No matter your expectations, the dark is full of the unknown: grim futures, distorted pasts, invasions of the uncanny, paranormal fancies, weird dreams, unnerving nightmares, baffling enigmas, revelatory excursions, desperate adventures, spectral journeys, mundane terrors, and supernatural visions. You may stumble into obsession - or find redemption. Often disturbing, occasionally delightful, let The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror be your annual guide through the mysteries and wonders of dark fiction.
Titles:
Wheatfield with Crows by Steve Rasnic Tem
Blue Amber by David J. Schow
The Legend of Troop 13 by Kit Reed
The Good Husband by Nathan Ballingrud
The Soul in the Bell Jar by KJ Kabza
The Creature Recants by Dale Bailey
Termination Dust by Laird Barron
Postcards from Abroad by Peter Atkins
Phosphorus by Veronica Schanoes
A Lunar Labyrinth by Neil Gaiman
The Prayer of Ninety Cats by Caitlín R. Kiernan
Shadows for Silence in the Forests of Hell by Brandon Sanderson
The Plague by Ken Liu
The Gruesome Affair of the Electric Blue Lightning by Joe R. Lansdale
Let My Smile Be Your Umbrella by Brian Hodge
Air, Water, and the Grove by Kaaron Warren
A Little of the Night by Tanith Lee
A Collapse of Horses by Brian Evenson
Pride: A Collector’s Tale by Glen Hirshberg
Our Lady of Ruins by Sarah Singleton
The Marginals by Steve Duffy
Dark Gardens by Greg Kurzawa
Rag and Bone by Priya Sharma
The Slipway Gray by Helen Marshall
To Die for Moonlight by Sarah Monette
Cuckoo by Angela Slatter
Fishwife by Carrie Vaughn
The Dream Detective by Lisa Tuttle
Event Horizon by Sunny Moraine
Moonstruck by Karin Tidbeck
The Ghost Makers by Elizabeth Bear
Iseul’s Lexicon by Yoon Ha Lee
Author Bios:
Steve Rasnic Tem is a past winner of the Bram Stoker, World Fantasy, and British Fantasy awards. His two books from 2012 were the novel Deadfall Hotel and the noir collection Ugly Behavior (New Pulp Press). Three Tem collections: Onion Songs (Chomu), Celestial Inventories (ChiZine), and Twember (NewCon Press) were released in 2013. Southern gothic Blood Kin (Solaris) is his latest novel. Goodreads
David J. Schow is a multimedia writer whose work includes the script for the dark cult classic, The Crow, and episodes for television series Masters of Horror. The author of nine novels, his acclaimed short stories are featured in dozens of anthologies and collected in seven volumes. He is also the author of an award-winning book of essays on modern media, Wild Hairs and The Outer Limits Companion (on the classic TV series). Schow recently updated the latter with a new fiftieth anniversary source for all things Outer Limits: The Outer Limits at 50. He lives in Los Angeles, California. Goodreads
Kit Reed’s most recent collection The Story Until Now (The Wesleyan University Press), was published in 2013; Severn House published her latest novel, Son of Destruction, in the UK in 2012 and US in 2013. Her 2011 collection, What Wolves Know, was nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award. Her many other novels include Enclave, The Baby Merchant, and Thinner Than Thou, a winner of the ALA. Alex Award. A Guggenheim fellow, Reed is the first American recipient of an international literary grant from the Abraham Woursell Foundation. Her stories appear in venues including The Yale Review, Asimov’s, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Omni, The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Literature, and The Kenyon Review. Her books Weird Women, Wired Women and Little Sisters of the Apocalypse were finalists for the Tiptree Prize. A member of the board of the Authors League Fund, she serves as Resident Writer at Wesleyan University. Goodreads
Nathan Ballingrud is the author of North American Lake Monsters, from Small Beer Press. Several of his stories have been reprinted in “year’s best” anthologies, and his story “The Monsters of Heaven” won a Shirley Jackson Award. He’s worked as a bartender in New Orleans, a cook on oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, and a waiter in a fancy restaurant. Currently he lives in Asheville, NC, with his daughter, where he’s at work on his first novel. Blog / Goodreads
KJ Kabza has sold over fifty stories to venues such as The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Nature, Daily Science Fiction, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, AE: The Canadian Science Fiction Review, Buzzy Mag, Flash Fiction Online, and many more. He’s been anthologized in The Best Horror of the Year, The Best of Every Day Fiction, and The Best of Beneath Ceaseless Skies. For updates on and free fiction, follow him on Twitter / Website / Goodreads
