Building the Horror in Best of the Best Horror of the Year edited by Ellen Datlow

Craft examination of the short story collection Best of the Best Horror of the Year.

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I only read a couple of stories from the Best of the Best Horror of the Year: 10 Years of Essential Short Horror Fiction edited by Ellen Datlow with my focus being on emotional action. I’ve been trying to find a way to combine my lyrical emotional writing with the clear movement and action of the story. One of the things that someone in my cohort mentioned was how I’m really good at voice to the point that there are never breaks where you can see my writer’s hand. At times, however, that hides key information that would help the reader understand the story, characters, and world.

I picked out six stories for this focus: “No Matter Which Way We Turned” by Brian Evenson, “Nesters” by Siobhan Carroll, “The Nimble Men” by Glen Hirshberg, “The Monster Makers” by Steve Rasnic Tem, “In a Cavern, in a Canyon” by Laird Barron, and “The Man from the Peak” by Adam Golaski. Each story was a different type of horror from vampire story to weird fiction, urban legends, and more. The authors of these stories all had an ability to use simple language to convey powerful images, emotions, and movement in the story.

In some cases, even though the language was simple, the prose was still confusing, dense, and lush in ways that I have amateurishly brushed aside, like in Tem’s “The Monster Makers.” “This is all I can bear of love,” (pg. 93) is how the short story about a grandparent in a family where for whatever reason, the children can turn people around them into monsters: “Robert is calling the children in, practically screaming it … But I’m too busy gazing at the couple as they talk to the park ranger, the way their ears melt, noses droop, elongating into something else as their hair warps and shifts color, their spines bend and expand, arms and legs crooked impossibly, and their eye sockets migrating across their faces so rapidly they threaten to evict the eye balls.” (pg. 93)

Throughout the story, there are few answers given only disturbing descriptions that when weaved together create a, sometimes, confusing and strange story. In Tem’s short story he also uses his simple language to keep a character specific distance from the setting and any descriptions of the world. It shows the detached nature of the perspective character—a grandfather, a patriarch of a family of monster makers.

When Tem’s introduces his characters and world, it seems like the grandfather’s detachment is about the children turning people into monsters. Then over the course of the story the author reveals that the grandfather’s nature goes deeper and connects to a grief unseen on the page. All this grief and all this horror builds and builds and builds until the end that is beautiful and touching:

“I can feel the terrible swiftness of my journey through their [the grandchildren] short lives. I become a voice clicking because it has run out of sound. I become a tongue silently flapping as it runs out of words…I become the stone and the plank and the empty field. I am really quite something, the monster made in their image, until I am scattered, and forgotten.” (pg. 98)

While Tem’s story used simple language to describe strange things and intense emotions, in “The Nimble Men” by Glen Hirshberg, the author uses him simple language to withhold information and create a short action story about a couple of small plane pilots in the Canadian wilderness. One night on a routine stop, the two pilots and their passengers see something that can’t be explained or fully understood: “Maybe he [other pilot] didn’t even see what the lights became, the thing with wings. Or the million smaller things, all of them shining. They came like a blizzard on a glacier, all at once and from everywhere…They were in my hair, ears, eyes, and they ached…The lights were screaming.” (pg. 46)

It's a captivating and withholding story, or not withholding but there’s a lot of absence, like there are hints that the main character lost his wife and was grieving the lost that happened three years ago throughout the story. The author also kept the story moving without falling into literary tricks—which I can be very guilty of.

And it’s not that I don’t believe or trust that Hirshberg has the skills to pull tricks, I just think he uses his skills in a way that pulls the reader in without losing them in frills and silly dresses. At one point while the pilots are waiting to be serviced at their stop, one pilot tells the other a story of The Nimble Men—a Canadian wilderness legend about lights that come to a woodsman suffering of grief. This story within a story is actually the story we are reading. Just a different version of it. One that feels as though it’s been added to the cannon of tellings of The Nimble Men.

A lesson I wasn’t expecting to learn from these stories snuck up on me as I read through the collection is how to balance a slow pace without the story falling dull. It’s all in the physical beats and keeping them steady in every sentence. Or, I’m hesitant to say it’s all in the physical beats, but the authors that I read all used them to keep their pacing slow but their story moving. The story that exemplifies this out of the six I read is “Nesters” by Siobhan Carroll. The story follows a young woman in a dry apocalypse world where her father has gone missing into a strange oasis the cropped up around a meteor crash.

Like in the other stories I mentioned in this piece, Carroll doesn’t use literary tricks or fancy language to describe the world or characters, “But Sally remembered that day at Ted Howser’s farm, the man scuttling out of the barn on his back, like an upside-down beetle.” (pg. 434) Simple yet unsettling. And it continues, getting deeper and stranger as the story advances, “The jumping orange light revealed twisted bodies—humans, cows, birds, plants, all merged together. Bird wings fanned air around the room. Human faces twisted on vine stems. A flower opened around an eye.” (pg. 446)

Unlike a few of the other stories, Carroll gives slow answers. She spaces them out from beginning to end so that whenever a question is posed you rush toward the answer knowing she will give it to you. And instead of worrying about any of the ‘plot,’ Carroll focuses on showing the reader how the character moves through the world, taking us along with her. It’s showing at its finest.

To keep a weird or unusual story from losing a reader, the physical beats should be mixed in with the weird and descriptions as a way of grounding the reader and moving the story along. Reading through The Best of the Best Horror of the Year: 10 Years of Essential Short Horror Fiction, I noticed that the stories often blended the lyrical with the plot movement and used character as a sort of enticement. It made me think that I can sort of save or direct my power in my prose by keeping the beauty and building it slowly and simply so that my prose isn’t dense but alluring.