Lucius Shepard

Darkness surrounds us. We can find darkness anywhere: in a strange green stone etched with mysterious symbols; at a small town's annual picnic; in a ghostly house that is easy to enter but not so easy to leave; behind the dumpster in the alley where a harpy lives; in The Nowhere, a place where car keys, toys, people disappear to; among Polar explorers; and, most definitely, within ourselves. Darkness flies from mysterious crates; surrounds children whose nightlights have vanished; and flickers between us at the movie theater. Darkness crawls from the past and is waiting in our future; and there's always a chance that Halloween really is a door opening directly into endless shadow. Welcome to the dark. You may never want to leave. This inaugural volume of the year's best dark fantasy and horror features more than 500 pages of dark tales from some of today's finest writers of the fantastique. Chosen from a variety of sources, these stories are as eclectic and varied as the genre itself.

In the jungles of Guatemala, David Mingolla is struggling to survive amongst the rotting vegetation and his despairing fellow foot soldiers. He knows he is nothing but an expendable pawn in an endless war. On R & R a few miles away from the warzone he meets Debora - an enigmatic young woman who may be working for the enemy - and stumbles into a deadly psychic conflict where the mind is the greatest weapon.

Lucius Shepard's work ranges across the fields of fantasy, science fiction and magic realism, garnering comparisons with Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Best-known for the story suite The Dragon Griaule - available as a Gollancz Fantasy Masterwork - he has won or been nominated for every major SFF award. This omnibus collects his ARTHUR C. CLARKE AWARD-shortlisted novel GREEN EYES, WORLD FANTASY AWARD-winning collection THE JAGUAR HUNTER and SHIRLEY JACKSON AWARD-winning novella VACANCY.

6,000 feet long from head to tail ... these are the stories of the Dragon Griaule.

The itinerant gun show draws together many subcultures from the margins of society: survivalists, Aryan brotherhoods, and the team of Rita Whitelaw and Jimmy Roy Guy, dealers in collectible arms. Rita has made Jimmy an exception to her general disdain for whites, for Jimmy's got a storytelling ability that borders on mystic vision, which he delights in applying to the weapons he acquires. When Jimmy makes an agreement with the widow of white supremacist martyr Bob Champion to broker her husband's infamous Colt .45, the widow stipulates that he keep it out of the hands of Champion's disciple, who considers it a powerful talisman for his racist agenda. Jimmy and Rita run afoul of "the Major," but aren't intimidated by his veiled threats. The gun has launched a story, and when Jimmy begins a story, one way or another, he's bound to see it through.

This second volume of The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy features over a quarter million words of fiction by some of the genre's greatest authors, as selected by Rich Horton, a well-known and well-received contributor to many of the field's most respected magazines.