Kristi here! Last year, I recommended an anthology I co-edited, Wicked Sick, to 34 Orchard readers because it shares our aesthetic, so it might be in your wheelhouse if you like what you read here.

I’m thrilled to share that not one, not two, but SIX of the stories that co-editor Scott Goudsward and I selected for the New England Horror Writers’ Wicked Sick anthology are on the recommended reading list for Ellen Datlow’s 2023 Best Horror of the Year, Volume Sixteen! It’s the highest number of stories selected in a single volume in the Wicked series (and also the only one I edited).

Stephen Mark Rainey—who appeared in our inaugural Spring 2020 issue with the moving piece “Night Crier”—wrote a generous introduction for Wicked Sick, writing that “these authors reach into your brain, into your mind, and with surgical assurance cut and twist you around until it hurts. But in the majority of these works, you’ll find not just sympathy for and by the various characters but empathy — which, rather than despair or trauma or disgust, I would say triggers catharsis. Even when the Specter of Sickness triumphs, for him it is often a bittersweet, less-than-complete triumph.”

Wicked Sick’s stories mentioned in Datlow’s list are:

“Irish Wake,” Michael Deady

“The Tall People,” Catherine Grant

“House of Tupper,” Meg Smith

“The Cancer Ward at Midnight,” L.L. Soares

“Toad in the Hole,” Gevera Bert Piedmont

“The Cancer Eaters,” K.H. Vaughan

Others who have appeared in the pages of 34 Orchard also appear in Wicked Sick: Trisha J. Wooldridge, Kurt Newton, and Jenna Moquin.

While in wait for our Spring 2025 issue, Wicked Sick would make for a perfect January read. You can pick it up on Amazon for either a nice holiday gift or for yourself here: Wicked Sick.