Dale Bailey lives in North Carolina with his family, and has published three novels, The Fallen, House of Bones, and Sleeping Policemen (with Jack Slay, Jr.), as well as a collection of short fiction, The Resurrection Man’s Legacy and Other Stories. He has been a four-time finalist for the International Horror Guild Award, a two-time finalist for the Nebula Award, and a finalist for the Bram Stoker and the Shirley Jackson awards. His fiction has appeared in Alchemy, Amazing Stories, Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Lightspeed, Nightmare, SciFiction, and Tor.com, among other places. “Death and Suffrage,” his award-winning novelette, was adapted by director Joe Dante as part of the television series, Masters of Horror. He has two books due out in 2015, The End of the End of Everything: Stories and Acheron: A City in Seven Stories. Goodreads
Laird Barron was born and raised in Alaska, did time in the wilderness, and raced in several Iditarods. Later, he migrated to Washington State where he devoted himself to American Combato and reading authors like Robert B. Parker, James Ellroy, and Cormac McCarthy. At night he wrote tales that combined noir, crime, and horror. He was a 2007 and 2010 Shirley Jackson Award winner for his collections The Imago Sequence and Other Stories and Occultation and Other Stories and a 2009 nominee for his novelette “Catch Hell.” Other award nominations include the Crawford Award, Sturgeon Award, International Horror Guild Award, World Fantasy Award, Bram Stoker Award, and the Locus Award. His first novel, The Croning, was published in 2012; his latest collection, The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All, was published last year. Barron currently resides in Upstate New York and is writing a novel about the evil that men do. Goodreads
Peter Atkins is the author of the novels Morningstar, Big Thunder, and Moontown and the screenplays Hellraiser II, Hellraiser III, Hellraiser IV, and Wishmaster. His short fiction has appeared in such anthologies as The Museum of Horrors, Dark Delicacies II, Hellbound Hearts, Gutshot, and The Alchemy Press Book of Pulp Heroes. His most recent book, Rumours of the Marvellous, was a finalist for the British Fantasy Award. “Postcards from Abroad,” set in the author’s native Liverpool, was written for the 2013 performances of The Rolling Darkness Revue, an annual folly he commits with Glen Hirshberg. Blog / Goodreads
Veronica Schanoes is Assistant Professor in the department of English at Queens College—CUNY. Her fiction has appeared in Queen Victoria’s Book of Spells, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Fantasy, and Strange Horizons. She lives in New York City. Goodreads
Neil Gaiman is a New York Times bestselling author of more than twenty books for adults and children, including the novels Neverwhere, Stardust, American Gods, Anansi Boys, Coraline, and The Graveyard Book; the Sandman series of graphic novels; and Make Good Art, the text of a commencement speech he delivered at Philadelphia’s University of the Arts. The Ocean at the End of the Lane is his most recent novel for adults and, for younger readers, Fortunately, the Milk. He is the recipient of numerous literary honors, including the Locus and Hugo Awards and the Newbery and Carnegie Medals. Born and raised in England, Neil Gaiman now lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Goodreads
The New York Times recently hailed Caitlín R. Kiernan as “one of our essential writers of dark fiction.” Her novels include The Red Tree (nominated for the Shirley Jackson and World Fantasy awards) and The Drowning Girl: A Memoir (winner of the James Tiptree, Jr. Award and the Bram Stoker Award, nominated for the Nebula, Locus, Shirley Jackson, World Fantasy, British Fantasy, and Mythopoeic awards). To date, her short fiction has been collected in thirteen volumes, most recently Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart, Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan (Volume One), and The Ape’s Wife and Other Stories. Currently, she’s writing the graphic novel series Alabaster for Dark Horse Comics and working on her next novel, Cherry Bomb. Goodreads
