Inferno: New Tales of Terror and the Supernatural » (Reprint)

Ellen Datlow is a winner of two Bram Stoker Awards, seven World Fantasy Awards, and the Hugo Award for Best Editor. In a career spanning more than twenty-five years, she has been the long-time fiction editor of Omni and more recently the fiction editor of SciFi.com. She has edited many successful anthologies, including Blood Is Not Enough, A Whisper of Blood, and, with Terri Windling, Snow White, Blood Red and the rest of their Fairy Tales series. She has also edited the Year's Best Fantasy and Horror series, The Green Man, and, for younger readers, The Wolf at the Door and Swan Sister. Ellen Datlow lives in Manhattan.

Multiple World Fantasy and Bram Stoker Award-winning editor Ellen Datlow presents twenty original tales of terror

Publishers Weekly

Datlow (The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror) makes a solid claim to being the premiere horror editor of her generation with this state-of-the-art anthology of 20 new stories by some of horror fiction's best and brightest. Several outstanding selections feature imperiled children and explore the horrific potential of childhood fears, among them Glen Hirshberg's "The Janus Tree," which gives a creepy supernatural spin to a poignant memoir of adolescent angst and alienation, and Stephen Gallagher's "Misadventure," in which a young man's near-death experience as a child endows him as an adult with consoling insight into the afterlife. The compilation's variety of approaches and moods is exemplary, ranging from the natural supernaturalism of Laird Barron's cosmic horror tale "The Forest," to the unsettling psychological horror of Lucius Shepard's "The Ease with Which We Freed the Beast"; the metaphysical terrors of Conrad Williams's "Perhaps the Last"; and the slapstick grotesquerie of K.W. Jeter's black comedy "Riding Bitch." If this book can be taken as a gauge of the vitality of imagination in contemporary horror fiction, then the genre is very healthy indeed. (Dec.)

Introduction • Ellen Datlow Riding Bitch • K.W. Jeter Misadventure • Stephen Gallagher The Forest • Laird Barron The Monsters of Heaven • Nathan Ballingrud Inelastic Collisions • Elizabeth Bear The Uninvited • Christopher Fowler

13 O'clock • Mike O'Driscoll Lives • John Grant Ghorla • Mark Samuels Face • Joyce Carol Oates An Apiary of White Bees • Lee Thomas The Keeper • P. D. Cacek Bethany's Wood • Paul Finch The Ease With Which We Freed The Beast Lucius Shepard Hushabye • Simon Bestwick Perhaps the Last • Conrad Williams Stilled Life • Pat Cadigan The Janus Tree • Glen Hirshberg The Bedroom Light • Jeffrey Ford The Suits at Auderlene • Terry Dowling