The Best Horror of the Year, Volume 9

The ninth volume of Ellen Datlow's The Best Horror of the Year is a particularly strong one, and has Lovecraftian overtones, as a handful of stories appeared in her Children of Lovecraft connection. Therefore the stories aren't the kind that make your hair stand on end, but make your skin crawl.

Those stories are the "Bright Crown of Joy," by Livia Llewellyn, which I found difficult to get through; "Nesters," by Siobhan Carroll, about a family that stuck it out through the Dust Bowl and don't like to think about what happened to a neighboring farmer, and what I think is the best story in the whole collection, "On the Blackened Shores of Time," by Brian Hodge, which involves a young man disappearing into a sinkhole that leads his family on a quest to find himself inside an old coal mine.

Some of the stories are quite brutal, including two involving mutilated animals: "Red Rabbit," by Steve Rasnic Tem, and "What's Out There," by Gary McMahon. Animal lovers be warned. There is also a story about a serial killer who is also a necrophiliac, Peter Straub's "The Process Is a Process All It's Own." Try reading that to the kids at night. "The Days of Our Lives," by Adam LG Nevill, explores the world of sado-masochism, and "The Numbers," by Christopher Burns, is about a guy who snaps. Boy, does he snap. Don't pick on your loser brother.

Here are the other of my favorites in this collection, in no particular order: "The Oestridae," by Robert Levy, which has a couple of teenagers holding down the fort after their mother disappears and a very strange aunt show up. I love this opening: "White dust rises from the road like tobacco smoke, followed by the grinding of car wheels on dry Pennsylvania dirt as a silver compact rumbles into view, up the hill on its way to the house." "House of Wonders," by C.E. Ward, is a tale about a sleazy tourist attraction that has some deadly secrets.

"The Ice Beneath Us," by Steve Duffy, involves two ice fisherman and the secret they share, which has to do with an Indian myth (or is it?), and "The Castellmarch Man" is also about a legend, this time a Welsh one, about a man with the ears of a horse, who doesn't like them to be seen.

A few stories didn't grab me, such as "No Matter Which Way We Turned," by Brian Evenson, which is short but completely confusing, and "The Bad Hour," by Christopher Golden, which I found a bit amateurish and not up to the quality of the rest of the collection.

Still, this may be the best of the Datlow-edited books I've read. I've just started another one.