New York Times #1 bestseller Brandon Sanderson made a name for himself in the fantasy genre with his first novel Elantris and its sequels as well as the Mistborn series before being chosen to finish Robert Jordan’s famous Wheel of Time sequence—left uncompleted on Jordon’s death—writing volumes such as The Gathering Storm, Towers of Midnight, and A Memory of Light. His fantasy series for young adults, Alcatraz, consists of Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians, Alcatraz Versus the Scrivener’s Bones, Alcatraz Versus the Knights of Crystallia, and Alcatraz Versus the Shattered Lens. The Stormlight Archive series began with The Way of Kings in 2010 and continues with the recently published Words of Radiance. He lives in American Fork, Utah. Blog / Goodreads
Ken Liu (kenliu.name) is an author and translator of speculative fiction, as well as a lawyer and programmer. His fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Strange Horizons, among other places. He is a winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy awards. Liu’s debut novel, A Tempest of Gold, the first in a fantasy series, will be published by Simon & Schuster’s new genre fiction imprint in 2015, along with a collection of short stories. He lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts. Goodreads
Joe R. Lansdale is the author of over forty novels and numerous short stories. His novella, Bubba Ho-tep, was made into an award-winning film of the same name, as was Incident On and Off a Mountain Road. His mystery classic Cold in July inspired the recent major motion picture of the same name starring Michael C. Hall, Sam Shepard, and Don Johnson. His novel The Bottoms will also soon be a film directed by Bill Paxton. His literary works have received numerous recognitions, including the Edgar, eight Bram Stoker Awards, the Grinzane Cavour Prize for Literature, American Mystery Award, the International Horror Award, British Fantasy Award, and many others. His most recent novel for adults, The Thicket, was published last fall. Goodreads
Brian Hodge is the award-winning author of eleven novels spanning horror, crime, and historical fiction. He’s also written over one hundred shorter works, and published five full-length collections. His first collection, The Convulsion Factory, was ranked by critic Stanley Wiater among the 113 best books of modern horror. Recent or forthcoming titles include Whom the Gods Would Destroy and The Weight of the Dead, both standalone novellas; Worlds of Hurt, an omnibus edition of the first four works in his Misbegotten mythos; a newly revised hardcover edition of Dark Advent, his early post-apocalyptic epic; No Law Left Unbroken, a collection of crime fiction; and his latest novel, Leaves of Sherwood. Hodge lives in Colorado, where a constant supply of mountain air and brewpubs keeps more of everything in the works. Website / Facebook / Goodreads
Bram Stoker nominee and Shirley Jackson Award-winner Kaaron Warren has lived in Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra, and Fiji. She’s sold many short stories, three novels (the multi-award-winning Slights, Walking the Tree, and Mistification) and four short story collections. Her most recent collection, Through Splintered Walls, won a Canberra Critic’s Circle Award for Fiction, two Ditmar Awards, two Australian Shadows Awards and a Shirley Jackson Award. Her stories have appeared in Australia, the US, the UK and elsewhere in Europe, including Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales. Blog / Twitter / Goodreads
Tanith Lee was born in the UK in 1947. After school she worked at a number of jobs, and at age twenty-five had one year at art college. Then DAW Books published her novel The Birthgrave. Since then she has been a professional full-time writer. Publications so far total approximately ninety novels and collections and well over three hundred short stories. She has also written for television and radio. Lee has won several awards; in 2009 she was made a Grand Master of Horror and honored with the World Fantasy Convention Lifetime Achievement Award in 2013. She is married to the writer/artist John Kaiine. Goodreads
