The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror Read online

  THE YEAR’S BEST

  DARK FANTASY AND HORROR

  2011

  Edited by

  PAULA GURAN

  To Gardner Dozois for (so far) twenty-eight editions of The Year’s Best Science Fiction and ninety-four other anthologies.

  (Thanks for the privilege of compiling the list!)

  Copyright © 2011 by Paula Guran.

  Cover art by Ivan Bliznetsov/Fotolia.

  Cover design by Telegraphy Harness.

  Ebook design by Neil Clarke.

  ISBN: 978-1-60701-322-8 (ebook)

  ISBN: 978-1-60701-281-8 (trade paperback)

  All stories are copyrighted to their respective authors,and used here with their permission.

  PRIME BOOKS

  www.prime-books.com

  No portion of this book may be reproduced by any means, mechanical, electronic, or otherwise, without first obtaining the permission of the copyright holder.

  For more information, contact Prime Books.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Introduction: Back to the Dark by Paula Guran

  Lesser Demons by Norman Partridge

  Raise Your Hand If You’re Dead by John Shirley

  As Red as Red by Caitlín R. Kiernan

  Tragic Life Stories by Steve Duffy

  The Naturalist by Maureen McHugh

  The Broadsword by Laird Barron

  A Thousand Flowers by Margo Lanagan

  Frumpy Little Beat Girl by Peter Atkins

  The Stars Are Falling by Joe R. Lansdale

  Hurt Me by M.L.N. Hanover

  Are You Trying to Tell Me This is Heaven? by Sarah Langan

  Sea Warg by Tanith Lee

  Crawlspace by Stephen Graham Jones

  Mother Urban’s Booke of Dayes by Jay Lake

  Brisneyland by Night by Angela Slatter

  The Thing About Cassandra by Neil Gaiman

  He Said, Laughing by Simon R. Green

  Bloodsport by Gene Wolfe

  Oaks Park by M.K. Hobson

  Thimbleriggery and Fledglings by Steve Berman

  You Dream by Ekaterina Sedia

  Red Blues by Michael Skeet

  The Moon Will Look Strange by Lynda E. Rucker

  The Things by Peter Watts

  Malleus, Incus, Stapes by Sarah Totton

  The Return by S.D. Tullis

  The Dog King by Holly Black

  How Bria Died by Mike Aronovitz

  The Dire Wolf by Genevieve Valentine

  Parallel Lines by Tim Powers

  The Mystery Knight by George R.R. Martin

  About the Authors

  Copyrights & First Publication

  About the Editor

  BACK TO THE DARK

  PAULA GURAN

  For those of you who missed the introduction (“What the Hell Do you Mean by Dark Fantasy?” ) to the first volume of this series, and wish to read it, you can find it online at http://www.prime-books.com/intro-ybdfh2010. But, just so you’ve got the basics, here’s the condensed version:

  “Dark fantasy” isn’t universally defined—the definition depends on the context in which the phrase is used or who is elucidating it. You know it when you “feel” it.

  Darkness itself can be many things: nebulous, shadowy, tenebrous, mysterious, paradoxical (and thus illuminating) . . .

  A dark fantasy story might be only a bit unsettling or perhaps somewhat eerie. It might be revelatory or baffling. It can be simply a small glimpse of life seen “through a glass, darkly.”

  Since horror is something we feel—it’s an emotion, an affect—what each of us experiences, responds, or reacts to differs. What terrifies one may not frighten another.

  I’m not offering any definitions. I’m merely offering you, the reader, a diverse selection of stories that struck me as fitting the title of this tome. Each of them—no matter the style of the writing, theme, or shade of darkness—grabbed me from the start and kept me reading.

