The Shirley Jackson Awards Blog

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2010-07-13T12:18:00.000-07:00

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Karen Maitland Interview (with Charles Tan)

2010-07-12T08:37:00.000-07:00

Karen Maitland

Hi! Thanks for agreeing to do the interview. In your novels, superstition and paranoia are key elements in the conflict. What made you decide to tackle these themes?

I have always been fascinated with how religion, or a belief in the supernatural, shapes our lives. It brings out both extremes of human behaviour. Think of the extraordinary lives of self-sacrifice and service which religions can inspire. Yet, faith can also bring out the very worst in humans, so many conflicts and atrocities throughout history have been committed in the name of religion and through superstition as well. Communities have cruelly murdered innocent people because of a superstitious belief that an albino child can bring the evil eye, or someone who looks too healthy might be a vampire.

In Middle Ages if you were born poor and without power, religion or magic could give you power. If you became a priest, a shaman, a toadsman or a horse whisperer, you could gain power over your community and that is still true today in many countries. In The Owl Killers the Church has the power of life or death over people, as well as holding the keys to the next world, but equally the pagan cult of the toadsmen, the Owl Masters, use superstition and magic to wield control over the villagers.

Even in this modern scientific age, in times of crisis and uncertainty, we are desperate to gain some measure of control over our lives. Sales of lucky charms, tarot cards and people consulting mediums shoot up when there is an economic crisis. There is currently a huge interest in angels, vampires and ghosts reflected in TV and books. People today claim not to be superstitious yet you only have to look at the little rituals most of us perform around sporting events or lottery draws or job interviews to know, there is still a part of us that hopes that by crossing our fingers, clutching a lucky mascot or wearing our lucky underpants we can influence events which are beyond our control.

I love the old saying which goes – “Just because I’m paranoid, doesn’t mean they’re not out to get me.” In my novels Company of Liars and The Owl Killers, both individuals and the groups are driven by fear.

I’m fascinated by how people react when they are afraid. Not just isolated moments of fear, but a threat that continues to build day after day. I had a glimmer of that living in Nigeria during a bloody civil war. I experienced the terror of lying awake every night listening the talking drums and knowing that any moment I might be attacked. Soldiers in prolonged combat are only too well aware of the effects of prolonged fear.

We react to fear and threat no differently now than we did centuries ago. In recent years we’ve seen modern communities, when faced with the threat of HIV Aids, Bird Flu and Swine Flu, behave exactly as they did in the Middle Ages over the plague. Ordinary decent people will do desperate things when they are terrified and I think most of us are capable of doing things through fear that, when we are in our right minds, would appall us.

For me the effects of fear, both on individuals and communities, is one of the most interesting things to explore in fiction, because it reveals the dark-side of the soul which lurks beneath the civilised surface in most of us.

I read in an interview that you're dyslexic. How has dylexia aided you--and challenged you--when it comes to writing fiction?

Curiously many well-known actors and novelists are dyslexic. There is a much higher proportion in these professions than in the population as a whole. Dyslexics seem to be hard-wired to become fascinated, even obsessed, by words.

Dyslexia is one of greatest gifts a writer or actor could be given. It allows you to make unusual or even unique links between words, patterns and rhythms in language. Your brain weirdly connects unrelated words and images.

Like many dyslexics, I taught myself to read and write as if the written word was an entirely separate language which had no connection to spoken English. So I learned to tell to stories rather than write them. Now when I approach a novel, it’s as if I am telling a story to a friend, rather than writing on the page. Of course, I do write it down. (I don’t dictate it or use a ghost-writer, as some people imagine.) I write straight into a computer, but the story appears first as a series of visual images in my head. I see the scenes played out in my mind. I hear the voices of the characters as if I am in that place with them. I smell the vegetation, and feel the heat of the sun on my skin. I hope this helps readers to experience the scene rather than simply read about.

Grown up with dyslexia made me conscious of being different. Like most novelists I tend to write about people who are slightly at odds with the world in which they find themselves. After all, if you wrote about Mr and Mrs Average who were well-adjusted, perfectly happy, respectable citizens, they would be the most boring characters in the world to read about. So for various reasons – race, disability, sexual orientation, beliefs – my characters inhabit the margins of society. They are the outsiders looking in and in effect that is exactly what a reader is doing when they read a novel.

What made you decide to write novels? What is it about the format that appeals to you?

I was a strange little child who loved going to bed and insisted on having all the lights put out. In total darkness I could tell myself stories and disappear into the worlds I created, without the ‘real world’ interrupting me. I’d invent people whose adventures would continue episode after episode for weeks. Even at that age I think I knew that there was something wonderful about creating characters who’d start off under the author’s control, but eventually come alive and do things the author never expected of them.

When I was a little older, I had a tiny radio I’d smuggle into bed and listen plays such as the Mystery of Black Tor and other chillers, all totally unsuitable for a young child. Having only sounds to work from really fired my imagination. So writing novels is only an extension of a childhood game.

There is often more truth to be found in fiction than you would ever find in any non-fiction book. Non-fiction only teaches facts, and fact and truth are not the same thing. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, is an enthralling adventure, but along the way the reader is able to explore and learn far more about themselves and about human behaviour – greed, love, loyalty, leadership, the effects of power – than you find in any psychology textbook. I think this is why most religious leaders have used stories to communicate and since ancient times, folk tales have taught us how to deal with the challenges of life.

In Company of Liars, I used the format that is one of the oldest forms of art known to man, a narrator who sits down and tells his audience or in this case the readers, about their life and adventures. In The Owl Killers, I employ five first person narrators, who each weave their stories through each other like whispers in the dark. They have different interpretations of the same events, and believe different truths, as people do in real life. But in both novels, the narrators, like any storyteller, constantly throw the tale open to the reader and asks the reader – what do you make of this? What do you bring to this tale?

The thrill and joy of any novel is that it is a unique reading experience for each individual reader. No two readers read the same story, because only half the story is written by the author, the other half is completed by the reader who brings their own unique experiences, personalities and imagination to it. In contrast, non-fiction is set up to say – this is how it is; take or leave it.

In the Middle Ages, people didn’t divide things into real and unreal, fact and fiction in the way we do now. Angels and demons, werewolves and sea monsters were as much part of everyday life in their minds, as cooking beans and ploughing the fields. They saw stories in the stars and omens in the flames of the fire or the way a bird flew across the sky. It is that way of looking at life I want to get back in my novels, the old tradition of telling a story where we don’t ask – Did it really happen? Could it really happen? – but one which each reader finds their own personal space to explore what the tale and the characters mean to them. Truth, not fact.

Dale Bailey and Nathan Ballingrud Interview (with Charles Tan)

2010-07-12T08:34:00.000-07:00

Dale Bailey and Nathan Ballingrud

Hi! Thanks for agreeing to do the interview. First off, how did the two of you end up collaborating on "The Crevasse"? What were the challenges in such a collaboration?

Dale: We were sitting out on my deck lamenting the fact that neither of us were going to make the deadline for Lovecraft Unbound, when one us--can't remember who--suggested trying to write a story together to meet the deadline, which was mere days away. Nathan was only staying that night, so we spent the rest of the evening talking through the story, roughing out the scenes, and then divvying them up. By the time Nathan left we had a draft which we then refined over email.

Working with Nathan was terrific. There were few challenges at all, to be honest. We both tend to be territorial with our prose but we were able to compromise enough on the language to create a unified draft.

Nathan: Collaborating was Dale's suggestion. He had this idea -- an enormous stairway descending into the ice -- and suggested we try to write the thing together in a day. I was skeptical at first; I'd never collaborated, and wasn't sure it was something I could comfortably do. As Dale mentioned, we tend to be pretty strong-willed and proprietary when it comes to our writing. But the idea was cool enough, and our aesthetics are similar enough, that I wanted to give it a shot. We talked through the story that night and spent all of the next day writing it. It was an invigorating experience. We each know what the other brings to the table, and I think we tried to raise our game a little bit in an effort not to be outdone. Despite having blocked out the scenes the night previously, we still managed throw a few curveballs in there to surprise each other. It was a lot of fun, and I hope we do it again.

How has Lovecraft influenced your fiction?

Dale: Indirectly. What appeals to me is his vision of the cosmos--that human beings are tiny, not very important inhabitants of an infinite and uncaring universe. Lovecraft, I think, occasionally goes further and depicts a universe that is actively malign, but I think that's a step too far. It assigns too much moral agency to forces that are infinite and vast but essentially impersonal physical laws. Yet I think his concept of Elder Gods provides an interesting metaphor to get at those ideas.

Nathan: I agree with Dale here. It's indirect. But Lovecraft has influenced dark fiction more profoundly, I think, than any other writer of the last hundred years, and I genuinely believe we all feel his influence whether we're aware of it or not. What I like most about his work is the antagonistic stance he takes towards the reader. His stories are an assault on our myths of comfort. He is actively trying to stir unease -- not just on the surface level, for as long as it takes to read the story, but fundamentally, in the place where you define yourself and your role in the universe. Lovecraft is the most ambitious fantasy writer still being read.

The plight of the sled dog is, I think, the key to the emotional impact of the story. What made you decide to focus on the sled dog?

Dale: I don't know that it was a conscious decision. I think Garner's wartime experience and the loss of his wife are important also--the dog makes a nice metaphor for that, and his attempt to rescue it, in my mind, is an attempt to reclaim some sense of humanity and compassion in a random uncaring universe. But people react emotionally in powerful ways to dogs. In my first novel, I had a scene where a man discovers that his dogs have been deliberately killed and that's the scene people latch onto as most disturbing, despite the fact that several human beings also die in relatively unpleasant ways. Emotionally, I get this: I have a dog and it would be fairly devastating if something happened to her. Intellectually, though, it mystifies me. I think it might be the absolute trust dogs have in us, and the unconditional affection they offer--qualities we can't get in any human relationship--so any cruelty to them strikes as a violation of that unconditional trust and love and is thus particularly disturbing.

Nathan: Again, I find myself agreeing with Dale here. I think the dog functioned as a metaphor. To me, the story is about Garner's loss of himself in the war, the loss of his wife in a way that did not allow him to grieve at her side, and the hole that left inside him. It's the abrupt cancellation of everything he believed in, all at once. When the dog fell into the crevasse, I feel Garner invested it with all of that freight. Under any normal circumstance, I don't think he would have risked himself and the safety of the others on such a desperate impulse. But he had to believe, I think, that it was still possible to save something. It was his last grab at hope.

Stephen Volk Interview (with Charles Tan)

2010-07-12T08:30:00.000-07:00

Stephen Volk

Hi! Thanks for agreeing to do the interview. How did you settle on the plot--and title--of Vardøger?

(Warning: Contains spoilers!) The start point came from two directions really. Firstly, the simple idea of a hotel booking mistake that seems innocuous enough to start with, then people recognise you in a place you've never been to before and you start to think you're going crazy. But I didn't know where that goes, ultimately, until I thought, completely unrelatedly, about the British serial killer Peter Sutcliffe (The "Yorkshire Ripper") who is still in Broadmoor secure mental hospital to this day, I believe, after killing several woman, mostly (but not all) prostitutes. I wondered how a person like that stands up in court and faces the reality of their crimes. Well, maybe they don't face the reality, I thought. Maybe they completely blank it out and create a different reality in their heads, one they can live with, of an ordinary job and a happy marriage and family life, which is a total fabrication. And say, part of that fabrication was thinking Broadmoor is actually a luxury hotel? (Maybe this also came from knowing that when my wife's mother was in a nursing home with Alzheimer's, she thought it was a luxury hotel and the staff were all waiters.) So it became a doppelganger story: the doppelganger of Sean being the "real" Sean threatening to reveal to him the awful truth. As for the title, I didn't want anything obvious like "Doppelganger" which gives everything away, but I found in my research that the Norwegian variation on "doppelganger" was "Vardger". I like the fact that that word tells you absolutely nothing (unless your are Norwegian!), but has a nice ring about it! Also, I was damned if I was going to explain the word in the text.

Did you encounter any challenges in writing Sean's point of view?

Once the idea was thought out, and I'm a scene-by-scene planner by nature, I had to keep in Sean's mindset of believing he was a good, normal person and an innocent. He'd mentally separated out all his badness into his double. The tricky part was achieving the double-take (sic) towards the end where I wanted the reader to think Sean has finished his police interview downstairs and is upstairs with Monica packing to leave, but in fact that is his double, except we don't know it yet. The only way I felt I could do that was to do it filmically as if cutting between two scenes. I hope it works. I hope it all works, obviously.

Part of what underscores the story is the feeling of being accused of a crime you didn't commit. I often have a dream where I've committed some crime and I don't know what it is, but it's going to be found out, and I'm full of panic and remorse and fear and total dread and a feeling of "Who am I? Who is the real me? Have I been living a lie?". I haven't often seen that feeling caught in a story and, even though I didn't realise when I was writing it, I think that was in the back of my mind. I hate to think what that says about me!

How did Gray Friar Press end up publishing your novella?

That was a real coincidence. I'd finished writing it and I saw Gray Friar Press announcing the previous novellas in its Gray Matter series (Paul Finch, Conrad Williams etc). I thought, "Hello", because Gary Fry of Gray Friar Press had already published my first collection of short stories, Dark Corners. So I e-mailed him and asked if he wanted to read it with the thought of it as a Gray Matter novella and he did indeed, and actually put it out quite quickly. I'm really lucky it happened like that because there's not a million places you can send a novella. And a Shirley Jackson Award nomination is just such a tremendous accolade I can't believe it. Thank you!

2009 Shirley Jackson Awards winners announced!

2010-07-11T17:17:00.000-07:00

Go here!

Danel Olson Interview (with Charles Tan)

2010-07-06T17:47:00.000-07:00

Danel Olson

Since EXOTIC GOTHIC 3 is the third in the series, what are the challenges in sustaining the book's theme while still covering new ground?

The book’s mission is to give a literary venue for new Gothic fiction set outside of its traditional homelands (Ireland, the UK, France, and Germany). Expanding Gothdom means inviting the Gothic’s insane passions, accursed lands, frothy plots, and violent femmes to China and Tibet, Morocco and Ethiopia, or Brazil and Chile. Take it everywhere. Naturally, each land through its art, culture, technology, and history either disinters or births a Gothic creature substantially its own. Compounding that, ambiguity and hybridization seem to be the Gothic's killing strength and foggy nature, so again something different from what’s expected comes.

Now the primary challenge is translation. As an international writer, you’re more aware of how labor-intensive, time-devouring, and expensive translation of prose can be. While I am finding entrancing artists in ever more remote places, getting them into English remains a problem. This Series has had a windfall--a good number of stellar Asian and Oceanic artists who happen to write in English are contributing-- the Iranian dissident writer (now living in America) Farnoosh Moshiri, the Filipino novelist Dean Francis Alfar in Manila, the Fiji-born Kenneth McKenney and Fiji resident Kaaron Warren, and the Malaysian-born author Tunku Halim, who has lived in Australia almost twenty years. But I desire to bring many more writers in, especially from South America and Africa. So far, EXOTIC GOTHIC 4 (appearing in 2011) has all-new stories incoming from writers who hail from England, Wales, Scotland, Italy, Russia, India, The Philippines, Malaysia, Australia, Canada, and America.

How would you describe the current state of the Gothic novel and short story? How different is it from previous preconceptions?

There is good and bad news in the post-2000 period of Gothicism. At least in America and Canada, the good word is that a super-abundance of both Gothic short stories and novels, with or without Fantastika, is appearing. Publishers are willing to publish them, Hollywood to film them, and untold millions to read and view them. At this moment tables at Barnes & Noble, Borders, Chapters, and other bookshops groan under the weight of vampire novels and story collections alone, for instance. What’s more, in tracking each week of the last two months from when I write, I am staggered that Gothic-themed novels have consistently appeared in four to seven of the fifteen to sixteen slots on THE NEW YORK TIMES Best Sellers list (with those most favored Gothic situations appearing in the TIMES' capsule descriptions: “a letter from his dead wife,” “a family secret,” “girl goes missing,” “a ruthless foe,” “fallen prey to an ancestral curse,” “woman’s body found in London cemetery,” and “slave flees with her master to New Orleans”). I can’t remember a time in my life when the Gothic was as snugly embraced by the mainstream. Perhaps its appeal is that more of us seems now inside the neo-Gothic “villain” than before. Isn’t there plenty of proof for Fred Botting’s belief (a professor from England’s Keele University) that vampires are now “mirrors of contemporary identity and sympathetic identifications”? With their lives of luxurious consumption and wasted desires, the Undead do indeed seem, as Botting puts it, like “latter-day consumer[s].” Another change is in the nature of the central creature within the Gothic narrative itself—seeming to be less predatory and more protective of the human characters that entangle it. Rather than a vampire that ravishes, a novel presently might show the creature to have a purer love than our own. Moreover, another trend is the playful Gothic, with monster tales crashing into, say, Regency-era romances, producing all those literary mash-ups and manglings on the heels of Seth Grahame-Smith’s bestseller PRIDE AND PREJUDICE AND ZOMBIES—from SENSE AND SENSIBILITY AND SEA MONSTERS to EMMA AND THE WEREWOLVES, to MANSFIELD PARK AND MUMMIES and many, many more. My own preference is for more bite and inventiveness, but millions of readers like these rollicking Gothic collisions with Jane Austen (and other canonical writers).

Despite some interesting contemporary changes in the old preconceptions of the Gothic, though, the disappointing news is that the Gothic novels batting before us each month don’t live up to our expectations. They don’t seem novels that most people would read again. They pass the time, but shouldn’t a novel or novella do more? I worry that the Gothic lives in an eternal return, and just as it was denounced as trash in the 18th and early 19th Centuries (and not just by those still loving Neo-Classical forms, but by Romantics themselves), in a very few years that the overexposure will make the Gothic again an outsider. This gypsy orphan of a literary form may have won the lottery just now, receiving everyone’s attention and emulation, but before long it will be merely an orphan again without a shilling, living at the fringes and considered unworthy of reading. Part of that reaction is deserved if the writing is routinely slipshod. It could be recently that many writers have leaped on to the vampire bandwagon (or zombie cart or shapeshifter wheels) to tell the story they wanted to tell in the first place--a romance, say, or an end of times battle, or a quest story, or a tale of adolescent anxiety--without knowing the mystery and despair inside the Gothic well.

