2019. The year certainly made its mark on the world - and more than its share of scars. It also made for a bounty of good horror stories of the extreme kind, the best of which the tales herein serve to illustrate. 

2019 was the year Year's Best Hardcore Horror went global. Not by design but because the stories inside just happened to have been written by authors hailing from various parts of the globe. From Australia by way of South Africa, to Italy, Scotland, Norway, Taiwan, North America and India - the common denominator being that their tales come from darkest regions of imagination.   

Table of contents: 

"Going Global: Introduction" by Randy Chandler and Cheryl Mullenax 

"Feast for Small Pieces" by Hailey Piper 

"Goddess of Gallows" by Kristopher Triana 

"Late Night Incident at the White Trash Motel" by Duane Bradley 

"A New Mother’s Guide to Raising an Abomination" by Gwendolyn Kiste 

"Upper Crust" by Michael Paul Gonzalez 

"Redless" by Annie Neugebauer 

"A Touch of Madness" by Tim Waggoner 

"Paradisum Voluptatis" by Joanna Koch 

"Radix Malorum" by Sean Patrick Hazlett 

"Lackers" by Leo X. Roberson 

"Why Do Birds Suddenly Appear?" by Rajiv Moté 

"Darjeeling" by Syon Das 

"Mrsa Me" by Alicia Hilton 

"What Did You Do to The Children?" by David L Tamarin 

"Have a Heart" by Matthew V. Brockmeyer 

"Swings and Suspensions" by D.A. Xiaolin Spires 

"Kirti" by Alessandro Manzetti 

"The Tea and Sugar Train" by Deborah Sheldon 

"Screams for Stargirl" by Ben Pienaar 

"Queer Weather" by Scáth Beorh