  This selection of stories—all originally published in 2010—presents what I feel is an even wider range than included in last year’s inaugural edition. There are tales of demons, ghosts, shapeshifters, vampires, zombies, and monsters of several varieties: supernatural, alien, merely human. You’ll encounter stories based on myth, folklore, and fairy tale. Find stories with swords (with and without sorcery) and sorcery (with or without swords). There’s also the science fictional, the amusing and quirky, retellings of the known and new tellings of the unknown, journeys into personal darkness and considerations of cosmic terrors. You will find yourself in future dystopias, the past, the present, and in between or outside any precise place in space or time. There are twists, turns, and, of course, terrific writing.

  As far as writers: you’ll be introduced to some new up-and-comers and renew acquaintances with established masters; there are well-known authors and those just beginning to be noted. Some writers are back who were in last year’s edition. There may even be a few re-introductions: authors you’ve read previously but haven’t recently come across.

  Of course, this is far from all the “best” that was published last year, it just skims the surface of an amazing depth of talent currently writing dark fiction and being published in anthologies, collections, and periodicals on paper with ink or in pixels on screens. This year, I had many sources pointed out to me I’d not been aware of last year. I look foreword to discovering even more great fiction published in 2011 to consider for the next volume. But I’ll continue to need your help finding it. Please keep sending suggestions, pointing out online publications, and submitting published anthologies and periodicals to [email protected]. (I prefer a PDF or Word .doc or RTF. But if you need to snail mail the actual book/magazine, email me for the address.)

  One surprise this year was the number of stories from anthologies that made it into the final line-up. I read so many good stories in periodicals, I probably would have said—if asked along the way—that a great many selections this year were going to come from such publications. Then you get down to those final decisions and . . . you never know until you know. In the end, I chose more anthologized stories than first anticipated.

  And—not really a surprise, but perhaps just one of those “things” about a particular year—the length of the stories averaged longer this year. More than a third fall into the longer-than-a-short-story (over 7500 words) but not-quite-a-novella length (starting at around 17,500 words or so) category some term “novelette.”

  As I write this, we’re already a quarter of the way through 2011. By the time it goes to press, we’ll be more than half way through the year—and I’ll be considering short fiction for The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror: 2012. What will it contain? No way to predict yet—and not just because the reading goes on (and on). There’s an aspect of defining dark fantasy I didn’t mention last year: the “Big Picture” of the times it is written and read in, the Zeitgeist, society’s overall emotional attitude as well as one’s personal feelings, reactions, hopes, fears, perceptions. What shade of darkness are we seeing right now?

  As I mentioned in the acknowledgements last year for the inaugural volume, the scope, intent, and—allow me to add—theme of The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror series is unique. I’ll note it here this time as a more obvious reminder to those looking to compare it to other “year’s best” compilations, past or present, or who are predisposed to assuming it is something it is not. There may be stories here that can be called “h
orror,” but this is not a horror anthology per se. Not all of the dark is horrific.

  One final note: Anthologies with titles including phrases like Year’s Best, Best of, Best (fill in the blank) are what they are. When compiling such a volume, no editor can completely and absolutely fulfill the inference of the title. Fiction is not a race to be won, there are no absolutes with which to measure it. Yet I’m sure every person who edits a “best” anthology exerts tremendous effort in a genuine attempt to offer a book worthy of its grandiose moniker. Ultimately, decisions are arrived at with sincere intention, but personal taste is, of course, involved, and—like it or not—compromises must be made.

  The job is somewhat onerous but, more often, enjoyable, and in the end, I’m sure we all hope you, the readers, find satisfaction in our selections. I know I hope you will.

  Paula Guran

  April 2011

  Deputy Roy Barnes liked to talk about things, especially things he didn’t understand, like those monsters that crawled out of corpses. The deputy called them lesser demons. He’d read about them in a book . . .

  LESSER DEMONS

  NORMAN PARTRIDGE

  Down in the cemetery, the children were laughing.

  They had another box open.

  They had their axes out. Their knives, too.

