The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, Volume Two
The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror • Book 2
by Paula Guran
Why You'll Love This
Thirty-plus writers, one curator with an unerring instinct for dread — this is what the genre looked like at its sharpest.
- Great if you want: broad exposure to dark fiction's most distinct contemporary voices
- The experience: varied and unpredictable — each story resets the mood entirely
- The writing: Guran curates for range: surreal, gothic, and quietly devastating sit side by side
- Skip if: you prefer sustained novels over short, disconnected narrative jolts
About This Book
The dark has always been populated by things we can't quite name — and this second volume of Paula Guran's annual gathering makes a strong case that contemporary writers are doing some of the most unsettling, emotionally resonant work in the genre right now. Drawn from a wide range of publications and venues, the stories here move between the supernatural and the surreal, the gothic and the quietly horrifying, the fantastical and the disturbingly mundane. What holds them together isn't a single mood or method but a shared willingness to go somewhere genuinely uncomfortable — and stay there long enough to mean something.
What distinguishes this collection as a reading experience is its range. Guran curates with a broad definition of darkness, which means a reader never settles too comfortably into any one register. Lyrical dread sits alongside cold psychological tension; folkloric strangeness gives way to something rawly contemporary. At 566 pages, it's a substantial commitment, but one that rewards readers who want their genre fiction to carry real weight — stories that linger well after the page is turned.
