The Year’s Best Horror Stories was a series of annual anthologies published by DAW Books in the U.S. from 1972 to 1994 under the successive editorships of Richard Davis from 1972 to 1975 (after a 1971-1973 series published by Sphere Books in the U.K.; the first volumes had the same contents, the U.S. second volume in 1974 drew stories from the second and third U.K. volumes, and the 1975 U.S. third volume was very different from the U.K's.; the U.S. third volume was published as a one-shot volume in the U.K. by Orbit Books in 1976), and of Gerald W. Page from 1976 to 1979, and Karl Edward Wagner from 1980 to 1994. The series was discontinued after Wagner's death. It was a companion to DAW’s The Annual World’s Best SF and The Year's Best Fantasy Stories, which performed a similar function for the science fiction and fantasy fields.
Each annual volume reprinted what in the opinion of the editor was the best horror short fiction appearing in the previous year. The series also aimed to discover and nurture new talent. It featured both occasionally recurring authors and writers new to the horror genre. Veterans among the contributing authors included Brian Lumley, Eddy C. Bertin, Kit Reed, R. Chetwynd-Hayes, Ramsey Campbell, Dennis Etchison, Richard Matheson, Robert Bloch, and Tanith Lee; some of the relative newcomers to the field featured were Stephen King, Al Sarrantonio, Lisa Tuttle, Jessica Amanda Salmonson, David Drake, Juleen Brantingham, and Nina Kiriki Hoffman.