  I sat in the sheriff’s department pickup, parked beneath a willow tree. Ropes of leaves hung before me like green curtains, but those curtains didn’t stop the laughter. It climbed the ridge from the hollow below, carrying other noises—shovels biting hard-packed earth, axe blades splitting coffinwood, knives scraping flesh from bone. But the laughter was the worst of it. It spilled over teeth sharpened with files, chewed its way up the ridge, and did its best to strip the hard bark off my spine.

  I didn’t sit still. I grabbed a gas can from the back of the pickup. I jacked a full clip into my dead deputy’s .45, slipped a couple spares into one of the leather pockets on my gun belt and buttoned it down. Then I fed shells into my shotgun and pumped one into the chamber.

  I went for a little walk.

  Five months before, I stood with my deputy, Roy Barnes, out on County Road 14. We weren’t alone. There were others present. Most of them were dead, or something close to it.

  I held that same shotgun in my hand. The barrel was hot. The deputy clutched his .45, a ribbon of bitter smoke coiling from the business end. It wasn’t a stink you’d breathe if you had a choice, but we didn’t have one.

  Barnes reloaded, and so did I. The June sun was dropping behind the trees, but the shafts of late-afternoon light slanting through the gaps were as bright as high noon. The light played through black smoke rising from a Chrysler sedan’s smoldering engine and white smoke simmering from the hot asphalt piled in the road gang’s dump truck.

  My gaze settled on the wrecked Chrysler. The deal must have started there. Fifteen or twenty minutes before, the big black car had piled into an old oak at a fork in the county road. Maybe the driver had nodded off, waking just in time to miss a flagman from the work gang. Over-corrected and hit the brakes too late. Said: Hello tree, goodbye heartbeat.

  Maybe that was the way it happened. Maybe not. Barnes tried to piece it together later on, but in the end it really didn’t matter much. What mattered was that the sedan was driven by a man who looked like something dredged up from the bottom of a stagnant pond. What mattered was that something exploded from the Chrysler’s trunk after the accident. That thing was the size of a grizzly, but it wasn’t a bear. It didn’t look like a bear at all. Not unless you’d ever seen one turned inside out, it didn’t.

  Whatever it was, that skinned monster could move. It unhinged its sizable jaws and swallowed a man who weighed two-hundred-and-change in onelong ratcheting gulp, choking arms and legs and torso down a gullet lined with razor teeth. Sucked the guy into a blue-veined belly that hung from its ribs like a grave-robber’s sack and then dragged that belly along fresh asphalt as it chased down the other men, slapping them onto the scorching roadbed and spitting bloody hunks of dead flesh in their faces. Some it let go, slaughtering others like so many chickens tossed live and squawking onto a hot skillet.

  It killed four men before we showed up, fresh from handling a fender-bender on the detour route a couple miles up the road. Thanks to my shotgun and Roy Barnes’ .45, allthat remained of the thing was a red mess with a corpse spilling out of its gutshot belly. As for the men from the work crew, there wasn’t much you could say. They were either as dead as that poor bastard who’d ended his life in a monster’s stomach, or they were whimpering with blood on their faces, or they were running like hell and halfway back to town. But whatever they were doing didn’t make too much difference to me just then.

  “What was it, Sheriff?” Barnes asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You sure it’s dead?”

  “I don’t know that, either. All I know is we’d better stay away from it.”

  We backed off. The only things that lingered were the afternoon light slanting through the trees, and the smoke from that hot asphalt, and the smoke from the wrecked Chrysler. The light cut swirls through that smoke as it pooled around the dead thing, settling low and misty, as if the something beneath it were trying to swallow a chunk of the world, roadbed and all.

  “I feel kind of dizzy,” Barnes said.

  “Hold on, Roy. You have to.”

  I grabbed my deputy by the shoulder and spun him around. He was just a kid, really—before this deal, he’d never even had his gun out of its holster while on duty. I’d been doing the job for fifteen years, but I could have clocked a hundred and never seen anything like this. Still, we both knew it wasn’t over. We’d seen what we’d seen, we’d done what we’d done, and the only thing left to do was deal with whatever was coming next.

