Booklist (08/01/2011):
Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, edited by Paula Guran
As editor Guran freely admits in the introduction to this second volume in the annual series she launched in 2010, dark fantasy is a label that defies easy definition, yet most readers know it when they see it. Along with its obvious embrace of horror fiction, this gathering also includes stories that stray into sword and sorcery, folklore, and science-fiction territory. Weighing in at over 550 pages, the volume offers a generous variety of themes and narrative styles from chilling but inventive ghost stories to nightmarish tales of dystopian futures. An aging pensioner in a rundown lodge meets an old friend, long presumed dead, bent on dragging him down to a hellish hotel subbasement. A Portland teen discovers an old book of spells allowing him to invoke a rainstorm he then has difficulty ending. In a plague-ridden future American landscape, Cleveland becomes a zombie penal colony. Many of the authors here are established genre masters, such as Joe R. Lansdale and Neil Gaiman, whose consummate storytelling skills will provide hours of satisfyingly unsettling entertainment.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)
