In the “The Puppet Motel” by Gemma Files (from Datlow’s own Echoes: The Saga Anthology of Ghost Stories), the lead character senses a beckoning tone of wrongness in a luxe apartment in a new high rise.Ī film crew encounters evil in Kristi DeMeester’s “A Song for Wounded Mouths” the horror comes from the choice to succumb or defy it. His dystopic future high school competition is not that far removed from current reality. Lansdale’s “The Senior Girls Bayonet Drill Team” is another stand-out. Datlow also includes an annual “summation” of the year in horror and a list of “honorable mentions.”įrankly, many of the selections were top candidates for my own The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror: Volume One (11th in the series), but Datlow got to them first.Īmong my personal favorites are two stories with maternal protagonists: “Playscape” by Diana Peterfreund (another mother’s child disappears and the mother is suspected) and “The Night Nurse” by Sarah Langan (an overtaxed Brooklyn mother acquires a night nurse who admits to being a witch).

This year is no different she offers 22 stories and novelettes and one novella first published in 2019.

Datlow unfailingly presents notable scary tales and – since her choices come from an immense variety of sources – even avid readers are unlikely to have encountered them all. If you combine the two series, only the late Gardner Dozois and his The Year’s Best Science Fiction series has (with 35 volumes) a longer history. After 21 volumes, the series ended, but Datlow continued with 2009’s The Best Horror of the Year Volume One. ( Night Shade Books 978-1-59780-973-3, $15.99, 480pp, tp) October 2020.Įllen Datlow’s career as the doyen of “year’s best” editors began with The Year’s Best Fantasy: First Annual Collection in 1988 (with co-editor Terri Windling), and the series was renamed The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror with the third annual collection. The Best Horror of the Year Volume Twelve, Ellen Datlow, ed.

Ellen datlow best horror of the year