I loved being in this book with one of my wee prose poems. It would never occur to me to SUBMIT anything of mine to a Year's Best anthology -- but I met Karl when WFC came to Seattle,m and he urged me to send him something. I doing the very short thing, prose-poems and vignettes, and I to risk submitting them to professional horror editors, as I did when Poppy was editing LOVE IN VEIN. It's a wonderful literary form, & I've become quite addicted to working therein. Ah, how I miss Karl Wagner -- what a wonderful force he was!2 s Kevin LuciaAuthor 76 books341

Fabulous. Must reads. Too bad there wasn't a way to get rights untangled and release all these in ebooks for the younger generation... Jay Rothermel749 7

As always, and necessarily, an uneven anthology.The Ramsey Campbell stories and "The Motivation" by David Langford are the most powerful and accomplished.

Drollest: "Nights in the City" by Jessica Amanda Salmonson

Worst taste: "Buckets" by F. Paul Wilson Bill Borre343 1 followerRead

"Kaddish" by Jack Dann - Nathan loses his wife and son and goes out into the sea on a speedboat to meet his end.This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.Show full review Skuli Saeland902 24

Þrátt fyrir lofsverðan titil á þessu smásagnasafni um að ritið innihaldi bestu hryllingssögur ársins þá fannst mér bókin ekki standa undir nafni. Sumar sögurnar voru hins vegar mergjaðar og fengu hárin til að rísa en aðrar fundust mér vera slappar þó þær séu sem betur fer í minnihluta.
Það má hins vegar segja að helsti kostur ritsins sé hve fjölbreyttar sögurnar eru og ólíkar í ritstíl og nálgun sinni við að vekja upp gæsahúðina.fantasy horror John16 5

Standouts: The Gravedigger's Tale, Meeting the Author, Sponge and China Tea, and On the Dark Road Fatman120 58

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This was the only installment in the long-lived series that I had not read, but sadly I was winding up my reading of the series just as Goodreads debuted, so only a handful got . Anyway, in hopes of eventually backtracking, here's a review for this one, covering stories released in 1984 (Junior year of High School!). I find myself very appreciative of Wagner's wide range of taste for different styles of horror, and this volume continues showcasing his "generalist" approach to curating the YBHS line.

As usual, weakest to strongest here, although there were no out and out bad stories (which, given the intent of the series, is not surprising). In the "good but somewhat weak/flawed" category, we have Charles L. Grant's "Are You Afraid Of The Dark", another example of his "quiet horror" approach (which, as I've said a few times, I find myself appreciating more in theory than practice) - the set-up is good (rambunctious young boys left with a strangely normal yet ominous babysitter while their parents debate the punishment for their latest act of delinquency) and the story moves in an interesting direction (sitter suggests playing some "games" which end up frightening each boy) while being atmospheric (dark closets, thunderstorms) but it wraps up with an underwhelming, kind of left-field ending. A man is hired to appraise the occult documents a distant friend has inherited - in "Hands With Long Fingers" by Leslie Halliwell - and instead finds himself mute observer to a black magic revenge plan instituted by a family retainer/friend in a perfectly fine but not overly original story - nice descriptive passages and character details, though.

On the one hand, "The Wardrobe" by Jovan Panich does a great job capturing that strange childhood perceptive state which makes unsupported visual associations (here between the hulking, Victorian-era titular object and a coffin) and which can intuit unstated parental emotional stress, and so imbues a piece of furniture with menace. Sadly, the ending resonates more as a TALES FROM THE CRYPT act of ironic violence. Not bad. Similarly, Vincent McHardy's "Angst For The Memories" starts as in interesting experiment (told completely in dialogue between two amnesiac, blind, floating consciousnesses) but the ending is... well, better for you to read and judge for yourself... The oddly hallucinatory "The End Of The World" by James B. Hemesath has a family driving across drought-dessicated South Dakota and engaging a garrulous roadside attendant in a weirdly discursive discussion about stolen children and Indians, before heading back onto the increasingly odd road. A good example of the kind of quasi-lit brand of horror Wagner would occasionally bring in, this one kind of works, but also feels unfocused.

