Best Book of 2010

I thought I would try to get this in before we are so far along in 2011, everyone forgets 2010 existed. Rather than try to rank the books from 1 to 10 like I usually do, I’m just going to go with a list of honorable mentions, then the top book. All of this is just my opinion, of course. I would also like to say that I tend to read books when I get to them, which is often well after the publication date (and sometimes before it), so my favorite book of 2010 may be something I’ll read in 2017, if the world doesn’t end in 2012. There is a bit of uncertainty on my part as to when some books came out, and I’m trying to stick with books published in 2010, not ones I got to in 2010. I don’t know if Norman Prentiss’ Invisible Fences, a favorite book of mine, was published last year or not. I think I first got to read it back in 2008. If it is a 2010 book, it should have been a contender, but I think I picked it as my top book of 2008, so I arbitrarily excluded it this time.

One thing that might be mildly controversial: everyone talks, of course, about how the heart and soul of the horror genre is the small press. I read a lot of small press publications, and they put out a lot of good things, but this year, the books I enjoyed most were published by the traditional big publishing houses. I have an opinion concerning that which I hope to put down in writing someday soon.

First the honorable mentions. This year seemed to be a year in which vampires, at least part of the time, stopped sparkling and came back to the dark side. Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan published the second part of their Strain Trilogy with The Fall, and Justin Cronin kicked off a trilogy with The Passage (review to come), a book that enjoyed a considerable boost from Stephen King. Peter Straub returned with the lyrical A Dark Matter. Stephen King published one of his periodic collections of four novellas in Full Dark, No Stars (review to come), which I thought was one of his strongest offerings in years. I enjoyed all these books quite a bit, and they mostly feature familiar names, and all come from big publishers. Perhaps I’m becoming more conventional, but I thought the books showed a generally higher quality of effort, and almost universally a stronger attention to editing, the great bugaboo of most of the small press.

My favorite book of 2010 is not from a familiar name, although it was a large mainstream publishing house. Australian author Stephen M. Irwin’s book The Dead Path hit all the right chords with me. The book, which told of a young man returning home to confront his childhood fears and a manifestation of The Green Man, heralded the arrival of a major new talent, in my opinion.

There you have it. The usual disclaimers, this is my opinion only, does not represent a scientific study, and no animals were harmed in the writing of this post.
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The Dead Path

The most over-used cover blurb in horror fiction is some version of “The next Stephen King!” There’s good reason for this, as King is the all-time horror sales reader, and is still hitting the best-seller lists 35 years after his debut, but the only Stephen King is still the original. Horror readers have learned to wince and ignore the hyperbole, which has to have been used with half the published horror writers over the years, and it has become pretty much of a joke, and most reviewers who want to be taken seriously have learned to avoid the comparison. I bring this up because I’m about to do it myself, as far as I can remember for the first time, with the debut novel of Australian author Stephen M. Irwin, The Dead Path.

Nicholas Close is an Australian expatriate living a good life in London. He’s got a good job, buying antiques to use in design for restaurants, and is in love with his wife, Cate. A tragic combination of accidents ends his dream, as Cate is killed, and he is left with an unwanted ability: to see the dead. His is not a hip, useful ability to converse with the spirits of the dead and gone, but a debilitating one. If he is where a death has occurred, he sees the person’s demise, repeated over and over again, including that of his wife. This destroys whatever chance he had of living a decent life in London (in such an old city, there probably aren’t too many locations where someone didn’t die at one time or another) and send him back to Australia, to his home town of Tallong and his distant mother.

Tallong presents more problems to Nicholas, as there is a patch of sinister woods near his old house mostly shunned by locals. When Nicholas was a boy, he and his best friend were chased through those woods by a killer. Nicholas escaped; his friend was found days later with his throat cut. This event is brought to the forefront of his mind upon his return when he learns another boy has died in similar fashion in the same woods. Haunted and with time on his hands, Nicholas learns children have been killed in a similar fashion for over a hundred years. Something ancient and evil lurks in those dark woods, and it has long had plans for him. He learns his past is more intertwined with those dark experiences than he could have imagined, and he may very well be the only one who can stop them.

I was riveted by this novel. It is the best horror novel I have read this year, and time will tell how high it ranks with me overall. Irwin has a smooth assured style, very much so for a first time novelist, and the book has a narrative flow that has become somewhat rare these days. I hate to make the comparison, but The Dead Path reminds me of nothing so much as early-to-mid period Stephen King, and in all the right ways. Transplant the location from Australia to King’s Maine, and it would fit in well with the better part of his body of work. If you like Stephen King, and if you read horror you probably do, I can’t imagine you wouldn’t like The Dead Path. I loved it, and I will be eager to see what Mr. Irwin writes next. A hat tip to my friend Matt Staggs for this one.

A lot has been made in recent months about the future of horror being found in the small press, but I have to say that most of the enjoyable new horror novels I’ve read in the past few months have come from mainstream publishers, with The Passage and The Fall joining The Dead Path on my tentative best of 2010 list.

If you live in the UK, The Dead Path was published there last year under the Bentley Little-ish title The Darkening. Normally, I think U.S. titles are somewhat dumbed down, but I think here The Dead Path is a superior title.

{Addition} As The Doctor points out in the comments, The Dead Path was the original title in Australia, it was changed to the more generic one in the UK. For no good reason, I think.
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