The Year’s Best Horror Stories was a series of annual anthologies published by DAW Books from 1971 to 1994 under the successive editorships of Richard Davis from 1971 to 1973, and, after a two-year hiatus, Gerald W. Page from 1976 to 1979, and Karl Edward Wagner from 1980 to 1994. The series was discontinued after Wagner's death. It was a companion to DAW’s The Annual World’s Best SF and The Year's Best Fantasy Stories, which performed a similar office for the science fiction and fantasy genres.
Each annual volume reprinted what in the opinion of the editor was the best horror short fiction appearing in the previous year. The series also aimed to discover and nurture new talent. It featured both occasionally recurring authors and writers new to the horror genre. Veterans among the contributing authors included Brian Lumley, David Drake, Eddy C. Bertin, Kit Reed, Lisa Tuttle, R. Chetwynd-Hayes, Ramsey Campbell, Richard Matheson, Robert Bloch, Stephen King, and Tanith Lee; some of the then-newcomers to the field featured were Al Sarrantonio, Dennis Etchison, Jessica Amanda Salmonson, Juleen Brantingham, and Nina Kiriki Hoffman.
Famous quotes containing the words year, horror and/or stories:
“look the spangles
that sleep all the year in a dark box
dreaming of being taken out and allowed to shine,
the balls the chains red and gold the fluffy threads,
put up your little arms
and i’ll give them all to you to hold”
—E.E. (Edward Estlin)
“I think of horror films as art, as films of confrontation. Films that make you confront aspects of your own life that are difficult to face. Just because you’re making a horror film doesn’t mean you can’t make an artful film.”
—David Cronenberg (b. 1943)
“A man is known by the books he reads, by the company he keeps, by the praise he gives, by his dress, by his tastes, by his distastes, by the stories he tells, by his gait, by the notion of his eye, by the look of his house, of his chamber; for nothing on earth is solitary but every thing hath affinities infinite.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)