The Best of the Best Horror of the Year: 10 Years of Essential Short Horror Fiction

Datlow’s 10th-anniversary volume of horror shorts is a stunning and flawless collection that showcases the most terrifyingly beautiful writing of the genre. This anthology opens with its strongest title “Lowland Sea” by Suzy McKee Charnas, the story of an African woman quarantined with a wealthy white director and his friends on a compound in France after an outbreak of the Red Sweat, a disease as lethal as it is contagious. The woman is sent into the apocalyptic landscape to seek help, only to face the betrayal of these rich, white people upon her return. “Chapter Six” by Stephen Graham Jones, another outstanding piece, suspensefully details the plight of an academic to understand the anthropological transition from human to zombie and his subsequent gory demise. Datlow’s palate for the fearful and the chilling knows no genre constraint, encompassing the undead, the supernatural, and the cruelty perpetrated by ordinary humans. Exciting, literary, and utterly scary, this anthology is nothing short of exceptional. (Oct.)