Black Gate

I’m a big fan of dark fantasy, and there’s a lot of terrific work going on in the field right now. Dale Bailey, Laird Barron, Gemma Files, Maria Dahvana Headley, John Langan, Ken Liu, Usman T. Malik, Helen Marshall, Simon Strantzas, Steve Rasnic Tem, Lavie Tidhar… these folks and many others are writing excellent fiction.

The real challenge, of course, is finding it. All of the writers above published top-notch stories last year, but you’d have to have access to a top-notch library to get even half of it. A lot of the very best fiction from last year appeared in small print run magazines (like Dark Discoveries, Sirenia Digest, Jamais Vu, SQ Mag and Lackington’s), premiere anthologies (such as Dead Man’s Hand, Letters to Lovecraft, Fearful Symmetries, Monstrous Affections, and Nightmare Carnival), and small press collections (like Burnt Black Suns, Here with the Shadows, and Black Gods Kiss).

What you really need is an astute editor with impeccable taste who can read through all that material (and a great deal more) for you, and collect the very best, so you can settle back in your favorite recliner with a cool beverage and enjoy the finest dark fantasy and horror from the top practitioners in the field in a single fat anthology, every single year.

You see where this is going, don’t you.

Paula Guran and Prime Books have released the sixth volume in their excellent The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, which collects stories from all of the writers mentioned above, and a great deal more. It is one of three Best of the Year volumes from Prime (the others are Rich Horton’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, and the brand new The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Novellas, also edited by Paula Guran).

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Lev AC Rosen is the author of All Men of Genius and the just-released Woundabout. But it’s his second novel, Depth, the tale of a private investigator whose routine surveillance case leads her to an impossible treasure in post-apocalyptic flooded New York City, that really grabbed my attention this year. Here’s what Lev said on his blog about the genesis of the novel:

I have a longstanding love of noir (I’ve even taught classes on it), and this book is near and dear to my heart. It’s a classic hardboiled noir… that happens to take place in NYC after global warming has melted the ice caps. New York is now a city of building tops, boats and bridges. It’s very far away from the conservative US mainland, and it operates differently.

Living in New York now, especially living in the financial district, I have a few things around me all the time; one is the constant… I don’t know what the word is. The financial district used to be this fantastic historical area – my building is over 100 years old. But there are so many new highrises going up, shiny, sleek looking condos. The moody vibe of 1930s and 40s NYC used to be, I think, most accessible in my neighborhood (when I moved in almost a decade ago). Now it feels fake, too modern, too rich. The grit is gone. I knew if I were going to write a noir, I’d have to bring that grit back somehow.

The other thing down here, of course, is the water. Even before Sandy, there were these great nights where I would be out walking and this heavy fog would come off the water and it would smell like the ocean and the dark would be silvery. And then, of course, Sandy hit – the day after my wedding – and my apartment got a moat. I got to see the first inklings of a New York with rivers instead of streets.

Both those things are what helped shape this. I wanted a noir that felt like the old Bogart and Bacall movies, but without being historical. So I went to the future – possibly not even that far – and I’m really proud of what I came up with.

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