Three stories here look back at past figures in the genre. "The Thing In The Bedroom" by David Langfordis an extended, modernized parody of William Hope Hodgson's occult detective Carnacki stories, here given the standard club tale frame as an "on the cheap" paranormal investigator runs afoul of a rather amorous haunting in a run-down seaside bed and breakfast (think Hodgson's "The Whistling Room", but more...uhh... priapic in character). WARNING - those with more delicate, humorless and prickly modern sensibilities may be shocked, offended and deeply wounded by some of the jokes in this fairly cute and funny story. You have been warned! M.R. James gets his usual pastiche here with "The Scarecrow" by Roger Johnson - a thoroughly adequate tale of two college students investigating standing stones and ethnomusicology in a small English village, only to discover a local legend about a black magic curse and a hideous scarecrow. Fine for what it is (a dream sequence of a slowly approaching tattered figure is creepy) but curiously unambitious and it moves in a predictable straight line. Finally, a heretofore uncommented connection between poet Hart Crane and H.P. Lovecraft's social circles is explored in "Weird Tales" by Fred Chappell - it was a story on my "to be read" list and it's certainly interesting, if perhaps also a bit typical in its use of "geometrical dimensional" horror (ala "Dreams In The Witch House", "A Victim Of Higher Spaces", "The Shadowy Street", etc.) - although the connections to Crane are interesting.

In the reliably "good" category:
"Catch Your Death" nicely interweaves three story skeins - a female schoolteacher under the thumb of her manipulative mother, two young children who have encountered the small-town folkloric death-omen "Black Shuck" and the narrative from the Shuck itself. A simple, dark fable from John Gordon who also satisfies with his second appearance here, the resolutely non-fantastic "Never Grow Up". Presented as a monologue from a young boy, regaling a crypt with his grim tales of awful home life and his his dysfunctional parents, it was a good example of real-life horror. Daniel Wynn Barber also features a young boy's viewpoint in "Tiger In The Snow", a simple story of a kid walking home through a snowstorm and wary of tigers - but all is not as it seems (no, it's not a "predator is prey" story) - an effective, concise tale.

"Borderlands" is a ghost story set at the US/Mexican border and, while not amazingly inventive or anything, John Brizzolara does a nice job conjuring an eerie, lonesome atmosphere in the piece. Charles Wagner's "Deadlights", adapted from a comic book story, is similarly familiar but again does a good job conjuring the feel of an urban legend as three friends, driving across a lonely stretch of Kansas, run afoul of ghostly headlights that closely tail them. Ramsey Campbell again illustrates how confidently he can evoke half-seen horrors out of small details in "Watch The Birdie", set in a dim pub with a squawking parrot, a graffiti filled basement bathroom and a creaking staircase. Presented as a "true" story - this was interesting and moody.

David J. Schow's "Coming Soon To A Theater Near You", meanwhile, is full-bore horror - a tribute to the old fleapit grindhouse cinemas of yore, docking bays for the city's effluvia: the poor, the cheap, the crippled and the wasted, where a dollar could buy you somewhere to sit for 6 or 8 hours out of the cold or the heat or the violence or just out of your life's circumstance. This is also one of Schow's tributes to Hollywood at the time, the sleazy, seedy Hollywood of the disenfranchised, homeless and hopeless. In this case, a bitter Vietnam vet who begins to realize the cut-rate exploitation palace he wastes his days at has some very strange things going on with its staff and premises. The ending is particularly powerful, skirting the dregs of the bottom of society and forcing the reader to reevaluate their dismissive definitions by opening up a lower nadir. I am proud to say I was able to purchase the rights to this story from Mr. Schow himself and present it on the weekly horror fiction podcast I edit, PSEUDOPOD.org. The link for that episode is here. And Dennis Etchison gives us "Talking In The Dark" featuring a troubled, alienated, young man living in a small town. He wants to be a writer and sends obsessive fan letters to a "Stephen King"- author he admires and projects on, but what happens when his idol actually visits him and proves to be more (and less) than he imagined? A very strange and, ultimately, intense, story - Etchison remains as inscrutable as ever, but I d it.

There are two standout stories in this collection, solidly excellent in every way. "Dinner Party" by Gardner Dozois is immensely powerful as it slowly reveals the circumstances that led a young National Guardsman to attend a highly publicized dinner with a media figure and his wife, even though they both obviously dis each other. This is the kind of real-world horror (one could argue it has to be a fantasy since it features politically committed campus protests in 1984 and we know that just didn't happen) that, again, Wagner was adept at noticing and including in his yearly anthology, and we're all the better for it. Finally, I experienced immense joy re-reading Stephen King's masterful "Mrs. Todd's Shortcut", which is a fine piece of dark fantasy and immensely assured writing and which I now must solidly place in the top echelons of his short fiction. What's great about it is that King is not merely satisfied to tell an inventive weird tale of a impetuous and fiery woman's penchant for "making time" on the Maine backroads (even if it takes her off the map entirely!) but ALSO uses the tale as an excuse to employ a powerful frame story, deploy some deft dialect work AND comment on the act of storytelling itself. Truly, a masterpiece (my favorite detail: the sign that says "Motorway B")!

