Join twenty-five masterful authors and talented newcomers with more than 400 pages of the disturbing, unnerving, haunting, and strange. This outstanding annual exploration of the year’s best dark fiction delivers tales of deathly possession, the weirdly surreal, mysterious melancholy, and frighteningly plausible futures. Confront your own humanity and the fears that stir you—from the darkly supernatural and painfully familiar to the disquieting terror of the unknown.

The supernatural, the surreal, and the all-too real . . . tales of the dark. Such stories have always fascinated us, and modern authors carry on the disquieting traditions of the past while inventing imaginative new ways to unsettle us. Chosen from a wide variety of venues, these stories are as eclectic and varied as shadows. This volume of The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror offers more than four hundred pages of tales from some of today’s finest writers of the fantastique?sure to delight as well as disturb!

Award-winning fantasy editor Paula Guran invites you to join an array of accomplished authors on an extraordinary and enchanting expedition. Seventeen fantastical stories weave a wonderful web of magic, revelation, and of course, adventure. The Year's Best Fantasy, Volume Three explores alternative realities that mirror a world much like our own, yet push the limits of one's imagination. Buckle up and enjoy the ride! This is a collection of tales fantasy fanatics won't want to miss.

Fantastically frightening tales await you in the fifth volume of The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror!

September 1905. At the heart of the Ottoman Empire, in the ancient city of Smyrna, Scheherazade is born to an opium-dazed mother. At the very same moment, an Indian spy sails into the golden-hued, sycamore-scented city with a secret mission from the British Empire. When he leaves, 17 years later, it will be to the smell of kerosene and smoke as the city, and its people, are engulfed in flames. Told through the intertwining fates of a Levantine, a Greek, a Turkish and an Armenian family, this unforgettable novel reveals a city, and a culture, now lost to time. 'Fiercely intelligent, finely textured and achingly beautiful' Elif Shafak 'Utterly delightful' Buki Papillon 'This rich tale of love and loss gives voice to the silenced, and adds music to their histories' Maureen Freely, Chair, English PEN 'A must-read' Ayse Arman, Hu ̈rriyet 'A symphony of literature' Açik Radyo 'Defne Suman is a story-teller. She tells the story of how love, emotions and identities are influenced by socio-political events of a lifetime' Cumhuriyet Newspaper 'A wonderfully braided story of family secrets set in the magical city of Smyrna, told in luminous prose' Lou Ureneck, author of Smyrna, September 1922

‘The perfect gift for the armchair epidemiologist’ Wall Street Journal Nature wants you dead. Not just you, but your children and everyone you have ever met and everyone they have ever met; in fact, everyone. It wants you to cough and sneeze and poop yourself into an early grave. It wants your blood vessels to burst and pustules to explode all over your body. And – until recently – it was really good at doing this… The subject of infection and how to fight it grows more urgent every day. How do pathogens cause disease? And what tools can we give our bodies to do battle? Infectious is not only a vital overview of what goes awry in our bodies, but also a hopeful story of ongoing human ingenuity.

Read award-winning author Stephen Graham Jones's horror story, "Wait for Night", a Tor.com Original A day laborer hired to clean up a flooded creek outside of Boulder, Colorado uncovers what could be a valuable find—if it doesn't kill him first. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.