Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 2008: 21st Annual Collection » (First Edition)

ELLEN DATLOW, winner of multiple World Fantasy, Stoker, and many other awards, has been fiction editor for OMNI and SCIFI.COM, and many successful anthologies. She lives in New York City. KELLY LINK & GAVIN J. GRANT are publishers of Small Beer Press. Link is the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Award-winning author of the story collections Strange Things Happen and Magic for Beginners. They live in Western Massachusetts.

As in every year since 1988, the editors tirelessly scoured story collections, magazines, and anthologies worldwide to compile a delightful, diverse feast of tales and poems.

On this anniversary, the editors have increased the size of the collection to 300,000 words of fiction and poetry, including works by Billy Collins, Ted Chiang, Karen Joy Fowler, Elizabeth Hand, Glen Hirshberg, Joyce Carol Oates, and new World Fantasy Award winner M. Rickert. With impeccably researched summations of the field by the editors, Honorable Mentions, and articles by Edward Bryant, Charles de Lint and Jeff VanderMeer on media, music and graphic novels, this is a heady brew topped off by an unparalleled list of sources of fabulous works both light and dark.

Publishers Weekly

The 40 selections in this exemplary anthology from Link and Grant (the fantasy half) and Datlow (the horror half) reflect virtually every hue of the fantasy/horror palette: urban fantasy in Jeffrey Ford's "The Drowned Life" and Karen Joy Fowler's "The Last Worders"; traditional supernatural horror in Paul Walther's "Splitfoot" and Terry Dowling's "Toother"; modern folk fantasy in Elizabeth Hand's "Winter's Wife" and Eileen Gunn's "Up the Fire Road"; and cosmic terror fiction in Laird Barron's "The Forest" and Don Tumasonis's "The Swing." A handful of stories involve child abuse and abduction, of which Lisa Tuttle's "Closet Dreams" is the most horrifying. The front matter's snapshot summaries of the past year's yield in fantasy, horror, comics, mixed media and music are a small and invaluable book unto themselves. (Oct.)

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