YEAR'S BEST WEIRD FICTION volume 5

YEAR'S BEST WEIRD FICTION, volume 5
ROBERT SHEARMAN (ed.)
Undertow Publications (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$4.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating:

The Publisher Says: Winner of the 2019 British Fantasy Award!

Welcome to the final volume of the Year’s Best Weird Fiction! For the past five years the Year’s Best Weird Fiction has unearthed a number of exceptional and inimitable voices, redefining and broadening genre distinctions and labels, bringing a diverse new group to the forefront of speculative fiction. We hope you enjoy our final volume.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA LIBRARYTHING EARLY REVIEWERS. THANK YOU.
My Review:It doesn't seem logical that this is the final volume of the Year’s Best Weird Fiction. A series that's garnered nothig but favorable fannish attenton seems as though five years and the "unearth{ing of} a number of exceptional and inimitable voices, seems to me to be one of those bullet-proof, recession-resistant sales cornerstones that publishers dream of. Enter, stage left, the villain of every recent piece of bad news: the pandemic of 2020 to 2022. All the usual formulae got upended; all the supply chains that we took for granted showed us how bad an idea that is by collapsing.

Thank goodness a lot of people we never so much as give a moment's though to worked very, very hard, and at risk of their lives, or we'd've seen a complete collapse à la the Bronze Age Collapse of 3,200 years ago that resulted in hundreds of years of grim, grinding poverty for a collapsed population of warring bands and tribes. (Of course, we still might.)

For the first time in 2023, we return to the blog's very venerable institution of using the Bryce Method of discussing collections (and/or anthologies) of short fiction story-by-story.


As an award-winning anthology, I'd feel hubristic rating this anthology less than four-plus stars; who am I to second guess such a distinguished body of experts?

“Live Through This” by Nadia Bulkin



“Flotsam” by Daniel Carpenter



“The Narrow Escape of Zipper-Girl” by Adam-Troy Castro



“The Unwish” by Claire Dean



“Worship Only What She Bleeds” by Kristi DeMeester



“The Second Door” by Brian Evenson



“When Words Change the Molecular Composition of Water” by Jenni Fagan



“The Convexity of Our Youth” by Kurt Fawver



“Corzo” by Brenna Gomez



“The Mouse Queen” by Camilla Grudova



“You Will Always Have Family: A Triptych” by Kathleen Kayembe



“The Anteater” by Joshua King



“Curb Day” by Rebecca Kuder



“The Entertainment Arrives” by Alison Littlewood



“The Rock Eater” by Ben Loory



“Eight Bites” by Carmen Maria Machado



“The Way She is With Strangers” by Helen Marshall



“The Possession” by Michael Mirolla



“Skins Smooth as Plantain, Hearts Soft as Mango” by Ian Muneshwar



“House of Abjection” by David Peak



“Disappearer” by KL Pereira



“Red Hood” by Eric Schaller



“Something About Birds” by Paul Tremblay



“Take the Way Home That Leads Back To Sullivan Street” by Chavisa Woods