The Best Horror of the Year Volume Fifteen

There's not much to say about Datlow's work as an anthologist at this point. This fifteenth installment of year's best horror is a solid selection of short fiction (one poem, one maybe novella) by mostly firmly established if not universally well known authors working in the field. While a few of the selections are not to my taste, and a few though dark I would question the veracity of labeling horror, there's certainly nothing to complain about here. That's sort of the point of these after all. Grab one, have a broad, representational selection of good horror from folks you may or may not have heard of but are all good at their craft. I'll put a few of my favorites below, but otherwise, you know what you're getting picking up one of show more these.
There's a good, fun, vampire story opener with Angela Slater's 'Solivagent'. Followed up with the strange, actiony but dream like 'Gate 9' by Jeffrey Ford and a couple entries later the equally strange and probably among my favorites here Steve Toase's post-apocalyptic 'On the Hills, The Knitters.' 'New Fox Smell' felt more like the start of a story I'd be excited to read, rather than a story in and of itself.
'The Harvester of Ladslove' by Steve Duffy and 'The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Reporter' by Daniela Tomova rank up there with 'Knitters' as among my favorites for very different reasons. Harvester gives us a lot of World War 1 trauma and drawing room conversation and social mores while Long-Distance Reporter makes you think you've got a bit of a zombie story before becoming deeply, deeply, strange.
My own honorable mention to an expectedly excellent Gemma Files' and Charly Hughes' stories about music because I'm a sucker for such ever since I read Erick Zahn as a kid and watched RahXephon years later. show less

Unfortunately, I was not impressed with this one at all. I’m 99.9% sure that I read “In the Wabe” somewhere else, probably another horror collection. As for the rest, they were just meh. The only one that really held my attention was the last story, by John Langan about the wendigo. Otherwise, it was just something to get through, I’ve read better.

Middling overall, arguably one of my least favorite of this series.