To Best or Not to Best! This Year for the Thirteenth Time

The Best Horror of the Year Volume Thirteen was to be my final book of 2021, the perfect closure of my reading year… Or so I thought. What actually happened is that it didn’t even make it to the first book of 2022 because it starts so damn slow! My initial impression of the first few stories is such a poor one that I seriously wondered if this really can be the best horror of any year at all! I was wrong, though, a slow start does not necessarily mean a bad anthology.

And as we all know anthologies usually are a mixed bag – it’s next to impossible to find consistently awesome ones and even if they were filled with only good stories we’d start petty bickering and comparing them to each other. Even though I was a little disappointed of the weak start (and honestly thought it would all go downhill from there because anthologies usually start really strong to get you hooked), I was very pleasantly surprised by the middle streak of genuinely scary and/or original stories which basically saved this anthology for me.

I’ll just shortly mention my highlights, as I do with every anthology;

“Cleaver, Meat, and Block” by Maria Haskins – Zombie apocalypse meets (or meats?) end of pandemic, but is it really over “when it is all over”?

“Scold’s Bridle: A Cruelty” by Richard Gavin – This short but effective piece of writing does its title justice! My god, seriously, just researching the titular torture device gave me the shivers.

“Mine Seven” by Elana Gomel – I’m enormously enjoying the fact that Datlow steadily includes more horror that doesn’t stem from the USA in her anthologies! Elana Gomel seasons her short story about a trip to the Arctic Russia with monstrous Chukchi mythology!

“Sicko” by Stephen Volk – What can I say except AWESOME? Volk’s own take on Robert Bloch’s Psycho, an alternate version of the story in which things don’t quite go as you anticipate.

“Heath Crawler” by Sam Hicks – An exquisite shorty of cosmic horror revolving around a man who takes his dog to a walk in a park and meets an artist of a different kind.

“The Devil Be at the Door” by David Surface – There aren’t enough good haunted house stories around, so I’m thrilled every time I find one like this, a story about cosmic horrors, lost relatives and houses that eat you up!

"Scream Queen" by Nathan Ballingrud –Ballungrad is the undisputed MASTER of scary and here he shows why: an older actress who in her heydays starred in a cult movie about a satanic possession and still carries the scars and consequences of that experience. I’m sure it’s nothing what you think. Shivers!

"Two Truths and A Lie" by Sarah Pinsker – A young woman, returning to her home town for her best friend’s brother’s funeral, discovers through her finds in the deceased’s house that the children of the town have been subject to some sort of seances disguised as a TV show. This is so well done and goes right under your skin!

So, as you see, it was in the end totally worth it AGAIN as Ellen Datlow's The Best Horror of the Year series usually is, and I’m sure that many stories I couldn’t warm up to at my first reading will do better on a second glance.