On the positive side, there are a small number of artists who truly redefine the Gothic now. They are stylistically artistic, experimentally successful, apt at genre-bending and blending, original, emotive, authentically scary and transgressive, and metaphysically or culturally significant, all with that strange alchemy of words that make scenes come back to us in dreams. If “myth is truth” and literature simply “words that provoke response,” as the Cheshire novelist Alan Garner once said in FACES OF FANTASY, then these works are both true and provocative. They also rejuvenate the Gothic with more mystery and dark secrets than we could reasonably hope for:

THE ANGEL MAKER (2005) by Stefan Brijs
THE BANQUET FOR THE DAMNED (2004) by Adam L. G. Nevill
BEASTS (2002) by Joyce Carol Oates
THE BLIND ASSASSIN (2000) by Margaret Atwood
THE BOOK THIEF (2006) by Markus Zusak
THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN: PANDORA’S BRIDE (2007) by Elizabeth Hand
CANDLES BURNING (2006) by Tabitha King and Michael McDowell
THE CASEBOOK OF VICTOR FRANKENSTEIN (2008) by Peter Ackroyd
CLOWNS AT MIDNIGHT: A TALE OF APPROPRIATE FEAR (2010) by Terry Dowling
COLD SKIN (2002) by Albert Sánchez Piñol
THE CRIMSON PETAL AND THE WHITE (2002) by Michel Faber
A DARK MATTER (2010) by Peter Straub
The DARK TOWER series (seven novels, 1982-2004) by Stephen King
THE DARKEST PART OF THE WOODS (2002) by Ramsey Campbell
THE DRACULA DOSSIER (2008) by James Reese
THE EDEN MOORE TRILOGY (2003-2007) by Cherie Priest
EVA MOVES THE FURNITURE (2001) by Margot Livesey
FATAL WOMEN (including novellas, “Rherlotte,” “Virgile,” and “Green Iris,” 2004) by Tanith Lee
FINGERSMITH (2002) by Sarah Waters
THE FORGOTTEN GARDEN (2008) by Kate Morton
FOUR SOULS (2004) by Louise Erdrich
THE GARGOYLE (2008) by Andrew Davidson
THE GHOST WRITER (2004) by John Harwood
GOULD’S BOOK OF FISH: A NOVEL IN 12 FISH (2001) by Richard Flanagan
THE GRAVEYARD BOOK (2008) by Neil Gaiman
HEART- SHAPED BOX (2007) by Joe Hill
THE HISTORIAN (2005) by Elizabeth Kostova
THE HORNED MAN (2002) by James Lasdun
HOUSE OF LEAVES (2000) by Mark Z. Danielewski
JONATHAN STRANGE AND MR. NORRELL (2004) by Susanna Clarke
THE KEEP (2006) by Jennifer Egan
THE LITTLE FRIEND (2002) by Donna
LOST (2001) by Gregory Maguire
THE LOVELY BONES (2002) by Alice Sebold
LULLABY (2002) by Chuck Palahniuk
MARTHA PEAKE (2000) by Patrick McGrath
THE MEANING OF NIGHT: A CONFESSION (2006) by Michael Cox
MEMOIRS OF A MASTER FORGER (2008) by William Heaney (AKA Graham Joyce)
A MERCY (2008) by Toni Morrison
THE MERRILY WATKINS SERIES (ten novels, 1998-2008) by Phil Rickman
THE MONSTERS OF TEMPLETON (2008) by Lauren Groff
NEVER LET ME GO (2005) by Kazuo Ishiguro
NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN (2005) by Cormac McCarthy
THE PORTRAIT OF MRS. CHARBUQUE (2002) by Jeffrey Ford
THE PUMPKIN CHILD (2002, a novella in the collection KNUCKLES & TALES) by Nancy A. Collins
REAL WORLD (2006) by Natsuo Kirino
A SERIES OF UNFORTUNATE EVENTS (thirteen novels, 1999-2006) by Lemony Snicket (AKA Daniel Handler)
THE SHADOW OF THE WIND (2001) by Carlos Ruiz Zafón
THE TERROR (2007) by Dan Simmons
THE THIRTEENTH TALE (2006) by Dianne Setterfield
THURSBITCH (2003) by Alan Garner
WHITE APPLES (2002) by Jonathan Carroll

Actually, I’ve compiled a 700 page reference guide describing, analyzing, and evaluating these Gothic works above, to be published in 2011 from Scarecrow Press. The book, 21ST CENTURY GOTHIC: GREAT GOTHIC NOVELS SINCE 2000, is composed of 53 essays from illuminating commentators all over the world, and S. T. Joshi provides a splendid foreword.

How did you come up with the series title "Exotic Gothic", and why did you settle on "Strange Visitations" for this volume?

When the four texts from Penguin I assigned in my college Gothic course suddenly went out of print, I was adrift. I decided somewhat rashly to create my own. Somewhat like a child, I like the music that floats inside titles that rhyme (or almost rhyme). The word “Gothic” had to appear, and “Exotic” was the only rhyming word that came to mind, and it did fit with the concept of inviting international authors. I noticed that no other book on Amazon.com or BarnesandNoble.com had the title, nor was their any online domain with it, so that’s what I created, taking it to 74 publishers in 2006, and lucking out with the marvellous, award-winning Ash-Tree Press from Christopher and Barbara Roden. The other thing nibbling at me was this: I remember clearly from Grad School learning of all those writers of the American Literary Renaissance who disrespected Edgar Allan Poe, calling him lowbrow, dubbing him “The Jingle Man,” for what they heard as excessive rhyme. He was a fellow who they saw as rather hopeless and pointless, in his messy life, cousined wife, lost chances, addictions, and, of course, relentless rhyming. But to call him names went too far. So this is my rather humble tribute to Poe. I’m not so sure ghosts don’t exist, and with this rhyming title I salute him. And I give those other shades little payback, especially to Rev. Ralph Waldo Emerson the man who supposedly gave Poe this tinselly moniker. So, Rev. Emerson, may your shade now enjoy a little EXOTIC GOTHIC 2: NEW TALES OF TABOO or prefer ye EG3?

“Strange Visitations” was chosen after I re-read all the stories and noticed the trend of a strange visitor appearing in most of them, often an inviting, but slightly-off woman. These figures turn out to be, as stated in the new preface, gory ladies all—they’re “cult fanatics, venomous were-snakes (the Asian and the African species), fantomes, forest djinns, sacrificial victims, devil girls, vampires, witches, tarted-up zombies, old ghosts, new-fangled fembots, and (not joking here) most favoured guests on The O’Reilly Factor, meaner than Ann Coulter with a chain whip.” They do such terrible things.

Along with the creating the concept, title, and author list, I have enjoyed finding images for the covers. The latest is a stunning drawing of Jason Zerrillo’s, influenced by Czech photographer František Drtikol’s “L’Étude.” EXOTIC GOTHIC 2’s cover was from a moody snapshot by English novelist Nicholas Royle of his friend walking in the Paddington Goods Depot of West London. And the first photograph, for EXOTIC GOTHIC, was from American bohemian Anne Brigman. The constant is to show a woman frozen in shadow, which I think is the most alluring and yet ambiguous thing in the world. What I concluded with in a 2007 interview with an Austin journalist on the first EXOTIC GOTHIC stands for the others: “The photograph was taken when it was dark—probably twilight. There’s a woman, alone, in the middle of the California mountains. She’s twirling and you see her from the back. She’s draped, dramatically, in a gauzy scarf . . . When she turns around, will you walk towards her or will you run away? Who is the vulnerable one?” To this day, that captures the most sublime and stilling Gothic moment for me: are we predator or are we prey?

Robert Shearman Interview (with Charles Tan)

2010-07-06T17:45:00.000-07:00

Robert Shearman

First off, what is it about the short story format that appeals to you?

I love the economy of it. I love the way, quite genuinely, that you can work on a piece of writing and know that every single word has to justify its place. I think in longer pieces I write it's sometimes hard to stay focused on that, and inevitably to keep the overall pacing and rhythm right you get tempted by padding and detours. And speaking as really rather a lazy writer, who wants to get from First Idea to the endorphin rush of The End, I am thrilled that I can start work on a project on a Monday morning, and by Tuesday evening it may all be finished. It gives you so much more chance to celebrate and feel clever.

You've written for a lot of other mediums, such as plays. What are some skills that work well when transitioning from plays to fiction?

The joy of theatre - and also the terror of it! - is that you never escape the verdict of your audience. You may think you have written the smartest or funniest thing ever, but night after night, as you sit in that darkened auditorium, listening to the reaction of strangers around you, you're given a pretty honest wake-up call. There's no sound more grim, or more undisguised, than an audience who is bored. And the first thing you want to do is snatch back your play and just cut out all the bits during which people were yawning. I came to prose pretty late, after fifteen years or so exclusively writing drama - and I suppose my first instincts are to try to avoid all the boring bits. I can always imagine that theatre audience on my shoulder, even now I'm scribbling in paragraphs and punctuation, and I do my best to keep them awake.

There's a certain level of absurdity in your writing. In your opinion, what are the strengths or absurdity and comedy ?

The danger of absurdism is that it takes the reader to a world where nothing makes sense, and therefore nothing matters. But if it's used carefully - if you break the normality very precisely, and only in a specific area, leaving the rest of reality intact - then the comic contrast is really rewarding. You can break the rules of what the reader expects, so long as you stick to the ones you want to obey with strict rigour! Comedy's wonderful. There's nothing so dark or so emotional that it can't be told through comedy. Comedy and horror are the two things that deliberately try to provoke an audible reaction from the audience - and they're not so very far apart.

Sarah Waters Interview (with Charles Tan)

2010-07-02T06:15:00.000-07:00

Sarah Waters

For The Little Stranger, what made you decide to write a ghost story?

I didn't plan for the novel to be a ghost story right from the start - I wanted to write a book about the class changes that Britain was going through in the period after the Second World War. But I set the novel in a crumbling country house, and found myself with a cast of unhappy, frustrated characters all in thrall to a world that was slipping away from them... In other words, the novel morphed into a haunted house story more or less by itself, and once I could see that happening, I realised that a novel of the supernatural was the perfect way to address the mournfulness and anxiety of post-war upper middle-class life. I was delighted, too, to have the chance to write a full-blown Gothic novel. I've always loved Gothic novels and films.

What kind of research did you have to do for the book? Who were your influences in writing this Gothic piece?

Because my previous novel, The Night Watch, was set in the 1940s, I already had a pretty good sense of the period - of how people looked, how they talked, what they wore, etc. For The Little Stranger, I visited a lot of country houses, and tried to get a feel for what life in such a house, with no spare money, would actually have been like; and because my narrator, Faraday, is a doctor, I read a lot of country doctors' autobiographies, and books about rural British life generally. I also read books about the paranormal - about hauntings and, in particular, poltergeists; and I read lots of stories of the supernatural, mainly ones by classic writers like M R James, Oliver Onions, Edgar Allen Poe, Henry James, Dickens, Daphne du Maurier... I wanted the novel to sit very firmly within the Gothic tradition, even while I hoped that the emphasis on class would bring something slightly new to the genre.

How did the genesis of Dr. Faraday's character come about? What were the challenges, if any, in writing from his point of view?

As in lots of classic ghost stories, at first I wanted a narrator who would be relatively 'transparent', someone who would recount a terrible story to us without having been much implicated in the drama itself. A bachelor country doctor felt right - partly simply because, as a doctor, he'd have a reason for regularly visiting Hundreds Hall and observing its decline; and also because, as a man of science, he could maintain a sceptical distance from the unsettling events. At first, I was definitely anxious about writing from a male point of view. I was afraid I might not be able to make his voice ring true. But as Dr Faraday began to develop for me, I became interested in him purely as a character, with his own particular history, his own set of issues and quirks. There were certainly moments when I had to stop and think: would he, as a man, notice this? Would he phrase his feelings quite like that? But that's true of any character: whether they're male, female, or androgynous, your job as a writer is to make the imaginative leap that will take you inside their head. Dr Faraday really began to come alive for me when I gave him a more complicated relationship with the Hall than I'd originally intended. He ended up being only superficially transparent, with lots of dark, murky depths. He's not a very likeable man, I suppose - but, from a technical point of view, he was fascinating to write!

Nick Antosca Interview (with Charles Tan)

2010-06-28T08:46:00.000-07:00

Nick Antosca

Hi! Thanks for agreeing to do the interview. In Midnight Picnic, one of the themes is revenge. What made you decide to tackle this theme?

I wouldn't say that I decided to tackle that (or any) theme. In my experience, themes emerge organically from ideas that are not so abstract. It's an inductive, not deductive, process. I wanted to write a story about a dead child taking a man through the world of the dead in pursuit of his killer; the basic themes are present in the idea. I was more interested in and compelled by the idea of creating a mood. I think of Midnight Picnic as a "mood book." In addition to writing something disturbing and otherworldly, I wanted to create a mood of peaceful fatalism.

What were the challenges in writing the book?

I wrote the book entirely at night. Maintaining a sleep schedule that allowed me to do this and to work at my day job was difficult. I took naps in my office during the summer when I wrote most of Midnight Picnic. I also had very strange dreams.

How did Word Riot Press end up publishing your novel?

The novel was originally to be published by the now-defunct Impetus Press, which published my earlier novel, Fires. The week before it was supposed to have come out, Impetus went bankrupt. (They hadn't printed any copies.) It seemed Midnight Picnic was totally screwed. But Jackie Corley at Word Riot stepped in, and the book was published only a few months late, despite a printing delay. Word Riot did a wonderful job. I thought the book was dead in the water and they came out of nowhere to rescue it.

Aimee Bender Interview (with Charles Tan)

2010-06-24T17:55:00.000-07:00

Aimee Bender

Hi! Thanks for agreeing to do the interview. You've written both novels and short stories, but what is it about the short story format that appeals to you? Which do you prefer more?

I feel a little more comfortable with stories-- I like to race along and then be done. So writing a novel takes a lot of patience for me, but then when finished, I do feel different-- it's like a shirt that has stretched bigger and won't shrink back right away. it's harder for me to remember how to write a two page story. The pace of development is so different.

One of your strengths in "Faces" is dialogue. How do you develop your ear for character voices? Do you find it easy or difficult?

I like it when it just happens-- I can't really force a voice, but I could hear William pretty well. I think eavesdropping is a writer's great tool here. I will assign students to go eavesdrop which is a fun assignment to give. It seems rude, but it really is necessary, and I think a lot of us do it without even realizing. Cell phones are a good new frontier here-- with people talking so unself-consciously in lines and on trains.

What made you decide to use William's problem as the focus of the story?

I'd written that scene as part of a larger book that never coalesced. And this scene was a way into his daily life that felt more like a self-contained story than part of a novel. I just wondered about him: what was he seeing/why and how was he both perceptive and kind of out of it at the same time?

Laird Barron Interview (with Charles Tan)

2010-06-23T11:07:00.000-07:00

Laird Barron

Hi! Thanks for agreeing to do the interview. As a contributor to both Poe and Lovecraft Unbound, how have Poe and Lovecraft influenced your writing?

Hi, Charles. Thank you for the interview.

I’ve read Poe since forever. We had a set of classical literature lying around the house -- those old, fancy clothbound books featuring Browning, Burns, Coleridge, Poe…As I’ve mentioned before, a lot of my obsession with madness, decadence, and live burial beelines directly back to Poe. The Cask of Amontillado has stuck with me all these years. It probably frightens me more now than ever, his brief illumination of betrayal and sadism, how you never know anyone.

Lovecraft loomed on my horizon a little later. I think he’s attributed as my most overt influence because one can’t really approach cosmic horror without being compared to him, its most infamous practitioner. One is blessed or doomed, depending on one’s mood, with the Lovecraftian label for approaching the topic too closely or too often. Critics seem indifferent to the fact cosmic horror in its various manifestations was around long before modern authors such as Lovecraft and his circle perfected the genre. Close scrutiny of the Bible is a manifold revelation on that score.

Frankly, much as I admire Lovecraft’s devices, the foundation of my writing is based upon the psychological horror of Poe and latter day noir and supernatural traditions than anything else.

What are the challenges in writing a story that goes beyond pastiche yet still evoking Poe/Lovecraft's style?

The trick is to avoid evoking their singular styles and instead concentrate on exploring their themes, amplifying them. The big flaw I see in much of current updates of classical masters is that contemporary authors are often content to simply modernize, to paraphrase and recycle. If you go digging in the lagerstätten of weird fiction and simply take molds and impressions of those artifacts, if you do nothing more than reframe them, it’s a sin. What we often end up with is watered-down M.R. James, diluted Blackwood, knockoff Lovecraft. The exceptional exceptions aside, if you’re going to enter the realm of these archetypal giants, you need to bring something of yourself to the table -- a fresh perspective, your own techniques and devices. Your own fear. The canon has no need for Poe 2.0.

Your writing technique has certainly been evolving over the years and yet horror has been the topic of your stories. What makes you keep on going back to horror?

I could write a hundred years and not have the opportunity to try my hand at the entire spectrum that comprises the dark genres. But the real reason I return time and again is because fear and dread have become sullen, yet faithful muses. I’m very comfortable with the lizard. I’m in touch with the primordial part of myself that understands the darkened sun is the mouth of a god yawning.

Michael Kelly Interview (with Charles Tan)

2010-06-22T05:34:00.000-07:00

Michael Kelly

Hi! Thanks for agreeing to do the interview. First off, how did the concept for Apparitions come about, and what made you decide to publish it yourself?

Thanks for having me, Charles! The conceit was simply to put together an anthology of ghost stories and strange tales by writers whose work I’ve admired. The story had to feature some sort of apparition, whether overt or ambiguous. Ghosts, sometimes, can seem a bit cozy. There’s nothing cozy, I thought, about apparitions. I published it myself after the press that was going to do the book became extremely back-logged. Rather than shopping the book around again, (because, frankly, I’d done quite a lot of that) I asked the writers if they’d consider letting me do the book, and, thankfully, they agreed. I’m very grateful to them.

