Okay, I’m a little late.
The winners of the 2008 Shirley Jackson Awards have already been announced. Honestly I didn’t even know of this award, now in its second year, until last week. However, I like what they’re doing so I’ll present the nominations over the next couple of days and then the winners. You’ll have a chance to see what kind of books were nominated and purchase one or five if the spirit moves you.
The Shirley Jackson Awards website describes the award this way:
In recognition of the legacy of Shirley Jackson’s writing, and with permission of the author’s estate, the Shirley Jackson Awards have been established for outstanding achievement in the literature of psychological suspense, horror, and the dark fantastic.
Today we’ll look at the first two category of awards: Novels and Novellas.
Remember, if you are interested in any of these books, click the mouse on the book cover or the store name to order them from an online bookseller.
Best Novel
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Alive in NecropolisAuthor: Dorst, Doug |
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Nominated for the 2008 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel A fresh, imaginative debut novel about a young police officer in northern California struggling to keep the peace — and maintain a grip on reality — in a town where the dead outnumber the living. Colma, California, is the only incorporated city in America where the dead outnumber the living. The longtime cemetery for San Francisco, it is the resting place of the likes of Joe DiMaggio, Wyatt Earp, and aviation pioneer Lincoln Beachey. It is also the home of Michael Mercer, a rookie cop trying to go by the book as he struggles to navigate a new realm of grownup relationships — including a shaky romance with an older woman; a growing alliance with his cocky, charismatic partner, Nick Toronto; fading college friendships; and an aching sense of responsibility for a local rich kid who Mercer rescues from a dangerous prank in the cemetery. But instead of settling comfortably into adult life, Mercer becomes obsessed with the mysterious fate of his predecessor in the police unit, Sergeant Featherstone, who seems to have become confused about whether he was policing the living or the dead. And as Mercer delves deeper into Featherstone’s story, it appears that Mercer’s own sanity is beginning to slip — either that, or Colma’s more famous residents are not resting in peace as they should be. With all the playful sensitivity of Haruki Murakami and the haunted atmosphere of Paul Auster, but with a voice all his own, Doug Dorst has crafted an irresistible, compelling debut. |
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The Man on the CeilingAuthor: Tem, Steve Rasnic and Melanie Tem |
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Nominated for the 2008 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel Two interwoven memoirs of love, loss, and family with a haunted, frightening edge. In 2000, American Fantasy Press published an unassuming chapbook titled The Man on the Ceiling. Inside was a dark, surreal, discomfiting story of the horrors that can befall a family. It was so powerful that it won the Bram Stoker Award, International Horror Guild Award, and World Fantasy Award — the only work ever to win all three. Now, Melanie Tem and Steve Rasnic Tem have re-imagined the story, expanding on the ideas to create a compelling work that examines how people find a family, how they hold a family together despite incomprehensible tragedy, and how, in the end, they find love. Loosely autobiographical, The Man on the Ceiling has the feel of a family portrait painted by Salvador Dali, where story and reality blend to find the one thing that neither can offer alone: truth. |
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PandemoniumAuthor: Gregory, Daryl |
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Nominated for the 2008 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel It is a world like our own in every respect . . . save one. In the 1950s, random acts of possession begin to occur. Ordinary men, women, and children are the targets of entities that seem to spring from the depths of the collective unconscious, pop-cultural avatars some call demons. There’s the Truth, implacable avenger of falsehood. The Captain, brave and self-sacrificing soldier. The Little Angel, whose kiss brings death, whether desired or not. And a string of others, ranging from the bizarre to the benign to the horrific. As a boy, Del Pierce is possessed by the Hellion, an entity whose mischief-making can be deadly. With the help of Del’s family and a caring psychiatrist, the demon is exorcised . . . or is it? Years later, following a car accident, the Hellion is back, trapped inside Del’s head and clamoring to get out. Del’s quest for help leads him to Valis, an entity possessing the science fiction writer formerly known as Philip K. Dick; to Mother Mariette, a nun who inspires decidedly unchaste feelings; and to the Human League, a secret society devoted to the extermination of demons. All believe that Del holds the key to the plague of possession — and its solution. But for Del, the cure may be worse than the disease. |
