The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: Volume 4 Edited by Paula Guran

 The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror series returns with a splendidly startling fourth volume!

From paranormal plots to stories of the supernatural, tales of the unfamiliar have always fascinated us humans. To keep the tradition alive, fantasy aficionado Paula Guran has gathered the most delightfully disturbing work from some of today’s finest writers of the fantastique!

No two mysterious shadows are alike, and the same can be said for the books in this series. T he Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, Volume 4 contains more than three hundred pages of mystical fiction. Reader beware and indulge if you dare, because these chilling tales are sure to spook and surprise!

The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror Volume 4 is an exceptional anthology that makes me want to search out and read the previous volumes because apparently, I have been missing out on something special.

The first story, Shadow Plane by Fran Wilde set the bar pretty high. If surviving a plane crash and being trapped in the bitter-cold wilderness isn't scary enough just wait until you see what those shadows are up to. This was a super freaky story that will have you scared of your own shadow.

Red Wet Grin by Gemma Files is a creepy story that is set in a nursing home where a new patient with a wicked smile has evil plans for staff and residents.

The Lending Library of Final Lines by Octavia Cade is gruesome, sad, original, and twisted. Complete books don't exist in this world but loose pages have an incredible and heartbreaking use. Reading can be dangerous.

Stephen Graham Jones knocks it out of the park with his story Men, Women, and Chainsaws. Breakups can be messy, but this story of romance, revenge, and the bonds of parental love was a riveting page-turner.

The Feeding of Closed Mouths by Eden Royce was another of my favorites. I knew it would be from the opening line "When the news said three more young men had been found dead in their homes, Grace knew her mother had come to town." All I'm going to say about this story is WOW! 

A Belly Full Of Spiders by Mario Coellho is a story of abuse and the supernatural. It is dark and disturbing and brilliant.

The Long Way Up by Alix E. Harrow is a tale of loss, and grief, and what one woman is willing to do for the love of her life.

The past catches up with a small group of teens in Sharp Things, Killing Things by A.C. Wise. This is a story that gave me goosebumps!

Swim the Darkness by Michael Kelly kind of broke my heart. Life is short even if you're not a girl with a strange affliction, so live as if you're on borrowed time. I'm not crying you're crying.

In The Smile Place by Tobi Ogundiran is about a boy who suffers a traumatic experience then later goes missing, and the big brother who lives with guilt over it. It's also scary as hell!

If you love dark fiction you need this anthology!

My thanks to Pyr Books

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Dread: 22 Tales of Terror by Kevin Bachar

A child died in an avalanche, and she won’t leave me alone.
A woman plagued by blood-draining mosquitoes on the Alaskan tundra figures out a horrific way to scratch her unending itching.
There’s something outside my tent…and I think it’s hungry.
A collector of rare tropical fish, receives a new species that is both fascinating and terrifying.

DREAD - Thousands of people have gone missing out in the wild and here is a collection of tales that offer up some horrifying reasons why. Emmy-award-winning National Geographic cinematographer Kevin Bachar has swum with sharks, climbed the peaks of mountains, and explored the darkest of forests. In DREAD, he weaves together terrifying true stories from his real-life adventures with twisted fiction from the depths of his frightening imagination. Flip open the pages to indulge in the dark side of nature— haunted forests, tree demons, monstrous snakes, and a search-and-rescue team terrorized by the ghosts of those they couldn’t save.
Read... if you dare.

Angry spirits, swarms of bugs, strange lights that lead people astray, Bigfoot, and more are featured in these 22 new tales of Dread. Most take place in wild and dangerous outdoor settings because like they say, write what you know, and the author certainly has lots of experience with such places.

Some of the stories were too short for my taste but that is just my own preference. I love short horror stories but I tend to avoid flash fiction. 

It was the longer stories that gave me chills, and I enjoyed all of them starting from the opening lines of The Peak of Fear in which a search and rescue team is haunted by a mistake. There was more than the icy temperatures in this one that gave me the shivers!

 Another of my many favorites was Forest For The Trees. I love a woodsy setting, probably due to my own complete lack of a sense of direction. I always get an uneasy feeling from these kinds of stories because I live vicariously through the characters from the safety of my cozy chair knowing full well that if it were me I would be the one lost and never seen again. 

