In 2008 I was busy moving out of my parents’ house and going to university in another city to complete a reading-intensive English Literature and History degree, so I was understandably out of touch with the current publishing trends in my favourite genre. And yet, if this collection showcasing the “year’s best” fantasy and horror is anything to go by, I apparently wasn’t missing out on much… Reading this collection was honestly a slog, and I am hard pressed to recall any stories that stood out to me from the over 2 months it took to get from cover to cover. What I do recall is a decidedly sharp focus on stories with strong horror elements and a preponderance of tales with overtly obnoxious chauvinist tone. I’m talking stories where all the women are typified by the male gaze, the protagonists mansplain ad nauseum to the reader, and are narrated via storytelling that relies on shock value, violence, and expectedly sordid mystery to get us to the finale. Honestly, very few of the tales made it past the first few pages for me, and I regularly found myself throwing the collection down in disgust to pick up literally anything else on my TBR to remedy my reading mood. It’s really too bad that the collection was so disappointing, because I was looking forward to getting into some short stories, discovering some new authors, and revisiting a time period in publishing that I seemingly missed out on. So much for nostalgia always being a positive recollection, I guess… ( )

As with most anthologies, there are two losers for every enjoyable story. In this case, though, I generally disliked stories purely because they did not fit to my personal taste. (A few too many were pretentious stories about the mystical ways of writers.) Still, it was a nice change from disliking stories because they're sloppy cliched messes.

I enjoyed:
"The Cambist and Lord Iron: A fairy tale of economics" by Daniel Abraham. A debauched lord with unlimited wealth and power finds amusement out of setting unsolvable riddles to a humble money-changer.

"The Last Worders" by Karen Joy Fowler. Twin sisters think precisely alike--until a small betrayal that tears them forever assunder.

"Winter's Wife" by Elizabeth Hand. A young boy observes his mysterious neighbor Winter, and Winter's equally fascinating and obscure new wife from Iceland. I love the magic here.

"A Reversal of Fortune" by Holly Black. Black is one of the very few authors who can write believable lower class teenager protagonists. Nikki lives in a trailer park with her erstwhile brother and devoted dog, and spends the summer missing her best friend and getting most of her calories from candy stolen from her job. When her dog is hit by her crush's truck, she challenges the devil to a candy-eating contest: she could win her dog's life, or lose her soul. Luckily, Nikki is as clever and gutsy as she is stubborn.

"The Boulder" by Lucy Kemnitzer is a well-crafted modern perspective on the classic "stolen beneath the Hill" fairy tale.

"The Hill" by Tanith Lee. The only one of the "horror" stories herein to actually have a scary moment. Disturbing imagery and a great concept, but the real strength here is the main character's sensible inner voice. The ending spends a little too much time explaining every bit of the mystery, but Lee does a good job of laying the clues throughout the story.

"Lovers: (Jaafar the Winged)" by Khaled Mattawa is the only poem I liked in this collection, despite Billy Collins's inclusion.

"Sir Hereward and Mister Fitz Go to War Again" by Garth Nix is a great adventure story. Nix is a true adept at creating interesting fantasy worlds and relatable heroes. Hereward is a mercenary knight who likes fine clothes, scarred lovers, and his former nursemaid, current companion, the ensorcelled puppet Fitz.

The anthology ends with the excellent "The Evolution of Trickster Stories Among the Dogs of North Park After the Change" by Kij Johnson. The animals of Earth all learned to speak in the same moment, but their newfound ability to communicate makes their former loving owners wary, shamed, and distrustful. Really interesting meditation on slavery and trust. ( )

This is a huge omnibus of 36 stories and 7 poems as chosen by Ellen Datlow for works premiering in 2008. With so much to choose from, there are some wonderful standouts and some that just made me go, "Huh?" (luckily, only 3 of them made me do that). I read this throughout February (a story or sometimes two each night before bed), and now I just want all of the collections I don't have yet.

