Readers might recall that last year Barron served as the guest editor for Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Volume 1. This year saw a continuation of the series with Kathe Koja as the guest editor. There was also no shortage of new original weird fiction. One of our favorites was The Loney by Andrew Hurley, a sort of unsettling rural British slow-burn. Then there was Lincoln Michel’s debut collection Upright Beasts, which collected a variety of modes of dark fiction from the Aickmanesque to the Kafkaesque, and Get in Trouble, which continues Kelly Link’s legacy as one of the best contemporary weird fiction writers.

Weird Fiction Review itself had no shortage of great pieces. We continued our Weird Writers series, had tons of great interviews, and published new fiction with features like Weird Voyages Week and two weeks of Weird Birds. We also had some great translations like “The Wagon” by Khalida Asghar and “The Supper” by Alfonso Reyes. To recap the year, we’ve compiled a list of recommendations from people who have contributed to Weird Fiction Review in one way or another: either with fiction, interviews, or articles.

Overall, 2015 was a great year for the Weird. So here’s to 2016—may it be just as Weird!

Lincoln Michel (Things Left Outside)

Secret Rendezvous by Kobo Abe (Vintage). Abe is one of Japan’s greatest weird writers, and his 1977 novel Secret Rendezvous is a darkly funny nightmare that resides somewhere between Franz Kafka and David Cronenberg. A man’s wife is mistakenly taken away in an ambulance. He goes to the hospital to find her, only to discover she’s can’t be located. Soon, he’s navigating a labyrinthian hospital run by surveillance-obsessed officers, scientists conducing bizarre sex experiments, and a man who turns himself into a horse by attaching another man’s lower half to his own.

Shadows in Summerland by Adrian Van Young (ChiZine). I’m cheating a bit here, as Van Young’s brilliant Gothic novel about 19^th-century spiritualism won’t be released by ChiZine until spring of 2016. However, I had the pleasure of reading it in manuscript form, so I’m going to count it. The novel is loosely based on the historical spirit photographer William H. Mumler, who famously photographed Mary Todd Lincoln with the alleged ghost of President Lincoln behind her. Fans of uncanny horror and gorgeous Gothic prose will want to put this on their to-read list

The Story of My Teeth by Valeria Luiselli (Coffee House Press). The Story of My Teeth is an odd and intriguing novel with an even odder back story. Luiselli was commissioned to write a piece by a juice factory in Mexico. She decided to do a collaboration with the workers in the juice factory, sending chapters and getting feedback across countries. The resulting novel mixes nonfiction, fiction, and metafiction in telling the story of Gustavo “Highway” Sanchez Sanchez, an auctioneer who makes money selling off the teeth of famous writers.

Sofia Samatar (The Space Between Objects)

Get In Trouble by Kelly Link (2015)

Kelly Link’s vision is extraordinary: she can make a parking lot into an uncanny landscape. Her latest collection revels in the threatening weirdness of ordinary spaces: ruined cabins, suburban bedrooms, theme parks, hotels. Like her settings, Link’s writing is simple and everyday and thick with something hidden that’s trying to press through. Her characters–mean kids, frightened parents, two-bit actors, washed-up superheroes–are on the edge of disaster. Like all of us, they’re in trouble.

The Last Lover by Can Xue (2005/2014)
Translated by Annelise Finegan Wasmoen

For over thirty years, Can Xue has been conducting an experiment in fiction, what she calls “an experiment without an escape route.” Her novel The Last Lover does not point the way to any exit, it does not unfold, it does not unroll like a piece of tape or a plotted novel. Rather, it shape-shifts. Can Xue’s characters lead double lives, and as these lives intersect, they create moving patterns of color. Lovers separate and reconnect, they make journeys to bleak mountains and snake-haunted rubber plantations, they encounter new animals, veiled or double-faced strangers, mysteriously empty towns. The Last Lover is senseless in the way that dreams are senseless and absolutely logical in the way that dreams are logical. It’s a novel that’s experienced rather than recorded in the reader’s memory. To open this book is to look into a kaleidoscope.

Post-Exoticism in Ten Lessons, Lesson Eleven by Antoine Volodine (1998/2015)
Translated by J. T. Mahany

Antoine Volodine is one of the names of the writer who also writes as Lutz Bassmann and Manuela Draeger. This heteronymous artist is creating a new literature, complete with its own literary forms and practitioners. These practitioners are the post-exotic writers and they are all in prison or dead. They write against capitalism, in the name of radical egalitarianism, employing the genres discussed in Post-Exoticism in Ten Lessons, such as the romånce, the Shaggå, the novelle, and the interjoist. Descriptions of these forms appear throughout the book, interrupting a series of interrogations of the incarcerated writers. The effect is bizarre, terrifying, uplifting. Filled with the stench of rotting prison cells and death, this is one of the most utopian books I have ever read.

Other weird delights I read this year: Gabriel Squailia’s adventure in the afterworld, Dead Boys (2015), Celeste Rita Baker’s debut collection Back, Belly, and Side: True Lies and False Tales (2015), and Aixa de la Cruz’ astonishing vampire story “True Milk,” translated by Thomas Bunstead for The Quarterly Conversation in 2012.

Usman T Malik (Khalida Asghar’s “The Wagon” and Fiction in Urdu)

The Occult by Naiyer Masud (2013). I was introduced to Masud’s work last year by the Indian horror writer Jayaprakash Satyamurthy. It took just a few Masud stories (many available here: http://www.urdustudies.com/Issue12/i12home.html) to make me realize he is possibly the best uncanny short story writer of his generation. Naiyer Masud derives his influence from the usual culprits like Kafka, Borges, Shultz, but he is also a professor of Persian and hence has linguistic access to a trove of untranslated fabulist work going back at least a thousand years. Such eclectic roots combined with Masud’s clean, taut, minimalist prose (rare in Urdu) mean Masud’s work is utterly original.

