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The Best Horror of the Year, Volume Four
edited by Ellen Datlow
Night Shade Books, 388 pages

Ellen Datlow
Ellen Datlow was the fiction editor of OMNI from 1981 until it folded in 1998. She later worked as the fiction editor of SCIFI.COM. Her well-deserved reputation as an editor for both The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror series and for the Fairy Tale Anthologies series has garnered her numerous awards.

Ellen Datlow Website
ISFDB Bibliography
SF Site Review: The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 2008: Twenty-First Annual Collection>
SF Site Review: The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy
SF Site Review: The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 2007: Twentieth Annual Collection
SF Site Review: The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Seventeenth Annual Collection
SF Site Review: The Green Man
SF Site Review: The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, 14th Annual Collection
SF Site Review: Year's Best Fantasy & Horror, 13th Annual Collection
SF Site Review: Black Heart, Ivory Bones
SF Site Review: Year's Best Fantasy & Horror, 12th Annual Collection
SF Site Review: Silver Birch, Blood Moon
SF Site Review: Black Swan, White Raven
SF Site Review: Year's Best Fantasy & Horror, 11th Annual Collection
SF Site Review: Year's Best Fantasy & Horror: 10th Annual Collection
SF Site Review: Fairy Tale Anthologies

Past Feature Reviews
A review by Mario Guslandi

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The Best Horror of the Year, Volume Four Editor Ellen Datlow has delivered the fourth volume of her classical The Best Horror of the Year, assembling eighteen stories that appeared in original anthologies, collections and magazines during 2011. Most of the included material was already part of my own, private "year's best" and I was pleased to find it included therein.

This is the case with "Roots and All" by Brian Hodge, an extraordinary, insightful tale where the strength of brotherly love and the nostalgia for a long gone past get imbued with supernatural horror or with Leah Bobet's "Stay," a creepy, atmospheric piece revisiting the myth of the Wendigo.

Stephen King's "The Little Green God of Agony" is a very horrific, vivid piece featuring a man affected by an unbearable pain of not quite human nature, while Anna Taborska's "Little Pig" is a short but adrenaline-rising piece reporting the tragic episode of a mother struggling to save her children from a pack of hungry wolves.

The latest story by the unprolific but excellent Terry Lamsley, "In the Absence of Murdock," is a weird, superb tale revealing unsuspected, hidden aspects of everyday reality.

Other stories (that I won't mention) failed to impress me the first time and still don't, despite the inclusion by Datlow in the present anthology. On the other hand the volume features a few outstanding stories which had escaped my radar and that I enjoyed very much. First of all what I consider the very best story in the book, Simon Bestwick's "The Moraine," a phenomenal tale of terror, intense and frightening, where a couple hiking in the mountains get lost in the mist and have to face an inexplicable, inhuman horror. Then "Blackwood's Baby" by Laird Barron, an extremely dark piece about a hunting expedition to trace down a murderous, devilish, ageless pagan god and "Omphelos" by Livia Llewellyn, a story of terrible beauty where an ill-fated vacation discloses the dirty secrets of a family traveling toward nowhere.

As always, although not everything is quite "the best," a book well worth reading.

Copyright © 2012 by Mario Guslandi

Mario Guslandi lives in Milan, Italy, and is a long-time fan of dark fiction. His book reviews have appeared on a number of genre websites such as The Alien Online, Infinity Plus, Necropsy, The Agony Column and Horrorwold.


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