Best of 2008 Picks -- Ellen Datlow

The best things I’ve read or seen in horror 2008:

Let the Right One In, the Swedish vampire movie, really knocked me out. I haven’t read the book but now I kind of want to. Two outsider kids, meet up in snowy winter

One of the best novels of the year (I don’t read many) was one recommended to me by Liz Hand. Sway by Zachary Lazar (Little, Brown) miraculously projects the reader into the lives and minds of some of the prime movers of the sixties: underground filmmaker Kenneth Anger, Brian Jones, Keith Richards, and Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones, and would be rocker/Charlie Manson follower Bobby Beausoleil. By doing this he creates what reads almost like a memoir of the era that started with love and promise, culminating in darkness with the murders of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the Manson killings and the near-riot at the Stones’ concert at Altamont. The voices sound so authentic it’s as if Lazar channels his characters.

I also loved Sharp Teeth by Toby Barlow (Harper) is a werewolf novel told in verse, but don’t let that scare you away. It’s free verse, not rhyming and it’s wonderfully gripping, in part to the compression of language. Go and read it, you will not be disappointed. Highly recommended. It came out in the UK in 2007 but was first published in the US in 2008.

The Shadow Year by Jeffrey Ford (William Morrow), is a wonderful expansion of his novella “Botch Town,” that creates a sharp snapshot of growing up on Long Island, New York, in the early 1960s. Two brothers and their young sister investigate mysterious occurrences in the neighborhood, partly with the help of the sister seemingly preternatural powers of detection. The adult narrator looking back at a dark year in his family’s hometown never intrudes on the story and the characters are so realistic that it’s almost painful to read about them. Highly recommended.