Working Like A Dog was another of my favorites. While not a scary story there are some supernatural aspects to this tale of a New England grave digger and his best pal, a loyal dog named Rex. 

I also loved The Starter, which is about a man with a struggling pizza restaurant. If you've ever wondered how to make the perfect crust at home like your favorite pizzeria does you can find an alarming secret here.

Branching Out was the final and creepiest of the stories, in which a grumpy old man who just wants some peace and quiet on his own property, goes a little overboard and pays a horrific price. All the stories were good but those are the ones that I am still thinking about that will be cemented in my memories for quite a while.

If you like dark fiction this collection is for you.

4 out of 5 stars

My thanks to Kevin Bachar

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The Reformatory by Tananarive Due

 

A gripping, page-turning novel set in Jim Crow Florida that follows Robert Stephens Jr. as he’s sent to a segregated reform school that is a chamber of terrors where he sees the horrors of racism and injustice, for the living, and the dead.

Gracetown, Florida
June 1950

Twelve-year-old Robbie Stephens, Jr., is sentenced to six months at the Gracetown School for Boys, a reformatory, for kicking the son of the largest landowner in town in defense of his older sister, Gloria. So begins Robbie’s journey further into the terrors of the Jim Crow South and the very real horror of the school they call The Reformatory.

Robbie has a talent for seeing ghosts, or haints. But what was once a comfort to him after the loss of his mother has become a window to the truth of what happens at the reformatory. Boys forced to work to remediate their so-called crimes have gone missing, but the haints Robbie sees hint at worse things. Through his friends Redbone and Blue, Robbie is learning not just the rules but how to survive. Meanwhile, Gloria is rallying every family member and connection in Florida to find a way to get Robbie out before it’s too late.

The Reformatory is a haunting work of historical fiction written as only American Book Award–winning author Tananarive Due could, by piecing together the life of the relative her family never spoke of and bringing his tragedy and those of so many others at the infamous Dozier School for Boys to the light in this riveting novel.

The Reformatory is a brutal, heartbreaking story set in the old South in the days when good old boys would not think twice about lynching a Black man or child for looking at a white woman. 

When 12 year old Robbie defends his sister from inappropriate advances he gets sent off to reform school. More than just a punishment for Robbie, this is a plot intended to make his father come out of hiding. 

Robbie's father was accused of a crime he didn't commit and skipped town before they could murder him, leaving his children behind with an elderly woman.

This reformatory is more a prison than a school, where the living inmates barely outnumber the dead. Many boys never left after not surviving their sentence thanks to the brutal treatment by the sadistic warden who relished any chance to torture the boys for any slight or made up infraction of his rules. The warden and the children are often plagued by ghosts.

If this sounds familiar, you may have seen the real life news stories about the human remains found at the now closed Dozier School, where it should be noted that the author had a relative who did not survive.

The writing depicts the language of those days. If child abuse and racism require trigger warnings for you then you may not be able to handle this book so proceed with caution.

The pacing was a little slow at times but by the final third, I was nearly sick with worry over whether or not Robbie would survive.

4 out of 5 stars

My thanks to Gallery / Saga Press

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About the Dozier School

 

This is Halloween by James A. Moore

 Author James A. Moore offers up ten autumnal tales of the darker things that lurk just around the corner of Indian Summer. A man learns of a town's obsession with scarecrows and tries to find the answers as to why they are so important. Children move through familiar streets and find that Halloween makes everything different. Tis' the season when ghosts are real, witches soar through the night, and things in the Beldam Woods are not always what they seem. Sometimes it's the monsters that wear the masks.

If the gorgeous cover didn't get me, the title would. Halloween is my favorite holiday. Short horror stories are my addiction, and Halloween horror is my favorite. I expected a lot from this collection, and it delivered all I could have hoped for.

These stories embody the spirit of the season. 

From folk horror to trick or treating at homes that don't exist in the light of day this book held me spellbound from start to finish. You will travel to small towns with strange and deadly customs, meet vengeful spirits, and more. The writing crackles like crisp leaves and snaps like an October wind. And much like Halloween itself, I hated for it to end.

5 out of 5 stars

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