As an editor, what do you look for in a short story?

I’m not sure I consciously look for anything – I edit mostly by feel -- but empathy is something that I’m always drawn to, whether it’s me empathizing with the characters or characters showing empathy. If a story can make me walk in another’s shoes, that’s a great achievement.

What is it about ghosts and weird stories that appeals to you?

Everything! I love the depth and breadth of the genre. I love the language, the mood and atmosphere. Horror literature, more so than film and other genres, has the ability to dig deep and explore the human condition. I’m always interested in that other side. And the weird, ghostly tale seems the perfect vessel for such exploration. I love that little frisson of terror I get when reading a well-told horror story. Maybe it’s a cathartic experience. Horror, to me, with its deeply personal examinations of that other, fights against the drowning cloak of entropy.

Gemma Files Interview (with Charles Tan)

2010-06-18T05:09:00.000-07:00

Gemma Files

How did the Jacaranda tree become a central image in your mind and became part of your title in "The Jacaranda Smile"?

To me, there's little more annoying than being jolted out of a narrative by an author writing about writing as a process, but not creating anything which seems like a genuine story--you get a look at the "magnum opus" somebody's been working on all this time, and you're like: "That's IT?" With "The Jacaranda Smile", I was working from the germ of an idea I'd had during my last visit to Australia--a story I wanted to write, but wasn't sure if I could. And eventually, the way I realized I had to frame it was as that sort of story--to make myself the protagonist, but also the monster. My description of the story inside the story incorporates a lot of the notes I wrote while on that trip, from architectural details to plot twists and character observations.

Most of the imagery in the story, if not its events, is taken directly from life. The apartment is an apartment my father and his S.O. lived in; there really was a jacaranda tree that you could look straight out into if you stood in the solarium. And during the period of my childhood when I was going back and forth to Australia, my Dad sometimes left me with my grandparents, his Mom and Dad, who had a house in the suburbs of Melbourne with a maple tree in its tiny front yard. I'd climb up there and read through every Edgar Rice Burroughs Mars book, in order, while wavering high above the neighbourhood. It became a symbol to me for the mixture of yearning and loneliness which embodied my trips to Australia in specific, but my relationship with my Dad in particular.

Said relationship remains simultaneously deep, disconnected, and volatile, even today. Frankly, I have no idea how he'd react if he read this story; not well, probably, though at least I have the patented "but it's fiction!" out to fall back on. But I haven't told him about it, and luckily, I doubt he'll go searching. As he's told me roughly a million times, horror's not his thing.

There's a lot of juxtaposition in your story, whether it's the narrator's life compared to her father, or her reality vs. her fiction. What were the challenges in using this technique?

What goes where, when, and why? When you're bending back and forth through time, using memory to inform and comment on two types of action--"real" and otherwise--it's really important to be able to keep a strict tally of pegs vs. holes. I thought about books and stories I'd enjoyed previously which did this extremely well, and tried to pick and choose what elements I wanted to poach from each; Peter Ackroyd's HAWKSMOOR comes to mind, for example, and Muriel Spark's "The Portobello Road".

But equally useful were tricks of pacing and layering I'd picked up from graphic novels and theatrical scripts, or radio plays. Though I haven't read "The Jacarands Smile" out loud in public thus far, I can see it working really well that way--single narrator, different angles, a soupcon of unreliability. It *is* challenging, but it's also fun.

How long did it take you to write this story? To get it published?

Like I said, I got the idea ten years ago, at least. Sat on it until, probably...three years ago, then began to peck away at it. The writing itself went surprisingly quickly after I broke through with the image of the bird in the fountain (again taken from life, though I actually ran across it when I was out with my son, who immediately tried to pick it up!) But I did despair a bit of anyone picking it up, because it seemed almost creepily intimate--a lot like very early stories of mine which were all-too-obviously based on personal experience. I think I was almost embarrassed by it.

Still, those are the qualities Mike Kelly said he liked most about it when he took it, maybe a year later, so there you go. Nobody really does know anything.;)

Christopher Golden, Tim Lebbon and James Moore Interview (with Charles Tan)

2010-06-15T17:29:00.001-07:00

Christopher Golden, Tim Lebbon and James Moore

Hi! Thanks for agreeing to do the interview. In your foreword, you mention that for British writers, "the lines between genres seem far more blurred". Could you expand more on that thesis?

JM: Whether it's the publishing houses and their requirements for publication, the marketing groups or the writers themselves is a topic for debate, but the US has a very different set of sensibilities when it comes to published works. The authors coming from Great Britain are often better at cross pollinating the genres. A horror novel can also be an epic tale of pirates and a fantasy novel about a tapestry can also be a police procedural at the same time. It sometimes seems that the US has a bit of trouble with the very idea of mixing genres or at least a different perspective on whether or not it's a good idea. I don't know that either group is right or wrong, but there is a definite difference in the end result that was the very subject of the discussion which brought about The British Invasion anthology.

CG: Jim's got it right. But I think there's even more to it. In the U.S. marketing concerns have caused publishers to create strict categories for fiction over the years. The definition of what is a "horror story" is more narrowly defined here. In fact, it's often broken down into sub-sections delineating what KIND of horror story it is, and writers have naturally been inclined to include certain trappings or follow certain formulae in order to let publishers and readers identify what sort of story they're telling. This is unfortunate and self-defeating, creating these kinds of limits on storytelling. It hasn't affected every writer, of course, but it's part of the consciousness of most of us. I know that the UK hasn't escaped this phenomenon, but I do think it's far less an issue there, at least based on my own reading of British supernatural fiction. The edges of horror, and other genres, are simply more blurred, and I think that feeds imagination in the sense that there aren't as many ruts worn into the path that a writer might fall into, not as many elements that are familiar and easy for a lazy or distracted writer to fall back on.

Since there's three of you, what was the collaboration process like? Did all three of you, for example, had to like a story before accepting it? Or was it more like dividing the anthology into three parts?

TL: We split the reading duties, but if there was a story one of us liked the other two had to like it as well for it to be used. I don't think there were many disagreements, actually, but it was an interesting process to see who favoured what.

JM: It was a very different process, but I think it worked very well. I think, in the end, we had a very solid list of stories. And yeah, there were a few minor disagreements, but I think it stuck to the spirit in which we originally discussed the anthology in the first place, which was sitting in a bar and chatting about what we do and don't like in stories.

CG: There were certainly things about which we weren't in complete agreement. I think if we ranked the stories in order of preference, those rankings would vary considerably. But as Tim says, if a story didn't impress us all, it didn't make the cut.

What was your criteria for choosing a story? And related to that, how did "British Horror Weekend" find a place in the anthology?

TL: 'British Horror Weekend' was a genuine submission, but the writer thought it would be good writing it as Anon. We loved that idea. And it's a very funny story, and we were delighted to include it. As for criteria - it had to be a good story, well told, as simple as that. Good stories not well told, or average stories beautifully written, didn't make it in. And we think we managed to assemble a wonderfully diverse, consistently first-rate collection of modern horror tales.

JM: I tend to think a better question is how could "British Horror Weekend" NOT be included. It was hilarious and it was decidedly original. As for the criteria, Tim nailed that on the head.

CG: I should add the obvious, that the author had to be British (or Irish) by birth. And yeah, "British Horror Weekend" is one of my favorite stories in the book. It's a love letter to the UK horror community, and a blast to read. As far as I know, the identity of the author is still a secret, but I can tell you that the story was written by an author who is (1) NOT one of the three editors, as has been suspected, or any combination thereof, and (2) British. It's an homage to horror novels and films of a certain period, and a great deal of teasing as well.

Sarah Pinborough Interview (with Charles Tan)

2010-06-09T05:24:00.000-07:00

Sarah Pinborough

Thanks for agreeing to do the interview. What is it about the concept of family that made you decide to write "The Language of Dying"?

I wrote The Language of Dying as a kind of cathartic process - and also so certain memories wouldn't be lost to me as time went by. Although the piece is a work of fiction, I drew heavily on experiences I had when a friend of mine came to stay with me when he was dying. The last week was quite awful but also a fascinating family study. I think this 'waiting for someone to die' is a terrible time, especially as with each day that passes that person often becomes so much less like the person you knew. I think we all worry we won't remember the real person and only the unrecognisable mask of illness - but I've found that when I remember that particular friend now I always see him when he was whole and healthy. This makes me happy. I think he'd have been very pleased with the novella and that makes me happy too.

Your novella is unlike anything I've ever read before--and I mean that in a good way. What were the challenges in writing such a story, especially for the novella-length?

I knew that the subject matter was too emotionally strong perhaps for a full-length novel, and didn't have a huge amount of action in it, and so it was natural that it would become a novella. I'd never written one before (or since in fact) but I was pleased with that length. The challenges involved were mainly personal and stylistic. I chose the first person/second person present tense because I felt it fitted that sense of living in the moment that comes towards the end of a life and I also wanted the power to be behind the words as it were. I didn't want too much description but went for, what I hope is, really clean prose. Some things are weakened by too much description and I didn't want to patronise any reader who may have been in the same situation at some point.

Your second to the last paragraph, in my opinion, is very important as it makes a drastic impact on your story. What made you decide to include this scene?

I just had to go and have a quick read to see which you meant! I think the story was always heading to that point right from the start. I can't remember exactly why I included it now as is always the way a couple of years after you wrote something, but i think I wanted to create a sense of terrible liberation and freedom. It's up to the reader to decide whether it's a good thing or a bad thing.

Quentin S. Crisp Interview (with Charles Tan)

2010-06-07T07:35:00.000-07:00

Quentin S. Crisp

Hi! Thanks for agreeing to do the interview. First off, what made you decide to set your story in Japan?

Thank you.

To answer your question, it was in Japan that I encountered the shrike, and the shrike, particularly the shrike's sacrifice, was the imagistic impetus behind the whole story. Some time after I had encountered the shrike I made one of those creative leaps that are so necessary to writing anything of depth, and pieced that initial image together with something else that I wanted to express. The 'something else' could have been set anywhere, really, but the shrike made a Japanese setting most natural. Of course, this setting ended up as something that seemed inevitable, in that it then took me into areas of cultural and aesthetic comparison and synthesis between east and west as if that had been part of the plan from the beginning.

What are the difficulties in structuring a narrative where most of the conflict is internal?

As far as I'm aware, they are very much the same as the difficulties in a narrative where the conflict is external. The only difference is, one kind of narrative might have more appeal to a different kind of reader than the other. I am very much influenced by Japanese zuihitsu and other forms of writing where essay, fiction, autobiography and so on are mixed, however, when one leans to the fictional then one knows that the strict essay form of argument, which must be thorough, would be too heavy handed. You only have to gesture lightly towards the various points you wish to rally in your 'argument'. I've read Ligotti say in interview that he assembles his plots rather like an essay (or I seem to remember that), and that he is very careful in this process of moving towards a conclusion, and therefore baffled when people say his stories have no plots. I tend to write stories in a similar way. I know precisely what points need to be made to support my 'conclusion', and, as long as they are all there, in their right places, in my mind and in the story, I need only gesture towards them lightly. Or that is how I feel. Others may disagree. Also, I would say that, although there is not much action in Shrike, with this and all of my stories, I try to keep things sensual, and most especially visual. A flower can be dramatic. Or it can to me.

In a previous interview, you mentioned how you like playing around with categories, such as "demented fiction". Could you elaborate more on your definition of demented fiction and how it applies--or doesn't apply--to your writing?

Sometimes I have this clear in my head and sometimes I don't. About two weeks ago, I would have been able to give very fine detail on this question, as I was much preoccupied with it. But I didn't write down the thoughts I had at the time, and they have passed. I think that there's a kind of expectation of writers that they are somehow omniscient. At the very least, the art of writing fiction (particularly the novel) often seems to be the art of pretending to know everything. Dazai Osamu once wrote something like, "It's ridiculous to feel that one should straighten one's collar while reading a novel." To me, being demented in fiction not only means freedom to be imaginative rather than knowing, it means honesty about the fact that ultimately one knows nothing. Being demented by no means precludes being beautiful or elegant. One can very well be dementedly elegant, or elegantly demented. Demented fiction is also related to 'dadaoism', which Justin Isis and I have been championing on the currently sleeping Chomu blog. I think underlying dadaoism is the recognition that words are not the things they signify. The intention is not to give an account of reality, it is to create something new, outside of reality.

Demented fiction and dadaoism should be available in abundance from Chomu Press, which is just starting up. The first novel Chomu releases will be "Remember You're a One-Ball!" by me. It would have been included in my Rule Dementia! collection, but it was too large.

Karen Joy Fowler Interview (with Charles Tan)

2010-06-04T09:47:00.000-07:00

Karen Joy Fowler

Hi! Thanks for agreeing to do the interview. How did you settle on your premise for "The Pelican Bar"?

I knew of a girl who'd been sent to one of these places, and I've been haunted by her story for years. But "The Pelican Bar" is equally about the current torture debate in the US. I will never quite believe that torturing people is now something to be calmly discussed and argued about, much less the policy so many prefer.

I saw a posting online about torture that referenced these offshore jail/schools, and said, basically, why should we be surprised to learn people are fine with shutting foreigners away and torturing them? We've let these facilities do the same to our own children and never raised a fuss.

A few years back I went with friends to Jamaica and realized, in the midst of our wonderful holiday, that we were only a few miles from one of these places. It seemed like the torture situation writ small. We know what's going on at Guantanamo and in more secret prisons. We are sorry about it, but our own lives remain pretty comfortable. What really can we do?

Your story has a dark scenario yet your protagonist also develops a certain strength due to her ordeals. What are the challenges in juggling these two elements? Do you perceive the story as bleak or optimistic?

I hate and love the world with absolutely equal force. Sometimes one feeling is in the ascendant and sometimes the other, but mostly I'm teetering right on the edge between the two. My own life has been filled with so much beauty and love and good luck. Great friends, great food, great family. Health and happiness. How can I hate the world? It would be unthinkably ungrateful.

And yet, I know what lives of horror others live, often for no better reason than that someone is making (or saving) money off their misery. How can I love a place where that's allowed to happen?

As to my character Norah, she had a lot of problems before being sent off, but I'm not sure lack of strength was among them. I don't think she's gained much of value from this experience. But I'm just happy she's out! Albeit into this problematic world of ours, see above. I have no idea what will happen to her next. So the story strikes me as neither optimistic nor pessimistic, but on that edge between. Probably tipping toward bleak, if I'm being honest.

In some of your stories, the fantastical element is subtle. What is it about fantasy or science fiction that appeals to you, and how does it affect your fiction?

Although I traffic in the strange, I don’t think of myself as leaving the real world behind when I do so. I think that I’m acknowledging how bizarre and unlikely the real world is. I’m a political person, not a spiritual one. I don’t believe in magic or ghosts or gods or the power of positive thinking. I believe that Elvis is dead. I’m not happy about it, but there it is. But what I believe most of all is that the world will always exceed our ability to understand it.

Fantasy, science fiction and other fantastical approaches seem better suited to convey this fact than realism and so, in my attempts to depict the real world, that's what I use. The word you've chosen is subtle, which is kinder than ambiguous (which I hear a lot, but is also totally fair.) Here's the thing though: if I'm using fantastical elements to convey the parts of the world beyond our understanding, then ambiguity is unavoidable. Clarity would make the completely wrong point, that even the strange parts of life are comprehensible.

However, in the case of "The Pelican Bar," there is no doubt in my mind that the people running the facility are actual aliens. I have my reasons, but they're unpleasant, misanthropic reasons and I should probably keep them to myself.

Gemma Files and Stephen J. Barringer Interview (with Charles Tan)

2010-06-02T16:41:00.000-07:00

Gemma Files and Stephen J. Barringer

First off, “Each Thing I Show You Is a Piece of My Death,” is a collage of information. What made both of you decide to use this technique?

GEMMA: The funny part is that I was going through the Afterword in one of my short story collections the other day (THE WORM IN EVERY HEART, Prime Books), and found a large chunk in which I was talking about the appeal of an epistolary novel like DRACULA…this boring/voyeuristic mishmash of documentation which challenges you to read between the lines in order to figure out what’s “really” going on. M.R. James does that too, though far more subtly, and he’s one of my baseline inspirations.

And then, when I thought about how to best update that idea, it cross-bred somehow with my experience reviewing mock-doc horror films, as best embodied by low-res ‘Net-hype sensations like THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT and (most recently) PARANORMAL ACTIVITY. After I added in stuff that I’d learned about experimental film when covering that community here in Toronto to root it in a reality I was familiar with, and made up a suitable “urban legend” to base it around, I felt like I was ready to go.

But the thing which really dictated the story’s form was the concept of the Exquisite Corpse, which I stumbled upon quite late in the game…on the Internet, as I recall. So there you go.

STEVE: Another influence which deserves to be mentioned is Eric Heisserer’s ‘Net-only horror story “The Dionaea House” (www.dionaea-house.com), which really brought home to me the serious potential for creep and dread in the Internet medium--like Gemma says, the wonderful subtlety of implying the horror between the lines in what the narrative *doesn’t* say, through the utterly familiar format of text messages and e-mails. Combined with that was the opportunity to use what I think of as my “business voice”--that deliberately impersonal and bland style of professional writing and documentation any office-worker knows, with which I made much of my living for many years--to talk about utterly horrible things in the way I imagine police and medical clerks must have to; I wanted to see if the juxtaposition of an incredibly mundane style with an incredibly appalling subject would be as effective as I hoped it would be. (Check out Ramsey Campbell’s story “A Street Was Chosen” for an inspiring example of this principle in action.)

How did both of you end up collaborating for this story? What were the challenges--and rewards--working together?

GEMMA: I had had the basic idea for “each thing” some time before, but when the CLOCKWORK PHOENIX 2 deadline approached, I found it really difficult to both jump-start and carry through, probably because of the slightly non-linear nature of the narrative itself. I started discussing it heavily with Steve, who had some great character and structural ideas. Pretty quickly, it became obvious that the story would got faster and work better if we were both involved, trading back and forth on the actual writing. Steve has an amazing mind for organization, research and realistic detail, and by the end, I felt he had more than earned co-authorial credit.

