The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2018 Edition

About the Authors

Simon Avery’s fiction has been published in a variety of magazines and anthologies including Black Static, Crimewave, The Third Alternative, The Best British Mysteries IV, Beneath the Ground, The Black Room Manuscripts: Volume 4, Birmingham Noir, Terror Tales of Yorkshire, Something Remains, and Occult Detective Quarterly. A novella, The Teardrop Method, was published in 2017. He lives and works in Birmingham, UK.

Laird Barron, an expat Alaskan, is the author of several books—including The Imago Sequence and Other Stories, Swift to Chase, and Blood Standard—and many short stories some of which have been reprinted in numerous year’s best anthologies and nominated for multiple awards. He is a three-time winner of the Shirley Jackson Award. Currently, Barron lives in the Rondout Valley of New York State and is at work on tales about the evil that men do.

Ashley Blooms was born and raised in Cutshin, Kentucky. She received her MFA as a John and Renee Grisham Fellow at the University of Mississippi. She’s been awarded scholarships from the Clarion Writer’s Workshop and Appalachian Writer’s Workshop, served as fiction editor for the Yalobusha Review, and worked as an editorial intern and first reader for Tor.com. Her stories have appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, and Shimmer, among others. Her nonfiction has appeared in the Oxford American. She currently lives in Oxford, Mississippi, with her husband and their dog, Alfie.

Aliette de Bodard lives (with her husband and children) and works (as a System Engineer) in Paris. She is the author of the critically acclaimed Obsidian and Blood trilogy of Aztec noir fantasies, as well as numerous short stories, which garnered her two Nebula Awards, a Locus Award, and two British Science Fiction Association Awards. Her space opera books include The Tea Master and the Detective. Recent works include the Dominion of the Fallen series, set in a turn-of-the-century Paris devastated by a magical war, which comprises the British Science Fiction Association Award-winning The House of Shattered Wings and its standalone sequel, The House of Binding Thorns.

Rebecca Campbell is a Canadian writer and an academic with a PhD in English (specifically Canadian literature) from the University of Western Ontario. Her speculative fiction has been published in Shimmer, Beneath Ceasless Skies, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Tor.com, and other venues. Her story “The Glad Hosts,” published by Lackington’s, was nominated for a Sunburst Award. The Paradise Engine, her first novel, was published in 2013.

Jeffrey Ford lives in central Ohio and teaches at Ohio Wesleyan University. He has contributed over 130 short stories to numerous magazines and anthologies including The Oxford Book of American Short Stories, Conjunctions, Puerto Del Sol, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, MAD Magazine, Weird Tales, Clarkesworld, Tor.com, Lightspeed, Subterranean, Fantasy, New Jersey Noir, Stories, The Living Dead,The Faery Reel, After, The Dark, The Doll Collection, many “year’s best” venues, and more. He is the recipient of four World Fantasy Awards and two Shirley Jackson Awards as well as the Nebula, Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire, and Edgar Allan Poe Awards.

Robin Furth’s fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in numerous magazines and journals including The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Cemetery Dance, Gramarye, Orbis, The Beloit Poetry Journal, and Interpreter’s House. Her book, Stephen King’s The Dark Tower: The Complete Concordance (originally created for King’s personal use), has been translated into five languages. Furth is the co-author of Marvel’s bestselling Dark Tower comic book series and has contributed to numerous other Marvel publications.

Lisa L. Hannett has had over seventy short stories appear in venues including Clarkesworld, Fantasy, Weird Tales, Apex, The Dark, and “year’s best” anthologies in Australia, Canada, and the U.S. She has won four Aurealis Awards, including Best Collection for her first book, Bluegrass Symphony, which was also nominated for a World Fantasy Award. Her first novel, Lament for the Afterlife, won the Australian National Science Fiction (“Ditmar”) Award for Best Novel. A new collection of short stories, Little Digs, is coming out in 2019.

Maria Dahvana Headley is the New York Times-bestselling author of the novels Aerie, Magonia (one of PW’s Best Books of 2015), Queen of Kings, and the memoir The Year of Yes. With Kat Howard she is the author of The End of the Sentence, one of NPR’s Best Books of 2014, and with Neil Gaiman, she is co-editor of Unnatural Creatures. Her short stories have been included in many “year’s best anthologies” and have been finalists for the Nebula and Shirley Jackson Awards. Her highly acclaimed novel The Mere Wife, which adapts Beowulf to modern-day New York, was published earlier this year.

Carole Johnstone is a British Fantasy Award-winning Scottish writer, currently living in Essex, England. Her fiction has appeared in numerous venues including Black Static, New Fears, Horror Library, Interzone, Terror Tales of the Scottish Highlands, Dark Minds, and Sherlock Holmes and the School of Detection. Her work has been reprinted in “best of” anthologies in the U.S. and UK. Her novella, Cold Turkey, and debut short story collection, The Bright Day is Done were both shortlisted for a British Fantasy Award.