The Occult is a collection of five interwoven stories, that like much of Masud’s work are dazzling displays of pattern hiding within seeming randomness. Try them out.

Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay (2015). One of my favorite novels of the year, this is a dark psychological thriller about a possession and its effects on a family. The real horror of the story comes from the narrator’s experience, as it should, rather the child’s possession. Notwithstanding the tremendous edge-of-your-seat storytelling, the book is also a fierce feminist commentary on the modern condition and how we are all complicit in the various unique assaults on women in every part of the world.

Get in Trouble by Kelly Link (2015). They are written by Kelly Link. That’s all you need to know.

Helen Marshall (101 Weird Writers #37 — Kelly Link)

Gemma Files, Experimental Film (ChiZine Publications) — Experimental Film was released late in the year, and so I feel fortunate that I managed to get my hands on a copy in time to write about it for this. Files has gained a well-deserved reputation for the chilling beauty of her short stories and novels. This is her most accomplished work to date: it weaves together, found-footage style, a fascinating history of early Canadian cinema (a topic even most Canadians would be hard pressed to speak on) with a horror-myth that will appeal to fans of Algernon Blackwood. But while this description may give them impression thatExperimental Film is a bit parochial in its interests, I can assure you it isn’t at all. This is far and away one of my favourite novels of 2015: an accomplished and ultimately devastating read.

Indra Das, The Devourers (Penguin India, forthcoming 2016 from Del Rey in North America) — Like Files, Das is an extraordinary stylist: his prose is lush and evocative, an approach taken by few science fiction writers. His debut novel, released in 2015 by Penguin India but slated for North American publication in 2016, may seem on the surface like a departure from stories like “Weep for Day” and “The Widow and the Xir” which have gained him a reputation as a talent to watch. The Devourers is a literary fantasy novel which alternates between seventeenth-century Mughal India and the twenty-first century. In it, Das offers a refreshingly bold take on the myth of the werewolf. The transition from short story to novel can be a difficult one, but I can say in all confidence that Das makes use of the larger canvas in all the best ways: the world he imagines is thrilling and complex, the history vivid and beautifully rendered. Like his short stories, this novel locates an extraordinary sense of compassion in even the darkest and most alien encounters. In The Devourers, he has fashioned a tale that is redemptive, transformative, and uniquely his own.

Emily Carroll, Through the Woods (Margaret K McElderry Books) — This gorgeous collection of short horror comics came out in 2014 to well-deserved acclaim, but I want to mention it again because it is just that good. If you haven’t had a chance to read any of Carroll’s comics before, I recommend you start with her personal webpage: these make brilliant use of the form of the webcomic, combining stunning art with stories that remind me of a strange mash-up between Kelly Link, Shirley Jackson and H. P. Lovecraft. Shifting between fairy tales, dreamlike musings, ballads, and hauntings, Carroll proves herself a master of the vocabulary of dark fantasy. Utterly, utterly spell-binding.

Christopher Burke (The Rim of Morning by William Sloane)

Nathan Ballingrud, The Visible Filth (This Is Horror) – I wanted to keep this list confined to works that have perhaps not received as much attention as they deserve. Nathan Ballingrud’s novella has received a lot of praise already, but it was so good that I can’t not include it here. This piece had just about everything I want in a work of weird fiction: unputdownable, goes in directions you will not predict and does so in convincing ways, strong characterization with an emotional core, great imagery, and a climax that simultaneously makes sense in context and I didn’t see coming. I went into the story knowing exactly nothing about the book other than some of the authors and reviewers who had blurbed it favorably, so I’m not going to say a word about the plot because I think it’s best consumed that way.

V.H. Leslie, Skein and Bone (Undertow) – In a column with unlimited space, I could justly expound upon essentially everything that Undertow has put out this year (Aickman’s Heirs, These Last Embers, and Year’s Best Weird Fiction 2), but I will devote this paragraph to their most recent release. There is a bit of similarity to the work of Damien Walters in these stories’ visceral, sometimes “extreme” bloodiness laid over emotional undercurrents (one might even view the title as a metaphorical inverse of this kind of structure), but Leslie’s fiction has plenty of its own to distinguish itself. If I had to pick a favorite from the collection, it would most likely be the title story, which genuinely made me let out a bit of a gasp upon its conclusion. There is also a fine undertone of dark humor that can be found in some of these pieces, which isn’t to diminish their seriousness at all. The short stories include a strange riff on the Jane Eyre tale, the amorous woes of a timekeeper and their mortifying consequences, an unsavory series of encounters at a mostly-abandoned French chateau, and plenty more.

Craig Laurance Gidney, The Nectar of Nightmares (Dim Shores) – This chapbook stems from an intriguing premise, tracking brief but seemingly-unconnected vignettes about three characters whose nightmares plague their waking lives and are fueled by the appearance of an ominous force or being. What I like so much about this story is how it finds a common humanity in the seemingly small and quotidian by linking the characters to larger forces and anxieties operating behind the scenes. The result is equal parts unsettling and poignant, which is a difficult balancing act to pull off. The extra attention to artwork in this series is also a fantastic bonus.

