This anthology contains 23 stories and one poem - most of these were mediocre in my opinion; they were unable to conjure up a sense of dread or horror or were only able to provoke a moderate sense of the same. There were, however, a few stand-outs and a few more that I felt had good premises and just failed in the execution."Down to a Sunless Sea" by Neil Gaiman, "The Fox" by Conrad Williams, "The House on Cobb Street" by Lynda Rucker, "The Anatomist's Mnemonic" by Priya Sharma, and "Halfway Hom...

This collection was very enjoyable. As another revieerw pointed out, these anthologies are always a crap shoot. While a significant portion of the stories were meh or underwhelming for me personally, I was pleased to see a lot of stories in the sweet spot of 18-25 pages long. The arrangement of the stories wasn't conducive to binge reading though... Too many similar stories stacked up next to each other. The 2/3 mark in the book was off-putting.Apports by Stephen Bacon - 2.5 rating - I found my

Horror anthologies run the spectrum from totally unreadable to bliss, and while many of the tales in The Best Horror of the Year, Volume Six were forgettable, the lack of any truly terrible stories and the presence of a few standouts pushes this collection to four stars. While each story is unrelated, there are strong themes of transformation and grief throughout this particular collection, examined from various supernatural and realistic horror scenes. As mentioned above, I would say about sixt...

Skillfully Written, but Rarely HorrorThe unifying theme between these stories generally seems to be as a rule an attempt at creating artistic character studies with some paranormal bent almost as an afterthought. Little , if anything, really happens in these stories and one gets the sense of pandering that you are in the universally slow slice of life dramas parading through the Oscars each year. Some of them escape this or have intriguing concepts and are universally well written with rich desc...

The first thing I do after pulling Volume Six of "The Best Horror of the Year" out of the Amazon box is flip to the copyright page to see who did that cover. Nice job, Pierre Droal! I'm not sure what's going on there, but I'm intrigued. The second thing I do is check the Table of Contents. A couple of name brands. A couple of personal favorites. But mostly a lot of unknowns. This was a bad thing last year. Volume Five was loaded with newbies who needed a lot more time practicing their craft befo...

Volume six of The Best Horror of the Year is a welcome return to the edgy and diverse selection of stories this series presented in its first two volumes; recent volumes have been a little bland, presenting stories that are fairly similar in tone and style. This year's volume contains several stories that provide food for thought as well as a few scares. From the first story on throughout the collection, there are morally complex tales in which the protagonist finds himself in a hopeless situati...

Very good collection of short horror fiction, with great representation across borders and gender. Highlights for me are the stories by Laird Barron, Dale Bailey, and Jane Jakeman. There is a little of everything here-from creepy to lightly amusing to our-and-out horrific. Can’t wait to read another volume!

When it comes to the annual 'Best of' anthologies, Jonathan Strahan may be the editorial King (especially in recent years) of sci-fi and fantasy, but Ellen Datlow is the undisputed Queen of horror.That brings us to The Best Horror of the Year, Volume 6, which is scheduled to hit the shelves early next month. The anthology begins with her usual summation on selection, awards, and notable novels, magazines, stories, anthologies, collections, and more. If you ever wondered just what an editor has t...

This copy is signed by Ellen Datlow.

Another superior collection from editor Ellen Datlow. (I'd give it a 4.5, but the system won't let me.)

Calling anything the best of the year is a tricky proposition. Taste is subjective; one person's trash is another person's treasure. However, I've never read an Ellen Datlow anthology that I didn't think was top-notch, so I've come to trust her taste implicitly. While there were a small handful of stories in this volume that didn't resonate with me the way they clearly must have for Datlow, overall this is a very strong sampling of short-form horror fiction from 2013. Among the standouts for me

When a reader must stop in the middle of a story in order to wait for daylight before continuing, and when a tale leaves the reader shivering even at the memory, that is a sign of a Horror Anthology well worth the reading. This is very true of this volume, which effectively proves that Horror can be subtle, not splatter.

Just started but I really enjoyed The good husband so far.

Well, I'm rapidly approaching the end of my previous reading list and will soon be plunging into my next one (newly retooled with expanded categories) which should, by a rough estimation, take me about 2 years or a bit longer to cycle through. So here I am mopping up the most recent of the big two "year's best" - having just finished Best New Horror: Volume 25, here's the complimentary volume in the annual publishing ritual....Experientially, I enjoyed this more than Jones' volume (some side com...

I received a copy at Book Con in NYC and haven't read the other volumes.This is a good anthology.Apports by Stephen Bacon: Chilling story about a dead child's ghost and the apports the kid leaves his father...and almost step-father.Mr. Splitfoot by Dale Bailey: It was an odd story that I didn't enjoy about girls in the 1800s raising a spirit.The Good Husband by Nathan Ballingrud: Gross (but not horribly so) story about a wife who committed suicide, but comes back (scaring her husband) until she

These anthologies are always a crap shoot, and it's impossible to please everyone with every story - there are twenty-three stories and one poem in this book, so while there's probably something for everyone here, the question is really how many out of the twenty-four. For me, sadly, I don't think the ratio favored this book. Since twenty-four stories/poems are just too many to review (and, frankly, the only thing I might have to say about some of them would be "Ugh." or "How did this get publis...

Overall an impressive collection of short stories, although I feel many do not necessarily fit within the horror genre.I have provided an overall review of the book as a whole followed by individual summary reviews of each story. You may need to pop some popcorn before you start this review – it may take a while to get through! Disclaimer: the following is strictly a reflection of my own personal (unconventional?) tastes and may or may not reflect the views of others. In other words, if you don’...

Where to start? Why 2 stars? It's because out of 23 stories (one is a poem), only 3 were actually entertaining, and only one was scary (The Good Husband). Neil Gaiman's teensy story was a good "gotcha!" moment, but still not horror. The last is almost a novella, and it's an update on Lovecraft's Innsmouth story. Still wasn't scary.This whole volume read as more of a strange tales collection, rather than any sort of horror. If they did hint at the horror genre or anything vaguely horrifying, the

I won't say I'm losing faith in Ellen Datlow. I'm not. But this volume is one of the weaker anthologies I've read in the past year. Maybe the horrors in the actual world are simply stealing the stuff of nightmare slipped into the seams of things, and the urge to face them have lessened, I don't know. I still love the look of this series, and I always like Datlow's long summation at the beginning. People don't talk enough about how a book looks these days... these volumes are well made with a gre...