And that's it folks!r-anth-h-s-20th-70-00-own10 s Scott539

Above average collection featuring big names Stephen King, Dennis Etchison, Charles Grant, Ramsey Campbell, Gardner Dozois, and David J. Schow alongside several less known authors. The only story I did not at all was "Mrs. Todd's Shortcut," an ironic title since King always takes the long way round when telling a tale and this was no exception. The journey was dull; the destination not worth the time.

Here are some that are better:

"Are You Afraid of the Dark?" by Charles L. Grant: A trio of delinquents is forced to play a series of sinister games with their babysitter.

"Coming Soon to a Theater Near You" by David J. Schow: A Vietnam vet discovers the truth lurking under the skin of a run-down movie theater.

"Dinner Party" by Gardner Dozois: A young military man endures a tense automobile ride with a noted doctor and his wife. More a suspense tale than a horror, but with a great punch at the end.

"Weird Tales" by Fred Chappell: A faux-nonfictional story featuring Lovecraft himself along with some of his contemporaries, positing the genesis of his famous mythology.

"The Thing in the Bedroom" by David Langford: A humorous story that pokes fun at the "occult detective" trope.

"Talking in the Dark" by Dennis Etchison: A fateful encounter between a famous horror author and his number one fan (no, not that one.)
horror short-stories2 s Kevin LuciaAuthor 76 books341

One of the things I love doing with these collections is reading all the bios. It's amazing to see writers now considered to be greats cutting their teeth, but also just as humbling to read wonderful stories by writers I've never heard of before, who, for some reason or other, faded off the scene. Humbling, and gives perspective. That, and of course, the stories rock. 2 s Ronald204 40

Table of Contents

Introduction: 13 is a Lucky Number by Karl Edward Wagner
Mrs. Todd's Shortcut by Stephen King
Are You Afraid of the Dark? by Charles L. Grant
Catch Your Death by John Gordon
Dinner Party by Gardner Dozois
Tiger In the Snow by Daniel Wynn Barber
Watch the Birdie by Ramsey Campbell
Coming Soon To A Theater Near You by David J. Schow
Hands With Long Fingers by Larecoreslie Halliwell
Weird Tales by Fred Chappell
The Wardrobe by Jovan Panich
Angst For the Memories by Vincent McHardy
The Thing in the Bedroom by David Langford
Borderland by John Brizzolara
The Scarecrow by Roger Johnson
The End of the World by James B. Hemesath
Never Grow Up by John Gordon
Deadlights by Charles Wagner
Talking in the Dark by Dennis Etchison

I read and reviewed two other books in this series. I got this one from the public library. This book was published in 1985, which contains editor Karl Edward Wagner's choice of the best horror short fiction of 1984.

s on some of the stories:

"Mrs. Todd's Shortcut" by Stephen King. Karl Edward Wagner, in his introduction to this story, says "For those who assume anything written by Stephen King is automatically published, three women's magazines rejected this story before Redbook accepted it."

After about four pages into the story, I gave up. The first person narrator communicates in a dialect of the English language, which, for me, reduces ease of reading.

"Dinner Party" by Gardner Dozois. I used to interact with Gardner Dozois on the Asimov's forum, before its demise. Some might feel that the demise of the Asimov's forum is a horror story itself. "Dinner Party" is a near future science fiction story. The background is tension between the Federal Government and some states; yes, a second Civil War is looming. In this background a Senator, who is pro-Union , might have wished he not made a certain promise.

"Tiger in the Snow" by Daniel Wynn Barber is perhaps the shortest story in the book, and one of the best. A child is travelling back home, in the cold and the snow, and wonders if he is seeing a real tiger near him, or if just mistaken.

