Back in 1995, Rob and Bill had the suspicion that a specific yearly 'best of' style collection was possible in the Australian market. Bill had just undertaken a major rewrite of the Sean McMullen & Steve Paulsen article published in Aurealis 14, 'The Hunt for Australian Horror' for the US magazine, Scream Factory. ('The Hunt for Australian Horror Fiction', Scream Factory 16, 1995) The oft lamented Aussie horror magazine Bloodsongs was at its peak, the Aurealis Awards had just got going, and we had a year in which an extraordinary amount of good Australian horror fiction was being published in a variety of venues. We decided to go ahead with Bonescribes. Even then, we were forced to exclude the two best stories of the year: 'Scaring the Train,' by Terry Dowling, which had only just been published by MirrorDanse in The Man Who Lost Red, and the novella Olympia, by Francis Payne, published as a chapbook by Bambada. Both were simply too long to include in Bonescribes, but we wish they could have been included. Olympia is sadly gone, unless you can find Chris Masters or Steve Proposch at a convention and beg a copy. 'Scaring the Train' was included in Antique Futures: The Best of Terry Dowling, published by Eidolon, which is sadly also out of print. It was also included in the Datlow & Windling, and Stephen Jones 'Year's Best' anthologies for that year, which should be available through your local library.

We had intended to continue with the Year's Best concept, but the following two years saw the publication of the Jonathan Strahan/Jeremy Byrne Year's Best Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy anthologies from Harper Collins, and those editors included horror fiction in their scope. All the good stories had already been taken.

We were left with a 'Year's Best' for the year 1995. An anthology stranded in time, but a damned fine one! Look at the authors: Stephen Dedman, Garry Disher, K. J. McKenzie, Francis Payne, Leanne Frahm, Renny Willins, Carmel Bird, Robert Hood, and Bill Congreve under his rarely used pseudonym of Jacci Olson. Some of the finest genre and literary writers in the country. The essay: 'A History of Australian Horror' went on to win the William J. Atheling award for genre criticism.

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