The challenge is that you’re writing with your husband, but the reward is that you get to write with your husband. Though Steve hasn’t been published as many times as I have, he’s very much a capable, professional writer with years of experience; personally, I see this story as his introduction into the community, something he’ll hopefully build on when he starts sending more things out on his own. And the fact that we now also get to share a Shirley Jackson nomination? Crazy!

STEVE: What Gemma calls a knack for organization, research and detail I tend to think of as obsessive nitpickiness, but hey, it worked for Tolkien--who is, unsurprisingly, one of my favourites and inspirations; I love the detail and scope of classic worldbuilding, and the conviction and verisimilitude involved in getting everything right is as useful in horror as it is in fantasy.

Writing with Gemma is on one level remarkably easy, because unlike so many people, when she asks you what you think, she actually wants to hear your answer and is willing to work with it. On another level, it’s tremendously challenging; not only in that her standard of quality demands an equally high standard of contribution, but because she’s so open to ideas that it can be hard *not* to throw in my two cents’ worth more than absolutely necessary. (The hardest thing for any writer to learn is the distinction between “what will make this better” and “what will make this more like something *I* would write”, which is why writing and editing *are* distinct skill-sets.) But the sheer potential, and room for play, in this particular idea and format was just too much to resist; with impending deadlines as an excuse, we both went all-out at whatever occurred to us and just fit the result together afterwards. It seemed to work. ;)

In your opinion, what is it about the "horror in film" motif that resonates with readers (and writers)?

GEMMA: Well, I was a professional film reviewer long before I became a professional writer, so I’ve had a lot of time to think about this, and I do think it’s something inherent in the medium itself. Film, the literal “moving image”, is like a ghost; flat yet vivid, charged with an unnatural sense of life. The reaction many people had to the Lumiere Brothers’ seminal film of a train arriving at a station, when it was first shown in public, was almost universally one of stark terror.

Add sound, color, F/X, and the universal tropes of horror-thriller-suspense, and film also becomes not only capable of capturing the image of a human being which can endure, apparently unscathed, long after the person who originated it is dead, but also of allowing an actor to play out an infinite variety of fake deaths that often look more “real” than the real thing.

At its heart, though, we somehow know that ALL film is an illusion: Shadows on a wall, mostly blank space. It lies sixty times a second, and it routinely tricks your mind into filling that empty space with whatever your subconscious wants to see. That’s very frightening as a concept, no matter the genre involved.

STEVE: Film also, and somewhat ironically given our awareness of its illusory nature (as Gemma notes), has a unique claim to *authority*; the belief that “if someone photographed or filmed it, it ‘really’ happened” is more seminal to Western culture than most people realize even now. For a comparatively brief but utterly transformative time--basically, from the newsreel footage for WW2 to just before the theatrical release of STAR WARS--photography and film were the ultimate “proofs” of reality, the things that changed a narrative from a mere story into the Telling Of Truth, and could even change the course of nations, as certain iconic images from the Vietnam War still demonstrate.

This power’s been weakened considerably by the ease of modern CGI and Photoshopping, but it’s not yet lost, which is why films like CLOVERFIELD or PARANORMAL ACTIVITY pack such a punch, and why “real-time” footage of UFOs, ghosts and demons gets such high view-counts on YouTube. We want to *see* something, to have proof of Something Out There; and yet if a ghost or an alien or a werewolf or some other impossible supernatural phenomenon was caught on camera in full focused detail, we would all write it off as “special effects” in an instant--the alternative being too horrifying to contemplate. “each thing” is, in a way, simply a story about someone faced with exactly that situation who doesn’t have the option of explaining it away, and what happens when he tries to deal with it.

Ellen Datlow (Interviewed by Charles Tan)

2010-05-17T10:04:00.000-07:00

ELLEN DATLOW

Hi! Thanks for agreeing to do the interview. Last year, you edited anthologies based on the works of two famous writers. The tricky aspect of such tribute anthologies is that the fiction might simply be homages and pastiches. How did you avoid this trap?

They weren’t exactly tribute anthologies, although Poe’s was published in honor of his Bicentennial. Each anthology was meant to be comprised of stories inspired by Edgar Allan Poe or H. P. Lovecraft. I tried to make it very clear in my guidelines that I did not want pastiches, that I wanted the writers to push the envelope by not using the sometimes overblown language of these two iconic writers but instead create something new using Poe and Lovecraft’s tone, thematic concerns, and especially obsessions.

Poe and Lovecraft are respected writers. What aspect of their writing particularly stands out for you, especially when it comes to the horror aspect?

Poe’s obsession with death and sometimes his language (particularly in his poetry). Lovecraft’s language and his obsession and dread of the unknown.

Both writers, in my opinion, flourished in the short story format. As an editor, what do you look for in a short story?

There are so many things I look for but most of them are subconscious. As I read, I either react positively to a story or not. And I’m excited by different things in science fiction, fantasy, or horror (although always, writing that either doesn’t impinge on the story or that creates the story).

But as we’re discussing my two horror anthologies, for me the best horror stories are those that embed themselves in my conscious (and possibly subconscious). Stories that won’t let go –whether they’re light or serious. Stories sharply told with a memorable character.

The Charles Tan Interviews (2010 edition)

2010-05-17T09:58:00.000-07:00

Writer, editor, uber-blogger, and all around hero of genre support Charles Tan is once again conducting interviews of the Shirley Jackson Awards Nominees.

Keep an eye on this blog as we'll post the interviews over the coming month-plus!

2009 Shirley Jackson Awards Nominees Announced

2010-04-15T11:36:00.000-07:00

Press releaseFor Immediate ReleaseContact: JoAnn F. Cox
Awards Administrator admin@shirleyjacksonawards.org

Nominees for the 2009 Shirley Jackson Awards

Boston, MA (April 2010) -- 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.

The Shirley Jackson Awards are voted upon by a jury of professional writers, editors, critics, and academics, with input from a Board of Advisors. The awards are given for the best work published in the preceding calendar year in the following categories: Novel, Novella, Novelette, Short Story, Single-Author Collection, and Edited Anthology.

The nominees for the 2009 Shirley Jackson Awards are:

NOVEL
Big Machine, Victor LaValle (Speigel & Grau)
Last Days, Brian Evenson (Underland Press)
The Little Stranger, Sarah Waters (Riverhead)
The Owl Killers, Karen Maitland (Delacorte Press)
The Red Tree, Caitlin R. Kiernan (Roc)
White is for Witching, Helen Oyeyemi (Nan A. Talese)

NOVELLA
The Language of Dying, Sarah Pinborough, (PS Publishing)
Midnight Picnic, Nick Antosca (Word Riot Press)
“Sea-Hearts,” Margo Lanagan (X6, coeur de lion)
Shrike, Quentin Crisp (PS Publishing)
Vardøger, Stephen Volk (Gray Friar Press)
The Witnesses are Gone, Joel Lane (PS Publishing)

NOVELETTE
“Catch Hell,” Laird Barron (Lovecraft Unbound, Dark Horse)
“Each Thing I Show You Is a Piece of My Death,” Gemma Files and Stephen J. Barringer, (Clockwork Phoenix 2, Norilana Books)
“Lonegan’s Luck,” Stephen Graham Jones (New Genre 6)
“Morality,” Stephen King (Esquire)
The Night Cache, Andy Duncan (PS Publishing)

SHORT STORY
“The Crevasse,” by Dale Bailey and Nathan Ballingrud (Lovecraft Unbound, Dark Horse)
“Faces,” Aimee Bender (The Paris Review, Issue 191, Winter 2009)
“The Jacaranda Smile,” Gemma Files (Apparitions, Undertow Publications)
“The Pelican Bar,” Karen Joy Fowler (Eclipse 3, Night Shade)
“Procedure in Plain Air,” Jonathan Lethem (The New Yorker, April 5, 2010)
“Strappado,” Laird Barron (Poe: 19 New Tales Inspired by Edgar Allan Poe, Solaris)

SINGLE-AUTHOR COLLECTION
Everland and Other Stories, Paul Witcover (PS Publishing)
Fugue State, Brian Evenson (Coffee House Press)
Love Songs for the Shy and Cynical, Robert Shearman (Big Finish Productions)
There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby: Scary Fairy Tales, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya (Penguin)
Tunneling to the Center of the Earth, Kevin Wilson (Harper Perennial)
Zoo, Otsuichi (Haikasoru/VIZ Media)

EDITED ANTHOLOGY
Apparitions, edited by Michael Kelly (Undertow Publications)
British Invasion, edited by Christopher Golden, Tim Lebbon, and James A. Moore (Cemetery Dance)
Exotic Gothic 3: Strange Visitations, edited by Danel Olson (Ash Tree Press)
Lovecraft Unbound, edited by Ellen Datlow (Dark Horse)
Poe: 19 New Tales Inspired by Edgar Allan Poe, edited by Ellen Datlow (Solaris)

Shirley Jackson (1916-1965) wrote such classic novels as The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, as well as one of the most famous short stories in the English language, “The Lottery.” Her work continues to be a major influence on writers of every kind of fiction, from the most traditional genre offerings to the most innovative literary work.

The Shirley Jackson Awards will be presented at Readercon 21, Conference on Imaginative Literature, in Burlington, Massachusetts. Nalo Hopkinson, Readercon Guest of Honor, will act as host.

Websites:

http://www.shirleyjacksonawards.org/
http://www.readercon.org/

Media representatives who are seeking further information or interviews should contact JoAnn F. Cox.

Closed to 2009 submissions

2010-02-04T16:55:00.000-08:00

We are currently closed to 2009 submissions. The jurors have taken to their lonely lairs, surrounded by books and pdfs, and will emerge in April with a final ballot.

Thank you to all the editors and publishers who submitted work!

We Have Always Lived in the Castle to be adpated to film

2009-11-18T18:56:00.000-08:00

Shirley Jackson's 1962 novel, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, is getting adapted by Michael Douglas' production company as what looks to be a more psychological horror film rather than the straight out horror we're seeing produced of late.

New Advisors, Jurors added for The Shirley Jackson Awards

2009-11-17T17:53:00.000-08:00

Boston, MA (October 2009) -- 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.

The Shirley Jackson Awards are voted upon by a jury of professional writers, editors, critics, and academics, with input from a Board of Advisors. The awards are given for the best work published in the preceding calendar year in the following categories: Novel, Novella, Novelette, Short Story, Single-Author Collection, and Edited Anthology.

The jurors for the 2009 Shirley Jackson Awards are, alphabetically:

F. Brett Cox, co-editor (with Andy Duncan) of Crossroads: Tales of the Southern Literary Fantastic (Tor, 2004); author of numerous short stories, critical essays, and reviews; English faculty at Norwich University in Northfield, Vermont.

John Langan, author of House of Windows (Night Shade, 2009) and Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters (Prime, 2008); nominated for the Bram Stoker and International Horror Guild Awards; English faculty at SUNY New Paltz.

Erika Mailman, author of novels The Witch's Trinity (Random House, 2007; a San Francisco Chronicle Notable Book and finalist for Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel) and Woman of Ill Fame (Heyday Books, 2007); MFA in Creative Writing, University of Arizona, Tucson.

Lisa Tuttle, author of numerous short stories and novels, most recently, The Pillow Friend, The Mysteries, and The Silver Bough; winner of the 2007 International Horror Guild Award for Mid-Length Fiction for “Closet Dreams”.

The Board of Advisors for the Shirley Jackson Awards includes editor Bill Congreve; renowned scholar and editor S.T. Joshi; author and teacher Jack M. Haringa (co-editor, with Joshi, of the critical journal Dead Reckonings); and author Mike O’Driscoll; editor Ann VanderMeer; and award-winning and best-selling novelist Stewart O’Nan. In 2009, Peter Straub, Elizabeth Hand, and Stefan Dziemianowicz (bios below) join this illustrious group along with former jurors Sarah Langan and Paul Tremblay.

Peter Straub is the author of seventeen novels, which have been translated into more than twenty languages. They include Ghost Story, Koko, Mr. X, In the Night Room, and two collaborations with Stephen King, The Talisman and Black House. He has written two volumes of poetry and two collections of short fiction, and he edited the Library of America’s edition of H. P. Lovecraft’s Tales and the forthcoming Library of America’s 2-volume anthology, American Fantastic Tales. He has won the British Fantasy Award, eight Bram Stoker Awards, two International Horror Guild Awards, and two World Fantasy Awards. In 1998, he was named Grand Master at the World Horror Convention. In 2006, he was given the HWA’s Life Achievement Award. In 2008, he was given the Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award by Poets & Writers.

Elizabeth Hand is the author of many novels, including Winterlong, Waking the Moon (Tiptree and Mythopoeic Award-winner), Glimmering, Mortal Love, and Generation Loss, and three collections of stories, most recently Saffron and Brimstone. She has been awarded a Maine Arts Commission Fellowship. She is a regular contributor to the Washington Post and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

Stefan Dziemianowicz has compiled more than forty anthologies of horror, mystery, and science fiction, and collections of macabre fiction by Louisa May Alcott, Robert Bloch, Joseph Payne Brennan, August Derleth, Henry Kuttner, Jane Rice, Bram Stoker, Henry S. Whitehead, and others. A former editor of Necrofile: The Review of Horror Fiction and the Necronomicon Press short fiction series, he co-edited Supernatural Literature of the World: An Encyclopedia. He is the author of Bloody Mary and Other Tales for a Dark Night and The Annotated Guide to Unknown and Unknown Worlds. His reviews have appeared in Publishers Weekly, Locus, and the Washington Post Book World.

Shirley Jackson (1916-1965) wrote such classic novels as The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, as well as one of the most famous short stories in the English language, “The Lottery.” Her work continues to be a major influence on writers of every kind of fiction, from the most traditional genre offerings to the most innovative literary work. National Book Critics Circle Award-winning novelist Jonathan Lethem has called Jackson “one of this century’s most luminous and strange American writers,” and multiple generations of authors would agree.

The 2009 Shirley Jackson Awards will be presented at Readercon 21, Conference on Imaginative Literature, in Burlington, Massachusetts.

Websites: ShirleyJacksonAwards.org
Readercon.org

Media representatives who are seeking further information or interviews should contact JoAnn F. Cox.

Darrell Schweitzer (Interview by Charles Tan)

2009-07-06T18:39:00.000-07:00

Darrell Schweitzer--Living with the Dead

The novella utilizes multiple points of view and has a mosaic-novel feel to it. What made you decide to use such a technique?

The truth of the matter is that it was not planned as a novella. I began with the initial episode, "The Most Beautiful Dead Woman in the World," as a complete story and sold it as such, to INTERZONE. But it demanded a sequel, and then another and ultimately a complete structure emerged. The last episode in particular does not stand alone, and completes the work overall. The technique, I will freely admit, is derived from Zoran Zivkovic's various story-cycles, which he publishes as small books. But it began by simply writing the first couple paragraphs, and following through from there.

What were the challenges in writing Old Corpsenberg? Did you have several cities/towns in mind when you envisioned the location?

I suppose the chief challenge was to maintain the "reality" of the setting without slipping into illogic or absurdity. Outright comedy would have been wrong, but a decidedly ironic edge is required. It would have been a profound misstep to make Corpsenberg some kind of afterlife or purgatory. It can't be that simple. It must remain a mystery. Why does all this happen? Why don't the corpses rot? Where do they came from? The whole point is that even the Observatory Committee, whose job is to understand these things and appreciate how well the place is run, hasn't a clue. People do what they do because they always have, and no one can remember otherwise. You've heard of the "dead hand of the past." This is more like the whole body. The story requires, if you will pardon the expression, a deadpan approach, which one can learn from, among others, Kafka. Once the outrageous central image is taken for granted, all else follows.

What was the inspiration for Living With the Dead?

Hard to say. Besides the influences of Zivkovic and Kafka, I can't deny that of Jason Van Hollander's wonderfully twisted and surreal artwork. I would describe the setting as a Mitteleuropan town out of a Jason Van Hollander illustration.

Tom English (Interview by Charles Tan)

2009-07-05T18:21:00.000-07:00

Tom English – Bound for Evil

Bound for Evil is a thick and large tome. What made you decide to go with this particular format, in addition to settling for the "book" theme?

Both the format and theme of the anthology grew out of a consuming passion for books. Although I’d like to believe I’m not a bibliomaniac---that it’s I who am in control, and not the thousands of books smugly regarding me from the overstuffed shelves of my library---Bound for Evil could serve as pretty damning evidence in my insanity case. Originally, the book was to be a thin paperback, perhaps seven supernatural tales exploring the power of books. After producing an 800-page hardcover with 67 stories, one might say I got a little carried away. I wrote a psychological ghost story in 2005, about a tormented bibliomaniac who carries his lifelong obsession to the grave (and perhaps beyond the grave). A few months later Barbara Roden accepted the tale for All Hallows, and that was almost the end of the matter. But while flipping through the notebook in which I jot down ideas for future stories, I realized about half of my ideas involved books and writers. Why was that? Writers tend to write about things they know, things that interest them: among those things are books and the creative process. I also realized I love reading stories about strange and forbidden books, ancient texts and lost knowledge. I thought of Lovecraft’s “Necronomicon” and Chambers’ The King in Yellow and several other classics of weird fiction, and numerous bookish stories by Ramsey Campbell and other contemporary writers. Putting together an anthology consisting entirely of such tales seemed like a fabulous idea and I couldn’t understand why no one had done it before. But I put the whole idea on a back burner until early 2007. During this gestation period, I decided two very important things about the direction the anthology would take. First, all the stories needed to flow naturally from some aspect of books, writing, reading and collecting. The book in each tale had to be integral to the story’s plot, and not simply a prop. And the book featured in each story had to be dangerous or somehow involved in a bit of devilry, because I wanted to lure back people who’ve thrown off books for movies and video games. I’m not sure why, but we’re often drawn to things that are exciting, forbidden, even dangerous. Put a warning label on a pack of cigarettes and you’ve just given it the best advertisement imaginable. Print a blazing skull on the package and change the brand name to “Instant Death” and you won’t be able to stock enough packs. Well, the idea behind Bound for Evil is that books can be hazardous to your health (and your bank account). What, are you reading again? Do you want to lose your mind? Don’t go near that book, you’ll put out your eye! So, in this way, I hoped to remind us all of the glamour and mystique of books. And what’s sobering about my little scheme is that books really do have incredible power, not only to effect good in our society but, as history bears witness, sometimes evil.

