The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2016

The 2016 volume of The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror is a strong one, as almost all the stories have some value. The first half-dozen or so are extremely good, starting off with "Sing Me Your Scars," by Damien Angelica Walters, which is kind of a riff on Frankenstein, as a mad scientist stitches together a perfect woman. That's followed by "There Is No Place for Sorrow in the Kingdom," a very eerie story about a woman who cares more about her doll collection than anything else, with pretty good reason, it turns out.

There are a couple of Lovecraftian stories. "Windows Underwater," by John Shirley, alludes to the human/fish hybrids, while a drolly funny "The Deepwater Bride," by Tamsyn Muir, sees Lovecraft's gods among suburban teenagers. It kicks off, "In the time of our crawling Night Lord’s ascendancy, foretold by exodus of starlight into his sucking astral wounds, I turned sixteen and received Barbie’s Dream Car."

There are some mystery homages, too. "The Street of the Dead House," by Robert Lopresti, is "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" from the orangutan's perspective, and my favorite story in the collection is "Ripper," which is really a novella, which creates a character involved in the Jack the Ripper case. I'm a sucker for anything to do with Saucy Jack, and the author, Angela Slatter, is creative by making the character a woman disguising herself as a man to be a policeman. If I were a director I'd want to make it into a film.

Other good stories are "1Up," by Holly Black, which is about old-fashioned computer games, you know the ones you typed in a response and the computer gave you options? "The Greyness," by Kathryn Ptacek, is about Mary Wollstonecraft, and a mysterious woman in gray who watches over her, and the last story, "Corpsemouth," by John Langan, about a Scottish legend.

There are a few clinkers. Kaiju maximus® 'So Various, So Beautiful, So New'" by Kai Ashante Wilson, has a complicated title and I couldn't make heads or tails of it so I had to quit it. "The Lily and the Horn" is a fantasy that is so steeped in cliches, like unicorns, that I could only roll my eyes at it. Here's an example:"The ladies will bring the peacock soup, laced with belladonna and serpent’s milk, and the men...of Mithridatium, of the country of Yew, will stir it with spoons carved from the bones of a white stag," Not for me.

But overall this book bats about ,800, a good showing, and credit to editor Paula Guran.