Nightmares

Datlow offers another impressive, diverse and hugely enjoyable collection of short fiction. I’ve loved horror fiction since I was a teenager and didn’t think this genre had anything really new to offer. This never bothered me because reading horror fiction is sometimes like slipping into a pair of well-worn shoes, moulded to the shape of your foot and still comfortable. Nightmares (A New Decade of Modern Horror) proves there is always something new for the horror genre to offer. I enjoyed every story in this collection. One of the stand-out stories of the collection is At Night, When the Demons Come by Ray Cluley which I’m pretty sure I read a few years ago in an old issue of Black Static magazine. This is a brilliant, chilling story and it was great fun to read it again. I also loved Our Turn Too Will One Day Come by Brian Hodge, Was She Wicked? Was She Good?” By M. Rickert, Interstate Love Song (Murder Ballad No. 8) by Caitlín R. Kiernan and Shay Corsham Worsted by Garth Nix. The other stories are all excellent but these shone a little brighter. This is a great collection of horror fiction. I’d highly recommend it.

This was a really diverse collection of stories that offers something to appeal to most readers. Horror is the only genre that I feel really gets it right with short stories, and this collection really proves that. I've read some awful horror collection (Dead Funny from Salt Publishing springs immediately to mind) that it was so refreshing to have a collection that just gets it!

Nightmares is a wonderful eclectic mix of horror themed short stories. They run the gamut from serial killers (female, no less!), post-apocalyptic, demons, witches, zombies, monsters, and pretty much everything in between.

Of course, as with all short story collections there were certain stories I liked better than others. The highlights for me include: Sob in the Silence, Our Turn Too Will Come One Day, Lonegan's Luck, and At Night, When the Demons Come By (seriously disturbing).

I would recommend this book to any fans of horror who are looking for a good scare.

This is an excellent collection of short stories. I recommend it to those who enjoy short snippets of well written short horror fiction. The author list is incredible!

Ms. Datlow is an accomplished anthologist, and "Nightmares" is her "sequel" to the excellent horror anthology "Darkness." Whereas "Darkness" covered the years 1985-2005, "Nightmares" picks up at 2005 and finishes with 2015. These are some of Ms. Datlow's favorite horror stories of that period, and they range from Lovecroftian to black magic, and everything in between.

I enjoyed reading the book and found the selections to be representative of the horror genre in the first two decades of the 21st century. An excellent pick of the upcoming and the established.

If you want a quick tour of the present day horror literature scene, this book fulfills that desire perfectly. An enjoyable read.

Nightmares: A New Decade of Modern Horror by Ellen Datlow
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC!

Since this hasn't been released yet, I'm going to skip all the spoilerish stuff and the Story by Story gush or other reaction, and instead pick out some of my absolute favorites and otherwise tease some of the best ideas and themes for the rest, because I'm gonna be honest... the whole book of horror tales was rather fantastic.

I mean, it should be. This was a cherry-picking of the last ten year's best horror stories from some of the biggest non-stratospheric names in the business. Meaning it's mostly underrated authors or authors that are up-and coming or are well on their way to becoming household names.

That being said, I was thoroughly creeped out, disturbed, amused, and even awed. Most of these did a very good job at keeping me on the edge of my seat, and some even managed to make me really squirm and and want to say, "Enough, enough" and a few made me want to go out and pick up everything that author has ever written and be thankful that this book let me in on the big secret of their existence. :)

As for that last group, here they are:

Kaaron Warren's Dead Sea Fruit

Truly creeped me out and it had some of the best triggers in the business. Ash Mouth Man? Wow. Totally knocked me over. :)

Gemma Files's Spectral Evidence

This one was stylistically a fantastic treat with lots of easter eggs, written as notes in an investigation with pictures and tons of footnotes that tell an even more interesting tale than I might have guessed from the standard section. It isn't a traditional tale, but it's a freaking excellent one. :)

Ray Cluley's At Night, When the Demons Come By

A rather bright spotlight of a look at gender issues and an epic look at a world after demons infest the skies and shred humanity, zombie-style, but a bit more dire. The voice in this one is haunting and fantastic.

Livia Llewellyn's Omphalos

Totally haunting. I doubt I'll look at maps the same way again. And I'll also be totally creeped out about this one all night, now. Thanks a lot.