Marian Womack (Orange Dogs)

Of my weird reading this past year I’ve picked two books by established authors, and two books by newcomers (one of them is only available in Spanish, and this recommendation is based on a review I wrote for the Science-Fiction and Fantasy Network earlier this year):

A new book by China Miéville is an event to mark in the calendar, and he does not disappoint with Three Moments of an Explosion (MacMillan). It is impossible to convey in a few lines the power behind this short story collection, in which Miéville makes it clear once again why he has no equal in the scope of his imagination, the daring of his premises, the sharp interrogation to which he subjects our post-communicative society through his own blend of the fantastic, science-fiction, horror, and even a grotesque near-realism, as his weird vistas read like actual offerings from the sickly and near-apocalyptic world we live in. With each story, whether three or thirty pages long, the reader is plunged into a new scenario with a new set of rules, its own daring premise, and world-building powers that one imagines could effortlessly sustain whole novel-length plots. Aside from Miéville, no one has interrogated the failings of our society and achieved much more than a dystopian postcard: whether involving aliens, floating icebergs, mysterious illnesses or German ghosts, these are stories that have the power to send us back to our world with our eyes newly opened, and that’s the greatest praise I can give a work of literature.

The artist B. Catling has produced in The Vorrh (Vintage) a pitch-perfect weird novel of complexity and depth, and it is impossible to overstate what a compelling and assured read this first novel is. The imaginatively weird plot ties together explorers, robots, tribes which make magical weapons with the bones and flesh of their dead shamans, a cyclops, and real-life Victorian photography pioneers, all tightly bound in a complex exploration of Imperialism, but also of modernity, identity, and tradition. The settings, in particular, recall other classics of weird fiction: the mysterious jungle, the decadent city rotten with secrets. One is amply compensated for this familiarity by the prose style, gloriously rich and verging on gothic-cosiness without ever entering flamboyant territory, a rare and unexpected pleasure. I found myself re-savouring sentences as I went along, re-reading paragraphs just to enjoy the writing itself. I would be surprised if this work didn’t pave the path for Catling’s recognition as one of the best prose stylists in weird fiction.

Elegantly written and superbly structured, Challenger (Aristas Martínez) by Guillem López, is the best novel I’ve read in Spanish this year. It is divided into seventy-three chapters, recalling the seventy-three seconds that the eponymous space shuttle was airborne before disintegrating, their prolegomena and consequences for a handful of characters. The concentration on this smallest of timeframes establishes the novel’s particular thesis: focus in depth on a particular slice of life, and its inexplicable edges will be vividly brought to life, the unnatural will end up revealing itself organically as a part of that very nature which had previously appeared to reject it. Telepaths, sects, mediums, sea monsters, and the suggestion of parallel realities all sit comfortably alongside realist tropes: suburban housewives, mafia bosses, corrupt or inept politicians, unethical lawyers… This is one of the great technical achievements of the book, and one that makes it stand out in the Spanish market, where genre writing tends to follow Todorov in its exploration of the fantastic as a disruptive element ‘entering the real’. Here the fantastic and the weird is not alien or distortional: it is born out of the very impossibilities and general messiness of real life, its wonders and sorrows, magnified in that instant at which life and death fatally interact, at a scale that touches a whole community, a whole country, even humanity itself.

But for me the book of the year has to be Get in Trouble (Canongate) by one of the few true innovators of genre writing: Kelly Link. Here, her savvy characters seem deliberately to obey the imperative of the title. Fond of framed narratives, Russian-doll tales within fictions within realistic dramas, Link’s own oeuvre seems to be playing this kind of game on a larger scale now: without being self-referential, her construction of interlocking narrative patterns has become her own personal brand, and allows her to explore the liminal territories between the magical and the mundane, offering clues to our ‘real’ selves. While the author’s taste for the surreal may be reminiscent of Leonora Carrington, and her wicked playfulness recalls Angela Carter, her chief literary referent is now her own work. Link is a unique talent, and her weirdness and flavour for the surreal must be celebrated in a list like this. When we read her we have the feeling that we are reading a classic of the future.

Leif Schenstead-Harris (101 Weird Writers #38 — Leonora Carrington)

This year, I found myself interested in less spectacularly weird books that explore the moments in life that yield up chaos, estrangement, and insight. I was reminded that weirdness operates in drama and nonfiction, as well as in fiction usually marketed as, say, allegorical or postmodern. These are the openings in life where the weird emerges – not as a foreign agent or as a fantasy, but as a natural constituent of the world as we know it. So while I’ve kept up with what’s new – Brian K. Vaughn and Fiona Staples’ latest instalment of Saga, for instance, which I continue to devour with a strange fascination – this year I found most resonant those works that ground their weirdness in the shifting soils and flowing waters of the observable world.

Ivan Vladislavić, The Folly (Archipelago Press)

First published in 1993 but republished this year, The Folly reminded me of two things. First, that Vladislavić, a South African writer of Croatian descent, has a keen eye for the way that people allow their illusions to control their lives and those of others. Second, that Archipelago Press have been putting out a high quality series of reprints and translations. The Folly rivetingly describes the way that wholly imaginary structures – ideologies, one might say – make their presence known. Its lively and even dangerously playful language alternately lulls and shocks its reader. One of the stranger and more oblique allegories of South African apartheid out there.

Lisa Dwan, in the “Beckett Trilogy”: Not I, Footfalls, Rockaby (Dir. Walter Asmus)

Since its emergence in 1972, Samuel Beckett’s monologue Not I has lost none of its distressingly inhuman chill. Check out Billie Whitelaw’s performance on YouTube to see for yourself. (I will not refer you to Julianne Moore’s version.) This year I saw Lisa Dwan perform Not I along with Footfalls and Rockaby, two more of Beckett’s short plays. as part of the “Beckett Trilogy.” Dwan’s harrowing performance is stunning and brilliant. So too the direction by Walter Asmus. Imagine: in the absolute darkness of a theatre so quiet and empty of light that vertigo sets in, the bizarre sight of an insatiable, fleshy mouth. Now, imagine that mouth tear through language as if it were a tattered cloth set afire. I count this among the most scorchingly weird things I’ve seen this year: “What?… who?… no! SHE!” The spectral Footfalls and the deathly Rockaby are not to be missed either, should the chance arise.

