The Year's Best Fantasy: First Annual Collection

The first volume of this series that has just recently been cancelled before its twenty-second installment. There is a yearly overview, but as a shorter book, these sections are much briefer than later on, one for fantasy, one for horror, and Edward Bryant taking a look at movies. Datlow's horror editing is pretty reasonable - the weakness again lies on the fantasy side of things. Given they list the anthologies etc. available, and where the stories come from, it is pretty easy to tell when the selection is avoiding a certain sort of story. Or loading up on one, as the case may be here. Windling clearly likes the fairy tale, and there are now less than a handful of these in the first double handful of stories if you like. That is egregious, especially in placement. If you are looking at being representative of the whole genre, there is absolutely zilch here that represents the epic fantasy adventure sort of tale, for one. To suggest there is nothing like that to match some of the dreck here published in the whole year is rubbish, making the Fantasy claim of Year's Best disingenuous, anyway. Windling also makes multiple excuses for selecting stories from kid's anthologies and even a child's picture book! Woeful. Interestingly, Horror isn't mentioned on the cover, but separated as per usual inside, and has no such problems with range. As usual, there is some poetry, including a couple by Lucius Shepard, who is also the writer with the clearly best story in this book, with Delta Sly Honey. Alan Moore's Hypothetical Lizard may match it for best title, though. A volume, given all the contents that is better than a 3.5, but not enough to approach a 4. Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 01 : Buffalo Gals Won't You Come Out Tonight - Ursula K. Le Guin Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 01 : A World Without Toys - T. M. Wright Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 01 : Friend's Best Man - Jonathan Carroll Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 01 : The Snow Apples - Gwyneth Jones Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 01 : Ever After - Susan Palwick Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 01 : My Name Is Dolly - William F. Nolan Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 01 : The Moon's Revenge - Joan Aiken Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 01 : Author's Notes - Edward Bryant Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 01 : Lake George in High August - John Robert Bensink Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 01 : Csucskari - Steven Brust Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 01 : The Other Side - Ramsey Campbell Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 01 : Pamela's Get - David J. Schow Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 01 : Voices in the Wind - Elizabeth S. Helfman Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 01 : The Circular Library of Stones - Carol Emshwiller Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 01 : Soft Monkey - Harlan Ellison Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 01 : Fat Face - Michael Shea Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 01 : Uncle Dobbin's Parrot Fair - Charles de Lint Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 01 : The Pear-Shaped Man - George R. R

This is the first volume in what became Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, now in its fourteenth year.Perhaps the best thing about these books is the introduction, containing overviews of publications in the fantasy (and now horror) industry and brief reviews as well as industry news. I found the stories to be a very mixed bag. The standout in this volume is Le Guin's striking, unsentimental, Native American mythology-inspired "Buffalo Gals, Won't You Come Out Tonight". Shephard's "Delta Sly Honey" was a beautifully written, evocative Vietnam War story, though it weakened toward the conclusion. "Lake George in High August" and "The Maid on the Shore" also stood out. Too many of the other stories, as in other volumes, are pedestrian, silly, or devoid of plot structure. I didn't find any of the poetry to be worthwhile. Overall, I'd give the stories mentioned a 4, but the others perhaps a 2. This uneven quality plagues every volume in this series.