Now, just so you know, I loved almost all of these stories, and leaving some of these out actually kind of pains me. :) I'm still anxious after reading this entire book. And that's all because of the fantastic skills and the creepy dolls and the western zombies and the UF overdrive of hell infestations and good old fashioned roadtrip murder sprees. :)

Really, this one one hell of a fun ride. Anyone just looking for a good sampler or just a crazy good time could do FAR worse than this. :)

I loved the geographical variety of the Nightmares collection. Too often stories are based in the same urban centers, it was so refreshing to have rural, small town, and international settings. The writing on a whole was good, but a few stories were great. Horrible, scary, stays-with-you-after-the-lights-go-off great stories. Perfect for October, brave readers at night and nervous readers in full daylight.

Ellen Datlow has edited a huge number of horror and dark fantasy anthologies in the last thirty years, and one of the more important volumes was Darkness: Two Decades of Modern Horror. This book collected some of the best horror short fiction from 1984 to 2005, a veritable who’s-who of horror’s movers and shakers: from King, Barker, Simmons, Straub, Lansdale, Schow, Gaiman, Steve Rasnic Tem, George R.R. Martin, all the way to Joe Hill, Kelly Link, and Elizabeth Hand. Darkness isn’t the best of the genre, but it’s an excellent cross-section; it holds up as an invaluable, must-read anthology, and I consider it a foundational work for those who want to see the evolution of horror as a genre.

Now, ten years later, comes a book called Nightmares: A New Decade of Modern Horror, also edited by Datlow. If you can’t tell by the title, this is pretty much Darkness Part II, collecting 24 stories from 2005 to 2015. The table of contents ranges from established authors dipping their toes into horror, to new masters, to young up-and-comers already making their mark on the genre. The list includes Caitlín R. Kiernan, Laird Barron, Gene Wolfe, Richard Kadry, Brian Hodge, Gemma Files, Lisa Tuttle, Stephen Graham Jones, Garth Nix, and more. The bottom line, though, is that this volume contains some of the best short horror of the last ten years.

Twenty-four stories is a lot to cover in one review, more so when there’s such a wide range and variety like with this collection, so I’ll hit on some of the ones that left most of an impact on me. (Besides, with some of these, you’ll want to read them without even the hint of a spoiler.) And really, the overall quality of fiction here is so high, it’s hard to figure out where to begin. “Shay Corsham Worsted” by Garth Nix seems like a good place to start, because it’s such a weird story, where old soldier Sir David attempts to disarm an elderly bloke who could well destroy the world as we know it. Or maybe “Dead Sea Fruit” by Kaaron Warren, about a dentist working in a clinic for anorexic girls; all the girls talk about a strange man whose kiss causes them to waste away to nothing. Everything seems to be going right for the protagonist, though, until her mysterious new boyfriend refuses to kiss her…

Many of these tales are downright chillers, unflinching tales of blood and death and moralities twisted beyond what we know. When you find yourself kept up at night yet unable to look away, you know you have some winning horror at hand. Margo Lanagan’s “The Goosle” is a bloody and beautiful retelling of Hansel and Gretel that sent shivers down my spine; the word choice and structure is excellent, but it’s one of the more unsettling stories in the collection. “At Night, When the Demons Come” depicts a post-apocalyptic hell infested with female demons, a place where nobody is safe, least of all women. “Strappado” by Laird Barron is about businessmen on various trips to Asia who meet at a bar, then head out looking for something exotic and exciting… and who end up finding something bloodier and more dangerous than what they wanted.

Some of these stories take themes or set-ups we’re already familiar with, and runs with them; they may not reinvent their tropes, but they get the most mileage out of them. Gene Wolfe has a delightfully eerie story about a horror writer who invites a friend’s family for a visit, having planned every nuance of how to abduct their teenage daughter; it’s oh-so-satisfying when he gets his just desserts in a surprise end. Richard Kadrey’s “Ambitious Boys Like You” takes another familiar old setup: two kids break into the “old haunted house” owned by some crazy old guy, looking to rob the place and kill the old man. The joke’s on them when they find a murderous layout of traps and creepy dolls, but ambitious boys sure don’t back away from this kind of thing, leading to a horrific, bone-crunching revelation.

Some stories deal with sick relationships and sexual violence, the kind of deep psychological horror I find most chilling. “Interstate Love Song (Murder Ballad No. 8)” by Caitlín R. Kiernan was one of my favorites here, about incestuous twin sisters who ride the highways in an old Impala murdering hitchhikers. The sisters tell each other to stay awake, not to sleep, and the story reads like an insomniac’s dream, the writing wonderful in its off-kilter, almost stream-of-consciousness cadence flowing as if from someone who’s been awake far too long. Livia Llewellyn’s “Omphalos” follows one disturbed family on a weird vacation up north, whose teenage daughter’s pleas for escape are finally answered when the void grants her oblivion as the cycle begins anew. “That Tiny Flutter of the Heart I Used to Call Love” by Robert Shearman starts with brother-sister sibling rivalry and ritual doll executions, and ends with the sister, all grown up, re-enacting the ritual with her meek husband. It’s a short and brutal love story, though not one of conventional love. And “Closet Dreams” by Lisa Tuttle is a true nightmare about a girl kidnapped and held in closet, by a man she thinks she encounters again later in life.

