This new volume of the world's most acclaimed Year's Best Horror series includes a masterful selection of the finest supernatural short stories and terrifying novellas from many of the biggest names and most exciting newcomers currently working in the genre. This is the very best of new short stories and novellas by today's masters of the macabre. Contributors include such names as Neil Gaiman, Michael Marshall Smith, Ramsey Campbell, Kim Newman and Glen Hirshberg. This is required reading for any fan of ghoulish fiction.

Winner of the 2009 British Fantasy Award.

Praise for Cynan Jones:

"[A] piercing novella. Like Cormac McCarthy, Jones can make the everyday sound fraught and biblical." — , starred review

"Jones's perfectly pitched novel will appeal to anyone looking beyond sheer thrills." —

"This slim volume has all the gravity of a black hole, and reading it is like standing on the event horizon. It's like a more beautiful Cormac McCarthy; a darker W.H. Auden." — Elliot Bay Book Company

“Jones is a Welsh writer who has been compared to Cormac McCarthy, but his sparse style also recalls Ernest Hemingway.”

"There's nothing bucolic about this elemental, extraordinary tale of good and evil." —

“Jones deftly explores his characters’ motives, particularly the hope they cling to despite the risks they take.”—

“It’s as if the novel is the slowed-down spinning of a bullet through the grooves of a barrel, waiting to be released into the world.”—

“Darkly luminous. [Jones] builds tension in an ultimately gripping and important story that transcends its own bleakness.”—

When a net is set, and that's the way you choose, you'll hit it. Hold, a Welsh fisherman, Grzegorz, a Polish migrant worker, and Stringer, an Irish gangster, all want the chance to make their lives better. One kilo of cocaine and the sea tie them together in a fatal series of decisions.

Orlon was the nicest, most friendly farmer on Dwarf Road.The perfect target for the likes of Ty the Parson who roamed about beginning quests here, quests there, quests everywhere, all in the name of saving the world from this evil threat or that. So it was Orlon learned his fate, or at least thought he had, late one night when Ty the Parson dropped by for a visit — and so it was confirmed, or so he thought, when the Parson returned the next morning with a party of warriors in tow. Not even his best friend, Tarl Bimbo, who always fancied one day having a walkabout, could save him from taking a journey to who knew what end…

Cover Art by Tracy E. Flynn

Cover Design by Timothy Ray Jones

The author examines genetics, its benefits and its potential dangers. 

Witty and erudite, but a little unfocused, this title is as much about anthropology and (pre) history as genetics. Jones has produced a thought-provoking and free-wheeling book for the nonspecialist that touches on the genetics of languages, the role of sexual reproduction in genetic mutations, the evolution of farming, and the relationship of surnames to gene pools in various populations. The wide variety of topics considered is refreshing, as is the worldwide focus, but readers looking for a quick overview of genetics should look elsewhere (e.g., Robert Pollack, Signs of Life: The Language of DNA, LJ 1/94). Periodically, the author interjects purely speculative comments, but in general the lessons and conclusions of this book are complex and suitably low-key, given the rapid pace of change in molecular biology today and the difficulty of foreseeing all the future implications of these changes. Not an absolutely essential purchase, but an interesting one.

Jones is sensitive to the social issues raised by genetics, yet his interest reaches beyond contemporary social issues to the human past, to what genetics can and cannot tell us about our evolution and patterns of social development. He interleaves a broad knowledge of biology with considerations of cultural, demographic and — as his title indicates — linguistic history. Jones's book is at once instructive and captivating.

Trenchant, witty and enlightening… Jones's literate and wide-ranging book is an essential sightseer's guide to our own genetic terrain.

This brilliant and witty book… is highly literate, and Jones goes a long way to bridging the deepening chasm between the two cultures. Not to know how genes affect us is to ignore a central factor in our lives.

Zara and Nick are soul mates, meant to be together forever. But that's not quite how things have worked out.

For starters, well, Nick is dead. Supposedly, he's been taken to a mythic place for warriors known as Valhalla, so Zara and her friends might be able to get him back. But it's taking time, and meanwhile a group of evil pixies is devastating Bedford, with more teens going missing every day. An all-out war seems imminent, and the good guys need all the warriors they can find. But how to get to Valhalla?

And even if Zara and her friends discover the way, there's that other small problem: Zara's been pixie kissed. When she finds Nick, will he even want to go with her? Especially since she hasn't just turned. She's Astley's queen.

Once again, multi-award-winning editors Stephen Jones and David Sutton take you on a terrifying journey into the dark heart of modern horror fiction.

Firmly established as the world's premier horror anthology series, this latest volume is twice the size, presenting almost a quarter of a million words of new fiction by some of the hottest names and most talented newcomers in the field. Contributors to Dark Terrors 5 include Peter Straub, Poppy Z. Brite, Ramsey Campbell, Mick Garris — Stephen King's director of choice — Gwyneth Jones, Michael Marshall Smith, Kim Newman, Gahan Wilson, Christopher Fowler and many, many more.

The award-winning team of Jones and Sutton once again push the boundaries of fear in this new collection of horror and dark fantasy. Drawing from both sides of the Atlantic, features stories by some of the genres' biggest names as well as their rising stars, including Ray Bradbury, Poppy Z. Brite, Pat Cadigan, Ramsey Campbell, Christopher Fowler, Neil Gaiman, Julian Rathbone, Mark Timlin, and Michael Marshall Smith. An anthology that will take you to the furthest reaches of your imagination — and beyond.

British Fantasy Award winner 1998, World Fantasy Award nominee 1998.

Lily has squeezed herself into undersized relationships all her life, hoping one might grow as large as those found in the Jane Austen novels she loves. But lately her world is running out of places for her to fit. So when her bookish friend invites her to spend the summer at a Jane Austen literary festival in England, she jumps at the chance to reinvent herself.

There, among the rich, promising world of reenactments, Lily finds people whose longing to live in a novel equals her own. But real-life problems have a way of following you wherever you go, and Lily's accompany her to England. Unless she can change her ways, she could face the fate of so many of Miss Austen's characters, destined to repeat the same mistakes over and over again.

Charley Davidson, Grim Reaper Extraordinaire, is back in this sexy, suspenseful novel of supernatural shenanigans.

When Charley is rudely awakened in the middle of the night by her best friend who tells her to get dressed quickly and tosses clothes out of the closet at her, she can’t help but wonder what Cookie’s up to. Leather scrunch boots with a floral miniskirt? Together? Seriously? Cookie explains that a friend of hers named Mimi disappeared five days earlier and that she just got a text from her setting up a meet at a coffee shop downtown. They show up at the coffee shop, but no Mimi. But Charley finds a message on the bathroom wall. Mimi left a clue, a woman’s name. Mimi’s husband explains that his wife had been acting strange since she found out an old friend of hers from high school had been found murdered a couple weeks prior. The same woman Mimi had named in her message.

Meanwhile, Reyes Alexander Farrow (otherwise known as the Son of Satan. Yes. Literally) has left his corporeal body and is haunting Charley. He’s left his body because he’s being tortured by demons who want to lure Charley closer. But Reyes can’t let that happen. Because if the demons get to Charley, they’ll have a portal to heaven. And if they have a portal to heaven…well, let’s just say it wouldn’t be pretty. Can Charley handle hot nights with Reyes and even hotter days tracking down a missing woman? Will Cookie ever get a true fashion sense? And is there enough coffee and chocolate in the world to fuel them as they do?