Mia Couto, Pensativities (Biblioasis, translated by David Brookshaw)

Mozambican writer, environmental consultant and biologist Mia Couto has a talent for mixing the real with the unexpected, the weird with the mundane. Pensativities assembles a selection of Couto’s essays and addresses from the last fifteen years; in them, Couto traces the jagged edges of modernity and its exclusions with an enchanter’s lightly transformative hands. In “Languages We Didn’t Know We Knew”, Couto argues that the purpose of writers, “as producers of dreams, is to gain access to that other language no one can speak, that hidden language in which all things can have names.” These essays are firmly located in Mozambican natural and social contexts, yet in them it is possible to see how flashes of weird lightning illuminate Couto’s observations on the world. Essays like these reveal how speculative literature emerges and grounds itself in lived realities across the globe.

Boris Vian, L’Écume des jours [Mood Indigo / Froth on the Daydream] (Farrar Straus & Giroux)

This is an older novel, first published in 1947, but with the Michel Gondry adaptation to film from last year I was finally motivated to begin reading Vian. Today I cannot imagine not having read him. The midcentury French writer proves a wicked seducer whose touch makes flesh with pleasurable pain and whose sentences dance before you with either joy or despair – depending on how you see things. I won’t ruin the novel’s surprises. Let me simply say that a mouse’s actions will not always fill you with determination, as this year’s Undertale has it. A mouse might look around and offer itself up to a cat. In a related thought: can a fairy-tale logic of love and devotion sustain life? Or is it a dangerous daydream?

Haralambi Markov (When Raspberries Bloom in August)

I had the chance to reinvigorate my reading this year and I’ve come across two 2015 releases, which I think fans of weird fiction will devour with glee. The third book is my introduction to a classic writer who enjoys a celebrated status – Angela Carter. Not a surprising choice, but I feel it’s necessary to also discuss and re-introduce previous works to new readers.

Vermilion by Molly Tanzer. Weird westerns are making a return and Molly Tanzer leads the charge with a fun, action-packed and strange as hell novel. In this version of the United States the reader is introduced to talking animals (bears do make a prominent appearance), monsters and ghosts. The last of which Lou Merriwether, your 19-year-old heroine and a psychopomp, hunts down for a living until she takes on a commission to find out what’s happening to her fellow Chinatown boys gone missing.

What could have simply been a light book that relies on plot, action and the trappings of the urban fantasy genre, instead blends character depth with a seriously fun, disconcerting world. It’s a fun sort of strangeness that you should read like you’d drink a shot — in one take.

Lament for the Afterlife by Lisa L. Hannett. Lisa L. Hannett has been doing wonders within the short fiction forms. Her stories always tiptoe the line between wondrous and dark, joyful and melancholic – always penned with impeccable eye for language. Now, in her debut, Lisa brings all her talents into a story about war against an enemy that seems to be invisible and invincible, where people suffer from a condition that bleeds their thoughts in the physical realm. Though that’s just scrapping the surface in terms of worldbuilding.

It’s a heavy book. It’s an unpleasant book at times, but it’s an important book that is all the more relevant given how the whole world is on the brink of more and more wars. Also, it helps it’s well-written, and strange, and beautiful the way it arranges startling images from the ruins of war. Ultimately, it’s a novel about making do with what you have, getting by and moving on; survival in a severely fragmented reality.

The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman by Angela Carter. Carter isn’t a surprise to anyone who has been reading weird fiction for a long time, but I’m featuring her because it is easy to a new reader to not where to start within weird and miss this genius book. Carter is a wordsmith in a league of her own; commanding, bending and shaping language any way she sees fit from the shortest sentences that ring clear and ecstatic to veiled paragraphs undulating on the page. It’s her same fearless abandon that results in a story that knows no limitation and blends vulgarity with great purity, philosophy with mystery, beauty with the grotesque.

Kathe Koja (Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Volume 2)

Having the YBWF2 reading as my delicious diet pushed longer form work off the plate. I’d recommend one sublime collection, not yet published but that I did read — devour — this year: Maryse Meijer’s Heartbreaker. There’s no voice like Maryse’s, and that’s my highest praise.

The post End-of-Year Book List (2015 Edition) appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

In addition to new publishers, we saw tons of fantastic original fiction. We saw a lot of great works from established authors like The Spectral Link by Thomas Ligotti to newer authors like Mike Allen’s debut collection, Unseaming. In fact, I wanted to make a list of my personal favorites from this year but I quickly amassed over fifteen entries. Instead of listing all of my picks from this year, I’ll just mention works that haven’t been covered already extensively on Weird Fiction Review or below by people who have been involved with WFR.

First, in the fall, I read two collections from ChiZine that were very different but both very excellent in their own rights. The first was Helen Marshall’s Gifts for the One Who Comes After. The focus of this collection is Marshall’s writing; her well crafted stories feature very stylistic and very unsettling prose. From bucolic small towns to small fishing villages, the atmosphere Marshall crafts is very subtle but also very suspenseful.

The other collection, Robert Shearman’s They Do the Same Things Different There, is the polar opposite of Marshall’s. It trades in the subtle stylistic prose for dark humor and absurdity. It is every bit as good as Marshall’s collection too. It is a comfort to see such diversity in weird fiction as it’s a good indication of the spaces left to explore by authors of the Weird. It’s also a good indication for ChiZine Press who had a number of phenomenal releases this year including Shadow’s & Tall Trees and the aforementioned Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Volume One.

