Year's Best Fantasy and Horror

So I finished the Year's Best Fantasy and Horror over the weekend. It went pretty quickly: it's a pretty thick book and it took me less than a month to finish it. I liked a lot of the stories included in it, with special notice going to:

"Pol Pot's Beautiful Daughter" by Geoff Ryman
"First Kisses From Beyond the Grave" by Nik Houser
"Fourteen Experiments in Postal Delivery" by John Schoffstall
"The Night Whiskey" by Jefferey Ford
"In the House of the Seven Librarians" by Ellen Klages
"Messages" by Brett Alexander Savory
"La Fee Verte" by Delia Sherman
"Father Muerte & The Flesh" by Lee Battersby
" Cup and Table" by Tim Pratt
"The Churring" by Nicholas Royle
"Directions" by Caleb Wilson
"Journey Into the Kingdom" by M. Rickert
"The Good Ones Are Already Taken" by Ben Fountain
"31/10" by Stephen Volk
"Femaville 29" by Paul Di Fillipo
"A Siege of Cranes" by Benjamin Rosenbaum
"The Lineanments of Gratified Desire" by Ysabeau S. Wilce

Some of the rest were OK, but they weren't great. Even some of the ones I've listed here, primarily "Journey Into the Kingdom," were great stories almost ruined by downer endings. I don't understand the fixation of some writers with endings where the main character fails (this was the problem I had with "Femaville 29") or have endings like "Journey Into the Kingdom," which takes the likable protagonist and turns him into a psychopath. Really, "Journey," which starts with a cool ghost story the main character is reading, would have been better had only been that story and not the character's reaction to it (which leads to the aforementioned psychopathic behavior). And, ironically, another huge problem with the story is that it pulls its punch: the main character's insane behavior, which is caused by the fact he's delusional, is revealed to be not insane at all, BECAUSE HIS DELUSIONS TURN OUT TO BE TRUE! If you're going to turn a likable character into a psychopath, you can't make him justified in his actions, because he's a PSYCHOPATH.

Really, too many of these stories seemed to revolve around taking a normal person and then revealing them to be insane or evil. "Journey," "Dog Person," "Sob in the Silence," and "Raphael" spring to mind. "Raphael" also suffers from an incomprehensible plot, and "Dog Person," which actually does the best job of using this idea, ends on an incomprehensible plot twist. I guess something in the water in 2006 led writers to think that writing stuff like this wsa "edgy," instead of aggravating.

I'm beginning to miss Terri Windling as the fantasy editor for this anthology series. Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant turn up plenty of brilliant stories, but a lot of the "fantasy" stories seem to be almost horror stories in disguise. A lot of the other ones are simply weird. There is also no heroic fantasy, which I found myself missing. "A Siege of Cranes" is the closest the anthology gets to a traditional heroic story, and it is quite dark and grim, although wonderfully creative and innovative.

All in all, it was a solid collection, but I hope that next year's anthology is a little lighter. I think that next year's anthology might also be the last, as not enough funding is coming through for it next year, which is a shame.