Black Gate

Last week I surveyed eleven upcoming Best of the Year anthologies, including books edited by Rich Horton, Jonathan Strahan, Paula Guran, Gardner Dozois, John Joseph Adams and Joe Hill, Stephen Jones, and others. All eleven will be published between May and October — a bumper crop for everyone who delights in excellent short fiction.

Night Shade Books used to publish two: Strahan’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, and Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year, but after the sale of Night Shade to Skyhorse two years ago, Strahan took his volume to Solaris.

Fortunately for us Night Shade have continued to publish the horror volume, and the seventh arrives in August of this year, with 22 short stories and novelettes from Garth Nix, Nathan Ballingrud, Genevieve Valentine, John Langan, Dale Bailey, Gemma Files, Robert Shearman, and many others.

James McGlothlin reviewed the Sixth installment in the series for us last year, saying it made a strong case that we’re living in a Golden Age of Horror.

Here’s the book description for the upcoming seventh volume.

For over three decades, Ellen Datlow has been at the center of horror. Bringing you the most frightening and terrifying stories, Datlow always has her finger on the pulse of what horror readers crave. Now, with the seventh volume of this series, Datlow is back again to bring you the stories that will keep you up at night.

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Sarah J. Maas is the author of the New York Times bestselling Throne of Glass series (Throne of Glass, Crown of Midnight, Heir of Fire, and the upcoming Queen of Shadows.)

Her new series is an adult fantasy with a strong fairy tale theme, drawing from Beauty and the Beast and the tales of Tam Lin.

When nineteen-year-old huntress Feyre kills a wolf in the woods, a beast-like creature arrives to demand retribution for it. Dragged to a treacherous magical land she only knows about from legends, Feyre discovers that her captor is not an animal, but Tamlin — one of the lethal, immortal faeries who once ruled their world.

As she dwells on his estate, her feelings for Tamlin transform from icy hostility into a fiery passion that burns through every lie and warning she’s been told about the beautiful, dangerous world of the Fae. But an ancient, wicked shadow over the faerie lands is growing, and Feyre must find a way to stop it. . . or doom Tamlin — and his world-forever.

A Court of Thorns and Roses will be published by Bloomsbury on May 5, 2015. It is 432 pages, priced at $18.99 in hardcover and $9.99 for the digital version.

See our summary of April new fantasy releases here, and all our reports on upcoming fantasy of note here.

We’re entering the Best-of-the-Year season.

Starting in May we’ll see no less than eleven volumes collecting the best short fiction of last year, beginning with Jonathan Strahan’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Nine (released May 12), and ending in October with the release of the latest volume in Stephen Jones’ long-running Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. We’ve showcased eight as Future Treasures in just the last few months (click on the links below for details on each.)

The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Nine, edited by Jonathan Strahan (May 12)
Best British Horror 2015, edited by Johnny Mains (May 25)
The Year’s Best Military SF and Space Opera, edited by David Afsharirad (June 2)
The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Novellas: 2015 edited by Paula Guran (June 16)
The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2015, edited by Rich Horton (June 16)
The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2015, edited by Paula Guran (June 24)
The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Second Annual Collection, edited by Gardner Dozois (July 7)
The Best Horror of the Year Volume Seven, edited by Ellen Datlow (August 4)
The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015, edited by John Joseph Adams and Joe Hill (October 6)
Year’s Best Weird Fiction Volume 2, edited by Kathe Koja (October)
The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 26, edited by Stephen Jones (October)

After 18 volumes, we lost David’s Hartwell’s Year’s Best SF in 2014 — a major loss– but we’ve added three to the list this year: the Afsharirad, Adams, and Paula Guran’s Best Novellas book. (And Year’s Best Weird Fiction just started up in 2014). I don’t remember any time in the history of the genre when we had this many Year’s Best volumes; certainly there’s been no time when I’ve looked forward with anticipation to nearly so many. I take it as a sign that there’s still a very healthy interest in short fiction in this market. Stay tuned over the next six months, and we’ll bring you additional details as they hit the market.

In her lengthy intro to her new anthology Blood Sisters, Paula Guran traces the modern literary history of the vampire, from C.L. Moore (“Whether… Moore’s “Shambleau” (1933) is a vampire story may be open to question, but one can make a good argument that the alien Shambleau is a form of vampire”) to Stephen King (“Salem’s Lot… downplayed vampiric eroticism, upped the level of terror, and focused on the vampire as a metaphor of corrupt power”) to Chelsea Quinn Yarbro (“Saint-Germain was the first genuinely romantic and heroic vampire”), and beyond.

In Blood Sisters Guran collects 25 vampire stories by Carrie Vaughn, Catherynne M. Valente, Nancy A. Collins, Suzy McKee Charnas, Pat Cadigan, Nalo Hopkinson, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Melanie Tem, Charlaine Harris, and over a dozen other women. It’s a stellar line-up, and one of the most intriguing collections of any kind I’ve seen this year.

A tantalizing selection of stories from some of the best female authors who’ve helped define the modern vampire.

Bram Stoker was hardly the first author — male or female — to fictionalize the folkloric vampire, but he defined the modern iconic vampire when Dracula appeared in 1897. Since then, many have reinterpreted the ever-versatile vampire over and over again — and female writers have played vital roles in proving that the vampire, as well as our perpetual fascination with it, is truly immortal. These authors have devised some of the most fascinating, popular, and entertaining of our many vampiric variations: suavely sensual… fascinating but fatal… sexy and smart… undead but prone to detection… tormented or terrifying… amusing or amoral… doomed or deadly… badass and beautiful… cutting-edge or classic…

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There are roughly ten Year’s Best volumes currently being published in the speculative fiction market, but they all bow before Gardner Dozois’ The Year’s Best Science Fiction. The Thirty-Second volume in this venerable series will be published in July.

Now, believe it or not, there were Year’s Best series before Gardner. Everett F Bleiler and T.E Dikty edited the first volume of The Best Science Fiction Stories way back in 1949 (I know, right? Who knew there was good science fiction in those days!) Judith Merril edited twelve volumes of The Year’s Greatest Science Fiction and Fantasy (1956-1967), while Donald Wollheim, Terry Carr, Lin Carter, Arthur Saha, Harry Harrison and Brian Aldis, and Lester del Rey all tried their hand at it for a while, with varying success. Gardner Dozois edited the Del Rey series, taking over from Lester del Rey, from 1977-81, until starting over again with The Year’s Best Science Fiction: First Annual Collection in 1984 (There’s a nice summary of all this history in Scott Laz’s review of that very first volume here.)

Gardner’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction was exceptional right from the very beginning. For one thing, most prior books — even market leaders like Terry Carr’s The Best Science Fiction of the Year — were slender paperback originals. With his first volume Gardner delivered a massive 575-page hardcover, packed with 25 stories — including a couple of novellas, like Dan Simmons’ knockout “Carrion Comfort.”

He also began what quickly became one of the most-read columns in the entire industry: his lengthy, frank, and often highly opinionated annual summation, covering news, magazines, anthologies, movies, deaths, awards, the birth and growth of fan websites, podcasts, and much more. His first one in 1984 was a thin 17 pages, but over the decades Gardner’s comprehensive report card on the field grew to nearly 100 pages. I, for one, read them cover-to-cover.

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