Well, we’re nearly halfway through 2025, but I’ve just finished reading Ellen Datlow’s 2024 collection of the best horror short stories published in 2023, or in other words: The Best Horror of the Year, Volume Sixteen. Ellen Datlow is one of the most celebrated editors and anthologists in the horror genre, and I have particularly enjoyed her themed horror anthologies like Haunted Nights and The Devil and the Deep. Short story anthologies are a wonderful way to discover new writers and plumb the diversity of a given subject or genre. But “best of the year” anthologies have the added benefit of highlighting particular trends or preoccupations that emerge in any particular year. The Best Horror of the Year, Volume Sixteen, is the perfect example of this.
The collection begins with editor Ellen Datlow’s summation of the year 2023, going over the various awards given out and notable books, magazines, anthologies, and poetry collections published within the horror genre. It’s probably more information that the average reader needs, but a wonderful resource if you ever need to look back and research something in particular about horror fiction in the year 2023. What follows are nineteen stories selected by Ellen Datlow as the very best published that year. The authors of these stories range from giants of the horror genres—like Stephen Graham Jones and Tananarive Due—to many writers I had never heard of before. Two of the stories in this collection were taken from another one of Ellen Datlow’s anthologies, Christmas and Other Horrors. The other stories come from various magazines and other anthologies. At the end of the volume is a list of nearly forty honorable mentions, just in case these nineteen stories weren’t enough and you need to seek out more.
My two favorite stories in this collection both involve an unusual form of haunting. The first is “R is for Remains” by an author I wasn’t previously familiar with, Steve Rasnic Tem. This tale centers on a man named Gene who works for a company that cleans up grisly death scenes. Gene also happens to have the ability to see ghosts, including both the recent murder/suicide victims whose viscera he is scrubbing from the floors and walls as well as the more peaceful spirits that populate his town. Over the course of the story, it is slowly revealed that Gene is haunted not just by spectral apparitions but also by deep sadness and lingering guilt. This was one of the most emotionally moving short stories I’ve read in a long time. My other favorite was “Return to Bear Creek Lodge” by Tananarive Due—an author I’ve only read one or two other short stories from but whose oeuvre has long been on my TBR. In this tale, which came from Datlow’s Christmas Horrors collection, a teenage boy must visit the remote cabin of his abusive grandmother for Christmas and is haunted by a strange, snow-white, weasel-like demon that seems to accompany her. This deceptively horrific furry apparition reminded me of the bizarre haunting in “Couching at the Door” by D.K. Broster, one of my all-time favorite weird horror stories, which I first encountered in Women’s Weird, Volume I. In both Due’s story and Broster’s, the furry creature seems to be tied to repressed feelings of shame for past misdeeds.
The main trend I noticed within this collection was the popularity of the folk horror subgenre—which I wrote about on this blog multiple times in 2023, so clearly it was having a moment. Out of the nineteen tales in this collection, two involve the most typical folk horror tropes of a rural setting where a small, isolated community offers human sacrifices to a local supernatural entity in return for good harvests (or bounty in general) and protection. In “Hare Moon” by H.V. Patterson, a new religion has emerged after a second Biblical-scale flood that worships a goddess known as Ostara, the Hare Mother. In a ritual that blends elements of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” with A24’s Midsommar, one family from the community is chosen alongside one interloping outsider to participate in a gruesome sacrificial ritual. Patrick Barb’s “The Scare Groom” takes place in a small town called Crowfly that lures in lost travelers. When a car breaks down in their midst, the men are killed and a young woman is chosen to become the new bride for the scare groom—a scarecrow figure who watches over their harvests. However, their latest bride has chosen to fully embrace her role in the way the town is unprepared for. A third story, Charles Hughes’s “The Motley,” similarly involves a small town with strange rituals, though they are more focused on justice than nature or harvest. The council members in this town get special access to a creature resembling a Frankensteined doll, stitched together from skin and sticks. The Motley knows all the townspeople’s untold secrets, and when it reveals crimes the rest of the community enacts a harsh justice, again strongly reminiscent of Jackson’s “The Lottery.” But as in “The Scare Groom,” one young woman takes it upon herself to turn the town monster against the abusive men who have become too comfortable in their power. “Rock Hopping” by Adam L.G. Nevill, though it focuses mainly on the struggles of a trio of adventurous kayakers on an ill-advised trip to a cursed island, also has a background atmosphere of folk horror as the reader is given the sense at the end that the community of local fishermen worship and enable the dark forces at work on the island in return for better fishing.
Lastly, I’ll end with one more story that doesn’t fit quite so firmly into traditional folk horror but seems to be closely related. “Lover’s Lane” by Stephen Graham Jones deals not in sacrificial cults and harvest gods, but rather in another form of folk belief: urban legends. The story is very cleverly formatted as a sort of “copypasta”—or its horror-specific derivative, “creepypasta”—a format unique to the internet, in which a frightening story is posted anonymously to blog sites and message boards and meant to be copied and pasted far and wide to ward off the horror it depicts. Jones’s story follows a middle-aged hobbyist folklore junkie who becomes immersed in the legend of the hook-handed man, who haunts amorous couples in lover’s lanes across the country. What starts off as a fun project interviewing elderly ladies in nursing homes takes a terrifying cosmic twist as the narrator begins to suspect that something non-human has emerged from the mountains and infiltrated humanity during these trysts interrupted by the hook-handed man.
If you’re looking for ways to discover new horror writers by dipping into a variety of bite-sized stories, you can’t go wrong with a best of the year horror anthology. You can find The Best Horror of the Year, Volume Sixteen, on shelves now at your favorite local retailer or buy it online and support The Gothic Library in the process using this Bookshop.org affiliate link. Once you’ve read it, let me know your favorite story in the comments!