I was deeply dismayed to realize that the long-running Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror anthology has ceased publication.
Although I thought it had gone slightly downhill in the years since Kelly Link replaced Terri Windling as the co-editor, I’ll still miss it.
Besides buying up back copies of the few years that I haven’t read, any suggestions for good replacement anthologies/collections to read? I’m not an out-and-out horror reader and am less keen on the “fairy tale remake” style of fantasy.
Try the series edited by Stephen Jones – Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. I haven’t read all of them, but the few I’ve read have been comparable in quality to Windling’s series. The cover art’s not as pretty though.
Does The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction still publish an occasional horror story? I haven’t subscribed in years. Cemetery Dance magazine isn’t as full of fun as the old Twilight Zone magazine, but it comes close.
I would also love to hear some suggestions for a good horror anthology. I tend to devour short fiction and I’ve burned through most of the YB volumes. Sad to hear they are ceasing publication.
For the OP if you haven’t already discovered pseudopod it’s worth a look. It’s all audio format but there are some excellent stories. There are sister sites for SF and fantasy. I think they’re called Podcastle and Escape Pod.
Noooo! I always described their series as, “You know how in most anthologies there’s a few great stories, a bunch of mediocre ones, and a couple lousy ones? Well in this one they’re ALL GREAT.” Though that was Windling, Link was good but not quite as much to my taste.
I’ve been trying to find a place to sell a short horror story I wrote, and I’m tellin’ ya, it’s bad times for the genre. Not just Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror but a lot of markets that existed last year are now no more. Gee, maybe people aren’t buying horror bad times? I dunno, but if you’re a fan of horror please support your publishers and writers. And if you hear of any good sources for it, please let me know both for my reading pleasure and potential profit.
Broomstick, check out this thread at the Shocklines board.
There will be a new series of the best of the year’s horror stories edited by Ellen Datlow from Night Shade Press:
Rich Horton does a year’s best science fiction and fantasy anthology. (Used to be separate but now combined into one volume.) He reads literally everything in the field, so his knowledge is unmatched.