Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 2007: Twentieth Annual Collection » (2007 edition)

Ellen Datlow was editor of SCI FICTION, the multi award-winning fiction venue of SCIFI.COM for six years, and before that fiction editor of OMNI and OMNI.com for many years. She continues to edit anthologies for adults, young adults, and children. Her horror anthology Inferno will be out in December.

Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant started Small Beer Press in 2000. They have published the zine Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet ("Tiny, but celebrated" —Washington Post) for ten years. An anthology, The Best of Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, will be published this autumn.

Kelly Link is the author of two collections, Stranger Things Happen, and Magic For Beginners (one of Time Magazine's Best Books of the Year). Stories from her collections have won the Nebula, Hugo, World Fantasy, Tiptree, and Locus awards, and her work has recently appeared in A Public Space, Firebirds Rising, and Best American Short Stories 2005.

Originally from Scotland, Gavin J. Grant regularly reviews fantasy and science fiction. Publications where his work has appeared include Los Angeles Times, BookPage, SCI FICTION, Strange Horizons, and Salon Fantastique.

For twenty years this award-winning compilation has been the nonpareil benchmark against which all other annual fantasy and horror collections are judged. Directed first by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling and for the past four years by Datlow and Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant, it consistently presents the strangest, the funniest, the darkest, the sharpest, the most original—in short, the best fantasy and horror. The current collection, marking a score of years, offers more than forty stories and poems from almost as many sources. Summations of the field by the editors are complemented by articles by Edward Bryant, Charles de Lint, and Jeff VanderMeer, highlighting the best of the fantastic in, respectively, media, music, and comics, as well as honorable mentions—notable works that didn’t quite make the cut, but are nonetheless worthy of attention.

The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: Twentieth Annual Collection is a cornucopia of fantastic delights, an unparalleled resource and indispensable reference that captures the unique excitement and beauty of the fantastic in all its gloriously diverse forms, from the lightest fantasy to the darkest horror.

Publishers Weekly

In the two decades since this venerable series was inaugurated, so many venues have begun to welcome horror and fantasy stories that these dedicated editors play a crucial role in bringing the best new works to fans who don't always read far afield. Trend spotters will note numerous ghost stories in Datlow's horror picks, including Christopher Harman's "The Last to Be Found" and Stephen Volk's "31/10," supremely eerie exercises in the ghost-hunt-gone-bad vein, and Stephen Gallagher's "The Box" and Glen Hirshberg's "The Muldoon," whose spooks are equal parts psychological and supernatural. Link and Grant's eclectic fantasy picks range from the haunting magical realism of Geoff Ryman's Hugo- and WFA-nominated "Pol Pot's Beautiful Daughter" to the light urban fantasy of Ellen Klages's "In the House of Seven Librarians" and Jeffrey Ford's blend of whimsy and the macabre in "The Night Whiskey." As the line between fantasy and horror blurs, this combined presentation of their exemplars will give readers of both genres much to enjoy, and may even broaden a few horizons. (Oct.)