The Shirley Jackson Awards finalists have just been announced and PS Publishing and Tor take top spots with four nominations each.
UPDATE: If you count Joe Hill’s story from Postscripts magazine, PS Publishing ends up with five noms.
The awards, established for outstanding achievement in the literature of psychological suspense, horror, and the dark fantastic will be presented on Sunday, July 20th 2008, at Readercon 19, Conference on Imaginative Literature, in Burlington, Massachusetts.
In recognition of the legacy of Shirley Jackson’s writing, and with permission of the author’s estate, The Shirley Jackson Awards were created by a group of like-minded individuals, however who those individuals are is being kept mum by awards administrator JoAnn F. Cox.
As for why we need another award, I found some answers on the Shirley Jackson Award Blog:
Over the last few years, dark fiction has returned, and is even popping up on the best-seller lists. Big publishers are paying attention, and acquiring titles they wouldn’t have touched with ten-foot poles in the 90s and early 00’s. Dark fiction is getting serious critical attention. The New York Times’ Book Review initiated a semi-annual column devoted to horror. So, now seemed like a good time to start an award honoring those works of fiction that would likely be overlooked by Booker Awards and Pen-Faulkner Awards as well as Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards, but whose merit, often brilliance, is undeniable.
And so, the Shirley Jackson Awards. Ms. Jackson’s work represents everything we seek in our nominees. Smart, dark, and able to tread the line between psychological and visceral with aplomb. Not only was her short story “The Lottery” published in The New Yorker, but it also elicited the most hate mail that magazine has ever received. Now that’s a writer.
Shirley Jackson (1916-1965) wrote such classic novels as The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle and National Book Critics Circle Award-winning novelist Jonathan Lethem has called Jackson “one of this century’s most luminous and strange American writers.”
The nominees for the 2007 Shirley Jackson Awards are listed after the jump.
NOVEL
Baltimore, Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden (Bantam Spectra)
Generation Loss, Elizabeth Hand (Small Beer Press)
Sharp Teeth, Toby Barlow (William Heinemann Ltd)
The Terror, Dan Simmons (Little, Brown)
Tokyo Year Zero, David Peace (Knopf)
NOVELLA
“12 Collections,” Zoran Zivkovic (PS Publishing)
“Illyria,” Elizabeth Hand (PS Publishing)
“The Mermaids,” Robert Edric (PS Publishing)
“Procession of the Black Sloth,” Laird Barron (The Imago Sequence and Other Stories, Night Shade Books)
“The Scalding Rooms,” Conrad Williams (PS Publishing)
“Vacancy,†Lucius Shepard (Subterranean #7, September 2007)
NOVELETTE
“The Forest,” Laird Barron (Inferno, Tor)
“The Janus Tree,” Glen Hirshberg (Inferno, Tor)
“The Swing,” Don Tumasonis (At Ease with the Dead, Ash-Tree Press)
“The Tenth Muse,” William Browning Spencer (Subterranean #6, February 2007)
“Thumbprint,†Joe Hill (Postscripts #10, March 2007)
SHORT STORY
“Holiday,” M. Rickert (Subterranean #7, September 2007)
“The Monsters of Heaven,” Nathan Ballingrud (Inferno, Tor)
“A Murder of Crows,” Elizabeth Ziemska (Tin House 31, Spring 2007)
“Something in the Mermaid Way,” Carrie Laben (Clarkesworld, March 2007)
“The Third Bear,” Jeff VanderMeer (Clarkesworld, April 2007)
“Unique Chicken Goes in Reverse,” Andy Duncan (Eclipse One, Night Shade Books)
COLLECTION
The Bone Key, Sarah Monette (Prime Books)
The Entire Predicament, Lucy Corin (Tin House)
The Imago Sequence and Other Stories, Laird Barron (Night Shade Books)
Like You’d Understand, Anyway, Jim Shepard (Knopf)
Old Devil Moon, Christopher Fowler (Serpent’s Tail)
ANTHOLOGY
At Ease with the Dead, edited by Barbara and Christopher Roden (Ash-Tree Press)
Dark Delicacies 2, edited by Del Howison and Jeff Gelb (Running Press)
Inferno (Tor), edited by Ellen Datlow (Tor)
Logorrhea, edited by John Klima (Bantam Spectra)
Wizards, edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois (Berkley)