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

The World Fantasy Awards were presented November 3, 2013, at a banquet held during the World Fantasy Convention in Brighton, England. The Lifetime Achievement recipients, Susan Cooper and Tanith Lee, were previously announced. Brian Aldiss and William F. Nolan were given special awards.

Winners for the best work in 2012: Novel: Alif the Unseen by G. Willow Wilson (Grove; Corvus); Novella: Let Maps to Others , K. J. Parker (Subterranean Summer ’12); Short Story: “The Telling,” Gregory Norman Bossert ( Beneath Ceaseless Skies 11/29/12); Anthology: Postscripts #28/#29: Exotic Gothic 4 , Danel Olson, ed. (PS Publishing); Collection: Where Furnaces Burn , Joel Lane (PS Publishing); Artist: Vincent Chong; Special Award: Professional: Lucia Graves for the translation of The Prisoner of Heaven (Weidenfeld & Nicholson; Harper) by Carlos Ruiz Zafon; Special Award: Non-Professional: S. T. Joshi for Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction, Volumes 1 & 2 (PS Publishing).

London Falling by Paul Cornell (Tor UK 2012/Tor/Forge 2013) is an engrossing dark urban fantasy/police procedural about strange doings in contemporary London. After two undercover cops participate in the increasingly strange end game of a criminal gang and its leader, they’re assigned to a special squad looking into a series of impossible and grisly slayings.

Blood Oranges by Kathleen Tierney aka Caitlín R. Kiernan (Roc) is a breezy and bloody romp about a young junky who fancies herself a monster killer and finds herself in the unlucky (and unique) position of being bitten by a werewolf and a vampire.

Red Moon by Benjamin Percy (Grand Central Publishing) is a werewolf novel that’s not about werewolves. It’s a political mash-up of terrorism and recent United States history. Often werewolves are partly used as metaphors for the “beast within” but, in most novels about them, this is not the “main event”—unfortunately, in Red Moon , the werewolf is all metaphor. In fact, the big bad master werewolf is barely in the book and is dispatched as if he’s just more fodder for destruction.

American Elsewhere by Robert Jackson Bennett (Orbit) is one of my favorite novels of the year. When a burned out, divorced former cop inherits the house she didn’t know her mother (dead many years from suicide) owned in a town no one has ever heard of called Wink, Mona Bright decides to check it out, hoping to learn more about the mother she barely remembers. As the story rolls on, it expertly blends elements of science fiction, dark fantasy, and horror, all folded into the primary mystery of this Bradburyesque town.

The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes (Mulholland Books) is a riveting thriller about a time-tripping serial killer and his only survivor. The novel provides a portrait of Chicago throughout the decades from the 1929 depression on. A mysterious house gives agency to an evil sadist who we see begins by torturing animals and moves to snuffing out young women who he has visited as children in the past, chosen for their promise.

Kill City Blues by Richard Kadrey (HarperCollins) is the fifth of the author’s Sandman Slim novels, about a Nephilim (half man-half angel) who has died, been resurrected, and traveled to Hell and back — more than once. Down and dirty urban dark fantasy with enough murder, mayhem, and gore to satisfy readers looking for adventure, and complicated moral/ theological issues to please readers looking for a bit more. James Stark (aka Sandman Slim), is living in Los Angeles minding his own business when, as always, trouble comes a calling. Someone wants to hire him to find a missing weapon and won’t take no for an answer.

Mayhem by Sarah Pinborough (Jo Fletcher Books) brings Victorian London to life in this supernatural police procedural about a brutal serial killer active during the same period as Jack the Ripper. This one dismembers and takes the heads of his victims. A pitiful male Cassandra “sees” the future, but is unable to persuade anyone to take him seriously, and a detective prone to roaming the streets of London (and partaking of opium) may be the only ones who can stop the murderer.

Murder as a Fine Art by David Morrell (Mulholland Books) is the perfect complement to Pinborough’s novel. It too takes place in London, is about a serial killer, and has a character enamored of (or rather, addicted to) opium — in this case based on the historical figure Thomas de Quincy, who, in addition to writing the infamous Confessions of an Opium Eater , also wrote crime essays, including “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts.” This latter article seems to be inspiring a spate of vicious mass murders similar to a series that took place years earlier.

Accidents Happen by Louise Millar (Emily Bestler Books) is about a woman traumatized by the death of her parents in a car accident the day of her wedding, and then the murder of her husband just a few years later. Fleeing London, she takes refuge in Oxford and in the world of statistics, driving herself crazy and screwing up her son. Then she meets a Scottish professor at Oxford University who believes he can help her. Unfortunately his “cure” is almost as bad as her sickness, plus she and her son are being stalked by a nutter. Although the first half is suspenseful and creepy, the second half devolves into unconvincing territory.

Six-Gun Tarot by R. S. Belcher (Tor) is a rousing first novel taking place in the weird wild west of 1869 cattle town Golgotha, Nevada. A seemingly unkillable sheriff and his half-Indian deputy are responsible for keeping the citizenry — a mixture of Christians, Mormons, Chinese immigrants, and rough-and-tumble silver miners — safe from bad stuff happening in town (and apparently it happens with regularity). The book is an entertaining mishmash of godly infighting to control Earth, featuring Lovecraftian Elder gods vs. the Judeo Christian Gods vs. the Goddess. Title and chapter heads heralding the tarot are misleading, as the plot makes no use of it.

The Darkling by R. B. Chesterton aka Carolyn Haines (Pegasus Books) is a southern gothic taking place in 1974, about an amnesiac teenage girl discovered wandering the streets and taken in by a family in Coden, Alabama. The live-in tutor, only a few years older than the newcomer, is immediately suspicious of the young woman, not to mention fearful of being displaced from her own secure niche within this happy, loving family. Of course, the mysterious teenager seduces her way into the family and things go badly for everyone. Alas, the prologue kills any surprise before the book actually begins.

Night Film by Marisha Pessl (Random House) is, if possible, both a page-turner and a slow burn of a novel in one of my favorite subgenres: film horror. Scott McGrath is an investigative reporter intrigued by the mysterious, reclusive underground filmmaker Stanislas Cordova, whose movies are disturbing, horrifying, addictive, and often difficult to track down. There have always been dark rumors swirling about the director’s working methods and when McGrath gets too close, he’s set up — leaving his reputation and career shot to Hell. But he’s sucked back into the world of Cordova when the director’s twenty-four-year-old daughter falls to her death in a derelict building. Fuelled by anger and bent on vengeance, McGrath sets out to prove that Cordova is responsible for his daughter’s death. I particularly love the visionary weirdness reminiscent of John Fowles’ great novel, The Magus .

The Burn Palace by Stephen Dobyns (Blue Rider Press) opens strongly with the disappearance of a newborn baby and the scalping of a middle-aged man. These incidents and other frightening occurrences are making the residents of the town of Brewster jittery. There are hints of the supernatural throughout: a young boy works on developing his skills in telekinesis; local coyotes don’t behave the way coyotes should; large, goat-like two-legged footprints are discovered; and a family man seemingly transforms into a rabid animal. Over the course of the novel, the sense of unease created by the non-supernatural behavior of the humans in town takes precedence over the otherworldly, but this shift doesn’t decrease the suspense. Dobyns has delved in the dark with two excellent previous novels, specifically in The Two Deaths of Senora Puccini and The Church of Dead Girls .