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Book Review: The Best Horror of the Year, Volume 12, edited by Ellen Datlow

cover art for Best Horror of the Year, Volume 12 edited by Ellen Datlow   (   Bookshop.org | Amazon.com )

The Best Horror of the Year, Volume 12, edited by Ellen Datlow

Night Shade Books, 2020

ISBN: 9781597809733

Available: Paperback, Kindle edition

 

The Best Horror of the Year anthologizes short stories by a variety of writers, previously published during 2019, chosen by well-known editor Ellen Datlow. It is an almost even mix of excellent, decent, and forgettable stories: out of the 22 stories, seven are outstanding, seven are skippable, and the other eight are satisfactory, middle-of-the-road stories.

The majority of the stories are written from a first person point of view.  Of the stories written in the third person, many of them are written in the present tense.  This book is best suited for those who like variety, both in story ideas and writing style.  Readers who prefer third person narratives in the past tense may not find what they’re looking for, but everyone else will probably find something here to enjoy.  Let’s take a look at some of the best ones:

Scariest: “The Hope Chest” by Sarah Read and “The Puppet Motel” by Gemma Files are both winners that get genuinely creepy right towards the end.  The first one is a bizarre story of a dead grandmother returning (sort of) through a dress form.  The second is a wonderfully chilling story of a rental room that may have access to another dimension.  Like “The Hope Chest”, it piles on the scare factor at the end.  The best in the book for true fear is “My Name is Ellie” by Sam Rebelein.  It has the classic cabin in the woods, but this is beyond any other one you have read.  Little people, human sacrifices, body parts… they all contribute to the terror. This is the one to keep you awake at night when you hear the house creak.

Most Unusual: “I Say (I Say I Say)”  by Robert Shearman. Remember all the jokes you heard growing up concerning an Englishman, a Scotsman, and an Irishman?  This turns those joke personalities into actual people who live on a different plane of existence, and get summoned from time to time to perform the jokes we all know.   It’s not scary, but it’s very original, and very good.

Best Thrill Rides: “The Senior Girls Bayonet Drill Team” by Joe R. Lansdale and “The Butcher’s Table” by Nathan Ballingrud.  The first one makes a story out of the girls’ team’s bus ride to their next match, where the object is to kill the opposing team members with bayonets.  This is a nice portrayal of psychology where each game played may be the last, and puts a twist on the craziness of high school sports.  “The Butcher’s Table” is the longest story, and possibly the most overall fun.  Set in the 1800s, it concerns pirates escorting Satan worshippers across the Caribbean to the shores of Hell, where they plan to dine with Satan.  So silly that it’s great fun, and it’s nice to finally have a horror story with pirates, as they are a character type that is rarely used anymore.

Best Thriller and Chiller:  “Below” by Simon Bestwick.  This story about two young English lads who fall into a pseudo-town below the Earth’s crust brings out the claustrophobic feelings that films like The Descent tapped into so well.  The scare factor is there, but it’s also just flat-out exciting as the two boys race through the underground trying desperately to find an escape. This is possibly the most well-rounded story out of the collection.

The stories above probably make the book worth the price of admission, and there are still the eight perfectly reasonable stories not covered here to go with it.  It’s enough to overlook the seven stories that simply don’t cut it.  Editor Ellen Datlow also provides a detailed summary of the horror fiction genre and awards winners of 2019. The Best Horror of the Year, Volume 12 will be a good addition for most horror readers to add to their collection, and a good purchase for libraries wanting to keep current on the trends and authors at the top or rising to the top of the horror genre.

 

Contains:  violence, profanity

 

Reviewed by Murray Samuelson

Posted on January 9, 2021 by , Reply

15 Years of Monster Librarian

It is hard to believe we’ve been doing this for fifteen years now. My husband Dylan, the original Monster Librarian, posted the first reviews on January 1, 2006, just three months (and a couple of days) after our first child was born, because what better time to take on a gigantic project than when you have a newborn.

He founded Monster Librarian because at the time, he was working an internship at a branch of the Indianapolis Public Library as part of completing his master’s degree in library science, and he found that the librarians there didn’t know anything about the horror genre past Stephen King and had no interest in putting in the effort to learn more about it. At the time, much of the horror fiction available was also being published only by small presses not listed in the databases of major wholesalers like Baker & Taylor, Follett, and Ingram. It required a commitment for librarians to seek out publishers and order individual titles, and the books could be expensive ( I was working as an elementary school library media specialist at the time, and Baker & Taylor provided a 40% discount. That’s a big deal for a small budget). As a longtime horror reader who started building his collection as a teenager by haunting his local used book store, the indifference the librarians had to the horror genre was something her felt he needed to do something about.

At the same time, I was working with elementary kids who were asking me for scary books while sitting on an awards committee for my state library association’s children’s choice award. The way that was supposed to work was that we read all nominated books, then met to choose a representative sample of 20 books that would cover all genres. The genre I had to fight for was horror. It went beyond indifference– some committee members actively disliked it. I had done research into reading engagement while working on my MLS and one thing Dylan and I both agreed on was how important it was to hook kids and teens with what researcher Stephen Krashen calls “home run books”. So many kids and teens get hooked through scary stories and horror that he felt it was important to reach librarians and advocate for the horror genre for readers. This was his passion and he posted reviews even after he became ill and through five years of painful migraines and chronic, life-imparing pain, until just before he died in 2014. I think he’d be delighted to see all the positive changes that have occurred in the horror genre and in librarians’ attitudes and knowledge of the horror genre and scary stories for kids since the site was founded in 2006.

