The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror

THE YEAR’S BEST
DARK FANTASY & HORROR:
2012 EDITION

PAULA GURAN

Copyright © 2012 by Paula Guran.

Cover art by Man In Black/Fotolia.

Cover design by Telegraphy Harness.

Ebook design by Neil Clarke.

All stories are copyrighted to their respective authors, and used here with their permission. An extension of this copyright page can be found
here
.

ISBN: 978-1-60701-368-6 (ebook)

ISBN: 978-1-60701-345-7 (trade paperback)

PRIME BOOKS

www.prime-books.com

No portion of this book may be reproduced by any means, mechanical, electronic, or otherwise, without first obtaining the permission of the copyright holder.

For more information, contact Prime Books at [email protected].

Contents

Introduction
, Paula Guran

Objects in Dreams May Be Closer Than They Appear
, Lisa Tuttle

After the Apocalypse
, Maureen McHugh

Sun Falls
, Angela Slatter

The Bleeding Shadow
, Joe R. Lansdale

Catastrophic Disruption of the Head
, Margo Lanagan

Tell Me I’ll See You Again
, Dennis Etchison

The Maltese Unicorn
, Caitlín R. Kiernan

King Death
, Paul Finch

Why Light?
, Tanith Lee

Josh
, Gene Wolfe

Time and Tide
, Alan Peter Ryan

Rakshasi
, Kelley Armstrong

Why Do You Linger?
, Sarah Monette

Vampire Lake
, Norman Partridge

Lord Dunsany’s Teapot
, Naomi Novik

The Dune
, Stephen King

The Fox Maiden
, Priya Sharma

Rocket Man
, Stephen Graham Jones

Journey of Only Two Paces
, Tim Powers

Near Zennor
, Elizabeth Hand

Conservation of Shadows
, Yoon Ha Lee

All You Can Do is Breathe
, Kaaron Warren

Mysteries of the Old Quarter
, Paul Park

Still
, Tia V. Travis

Crossroads
, Laura Anne Gilman

The Bread We Eat in Dreams
, Catherynne M. Valente

Hair
, Joan Aiken

The Lake
, Tananarive Due

Walls of Paper, Soft as Skin
, Adam Callaway

The Last Triangle
, Jeffrey Ford

After-Words
, Glen Hirshberg

Four Legs in the Morning
, Norman Prentiss

A Tangle of Green Men
, Charles de Lint

About the Authors

Acknowledgements

The Third Time May Be a Charm, but It’s Not Necessarily Definitive
Paula Guran

This is the third volume of
The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror,
and I still feel I need to introduce it by pointing out that there is really no definition of “dark fantasy.” Beauty is in the eye of the beholder; dark fantasy is in the mind of the reader.

I mean that literally. Neuroscience can now identify the particular parts of the brain affected by reading. According to Maria Nikolajeva, director of the Cambridge/Homerton Research and Training Center for Children’s Literature, fiction with a very dark theme “creates and amplifies a sense of insecurity . . . but it can also be a liberation, when readers ‘share’ their personal experience with that of fictional characters . . . readers’ brains are changed after they have read a book . . . ” (quoted by Valerie Strauss, “The Answer Sheet,”
The Washington Post
/washingtonpost.com: 2010 September 4.)

But what makes one brain sense insecurity may not affect another in the same way. What our minds perceive as “dark” varies. Dark fantasy, in general, can evoke a wide range of responses and those may differ by degree. It can be slightly unsettling, a bit eerie, profoundly disturbing, or just generally convey a certain atmosphere. Since darkness itself can be many things—shadowy and mysterious, deep and unknowable, paradoxically illuminating—it can be used in fiction in innumerable ways. Stories need not even remain dark throughout. They can be journeys through the dark with a positive, even uplifting, outcome. The dark can amuse even as it disturbs.

“The dark” can be found in any number of literary forms—weird fiction (new or old), supernatural fiction, magical realism, the mythic, fairy tales, adventure, mystery, surrealism, or the
fantastique.
Since it is fantasy, something of the supernatural needs to be involved, or the story can be set in a world where what is ordinary is, in our world, extraordinary.

As for horror: horror is a subjective and personal emotion. Again, what you feel is not necessarily what I feel. Not everyone agrees—there is no exact definition—but I do not think horror fiction needs to be supernatural. Life itself—and our fellow humans—can be far more terrifying than the extramundane. And when we speculate on the darker possibilities of our future, that, too, can be horrific.

As far as this series of anthologies is concerned, you will encounter scary stories, but the intent is not to
always
frighten the reader. Nor is it to make you constantly feel subconsciously insecure—although some of you may. Certainly you will feel slightly uneasy at times, perhaps apprehensive, possibly unsettled, even disturbed. Thoughts may be provoked. But you’ll also smile here and there, maybe even laugh out loud.

