Some reviews of YBFH #21

Two excellent reviews followed up our starred advance review in Publishers Weekly.
The Green Man Review's editor Denise Dutton provides a lengthy, very generous review here: YBFH#21

Booklist(Wednesday, October 15, 2008):
As the market for fantasy and horror continues to embrace more venues, from online publications to original story anthologies, the editors of this venerable series have been forced to widen their nets. The payoff for the latest editions readers is more than 300,000 words of short fiction, poems, and essays offering a feast for both intellect and imagination. An outstanding feature of this years diverse selection of voices and themes is the often seamless overlap between the two genres. Undercurrents of horror, for example, run through M. Rickert's fanciful tale about a writer visited by the ghost of a murdered child celebrity, and through Karen Joy Fowlers story about an imaginary South American town with a poetry cafe that changes destinies. Fantasy motifs surface in Paul Walthers "Splitfoot," about a remote Minnesota home possessed by demons, and in Karen Russells whimsical yarn about vampires. As usual, a sizable portion of the volume is devoted to year-end summations dissecting fantasy and horrors contemporary trends, and tributes to notable authors and film actors who have died.

We also received a very generous review by Gary Wolfe in the September Locus

End of trip and what I'm up to now--WORK

I had a marvelous time visiting out west. While I was in Stallion Springs, Richard (Mikey's husband and a marvelous sculptor) some of the work by Richard that I own and I drove to Red Rock in the high desert one day while Mikey was working. I've taken photos, which I will eventually post--there a LOT to go through.
I'm still catching up since I returned Thursday night. I'm mostly unpacked, mostly gone through my mail, and now am hunkering down to work this weekend. The problem with trips is that even if I take some work with me, there's a lot more waiting for me at home, work I have to focus more on like reading and editing. I caught up on my non-YBFH magazine reading (including The New Yorker--which after reading about six in a row I anxiously hope for something with a plot and characters that excite me. There were two stories that stood out: one by T. Coraghessan Boyle, and another (that I really liked) by Janet Frame. Both are getting HMs in the next Year's Best. I also read a bunch of webzine printouts, plus finished the novel Infected by Scott Sigler, which while I enjoyed it, has some enormous plot holes, some of which might be plugged by the sequel.

The long trip home went extremely well, with no problems at all. We all three got up at 6:30 and at 7:15 drove to Bakersfield, where I caught the 9:00 am bus to LAX. Got to the airport by 11:30 and was able to relax and nosh on the lunch that Mikey made for me). My flight was 1:55, left on time, and was pleasant. Half empty plane and a seat empty in the middle-yayyy. Arrived on time and as I think I mentioned earlier, was in the door of my apartment half an hour before I expected to be: 11:30. Then, of course, the hassle begin with the email meltdown. It seems to have subsided although I really don't think my program likes downloading 465 emails at a time. Which means I'll probably have the same problem when I get back from WFC.

I knew I was going to run out of reading material by the time I got to LAX so picked up three paperback crime novels in a used bookstore in Tehachapi while I was there. One, Crusader's Cross by James Lee Burke--I soon realized that I'd read when it came out--I hate that. I was purposefully looking for the Robicheaux novels I hadn't read yet--now I think it must have been the most recent two. Then I read Tess Gerritson's The Surgeon about a serial killer. At times, I thought I'd read that one, too, but alas--the two bits that made me think I'd read it before were merely minor borrowings from other serial killer novels I must have read. At least I think that. I never got to The Overlook by Michael Connolly. Maybe next time I'll toss it into my bag for an emergency read.