Jim Frenkel -- Best Literature Picks of 2007

I'm biased, of course, having edited or otherwise worked on all the books listed below, but I was mightily impressed by them. Unfortunately, I haven't had a lot of time to read books other than the ones I edited last year, but these gave me great plesausre:

A Betrayal in Winter by Daniel Abraham, the sequel to his first novel, A Shadow in Summer, is notable because while it shares some characters with the previous novel, it is complete in itself, and a very powerful, dark story with echoes of Macbeth (someone said Lear, but I still think more Macbeth. High tragedy, wonderfully done.

and completely different, another book I liked an awful lot:

Darkness of the Light by Peter David. Peter David is so prolific and his work so diverse that I never know what to expect. This novel, set in a post-holocaust Earth peopled with the descendants of mankind and of creatures from some of our greatest myths (well, we think they're myths) is a very cool adventure novel with some great twists and turns.

Yet another fantasy, equally different, equally compelling:

A Sword from Red Ice by J. V. Jones. What I love about this book, and all of Jones's novels, is that the world is an incredibly real place. It feels remarkably complete, and is filled with conflict, uncertainty, and people who seem utterly real. Yes, there are archetypes here, but they're anything but perfect; wonderfully, humanly flawed people. And they have to deal with the kinds of conflict that affect everyone--but on a big scale, mythic, epic in scope, and yet still terribly human.

And one yet again very different and marvelous novel:

Sword of the Deceiver by Sarah Zettel: ASarah Zettel is a terrific storyteller who sucks me in to every new novel. In this particular novel, I love the magic in this imaginary world, drawn from three traditions: Russian folklore, Indian myth, and Chinese lore. She uses them all with great dexterity, creating a rich weave of story. It's also, like all her Isavalta novels (this is the fourth) a romantic story very satisfying in its resolution.

And a couple anthologies I was connected with of which I'm very fond:

The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 2007, edited by Ellen Datlow and Kelly Link & Gavin J. Grant--just a lot of great stories and poems, ranging from very dark fantasy to the heights of fantasy creation. The editors, as usual, have found many gems, from a wide range of authors and sources.

Inferno, edited by Ellen Datlow--a lot of very scary stories. Some of them are extremely unusual; most are flat-out terrific chillers. The Pat Cadigan, the Nathan Ballingrud, the Christopher Fowler, the Mark Samuels . . . I could go on; it is an altogether nasty (in a good way) collection of short horror fiction.

Those are some of the high-spots for me this year in fantasy (and horror