2024 the best horror series review

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For over three decades, Ellen Datlow has been at the center of horror. Bringing you the most frightening and terrifying stories, Datlow always has her finger on the pulse of what horror readers crave. Now, with the seventh volume of this series, Datlow is back again to bring you the stories that will keep you up at night.

Encompassed in the pages of The Best Horror of the Year have been such illustrious writers as:

Neil Gaiman
Kim Robinson
Stephen King
Linda Nagata
Laird Barron
Margo Lanagan
And many others

With each passing year, science, technology, and the march of time shine light into the craggy corners of the universe, making the fears of an earlier generation seem quaint. But this “light” creates its own shadows. The Best Horror of the Year chronicles these shifting shadows. It is a catalog of terror, fear, and unpleasantness, as articulated by today’s most challenging and exciting writers.

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00RM48I92
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Night Shade Books (August 4, 2015)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ August 4, 2015
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 2424 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Print length ‏ : ‎ 416 pages
Reviewer: Nancy L. Middleton
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Another great collection of new horror from Ellen Datlow...keep the night light on!
Review: If it's edited by Ellen Datlow, I know I'm going to love it. While I liked some stories more, some less, overall I found this to be a solid collection of horror stories ranging from humorously spine-tingling to clenched stomach, keep the nightlight burning scary...and what more can you ask of an anthology of horror?

Reviewer: A. Reader
Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars
Title: A Solid Collection
Review: Ellen Datlow is among the best editors in the business, and Best Horror of the Year is essentially her annual showcase. With that said, there are stronger and weaker entries here. "It Flows From the Mouth" by Robert Shearman is one of the more bizarre and unsettling entries, and a cryptic one at that. "The Dogs Home" by Alison Littlewood is predictable and conventional, while Laird Barron's "the worms crawl in" is weird even using that author as a metric. "The Atlas of Hell" by Nathan Ballingrud reads like part of a series (which it is), and comes across as somewhat incomplete as a result. "Nigredo" by Cody Goodfellow is an interesting homage to Chambers' Yellow King work. The other one that stood out for me is "Past Reno" by Brian Evenson, which has a fairly haunting atmosphere to it.Is this the Best Horror of the Year? I'm not sure; I think that there are other works that probably merit entry. But it is a solid collection and worth the price of admission.