Brian Evenson is the author of over a dozen books of fiction, most recently the short story collection Windeye (Coffee House Press) and the novel Immobility (Tor) which both were finalists for the Shirley Jackson Awards. His collection The Wavering Knife (FC2) won the International Horror Guild award, his novel The Open Curtain (Coffee House Press) was a finalist for the Edgar Award, and his novel Last Days (Underland) won the American Library Association’s Award for Best Horror novel of 2009. He has a new collection, A Collapse of Horses, forthcoming in 2015. He lives, as weirdly as possible, in Providence, Rhode Island, and works at the college upon which Lovecraft’s Miskatonic University is based. Goodreads
Glen Hirshberg’s novels include The Snowman’s Children (2002), The Book of Bunk, 2010), and Motherless Child (2012), which has just been republished in a new, revised edition by Tor. He is also the author of three story collections: The Two Sams (a Publishers’ Weekly Best Book of 2003), American Morons (2006), and The Janus Tree (2011). In 2008, he won the Shirley Jackson Award for novelette, “The Janus Tree.” He is also a three-time winner of the International Horror Guild Award, and a five-time World Fantasy Award finalist. With Peter Atkins and Dennis Etchison, he cofounded the Rolling Darkness Revue, an annual reading/live music/performance event that tours the west coast every fall and has also made international appearances. He lives in the Los Angeles area with his wife, son, daughter, and cats. Goodreads
Sarah Singleton is an award-winning writer of fiction for adults and teenagers. Her first novel, The Crow Maiden, was a finalist for the IAFA William L. Crawford Fantasy Award and her eight novels for young adults, published by Simon & Schuster, include Century, which won the Booktrust Teen Award 2005, the premier award for YA fiction in the UK. Her short stories have been published in magazines and anthologies including Interzone, Black Static, Time Pieces, and Spectrum SF. She was a journalist for many years and now works as a teacher of English literature and language at a secondary school in Wiltshire, England—county of ancient forests, chalk downlands, standing stones, long barrows and white horses. Goodreads
Steve Duffy has written/coauthored five collections of weird short stories. Tragic Life Stories, The Five Quarters, The Night Comes On (all From Ash-Tree Press), and his most recent, The Moment of Panic (PS Publishing). His work also appears in a number of anthologies published in the UK and the US. He won the International Horror Guild Award for Best Short Story, was shortlisted for a World Fantasy Award in 2009, and again in 2012. Goodreads
Greg Kurzawa studied theology before stumbling into an information technology career. His work has appeared in Interzone, Clarkesworld, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show. He has a passable impression of Gage Kurricke, with whom he coauthored the bleak fantasy novel, Gideon’s Wall. Website / Goodreads
“Rag and Bone” is based in Liverpool, UK, the beautiful city where Priya Sharma was a medical student. She is now a doctor but writes whenever she can. Her short stories can be found in various publications including Interzone, Black Static, Alt Hist, Tor.com, and more will be available in 2014. She has been anthologized in several “Year’s Bests.” Blog / Goodreads
Helen Marshall is an award-winning Canadian author, editor, and doctor of medieval studies. Her debut collection of short stories Hair Side, Flesh Side (ChiZine Publications, 2012) was named one of the top ten books of 2012 by January Magazine and won the 2013 British Fantasy Award for Best Newcomer. Her second collection, Gifts for the One Who Comes After, will be released from ChiZine in September 2014. She lives in Oxford, England—that is, medieval Disneyland. Goodreads
Sarah Monette grew up in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, one of the three secret cities of the Manhattan Project, and now lives in a 108-year-old house in the Upper Midwest with a great many books, two cats, one grand piano, and one husband. Her PhD diploma (English Literature, 2004) hangs in the kitchen. She has published more than fifty short stories and has two short story collections out: The Bone Key (Prime Books, 2007—with a new second edition in 2011) and Somewhere Beneath Those Waves (Prime Books, 2011). She has written two novels (A Companion to Wolves, Tor, 2007, and The Tempering of Men, Tor, 2011) and four short stories with Elizabeth Bear, and hopes to write more. Her first four novels (Melusine, The Virtu, The Mirador, Corambis) were published by Ace. Her latest novel, The Goblin Emperor, published under the pen name Katherine Addison, came out from Tor in April 2014.
