The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2018 is an anthology of dark fantasy and horror stories. It was edited by Paula Guran and contains more than twenty stories, each by a different author. This is the ninth edition of the yearly anthology that Guran has edited and released.
Since The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2018 is a collection of stories, and contains so many, this review is going to be a little different than my other reviews. With around 30 stories, there's no way I could review every single one of them without making this review unbearably long. At the same time, I can't give a review of the book as a whole, since each story is so different. Instead, I'm going to talk about five stories: three that were my most favorite, and the two I disliked the most.
The Crow Palace by Priya Sharma is the story of a woman named Julie who returns home following the death of her father. She left him and her sister, with cerebral palsy, years ago and has only returned to bury her father and take care of a few last minute things. While she's visiting, she uncovers a dark family secret. I think the reason why I enjoyed this story so much was because it subverted my expectations. Julie's family has a very strange connection with birds, which is apparent on the first page. What the connection is, and how deep it goes, is revealed much later. The thing that made this story stick in my mind, though, was the final revelation regarding the birds. I won't spoil the ending, but let's just say, Julie's assumption about what the birds did, and who they did it to, is wrong.
The Little Mermaid in Passing by Angela Slatter can best be described as telling the story of the Little Mermaid from the Sea Witch's perspective. In the original fairytale, the reader doesn't ever learn why the Sea Witch would help the Little Mermaid. In the Disney film, Ursula obviously has a masterplan to take over the ocean, but the original story never reveals that. I liked this story because it took a story I already knew, and showed it from a different angle. Much like other stories such as Wicked, it made me rethink how I viewed the "villain". I found the writing style and the direction the story went in to be unique and unexpected as well.
Secret Keeper by Bonnie Jo Stuffelbeam I would categorize as halfway between psychological horror and teen drama. The story takes place almost entirely in a high school. It tells the story of a Ghost Girl, who isn't dead and lives in the bowels of the school, who begins training Chrissie, an actress in the school musical, to sing better. If this set-up sounds like Phantom of the Opera, but with the Phantom having a different gender, that's because it kind of is. While the set-ups are similar, the plots are different. The Ghost Girl wants something different from what the Phantom wanted. The ending was unexpected as well, since it's ambiguous regarding what was and wasn't reality.
Moon, and Memory, and Muchness by Katherine Vaz tells the story of a woman grieving the loss of her child who encounters a little girl that reminds her of her deceased daughter. She owns a tea shop and the girl and her mother become regular customers. The story is chock full of Alice in Wonderland references as well.It's somewhat of a thriller, but I wasn't a huge fan. It's not a bad story, just one with weird pacing. The story goes from 0 to 100 very suddenly, then back to 0, and I don't feel there was enough build-up beforehand.
Survival Strategies by Helen Marshall is the story of a British scholar going to New York to do a piece of a famous horror author, who's supposed to be Stephen King, but isn't. This was my least favorite story, mostly because not a lot happens. She does some research, talks to the author's ex-editor and that's pretty much it. Scenes of the narrator talking about the author's career are interspersed with her mentioning how bleak and tense things are in the world due to politics. Perhaps some might find the story suspenseful, but I didn't. The only way this story is connected to horror is that the author she's researching, who never appears, writes horror.
The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror series, for a lack of a better term, is one of my favorite releases, because its one of the ways I find new authors. It's also where I find some of the most interesting and creative stories. I feel like authors of short stories are more willing to take risks and try new things than with full length novels.
Rating: 3.5 stars. I didn't love every story, but I liked the collection as a whole.
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