The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror

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 • (2011) • shortstory by Joan Aiken

Rakshasi • (2011) • shortfiction by Kelley Armstrong

Walls of Paper, Soft as Skin • (2011) • shortstory by Adam Callaway

The Lake • (2011) • shortfiction by Tananarive Due

Tell Me I'll See You Again • (2011) • shortstory by Dennis Etchison

King Death • (2011) • shortfiction by Paul Finch

The Last Triangle • (2011) • shortfiction by Jeffrey Ford

Near Zennor • (2011) • novella by Elizabeth Hand

Crossroads • (2011) • shortstory by Laura Anne Gilman

After-Words • (2011) • novelette by Glen Hirshberg

Rocket Man • (2011) • shortfiction by Stephen Graham Jones

The Maltese Unicorn • (2011) • shortfiction by Caitlín R. Kiernan

The Dune • (2011) • shortfiction by Stephen King

Catastrophic Disruption of the Head • (2011) • shortfiction by Margo Lanagan

The Bleeding Shadow • (2011) • shortfiction by Joe R. Lansdale

Why Light? • (2011) • novelette by Tanith Lee

Conservation of Shadows • (2011) • shortstory by Yoon Ha Lee

A Tangle of Green Men • [Chronicles of the Borderlands] • (2011) • novella by Charles de Lint

After the Apocalypse • (2012) • shortfiction by Maureen F. McHugh [as by Maureen McHugh ]

Why Do You Linger? • (2011) • shortfiction by Sarah Monette

Lord Dunsany's Teapot • (2011) • shortstory by Naomi Novik

Mysteries of the Old Quarter • (2011) • novelette by Paul Park

Vampire Lake • (2011) • shortfiction by Norman Partridge

A Journey of Only Two Paces • (2011) • shortstory by Tim Powers

Four Legs in the Morning • (2011) • shortfiction by Norman Prentiss

The Fox Maiden • (2011) • shortfiction by Priya Sharma

Time and Tide • (2011) • shortstory by Alan Ryan [as by Alan Peter Ryan ]

Sun Falls • (2011) • shortstory by Angela Slatter

Still • (2011) • shortfiction by Tia V. Travis

Objects in Dreams May Be Closer Than They Appear • (2011) • shortstory by Lisa Tuttle

The Bread We Eat in Dreams • (2011) • shortstory by Catherynne M. Valente

All You Can Do Is Breathe • (2011) • shortstory by Kaaron Warren

Josh • (2011) • shortfiction by Gene Wolfe