Specializing in dark fantasy and horror, Angela Slatter is the author of the Aurealis Award-winning The Girl with No Hands and Other Tales, the World Fantasy Award finalist Sourdough and Other Stories, and the Aurealis finalist Midnight and Moonshine (with Lisa L. Hannett). She is the first Australian to win a British Fantasy Award (for “The Coffin-Maker’s Daughter” in A Book of Horrors, Stephen Jones, ed.). In 2013 she was awarded one of the inaugural Queensland Writers Fellowships. She has an MA and a PhD in Creative Writing, and is a graduate of Clarion South 2009 and the Tin House Summer Writers Workshop 2006. Blog / Goodreads
Carrie Vaughn is the bestselling author of the Kitty Norville series. The twelfth novel, Kitty in the Underworld, is due out in July 2013. She has also written young adult novels, Voices of Dragons and Steel, and the fantasy novels, Discord’s Apple and After the Golden Age. Her short fiction has appeared many times in Lightspeed and Realms of Fantasy, and in a number of anthologies, such as Fast Ships, Black Sails, and Warriors. She lives in Colorado with a fluffy attack dog. Website / Goodreads
Lisa Tuttle began writing while still at school, sold her first stories at university, and won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Science Fiction Writer of the year in 1974. Her first novel, Windhaven, was a collaboration with George R. R. Martin published in 1981; her most recent is the contemporary fantasy The Silver Bough, and she has written at least a hundred short stories— science fiction, fantasy and horror—as well as essays, reviews, non-fiction, and books for children. Born and raised in Texas, educated in New York, later a resident of London, she now makes her home in a remote, rural part of Scotland. Goodreads
Sunny Moraine is a humanoid creature of average height, luminosity, and inertial mass. They’re also a doctoral candidate in sociology and a writer-like object whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in Lightspeed, Shimmer, Clarkesworld, and Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History, as well as multiple Year’s Best anthologies, all of which has provided lovely reasons to avoid a dissertation. Their first novel Line and Orbit, co-written with Lisa Soem, is available from Samhain Publishing. Their solo-authored novel Crowflight is available from Masque Books. Its sequel, Ravenfall, will be released this summer. Goodreads
Karin Tidbeck lives and works in Malmö, Sweden. She’s published prose and poetry in Swedish since 2002, with publications in journals like Jules Verne-magasinet and Lyrikvännen. Her English publication history includes Weird Tales, Tor.com, Lightspeed, and the anthologies Steampunk Revolution and The Time Travelers Almanac. Tidbeck’s stories have appeared in The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror: 2013, The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Eight, The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy: 2014, and The Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Volume One. Tidbeck’s 2012 short story collection Jagannath won the Crawford Memorial Award in 2013 and was shortlisted for the Tiptree Award and World Fantasy Award. One of the stories, “Augusta Prima,” won the SF & Fantasy Translation Award. Goodreads
Elizabeth Bear was born on the same day as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, but in a different year. When coupled with a childhood tendency to read the dictionary for fun, this led her inevitably to penury, intransigence, and the writing of speculative fiction. She is the Hugo, Sturgeon, Locus, and Campbell Award winning author of twenty-five novels (The most recent is Steles of the Sky, from Tor) and almost a hundred short stories. Her Promethean Age novel, One-Eyed Jack, will be published by Prime Books in August 2014. Her dog lives in Massachusetts; her partner, writer Scott Lynch, lives in Wisconsin. She spends a lot of time on planes. Goodreads
Yoon Ha Lee’s Crawford Memorial Award-nominated short fiction collection Conservation of Shadows was published in 2013 by Prime Books. She lives in Louisiana with her family, used to design constructed languages as a hobby, and has not yet been eaten by gators. Goodreads
ABOUT THE EDITOR:
Paula Guran serves as senior editor for Prime Books. She edited the Juno fantasy imprint from its small press inception through its incarnation as an imprint of Pocket Books. In addition to the annual Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror series, she edits a growing number of other anthologies as well as novels and single-author collections. In an earlier life she produced weekly email newsletter DarkEcho (winning two Stokers, an IHG Award, and a World Fantasy Award nomination); edited Horror Garage (earning another IHG and a second World Fantasy nomination) and other periodicals; and has contributed reviews, interviews, and articles to numerous professional publications. The mother of four, mother-in-law of two, and grandmother of one, she lives in Akron, Ohio with two cats and—depending on the day or week—a variable number of adult children and/or two of their dogs.