Two other original collections that I really enjoyed was Scott Nicolay’s debut collection, Ana Kai Tangata, and D.P. Watt’s The Phantasmagorical Imperative and Other Fabrications. Nicolay’s collection contained a story, “Eye’s Exchange Bank,” that was also featured in Year’s Best. It was one of my favorite short stories that I read this year, and it’s clear that Nicolay has a promising future. Meanwhile, Watt’s collection featured a genre-bending set of stories that blurred weird fiction into the realms of surrealism and magical realism. In my opinion, Watt is at the pinnacle of both his career and modern Weird.

D.P. Watt’s Phantasmagorical Imperative was striking in its artwork. Another book this year that also featured some dazzling artwork was A Mountain Walked edited by S.T. Joshi and published by Centipede Press. The artwork almost eclipsed the fantastic stories that Joshi collects in this Cthulhu mythos anthology. Joshi states in the introduction that his intent was to show off “a vigorous cadre of younger writers who refuse to engage in mere imitation but instead use Lovecraft’s themes, imagery, and conceptions as a springboard for the expression of their own ideas.” His anthology far exceeded this goal. Another anthology I enjoyed was Infra Noir from Zagava who’s taken over some of Ex Occidente’s titles. With text written vertically and weird artwork featured alongside its stories, this weird anthology wasn’t afraid to push the bounds of strange literature.

I think this will be a year that will be remembered for a long time as the year when the Weird Renaissance hit full stride. The amount of quality weird fiction that is being produced now is staggering and the Weird is beginning to seep into other areas of fiction and pop culture. I think it’s safe to say this year is a tipping point and thus, it’s worthwhile to take stock of all the great releases that were released or discovered this year. Thus, we’ve compiled a list below of books that people associated with Weird Fiction Review this year have enjoyed in 2014. Also, we’d like to hear from you, our readers, which books you discovered this year so be sure to leave us your favorites in the comments below.

And so here’s to 2015! May it be another weird year!

Richard Gavin

• Thomas Ligotti, THE SPECTRAL LINK (Subterranean Press) – After a long hiatus that many, myself included, feared was permanent, Thomas Ligotti returned to the sphere of Horror fiction with a pair of new short stories, which are beautifully presented in this Subterranean Press volume. The tales evidence that Ligotti has lost none of his powers, particularly “The Small People”, which is an exemplary evocation of Freud’s Das Unheimliche.
• Amos Tutuola, MY LIFE IN THE BUSH OF GHOSTS (Grove Press) – This 1954 novel is but one of the gems produced by Nigerian writer Amos Tutuola before his death in 1997. Like many of his works, MY LIFE IN THE BUSH OF GHOSTS draws upon the folklore of the Yoruba people. Mingling the visionary terror of the Spirits that inhabit the titular bush with the harrowing horrors of slavery and corruption, the novel sings with Tutuola’s barbed, earthy prose and a genuinely bewitching narrative sweep.
• Simon Strantzas, BURNT BLACK SUNS (Hippocampus Press) – The fourth collection by my fellow Canadian Simon Strantzas showcases his ever-diversifying talents as an author of weird fiction. From sprawling cosmicism to gritty realism, BURNT BLACK SUNS is a varied banquet of fine frights.

Marly Youmans

My newest acquisition is a book translated and edited by Jack Zipes, The Complete First Edition: The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, illustrated by Andrea Dezso (Princeton University Press, 2014.) In the introduction, Zipes argues “that the first edition is just as important, if not more important than the final seventh edition of 1857, especially if one wants to grasp the original intentions of the Grimm brothers and the overall significance of their accomplishments. In fact, many of the tales in the first edition are more fabulous and baffling than those refined versions in the final edition, for they retain the pungent and naive flavor of the oral tradition.” These are earthy, marvelous tales that do not politely gloss over the fact of sexual encounters and class conflicts, as in later editions.

I want to recommend two new re-issues from The New York Review of Books. One is the marvelous, magical Krabat and the Sorceror’s Mill by Otfried Pruessler, translated by Anthea Bell (A New York Review Book, 2014.) Krabat is a teenage Wendish beggar when he is lured into the sorcerer’s mill or Black School with its mysteries and ravens and “dead stones.” Time moves as strangely there as in Faerie, and before long Krabat is a young man, still bound but a dangerous, adept pupil to his master. A few sweet, pure notes from the outside world suggest to Krabat that he might find a way to break away from his terrible apprenticeship. This magical bildungsroman gave back to me that delicious sensation of being completely lost in a story that belongs especially to childhood. Another book ostensibly for children that I dearly love was reissued by NYRB late in 2013: Smith: The Story of a Pickpocket, by Leon Garfield. If you like Stevenson and Dickens, try it! It’s full of adventure, murder, betrayal, and is fine proof (like the Otfried Pruessler book) that there’s no publisher’s category or genre in the world that matters in the end except the one called “a good book.”

If you’re thinking about a book of poems, I’d suggest Irresistible Sonnets, edited by Mary Meriam (Headmistress Press, 2014.) You’ll encounter a great number of poets interested in formal work, and you’ll find poems that range in focus from the ultra-mundane to the fantastical. I’d quote something, but I need to buy a new copy–someone walked off with mine.

My favorite 2014 nonfiction reading from the land of the weird was a slightly older book–Leonora Carrington: Surrealism, Alchemy and Art, by Susan L. Aberth (Lund Humphries, 2010). While it’s not the last word on Carrington and her paintings (my margin notes sometimes argued with the author, and there’s room for a lot more discussion of her life and works), it’s an interesting book and has a good selection of illustrations.