"Talking in the Dark" by Dennis Etchison. Interesting idea in this story, and after reading the first half, I had no good idea where it was going to lead, which is good thing. A man writes a long letter, revealing a lot of personal info, to a horror writer he s. The fan of the horror writer, and the horror writer meet up. A bit of advice sometimes given to writers is "Write what you know." hehe

The other stories in this book I didn't mention are well worth reading.



horror-fiction weird-fiction1 Pam BaddeleyAuthor 2 books56

One in a long running series, this was published in 1985 to showcase the best stories of 1984. Not all are what I would catagorise as horror: for example, Mrs Todd's Shortcut by Stephen King is about ageing, loss, new beginnings and other dimensions, and would perhaps fit better in a fantasy collection, which is not to minimise its impact as a great story. Similarly, Dinner Party by Gardner Dozois is an alternative future tale in which the United States is building up to a second Civil War, but foregrounds a story of the horror of what human beings can do to each other mentally and emotionally as well as physically.

Tiger in the Snow by Daniel Wynn Barber is a poignant story of a young boy's last hours, while The Thing in the Bedroom by David Langford is a tongue in cheek story which makes fun of the cliches of the genre. The End of the World by James B Hemesath, set in a remote part of the USA that is suffering a long drought, is another story of the horrific crimes human beings perpetrate against each other. Never Grow Up, one of two stories by John Gordon in this volume, is also in this vein and takes the form of a young boy telling the story of his life with his parents to the grave of a long-dead girl. Fred Chappell's Weird Tales is a Cthulhu Mythos tale with a twist in which the real life characters of H P Lovecraft and others appear.

Stories that "fit" the traditional genre include Daniel S Schow's Coming Soon to a Theatre Near You about an embittered Vietnam veteran and Leslie Halliwell's Hands with Long Fingers, a traditional story of supernatural vengeance. Talking in the Dark by Dennis Etchison is a rather nasty story where a reclusive and socially awkward fan gets the chance to meet the author whose work he idolises. The other stories in the collection are fairly standard supernatural revenge type tales, but for the standout stories that don't fit a formula, the collection merits 4 stars.horror supernatural Bill Borre343 1 followerRead

"The End of the World" by James B. Hemesath - Ralph is driving to South Dakota with his family when gas station attendant Cletus offers to buy his son so he can sell him to the Indians for a rain dance.

"The Thing in the Bedroom" by David Langford - The protagonist neglects to ritually seal each of the nine orifices of the body during a summoning and pays for it.

"Hands with Long Fingers" by Leslie Halliwell - Binet sticks pins in insects voodoo dolls in order to dispose of his enemies.

This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.Show full review Taueret172 9

Loving these anthologies. Standouts for me in this collection- Catch Your Death, Borderlands, End of the World, Never Grow Up. Have never been able to match the cover art to the story- this volume or any other... but that's ok.have horror short-stories Sylvie92 Want to read

I loved being in this book with one of my wee prose poems. It would never occur to me to SUBMIT anything of mine to a Year's Best anthology -- but I met Karl when WFC came to Seattle,m and he urged me to send him something. I doing the very short thing, prose-poems and vignettes, and I to risk submitting them to professional horror editors, as I did when Poppy was editing LOVE IN VEIN. It's a wonderful literary form, & I've become quite addicted to working therein. Ah, how I miss Karl Wagner -- what a wonderful force he was!2 s Kevin LuciaAuthor 76 books341

Fabulous. Must reads. Too bad there wasn't a way to get rights untangled and release all these in ebooks for the younger generation... Jay Rothermel750 7

As always, and necessarily, an uneven anthology.The Ramsey Campbell stories and "The Motivation" by David Langford are the most powerful and accomplished.

Drollest: "Nights in the City" by Jessica Amanda Salmonson

Worst taste: "Buckets" by F. Paul Wilson Bill Borre343 1 followerRead

"Kaddish" by Jack Dann - Nathan loses his wife and son and goes out into the sea on a speedboat to meet his end.This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.Show full review Skuli Saeland902 24

Þrátt fyrir lofsverðan titil á þessu smásagnasafni um að ritið innihaldi bestu hryllingssögur ársins þá fannst mér bókin ekki standa undir nafni. Sumar sögurnar voru hins vegar mergjaðar og fengu hárin til að rísa en aðrar fundust mér vera slappar þó þær séu sem betur fer í minnihluta.
Það má hins vegar segja að helsti kostur ritsins sé hve fjölbreyttar sögurnar eru og ólíkar í ritstíl og nálgun sinni við að vekja upp gæsahúðina.fantasy horror John16 5

Standouts: The Gravedigger's Tale, Meeting the Author, Sponge and China Tea, and On the Dark Road Fatman120 58

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