Reviewer: jonathan briggs
Rating: 3.0 out of 5 stars
Title: The Best Horror of the Year Volume Seven
Review: In reading editor Ellen Datlow's opening summation of the notable novels and stories from 2014, I couldn't help but feel a bit discouraged as she reeled off recaps of rehashes featuring vampires, zombies, vampire/zombie detectives and blogging psycho killers, all overseen by the overbearing presence of H.P. Lovecraft all over the damn place. Have we come to this?Not entirely. You couldn't ask for a much better lead-in paragraph than what Nathan Ballingrud provides in this annual's opening story, "The Atlas of Hell." It's too long to repeat in this review, but there's no way to stop reading after that intro. (Well, I had to stop reading coz my train arrived, but as soon as I boarded, I started reading again.) Ballingrud starts in tough guy territory, like Dennis Lehane with a satanic spin. Jack, a bookseller with unseverable ties to organized crime, has a backroom sideline in grimoires. Jack is ordered into the beast-infested bayous outside New Orleans to fetch one such tome from a swamp rat grifter who sells diabolical souvenirs from an afterlife of everlasting torment. Jack works in the tradition of the occult detective, a chubby schlubby version of John Constantine or Harry D'Amour. I don't know if Ballingrud intends "Atlas" as the initial adventure of a series. The field of franchise detectives, supernatural or otherwise, is so crowded, it's a hard gig to pull off well. But whether this is a standalone or an opening salvo, Ballingrud has made his bones (yah yah, pun intended).And then ... a vampire story. Angela Slatter's generic "Winter Children" is readable as generic vampire stories go, but the heroic Shih Tzu is a bit much to ask of readers. Like Ballingrud, Slatter writes an open ending suggesting this, too, could become an ongoing series. However, the prospect of further vampire adventures crowding Sookie Stackhouse, Anita Blake and the rest of the housewife horror on the sci fi/fantasy shelves is far less appealing. I don't read nearly as much genre fiction as Ellen Datlow does, yet I've read this story many more times than I would have wished. Given how many boots have trampled this snowy ground, I have to wonder: How did this story merit inclusion? Maybe Datlow has a soft spot for dogs, which would also account for the presence of Alison Littlewood's "The Dog's Home," another saw-it-coming-from-way-off retread.Genevieve Valentine's "A Dweller in Amenty" plays more like a sin eater's mopey career day lecture at community college than a fully (atrophied) fleshed story. Valentine lays out the premise, then leaves it lying there as inert as a corpse in the parlor. Elizabeth Massie got a whole novel out of this folklore. Valentine should have at least managed an entire short story.In "Outside Heavenly," rural authorities investigate a fire of unknown origin involving the gruesome death of a hated and feared community member, "a fiercely wicked man who crushed all that could be loved." How wicked, they'll learn over the course of this sweltering Southern Gothic that winds up in a settlement that might appear in Ballingrud's atlas. Rio Youers is a new one on me. I was surprised to read in his author's bio that he's Canadian. I had him pegged as a William Gay disciple pecking at a typewriter in a tarpaper shack far south of Ontario. Some of his extended dialog is too self-conscious in its attempts to sound literary, but I'd like to see Youers make another appearance in "Best Horror."Why has it taken seven years for Caitlin Kiernan to get a story within these pages? Despite being one of the leading voices in the genre since debuting with "Silk" in 1998, Kiernan has been known to get persnickety when referred to as a horror author, so that might have something to do with the delay. One could wish for a slightly less traveled route than the muggy midnight ride of the killer couple in "Interstate Love Song (Murder Ballad No. 8)," which comes off like the product of a few too many viewings of "Natural Born Killers." Cool '70s car. Tunes on tape. Speed in the glove box. Victim in the trunk. Etc. The incestuous twin-sister twist doesn't do enough to set this road trip apart from the myriad other young psychos in love plying their trade by twos among the badlands, but Kiernan's craftsmanship and style of bloody brushstrokes make the journey, clichéd as it is, interesting enough to keep me from nodding off in the passenger seat.Fear of the unknown is an important element of horror fiction. It's debatable whether Brian Evenson's "Past Reno" is an exercise in that fear or an overly abstract extended metaphor (perhaps for Evenson's own relationship with Mormonism). I lean toward the latter interpretation, but as a story about sinister beef jerky, it could have been much worse.Who holds the record for most appearances in Datlow's annual roundups? I'm sure Laird Barron is high on the list, and deservedly so. In "the worms crawl in," a cuckold goes camping with his wife's lover -- a sonnet-writing rival, no less. "Everybody hates those guys," the narrator points out, and this outdoors jaunt presents a prime opportunity for payback. The setup is straight "Tales from the Crypt," but Barron takes us in a darker direction when his characters almost stumble into an open grave gouged out of the wilderness clay, a passage leading back millennia to a period when "dinosaurs have not been invented, but the devil is everywhere." The mind-torquing gulfs of deep time, deranged deities and hyper-masculine antiheroes have become staples of Barron's oeuvre, and he deploys them deftly, but he might want to consider taking his writing in some new directions and climbing out of his cosmic horror (dis)comfort zone. This is not one of Barron's better stories (it has a much scarier elder brother named "Blackwood's Baby"), but Barron gives such good carnage that "worms" is one of the better stories in this volume. And, hey, I learned Alaska has swamps.Orrin Grey's "Persistence of Vision" illustrates a mini-trend in this volume and a potentially unhealthy development in horror fiction as a whole: stories too explicit about expressing their debt to cinematic forebears. The literary side of the genre should be leading the way, not chasing the empty flash out of Hollywood (that goes double for remakes). "Persistence of Vision" reads less like a short story than an aspiring film treatment. Granted, the movie it's pitching does sound pretty cool, but if there was a ghost apocalypse, it's unlikely that even the most fervently maladjusted movie geek would take time out to reminisce about his favorite horror movie moments. All the references neuter the horrific elements and turn "PoV" (another movie term) into a toothless exercise in academic meta.In last year's summation, Datlow linked Nathan Ballingrud, Laird Barron and John Langan in a kind of terror triumvirate. I don't know if they're drinking buddies in their personal lives, but they've been working ceaselessly in some kind of conspiracy to ensure that at least one of them places a story in every new anthology. They're unavoidable, and they're largely responsible for whatever forward momentum has been recently achieved in a genre that too often prefers to settle into a static, staid status quo.In "Ymir," Langan emulates the kind of weird fiction Barron has been in the process of mastering. Marissa, a former security contractor struggling with PTSD from the Iraq War, takes a job guarding a rich adventurer who drives great distances for donuts. "He's walked into some pretty dodgy places." Including Marissa's current gig down a depleted diamond mine punched deep into the icy Canadian earth. Marissa is shadowed by a ghost from "the sand," and at the bottom of the frozen pit lurks ... a hotel lobby from Barron's Mythos. I agree with Datlow that it's too early in Barron's career for such tributes. I disagree with her that "Ymir" is a strong enough story regardless to rank as one of the year's best. "Ymir" is overstuffed, all over the place and leaves the unfulfilling aftertaste of an in-joke between two author cronies. Langan is a fine writer, but he's generally a step behind his companions in the trailblazing trio. Perhaps he'd be better served developing and strengthening his own quite valid voice (he especially needs to work on making his dialog sound more believably natural and less like writing) instead of borrowing Barron's.(Oh, and just a side note: Langan should be told that driving from Olympia, Wash., to Portland, Ore., for a donut isn't such a big deal. Twice I've traveled from the OTHER Washington, the D. of C., to Portland for the bacon maple bar and Memphis Mafia at Voodoo Doughnut. They're worth the trip.)This year's "Best Horror" never gets better than Ballingrud's kickoff story. Long stretches of the book -- populated by the aforementioned vampires, zombies, a small army of psychos and the spirit of Lovecraft receiving homage -- make Volume Seven seem like a placeholder, sluggish and somnambulant. "Best" becomes "Eh, good enough." There's nothing really bad among 2014's batch of tales, but there's not much to get excited about either. Over most of the contents hangs a sense of habitual autopilot repetition, like a thrice-weekly treadmill run. It's good to keep the muscles oiled and working, but we don't seem to be charting any new territory. Several stories are near-misses. Some are mildly clever. A few are rote to the point of raggedy obsolescence. And a couple are as flat as that half-bottle of Pepsi left over from last month's Halloween party. Speaking of Halloween, it's telling that this year, when I went looking for horror fiction that was fresh and original to augment the autumn revel, I most often found it by cracking anthologies (some even edited by Datlow) or collections from the early 1990s. As I was finishing the final pages of the best 2014 had to offer, I started to get that discouraged feeling again.

