The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 21 Review

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(More customer reviews)In September this year it was announced that BEST NEW HORROR had won the British Fantasy Society Award for Best Anthology (Original or Reprint) for the third consecutive year.
It now enters its 21st volume, with the editor's website already soliciting works first published in 2010 be submitted for consideration in #22. That would put the series on a par with the current record-holder for the longest running `best of' horror anthology, DAW Books' THE YEAR'S BEST HORROR STORIES (1971-1994), the final fifteen volumes of which were edited by the great Karl Edward Wagner; sales of this current volume will dictate whether or not the publishers will commission a 23rd.
And on the basis of this present selection it deserves to sell a bundle. As much as I admire - and religiously buy - Ellen Datlow's various anthologies, I got to admit that I feel Jones is better at balancing his Table of Contents: his books have an eclectic feel, slipping in an old-style tale, subtle and creepy, next to an all-out screamer, or a straight-up-whisky-shot urban angst depressor one minute and a tongue-in-cheek wry tale the next. Traditionally written, where the prose is clipped, suited and wearing a tie, to hip and flash, the writer letting their colloquialism all hang out. Datlow, meanwhile, is superb at maintaining a consistent mood throughout her choices - too successful perhaps; at times it can lend a certain lifelessness to the reading experience, as some of the sense of surprise has been subdued. You might not know what the next story will be about, but you'll know what kind of `feel' it will have to it.
Not that I'm advocating a boycott of Datlow in favour of Jones (I probably have as many Datlow edited anthologies as those by Jones, if not more); indeed, the genre is too marginalised as it is - we need both of them!
And so to #21 and JOE HILL and STEPHEN KING's novella "Throttle". A spin on Richard Matheson's "Duel" (brilliantly filmed by Steven Spielberg in the early `70s), only here it is a gang of bikers relentless hounded by a truck driver. But the destruction is more than just mindless carnage sans motivation, as the reader discovers at the end. The true success of the tale lies in the ease of the dialogue, the pithy characterization and the interplay between the bikers. This is Hill's fourth appearance since #14 in 2003; incidentally, Jones was the first editor to reprint his work, two years before fandom learned he was the son of Stephen King. "Throttle" is their first collaboration.
Although Ellen Datlow did not feature any stories by BARBARA RODEN earlier in the year in THE BEST HORROR STORIES OF THE YEAR VOLUME TWO, in was the praise she gave in her `Summation' of Barbara Roden's debut collection, NORTHWEST PASSAGES (2009), that convinced me to buy a copy. And I'm glad I did. Here Jones selects "Out and Back", one of two stories original to the collection. Eerie and elegant, the story involves a young man whose hobby is photographing derelict structures, and who drags his long-suffering girlfriend to a disused amusement park. The ending is wonderfully executed and finely balanced. Lovers of Algernon Blackwood and Robert Aickman will not be disappointed and I urge you to seek out the entire collection.
From the well received limited edition anthology, BRITISH INVASION (from specialty publisher Cemetery Dance) comes "Respects" by Ramsey Campbell, who examines the trend of glorifying the flotsam and detritus of human society when they come to a grisly end at the hands of the police (think of the recent Raoul Moat case: police officer shot in the face, unarmed ex-girlfriend hospitalised and new-boyfriend murdered all in a pique of jealous rage, and yet the public treat him as some kind of folk hero). A horror story indeed. It has also been reprinted in THE YEAR'S BEST DARK FANTASY AND HORROR 2010, edited by Paula Guran.
"Cold to the Touch" (from his second collection of the same name) is SIMON STRANTZAS's third consecutive appearance in BNH. Although a fine tale, about two men exploring a ring of stones in the Arctic which possess strange anomalies, my own personal preference would have been for "Like Falling Snow". However, that simply speaks to the further pleasures to be had in Strantzas's book. Jones called his first volume of short stories, BENEATH THE SURFACE (2008), "Quite possibly the most important debut collection in the genre" to appear this decade. Sadly, the book was released just as the publisher suddenly went bust and it quickly vanished as a result. Happily, though, it has been revised, expanded and re-released just recently as a trade paperback from Dark Regions Press. Don't let this second incarnation pass you by.