What was the research and solicitation process like? What was the most challenging experience?

By the time I started working on Bound for Evil I had researched, edited, and written introductions for close to two dozen chapbooks. At least half of these little books contain 3 to 5 stories united by a common theme. So I felt reasonably comfortable tackling BfE. For the most part, I enjoyed reading the slush pile. The majority of the material I received was well written, much of it by accomplished writers who were excited by the theme of the anthology. I think the most challenging aspect of editing BfE was completing the task while not neglecting a very demanding day job as a chemist. By the time the book was finished I was exhausted both mentally and physically. What got me through the last few weeks of editing was the support and encouragement of my wife, Wilma, whose patience should have been worn quite thin during the whole process but instead proved extremely durable. Thank God she’s a book person!

There's a couple of easter eggs in the anthology. How did you come up with them and what made you decide to include them?

Jeff Ryan submitted a piece of flash fiction that worked splendidly as a … well, that would be telling. I asked him if I could use the piece in an unusual way and without his byline. Being just as mischievous as I am, if not more so, he gleefully assented. Since many of the stories in the anthology deal with ancient books harboring dark and terrible mysteries, it seemed only fitting that, veiled within its pages, Bound for Evil should hold a few secrets of its own.

Laird Barron (Interview by Charles Tan)

2009-07-02T18:14:00.000-07:00

Laird Barron – “Lagerstatte”

The title of your story is apt. What made you decide to go with Lagerstatte? When did you first encounter the word?

Lagerstätte is a German word meaning “resting place.” Paleontologists use the term to describe areas that are particularly rich in intact fossil records, such as the Burgess Shale and the Le Brae Tar Pits. Lagerstatte is certainly a reference to dual aspects of the story, literal and metaphorical. And to some extent, it’s a nod to Darren Speegle’s work. European titles are one his trademarks.

What made you decide to go for psychological horror? What makes it effective in contrast to other horror tropes?

I’ve been working on a collection that features psychological horror in a major way. Even when submitting to various themed anthologies, I keep in mind how a piece will fit into a larger whole. The Lagerstatte represents what will be the core of the next book. Psychological horror is attractive to me because among other things, it introduces ambiguity. Where does reality end and the nightmare begin? If I want to unnerve a reader, I leave them to their own devices in a dark room. They’ll take that ambiguity and conjure mental images of terrors far beyond the scope of my ability.

Was the story originally intended to be horrifying or was that an element that evolved as you were writing a story for The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy?

I wrote The Lagerstätte in reaction to tragedies loved ones of mine have endured. Danni’s fugue and her survivor’s guilt are details that revealed themselves once I began researching grief and its manifold incarnations, the damage it inflicts. The horrific aspects seemed integral from the first draft, but I envisioned them to be more remote, more emotionally restrained. In the immortal words of Nathan Ballingrud, “you go where it takes you,” and this one took me to far darker places than I’d bargained for.

John Kessel (Interview by Charles Tan)

2009-07-01T05:56:00.000-07:00

John Kessel – “Pride and Prometheus”

What were some of the challenges in combining Jane Austen with Mary Shelley?

Yes. Though PRIDE AND PREJUDICE and FRANKENSTEIN were published within five years of one another, they are very different types of novels. Austen's book is a novel of manners, a social comedy with serious overtones written from the point of view of a witty omniscient narrator who slyly comments on the action and characters, very unobtrusively. Shelley's is a gothic romance, written by a series of unreliable first-person narrators, indulging all the excesses of emotion and description of romantic literature, but with a critical intelligence and social commentary behind the melodrama.

The two things are hard to fit together. For one thing, no one is wittier than Jane Austen, and though I could attempt her prose style, I am not in her league as a wit. I made some attempts. My story deliberately starts as close to Jane Austen as I could manage, and gradually slips into Mary Shelley style as it goes along and the sf/gothic element comes to center stage. I thought of it as FRANKENSTEIN over PRIDE AND PREJUDICE. But in the end I wanted to pull back from the gothic, too. The climax of the story comes, not with a mortal struggle on an ice floe at the north pole, but with Mary Bennet and the monster sitting at a table talking about marriage. I think of Austen and Shelley as the mothers of the modern novel of manners and of science fiction. As such, it was appropriate for a writer like me, who has been influenced by both, to try to merge them.

In your opinion, what are the strengths of the short story--or in this case, the novelette--especially in light of your writing goals for "Pride and Prometheus"?

I think this kind of pastiche can get out of hand at novel length. The game playing is not enough to sustain a novel. I wanted the story to be more than a joke, more than just a high concept; it had to be a story about real people with serious issues, as much as I could make it. The novelette form works well for me with these situations. I saw the opportunity to insert my story into the narrative of FRANKENSTEIN in the middle of chapter nineteen of that novel. By keeping it to story length, you could imagine all the events of "Pride and Prometheus" occurring between paragraphs of that chapter, after which FRANKENSTEIN moves on to the rest of its plot unaltered. That was one of my goals in writing it. To do as little violence as possible to either PRIDE AND PREJUDICE (my story takes place ten years after it ends, though I tried to make my characters recognizably the same people they were in that book) or to FRANKENSTEIN. This wasn't meant to be PRIDE AND PREJUDICE AND ZOMBIES.

As an author who's written a lot of material over the decades, does the writing experience become easier or is it more difficult as you become conscious of your own style or attempt something new?

Having written many stories, I guess I have learned a lot of craft that theoretically can help me in writing new ones. But every time I start something new I feel like I am reinventing the wheel. Often with a sense of panic. The one thing I can tell myself is, "you did this before, so the feelings of not knowing how this is going to come out ought to be familiar to you. Stop fretting."

I do try to do new things, so that helps keep me fresh. I don't want to write the same story over and over, though I think it is inevitable that a writer has certain obsessions that come out regardless of his intention. In putting together my recent collection THE BAUM PLAN FOR FINANCIAL INDEPENDENCE, I did notice certain repetitions, and I'm wary now of doing the same things again--time to strike out in a new direction.

But I don't think the writing, for me, has become easier. Or rather, some things have become easier, but different things are still hard.

Doug Dorst (Interview by Charles Tan)

2009-06-28T18:05:00.000-07:00

Doug Dorst - Alive in Necropolis

What made you decide to use San Francisco as your setting?

Alive in Necropolis started out as a short story that took place in Iowa City, where I was living at the time. I got nowhere with it, though, so I put it away for a year or so, until I had moved back to San Francisco. The local newspaper ran a feature piece about Colma and its cemeteries, and I realized that that was the setting I should use for this story (which starts out with a chance discovery in a graveyard). I had lived nearly all of my adult life in the Bay Area, and I felt like I could write both passionately and confidently about it.

Since Alive in Necropolis is your first novel, what was the most challenging process? How did you overcome it?

The most challenging part of writing the novel was following the advice that many friends had given me: on the first draft, just keep going -- even if you don't know where you're going, even if you think everything you're writing is terrible, even if you'd rather do anything but sit down and face the screen. Just write and write and get to the end, without agonizing over the little stuff, because you're going to have to go back several times to revise, anyway. I have a perfectionist streak, which is useful when I'm revising but deadly when I'm trying to generate new material. I spent a ridiculous amount of time polishing my first 50 pages, and guess what that got me? Fifty shiny-brite pages, and the vast majority of a book still to write (and many people not-so-subtly clearing their throats and tapping their watches).

Another friend of mine taught me the trick of setting a timer for 20 minutes and challenging myself to write a draft of a full scene in that time. No backspacing, no fixing things, no pausing-- not even to think. I'd end up throwing away 95% of the actual text that came out during that stretch, but I'd nearly always end up with a detailed map for a scene that flowed organically, felt alive, and had something surprising in it. It's a great way to get un-stuck.

Character is important in the book. How did you get a handle on the characters and what made you settle on the Point of View you used?

Some of the characters revealed themselves immediately, and I understood them intuitively. Others took me much longer to understand, and I had to keep writing (and, in most cases, throwing out) sketches of scenes with them in order to figure them out-- not just as individuals, but also in terms of their relationships with other characters in the book.

As for point of view, I knew from the beginning that I wanted to work in limited third person. I was at first inclined to use only one viewpoint character (Mercer, the cop), but the story kept getting bigger and bigger, and I needed to be able to write scenes that he wasn't in. So I ended up using a rotating third person, which allowed the narrative to range farther afield and also get deeper into the inner worlds of more characters.

Ann/Jeff Vandermeer (Interview by Charles Tan)

2009-06-24T19:41:00.000-07:00

Ann VanderMeer/Jeff VanderMeer - Fast Ships, Black Sails

What spurned both of you to work on a pirate anthology? Did you pitch the concept or was it assigned to you?

A - The good folks at Nightshade asked us to do it. It sounded like a lot of fun, an all-original pirate anthology. We were excited to do it.

J - In addition to the fun aspect, I wanted, following on the New Weird antho, to show that we could also deliver a satisfying traditional good-old-adventure-and-excitement kind of anthology. Thing is, we usually focus on the more surreal stuff because no one's really doing that. But we both love more traditional fiction, too. So in a way we got to satisfy another part of our reading experience with this opportunity. I'd like to do more in this vein, in addition to the more cutting edge stuff.

You mentioned in the introduction that there were some stories that surprised you. Did the fact that you were open to submission for the anthology affect that result or is it more due to the diversity of the subject matter?

A - Having an open reading period is what made all the difference. It allowed us to discover other writers we might not have read before. In addition, I have published some of those writers in Weird Tales, too! So the surprises were delightful ones. I understand the appeal of doing anthologies purely by invitation only, but in doing so you run the risk of all anthologies being exactly the same, with the same writers. Pirates is also a broad theme and we were determined to create a book that showed diversity.

J - We picked about half the stories from the open reading period. Kelly Barnhill's story is amazing, for example. We wouldn't have seen that one otherwise. Even writers we rejected, like Jonathan Wood, wound up getting into Weird Tales because of the open reading period. And Jonathan Wood went on to become a good friend, in part because of that. There's a guy who is going to hit the big time soon. So you also keep your finger on the pulse of what's going on out there by reading slush. Whenever possible, we're committed to that process. We make money on anthologies, but we don't edit anthologies to make money, if that makes sense. I mean, we can do a four-hour workshop and make more than you usually get from anthos, so you have to edit for the love. The Conrad Williams story up for a Jackson Award (which cracks us up, since our cat is named Jackson) was, I believe, by invitation, though. We just thought Conrad would create something mysterious and bloody and weird. He's such a great writer--totally underrated no matter how much praise he gets.

What were your criteria in selecting stories for the antho?

A - Well-written, unusual and unique - first. Then we make sure that the stories work well together. We wanted to make sure that each story was completely different from all the rest. That's why you'll see a traditional adventure story next to a horror story next to a humor story.

J - Yeah, but we also did want to work off of a more traditional model, and some of our favorite writers who are known for being more off-beat delivered in that sense--like Rhys Hughes, whose story is hilarious. We must have done something right, since stories were taken for several year's bests and they continue to be up for various awards. It's very satisfying.

Daryl Gregory (Inteview by Charles Tan)

2009-06-22T13:01:00.000-07:00

Daryl Gregory - Pandemonium

You're highly-praised for your short fiction. Was it a difficult transition, progressing from writing short stories to a novel? What was the most challenging aspect?

I don't think I've "progressed" from one form to the next, because I'm still trying to figure out how to write short stories, and I'm certainly still struggling with novels! Also, my messy chronology doesn't follow an ascent-to-novels arc. I first published a few short stories in the early 90's, disappeared for ten years while I worked full time, helped raise babies, and slowly pecked out a sprawling, unsellable SF novel. Then I went back to short stories, and realized that the novel-writing process -- and ten years of life, I suppose -- had helped me figure out some things about how to write short fiction. Only then did I start on Pandemonium.

One of the things I had to learn about novels was that even though they gave me so many more pages to play with, they still had to be focused, and I was going to have to leave out much more than I put in. I know that sounds dead obvious, but I went into my first novel with the naive idea that I'd have room to dump every interesting thought I'd have during the course of the writing. That went about as well as you'd expect it to.

I can be a little looser than I am in a short story -- there's room, for example, to tell several characters' stories and show how they intersect -- but everything has to serve the aims of the book. Still, at the end of a first draft of a book, I'm always disappointed by how many ideas didn't make it from my notebooks to the final page.

What is it about the novel format that you couldn't accomplish with the short story, especially in light of the "dark fantastic"?

Even though I learned that I couldn't put everything into a novel, I did enjoy the broader range of effects that are possible. One of the things I particularly enjoyed was being able to shift tone and voice over the course of the work. In the limited space of a short story, I usually take a very Poe-ish policy about unity of effect. I can shift mood at the end if I bring the readers with me, but that's about it.

In Pandemonium, however, I could skate back and forth across that line between light and dark, especially in regard to the horror elements. My first person narrator helped me out here. His first response to terrible events is irony, banter, emotional distance -- but then the irony becomes untenable, banter fails, and he can't keep his distance. I wanted to have that same effect on the readers. My, isn't this amusing! Then hit them with a blind-side tackle.

In your novel, you draw inspiration from various sources. What is it about mash-ups that appeal to you as a writer and as a reader?

Mash-ups are a form of play. When they're done well, by writers such as Kim Newman and Philip José Farmer, and Alan Moore, they're just fun in a way that's hard to define. Maybe it's because mash-ups are an expression of how our minds work. Each of us has a personal collection of pop-cultural fragments floating loose in the brain, and when they slam together in the right way, old familiar things seem fresh and strange. So, one way to consider this book is as a graph of Daryl's Head. Captain America occupies a point just north of Casey Jones, and Lovecraft and Philip K. Dick are next door neighbors. I gave myself permission to include all these references because the idea of the mash-up is one of the themes of the book -- Pandemonium is about a man literally constructing an identity out of all the stories he's read and heard from his family.

That said, pop cultural references or literary allusions are no substitute for character, or story. My rule was that the book had to pass the Thelma test, named after my mom, who's never read a superhero comic or an SF book (except mine, of course). If the reader catches the allusion, then that's a nice Easter egg, but the story has to make sense, and be engaging, on its own terms.

Ra Page (Inteview with Charles Tan)

2009-06-17T07:17:00.000-07:00

Ra Page – The New Uncanny

What made you decide to collaborate on this anthology together and what was it like working with each other?

As an editor, I've always been interested in crossovers been scientific thinking and literature; my own background is in physics, and my father is a psychologist. Sarah, on the other hand is an artist and photographer, whose work has often delved into uncanny subjects and processes: unnatural interventions, dislocated spaces, foreign bodies. When it comes to re-evaluating Freud and the uncanny, the visual arts have been ahead of the curve for a while now: so when Sarah first showed me Freud's original essay, it was like a discovering Constantinople, a meeting point between two different continents of thought, a bridge for science to enter art, and vice versa.

As such, the editorial collaboration was perfect - an artist and a scientifically minded editor working together - it reflected the interchange going on in the essay itself.

My job was to champion the essay and break it down (if necessary) for the less science-friendly writers. Sarah's was to use her instincts in culling, cutting and tweaking those responses that didn't pass muster, as soon as any they came in. She can tell instantly if a story isn't working, while I have to work out why it isn't, before I can even decide that it isn't. So she works a bit quicker than me!

What is it about the short story medium that appeals to you and to Comma Press?

Oh everything. How long have we got?

First and foremost I think the short story is playful as a form. It encourages the writer to experiment and make something new of the story-shape, and it kind of winks and nods at the reader, too, allowing us to enjoy the fact that we're being, or we're about to be, messed with. It's a teasing form, and it's capable of projecting patterns outwards that are revelatory and wondrous, patterns and epiphanies that are almost impossibly clear. With a novel, it's different ball game - novels are all about detail, context and the wider texture of the characters' histories and backstories, interlocking and moving ever-forwards. With short stories, the image you get is only there for a split-second, but like a flash it burns its shape on the retina in the darkness left after the last line.

Nadine Gordimer has this great argument about the short story. She says, in life truth doesn't come with a capital T, and it doesn't accumulate and build up and up towards a singular monumental viewpoint at the end. Instead it's fragmentary, it's discrete, it hits us in flashes and leaves us ignorant as quickly it arrives, ignorant until our next, contradictory moment of insight. The short story, she says, is better equipped for this fragmented reality (unlike the novel which builds and builds over time), the short story's insights are clear and singular, and only last as long as they do because they're incompatible with any other story, or any other wider 'Truth'. It's like the particle theory of truth vs. the wave theory. We, at Comma, think it's a particle; we're all about the particle.

What was your criteria in selecting the contributors and the stories for the anthology?

Firstly, we wanted to get a spread of authors from different backgrounds; there's filmwriters and TV comedy writers in there, as well as masters of dark fiction and 'literary' big hitters. We wanted to show Ramsey Campbell, for instance, can easily hold his own against some of the best literary writers on the block - as there's a lot of snobbery out there towards 'dark fiction'. A S Byatt was the first author to get on board and, to be honest, her support for Comma has kept us going, one way or another, over the last couple of years. She's been like a fairy godmother to us. Once she was on board with this book it was all systems go.

Our main criteria in selecting stories was to only go for those that freshened things up. The task was to update the examples of uncanny archetypes that Freud talks about, to come up with genuinely new manifestations of them, and thus extend the canon. So we were looking for stories that would both slot into place and push the envelop, stories that respected the greats of the horror tradition and, at the same time, cleared the decks for something new. As a result it's quite interesting to see AS Byatt's 'Dolls Eyes' (which is classic Freud sprinkled with Rilke), alongside Adam Marek's 'Tamagotchi' and Frank Cottrell Boyce's 'Continuous Manipulation' (about the computer game, The Sims). They're all about essentially the same thing: life-imitating playthings. It's Michael Redgrave and the ventriloquist's dummy from Dead of Night all over again... but as you'd least expect it.

Julia Leigh (Interview with Charles Tan)

2009-06-15T06:03:00.000-07:00

Julia Leigh - "Disquiet"

How did you decide on the length of "Disquiet?" What is it about the novella format that makes it apt for this particular story?

