A review by crowyhead
The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Ninth Annual Collection by Ellen Datlow, Terri Windling

5.0

I love these collections. I don't read much short fiction, generally -- I used to subscribe to some of the genre fiction magazines, like "Asimov's" and "Realms of Fantasy," but they had a tendency to sit there and not get read. So I like these collections because I can catch up on some of what I've missed. Plus Windling and Datlow don't just get stories from the usual genre sources, there's stuff from "The New Yorker" and literary magazines as well. Anyway, this collection, from 1996 (collection stuff from 1995) doesn't disappoint at all. Some of my favorites were the most off-beat stories: "Professor Gottesman and the Indian Rhinoceros" by Peter S. Beagle, in which a gentleman befriends a talking rhino who insists he is not a rhino at all, but a unicorn; "The James Dean Garage Band" by Rick Moody, in which James Dean is alive and well and starting a musical revolution; and "The Printer's Daughter" by Delia Sherman, which is a more classic fantasy tale but weird and wonderful nonetheless. Good stuff.