Ellen Datlow - The Best Horror of the Year. Volume 6

Astoria by S. P. Miskowski (Omnium Gathering) is about a woman who flees her hometown after a tragedy only to discover it’s not that easy to escape her past.

The Madman of Toserglope by Louis Marvick (Les Éditions de L’Oubli) is a beautiful oblong hardcover artifact of a book. A man visits a town in Saxony to research the life and the disappearance of a pianist possessed of an extra thumb. A strange tale filled with paranoia.

The Gist by Michael Marshall Smith (Subterranean Press) is a marvelous experiment in addition to an absorbing story. Smith wrote the story about a man hired by a dealer in old and lost books to extract the meaning of one such item. The story was then translated into French by Benoît Domis and re-translated from the French back into English by Nicholas Royle. Not a reader of French, I can’t judge how closely that version is to the original, but the slight alterations in the English translation are fascinating.

Love in the Time of Metal and Flesh by Jay Lake (Prime) takes place in San Francisco’s sexual underground and is about extreme body modification. Earthling Publications published two substantial hardcover chapbooks: The Bones of You by Gary McMahon is about a divorced father who moves next door to an abandoned house in the suburbs. The ghostly residue of the evil done in the house endangers both him and his daughter.

It Sustains by Mark Morris packs a wallop from its beginning, as a teen and his father leave their home, hoping to escape from personal trauma by moving away. Unfortunately, starting a new life is harder than they think. Morris ratchets up the suspense as the son begins to see unexplained images and becomes involved with some troublesome local boys.

Tyler’s Third Act by Mick Garris (CD) is number 12 in the signature book series of novella chapbooks. This one treads familiar territory by showing how awful the media is and how far both viewer and viewed are willing to go in the name of entertainment.

I Travel by Night by Robert McCammon (Subterranean Press) is about a Civil War soldier turned into a vampire during the Battle of Shiloh. For twenty-five years, he’s fought to retain his humanity and now he searches for the vampire who turned him to kill her and save himself.

Summer’s End by Lisa Morton (Journalstone) is about a woman hired as a consultant on an ancient text that might shed light on Samhain, the Celtic precursor to Halloween. But nasty things start happening around her.

Steampunk H. G. Wells illustrated by Zdenko Basic (RP Classics) is a beautifully illustrated omnibus of The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds , and “The Country of the Blind.” The award-winning Croatian artist has illustrated a number of children’s classics.

The Resurrectionist by E. B. Hudspeth (Quirk) is a fascinating and imaginative fictional biography of a surgeon studying at The Philadelphia Academy of Medicine in the last 1870s who had some radical ideas about mythological creatures and their relationships to humanity, leading him to radical “creative” surgery exhibitions and finally to his mysterious disappearance. It’s also a compendium of the detailed anatomical illustrations the surgeon made of mythical creatures of those mythical creatures.

The Lady and Her Monsters: A Tale of Dissections, Real-Life Dr. Frankensteins, and the Creation of Mary Shelley’s Masterpiece by Roseanne Montillo (William Morrow) is an entertaining almost pop-biography of Mary Shelley (with all the scandal) entwined with a study of the anatomists whose work in the 1700s helped inspire her to create her great novel.

They met at a café on the corner of Mulberry Street. It was a fairly nondescript place — greasy net curtains, laminated menus, chipped formica tables. Probably bustling with overweight truckers first thing in the morning, but at this hour it was almost deserted. Casual patrons had possibly been deterred by the rain. Or maybe the poor hygiene.

Cowan spotted Jimenez as soon as he stepped inside. He was sitting at a table in the corner, and he glanced up and waved at the sound of Cowan’s entrance. The only other customer was an elderly man slurping noisily from a mug, a mangy dog lying at his feet. Despite the ban, the air was thick with cigarette smoke.

Cowan slid into the plastic chair opposite Jimenez. At first he thought the older man’s hair was wet, but then realised the greying locks were actually slicked back with Brylcreem. Dandruff dusted his shoulders. The lines around his mouth were deeply ingrained with age, greying whiskers indicating several days’ growth. He drew out a manila envelope from beneath the table and patted it with his nicotine-stained fingers. “Got what you wanted, Mr. Campbell.”

Cowan licked his lips. “Good.” He squirmed inside his tight collar. “Got the money?”

Cowan took an envelope from his pocket and passed it quickly across to Jimenez, who accepted it and transferred it into his own. There was a layer of dirt beneath the man’s cracked fingernails, so ingrained it looked like wood-varnish.

“Five hundred — like you said.” Cowan cleared his throat and glanced at the counter. The owner — an Asian woman in a stained apron — was wiping down the wall-tiles with a dishcloth. Behind her, a tinny speaker blared out the insipid blandness of local radio.

Jimenez began to speak. “I managed to locate him…. Before I run through what I found, though, I need to ask you one question — why’re you looking for Mark Fisk?”

Cowan continued to shift his gaze round the café. “I told you — we were at school together. He was a mate of mine. I just wanted to see him again. You know — catch up.” His eyes were restless. “Old time’s sake and all that.”

“Ah yes, I remember now.” He flexed his fingers and rubbed the back of his left hand. “Took quite an effort to find him. Our Mr. Fisk did not want to be found.”

“Really?”

“Hmmm. You see, he’s going under an assumed name now — Peter Feltham. Been living under that name for several months, in fact.” His eyes searched the younger man’s face. “I had to call in some extra favours to discover this, believe me.”

Cowan blinked. “I thought we’d agreed the fee—”

“We did, we did. Don’t worry — no extra.” Jiminez waved a hand. “No, I meant I know a few contacts in the criminal justice system, the legal profession. And the police, for that matter. Had to go to them to get the info. Quite interesting really.”

“Oh?”

“Well you know the first part of the story — up till he left school, right? Well after that, Fisk got a job in the steelworks. Worked for a Sheffield company. He inherited his mother’s house when she died in 1994. Lived there for a couple of years. Then in ’97 he married a Rosemary Willows. They sold his house and moved to Stannington. He was still at the steel company. She was a secretary at a firm of insurance brokers. They had a son, Alex, in 2002. This is where it takes a turn.”

He leaned forward in his chair. “In 2006 they separated. The wife left him and got custody of the kid. He was pretty cut-up about it, apparently. As you would be. Had to move into a council flat. For a few months he was just getting access to the lad every other weekend. The missus starts seeing another bloke. Looks like Fisk then gets edgy — thinking he’s going to lose the kid; reckons the lad’s going to start calling another bloke ‘ Dad .’

“Then in the summer of 2008 he picks little Alex up as usual. Takes him to the top of the towerblock and they both jump off.”