Ellen Datlow has a detailed list:
Occultation by Laird Barron (Night Shade Books) is the second collectionby a writer with a sure hand and a memorable voice. If you want to read literary horror stories, with their share of visceral chills and the occasional shock, you’ll find no better among the younger writers in the genre. The three originals, two novellas and a short story are all excellent. One of the best horror collections of the year.
Relative newcomer Angela Slatter had two fine collections of her work out: Sourdough (Tartarus) and The Girl with No Hands (and Other Tales) (Ticonderoga Publications). Many of Slatter’s stories are dark retellings ofclassic fairy tales, following in the tradition of Angela Carter and TanithLee. In The Girl with No Hands (and Other Tales) there are sixteen stories, three original to the volume. Sourdough has sixteen stories, only four previously published. Each stands alone, even though the stories and characters are often related to previous stories.
Holiday by the remarkable M. Rickert (Golden Gryphon) is a beauty of a book with illustrations for each of the eleven holiday-themed stories (one original, which is a quite dark). Rickert’s work has mostly been published in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and runs the gamut of fantastic genres including science fiction, dark fantasy, and horror. Although her stories are sometimes grim, they’re always worth reading. Several of the stories were chosen for Best of the year anthologies.
The Ones That Got Away by Stephen Graham Jones (Prime) is an important collection containing eleven powerful stories published since 2005 and two new ones. Jones’s work is visceral, violent, and disturbing. Several of the stories were reprinted in various Year’s Best anthologies, including my own. With an insightful introduction by Laird Barron and story notes by the author.
Lesser Demons by Norman Partridge (Subterranean Press) collects ten stories written since 2000, one brand new and novella length. Partridge is one of those writers who is equally fine in whatever genre his tale falls: hard-boiled western, contemporary noir, or monster tale. The title novelette is Lovecraftian and very effective (it’s also in S.T. Joshi’s 2010 anthology Black Wings).
Kraken: An Anatomy by China Miéville (Ballantine Books) is charming, funny, disgusting, inventive, and just plain entertaining. A young man working in the British Museum becomes enmeshed in a cult that worships a giant squid and someone’s plan to end the world in a final conflagration. London, even the world is threatened and London is a living, breathing city with every
part of it from the sea to its masonry part of the final battle. A few too many characters and extrusions off the main plot, but still satisfying.
Horns by Joe Hill (William Morrow) is the author’s masterful second novel in which a young man awakens after a drunken night with horns growing out of his forehead. From there the book moves back and forth between Ig’s perfect life of privilege and happiness, to the murder that ruins his life, and backinto his present as he tries to find out why he’s developed a strange powerof persuasion and can see the deepest desires of those around him. There’s asense of wonder, humor, and horror that runs throughout this fine novel.
Kill the Dead by Richard Kadrey (Eos) is the excellent sequel to his Sandman Slim, about the continuing adventures of James Stark (aka Sandman Slim), a former denizen of Hell who is hired as Lucifer’s bodyguard while the Prince of Darkness is in Hollywood overseeing a movie of his life. I’ve heard somecall it “pulp” but it’s way too well-written to describe it that way. It’s fun, bloody, and fast moving. A great read.
The Millennium Trilogy (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Vintage), The Girl Who Played With Fire (Vintage), and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest (Knopf) by Stieg Larsson creates one of the most memorable heroes of modernfiction: Lisbeth Salander, a young woman systematically abused by the Swedish social system from childhood, who has despite this grown into a brilliant computer hacker. The three books make up a fascinating fictional
study of government wide corruption and truly live up to the first book’s original title Men Who Hate Women.
The Django by Levi Pinfold (Templar Books) is an illustrated children’s book inspired by the great guitarist Django Reinhardt. In the book, the Django is a trickster, forever getting a young boy named Jean into trouble by breaking his father ‘s banjo, scaring a large horse, and eventually by speaking through Jean’s mouth, dancing through Jean’s feet. Jean, increasingly frustrated at being blamed for things he has not done, yells at the Djangoto go away and leave him alone. Which the Django does. Not horror at all but a beautiful, charming picture book.
The Horror the Horror: Comic Books the Government Didn’t Want You to Read (Abrams ComicArts) Selected, edited, and with commentary by Jim Trombetta. This is a fabulous oversized trade paperback heavily illustrated with comics not seen for nearly sixty years because of their censorship by Congress in 1954. Crime, gore, sex galore the pre-cite comic books were colorful, flamboyant and considered a very bad influence on juveniles. With an introduction by R. L. Stine and a bonus DVD of Confidential File, a half hour television show from 1955 about the “’evils’ of comic books and their effects on juvenile delinquency.”
And I just discovered Milla Jovavich’s 1994 album The Divine Comedy, which I love.
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