Stephen Graham Jones is the author of sixteen novels, six story collections, more than two hundred and fifty stories, and has some comic books in the works. His latest novel is Mongrels. He’s been the recipient of an NEA Fellowship in Fiction, the Texas Institute of Letters Jesse H. Jones Award for Best Work of Fiction, the Independent Publishers Award for Multicultural Fiction, the Bram Stoker Award, and three This Is Horror Awards. Jones teaches in the MFA programs at University of Colorado at Boulder and University of California Riverside-Palm Desert. He lives in Boulder, Colorado.

Hailed by the New York Times as “One of our essential writers of dark fiction,” Caitlín R. Kiernan has published twelve novels, including The Red Tree and The Drowning. She is the recipient of the Barnes and Noble Maiden Voyage, Bram Stoker, IHG, James Tiptree, Jr., Locus, and World Fantasy Awards. Kiernan studied geology and paleontology at the University of Alabama and the University of Colorado and has published in several scientific journals, including the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. A prolific short fiction writer, her most recent collection is Houses Under the Sea: Mythos Tales. Two more, one from Subterranean Press and The Very Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan from Tachyon Publications, are forthcoming.

After receiving a PhD from Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto, Helen Marshall completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Oxford. She was recently appointed Senior Lecturer of Creative Writing and Publishing at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, England and is the general director of the Centre for Science Fiction and Fantasy. Her first collection of fiction, Hair Side, Flesh Side, won the Sydney J Bounds Award. Her second collection, Gifts for the One Who Comes After, won the World Fantasy Award and the Shirley Jackson Award, and was shortlisted for the British Fantasy Award, Bram Stoker Award, and the Aurora Award from the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association.

Kate Marshall is the author of the Young Adult novel I Am Still Alive. Her science fiction and fantasy fiction has appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Crossed Genres, and elsewhere. She writes historical romance as Kathleen Kimmel and works in the video game industry as a writer and occasional designer. Her love of books runs through every aspect of her career; she serves as both a developmental editor and a cover designer for fellow authors. She lives outside of Seattle with her husband, a dog, a cat, and a baby.

Ian Muneshwar is a writer and teacher currently based in Raleigh, North Carolina. His short fiction appears in venues such as Clarkesworld, Gamut, Liminal Stories, and The Dark. In both his writing and course design, he is concerned with queer subjectivities, cultural memory, and the ways in which queerbrown identities are shaped by diaspora. Muneshwar holds a BA from Vassar College and is a graduate of both the Clarion West and Odyssey workshops. He is currently pursuing an MFA in fiction at North Carolina State University.

Before earning her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts, M. Rickert worked as kindergarten teacher, coffee shop barista, balloon vendor at Disneyland, and in the personnel department of Sequoia National Park where she spent her time off hiking the wilderness. She now lives in Cedarburg, Wisconsin, a small city of candy shops and beautiful gardens. She has published numerous short stories and two collections: Map of Dreams and Holiday. Her first novel, The Memory Garden, was published in 2014, and won the Locus Award for Best First Novel. Her first collection, Map of Dreams, was honored with both the World Fantasy and Crawford Awards. Her latest collection, You Have Never Been Here, was published in 2015.

Rebecca Roanhorse is an Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo/African-American writer and a VONA workshop alum. She is also a lawyer and Yale grad. She lives in northern New Mexico with her daughter, husband, and pug. Her debut novel, Trail of Lightning, was published earlier this year. Her children’s book Race to the Sun is coming in 2019 from Rick Riordan Presents. Her recent nonfiction can be found in Invisible 3: Essays and Poems on Representation in SF/F, Strange Horizons, Uncanny, and How I Resist: Activism and Hope for a New Generation.

Eden Royce describes herself as “Freshwater Geechee. Charleston girl living in the Garden of England” who grew up around rootworkers and hoodoo practitioners. A Speculative Literature Foundation’s Diverse Worlds grant recipient, her short stories appear in over a dozen anthologies and magazines. She’s voiced podcasts, been a reptile handler, bridal consultant, and stockbroker, but is now a full-time writer. She enjoys roller-skating, reading, cooking, traveling, and listening to thunderstorms.

Mark Samuels is a British writer of weird and fantastic fiction in the tradition of Arthur Machen and H. P. Lovecraft (although his story here was published with a nod to Reggie Oliver). Born in deepest Clapham, South London, his short stories often focus on detailing a shadowy world in which his protagonists gradually discover terrifying and rapturous vistas lurking behind modernity. Samuels work has been highly praised by the likes of Thomas Ligotti and Ramsey Campbell and has appeared in prestigious anthologies of horror and weird fiction on both sides of the Atlantic.