I think Nightmares is a worthy successor to Darkness, an excellent collection in its own right. There’s a variety of stories here, and no matter what kind of horror terrifies or fascinates you, there’s probably a few stories here perfect for your taste. Datlow has a nigh-immaculate eye for stories, often passing up on obvious choices in favor of an author doing something new or unique, making the collection feel more personal and interesting. Die-hard horror aficionados may have seen these already—I read Brian Hodge’s chilling “Our Turn Too Will One Day Come” just last year when I reviewed Datlow’s The Monstrous anthology, for example, and a vigorous reader of Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year series will have read most of this volume. But for the novice or neophyte, this is another invaluable collection. It’s not exactly the “best of the best” of the last ten years… but it may as well be. Nightmares works as a great introduction to recent horror short stories, and includes some downright chilling stories. Pick it up and prepare to have the crap scared out of you.

Nightmares: A New Decade of Modern Horror edited by Ellen Datlow
Tachyon Publications, 2016
ISBN-13: 978-1616962326
Available: Paperback, Kindle edition

Nightmares is a collection of stories chosen by Ellen Datlow as the best stories of 2005-2015. It is a companion volume to Darkness, a previously published anthology of stories chosen by her as the best stories written between 1985 and 2005. Not being as widely read in contemporary short horror fiction as Datlow is, I can't say whether I agree with her choices or not, but I can say that the stories she chose do live up to the book's title: in one way or another, they are all nightmares.

Datlow chose stories that take a variety of approaches to instilling horror, from the understated to over-the-top: you'll find weird fiction, cosmic horror, twisted fairy tales, disturbing family secrets, ghosts and hauntings, Gothic horrors, body horror, incestuous relationships, and more than enough blood and gore. As a reader who prefers creepy and atmospheric writing to graphic descriptions, I found this book to be emotionally, mentally, and even physically exhausting. I received it as an ebook from NetGalley and am not sure how long it actually was, but it required several days for me to read it through. However, as a sampler of well-done short fiction in the horror genre, I think it is successful. Certainly, I have found that several stories have stuck with me even though a few weeks have passed since I finished it.

Standout stories include "Shallaballah" by Mark Samuels, a surreal tale that takes a disoriented plastic surgery patient through a disturbing Punch-and-Judy inspired hospital experience; "Dead Sea Fruit" by Kaaron Warren, about a dentist with a taste for revenge who destroys a man whose kiss drives girls to starve themselves to death; "Closet Dreams" by Lisa Tuttle, the story of a girl who was trapped in a closet by her kidnapper; "The Goosle" by Margo Lanagan, a horrific take on the Hansel and Gretel story requiring the reader to have an iron stomach; "The Shallows" by John Langan, a tale of a gardener trying to keep going after his wife has died, his son has left, and tentacled aliens have begun their invasion; and "Interstate Love Song (Murder Ballad No. 8)" by Caitlin Kiernan, a bloody tale of a road trip of serial murders by vicious, incestuous, necrophiliac sisters that you won't soon forget.

For those horror readers who enjoy variety in their short fiction, Nightmares is an excellent way to discover authors they may not have tried out before. With her choices for this collection of short fiction from the past decade, despite her disclaimer, Ellen Datlow continues to show not just her enthusiasm as a fan of the horror genre, but her excellence as an anthologist. Recommended.

Contains: graphic gore and torture, cannibalism, incest, necrophilia, violent murders, disturbing sexual situations, body horror, rape

Ellen Datlow has curated countless collections of horror and fantasy; anything with her name attached pretty much guarantees that the stories I'm about to read are high quality and will linger in my mind long after I finish reading the book. This volume of twenty-four stories is not an exception to that rule. The authors of the individual tales are well known in horror and other genres and do involve topics that might leave you queasy. There's the horror of the every day -- kidnapping, incest, murder, torture -- as well as the supernatural elements that include body horror and modification. Some of the stories have unreliable narrators, and most of the grotesqueries aren't described in explicit detail. Still, if you have a very vivid imagination, you can't help but picture it in your mind and feel the shivers.

