News & Blog

The nominees for the 2013 Shirley Jackson Awards have been announced, and I must say, the list looks fantastic! Longtime readers know I’ve been a strong proponent of the Shirley Jackson Awards since its inception. I even edited a special fundraiser anthology for them. Because they are a fully juried award, and the jurors tend to be respected authors and editors in the field, the Shirley Jackson Awards tend to display a lot more sophistication and taste — and a lot less cronyism — in their choice of nominees and winners than some other horror-based literary awards do. Such an approach leads to selections of real quality, and this year’s list of nominees is no exception. Behold!

NOVEL

• The Accursed, Joyce Carol Oates (Ecco)
• American Elsewhere, Robert Jackson Bennett (Orbit)
• The Demonologist, Andrew Pyper (Orion-UK/ Simon & Schuster-US)
• The Ghost Bride, Yangsze Choo (William Morrow)
• Night Film, Marisha Pessl (Random House)
• Wild Fell, Michael Rowe (ChiZine Publications)

NOVELLA

• Burning Girls, Veronica Schanoes (Tor.com)
• Children of No One, Nicole Cushing (DarkFuse)
• Helen’s Story, Rosanne Rabinowitz (PS Publishing)
• It Sustains, Mark Morris (Earthling Publications)
• “The Gateway,” Nina Allan (Stardust, PS Publishing)
• The Last Revelation of Gla’aki, Ramsey Campbell (PS Publishing)
• Whom the Gods Would Destroy, Brian Hodge (DarkFuse)

NOVELETTE

• Cry Murder! In a Small Voice, Greer Gilman (Small Beer Press)
• “A Little of the Night,” Tanith Lee (Clockwork Phoenix 4, Mythic Delirium Books)
• “My Heart is Either Broken,” Megan Abbott (Dangerous Women, Tor Books)
• “Phosphorus,” Veronica Schanoes (Queen Victoria’s Book of Spells: An Anthology of Gaslamp Fantasy, Tor Books)
• “Raptors,” Conrad Williams (Subterranean Press Magazine, Winter 2013)

SHORT FICTION

• “57 Reasons for the Slate Quarry Suicides,” Sam J. Miller (Nightmare Magazine, December 2013)
• “Furnace,” Livia Llewellyn (Grimscribe’s Puppets, Miskatonic River Press)
• “The Memory Book,” Maureen McHugh (Queen Victoria’s Book of Spells: An Anthology of Gaslamp Fantasy, Tor Books)
• “The Statue in the Garden,” Paul Park (Exotic Gothic 5, PS Publishing)
• “That Tiny Flutter of the Heart,” Robert Shearman (Psycho-Mania!, Constable & Robinson)
• “The Traditional,” Maria Dahvana Headley (Lightspeed, May 2013)

SINGLE-AUTHOR COLLECTION

• Before and Afterlives, Christopher Barzak (Lethe Press)
• Everything You Need, Michael Marshall Smith (Earthling Publications)
• In Search of and Others, Will Ludwigsen (Lethe Press)
• North American Lake Monsters, Nathan Ballingrud (Small Beer Press)
• The Story Until Now, Kit Reed (Wesleyan)

EDITED ANTHOLOGY

• The Book of the Dead, edited by Jared Shurin (Jurassic London)
• End of the Road, Jonathan Oliver (Solaris)
• Grimscribe’s Puppets, edited by Joseph S. Pulver, Sr. (Miskatonic River Press)
• Queen Victoria’s Book of Spells: An Anthology of Gaslamp Fantasy, edited by Ellen Datlow (Tor Books)
• Where thy Dark Eye Glances: Queering Edgar Allan Poe, edited by Steve Berman (Lethe Press)

The 2013 Shirley Jackson Awards will be presented at a ceremony on Sunday, July 13th at Readercon 25. Congrats and good luck to all the nominees! (But especially to my good friends Robert Jackson Bennett, Veronica Schanoes [twice over!], Livia Llewellyn, Robert Shearman, and Nathan Ballingrud!)