My sense is that the length of a work is more or less determined by an author's stylistic choices. DISQUIET is very controlled - in keeping with the control of the characters, characters who cannot bring themselves to discuss their great losses, who try to hold themselves together as they bear towards breaking. There is more silence than there is consolation.

"Disquiet" explores several uncomfortable subjects. Did you have any difficulty with these scenes, or is that what you particularly enjoy when it comes to writing fiction?

The book comes from a place of intense feeling....I can't say it was particularly easy or enjoyable to write. Maybe there's such a thing as a difficult pleasure.

You're a lauded writer. In what way has your writing improved or altered since The Hunter, and how has your experience helped you in writing this book?

I almost feel as if I had to shuck off the first book in order to write the second. And I expect it will be the same with the next book: 'don't look back'. I have a great admiration for authors who have created a strong body of work, from book to book.

Danel Olson (Interview by Charles Tan)

2009-06-07T15:35:00.000-07:00

Danel Olson, editor of Exotic Gothic 2: New Tales of Taboo

In both Exotic Gothic anthologies, there's a focus on stories not just by Western authors but by international authors as well. What made you decide to implement this?

On the one hand, British and Irish DNA must have a strand for writing great Gothic stories. Encouraging this genetic tendency are those countries' histories of royal sexual excess and decapitated queens, disputed estates, curses, revenge cycles, old graveyards, dark streets, thousands of castles, and dependable rain. So, know I love to work with their authors! They certainly do have a home-field advantage, as the Gothic was born there. Don’t you think their peoples' influence on Gothic literature, music, and film is unmatched?

But I'm not from those islands, and my curiosity to hear other voices from the back of beyond is keen. Discussing Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea or teaching Carlos Fuentes's Aura at Lone Star College, I realized how startling a Gothic frame appears outside its traditional home. How alluring but deceptive is the familiar in an exotic place, and how suggestive it is that the observer is wishing alive a reality. Why not then make a collection of out-sourced Gothika? Why not find storytellers from the farthest lands to take us to new castles & new dungeons?

Fortunately there was a publisher given to adventure (Barbara and Christopher Roden's Ash-Tee Press). There were also international artists who loved a challenge, and they smuggled the old Gothic impulse to seven continents. It worked a lot of mayhem, turns out. What Dean Francis Alfar, Edward P. Crandall, Steve Duffy, Milorad Pavić, and John Whitbourn showed happen in Asia shocked and captivated me. Astonishing, too, was a Cambodian retelling of Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" by Genni Gunn. What George Makana Clark and Nicholas Royle let loose in Africa moved me. Three astonishing artists of Australia--Stephen Dedman, Terry Dowling, and Robert Hood--unfolded the mystifying in their homeland, and something heart-stopping there. Even stranger discoveries from my home continent awaited when I read of John Bushore's, Elizabeth Massie's, and Tia V. Travis's North American journeys. An uncanny wandering through one of South America's most desolate landscapes in Adam Golaski's tale--the salt flats of Bolivia-- gave new meaning to the idea of a brief encounter. And in Europe, but still outside of the traditional Gothic settings (of Ireland, UK, Germany, France, & Italy), many dark secrets were illuminated from Peter Bell, Nancy A. Collins, Christopher Fowler, Taylor Kincaid, Kenneth McKenney, Reggie Oliver, Steve Rasnic Tem, and David Wellington. Capping it on ice, an elusive Gothic blood tale of Antarctica was dreamt by Canadian Barbara Roden.

I'm proud that the next book in the original story/novel excerpt series, Exotic Gothic 3 (to be released September 2009) will feature writers of The Czech Republic, Serbia, Australia, Fiji, Malaysia, and Russia, and points beyond.

What was your criteria in selecting the stories? What for you makes a "good, Exotic Gothic" story?

Ever read a story that makes your body so cold no fire can ever warm you? Ever felt physically as if the top of your head were taken off? That story's perfect! That's the only way I know an exceptional Gothic tale. Emily Dickinson said the same when she was asked about how she knew what she read was poetry. I would add that a Gothic work stays with us when it shows a heart, mind, and spirit divided till the very end. All along the tale is mired in ambiguity--this could be Heaven or this could be Hell—even to the last sentence, even unto the character’s last breath.

What's the appeal of gothic fiction for you?

Its appeal is to revisit the delicious dread I felt at another time. My soul caught afire on first reading "Adventures of a German Student" by Washington Irving (when I was six years old), hearing "Hotel California" by the Eagles when it first came out in 1976 (when I was eleven), and writing on Wuthering Heights (at nineteen). So much wildness lives in all three of those! So much death-in-life! Doesn't their attention to physical longing and sudden loss, illusion and desire, remind us that we are merely lanterns carried in blood and skin? The intimate discoveries they share even sometimes encroaches on our real lives: that the one we love we might not really know, that she or he wears a masquerade or may damn us, that we are "prisoners of our own device"--victims partaking in her own victimization, that we shall never run fast enough to get out the door, that we can hate and love with a shameless intensity the same person. And that when she is gone, even gone behind the veil, we will go looking for her. Lovely morbidities, no?

Maybe the Gothic love is a strange nostalgia, too, for when I was little. My mother worked in a mental hospital with twenty-one identical red brick buildings, back in the time when you could still commit your relatives without so many irksome restrictions, and when small magic pills seemed the answer to every quirk. Starting when I was four years old, I would be toted along, as there was no one to care for me at home. I suppose it could be viewed as a slightly-off form of Headstart or Daycare. I spent my days playing in the halls and the dining rooms, and the asylum became a kind of kinder-home. It was very clean, and there were books, too, though mostly on mental diseases. But children generally adjust to abnormalities around them. Well, one lemony morning I saw a softly feminine woman staring out the window as we came in to the hospital; she was there staring off again when we left at 3:00. She would be there many mornings and afternoons after that, looking out the western window of Building 20. She had long hair that was dark and shiny, freckled skin, and blue and vacant eyes. I thought her odd, old (she was probably 20), and lovely. Naturally, I fell in love with all my sincere and bursting boy’s heart.

So here we had a mysteriously imprisoned woman, longing to be free (I thought anyway), but controlled, fed medication, and held within by An Authority Who Knows Best. She was not a figure of fiction that I picked up in college by reading Hardy's heart-breaking "Barbara of the House of Grebe" or Ray Russell's cold "Sardonicus", though she would in time remind me of them. No, this trapped woman--the central feature of the Gothic novel--was a breathing one. I never heard her to have visitors. What could she have done to be stashed there and forgotten? I learned her name was Kimberley, but that was all. And I remember to this day, very gothically, a woman who was made a ghost of the State, and who said nothing to me at all.

Stephen Graham Jones (Interview by Charles Tan)

2009-05-31T19:17:00.000-07:00

Stephen Graham Jones - "The Long Trial of Nolan Dugatti"

How did you come up with the structure for "The Long Trial of Nolan Dugatti?"

It was complete and total luck, all documented here. I was planning on writing something completely different, set in a nursing home, but then the first line of Nolan Dugatti just came at me out of nowhere, and it's the kind of line that has a back-and-forth structure just built right into it. And, if you're going to jam a novel onto paper in seventy-two hours like I did with Nolan Dugatti, you need that back-and-forth kind of thing happening, because you don't really have time to stop and wonder what comes next. That next thing needs to be already happening. So, with the 'investigation' monologue and the suicide letters handing the story off to each other constantly, I never had to stop and get all second-guessy, could just roll. And that's the best kind of writing. Doctorow (E.L., not Cory) compares writing like that to taking dictation, and that's it exactly. Some days your fingers can hardly type fast enough.

What was the most difficult aspect when it came to writing the story?

Not letting the father's voice just dominate. Because I knew early on that it wasn't his ('my,' yes) story, really, but Nolan's. But the father, the dad, always trying to kill himself in stupider and stupider ways, he kind of draws the spotlight. Then too, though, he has no camopede in his parts of the story either, and no ninjas either, an no shrimp floating across the page. So maybe I was nervous for no reason.

Another difficult part -- but it wouldn't be writing if it weren't difficult -- would be the ending, I suppose. Even ninety-percent through the thing, probably even ninety-five, I had zero clue how this was all going to come together. Which is to say I was setting myself up for one of those stupid 'literary' guess-the-ending final paragraphs, where the idea's that the reader's supposed to have read close enough to now be able to project what's going to happen, making it unnecessary for me to actually stoop to write it. Except those kinds of endings are really just the writer not having nerve, not having confidence, so he or she takes the easy way out, foists it all off onto the reader then calls them stupid if they don't get it. But we all know where the stupidity lies there, yeah?

"The Long Trial of Nolan Dugatti" combines science fiction, horror, and speculative fiction. In your opinion, how do these elements--when used properly--can strengthen a work of fiction, horror or otherwise?

I think an answer here starts with what I think each of those three does, just in general. So. Horror, what it does is remind us that we're human. It engages that animal part of our brain that still remembers that there's stuff around every corner, just waiting to chomp down on us. Except, in today's world, we've got the place so lit that the dark corners aren't so dark. Horror gives that darkness back, lets us be what we are, instead of some cleaned-up version. And it's good to feel human in that most basic way. As for science fiction, it lets us feel wonder, that pure, unadulterated kind. I mean, sure, you can read it all as cautionary tales, dystopias, critiques of whatever's going on now, but I choose not to. I read science fiction like a kid, just going so slow through those sentences where some character looks out the window, sees galaxies spread out that we can't even see now with telescopes. Fiction's a much better lens, finally, allows us to see so much deeper into reality. The only reality that matters, anyway. And, speculative fiction, which kind of takes from horror and science fiction both -- fantasy as well, I'd say -- it's usually more just our everyday world, but with a little bit of that magic reintroduced, to perturb (fix?) everything. And that's a very, very important thing to do. It makes us look at the world outside the story in a different way, I think. A way in which things are possible, in which small things matter -- or, this gets as what I think art in general does, really: say you've just hit a stageplay, and what you've seen up there for the last couple of hours is this narrative efficiency, this economy of characters and events, where every word said aloud matters, where every pistol on the mantle has big meaning. Now, when you leave that theatre, don't your eyes kind of stick like that for a while, such that the next newspaper to blow up against your leg, you look down at it wonder what column's there unaccidentally, specifically for you? What's the world, efficient itself, trying to tell you here, with this? We're all in stories, after all. What good fiction can do is teach us better how to navigate within them, maybe even rise above every once in a while, see through the page to the bigger page, and on and on.

But that maybe wasn't exactly the question. As for how these -- horror, science fiction, speculative fiction - can strengthen a work: how can they not? Given the choice (and we all are given that choice), I'd much rather read a werewolf novel than a non-werewolf novel. Just because, at the end of the book, even if the werewolf story's failed in some grand, obvious fashion, still, I've maybe seen a werewolf, and am now maybe a little more afraid to step out into the alley with my trashbag. Give me the werewolves any day. Please. I can keep stacking the trash up by the back door for as long as necessary.

And, this is maybe the same answer all over, but finally there's just the boredom factor. I have zero interest in reading kitchen sink drama, just for the obvious reason: I've got plenty of that particular kind of drama in my everyday life. No, if I'm going to stay interested in something, sure, I need real people in that story, just because I need to identify, to engage, to be lured into investing myself, but I also need a cyborg bear standing on the sidewalk every now and again, just reading today's newspaper, waiting for a certain blue Chevrolet to crawl by, its limo-tint windows at half-mast, at which point the game's on, the newspaper's floating behind him, he's down on all fours giving chase, and I'm right there behind him, smiling, thrilled again to be part of a world like that, even if just for a little while.

Melanie and Steve Rasnic Tem (Interview by Charles Tan)

2009-05-25T17:32:00.000-07:00

Melanie and Steve Rasnic Tem – The Man on the Ceiling

What were some of the difficulties in combining real life with fiction?

Melanie:

The underlying creative reason for using that combination technique was to say more about the themes and events (factual and imaginary) than either straight-ahead non-fiction or pure fiction could have done. So the ongoing requirement was to find the right balance, the most illuminating angle, so we could tell the most truthful truth. We also had to grapple with the question of when we were being self-indulgent and when we were being creatively honest, and the converse: when were we withholding something out of timidity, and when did the story demand a less direct approach?

Steve:

I’d say giving up one’s natural urge to self-protect, or at least severely compromising it, was the most difficult part for me. I’m generally willing to do anything a piece demands. In this case the piece demanded that I not worry about how I, personally, was coming across to the reader—that was difficult to swallow sometimes. I had to just grit my teeth and push through.

One of the stranger aspects of this writing experience, and it’s in keeping with the goal of the book itself, was that throughout the writing of THE MAN ON THE CEILING I never felt as if I were writing fiction. The childhood and young adult delusions and fantasies were the very ones I had experienced at the time. They were an important part of my reality. I grew up fairly isolated in a town of 600. I wasn’t allowed to go out much, even within that small community, and because of my father’s alcoholism people rarely visited. So much of my experience was inside my head. To call that experience fiction would have been to call a large segment of my life fiction.

As much as anything else, TMOC is also about spiritual experience and the spiritual aspect to fiction. Is spiritual experience fiction? I would tend to say yes, but with the caveat that it’s fiction of a peculiar sort, in that it’s fiction created because no other narrative tools are adequate to capturing the experience you’re trying to illuminate. I’d say that spiritual fiction is as valid and as important as everyday reality. But that its validity is most sound within a personal context. Once you have a number of people authoring that spiritual fiction as a group collaboration and proselytizing it to others as something that should be their fiction as well, things become a bit dicey. I get antsy inside churches, or around large groups of people who all seem to believe the same things.

There's a lot of things you end up doing with Point of View in the novel. How did you decide who'll write each scene and what does it feel when the other person is writing from "your" POV?

Melanie:

Seeing how far we could go with point of view was one of the most exciting aspects of writing this book for me. Writing from each other's point of view had the interesting effect of showing me aspects of my own experience that I hadn't considered before.

Steve:

POV changes everything, really. If you change a story’s POV you’re writing a completely different story, assuming that POV is adequately realized. That became so obvious when writing this particular book it was actually a bit intimidating. There could have been potentially a dozen or more very different versions of the book. I think finally aspects of the story were divided up according to who felt the strongest about a particular area of content. Some chapters are practically “life testimonies” for one or the other of us. And some sections were a kind of indirect answer to what the other had written. Some of the more unexpected uses of POV were an attempt to break things open, to help us find out things we had forgotten, or never knew.

How did you decide which elements to fictionalize and which to maintain? How do you think your novel interacts with the reader-writer relationship?

We ask a lot of the reader in this book. We ask a particular kind of suspension of disbelief--really, we ask the reader to set aside the belief/disbelief paradigm, to put on hold the impulse to figure out what "really" happened and look at what's "true" in a different way. It seems to have worked for some readers. No doubt others are still annoyed by it, or just stopped reading when they realized what we wanted from them.

Bottom line, The Man On The Ceiling was an attempt to use the tools of fiction because no other tools seemed adequate to the task of trying to capture the breadth of everyday lives which have both an exterior and an interior, an observable shape and an invisible shape, a forward progress not only in consensus reality, but in the imagination as well.

Nadia Bulkin (Interview by Charles Tan)

2009-05-17T20:13:00.000-07:00

Nadia Bulkin – "Intertropical Convergence Zone”

Your story references various cultures and myths. Did you have to do a lot
of research for these? What made you decide to mash them up?

I grew up in Indonesia, and in writing my story I used a combination of urban and local legends that I knew from childhood. I like sewing together bits and pieces of magic folklore to make my own "laws of magic," so to speak - in Indonesia, myth and spirituality are usually what you make them, and its sources are almost always diverse. As far as I know, however, I invented the specific rituals used in the story.

What was the most difficult part in writing the story?

I would say getting the right events in place and setting the right tone.

How does your political science background influence your writing?

Political science plays a huge role in my writing, although I don't always write explicitly about politics. Political science is really just the interaction of a whole lot of powerful plots and characters, which is why I love it. "Intertropical Convergence Zone" was a way for me to write about a political period (the Suharto era) that had a lot of impact on me personally with the freedom, texture, and emotional punch of fiction.

Conrad Williams Interview (by Charles Tan)

2009-05-11T19:22:00.000-07:00

Conrad Williams--"68° 07’ 15"N, 31° 36’ 44"W"

"68° 07’ 15"N, 31° 36’ 44"W" has a certain tone. Was it easy or difficult for you sustaining that particular tone?

I found it fairly easy, once I'd played around with the voice of the story for a while. But maybe that had something to do with its relatively short length. I was trying for a kind of vile elegance. I felt the story needed some unusual textures, something skewed and knotty. I wanted readers to sense insanity trembling at the edges of the page. I'm not sure how successful I was in capturing that, but I had enormous fun writing it.

What was the inspiration for the story and what made you finally settle on the coordinates as the title?

I've always been in thrall to the kind of character that possesses a supernatural elusiveness. He's always a few steps ahead, flitting out of view at the moment you think you have him. Dracula is the obvious example. I'm also attracted to the idea of the enemy within. I thought about someone driven to the edge of madness by a foe who has killed off his crew and goes in pursuit no matter what it takes. I love maps and I was spending some time looking at Google Earth, trying to find a dramatic location where I could end the story. I found a great ice mass in the Arctic and it was really only as I was shutting down the application that I noticed the coordinates in the bottom corner of the screen. Written down they look evocative, mysterious. You know they refer to a tangible spot on the planet, but without a map, it's all just so much alien code. Although there is a drawback. I was asked at the World Horror Convention what my pirate story was called and I couldn't remember... In future I think I'll refer to it as '68'.

Ending a story can sometimes be tricky but you succeed with this one. Was this originally the ending that you envisioned and for you, how does endings play a role in scaring the reader?

SPOILER ALERT - Don't read this if you intend to check out the story...

