Guran’s Picks for Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2019

Editor Paula Guran has announced her selections for The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2019.  The book is due to be released September 3.

The supernatural, the surreal, and the all-too real . . . tales of the dark. Such stories have always fascinated us, and modern authors carry on the disquieting traditions of the past while inventing imaginative new ways to unsettle us. Chosen from a wide variety of venues, these stories are as eclectic and varied as shadows. This volume of 2018’s best dark fantasy and horror offers more than five hundred pages of tales from some of today’s finest writers of the fantastique?sure to delight as well as disturb . . .

Table of Contents

• “Down Where Sound Comes Blunt”, G. V. Anderson (F&SF, Mar-Apr 2018)
• “Hainted”, Ashley Blooms (F&SF Jul-Aug 2018)
• “The Empyrean Light” Gregory Norman Bossert (Conjunctions:71, A Cabinet of Curiosity, Fall 2018)
• “Raining Street” by J. S. Breukelaar (Black Static #63)
The Black God’s Drums, P. Djèlí Clark (Tor.com)
• “Faint Voices, Increasingly Desperate”, Anya Johanna DeNiro (Shimmer #43)
• “Big Dark Hole”, Jeffrey Ford (Conjunctions:71, A Cabinet of Curiosity, Fall 2018)
• “And Yet”, A.T. Greenblatt (Uncanny #21)
• “Second to the Left, and Straight On”, Jim C. Hines (Robots vs. Fairies, eds. Parisien & Wolfe)
• “He Sings of Salt and Wormwood”, Brian Hodge (The Devil and the Deep, ed. Datlow)
• “Just Another Love Song” Kat Howard (Robots vs. Fairies, eds. Parisien & Wolfe)
• “Four Revelations from the Rusalka Ball”, Cassandra Khaw (The Underwater Ballroom Society, eds. Trent & Burgis)
• “Rust and Bone”, Mary Robinette Kowal (Shimmer #26)
• “The Thing About Ghost Stories”, Naomi Kritzer (Uncanny #25)
• “A Man Walking His Dog” Tim Lebbon (Phantoms, ed. O’Regan
• “Honey” Valya Dudycz Lupescu (A World of Horror, ed. Guignard)
• “Big Mother”, Anya Ow (Strange Horizons, 1 Jan 2018)
• “Fish Hooks”, Kit Power (New Fears 2, ed. Morris)
• “The Governor”, Tim Powers (The Book of Magic, ed. Dozois)
• “True Crime”, M. Rickert (Nightmare #72)
• “Sour Milk Girls”, Erin Roberts (Clarkesworld, Jan 2018)
• “Every Good-bye Ain’t Gone”, Eden Royce (Strange Horizons, 30 July 2018)
• “Tom Is in The Attic”, Robert Shearman (Phantoms, ed. O’Regan)
• “When We Fall, We Forget”, Angela Slatter, (Phantoms, ed. O’Regan)
• “In This Twilight”, Simon Strantzas (Nothing Is Everything)
• “The Crow Knight”, Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam (Beneath Ceaseless Skies, 11 Oct 2018)
• “Thanatrauma”, Steve Rasnic Tem (New Fears 2, ed. Morris)
• “Sick Cats in Small Places”, Kaaron Warren (A World of Horror, ed. Guignard)
• “Blood and Smoke, Vinegar and Ashes”, D.P. Watt (The Silent Garden, Vol. 1)
• “The Pine Arch Collection”, Michael Wehunt (The Dark #36)
• “In the End, It Always Turns Out the Same”, A. C. Wise (The Dark #37)
• “Asphalt, River, Mother, Child”, Isabel Yap (Strange Horizons, 8 Oct 2018)
• “Music for the Underworld”, E. Lily Yu (Terraform, 29 Mar 2018)

[Thanks to Jason for the story.]

One thought on “Guran’s Picks for Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2019

  1. I’m happy to see “He Sings of Salt and Wormwood” in there. That was an amazing story, easily my favorite in the anthology it appeared in.

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