Ok, I like to be scared. I like good ol' traditional scary stuff! This book was just (for the most part) weird! The tales were weird, the author comments were weird, and most of the stories were pathetic. I mean, some of them were definitely worth the read, but it's not worth the fifteen bucks this book costs. Used, five bucks, MAYBE, but I would strongly suggest spending your money elsewhere--I'll let you know when I run across an anthology worth fifteen bucks, but it isn't this one.

The 2004 (covering 2003 material) edition of the long-running horror anthology.

A few of these stories -- the Marc Laidlaw, Caitlin Kiernan, Mike O'Driscoll and Paul McAuley stories -- stood out, and the Gemma Files story was old-school splatterpunk reminiscent of pre-young adult fiction Kathe Koja, but the majority of the material didn't really grab my interest. The reliance on tried-and-true old horror tropes seemed too high for me. I'm idiosyncratic about short stories, though, and others' mileage will probably vary.

The anthology opens with a review of horror publications in 2003, focusing on Britain, and mostly formatted as a list without editorial opinion. It was interesting, though, to note that the editor several times expressed a briefly phrased negative opinion of China Mieville's work (and/or of "New Weird" writing in general), since Mieville has been represented by stories in earlier volumes of this anthology. But not in this one. A more detailed opinion would not have seemed out of place -- if it's not the business of editors to opine on literary work, whose is it?

In any case, I enjoyed some of the writing in this anthology but felt overall it was not as strong as some of the earlier editions.