Perhaps you can consider
The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror
an exploration of the shadowy places and darker paths of the imagination. These stories—all published in 2011—will take you to a great many of those locations. It will take you back in time to several eras (not all of which are part of our history), forward into several futures, down mean streets, just next door or perhaps over the next hill, inside minds quite unlike (I hope) yours, to places you don’t quite recognize but are still somehow familiar, and into many otherworlds.

In some instances, you may visit some tenebrous locales that are quite similar, but since there are different guides, the peregrinations each prove unique.

Each reader will, no doubt, take an entirely different trip—choosing, feeling, reacting individually; abandoning some adventures, lingering for a while elsewhere.

The authors whose work you encounter include some of whom you’ve probably never heard; some you may have read before, but don’t know well; others whose work you already acknowledge as masterful.

Of course, a single book can gather only a small portion of the great new dark fiction being published each year in anthologies, collections, and periodicals on paper with ink or in pixels on screens. This is far from
all
“the best” published in one year.

To repeat what should be obvious: Anthologies with titles including phrases like
Year’s Best,
Best of,
Best (fill in the blank)
are what they are. When compiling such a volume, no editor can completely fulfill the inference of the title. Fiction is not a race to be won, there are no absolutes with which to measure it. Yet those of us who edit such anthologies exert tremendous effort in a genuine attempt to offer books worthy of their grandiose monikers. Decisions are arrived at with sincere intention, but personal taste is, of course, involved, and—like it or not—compromises must be made.

One compromise I made this year was to not include what I felt was certainly one of the finest dark stories of last year (“The Adakian Eagle” by Bradley Denton) because my fellow Prime Books editor, Rich Horton, chose it first. Rich, infinitely more organized than I, invariably meets his deadline long before I do, and announced his table of contents before I did. Fair and square! But since his
The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy
and my
The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror
are companion volumes published at same time, I thought it best not to duplicate.

And, with timeliness in mind, for next year’s volume, it is best to make sure any recommendations or material published in 2012 reach me by February 1, 2013—
preferably sooner.
Information on previous volumes of the series can be found on the Prime Books website (www.prime-books.com) and the current “Call for Submissions” can be found at www.prime-books.com/call-for-submissions-years-best-dark-fantasy-horror-2013. You can e-mail me at [email protected].

Paula Guran

April 2012

She knew she had been here before. It was the strongest wave of
déjà vu
she’d ever felt, a sickening collision between two types of knowledge: she knew it was impossible, yet she remembered . . .

Objects in Dreams May Be Closer than They Appear
Lisa Tuttle

Since we divorced twenty years ago, my ex-husband Michael and I rarely met, but we’d always kept in touch. I wish now that we hadn’t. This whole terrible thing began with a link he sent me by e-mail with the comment, “Can you believe how much the old homestead has changed?”

Clicking on the link took me to a view of the cottage we had owned, long ago, for about three years—most of our brief marriage.

Although I recognized it, there were many changes. No longer a semi-detached, it had been merged with the house next-door, and also extended. It was, I thought, what we might have done ourselves given the money, time, planning permission and, most vitally, next-door neighbors willing to sell us their home. Instead, we had fallen out with them (they took our offer to buy as a personal affront) and poured too much money into so-called improvements, the work expensively and badly done by local builders who all seemed to be related by marriage if not blood to the people next-door.

Just looking at the front of the house on the computer screen gave me a tight, anxious feeling in my chest. What had possessed Michael to send it to me? And why had he even looked for it? Surely he wasn’t nostalgic for what I recalled as one of the unhappiest periods of my life?

At that point, I should have clicked away from the picture, put it out of my mind and settled down to work, but, I don’t know why, instead of closing the tab, I moved on down the road and began to discover what else in our old neighborhood was different.

I’d heard about Google Earth’s “Street View” function, but I’d never used it before, so it took me a little while to figure out how to use it. At first all the zooming in and out, stopping and starting and twirling around made me queasy, but once I got to grips with it, I found this form of virtual tourism quite addictive.

But I was startled by how different the present reality appeared from my memory of it. I did not recognize our old village at all, could find nothing I remembered except the war memorial—and that seemed to be in the wrong place. Where was the shop, the primary school, the pub? Had they all been altered beyond recognition, all turned into houses? There were certainly many more of those than there had been in the 1980s. It was while I was searching in vain for the unmistakable landmark that had always alerted us that the next turning would be our road, a commercial property that I could not imagine anyone converting into a desirable residence—the Little Chef—that it dawned on me what had happened.