The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2012

3.8/5 ( ratings)

Take a journey into darkness. Visit places where one might expect to find the dark — in a house where love was shared and lost, a milky-white pool in an Australian cave, the trenches of World War I, the deep woods. You would not be surprised to find the dark in a cheap apartment on the wrong side of town, down mean streets, under a gallows-tree, along dank passageways, trapped underground, in the near future, or among the mysteries of old New Orleans. Dunes, lakes, isolated cabins, old books, and Old West saloons — well, the darkness might easily be there. But we've also found locales you thought were safe from shadows — a rib joint with good blues playing, inside an old wardrobe, on a baseball diamond, the Beverly Wilshire Hotel...

Travel into the best dark fantasy and horror from 2011 with more than five-hundred pages of tales from some of today's best-known writers of the fantastique as well as new talents — stories that will take you to a diverse assortment of dark places

Contents
Hair • • shortstory by Joan Aiken
Rakshasi • • shortfiction by Kelley Armstrong
Walls of Paper, Soft as Skin • • shortstory by Adam Callaway
The Lake • • shortfiction by Tananarive Due
Tell Me I'll See You Again • • shortstory by Dennis Etchison
King Death • • shortfiction by Paul Finch
The Last Triangle • • shortfiction by Jeffrey Ford
Near Zennor • • novella by Elizabeth Hand
Crossroads • • shortstory by Laura Anne Gilman
After-Words • • novelette by Glen Hirshberg
Rocket Man • • shortfiction by Stephen Graham Jones
The Maltese Unicorn • • shortfiction by Caitlín R. Kiernan
The Dune • • shortfiction by Stephen King
Catastrophic Disruption of the Head • • shortfiction by Margo Lanagan
The Bleeding Shadow • • shortfiction by Joe R. Lansdale
Why Light? • • novelette by Tanith Lee
Conservation of Shadows • • shortstory by Yoon Ha Lee
A Tangle of Green Men • [Chronicles of the Borderlands] • • novella by Charles de Lint
After the Apocalypse • • shortfiction by Maureen F. McHugh [as by Maureen McHugh ]
Why Do You Linger? • • shortfiction by Sarah Monette
Lord Dunsany's Teapot • • shortstory by Naomi Novik
Mysteries of the Old Quarter • • novelette by Paul Park
Vampire Lake • • shortfiction by Norman Partridge
A Journey of Only Two Paces • • shortstory by Tim Powers
Four Legs in the Morning • • shortfiction by Norman Prentiss
The Fox Maiden • • shortfiction by Priya Sharma
Time and Tide • • shortstory by Alan Ryan [as by Alan Peter Ryan ]
Sun Falls • • shortstory by Angela Slatter
Still • • shortfiction by Tia V. Travis
Objects in Dreams May Be Closer Than They Appear • • shortstory by Lisa Tuttle
The Bread We Eat in Dreams • • shortstory by Catherynne M. Valente
All You Can Do Is Breathe • • shortstory by Kaaron Warren
Josh • • shortfiction by Gene Wolfe