I love seeing the diversity growing in the genre. There is still plenty of room for growth, but wow, things have changed a lot, and mostly for the better. I think Dylan would love to see it.

I would like to make sure we are providing useful information to you. Monster Librarian is an all-volunteer effort and I need to make sure we are at least covering our hosting costs and postage. That costs about $200  every year and we almost didn’t make it this year. Without your support, either through purchasing items through Monster Librarian’s store at Bookshop.org or contributing through Paypal, we will struggle to continue our work, and after this long at running the site, I’m not sure what I would do without it! Thanks for visiting, and I hope you’ll be back again soon!

 

Posted on January 1, 2021 by , Reply

Book Review: The Readers’ Advisory Guide to Horror, Second Edition by Becky Siegel Spratford

Since Monster Librarian has been around for quite some time, we actually reviewed reader’s advisory reference books in horror before there were many reader’s advisory books on the horror genre and even before social media became all-consuming. Most of these are on a page on our original website titled “Librarian Resources”. It’s pretty sparse, because anything published after 2014 will be found on this blog instead of the original site, and there really wasn’t much in existence then. What was once a fairly restricted community of readers and writers has grown like crazy, and the past few years have really boomed in terms of providing all kinds of helpful resources.

So it was a very big deal when Becky Siegel Spratford wrote a second edition to The Readers’ Advisory Guide to Horror, which was published in 2012. This month I saw her announce that the third edition will be coming out next year (wow!) so I’m republishing our review of the second edition now. She has kept it updated through her blog  RA for All: Horror.  If you visit now, Becky is counting down the days until the announcement of the titles for the HWA’s summer reading program, Summer Scares, for 2020.

With the horror genre having expanded its reach and audience considerably I will be curious to see the changes in the third edition!

 

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The Reader’s Advisory Guide to Horror, Second Edition by Becky Siegel Spratford

American Library Association, 2012

ISBN-13: 978-0838911129

Available: Paperback, Kindle edition

 

The Reader’s Advisory Guide to Horror, Second Edition, is the updated version of The Reader’s Advisory Guide to Horror, part of the American Library Association’s Reader’s Advisory series on genre fiction,. That is, the major professional organization for librarians endorses this as the authoritative text on reader’s advisory in the horror genre. The author, Becky Siegel Spratford, is a reader’s advisory librarian with a particular interest in the horror genre, and in promoting horror in the library– and is someone I admire very much. Updates for this edition can be found at her blog, RA for All: Horror. 

        The Readers’ Advisory Guide to Horror, Second Edition is an important book for a couple of reasons. First, because it’s published by the American Library Association, it is likely to reach a wide audience of librarians, and because it’s part of an established series on readers’ advisory, it has credibility as a resource for librarians who may not know much about(or like) the horror genre that other resources may not have. That opens a door for connecting a lot of people to books they may like. Spratford does a nice job of providing a concise history of horror, introducing some prominent authors, and addressing the classics. Spratford also mentions that many horror readers prefer to read only within one subgenre (such as werewolf books), and has set up the book to provide annotated lists for recommended titles in popular subgenres,. She also includes a chapter on horror resources and marketing, which does a very nice job of offering tools and strategies for growing and promoting library horror collections, not just during October but throughout the year. This is a topic that really needed (and needs) to be addressed– horror readers don’t just read horror as Halloween rolls around, and if your horror novels are shelved with the rest of the fiction they may not even know what the library has. I’m glad that Spratford specifically addressed this in her book.

        However, there are aspects to the book of which librarians should be aware. Spratford chose to define horror as “a story in which… unexplainable phenomena and unearthly creatures threaten the protagonist and provoke terror in the reader”.  That’s a very narrow definition. I recognize that for purposes of writing a reader’s advisory guide it’s necessary to set limits of what qualifies as belonging to a genre, but reader’s advisory librarians attempting to serve horror readers should be aware that many horror readers don’t require there to be a supernatural or unexplainable element in their reading. Because of the way she defines horror, Spratford’s breakdown of subgenres is sometimes problematic. For instance, in her chapter on “shape-shifters”, she included not only werewolf titles but killer animal books, and these two types of books appeal to different audiences. Many killer animal books have no supernatural aspect at all, such as Cujo, Stephen King’s novel about a rabid dog terrorizing his neighborhood (Spratford writes that Cujo “comes under the spell of demonic forces”, but that is not the case). Her chapter “Monsters and Ancient Evil” also combines in one list books that will appeal to different audiences- Lovecraftian fiction and more modern monster novels. In addition, Spratford leaves out the notable category of human horror. Books in this category aren’t literary novels of psychological suspense- they display the worst of human nature, without needing to employ the supernatural. Usually they have graphic gore, violence, and sexual situations (such as in the work of Wrath James White). This category doesn’t fall under Spratford’s definition of horror, and so it isn’t addressed in the book. Spratford  is covering a huge amount of territory in a limited number of pages, but it would really have benefited users, and readers, to have these particular issues dealt with, and hopefully we will see that in the next print edition. In addition to covering a wide variety of authors and subgenres, Spratford addresses whole collection reader’s advisory and mentions several categories of books outside the genre that horror readers might also enjoy, I especially appreciated her mention of nonfiction, as there are a lot of appealing nonfiction titles that horror fiction readers will probably never find on their own.

        Horror is a very difficult genre for both collection development and reader’s advisory. It doesn’t get much respect, or even recognition. The Reader’s Advisory Guide to Horror, Second Edition, although not a perfect tool, does a great job providing resources to librarians serving horror readers. Highly recommended for purchase by public and academic libraries.

Review by Kirsten Kowalewski

 

Posted on October 25, 2019 by , Reply
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