Sunday, October 30, 2022

The Shirley Jackson Awards, for work published in 2021:

 ***indicates the winner

to see video of the ceremony: https://www.facebook.com/shirleyjacksonawards

https://www.shirleyjacksonawards.org/

NOVEL

All the Murmuring Bones by A.G. Slatter (Titan Books)

Hummingbird Salamander by Jeff VanderMeer (MCD)

***My Heart Is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones (Saga Press-US/Titan Books-UK)

No Gods, No Monsters by Cadwell Turnbull (Blackstone Publishing-US/Titan Books-UK)

Nothing But Blackened Teeth by Cassandra Khaw (Nightfire-US/Titan Books-UK)

NOVELLA

Comfort Me with Apples by Catherynne M. Valente (Tordotcom)

Dirty Heads: A novella of cosmic coming-of-age horror by Aaron Dries (Black T-Shirt Books)

***Flowers for the Sea by Zin E. Rocklyn (Tordotcom)

A Rose / Arose by Michael Bailey (Written Backwards)

The Route of Ice and Salt by José Luis Zárate, translated by David Bowles (Innsmouth Free Press)

NOVELETTE

House of Crows by Lisa Unger (Amazon Original Stories)

“The Nag Bride” by A.C. Wise (The Ghost Sequences, Undertow Publications)

The Night Belongs to Us by Jess Landry (Independent Legions Publishing)

***“We, the Girls Who Did Not Make It” by E. A. Petricone (Nightmare Magazine, February 2021)

The Women by Margaret Jameson (F(r)iction)

SHORT FICTION

“Dizzy in the Weeds” by L.D. Lewis (Unfettered Hexes: Queer Tales of Insatiable Darkness)

“Forward, Victoria” by Carlie St. George (The Dark Magazine, April 2021)

“Gordon B. White is Creating Haunting Weird Horror” by Gordon B. White (Nightmare Magazine, July 2021)

“Human Reason” by Nicasio Andres Reed (Unfettered Hexes: Queer Tales of Insatiable Darkness)

***“You’ll Understand When You’re a Mom Someday” by Isabel J. Kim (khōréō magazine, August 2021)

 SINGLE-AUTHOR COLLECTION

***Folk Songs for Trauma Surgeons: Stories by Keith Rosson (Meerkat Press)

People from My Neighborhood by Hiromi Kawakami, translated by Ted Goossen (Soft Skull Press)

Sometimes We’re Cruel by J.A.W. McCarthy (Cemetery Gates Media)

We are Happy, We are Doomed by Kurt Fawver (Grimscribe Press)

Where All is Night, and Starless by John Linwood Grant (Trepidatio Publishing)

EDITED ANTHOLOGY--a tied vote, thus two winners

Giving The Devil His Due: A Charity Anthology, edited by Rebecca Brewer (Running Wild Press)

***Professor Charlatan Bardot’s Travel Anthology to the Most (Fictional) Haunted Buildings in the Weird, Wild World, edited by Eric J. Guignard (Dark Moon Books)

Stitched Lips: An Anthology of Horror from Silenced Voices, edited by Ken MacGregor (Dragon’s Roost Press)

There Is No Death, There Are No Dead, edited by Jess Landry & Aaron J. French (Crystal Lake Publishing)

***Unfettered Hexes: Queer Tales of Insatiable Darkness, edited by dave ring (Neon Hemlock)

SPECIAL AWARD

The Shirley Jackson Awards, Inc., also is committed to promoting the legacy of Shirley Jackson and, as part of this mission, will present a Special Award to Ms. Ellen Datlow in recognition of the anthology When Things Get Dark: Stories inspired by Shirley Jackson (Titan Books, 2021).

Ms. Datlow was a nominee for the Shirley Jackson Award for Edited Anthology for the years 2011, 2013 (with Terri Windling), 2015, 2017, and 2019, and won the award in this category for the years 2007, 2009, and 2014.

Previous recipients of a Special Award from the Shirley Jackson Awards are Joyce Carol Oates as editor of the Library of America edition of Shirley Jackson:  Novels & Stories (Library of America, 2010) and Ruth Franklin in recognition of her biography Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (Liveright/W.W. Norton, 2016).


Friday, October 28, 2022

King Kong, the 1968? pillow

 One face:

The other face:


Purchased for me, whether or not at my urging I have no memory, presumably sometime around 1968, when I had seen some number of runs of King Kong, which had had no few public-domain prints circulating, on local tv broadcasts...I had seen the film about ten times, at least, by the time I was six years old (in '7o), and have no clear memory of Not having this pillow around. Presumably my mother sewed up a part of it for me, after rough treatment and/or the Cheena River flood (in Fairbanks, Alaska) in 1967 caused it some damage. That such a pillow was mass-produced sometime in the mid-late '60s gives some indication of how much a Very Young audience was taken with KK in those years, if the KK/Gojira film and similar ripoffs and the 1960s cartoon series and other similar ripoffs in that arena didn't make that clear. 

Have you had anything Rosebud-esque that has managed to survive a similar passage, so far?