You can either go for the big payoff in which you tie off all the strands and leave it neat, or choose something a little more ambiguous. I think ambiguity, especially in horror fiction, is an underrated element. You can draw out enormous power by leaving things a little vague; leaving things to the reader to decide in other words, because what is going on in the little cinema behind their eyes is much more intense and frightening that anything you, as a writer, can confront them with on the page. I liked the idea of Captain Low finally cornering Greenhalgh – who he has suspected is Fetter throughout the story – in the icy wastes. The ship, his crew... they're no longer important to Low. He has found what he was looking for. His quest – he believes – is over. Now he wants to simply walk his quarry into the wilderness. He's forcing the pace, he's waiting for something to happen. What comes next is up to the reader...

Jeff Vandermeer (Charles Tan interview)

2009-05-04T18:57:00.000-07:00

Jeff VanderMeer - The Situation

What is it about insects, mollusks, and Cthulhu-esque creatures that fascinate you and make them effective in producing the desired effect on the reader?

Heh. No disrespect to Lovecraft, but these creatures have existed for millions of years. I first encountered them in nature, and in nature books. Looking at them, they seemed like alien life forms on Earth. I'm fascinated by them because I find them beautiful in both their forms and their complexity, but I also know that in fiction they tend to enhance the sense of other or the alien. So they seem like effective delivery systems for making the familiar strange. So, in "The Situation" you have a typical office situation rendered up with bugs and giant fish, among other things, so that the reader will come to see that our modern "typical office" situations aren't, er, actually all that normal. But to get to that point, or the reader to get to that point, you have to add an element of disorientation. Personally, though, having grown up in a family with a father who studied rhinoceros beetles, moths, and fire ants, it's really the odd beauty of these creatures that drives me. Besides, I always seem to need to have a totem animal in my fiction. In "The Situation" that totem is actually fairly conventional: a giant bear-like creature. But, in the context of the other stuff, he seems normal even when he floats.

What made you tackle the corporate workplace in The Situation? Personal experience, catharsis, or simply another creative outlet?

In some ways, it's a fictionalization of certain events that happened to me. To get it out of my system, I wrote out the circumstances of my own "situation" and then one night woke up with the image of a giant fish and a giant bear in my head, sat down and typed the full rough draft of "The Situation." By that point, of course, only the bare bones of reality were left--just the basic situation at the core. Now, of course, it's being turned into a graphic novel for Tor.com, with the art of Eric Orchard, and thus undergoing a totally new transformation through Eric's imagination.

As one of the editors of The New Weird anthology, do you think your novelette fits that category? (Why or why not?)

That's a good question. Not to dance around an answer, but one reason to edit but not be in a New Weird anthology is to stand a little apart from it, to have some distance from it. I don't consider myself a New Weird writer, but someone who writes some fiction that can be considered New Weird every once in awhile. I don't know if "The Situation" is New Weird or not, and I'm not sure it matters. This is what I mean about editing an anthology. As a reader, as an editor, perhaps as a critic or reviewer, I have interest in the term "New Weird." But as a writer, I'm not that interested in labels. What I'm most interested in is trying new things and pushing myself.

Charles Tan to interview the 2008 Shirley Jackson Award Nominees

2009-05-03T19:43:00.000-07:00

As Charles did last year, he is interviewing many of our Shirley Jackson Awards nominees. Keep an eye on this blog in the coming weeks!

Charles A. Tan is the co-editor of the Philippine Speculative Fiction Sampler and his fiction has appeared in publications such as The Digest of Philippine Genre Stories and Philippine Speculative Fiction. He has conducted interviews for The Nebula Awards and The Shirley Jackson Awards, as well as for online magazines such as SF Crowsnest and SFScope. He is a regular contributor to sites like SFF Audio and Game Cryer. He used to contribute reviews at Comics Village. You can visit his blog, Bibliophile Stalker, where he posts book reviews, interviews, and essays.

Auction reminder

2009-04-27T14:23:00.000-07:00

The Alleged Haunting of B______ House is ending soon! Get those bids in.

The Alleged Haunting of B_____ House now live

2009-04-21T16:53:00.000-07:00

The Shirley Jackson Awards online auction of a rare book to benefit the award is now live. Peter Schneider has kindly donated a first edition of the 1899 publication of The Alleged Haunting of B----- House.

Persons may bid on this item from Tuesday, April 21 through midnight on Thursday, April 30, 2009.

Good luck

Nominees Announced for the 2008 Shirley Jackson Awards

2009-04-15T08:00:00.000-07:00

Boston, MA (April 2009) -- 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.

The Shirley Jackson Awards are voted upon by a jury of professional writers, editors, critics, and academics, with input from a Board of Advisors. The awards will be given for the best work published in the preceding calendar year in the following categories: Novel, Novella, Novelette, Short Story, Single-Author Collection, and Edited Anthology.

The nominees for the 2008 Shirley Jackson Awards are:

NOVEL
Alive in Necropolis, Doug Dorst (Riverhead Hardcover)
The Man on the Ceiling, Steve Rasnic Tem and Melanie Tem (Wizards of the Coast Discoveries)Pandemonium, Daryl Gregory (Del Rey)
The Resurrectionist, Jack O'Connell (Algonquin Books)
The Shadow Year, Jeffrey Ford (William Morrow)
Tender Morsels, Margo Lanagan (Knopf Books for Young Readers)

NOVELLA
Disquiet, Julia Leigh, (Penguin/ Hamish Hamilton)
“Dormitory,” Yoko Ogawa (The Diving Pool, Picador)
Living With the Dead, Darrell Schweitzer (PS Publishing)
The Long Trial of Nolan Dugatti, Stephen Graham Jones (Chiasmus Press)
“N,” Stephen King, (Just After Sunset, Scribner)

NOVELETTE
“Hunger Moon,” Deborah Noyes (The Ghosts of Kerfol, Candlewick Press)
“The Lagerstatte,” Laird Barron (The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy, Ballantine Books/Del Rey)
“Penguins of the Apocalypse,” William Browning Spencer (Subterranean: Tales of Dark Fantasy, Subterranean Press)
“Pride and Prometheus,” John Kessel (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, January 2008)
The Situation, Jeff Vandermeer (PS Publishing)

SHORT STORY
“68° 07’ 15”N, 31° 36’ 44”W," Conrad Williams (Fast Ships, Black Sails, Night Shade Books)
“The Dinner Party,” Joshua Ferris (The New Yorker, August 11, 2008)
“Evidence of Love in a Case of Abandonment: One Daughter’s Personal Account,” M. Rickert (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Oct/Nov 2008)
“The Inner City,” Karen Heuler (Cemetery Dance #58, 2008)
“Intertropical Convergence Zone,” Nadia Bulkin (ChiZine, Issue 37, 2008)
“The Pile,” Michael Bishop (Subterranean Online, Winter 2008)

COLLECTION
A Better Angel, Chris Adrian (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)
Dangerous Laughter, Steven Millhauser (Knopf)
The Diving Pool, Yoko Ogawa (Picador)
The Girl on the Fridge, Etgar Keret (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)
Just After Sunset, Stephen King (Scribner)Wild Nights!, Joyce Carol Oates (Ecco)

ANTHOLOGY
Bound for Evil, edited by Tom English (Dead Letter Press)
Exotic Gothic 2: New Tales of Taboo, edited by Danel Olson (Ash-Tree Press)
Fast Ships, Black Sails, edited by Ann and Jeff Vandermeer (Night Shade Books)
The New Uncanny, edited by Sarah Eyre and Ra Page (Comma Press)
Shades of Darkness, edited by Barbara and Christopher Roden (Ash-Tree Press)

Shirley Jackson (1916-1965) wrote such classic novels as The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, as well as one of the most famous short stories in the English language, “The Lottery.” Her work continues to be a major influence on writers of every kind of fiction, from the most traditional genre offerings to the most innovative literary work. National Book Critics Circle Award-winning novelist Jonathan Lethem has called Jackson “one of this century’s most luminous and strange American writers,” and multiple generations of authors would agree.

The Shirley Jackson Awards will be presented on Sunday, July 12th 2009, at Readercon 20, Conference on Imaginative Literature, in Burlington, Massachusetts. Elizabeth Hand, Readercon Guest of Honor, and author of Generation Loss, which won the 2007 Shirley Jackson Award for “Best Novel”, will act as host.

Websites: ShirleyJacksonAwards.org Readercon.org

Readercon to host the 2008 award Ceremony

2009-04-09T19:12:00.000-07:00

Readercon to host ceremony for The 2008 Shirley Jackson Awards

Boston, MA (April 2009) -- The Shirley Jackson Awards will be presented on Sunday, July 12th 2009, at Readercon 20, 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 have been established for outstanding achievement in the literature of psychological suspense, horror, and the dark fantastic.

The Shirley Jackson Awards are voted upon by a jury of professional writers, editors, critics, and academics, with input from a Board of Advisors. The awards will be given for the best work published in the preceding calendar year in the following categories: Novel, Novella, Novelette, Short Story, Single-Author Collection, and Edited Anthology.

Shirley Jackson (1916-1965) wrote such classic novels as The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, as well as one of the most famous short stories in the English language, “The Lottery.” Her work continues to be a major influence on writers of every kind of fiction, from the most traditional genre offerings to the most innovative literary work. National Book Critics Circle Award-winning novelist Jonathan Lethem has called Jackson “one of this century’s most luminous and strange American writers,” and multiple generations of authors would agree.

Nominees for The 2008 Shirley Jackson Awards will be announced later in April.

Website: ShirleyJacksonAwards.org
Readercon.org

Fundraiser "Lottery" a Success for the Shirley Jackson Awards

2009-02-26T18:25:00.000-08:00

Boston, MA (February 2009) – The Shirley Jackson Awards online raffle, or “lottery,” was an overwhelming success. Fifty-seven individuals from across the United States, and from Canada, England, and Germany, were selected as winners for an array of donated prizes from well-known authors, editors, artists, and agents.

The Board of Advisors and jurors thank all of the donors and ticket buyers for their tremendous support and generosity. All proceeds go to support the administration of The Shirley Jackson Awards.

The full list of winners can be found online.

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.

Shirley Jackson (1916-1965) wrote such classic novels as The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, as well as one of the most famous short stories in the English language, “The Lottery.” Her work continues to be a major influence on writers of every kind of fiction, from the most traditional genre offerings to the most innovative literary work. National Book Critics Circle Award-winning novelist Jonathan Lethem has called Jackson “one of this century’s most luminous and strange American writers,” and multiple generations of authors would agree.

The Shirley Jackson Awards will be presented on Sunday, July 12th 2009, at Readercon 20, Conference on Imaginative Literature, in Burlington, Massachusetts.

www.shirleyjacksonawards.org

Fundraiser Winners Annoucned!

2009-02-24T03:52:00.000-08:00

The Shirley Jackson Awards is excited to announce the winners of our fundraiser “lottery.” We wish to thank everyone for supporting the Awards, and we wish to give a very special thank you to all the prize donors. Winners are listed below by name, city, country, and order number. The prize donors will contact the winners by email to arrange for shipment.

Now, on to the winners!

Signed copies of TAKE NO PRISONERS & DRAGONS OF MANHATTAN (SIGNDPBARNETT):
Roy Anati of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States
Order ID: 67

Limited edition of David Drake’s BALEFIRES (BKNIGHTSHADE3):
William Lindblad of Plano, Texas, United States
Order ID: 208

The Arthurian Tarot donated by Jody Rose (TAROTJROSE):
Linda Addison of Bronx, New York, United States
Order ID: 172

THE DEVILS IN THE DETAILS signed by James Blaylock & Tim Powers (SIGNDBLAYLOCKPWRS):
Bethany Herron of Oakland, California, United States
Order ID: 3

Signed copy of IN FOR A PENNY by James Blaylock (SIGNDBLAYLOCK2):
Bethany Herron of Oakland, California, United States
Order ID: 3

Editorial evaluation of a novel proposal by John Douglas (CRITJDOUGLAS):
Lydia Ondrusek of Richardson, Texas, United States
Order ID: 128

Novel manuscript critique by Stephen Barbara (CRITSBARBARA):
Christine Nguyen of Cupertino, California, United States
Order ID: 165

Personally inscribed keyboard from Neil Gaiman (SIGNDKYBDNGAIMAN):
Alison Campbell-Wise of Downingtown, Pennsylvania, United States
Order ID: 13

Personally inscribed keyboard from Jeff Ford (SIGNDKYBDJFORD):
Chris McLaren of Hubley, Nova Scotia, Canada
Order ID: 85

More than a Tuckerization from Nick Mamatas (TUCKNMAMATAS):
Nick Kaufmann of Brooklyn, New York, United States
Order ID: 107

Tuckerization by Richard Bowes (TUCKRBOWES):
Chris McLaren of Hubley, Nova Scotia, Canada
Order ID: 85

Signed copy of ALCHEMY OF STONE and gift from Ekaterina Sedia (SIGNDBKESEDIA):
Alexandra Reddick of Denver, Colorado, United States
Order ID: 37

Copy of PAPER CITIES & a subscription to SYBIL’S GARAGE (BKMAGMKRESSEL):
Brian Chandler of Poteau, Oklahoma, United States
Order ID: 49

Signed and numbered edition of John Clute’s THE DARKENING GARDEN (SIGNDJCLUTE):
Eric Anderson of Superior, Wisconsin, United States
Order ID: 89

Limited edition version of Laird Barron’s THE IMAGO SEQUENCE (BKNIGHTSHADE1):
Geoffrey Goodwin of Natick, Massachusetts, United States
Order ID: 180

Manuscript critique of a short story by Sarah Langan (CRITSLANGAN):
Stacey Friedberg of Short Hills, New Jersey, United States
Order ID: 112

Signed copy of Cherie Priest’s novel DREADFUL SKIN (NVLCPRIEST):
Dan Pietrasik of Milpitas, California, United States
Order ID: 31

Signed, numbered limited edition of COSMOCOPIA, Paul DiFilippo (SIGNDPDIFILLIPO):
Bill Hendee of Worcester, Massachusetts, United States
Order ID: 15

Signed afterword to the novel HIDE AND SEEK by Jack Ketchum (SIGNDJKETCHUM):
Matt Schwartz of Jersey City, New Jersey, United States
Order ID: 94

Signed, numbered ed:AND NOW WE ARE GOING TO HAVE A PARTY (SIGNDNGRIFFITH):
Lisa Eckstein of Santa Clara, California, United States
Order ID: 87

Personally inscribed: THE CHAINS THAT YOU REFUSE, Elizabeth Bear (SIGNDBKEBEAR):
Alison Campbell-Wise of Downingtown, Pennsylvania, United States
Order ID: 13

Signed copy of THE IMAGO SEQUENCE & a new story by Laird Barron (SIGNDLBARRON):
William Lindblad of Plano, Texas, United States
Order ID: 208

Limited edition of Tim Lebbon’s WHITE AND OTHER TALES OF RUIN (BKNIGHTSHADE2):
Jody Rose of North Las Vegas, Nevada, United States
Order ID: 14

Personally inscribed galley of THE LITTLE SLEEP by Paul Tremblay (SIGNDGALLEYPTREMBLAY):
Nicholas Curtis of New Paltz, New York, United States
Order ID: 65

Signed copy of Gahan Wilson’s The Cleft and Other Odd Tales (SIGNDBKGWILSON):
Robert Brouhard of Salem, Oregon, United States
Order ID: 61

Signed copy of Cherie Priest’s novel NOT FLESH NOR FEATHERS (NVLCPRIEST2):
Chris McLaren of Hubley, Nova Scotia, Canada
Order ID: 85

Signed copy of the VAMPYRICON trilogy by Douglas Clegg (BKDCLEGG):
Michael Cieslak of Ferndale, Michigan, United States
Order ID: 72

Critique or tuckerization by Ekaterina Sedia (CRITESEDIA):
Mark Huenken of Aachen, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany
Order ID: 81

Tuckerization by Laura Anne Gilman (TUCKLAGILMAN):
Mary Robinette Kowal of New York, New York, United States
Order ID: 113

Three collections by Sheridan Le Fanu, from Ash Tree Press (BOOKLEFANU):
Paul Edson of Alexandria, Virginia, United States
Order ID: 55

Advance copy of Elizabeth Hand’s WONDERWALL (GLLYEHAND):
Lisa Morton of North Hollywood, California, United States
Order ID: 18

Inscribed copies of two essay collections by Michael Dirda (SIGNDMDIRDA):
Edward Jacknitsky of Georgetown, Texas, United States
Order ID: 150

Manuscript critique by Alice Turner (CRITATURNER):
M. M. De Voe of NEW YORK, New York, United States
Order ID: 136

Signed copy of THIRTEEN PHANTASMS by James Blaylock (SIGNDBLAYLOCK1):
Carla Morales of Bronx, New York, United States
Order ID: 48

Novel submission materials critique by Beth Fleisher (CRITBFLEISHER):
Jason Gruber of Homewood, Alabama, United States
Order ID: 130

Carnivorous plant terrarium (PLNTPRIDDELL):
Paul Walther of Hopkins, Minnesota, United States
Order ID: 116

Signed copy of an unproduced screenplay by Stewart O’Nan (SCRPLAYSONAN):
Kristi Petersen Schoonover of Danbury, Connecticut, United States
Order ID: 141

Slip of Paper with Black Spot (BLACKSLIP):
Melissa Higuchi of San Francisco, California, United States
Order ID: 25

A reading copy of THE SKYLARK, Part 1, by Peter Straub (MSCRIPTPSTRAUB):
John Harvey of Providence, Rhode Island, United States
Order ID: 167

Manuscript critique by Helen Atsma (CRITHATSMA):
M. M. De Voe of NEW YORK, New York, United States
Order ID: 136

Graphic novel or comics critque by Chris Claremont (CRITCCLAREMONT):
Karin Huehold of Redwood Meadows, Alberta, Canada
Order ID: 111

NC Literary Review SciFi & Fantasy issue, signed by F. Brett Cox (SIGNDMAGFBCOX):
Geoffrey Goodwin of Natick, Massachusetts, United States
Order ID: 180

Signed copy of THE LIVING DEAD and WASTELANDS (SIGNDJJA):
David J Corwell of Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States
Order ID: 74

Signed John Langan’s MR. GAUNT AND OTHER UNEASY ENCOUNTERS (SIGNDJLANGAN):
Barbara Roden of Ashcroft, British Columbia, Canada
Order ID: 39

Payseur & Schmidt Ephemera (EPHEMERA):
Matthew Betts of Columbus, Ohio, United States
Order ID: 181

Manuscript critique by Don D’Auria of Leisure Books (CRITDDAURIA):
Monica ORourke of Astoria, New York, United States
Order ID: 189

Nonworking laptop from Brian Keene (LPTPBKEENE):
Mark Sylva of Blacklick, Ohio, United States
Order ID: 47

Signed galley from Brian Keene of his forthcoming novel, SCRATCH (SIGNDPRFBKEENE):
Dave Perie of Santa Cruz, California, United States
Order ID: 126

Signed bound proof from Brett Savory of his novel IN AND DOWN (SIGNDBKBSAVORY):
Robert Brouhard of Salem, Oregon, United States
Order ID: 61

CROSSROADS, signed by editors F. Brett Cox and Andy Duncan (SIGNDBKBCOXADUNCAN):
John Harvey of Providence, Rhode Island, United States
Order ID: 167

Signed, recent limited edition novella by David Niall Wilson (SIGNEDDNWILSON):
Michael Cieslak of Ferndale, Michigan, United States
Order ID: 72

Caitl?n R. Kiernan signed paperback set (SIGNDKIERNAN):
Allyson Bird of Sheffield, South Yorkshire, United Kingdom
Order ID: 146

Signed, afterword to the novel ONLY CHILD, by Jack Ketchum (SIGNDJKETCHUM2):
Matt Schwartz of Jersey City, New Jersey, United States
Order ID: 94

Signed SPARKS AND SHADOWS & LAUGHING BOY’S SHADOW (SIGNDHWPRESS):
Robert Brouhard of Salem, Oregon, United States
Order ID: 102

Early draft of Mary Robinette Kowal’s forthcoming first novel (ROBINETTEMSS):
Mark Huenken of Aachen, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany
Order ID: 171

Signed afterword, Jack Ketchum: TALES FROM A DARKER STATE antho (SIGNDJKETCHUM3):
Devin Poore of Hoboken, New Jersey, United States
Order ID: 161

Signed Screenplay of Scott Nicholson’s “Appalachian Haunting” (SIGNDSNICHOLSON):
Paul Berger of New York, New York, United States
Order ID: 200

Shirley Jackson Awards "Lottery" begins today

2009-02-09T06:06:00.000-08:00

Our online fundraising lottery is now live.