My article for the exemplary Nightmare Magazine, “The H Word: Hardboiled Horror,” is now available to read for free on their website. Here’s a snippet:

Some of the best authors of horror and dark fantasy have been utilizing noir for decades now. William Hjortsberg’s famous novel Falling Angel dates back to 1978 (and was adapted into the movie Angel Heart in 1987). It features a hardboiled private investigator, Harry Angel, who takes on a missing person case that turns into a phantasmagoria of ritual murders, voodoo, and Satanism. Peter Straub’s novels Koko and The Throat take a number of noir tropes—murder, amateur detectives, and a colossal distrust of the supposed rules of a civilized society—and mix them with a strong dose of psychological horror.

Click on through to read the whole thing. For free, even!

My article “Hardboiled Horror,” about the intersection of horror and noir, is featured in the April issue of Nightmare Magazine, the fabulous online horror and dark fantasy magazine edited by John Joseph Adams. Those of you with a subscription can read it now. Those of you without a subscription will have to wait until April 16th to read it online for free. For now, though, here’s a taste:

Consider the works of Poe, who saw nothing but the inevitability of death and decay in all human relationships. Or Lovecraft, who watched the frantic hubbub of our daily lives with the icy gaze of a disinterested spectator and told us nothing we did mattered. (“Life is a hideous thing,” Lovecraft wrote as the very first line of “Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family,” and if that’s not a noir sentiment, I don’t know what is.) In Shelley’s Frankenstein, the creature is the ultimate outsider. Everywhere he goes he is greeted with only hatred and fear, until finally he accepts this as the true dark, seething heart beneath society’s friendly façade. Once he embraces it by murdering Victor Frankenstein’s brother William, friend Henry Clerval, and wife Elizabeth, the creature becomes the very monster everyone thought him to be, and thus becomes an equal at last.

This issue also features stories by Dale Bailey, Nancy Etchemendy, Martin Cahill, and the mysteriously named Bones; Julia Sevin’s art showcase on digital artist Federico Bebber; and Lisa Morton’s author interview with Darren Shan. So if you haven’t subscribed yet, what are you waiting for? Nightmare Magazine is where it’s at!

The following press release from the Horror Writers Association (HWA) is about something I think is pretty cool. In fact, I’m tempted to call it the coolest thing the HWA has done in a long time. If I had one suggestion, though, I’d recommend opening the scholarship up to promising female writers outside the HWA, too. Then, if the winner turns out to not be a member of the HWA already, they could be awarded the scholarship as well as one year’s free membership.

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Starting from 2014 the Horror Writers Association (HWA) has instituted the Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Scholarship, open to female writers who are members of the HWA. The Scholarship is designed to address the unseen, but real, barriers limiting the amount of horror fiction being published by women.

The first Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Scholarship has been awarded to Erinn Kemper, a Canadian writer who resides in Costa Rica. Erinn Kemper (E. L. Kemper) grew up in an isolated mill town in coastal British Columbia, Canada. From there she moved to the city to study Philosophy at the University of Victoria. Over the years she’s worked as an eye glasses repair person, a fish farmer, a cabinet maker, a parks department laborer, a book store clerk, a home nurse, a teacher—and lived in a camper, in Japan and on a forty foot wooden sailboat. She now lives in a small town in Costa Rica on the Caribbean Sea where she plans to write her first novel from her hammock.

Erinn has sold stories to Cemetery Dance Magazine and [Nameless] Digest and appears in various anthologies including A Darke Phantastique and Chiral Mad 2. Visit her website at erinnkemper.com for updates and sloth sightings.

Erinn said, “I am honored and thrilled to be chosen to receive The Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Scholarship. I appreciate the opportunity to take some writing courses for the first time and to challenge myself to dig deeper and darker. It’s a wonderful thing that the HWA supports writers and invests in the future of the genre through mentoring and now with these scholarships! When it’s my turn I can’t wait to give back by offering my support as a mentor.”

HWA President Rocky Wood said, “We are proud to be the first genre writers’ organisation to present a scholarship specifically targeted to support the development of female authors.”

About the HWA

The Horror Writers Association is a worldwide organization promoting dark literature and its creators. It has over 1200 members who write, edit and publish professionally in fiction, nonfiction, videogames, films, comics, and other media. For more information about the HWA visit www.horror.org. Media inquiries to president@horror.org.