Reviewer: George C. Kerr
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Relevant and missed
Review: Best of best of. E D is respected amd trustworthy. Wish it was stillAround. The summation is wurth its price. This amdLocus magazine belped define the field.

Reviewer: Mississippi Malka
Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Dependable and easy reading for horror fiction readers
Review: What can I say? This is an anthology of horror stories. I find this series dependably good enough to buy various years of it. I read them on my Kindle, so I can't easily point out one or two stories as particularly good or the opposite. It's light reading for people who enjoy reading horror.

Reviewer: K. Burgess
Rating: 2.0 out of 5 stars
Title: It felt like some of them were trying to hard to be ...
Review: Most of the stories weren't scary. It felt like some of them were trying to hard to be clever or relevant but it came off wrong.

Reviewer: Dyanne
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Best Horror Book
Review: I love horror stories, totally creepy good, a wide variety of stories, but you get some endings you would never expect! I read before going to sleep, maybe not too smart of me! You will enjoy this book!

Reviewer: VonBek98
Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Some interesting stories
Review: Enjoyable reading. I liked the mix of stories and authors. Some clunkers, but by and large well worth the time. I quite liked the Atlas of Hell and Shay Corsham Worsted as well as Tread Upon a Brittle Shell. Not too sure about the King in Yellow piece, Nigredo. I will definitely keep going with this series.

Reviewer: eaglingeye
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: Great Assortment

Reviewer: Holly Rennick
Rating: 1.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: A lot of the stories could not get my attendion.