Christopher Burke

• Thomas Ligotti, The Spectral Link (Subterranean Press) — Although the first story in this short collection, “Metaphysica Morum”, was perhaps not his best and trod pretty familiar territory, the second story, “The Small People”, struck me as more distinct and it makes this book well worth the price of admission. “The Small People” is, in my opinion, one of the strongest works that Ligotti has produced that I’ve had the privilege to read.  In it are some of the anxieties and bizarre deformities that one will find in most of his works, but they are presented in a way that makes me confident that the author will continue to explore new territory for these recurring themes.  The narrator of this piece lives side-by-side with a civilization of toy-like, miniature humans and finds himself consumed by revulsion for them, but much of the horror comes from his sense of unbelonging amongst his “own kind,” as he is continually beset by accusations of bigotry.  Ligotti’s narrator is doubly displaced in this context, leading to much of the underlying “existential” horror that persists through the author’s work.  This is a story that has stayed with me throughout the year and I intend to reread it soon.
• Robert Shearman, They Do the Same Things Different There (ChiZine) — By turns horrifying and hilarious, Robert Shearman’s short fiction is always worth a read.  Best known perhaps for his work as a writer for Doctor Who, Shearman is very capable as a writer of his own dark speculative tales and I think he deserves more attention. Ellen Datlow selected “That Tiny Flutter of the Heart I Used to Call Love” (included in this Shearman collection) as part of her “Best Horror of the Year” series, and that seems as good a place as any to start.
• Hannah Berry, Adamtine (Random House UK) — Although originally published in 2012 in the U.K., this title didn’t become available to U.S. stores until 2014.  This is a strange, creepy graphic novel with echoes of Robert Aickman.  A train mysteriously becomes stranded in the middle of the night and most passengers have disappeared. Meanwhile, a parallel story unfolds concerning other strange disappearances that may be perpetrated by someone acting as a messenger from some strange, otherworldly force.  The art is rendered beautifully and many panels are as genuinely creepy as anything you could find in a well-constructed shot from a horror movie, while the story itself is tightly told and leaves just the right amount to the imagination.  I finished this book feeling perfectly unsettled.  I loved the author’s previous work as well (Britten and Brülightly), a surreal and darkly comic riff on the hard-boiled detective novel.

Bobby Derie

• Dennis Detwiller, Delta Green: Tales from Failed Anatomies (Arc Dream Press) Before Charlie Stross got into the game, Delta Green redefined the Cthulhu Mythos for the modern day. These are stories for the generation that sat up nights to watch the X‑Files, where the Cold War was a running joke that was over almost before they knew it, but whose lessons still haven’t been fully learned and digested today. Now, in an era where surveillance is rampant and the dissemination of secrets is easier than ever before, Detwiller’s cloak-and-tentacle tales remain more relevant than ever before.
• Jeffrey Shanks (Ed.), Zombies from the Pulps! (Skelos Press) We may have reached Peak Zombie, but sometimes it pays to go back and remind ourselves where the infection first took hold. Zombies from the Pulps! is a collection of some of the earliest walking-dead stories from the era of Black Mask and Weird Tales, when tales of Haitian voodoo first started trickling into the popular culture and corpses first shambled into unholy mockery of life from the Victorian-era ghost stories to the four-color horror pre-Code horror comics. Shanks’ has assembled quite the lineup, including H. P. Lovecraft, Henry S. Whitehead, Seabury Quinn, Ray Cummings, August Derleth, Clark Ashton Smith, E. Hoffmann Price, Henry Kuttner, Robert E. Howard, and Manly Wade Wellman — as well as more obscure and rarely reprinted pulpsters.
• Nick Mamatas, The Nickronomicon (Innsmouth Free Press) There is an awareness that comes with being a fan of the Cthulhu Mythos, a familiar feeling when your eyes scan across the familiar names and you know that yes, once again you’re in a Mythos story, and as weird as it might be you have the comfort of knowing who the players are, and probably have a better sense for what’s at stake and what’s about to happen than any of the characters do. It’s refreshing when jaded brains are jolted out of complacency be something fresh, new, and different, and Mamatas is the writer that thinks outside of the hypercube. While I’ve very much enjoyed his Lovecraftian novels Move Under Groundand The Damned Highway: Fear and Loathing in Arkham (with Brian Keene), short stories are where Mamatas does his best work. This collection delivers.

A.C. Wise

I’m wildly behind on reading for 2014, but amazingly enough, I did manage to sneak in a few books that were actually published this year. These are the ones that stuck out for me.

• The Girls at the Kingfisher Club by Genevieve Valentine. A novel re-telling the story of The Twelve Dancing Princesses in the era of speakeasies and prohibition would have caught my eye even if I didn’t already love Valentine’s writing. Like the best fairy tale re-tellings, this one digs deep beneath the surface of the source material, turning sketched-out characters who aren’t even given names in the original into living, breathing human beings. The relationship between the twelve sisters is the novel’s lifeblood. It’s often heartbreaking, the way family only can be, but it is always real. The glitter of the dresses, and the glamour of the dance halls makes a wonderful backdrop, but it’s Jo and her sisters that really make this novel sing.
• Kaleidoscope edited by Julia Rios and Alisa Krasnostein/Long Hidden edited by Rose Fox and Daniel Jose Older. This is a two for one recommendation, not because these books are interchangeable, but because they are similar — and similarly successful — in their aim. Both anthologies are the result of crowdfunding projects and seek to bring diverse stories by often marginalized authors, about often marginalized characters to the forefront. Long Hidden focuses on history and the stories we don’t hear — the stories told by women, children, and people of color — that are left on the edges and unfairly dismissed when most narratives are written. Kaleidoscope is aimed at a YA audience, but broader in its focus, encompassing fantasy, science fiction, and everything in-between. Both anthologies are filled with gorgeous stories with rarely a misstep in either, a rare thing for any collection.
• Maplecroft by Cherie Priest. Since this is Weird Fiction Review, I should include at least one Weird work, right? The premise of Maplecroft — Lizzie Borden Fights Monsters with Her Axe — could very easily have descended into silly camp. This novel caught me off-guard with its heart, as another story that places sisters front and center. Lizzie and Emma’s relationship is broken and messy and painful, but there’s love there as well, and a sense of strength that comes from two people standing together against the world. All of this is wrapped in a surprisingly brutal package, containing some truly creepy, effective, and horrifying scenes. Overall, the novel strikes the perfect balance between history, family, and the Weird.