Most people might think of horror as the blood and gore kind. The book description includes the story about two inexperienced thieves, and that story certainly has the chilling blood and gore horror that could make you queasy. The stories that stick with me more are the quieter ones, the horrors of the every day. Lisa Tuttle's "Closet Dreams" is one of those. The girl that was kidnapped somehow escaped through the wall then saw her kidnapper again. The end of that story was heartbreaking and hit me in the gut like a punch. Anna Taborska's "Little Pig" truly evoked the freezing cold of a Russian winter and horror that had to take place to survive it. Ray Cluley's "At Night, When the Demons Come By" nearly made me cry at the end of it; there are demons and people trying to survive the end of the world, but horrible thing is truly what people do to each other in the name of survival. And maybe that's the theme with all of these stories. The narrators try their best to survive awful situations. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes you really don't want them to.

Ellen Datlow is a master curator of fiction, and though she calls herself a “horror enthusiast,” I don’t think it’s a stretch to say she is also one of the guiding hands of the genre. Her Best Horror of the Year anthologies are a snapshot of current trends in horror, offering readers a sampling of new and established authors in one volume. Nightmares expands on those best-of collections and represents Datlow’s favorite short fiction from the years spanning 2005 to 2015.

Every story in the collection is exceptional. This surprised me. Usually, anthologies contain a tale or two that made me wonder how it made the cut, but not this one. There were a few stories that I’d read before and was delighted to read again. Sometimes, a story brought up personal terrors and was hard to read, but isn’t that what horror is supposed to do? It took me several weeks to read all 24 stories because I had to think about what I’d just read. I spent a few nights staring at the ceiling trying to chase the afterimages out of my brain so I could sleep.

Here are the stories that kept me awake:
“Closet Dreams” by Lisa Tuttle left me with fear scrabbling at the inside of my ribcage. A survivor of an ordeal at the hands of a depraved child molester can’t let go of the past. Her abductor had forced her into a closet during the day so no one would hear her if she screamed for help. After her escape, and years of therapy, the dreams of the closet still haunt her. She tries to glean clues from her dreams, something that can give the police a means to find her captor, but all she can see is the dark, and the room beyond the crack under the door.

“Interstate Love Song (Murder Ballad No. 8)” by Caitlín R. Kiernan made me read it twice. Twin sisters cruise across a landscape of blood, depravity and blind, obsessive love. They mark their map and memories by the bodies in their wake. To me, they may be escaping hell or hurtling toward it, or perhaps they’re already there.

The story that challenged me the most was “Omphalos” by Livia Llewellyn. It’s transgressive and brutal, pushing the boundaries of parental cruelty into a nightmare of a vacation. Their love is abusive and drives their daughter June into territory that only she can see on the map. Her father wants her to take him with her, but she alone knows the way to the center where chaos and darkness lies.

There are so many more. This is the best anthology I’ve read all year and a must-have for any horror fan’s bookshelf.

Hands down one of the best anthologies I've read in years. Terrifying, challenging, and brilliant. Every horror fan needs this on their shelves!

Fantastic collection of horror stories, often crossing a wobbly triggerwarning-y line from 'horror' to 'horrifying'. I got to add a good handful of authors to my ever-growing list of authors whose work I need MORE of, which is exactly how I want to respond to reading an anthology.

This is an anthology of outstanding modern horror and weird stories that are in other anthologies, I'm glad to have this feast of stories in one volume. It features some of the best authors in horror. It has somethhing for everyone to enjoy. The stories are chilling, and unsettling. The editor has done an outstanding anthology I think due to the variety and quality of the stories. If you don't read this, you will have truly missed a fantastic read!

As reviewed by Keith Rawson for LitReactor.com

The Verdict:

Not to repeat myself (or, more accurately, repeat Ellen Datlow), but over the last decade, horror has seen a major resurgence. You know, not that there weren’t some truly amazing writers working their asses off back in the day, but the sheer mass of creativity coming out of the genre has been impressive to say the least. And I imagine putting together an anthology representing the whole of this rush of diverse talent and ingenuity would be next to impossible to assemble. But, yet, Datlow manages to do so.

Within the 400 some odd pages of this rather intimidating, albeit highly readable, tome, resides virtually every kind of scare the human brain can imagine. From post-apocalyptic visions (Such as Langan’s “The Shallows”) to near stream of consciousness gems such as Gemma Files surreal “Spectral Evidence”. Now don’t get me wrong, like most anthologies, there are a few clunkers in the bunch, but overall it’s a solid read with stories by both the new and old guard alike.

For horror fans, Nightmares: A New Decade of Modern Horror, is a must own anthology. Simply put, you need this on your shelf. But for non-horror fans who have been thinking about dipping their toes into the genre, this is a perfect place to start kicking the tires.

I'm a lover of horror stories, be them short or full novels. I find it hard to chose between the 24 stories , but The Atlas of hell and At Night When the Demons Come were among my favorites.