As with most books of collected short stories by various authors, there were some worthwhile tales but a lot of the material was lacklustre. Ironically, as I’m not generally a fan of horror novels (unless it’s vampires not of the Twilight variety) I enjoyed many more of the stories chosen by Ellen Datlow, who takes charge of selecting the year’s best horror publications, than I did of the set picked by Terri Windling. Stephen King’s short stories, for example, are always surprisingly enjoyable, even though I am not a fan of his slow burn horror style full length novels. Maybe his style is just more palatable to me in short stories, where I can enjoy his concise storytelling style in a small dose without having to really consider the longer arcs of character development and drawn out midwestern settings. Out of this collection, there weren’t any authors who I really felt compelled to explore more of, which was kind of the point in reading the collection, but that’s okay - we’ll try another year and see if we fare any better. ( )

This is one installment of a prestigious annual anthology of fantastic and "horror" genre writing—mostly fiction, with a smattering of poetry and an essay. The over 50 selections represent both established names in the field and relatively less known authors, and the structure of the book is typical of "year's best" collections.

Writing quality of each story is high, but I didn't care for many of them. High incidence of lit-porn. ( )

Among modern fantasy anthologists, no one has been quite able to match the success of Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling as an editing team. Together, these two intrepid women have launched the annual The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror collection, the Snow White, Blood Red series, and the Mythic Fiction series, as well as putting together a couple of standalone YA collections. I’d previously read one of the latter, and was fairly unimpressed, but resolved to give them at least one more try.

This volume, the eighth annual Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror collection, seems to be one of the more popular entries in its particular series, whatever that counts for.

There’s quite a bit of mature content here (of various types), but I was expecting that, and whenever things got too uncomfortable for me I simply skipped to the next story. What I was not expecting was for the collection to be so blasted literary. While I understand the temptation to branch out and reach for the highbrow, this is after all a volume that celebrates genres—two of them, to be exact. And yet there was little of the horrific or the fantastic in several of the stories included here (Jonathan Carroll’s “A Wheel in the Desert, the Moon on Some Swings,” David Garnett’s “A Friend Indeed,” Barry Lopez’s “The Entreaty of the Wiideema,” to name a few). And even when a story was, say, a fantasy, it couldn’t be the kind of fantasy people expect to read. No medieval settings or sword-and-sorcery epics. Just urban fantasy and magic realism, and genre-benders.

One of the horror stories was about potatoes.

I’m not even kidding.

After all of that, it was a relief to run into a real live unicorn in Jane Yolen’s “De Natura Unicorni.” Not that Yolen’s treatment of the subject was at all generic: I was simply happy to encounter something recognizable among the collection’s tribal languages and man-eating potatoes. (The author’s poem “Märchen” was also a breath of fresh air.) It was even more of a relief to make the acquaintance of a bona fide original fairy tale by science fiction author Geoffrey A. Landis, “The Kingdom of Cats and Birds.” I think my very favorite story, however, was Judith Tarr’s “Mending Souls.” It was wonderfully Celtic and fey, and reminded me quite a bit of Susanna Clarke’s faerie stories—and believe me, you can’t get much higher praise from me than that.

I ended up skipping most of the horror stories (not my cup of tea), but enjoyed Michael Marshall Smith’s “Rain Falls” and Stephen King’s “The Man in the Black Suit.” The subject matter of King’s tale was not incredibly appealing to me, but boy can he write! I can see myself reading more of his short stories and novellas, although not, perhaps, his novels.

And of the stories that I wouldn’t properly consider either fantasy or horror, I must admit that I was quite taken with Kelly Eskridge’s “Strings,” a dystopian tale about a government-run classical music industry, which ends with the lines “Her hands were empty. She was full of music.”

But for every story that I enjoyed, it seemed that there were at least five that were completely awful, and overall I have to rank this the worst anthology I’ve ever read.

If this was the best of 1994, I don’t want to see the worst.

Strike two for Datlow and Windling. ( )

just guessing at year