Mark Samuels

• THE SPECTRAL LINK by Thomas Ligotti. It’s been too long since we last had some weird fiction from Ligotti. It would be a mistake to regard these two long stories as just a vehicle for his increasingly popular (with fans who also happen to be antinatalists, at least) worldview of total pessimism. I enjoyed the two novellas in this collection immensely. There are some brilliantly realised blackly comic episodes as well as some truly disturbing metaphors in both of the novellas. The Master is still at the top of his game.
• FOR THOSE WHO DREAM MONSTERS by Anna Taborska. The first collection from a highly talented and young Anglo-Polish author. Wicked black humour, a poetic sensibility and emotionally powerful narratives are all in evidence here, as is horrible folklore and a superlative sense of strange genius loci. The most remarkable feature of the book though may well be Taborska’s insight into human psychology and her highly polished authorial voice.
• BURNT BLACK SUNS by Simon Strantzas. Undoubtedly the collection of the year. Strantzas development as a writer of weird fiction continues and he improves with each new book. The tales herein are diverse, stunning and grim in their cosmic dread. “One Last Bloom” is a modern weird fiction classic.

Michael Kelly

• The Phantasmagorical Imperative and Other Fabrications (Egaeus Press), by D. P. Watt. Watt’s supernatural tales are a treasure. The stories here are a melange of influences — Vernon Lee, Ewers, Machen, M.R. James, Kubin — but Watt’s own style and sensibility cuts through, like the snick of a scythe. This is heady stuff. Watt is at the forefront of today’s weird fiction stylists. Macabre but never morbid. The Phantasmagorical Imperative and Other Fabrications is required reading for the weird fiction aficionado. And, as always, Egaeus Press has produced this in a gorgeous volume.
• Burnt Black Suns (Hippocampus Press), by Simon Strantzas. This is the fourth collection penned by Simon Strantzas, and it is his most ambitious work to date. The impressive thing about Strantzas is that each collection is a different flavour, a different texture. His stories linger. Even when he is at his most visceral, as he is here, he is an elegant wordsmith. And his stories seemingly offer up new insights upon re-readings. These are damaged souls in damaged environs, yes, but they are people we know all too well. People like us. And that’s why Strantzas is among the top practitioners of weird fiction.
• Here With the Shadows (Swan River Press), by Steve Rasnic Tem. Tem is a prolific writer of short fiction, but unlike other prolific authors the quality of his tales are always of the highest order. He’s a craftsman, a stylist, and a natural story-teller. Here With the Shadows presents us with a number of exquisite ghost stories and supernatural tales that leave liminal impressions and a faint, queer unease. Ghostly residues, as it were. These little literary soupcon’s are must-reads.

Other Notable Books: Mercy and Other Stories (Tartarus Press) by Rebecca Lloyd; The Lord Came at Twilight (Dark Renaissance), by Daniel Mills; Gifts For the Ones Who Come After (ChiZine Publications), by Helen Marshall; The Sea of Blood (Dark Renaissance), by Reggie Oliver; Letters to Lovecraft (Stone Skin Press), edited by Jesse Bullington.

C.M. Muller

• Simon Strantzas, Burnt Black Suns (Hippocampus Press). Like some kind of nightmare ink spread supernaturally across the page, these nine Rorschach’s of weird horror culminate in the collection’s titular novella, a piece so immersive and terrifying that it begs comparison to the work of T.E.D. Klein, particularly his groundbreaking collection Dark Gods. Strantzas writes with a passionate intensity that few authors can match. The apex of carefully-crafted terror.
• Smith, Ghouljaw & Other Stories (Hippocampus Press). The debut of a talented newcomer whose original tales and weird concepts break new ground. Smith is a master storyteller and literary wordsmith who concludes his fictions in the most unexpected and satisfying ways. That, and he is also one of a select few authors who has written a tale or two of what might be termed “culinary horror”. Highly palatable stuff. You’ll want seconds.
• Daniel Mills, The Lord Came at Twilight (Dark Renaissance Books). An accomplished debut of supernatural and historical wonders channeled to perfection. Mills strikes me as writer who thrills at the idea of imagining the past, someone who will stop at the side of the road to admire a lonely field, derelict house, leaning barn or crumbling chimney. He understands the dark mysteries such structures hold and is only too willing to listen to the ghosts of the past.

Seb Doubinsky

• The Black Dog That Ate The City, by Chris Kelso: Scottish Chris Kelso’s novel about a strange disease brought be a huge and mysterious black dog is a truly amazing tale of melancholy, terror and beauty that keeps haunting me. If you are into, as I am, new surrealistic fiction with a new weird twist, this book is definitely for you.
• The False Magic Kingdom Cycle/Your Cities Your Tombs, by Jordan Krall: This urban cut-up fiction takes on terrorism and collapsing buildings, secret medical experiments and Japanese underground films – among other stuff. Imagine David Lynch, JG Ballard and William Burroughs meeting in a snuff-movie theater, and you have a pretty good idea of what’s awaiting you: cutting edge avant-garde.
• Ascent, by Matt Bialer: If you think epic poetry is dead and that it is boring, Ascent will make you revise your opinion. Based on the 1903 Van Meter urban legend of a mysterious flying creature coming out of an abandoned mine, Matt Bialer attaches himself to the human sides of the legend and the consequences it entails. Extremely readable, subtle and intelligent, Bialer’s poem is also deeply moving and thought-provoking.
• The Horror Show, by Vincenzo Bilof: Another poetry collection that tells a full story, Vincenzo Bilof’s Horror Show is a nightmarish and beautiful trip through insanity and violence. Centered around a Nobel-prize and murderous poet that is reported missing, and an insane doctor that experiments with him, Bilof’s poems are both chilling and fascinating, blurring the limits between genres like poetry and fiction. A must-read.

