The 1982 edition of the late Terry Carr's annual series -- each selecting the best fantasy of the year -- was amongst the best, but it was also the last. In all honesty, when compared to the much longer science fiction equivalents edited by Carr, which were much more comprehensive and almost half as long again for the same price, it's hardly surprising that sales at a time of industry retrenchment were unacceptable to the publisher.
The book opens with Parke Godwin's Hugo and Nebula nominated and World Fantasy Award-winning novella 'The Fire When it Comes,' the story of a young couple moving into an apartment , told through the eyes of the ghost of an actress who died too young, of her desperate attempts to reach out to them, and a poignant resolution.
The next story, George R.R. Martin's 'Remembering Medlody' is a grimly horrific little story about a very demanding friend and how she repays those friends who let her down. It's so similar to the opener that it's placement can't be coincidence, but where the opening story is poignant, Melody is simply nasty.
Amongst the other highlights are C.J. Cherryh's 'The Haunted Tower,' set in a far-future London when our sun is dying, and a woman imprisoned in the tower is visited by ghosts from our past; Roger Zelazny's flying Dutchman tale, 'And I only am Escaped to Tell Thee,' the shortest story in the book, but one of the most effective; Robert Silverberg's marvellous 'The Regulars,' about the drinkers in a very unusual bar, and Michael Reaves' 'Werewind,' an atmospheric horror story set in the Santa Ana canyons.
The wind is also ever-present in the second of the three Nebula-nominated stories, James Tiptree Jr.'s atmospheric novelette, 'Lirios: A Tale of the Quintana Roo,' in which a expatriate psychologist living beside a windswept, sun-scorched Mexican beach is visited by a mysterious caminante, one of the legendary Mayan walking men, in the shape of a young man who each year walks down from the USA, sometimes as far as Belize, before returning North.
The collection ends with Michael Bishop's superb Nebula Award winning novelette 'The Quickening,' in which the entire population of the world suddenly awake in different places, seen through the eyes of an American serviceman suddenly displaced to Seville, and how the population of our suddenly fragmented world come to terms with their new lives.
It's a fine story, and ends a prematurely stillborn series on a high.