  That meant checking out the Chrysler. I brought the shotgun barrel even with it, aiming at the driver’s side door as we advanced. The driver’s skull had slammed the steering wheel at the point of impact. Black blood smeared across his face, and filed teeth had slashed through his pale lips so that they hung from his gums like leavings you’d bury after gutting a fish. On top of that, words were carved on his face. Some were purpled over with scar tissue and others were still fresh scabs. None of them were words I’d seen before. I didn’t know what to make of them.

  “Jesus,” Barnes said. “Will you look at that.”

  “Check the back seat, Roy.”

  Barnes did. There was other stuff there. Torn clothes. Several pairs of handcuffs. Ropes woven with fishhooks. A wrought-iron trident. And in the middle of all that was a cardboard box filled with books.

  The deputy pulled one out. It was old. Leathery. As he opened it, the book started to come apart in his hands. Brittle pages fluttered across the road—

  Something rustled in the open trunk. I pushed past Roy and fired point blank before I even looked. The spare tire exploded. On the other side of the trunk, a clawed hand scrabbled up through a pile of shotgunned clothes. I fired again. Those claws clacked together, and the thing beneath them didn’t move again.

  Using the shotgun barrel, I shifted the clothes to one side, uncovering a couple of dead kids in a nest of rags and blood. Both of them were handcuffed. The thing I’d killed had chewed its way out of one of their bellies. It had a grinning, wolfish muzzle and a tail like a dozen braided snakes. I slammed the trunk and chambered another shell. I stared down at the trunk, waiting for something else to happen, but nothing did.

  Behind me . . . well, that was another story.

  The men from the road gang were on the move.

  Their boots scuffed over hot asphalt.

  They gripped crow bars, and sledge hammers, and one of them even had a machete.

  They came towards us with blood on their faces, laughing like children.

  The children in the cemetery weren’t laughing anymore. They were gathered around an open grave, eating.

  Like always, a couple seconds passed before they no
ticed me. Then their brains sparked their bodies into motion, and the first one started for me with an axe. I pulled the trigger, and the shotgun turned his spine to jelly, and he went down in sections. The next one I took at longer range, so the blast chewed her over some. Dark blood from a hundred small wounds peppered her dress. Shrieking, she turned tail and ran.

  Which gave the third bloodface a chance to charge me. He was faster than I expected, dodging the first blast, quickly closing the distance. There was barely enough room between the two of us for me to get off another shot, but I managed the job. The blast took off his head. That was that.

  Or at least I thought it was. Behind me, something whispered through long grass that hadn’t been cut in five months. I whirled, but the barefoot girl’s knife was already coming at me. The blade ripped through my coat in a silver blur, slashing my right forearm. A twist of her wrist and she tried to come back for another piece, but I was faster and bashed her forehead with the shotgun butt. Her skull split like a popped blister and she went down hard, cracking the back of her head on a tombstone.

  That double-punched her ticket. I sucked a deep breath and held it. Blood reddened the sleeve of my coat as the knife wound began to pump. A couple seconds later I began to think straight, and I got the idea going in my head that I should put down the shotgun and get my belt around my arm. I did that and tightened it good. Wounded, I’d have a walk to get back to the pickup. Then I’d have to find somewhere safe where I could take care of my arm. The pickup wasn’t far distance-wise, but it was a steep climb up to the ridgeline. My heart would be pounding double-time the whole way. If I didn’t watch it, I’d lose a lot of blood.

  But first I had a job to finish. I grabbed the shotgun and moved toward the rifled grave. Even in the bright afternoon sun, the long grass was still damp with morning dew. I noticed that my boots were wet as I stepped over the dead girl. That bothered me, but the girl’s corpse didn’t. She couldn’t bother me now that she was dead.