Leif Schenstead-Harris

• Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven (HarperCollins). What can be said? I must add my voice to the growing chorus that testifies to the capacious, electric brilliance of Mandel’s post-apocalyptic Station Eleven. As the novel has it, cribbing from artistic sources from televisual science fiction to Shakespeare’s plays, “survival is insufficient.”
• Sjón, The Blue Fox; From the Mouth of the Whale; The Whispering Muse (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). I’m a late-comer to Victoria Cribb’s translations of these three novels from Icelandic into English, with the latest dating from 2012. That’s no reason to discount them, however, since Sjón’s prose is both exquisitely lush and muscle-taut when the occasion calls. His stories take place on the very edge of the world where the borders between myth, stories, and cold reality are porous indeed.
• Jean Ferry, The Conductor and Other Tales (Wakefield Press). Again, this came out late last year, and so I must concede some slowness to my reading. That said, these stories have been buried in the archives of surrealist ephemera since 1950. Their emergence into the light (courtesy of translations into English by WFR’s own Edward Gauvin), is understandably gradual. Ferry’s surreal, sliver-short stories are certainly wistful explorations of loss, as Andre Breton wrote; however, they are also absolutely incendiary in their delivery and emotional impact. Claude Ballaré’s accompanying collages are the graceful accompaniment to Ferry’s dreamlike cartographies.
• William Kentridge, Six Drawing Lessons (Harvard). If you read any academic lectures this year, let it be these. If you haven’t discovered William Kentridge, let this be your introduction to his charcoal art of shadows.

Timothy Jarvis

• Helen Marshall, Gifts for the One Who Comes After. Marshall’s powerfully disconcerting prose can switch from sentimental whimsy to disturbing grotesque in a single sentence. She baits her snares with believable, relatable characters and powerful affect, and the reader blunders into a tightening loop of the bizarre and dread.
• Jeff VanderMeer, Southern Reach Trilogy. These are mesmerizing, harrowing, and deeply moving books. They are constantly becoming other, shifting genre, tone, style, and the reader is continually wrong-footed. The last volume, Acceptance, is an incredible bit of alchemy, which brings together the various elements of the trilogy’s plot in a way that’s satisfying, but also denies the reader any kind of definitive or ‘closed’ interpretations, leaving Area X hauntingly open and inscrutable. These books outweird the Weird, but retain a heart-rending human core.
• D.P. Watt, The Phantasmagorical Imperative and Other Fabrications, and Mark Samuels, Written in Darkness. Two powerful collections of weird stories that focus more on the transmutative than the bleak. Tales of becoming in which dread is suffused with ecstasy. Watt writes more in a European tradition of decadent mutability, while Samuels’s fictions are in the British hermetic line, but these collections make good companion pieces. Both released in editions by Egaeus Press that are compelling artefacts in their own right.
• Nicholas Rombes, The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing. In Rombes powerful, fragmented fiction, a man, with deep sadness in his past, interviews Laing, a former film librarian. Laing describes a number of films he’s destroyed for their dark mesmeric power. An unsettling, deeply strange, and innovative metatext, with nightmarish implications subliminally cut in.
• M. John Harrison, ‘The 4^th Domain’. A potent distillation of Harrison’s bleakly compelling corpus. There are sardonic references to Borges, seedy séances in a house by a graveyard, intimations of ancient lost civilizations, shattered lives, blood, and forbidden lore. Like the Thames at East Sheen, it has a surface scum that glisters deceptively, but dark currents lie beneath. Harrison achieves in this short story what, for most, would take an entire novel.
• C.D. Rose, The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure. C.D. Rose’s odd book masquerades as a series of brief biographies of lost and forgotten writers. It’s erudite and playful, quirky and poignant. And deeply weird. There’s Borgesian absurdity and Kafkaesque nightmare here, and a couple of entries reference little-known decadent and weird progenitor, Count Stenbock.
• Lauren Beukes, Broken Monsters. This novel begins in fairly conventional serial killer territory, but has weird speculative elements glued on bit by bit. At first this is barely noticeable, but the effect mounts, and, by the end, the book has become an utterly harrowing chimera, concluding on a note of utter dread.
• John Howard and Mark Valentine, Secret Europe. A slight cheat, as this book was initially released in 2012 and reissued this year. A mesmerizing collection of strange fiction. These tales cover the whole gamut of moods and tones, but are held together by setting: the backwaters of Europe between the wars, the fraying hems of unravelling empires. But the gaze is unflinching, not wistful, nostalgic. The atmosphere throughout is uncanny, but the supernatural element is largely muted, though the denouement of some of the stories will give rise to a shudder. A compelling and affecting weird travelogue.
• Cardboard Computer, Kentucky Route Zero. Not a book, but a computer game, in which the player guides characters around a surreal and beautiful Kentucky, both over- and underground, and chooses between dialogue options which range from the bizarrely upbeat to the hauntingly melancholy. The developers have described it as a magical realist adventure game, but it braids together the naturalistic, and the utterly bizarre, and can be claimed for the Weird. The first part was released in 2013, but Act III, released this year, is the most mesmerizing yet.

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