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The ResurrectionistAuthor: O’Connell, Jack |
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Nominated for the 2008 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel Gritty noir fiction, mind-bending fantasy, and medical thriller combine in a new novel by an author dubbed the “cyberpunk Dashiell Hammett.” Sweeney is a druggist by trade; Danny, his son, is in a persistent coma, the victim of an accident. Hoping for a miracle, they have come to the Peck Clinic, a fortress-like haven in a post-industrial city overrun by gangs. Doctors there claim to have resurrected two patients who were similarly lost in the void. Gradually, Sweeney realizes that the cure for his son’s condition may lie in “Limbo,” a fantasy comicbook world into which Danny had been drawn at the time of his accident. Plunged into the intrigue that surrounds the clinic, Sweeney searches for answers and instead finds sinister back alleys, brutal dead ends, and terrifying rabbit holes of mystery. Full of puzzles and surprises, The Resurrectionist is a surreal, gothic meditation on identity, the nature of consciousness, the power of stories, love, mad scientists, circus freaks, and ultimately forgiveness—both giving and receiving. |
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The Shadow YearAuthor: Ford, Jeffrey |
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Nominated for the 2008 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel Jeffrey Ford’s writing has been compared to Kafka, Dante, and Caleb Carr. In this powerful tale he turns his talents to nostalgia and youth, bringing the optimism and dark underbelly of 1960s small-town suburbia to life. The Shadow Year is a time marked by strange events for one particular Long Island sixth grader: a classmate disappears; a man in a large white car appears; a peeping tom prowls the neighborhood; the school librarian goes crazy. The narrator and his older brother, Jim, keep track of these events in “Botch Town,” a neighborhood of cardboard houses and clay figures that they build in their basement. But then the brothers realize that their younger sister, Mary, is secretly rearranging the clay figures — changes that are soon reflected in actual events. With the help of their sister, the brothers investigate the disappearance of a neighborhood boy and make a discovery that will cast a long shadow across their lives. |
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Tender MorselsAuthor: Lanagan, Margo |
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Nominated for the 2008 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel Tender Morsels is a dark and vivid story, set in two worlds and worrying at the border between them. Liga lives modestly in her own personal heaven, a world given to her in exchange for her earthly life. Her two daughters grow up in this soft place, protected from the violence that once harmed their mother. But the real world cannot be denied forever — magicked men and wild bears break down the borders of Liga’s refuge. Now, having known Heaven, how will these three women survive in a world where beauty and brutality lie side by side? |
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Best Novella
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DisquietAuthor: Leigh, Julia |
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Nominated for the 2008 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novella Olivia arrives at her mother’s chateau in rural France (the first time in more than a decade) with her two young children in tow. Soon the family is joined by Olivia’s brother Marcus and his wife Sophie — but this reunion is far from joyful. After years of desperately wanting a baby, Sophie has just given birth to a stillborn child, and she is struggling to overcome her devastation. Meanwhile, Olivia wrestles with her own secrets about the cruel and violent man she married many years before. Exquisitely written and reminiscent of Ian McEwan and J. M. Coetzee, Disquiet is a darkly beautiful and atmospheric story that will linger in the mind long after the final page is turned. |
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“Dormitory”Collected in The Diving Pool: Three Novellas |
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Nominated for the 2008 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novella The first major English translation of one of contemporary Japan’s bestselling and most celebrated authors From Akutagawa Award-winning author Yoko Ogawa comes a haunting trio of novellas about love, fertility, obsession, and how even the most innocent gestures may contain a hairline crack of cruel intent. “The Diving Pool” — A lonely teenage girl falls in love with her foster brother as she watches him leap from a high diving board into a pool–a peculiar infatuation that sends unexpected ripples through her life. “Pregnancy Diary” — A young woman records the daily moods of her pregnant sister in a diary, taking meticulous note of a pregnancy that may or may not be a hallucination — but whose hallucination is it, hers or her sister’s? “Dormitory” — A woman nostalgically visits her old college dormitory on the outskirts of Tokyo, a boarding house run by a mysterious triple amputee with one leg. Hauntingly spare, beautiful, and twisted, The Diving Pool is a disquieting and at times darkly humorous collection of novellas about normal people who suddenly discover their own dark possibilities. Table of Contents:
