The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: Volume Two

Guran’s (editor of Beyond the Woods: Fairy Tales Retold and Blood Sisters: Vampire Stories by Women) latest short story anthology features a diverse group of authors who provide a wide array of cultural, ethnic, and sexual orientation and gender identity perspectives in these dark fiction stories. Not the typical fantasy/horror stories, these works expand the genre, overlaying the dark and horrific with the mundane as well as shining a light on political issues such as feminism, genetics, and climate change. Meet the ghosts of COVID-19 in Victor LaValle’s “Recognition.” Find a gem of a haunted house in John Wiswell’s “Open House on Haunted Hill.” Watch as a genetically engineered “perfect” child uncovers the ultimate betrayal in Elaine Cuyegkeng’s “The Genetic Alchemist’s Daughter.” Read the diary of a teenage sea monster in Soleil Knowles’s “Lusca.” See a twist on the Daphne and Apollo myth in Alix E. Harrow’s “The Sycamore and the Sybil.” View the past and the future through the lens of a Betamax video camera in Catherynne M. Valente’s “Color, Heat, and the Wreck of the Argo.” Discover the ghost in the machine in Kelley Armstrong’s “Drunk Physics,” and see a new take on the zombie apocalypse in Steve Rasnic Tem’s “The Dead Outside My Door.”