Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 2007: Twentieth Annual Collection

It has taken me about three weeks instead of the usual one or two days to work through this year's installment of The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, and neither papers nor the usual budget of Victorian anti-Catholic fiction is to blame.  Jeff Vandermeer's assessment of the current state of fantasy short fiction--"It’s good–it’s just not great"--could just as well sum up my response to this anthology.  The literary craft on display didn't offend, but it rarely got up from the table and danced, either: only a few of the authors experimented with style, or tried to rethink genre conventions, or even attempted to be just plain outrageous.  (It's fantasy and horror, after all!)  Nor did it help that one of my courses this semester is heavy on the Victorian Gothic/horror; reading this anthology in conjunction with the earlier stories only intensified my sense that really, we've been here before.

This is not to say that there's nothing worth reading. Nicholas Royle's "The Churring," almost a mood piece, juxtaposes the death-in-life of the narrator's sexual imprisonment with the death that follows hearing the nightjar's song--other people's deaths, that is.  Ysabeau S. Wilce's "The Lineaments of Gratified Desire" takes the most risks with language.  Set during a hyped-up, Halloween-style celebration in an alternate world filled with ghastlies of various descriptions, the story tracks a hunky magician's quest for his temporarily-misplaced five-year-old wife and her stuffed pink pig (don't ask).  Wilce packs her sentences with adjectives and adverbs, parallelism and paradox; the words themselves chime with alliteration and assonance.  ("He's cool and cold and so angry that if he touched timber it would burst into flames, if he tipped tobacco it would explode cherry red" [393].)  While at times the experiment goes over the top, Wilce's language games nevertheless have a sharp bite. 

The anthology offers a number of lightly or darkly comical stories.  John Schoffstall's surreal "Fourteen Experiments in Postal Delivery," although sometimes too precious for its own good, still plays amusing games with the epistolary form.  Epistolary fiction emerges from absence; Schoffstall rings a number of changes on what it might mean to make oneself present to a beloved.  A young woman who has rejected her lover finds herself beset with an increasingly bizarre array of gifts--Spain, for example--until she is finally forced to look inside herself (quite literally).   Nik Houser's post-Whedon "First Kisses from Beyond the Grave" puts one adolescent into a high school located in Limbo and populated with vampires, zombies, and other forms of the undead, then takes off into a bizarre coming-of-age narrative.  Although I ultimately found the black humor too obvious and broad, the story is still  genuinely funny.  At the other end of the gore quotient, Ellen Klages' quirky "In the House of the Seven Librarians" is a delicate fairytale about the power of books, a passion for reading, and the sad necessity of growing up.  The same respect for childhood creativity permeates Paul Di Filippo's "Femaville 29," set in a relocation camp after a Katrinaesque disaster; as Di Filippo alerts us at the end, the story inverts "The Pied Piper of Hamlin," with the children leading the adults into a fantasyland far superior to anything the government has to offer. 

Although in past years neither this anthology nor its sister, the Year's Annual Best Science Fiction, has handled religious themes especially well, things were greatly improved this time.   Christopher Rowe's "Another Word for Map is Faith," set in an unspecified future, imagines a strange hybrid of fundamentalism, cartography, environmentalism, and wildly multiplying Christianities.  Brett Alexander Savory's "Messages" yokes together divinely-inspired authorship, interpretation, and the Rapture; while positing a world in which men are, apparently, passing messages from God on to the government, Savory's tale also meditates on the possibility that there is no way to understand God's purposes (if, after all, it is God speaking).  Geoff  Ryman's "Pol Pot's Beautiful Daughter" is a lyrical story about ghosts, ancestors, and redemption through memory.   And Glen Hirshberg's Jewish-themed ghost story "The Muldoon" itemizes the usual reason for ghosts to stick around before adding another: "Or was it just a peculiarly Jewish sort of ghost, clinging to every last vestige of life, no matter how painful or beset by betrayal, because only in life--this life--is there any possibility of pleasure or fulfillment or even release?" ( 452)

One of the oddest things about this anthology is that the horror stories are not especially...horrific.   The scariest, Christopher Harman's "The Last to be Found," finds a so-far disappointed haunted-house investigator in a house that, it seems, is given to slipping between our universe and one far more frightening.  In classic form, Harman accentuates the terror by giving us just the tiniest glimpses of what the protagonist sees in front of him.  Stephen Volk's "31/10" joins supernatural terrors with society's favorite bogeymen, all in the form of that familiar genre known as the reality show.   Finally, and like "The Last to be Found," Gene Wolfe's "Sob in the Silence" draws on another Gothic convention: the ghost story within the ghost story.  The tale's unnamed "horror writer" claims that his house is not haunted--perhaps because his own monstrosity, slowly-revealed, prevents him from hearing the voices.