Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #268981 in Books
• Published on: 2007-12-10
• Released on: 2007-12-10
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 384 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Datlow (The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror) makes a solid claim to being the premiere horror editor of her generation with this state-of-the-art anthology of 20 new stories by some of horror fiction's best and brightest. Several outstanding selections feature imperiled children and explore the horrific potential of childhood fears, among them Glen Hirshberg's The Janus Tree, which gives a creepy supernatural spin to a poignant memoir of adolescent angst and alienation, and Stephen Gallagher's Misadventure, in which a young man's near-death experience as a child endows him as an adult with consoling insight into the afterlife. The compilation's variety of approaches and moods is exemplary, ranging from the natural supernaturalism of Laird Barron's cosmic horror tale The Forest, to the unsettling psychological horror of Lucius Shepard's The Ease with Which We Freed the Beast; the metaphysical terrors of Conrad Williams's Perhaps the Last; and the slapstick grotesquerie of K.W. Jeter's black comedy Riding Bitch. If this book can be taken as a gauge of the vitality of imagination in contemporary horror fiction, then the genre is very healthy indeed. (Dec.)
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Review
"Datlow makes a solid claim to being the premiere horror editor of her generation." --Publishers Weekly (starred review) on Inferno 

“One good ghost story, one truly effective tale, is usually sufficient to scare the bejesus out of a person. The Dark contains sixteen tales, enough to keep fans tossing and turning and peeking under the bed for a fortnight and then some. Watch your hackles when you read this book; Ms. Datlow and her horrormongers are out to raise them.” --Dallas Morning News

“Sure to provide a yardstick by which future ghost fiction will be measured.” --Publishers Weekly (starred review) on The Dark

About the Author
Ellen Datlow is a winner of two Bram Stoker Awards, seven World Fantasy Awards, and the Hugo Award for Best Editor. In a career spanning more than twenty-five years, she has been the long-time fiction editor of Omni and more recently the fiction editor of SciFi.com. She has edited many successful anthologies, including Blood Is Not Enough, A Whisper of Blood, and, with Terri Windling, Snow White, Blood Red and the rest of their Fairy Tales series. She has also edited the Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror series, The Green Man, and, for younger readers, The Wolf at the Door and Swan Sister. Ellen Datlow lives in Manhattan.

Customer Reviews

More, Please.
I particularly like "Bethany's Wood" by Paul Finch, "Stilled Life" by Pat Cadigan, and "An Apiary of White Bees" by Lee Thomas. Oh, that stories like these have made it into YBFH 2008. I read the Datlow-chosen stories in YBFH 2007 right after reading Inferno and was disappointed; the story by Oates, in particular, seemed misplaced: I'm a fan of the bizarre, and this one seemed pointlessly grotesque instead. But Inferno is everything I look for in modern horror! I think it's Ellen's best book so far.

Chilling
Inferno is the kind of anthology a reader waits and hopes for. It's filled with disturbing tales from some of the best horror/dark fantasy authors, and these tales leave chilling, lasting impressions. The deepest impression on me came from P.D. Cacek's "The Keeper." Simple, heartbreaking, and powerful. Ellen Datlow has compiled another incredible collection here. She's the best editor in the field. Highly recommended!

An excellent anthology in every way
In Stephen King's Danse Macabre, King compared Ramsey Campbell's prose to a low level acid trip. I was thinking of that description many times throughout this anthology, were most of the stories take place in this world but something's not right. NOt just the horror portion of the stories but everything about these characters and their world is off-kilter in some way or fashion.

Take for example "Riding Bitch" by K.W. Jeter where the protagonist is a loser biker who takes corpses to the funeral home to pick up extra money. By this time we've all seen the tropes from the tough biker to the seedy bar, but add in a dead girlfriend who won't quite stay dead or is dead but he hears it - you can never tell - and it's a story that won't let you go.

Similarly "Monsters of Heaven" being reminiscent of Marquez's "Man with Wings" (sic?) doesn't just let the characters get by with ignoring the angels. Even as they are embroiled in a lost child tragedy, they still have time to do some truly horrific things to each other and finally an innocent.

Not all of the stories work, but the stories that don't work for me are the ones that appear to be trying too hard like Laird Barron's "THe Forest" or Lee Thomas's "An Apiary of WHite Bees." They are strange but I never get the sense of being taken along for a ride. More like I'm being told about someone's acid trip laden vacation.

Ultimately these stories are disturbing because human beings are disturbing. Vampires, werewolves and ghosts have nothing on Basra militias or Serbian death squads. These stories reflect the evil that humans do to each other on a constant basis and they are much more powerful for that.