Tuesday, September 27, 2005

New horror anthology

Bookgasm (which is a great new blog by the way) posts about the new horror best of anthology. It's edited by John Betancourt, who has a hand in Weird Tales, Wildside Press, the new tales of Amber, and various other things.
The Bookgasm post says he has wondered about best ofs: “Why in the hell don’t they do one of these for horror?” Off the top of my head, I can think of two: The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror (the horror section of which is edited by Ellen Datlow) and The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror (edited by Stephen Jones). Maybe the Mammoth collection doesn't count because it's British (though I don't think that's a good reason) but why exclude The Year's Best?
Anyway, I'm excited to see a new horror collection as well. It will be released in February 2006. I can't find a content list yet, though the cover of the book mentions Neil Gaiman, Gene Wolfe and Michael Swanwick.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the Bookgasm plug! I forgot about the Mammoth collection, but didn't realize it was an acutal annual. I don't pick them up because I absolutely hate the flimsy paper they print on, so it slipped my mind.

As for THE YEAR'S BEST FANTASY AND HORROR, I don't count that because of the "FANTASY AND." It's mostly fantasy and not much horror. I don't think they always go together as nicely as chocolate and peanut butter.

Brian said...

Happy to give you the plug. You guys are doing the kind of book talk I enjoy. As for the Fantasy and Horror anthology, I hear many people complain that the horror is not horrific enough. I guess they go for the quieter type of horror, but I still think there is plenty of the genre in there. In fact, the Mammoth anthology and YBFandH seem to cross over on at least 2 or 3 stories each year.
Anyway, thanks for checking out my blog.

Brian.