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Living With the DeadAuthor: Schweitzer, Darrell |
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Nominated for the 2008 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novella The dead come from the sea, at night. They merely arrive and are discovered in the morning on the wharves, lying in great heaps. It has been the immemorial custom for people to take them into their homes, to find places for them, to pattern their increasingly cluttered lives around the growing accumulation of corpses. No one knows why, although it is the irresistible decree of the Unseen Government that the order of things must be preserved, at all costs. Old and young must participate, and carry away the dead, on bicycles, in carts, on their backs if need be. It has always been so. It always will be so. This isn’t Hell, or an Afterlife, just a place, a fog-shrouded, tradition-stifled town without a name, where the dead are accommodated at the expense of the living, where the established way of life has become a grotesque absurdity, and a few brave or foolish or deviant souls struggle to find some meaning, and perhaps unravel the mystery of the dead. On the knife-edge of horror and dark comedy, like an improbable collaboration between Franz Kafka and Clive Barker, this book is a brilliant departure, even for the author of The Mask of the Sorceror. |
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The Long Trial of Nolan DugattiAuthor: Jones, Stephen Graham |
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Nominated for the 2008 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novella If there’s a line between the real and the digital, between meat and the game, between past and present, then hold this book close to your mouth and whisper it into the pages. Please. Maybe the kid in there’ll hear you. His name is Nolan Dugatti. He’s lost, see, running down hall after hall, something both ancient and not-yet born galloping up behind him on a hundred legs, each individual footfall a sound he knows, a way of shuffling that he’s always known. His father? Except it can’t be. Unless of course this is another novel from Stephen Graham Jones. Not quite horror, not quite science fiction, but like his five or six other books, a story trembling at some pupal stage between meat and the game, where words will sometimes stop their crawl across the page and crane their neck around at the sky, nod about what they see there — you — then unfold their wings, drift up into another world altogether. |
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“N.”Collected in Just After Sunset |
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Nominated for the 2008 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novella Stephen King — who has written more than fifty books, dozens of number one New York Times bestsellers, and many unforgettable movies — delivers an astonishing collection of short stories, his first since Everything’s Eventual six years ago. As guest editor of the bestselling Best American Short Stories 2007, King spent over a year reading hundreds of stories. His renewed passion for the form is evident on every page of Just After Sunset. The stories in this collection have appeared in The New Yorker, Playboy, McSweeney’s, The Paris Review, Esquire, and other publications. Who but Stephen King would turn a Port-O-San into a slimy birth canal, or a roadside honky-tonk into a place for endless love? A book salesman with a grievance might pick up a mute hitchhiker, not knowing the silent man in the passenger seat listens altogether too well. Or an exercise routine on a stationary bicycle, begun to reduce bad cholesterol, might take its rider on a captivating — and then terrifying — journey. Set on a remote key in Florida, “The Gingerbread Girl” is a riveting tale featuring a young woman as vulnerable — and resourceful — as Audrey Hepburn’s character in Wait Until Dark. In “Ayana,” a blind girl works a miracle with a kiss and the touch of her hand. For King, the line between the living and the dead is often blurry, and the seams that hold our reality intact might tear apart at any moment. In one of the longer stories here, “N.,” which recently broke new ground when it was adapted as a graphic digital entertainment, a psychiatric patient’s irrational thinking might create an apocalyptic threat in the Maine countryside . . . or keep the world from falling victim to it. Just After Sunset — call it dusk, call it twilight, it’s a time when human intercourse takes on an unnatural cast, when nothing is quite as it appears, when the imagination begins to reach for shadows as they dissipate to darkness and living daylight can be scared right out of you. It’s the perfect time for Stephen King. |
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