The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, Eighteenth Annual Collection

Edited by Ellen Datlow, Kelly Link, and Gavin J. Grant

St. Martin’s Griffin Pub., cxxviii + 480 pp., $19.95

Forty-four stories from as many authors and almost as many sources; the only repeats I noticed were two from F&SF magazine and four from SCI FICTION. Plus, almost a hundred pages of genre overviews in 2004: fantasy, horror, media, comics and graphic novels, anime and manga, music, obituaries, honorable mention stories not in this anthology. Fantasy has certainly kept up its literary quality besides its wondrous, fantastic imagination that one might presume comes from the trashy-pulpy gutter instead. Some stories manage to combine such disparate elements successfully. For example, Stepan Chapman’s ‘Revenge of the Calico Cat’ seems to mix the crime noire into pure fantasy. An afterlife for animals is a city full of crude violence, gangsters, and a giant calico cat and gingham dog that chase and alternate killing each other every night. The intro blurb describes it as “A surreal and surprisingly moving tale of balance and destruction.” For all that, I get a realistic question out of it: maybe people won’t think or act in the afterlife any differently than they do in this one. The animals in the story are doomed by their decisions in their earthly lives. Are we? How’s that for literary quality mixed into pulp? And in a pure fantasy story, no less. Yes, this anthology shows us quite an interesting genre. It ain’t all just fairy tales any more – but then it never really was, was it? - Mike Griffin