The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2012 — Paula Guran

Take a journey into darkness. Visit places where one might expect to find the dark -- in a house where love was shared and lost, a milky-white pool in an Australian cave, the trenches of World War I, the deep woods. You would not be surprised to find the dark in a cheap apartment on the wrong side of town, down mean streets, under a gallows-tree, along dank passageways, trapped underground, in the near future, or among the mysteries of old New Orleans. Dunes, lakes, isolated cabins, old books, and Old West saloons -- well, the darkness might easily be there. But we've also found locales you thought were safe from shadows -- a rib joint with good blues playing, inside an old wardrobe, on a baseball diamond, the Beverly Wilshire Hotel...

Travel into the best dark fantasy and horror from 2011 with more than five-hundred pages of tales from some of today's best-known writers of the fantastique as well as new talents -- stories that will take you to a diverse assortment of dark places.