The Best Horror of the Year: Volume Seventeen edited by Ellen Datlow | review by Rafe McGregor

The Best Horror of the Year: Volume Seventeen edited by Ellen Datlow

Night Shade Books, paperback, £15.99, February 2026, ISBN 9781949102789

 

Ellen Datlow will be a household name to many if not most readers of Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction as one of the world’s leading editors of speculative fiction. She began her career with a publisher that is now one of the Big Five, moved on to magazines, webzines, and independent publishers, and is best-known for her horror anthologies. Datlow’s reputation was established with the Year’s Best Horror and Fantasy, which was published by St. Martin’s Press for twenty-one years, from 1988 to 2007. After a year’s hiatus, she began editing The Best Horror of the Year for Night Shade Books in 2009 and the series has now reached its seventeenth instalment, which was published in February and collects short fiction and poetry originally published in 2024. Datlow has edited about eighty other anthologies and won numerous awards across a period of four decades and my first taste of her work was Lovecraft Unbound, which was published in 2009 and includes what might be the most impressive coterie of authors I’ve ever seen between two covers: Michael Chabon, Brian Evenson, Nick Mamatas, Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear, Caitlín R. Kiernan, and Joyce Carol Oates.

As a reader and writer of short fiction, I have mixed feelings about The Best Horror of the Year. Not just this series, but all ‘best of’s, including those in crime fiction, my other genre of choice. On the one hand, I love them – what’s not to love – and have read as many of this series as I can since discovering Volume Two in 2010. On the other hand, I question whether the selected stories really are the best of each year’s batch. Setting aside the definition of ‘best’, the volumes often seem like a parade of the ‘usual suspects’. Why does this bother me? Two reasons. First, most of the big names in twenty-first century genre fiction have become big because of their (usually well-deserved) success with novels. But, of all bibliophiles, horror enthusiasts know better than most that being a great novelist and being a great short story writer do not always coincide (for example: E.A. Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, T. Ligotti). Being a great novelist is no guarantee of being a great short story writer, even if the mere presence of a story by one of the former is likely to make an anthology sell so much better. Second, speculative fiction has always been closely associated with amateur magazines, webzines, and whatever the latest name for online-only or print-on-demand publications is. Most of what is published in these venues probably doesn’t come close to a longlist of the year’s best, but there are many exceptions that prove the rule and I wonder how it’s possible to read anything more than a small percentage of the overall output. To put it in social scientific terms, the population (every horror story published in English in 2024) from which the various samples (longlist, shortlist, list) are drawn is self-selected before the selection ostensibly starts.

With that in mind, it’s particularly commendable that Datlow begins Volume Seventeen with ‘Summation of the Year 2024’, a forty-page introduction that attempts to summarise this population, beginning with award-winning titles and novels, covering the full range of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry, and concluding with ‘Odds and Ends’. Again, in social scientific terms, this is akin to setting out one’s methodology and highlights both the scope and the rigour of Datlow’s editorial efforts. As if to put sceptics like me in their place, she begins her summary by noting that thirteen of the twenty-three contributors have not appeared in previous instalments of this series and, indeed, the only authors with whom I was already familiar were Charles Wilkinson (a fellow TQF contributor), Stephen Volk, and Paul Tremblay. Datlow also summarises the contents in terms of the word count range of the twenty-two short stories and one poem, which I always find interesting as a writer and is 2,000 to 8,300. This raised another question for me, however, about an important part of the selection process. Given that the anthology includes poetry, I assume there is no lower end of word count, but what about the upper end? Genre magazines tend to use 7,500 words as the watershed between short stories and novelettes, which clearly puts the longer stories in the anthology in the latter category. Were all novelettes considered or was there a limit within that category – perhaps 9,000 or 10,000 words? It won’t matter to most readers, but because the summation was so thorough, I would like to have seen a brief discussion – list, even – of the selection criteria.

Instead of introducing each story, I’ll begin by saying that there were very few I didn’t enjoy and mention what, for me, were the highlights. My favourite was ‘Summer Bonus’ by Lee Murray, which was first published in another anthology, Beyond and Within Folk Horror. I’m wary of ‘folk horror’ because it seems to have become a fad, a catch-all-category buzzword used to increase sales as if it’s a new phenomenon, when the subgenre has been around for centuries and popular since, at least, the release of Robin Hardy’s tour de force, The Wicker Man, in 1973. Whatever one chooses to call ‘Summer Bonus’, it is an exemplary short story, one of those that lingers with you long after you’ve finished it. There was a tie for my second place, between David Nickle’s ‘Fancy Dad’ and Steve Kilby’s ‘Pages From a Diary’, both also first published anthologies (Northern Lights and Nosferatu Unbound respectively). I’m assuming that the latter, which is the diary of a vampire, is the poem to which Datlow refers because of its lineation. I’m not sure what term most accurately describes the work. If a ‘prose poem’ has the appearance of prose but is poetic in form, then Kilby’s text is the opposite, having the appearance of poetry but the formal qualities of narrative without being a narrative poem. That may sound like faint praise, but it’s compelling, consequential, and highly original. In the order they appear in the anthology, my other favourites were James Cooper’s ‘An Act of Sorrow’, Wilkinson’s ‘Davidson’s Son’, and ‘Robert Shearman’s ‘I Love the Very Flesh Off You’. These were first published in Glass Shatters Fist (a collection of Cooper’s fiction), Cthonic Matter Quarterly 5, and Skin: An Anthology of Dark Fiction. I’m tempted to comment on the fact that five of my six were all published in other anthologies or collections rather than magazines, but my own sample isn’t representative of the full contents of the volume.

I’ll conclude with a different reflection. Volume Seventeen is a superb anthology of horror fiction, well worth reading, and testimony to both Datlow’s editorial skills and dedication to the genre. I look forward to Volume Eighteen (which will cover 2025 and, I assume, be published in 2027) and hope that the series continues even longer than its predecessor. I read Volume Seventeen at the same time as Best Crime Stories of the Year Volume 4 (2024), edited by Anthony Horowitz, with the intention of alternating between the two. While I love Horowitz’s own fiction and have great respect for him as an author, I found the anthology (which I haven’t managed to finish yet) a little disappointing, with few stories standing out from the rest and only one whose plot and characters I can still remember. I wonder whether this is just idiosyncrasy on my part, a coincidence caused by my choice of anthologies, or an indication that, as far as short fiction goes, horror is in a far healthier state than crime. If short horror is more inventive, intricate, and intriguing than short crime at present, that is perhaps unsurprising given the distinct directions the two genres have taken in the last fifty years.