrolets trolled the mossy bottom...And here he was in Southern California instead, spending his days in waist-deep water and sleeping his nights in an oversized bathtub in a crummy apartment." The creature will end up falling in love with his co-star, Julie Adams, and taking career advice from Boris Karloff. It's my favorite in the book.

For mystery lovers there's "The Gruesome Affair of the Electric Blue Lightning (From the Files of Auguste Dupin)." Yes, this is a pastiche of Edgar Allan Poe's Dupin character. I've read many of these using Sherlock Holmes, but this story by Joe R. Lansdale is the first of this type that I've come across. As with "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," it deals with a simian, and a real-life scientist who lived in the Castle Frankenstein.

I've got two candidates for the creepiest story of the collection. One is "Event Horizon," by Sunny Moraine, which deals with some kids and a house that eats things. The other is "Dark Gardens," by Greg Kurzawa, a very chilling story about a man who moves into a dead magician's house and finds strange things, including an underwater cavern underneath the house. I'm not sure what was going on here--a lot of it involved mannequins, but I found myself spooked by it.

There are many other good stories, and just a few clunkers that I won't bother mentioning. For fans of this type of story, it's a great source of thrills and chills.