The Best of Cemetery Dance: Volume Two showcases the very finest short stories from issues 26 to 50 of Cemetery Dance magazine, picking up where the acclaimed and award-winning first "Best of" volume left off! Featuring a virtual "who's who" of today's greatest authors of dark fiction, The Best of Cemetery Dance: Volume Two will be one of the most important anthologies of the year. Just a handful of the contributors include Stephen King, Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson, Peter Straub, Bentley Little, Michael Marshall Smith, Ray Garton, Jack Ketchum, Douglas Clegg, Poppy Z. Brite, Joe R. Lansdale, Nancy A. Collins, Peter Crowther, Norman Partridge, Ed Gorman, William F. Nolan, F. Paul Wilson, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Simon Clark, Richard Christian Matheson, David J. Schow, Stewart O'Nan, Glen Hirshberg, Ramsey Campbell, and dozens of others! Cemetery Dance magazine has been published for more than thirty years now, and is the winner of the World Fantasy Award and the International Horror Critics Guild Award, as well as a nominee for both the British Fantasy Award and the American Horror Award. Don't miss what's sure to be one of the most talked about anthologies of the year!
This was one of the two anthologies I brought with me on vacation, but being a whopping 756 pages it turned out to be the only one I had time to read.
This is a massive tome with so many authors that I feel confident in saying there is literally something for everyone in this book. Not every story was a huge hit with me but there were several I would rate 5 stars and a multitude of 4 star stories. There were only a couple I skimmed or skipped due to not holding my interest. The table of contents reads like a who's who of horror. There are many familiar names and only a few that I had not heard of, but now that I have I will be looking into what else they have written.
Just a few of the stand out 5 star stories would be Graham Masterton's Ballyhooly Boy about a haunted house that needs a particular owner, The Goddess of Cruelty by Thomas Tessier is a very dark love story with a nasty twist, The Riders by Bentley Little, which is about the last remaining socially acceptable prejudice, fat shaming, taken to a horrifying extreme.
If you love short horror stories as much as I do you really need a copy of this massive anthology.
4 out of 5 stars
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