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 paula@prime-books.com.
Paula Guran
April 2012