Priya Sharma is a medical doctor who lives in the UK. Her fiction has appeared in periodicals such as Albedo One, Interzone, Black Static, and Tor.com and anthologies including Once Upon a Time, Black Feathers, Mad Hatters and March Hairs. She’s been anthologized in several “year’s best” anthologies in the U.S. and UK. Her work has appeared on the Locus Recommended Reading List. Sharma’s story, “Fabulous Beasts” was a Shirley Jackson Award finalist and won a British Fantasy Award for Short Fiction. Her first collection, All the Fabulous Beasts, was published earlier this year.

Robert Shearman has worked as writer for television, radio, and the stage. He is probably best known for being one of the writers for the BAFTA Award-winning revived Doctor Who series starring Christopher Eccleston. (His episode “Dalek,” was nominated for a Hugo Award.) Shearman’s first collection of short stories, Tiny Deaths, won the World Fantasy Award, and was shortlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize and nominated for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Prize. His second collection, Love Songs for the Shy and Cynical won the Shirley Jackson Award, the British Fantasy Award, and the Edge Hill Short Story Reader’s Prize. His third collection, Everyone’s Just So So Special, won the British Fantasy Award

Shearman’s first collection published in North America, Remember Why You Fear Me, was shortlisted for the Shirley Jackson and British Fantasy Awards.

Angela Slatter is the author of the urban fantasy novels Vigil, Corpselight, and Restoration as well as eight short story collections, including The Girl with No Hands and Other Tales, Sourdough and Other Stories, The Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings, and A Feast of Sorrows: Stories. She has won a World Fantasy Award, a British Fantasy Award, a Ditmar, an Australian Shadows Award, and six Aurealis Awards. She has an MA and a PhD in Creative Writing, is a graduate of Clarion South and the Tin House Summer Writers Workshop, and was awarded one of the inaugural Queensland Writers Fellowships. Slatter served as the Established Writer-in-Residence at the Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers Centre in Perth. She has been awarded career development funding by Arts Queensland, the Copyright Agency and, in 2017/18, an Australia Council for the Arts grant.

Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam’s fiction and poetry has appeared in over forty magazines and anthologies such as Black Static, The Toast, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Hobart, Interzone, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Fairy Tale Review. She and her partner collaborated on the recently released audio fiction-jazz collaborative album Strange Monsters. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast program and created and coordinates the annual Art & Words Collaborative Show in Fort Worth, Texas.

Steve Rasnic Tem’s collaborative novella with his late wife Melanie Tem, The Man On The Ceiling, won the World Fantasy, Bram Stoker, and International Horror Guild Awards. He has also won the Bram Stoker, International Horror Guild, and British Fantasy Awards for his solo work. His recent novel UBO won the Bram Stoker Award. His previous novels are Deadfall Hotel, The Man On The Ceiling (written with Melanie Tem as an expansion of their novella), The Book of Days, Daughters (also written with Melanie Tem), and Excavation. Tem has published over four hundred short stories. His ten story collections include City Fishing, Celestial Inventories, Twember, Here With The Shadows, and the giant seventy-two-story treasury, Out of the Dark: A Storybook of Horrors. A transplanted Southerner Virginia, Steve is a long-time resident of Colorado. He has a BA in English Education from VPI and a MA in Creative Writing from Colorado State.

Katherine Vaz is the author of two novels, Saudade and Mariana, as well as two short story collections, Fado & Other Stories and Our Lady of the Artichokes & Other Portuguese-American Stories. Her work has appeared in six languages and has received numerous accolades, including the Library of Congress’ Top Thirty International Books of 1998, the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, and the Prairie Schooner Book Award. The recipient of fellowships at Harvard University, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as the Harman Fellowship, Vaz has lectured internationally about Portuguese and Luso-American literature and is the first Portuguese-American to have her work recorded for the archives of the Library of Congress (Hispanic Division). A native Californian, she lives in New York City and East Hampton with her husband.

Kaaron Warren has published over seventy short stories, some of which are collected in The Gate Theory, Through Splintered Walls, The Grinding House, and Dead Sea Fruit. Her short fiction has won Australian Shadows, Ditmar, and Aurealis Awards. Her four novels are Slights, Walking the Tree, Mistification, and The Grief Hole. An Australian, she’s lived in Melbourne, Sydney, and Canberra, with a three year stint in Fiji. She currently lives in Canberra with her family, two cats and, possibly, rats in the roof.

Conrad Williams is the author of nine novels (Head Injuries, London Revenant, The Unblemished, One, Decay Inevitable, Loss of Separation, Dust and Desire, Sonata of the Dead, and Hell is Empty), four novellas (Nearly People, Game, The Scalding Rooms, and Rain) and three collections of short stories (Use Once Then Destroy, Born with Teeth, and I Will Surround You). One was the winner of the August Derleth Award for Best Novel, while The Unblemished won the International Horror Guild Award for Best Novel. He also received a British Fantasy Award for his novella The Scalding Rooms. He is an associate lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University and lives in Manchester, UK, with his wife and three sons.