Here are some of my notes:

The Forest by Laird Barron - feels like you have to be high to appreciate it

The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate by Ted Chiang - an Egyptian fable about a Gate of Years which transports you 20 years into a fixed future - I really liked this one

Rats - by Veronica Schanoes - a familiar, darkly modernized fairy tale .. with rats - I liked this one too

The Swing by Don Tumasonis - where a swing appears to swallow up young girls - I liked this one, but it was one of those reads where you really need to pay attention to catch all of the nuances

My two favorites:

The Fiddler of Bayou Teche by Delia Sherman - about a girl named Cadence with white skin, hair, and pink eyes who was found in the swamp by loup-garous (werewolves) and raised by Tante Eulalie, a woman with many gifts, including healing, in her self-imposed swamp exile. Cadence eventually finds herself in a battle with a fiddler who can "fiddle the Devil out of Hell."

Winter's Wife by Elizabeth Hand - In Shaker Harbor, ME, Roderick Gale Winter, much beloved by his neighbors, including 15-year-old Justin, takes a wife from Iceland (Vaia). In Roderick's house, huldu folk reside as carvings in the beams of the house. When the King's Pines, three majestic pines near the water, are threatened by a wealthy and selfish area developer, strange happenings abound.

I love collections like these, and as I said before, reading this one made me put the others on my to-buy list. If you like fantastically dark tales, this is probably a collection you'll want too.

BOOK RATING: 4.5 out of 5 stars ( )

The twenty-first (and, unfortunately, final) installment of this long-running anthology series.

There's some very good stuff here, starting with the summations. I generally find these pretty interesting, but this year's round-up was awesome. Both the Fantasy and Horror sections reminded me of some novels I'd like to get my hands on, but the real TBR-breaker came when the editors began discussing anthologies and collections. I've discovered any number of wonderful authors through the YBF&H series, and many of my favourites released short fiction collections in 2007. Onto the wishlist they go!

There are also some remarkable stories herein. I've gotta tell you, I did the happy dance when I saw Ted Chiang's name in the TOC. He's yet another author whose complete works I must seek out and greedily devour one of these days, and "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate" was every bit as wonderful as I expected it to be. It's an Eastern-inspired tale that plays with storytelling conventions in some interesting ways. Eastern fairy tales and folk stories utilize a different sort of logic than their Western counterparts. I find that there's a much larger awareness of the ways in which all stories are connected. Chiang recognizes this, and he uses it to great effect.

Other stand-outs included "The Cambist and Lord Iron: A Fairy Tale of Economics" by Daniel Abraham, "Sir Hereward and Mister Fitz Go To War Again" by Garth Nix, "The Fiddler of Bayou Teche" by Delia Sherman, "Rats" by Veronica Schanoes and "The Evolution of Trickster Stories Among the Dogs of North Park After the Change" by Kij Johnson. I read the last with my own dog sitting on my lap, and I teared up more than a little. As an added bonus, a few of these stories are available for free online. Link and Grant have linked to them from their page for this book.

There were also a fair number of very good stories and poems; not stand-outs, exactly, but stories I'm glad to have read. The problem is that there are an equal number of stories and poems that did nothing for me--and by nothing, I mean nothing. I normally find that Datlow, Link and Grant select stories that show such an exemplary grasp of craft that I can appreciate them on a technical level even when the story itself falls flat for me. That wasn't the case here. All too often, I finished the piece and wondered who I could apply to to get my twenty minutes back. The writing was nothing particularly special. There seemed to be a lot of non-sequiturs. The endings often felt disconnected from the rest of the story. And this wasn't an infrequent occurrence; it happened over, and over, and over.

Urgh.

The collection is still worth reading for the summations and some of the stories, but it wasn't such a treat as some of the previous installments. I'd say the summations and a few of the stories are solidly in 4-star territory, but there were enough stories I'd rate at 3-stars and below that I can't whole-heartedly recommend the collection.

(A slightly different version of this review originally appeared on my blog, Stella Matutina). ( )

Good, solid collection. My favorite authors were:

• Chaz Brenchley


• Ted Chiang


• Veronica Schanoes


• Lucy Kemnitzer


• Liz Williams


• Lisa Tuttle

( )