Simply the Best
by June Pulliam
Datlow, Ellen, and Terri Windling, eds. The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Sixteenth Annual Collection. New York: St. Martin's, 2003. 564 p.
Like its fifteen predecessors, this newest The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror collection lives up to its claim. Datlow and Windling's biggest accomplishments as editors of this series is their ability to select not only high quality material, but pieces that are not easily pegged as genre fiction, in spite of the series's name. Most of the selections would not be mislabeled if described as horror, dark fantasy, or even modern gothic fiction. However, most also stand alone as fine pieces of mainstream fiction (not that there's anything wrong with genre fiction). Another of the duo's editorial accomplishments is their ability to combine the work of up-and-coming writers and well-known authors in their respective genres. Contributors to this year's collection include Neil Gaiman, Christopher Fowler, Elizabeth Hand, Bentley Little, Tom Disch, Kim Newman, China Miêville's, Graham Joyce, Ramsey Campbell and Brian Hodge.
This year's collection is filled with some particularly subtle and disturbing stories in the vein of Joyce Carol Oates or Poppy Z. Brite, making me wonder if horror and fantasy are merging once again, as they once were merged before the advent of the Stephen King era showed publishers that there was profit to be made by splitting works into what could be identified as two more distinct genres. The volume begins with a story that sets the tone for the entire collection. Kelly Link's "Lull" describes several couples having the typical middle age crisis, a lull of sorts, where the children finally leaving the nest gives them the leisure to reflect on their lives, and no one is really satisfied with the path his or her life is taking. They find themselves living in a time loop, where they pursue activities cast aside two decades ago, buy drugs from one another's children and listen to the music of the younger generation. One of the members of the group, recently separated from his wife, finds himself living in an old farmhouse surrounded by women who are a fragmentation of his former partner during various stages of her life.
M. Shayne Bell's "The Pagodas of Ciboure" and Terri Dowling's "Stitch" are eerie and memorable. "The Pagodas of Ciboure" imagines the childhood of a young Maurice Ravel, debilitated by a mysterious illness. The pagodas are rather like fairies in that they inhabit the woods, but their physical form more closely resembles shards of glass. Naturally, they show themselves to very few humans, but are renown for their ability to make beautiful tinkling music and to heal through these tones. Young Ravel is both healed and inspired by these creatures, whom he is privileged to see. "Stitch" deals with the peculiarities of childhood fears. The adult Bella confronts her childhood fear of Mr. Stitch, a malformed being inhabiting a cross-stitched landscape created by her aunt and decorating her childhood home. It is Mr. Stitch who oversees Bella's a very real childhood trauma, and consequently, the pain suffered in this ordeal is transferred onto his woolen, two-dimensional existence.
Graham Joyce's "The Coventry Boy" is also noteworthy. During World War II, a Coventry girl with second sight is able to use her particular gift to predict air raids, which is particularly useful to her already sleep-deprived family as she's able to tell them when the sirens are false alarms, and they can safely sleep through the night. Her gift becomes even more pronounced with her developing womanhood, reaching its greatest powers yet on the night of a major German air raid of her city, allowing her to bring down several Nazi planes.
The haunting and memorable works in this volume might be more simply classified as fantastic fiction rather than anything adhering to a more specific genre with certain ground rules and predictable patterns, which if you ask me is great news for fans of all three genres. However, I must end this review on a final note of sadness: this will be the last edition of the volume that Terri Windling will be editing with her partner Ellen Datlow. She is bowing out of collaborating on future editions so she can spend more time with her own writing. Necropsy wishes both the best of luck in their separate futures.