"The Game of Bear" also marks REGGIE OLIVER's third consecutive appearance, although he is a man of seasoned years, unlike our young pup Strantzas. He has written and performed many plays over the past decades, but it has only been in recent years that he has come to the attention of horror aficionados for his quietly measured supernatural tales. This present story heralds a rare treat: the great-nephew of M. R. James has granted Oliver permission to complete one of the ghost story master's unfinished story fragments, that of a man being haunted by the presence of a relative who won't leave their property. It's a reflect of the high esteem that Oliver has so quickly attained that only he was considered worthy of this honour.
Set in 1920's Cairo, "Shem-el-Nessim" by CHRIS BELL is a tale about a man who follows a woman after becoming captivated by the scent of her perfume. He loses her, but immediately goes on a mission to track down what kind of unique fragrance it was she wore. But some things are best left undiscovered...
A deceptively simple tale, the power of "What Happens When You Wake Up in the Night" by MICHAEL MARSHALL SMITH lies in the voice of the child Maddy from whose point of view the story is being told. A cautionary fable about what happens if you don't leave the light on during the night and (as the closing line puts it) "this is why, if you wake up in the night, you should never ever get up out of bed." There is no rationale given for what happens, but as with the novels THE OVERNIGHT (2004) by Ramsey Campbell and THE DELUGE (2007) by Mark Morris, that isn't the point, and probably wouldn't be very interesting if it was explained anyway. No, the pleasure here lies simply in the fact of what is happening. Oh, and together with having won the British Fantasy Society Award for Best Short Story it is the ONLY tale to appear in all of this year's `best of' horror anthologies: Jones's, Datlow's and Guran's. Also, get a hold of his powerful and poignant short novel THE SERVANTS (2007). A must read, and somewhat overlooked due to his `Michael Marshall' thrillers. Deserves a much wider readership. It was released in the UK under the name `M. M. Smith'.
A riff on Edgar Allan Poe's "William Wilson", NICHOLAS ROYLE offers up "The Reunion", a finely crafted tale of a couple who go to a reunion at a hotel, where the husband is convinced two corridors are not simply identical, but that they are the same corridor. It's not the only thing that's duplicated, as the title of the story doesn't simply refer to the evening gala the couple is attending.
Master of the short-short story, RICHARD CHRISTIAN MATHESON, returns with "Venturi", about a man's fear of fire in a tale inspired by his father's study in paranoia, "Legion of Plotters" (1953), and which pulls off the remarkable feat of being more unsettling than his father's original. The language is tight, the sentences short, the sense of unease palpable.
Although known for some years now for his television scripts, ROBERT SHEARMAN has made a dramatic impact on the short story scene in the last few years, with the very well received collections TINY DEATHS (2007) and LOVE SONGS FOR THE SHY AND CYNICAL (2009), both multi-award winning books, including the World Fantasy and British Fantasy Awards. His story here, "Granny's Grinning", features two youngsters being given monster costumes with a difference for Christmas. . . and the lengths Mommy and Daddy will go to keep granny happy. Meant as a blackly humorous tale, it's in fact quite unsettling. Definitely a writer whose first two books you should check out.
Next is ROSALIE PARKER with "In the Garden" from THE FIFTH BLACK BOOK OF HORROR edited by Charles Black, a series created in homage to the infamous THE PAN BOOK OF HORROR STORIES (1959-1989) and which is rapidly making a name for itself: volume eight is already in the works. Another story from #5 was selected this year be Ellen Datlow for THE BEST HORROR STORIES OF THE YEAR VOLUME TWO. Parker's comes across as a lightweight tale, and yet that's what makes it work; as with the Marshall story, it's the `voice' that clinches it. This time it's a sweet lady talking directly to the reader about the pride she takes in her garden, and the things in it... including -
- well, that would be telling. (Incidentally, the first `Pan Book of Horror Stories' - from 1959! - has just been re-released in a facsimile edition by the original publisher. I urge you to look it up on Amazon: apparently if the re-launch is successful they'll reprint further volumes in the series.)
Reader's of Caitlin R. Kiernan's "The Ape's Wife" from BNH #19 will be familiar with the concept of the next story, a sequel to the 1930's King Kong movie, where the author postulates `what happened next'. But whereas Kiernan's was an almost lyrical dream, STEPHEN VOLK's "After the Ape" is short and bitter; for Ann Darrow, after the ape's death, there isn't anything. Packs more of a punch that your initial reading might imply: a story that lingers.
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