Good luck to all!

Kelly Link added as a fifth juror for The Shirley Jackson Awards

2009-01-20T18:45:00.000-08:00

Kelly Link is fifth juror for Shirley Jackson Awards

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.

Shirley Jackson (1916-1965) wrote such classic novels as The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, as well as one of the most famous short stories in the English language, “The Lottery.” Her work continues to be a major influence on writers of every kind of fiction, from the most traditional genre offerings to the most innovative literary work. National Book Critics Circle Award-winning novelist Jonathan Lethem has called Jackson “one of this century’s most luminous and strange American writers,” and multiple generations of authors would agree.

The Shirley Jackson Awards are voted upon by a jury of professional writers, editors, critics, and academics, with input from a Board of Advisors. The awards are given for the best work published in the preceding calendar year in the following categories: Novel, Novella, Novelette, Short Story, Single-Author Collection, and Edited Anthology.

The website, ShirleyJacksonAwards.org, provides information on the 2007 winners, the award categories, and the selection process.

The jurors for the 2008 Shirley Jackson Awards are, alphabetically:

F. Brett Cox, co-editor (with Andy Duncan) of Crossroads: Tales of the Southern Literary Fantastic (Tor, 2004); author of numerous short stories, critical essays, and reviews; English faculty at Norwich University in Northfield, Vermont.

Kelly Link, author of the collections Stranger Things Happen, Magic for Beginners, and Pretty Monsters; winner of three Nebula Awards, a Hugo Award, and a World Fantasy Award. Co-editor, with Gavin J. Grant, of the fantasy half of The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror; Co-founder, with Gavin J. Grant, of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet.

John Langan, author of short story collection Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters (Prime Books) and House of Windows (Night Shade Books, forthcoming 2009) and numerous critical essays and reviews; English faculty at State University of New York-New Paltz.

Sarah Langan, author of novels The Keeper (Harper, 2006; finalist for Bram Stoker Award for Best First Novel) and The Missing (Harper, 2007; winner of Bram Stoker Award Winner for Superior Achievement in a Novel); MFA in Creative Writing, Columbia University; freelance writer currently living in New York City.

Paul G. Tremblay, author of collection Compositions for the Young and Old (Prime Books), novella “City Pier: Above and Below” (Prime, 2007), and novel The Little Sleep (Henry Holt); co-editor of the anthologies Fantasy and Bandersnatch.

The Board of Advisors for the Shirley Jackson Awards includes editor Bill Congreve; award-winning editor and anthologist Ellen Datlow; renowned scholar and editor S.T. Joshi; author and teacher Jack M. Haringa (co-editor, with Joshi, of the critical journal Dead Reckonings); author Mike O’Driscoll; editor Ann VanderMeer; and award-winning and best-selling novelist Stewart O’Nan.

www.shirleyjacksonawards.org
Media representatives who are seeking further information or interviews should contact JoAnn F. Cox: admin at shirleyjacksonawards dot org

Closed to submissions for 2008

2009-01-20T18:40:00.000-08:00

We are now closed to publisher submissions to The Shirley Jackson Awards for works published in 2008.

"Shelley’s Daughters" and The Shirley Jackson Awards

2008-10-25T07:19:00.000-07:00

Terrence Rafferty's NY Times Sunday Book Review article on contemporary women horror writers, featuring Sarah Langan and Liz Hand among others, gives a nice mention to the Shirley Jackson Awards:

"...in Elizabeth Hand’s startling, unclassifiable GENERATION LOSS (Small Beer, $24), which was recently honored with the first Shirley Jackson Award for what the award’s Web site calls “outstanding achievement in the literature of psychological suspense, horror and the dark fantastic.” (Sarah Langan was one of the judges.) Amorphous as this definition may sound, it suits the kind of unsettling stories Hand likes to tell..."

Help Support the Shirley Jackson Awards

2008-09-07T07:58:00.000-07:00

Please consider supporting the Shirley Jackson Awards with a direct donation or by purchasing Jack Haringa Must Die!

Ellen Datlow's photos of the KGB Shirley Jackson group reading

2008-07-26T05:05:00.000-07:00

Thank you to the KGB bar for hosting the event, to the authors who donated their talent and time, and, of course, to everyone who attended the reading.

Ellen's pictures.

2008-07-21T12:05:00.000-07:00

Winners Announced for Inaugural Year of The Shirley Jackson Awards

Boston, MA (July 2008) -- 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.

The Shirley Jackson Awards are voted upon by a jury of professional writers, editors, critics, and academics, with input from a Board of Advisors. The awards are given for the best work published in the preceding calendar year in the following categories: Novel, Novella, Novelette, Short Story, Single-Author Collection, and Edited Anthology.

The Shirley Jackson Awards were presented on Sunday, July 20th 2008, at Readercon 19, Conference on Imaginative Literature, in Burlington, Massachusetts. National Book Critics Circle Award-winning novelist Jonathan Lethem was the Master of Ceremonies.

The winners for the 2007 Shirley Jackson Awards are:

NOVEL
Generation Loss, Elizabeth Hand (Small Beer Press)

NOVELLA
“Vacancy,” Lucius Shepard (Subterranean #7, September 2007)

NOVELETTE
“The Janus Tree,” Glen Hirshberg (Inferno, Tor)

SHORT STORY
“The Monsters of Heaven,” Nathan Ballingrud (Inferno, Tor)

COLLECTION
The Imago Sequence and Other Stories, Laird Barron (Night Shade Books)

ANTHOLOGY
Inferno, edited by Ellen Datlow (Tor)

Shirley Jackson (1916-1965) wrote such classic novels as The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, as well as one of the most famous short stories in the English language, “The Lottery.” Her work continues to be a major influence on writers of every kind of fiction, from the most traditional genre offerings to the most innovative literary work.

Website: ShirleyJacksonAwards.org
Readercon.org
______________________________________________________________
Media representatives who are seeking further information or interviews should contact JoAnn F. Cox.

Shirley Jackson Awards Fundraiser at KGB bar in NYC

2008-07-13T08:32:00.000-07:00

Leading authors read from Shirley Jackson canon to commemorate 60th anniversary of “The Lottery.” Event to take place July 23rd at KGB Bar in New York City. Peter Straub and Jack Ketchum among readers

In honor of Shirley Jackson, Ellen Datlow will be hosting a reading of Shirley Jackson’s work by award-winning and leading authors of the dark fantastic and horror on July 23rd at the KGB Bar in New York City. Proceeds from the event will benefit the Shirley Jackson Awards.

Shirley Jackson (1916-1965) wrote such classic novels as The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, as well as one of the most famous short stories in the English language, “The Lottery.” “The Lottery” was first published on June 28, 1948 in The New Yorker.

Ms. Jackson’s work continues to be a major influence on writers of every kind of fiction, from the most traditional genre offerings to the most innovative literary work. National Book Critics Circle Award-winning novelist Jonathan Lethem has called Jackson “one of this century’s most luminous and strange American writers,” and multiple generations of authors would agree.

Authors who will read from Ms. Jackson’s work are:

F. Brett Cox's most recent stories appeared in Black Static and Postscripts. His newest story, "She Hears Music Up Above," is forthcoming in the original anthology from Prime Books, Phantom. With Andy Duncan, he co-edited Crossroads: Tales of the Southern Literary Fantastic. He is a juror for the 2007 Shirley Jackson Awards.

Jeffrey Ford is author of the novels The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque and The Girl in the Glass, and the story collection, The Empire of Ice Cream. In 2008 he will have out a new novel, The Shadow Year, and a new collection, The Drowned Life.

Jack Ketchum is the author of many novels, including Joyride, Red, Only Child, and Hide and Seek. His book of two novellas was just released by Leisure, and his collection of memoirs, titled Book of Souls, is about to be published by Bloodletting Press.

Carrie Laben’s story “Something in the Mermaid Way,” is a nominee in the short story category for the 2007 Shirley Jackson Awards. Another story is just out in the anthology Phantom. She is currently working on her first novel, in which most of the nicer characters are rats.

John Langan's collection, Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters, is forthcoming from Prime Books. His novella, "How the Day Runs Down," or, as he likes to call it, "my zombie Our Town," will appear in John Joseph Adams's massive zombie anthology, The Living Dead, in September. He is a juror for the 2007 Shirley Jackson Awards.

Sarah Langan’s first novel, The Keeper, was a New York Times Editor's Pick. Her second novel, The Missing, won the Stoker Award for outstanding novel of 2007. Her third novel, Audrey's Door, is slated for publication in early 2009. She's currently at work on a collection of short stories. She is a juror for the 2007 Shirley Jackson Awards.

Peter Straub is the author of seventeen novels, including Ghost Story, Koko, Mr. X, In the Night Room, and two collaborations with Stephen King. He also has written two volumes of poetry and two collections of short fiction, and he edited the Library of America’s edition of H. P. Lovecraft’s Tales. He has won many awards for his writing and in 1998, was named Grand Master at the World Horror Convention. In 2006, he was given the Horror Writers Association’s Life Achievement Award.

David Wellington is the author of Monster Island, 13 Bullets, 99 Coffins, and the forthcoming Vampire Zero. His work is serialized online for free at www.davidwellington.net.

Jack Womack is the author of Ambient, Terraplane, Heathern, Elvissey, Random Acts of Senseless Violence, Let’s Put the Future Behind Us, and Going, Going, Gone. He was in 1994 a co-winner of the Philip K. Dick Award for Elvissey.

An evening of live readings from Ms. Jackson’s work is sure to unsettle audience members. The event will take place at KGB Bar, well-known for its regularly held readings of poetry and non-fiction, and for the Fantastic Fiction reading series, co-hosted by Ellen Datlow and Matthew Kressel. KGB is located at 85 East 4th Street (just off 2nd Ave) New York City.

Readings from Shirley Jackson’s work will begin at 7pm and end by 9pm. The cover charge is $5 per person.

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. The 2007 Shirley Jackson Awards will be presented on Sunday, July 20th 2008, at Readercon 19, Conference on Imaginative Literature, in Burlington, Massachusetts.

Websites: http://www.ShirleyJacksonAwards.org
http://www.kgbbar.com/bar
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Media representatives who are seeking further information or interviews should contact JoAnn

Charles Tan Interviews Joe Hill

2008-07-02T04:58:00.000-07:00

Since "Thumbprint" is partially based on current events, was this the type of story that you heard on the news and you felt "I must write this story..." or is it more along the lines that you were looking for a compelling story to write and this is what turned up?

My first book was published late in 2005, a collection of stories titled 20th CENTURY GHOSTS (PS Publishing). And in the months that followed, I tried my hand at several other shorts, but didn't finish any of them. I'd get a few pages in and then start to feel like I was just rehashing one of the stories I had already written, and not doing it as well.

"Thumbprint" was the first story I wrote, post GHOSTS, that felt fresh, that excited me enough to finish... I think, in part, because I had never written a story with a convincing female lead. All of the stories in GHOSTS - and my novel - were about troubled, morally adrift boys and men. What I responded to, what led me to tell this particular story, was the chance to explore this very angry haunted woman, to get inside Mal Grennan's head and find out how she felt about the things she had done in Iraq. So, no, I didn't decide to write about Abu Ghraib and then build a story around that subject. I decided to write about Mal, and it happened that Mal had served in Abu Ghraib.

How do you think the Iraq War has affected the horror genre?

For one thing, we've seen a whole avalanche of movies often referred to as torture-porn: flicks like Hostel and Saw. I think those films are pretty obviously a reaction to what's been going on in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, and a shared cultural fear that America might have done some things in the last few years, in the name of self-preservation, that will come back to bite us later. We don't want to be torturers, and suddenly we are.

You see this, though, throughout pop culture history. In the fifties, when people were afraid of being infiltrated by the communists, you had stories about invasion: Body Snatchers and The Thing. Fears of atomic weapons and atomic power provided the fuel for movies like THEM! and books like On the Beach. In the Seventies, you had Charlie Manson, so it was only natural you'd have films like Texas Chainsaw Massacre. When you watched the evening news, you saw naked babies with Napalm burns, and soldiers covered in their own blood, so it made sense that stories and films would also correspondingly become more violent and gory. Fiction is always a tool for grappling with questions that frighten and discomfit us, questions with difficult answers, or maybe no answers at all.

You've written your fair share of supernatural horror stories but that's not the case with "Thumbprint". How do you decide whether to include or not include the supernatural in your stories?

I always work from concept first. I need an idea that excites me, an absurd or frightening or unexpected what if to explore. Such as, what if someone loved the movies so much that they kept going to them after they died? Or what if you started getting letters from some mysterious person, blank letters, nothing on them except a single black thumbprint? How scary would that be? And so I usually know before I go into a story, whether it has a supernatural element or not, because it's right there in the idea.

What for you is the most important aspect of a horror story?

That's easy. It has to be scary.

Having written both novels and short stories, which format do you prefer?

I don't really have a preference. My attitude is that a story shouldn't go on one sentence longer than it needs to. I don't care whether it takes a year to write or an evening, whether it's a movie, a novel, a short story, or a comic book. I always want the same things out of a story. I want a character to explore, someone with secrets and regrets, someone struggling to become a better person, someone with something to confess. And I also want the narrative to rush the reader along toward some powerful final moment, without wasting their time, and without making them feel like what they're doing is work and it would really be more fun to turn on the TV. That's what I'm after every time I write, and I'm content to let a story tell me whether it ought to be thirty pages or three hundred.

What in your opinion is the advantage of the short story format, at least when it comes to the horror genre and how you write?

In a short story, you've only got thirty pages to operate in, and so by necessity much is left to the reader's imagination. And in horror especially, the things the reader imagines are often much worse than anything the writer could come up with. The voice screaming behind the door is dreadful because you don't know what's happening to that person. The thing moving in the darkness is much less terrifying once it moves into the light.

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Charles Tan Interviews William Browning Spencer

2008-07-01T19:14:00.000-07:00

"The Tenth Muse" is quite detailed when it comes to characterization and setting. In your opinion, how do these elements increase the effectiveness of a story? Are these elements always a priority in your writing?

I think my first allegiance is to story (the thing that happened, that needs to be told, that someone wants, perhaps needs, to hear). Details of character and setting are what draw a reader into the story. Horror, with its fantastical elements, probably needs to create a deeper sense of verisimilitude to counter its inherent weirdness. Anyway, the visible world and its inhabitants warrant close observation; it’s fun to try to make the old new, part of the joy of writing fiction. Horror, as I see it, isn’t designed for fable or myth; it isn’t Everyman facing Existential Horror. It is more apt to be an exclamation of personal dread, something like: “Jeez! This is happening to me!”

Were there any parts in "The Tenth Muse" that was based on personal experience? What kind of research did you have to do for the story?

I was living in a small town in Missouri when I wrote this story. I had also just finished reading a biography of Harper Lee. What more can I say? I guess I can say I am really, really glad to be back in Austin, Texas.

What is it about the horror genre that appeals to you?

John Fowles, in his novel, Daniel Martin, has the narrator state the following: “The hyperactive imagination is as damaging a preparation for reality as it is useful in writing.” True words. My hyperactive brain always hears the bad news in a ringing phone. Horror is hard to dodge in the world. I suspect my first thought, on being born, was Oh great! I’m in a hospital! Writing fiction appeals to me, and horror often feels like the most accurate and appropriate perspective for a writer considering the disturbing aspects of trapped sentience. Stephen King understands this mortality problem—but so does Flannery O’Connor, so does Cormac McCarthy (our most gruesome horror writer). Most writers are, to one degree or another, horror writers.

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Chalres Tan Interviews Elizabeth Ziemska

2008-06-30T09:59:00.000-07:00

The title of your story, "A Murder of Crows", seems a perfect fit and works on many levels. Did you start writing the story with the title in mind or if not, how did you come up with it?

The title of my story, "A Murder of Crows," came to me, almost as a gift, while I was writing the second draft. A friend was telling me about all these wonderful names for groups of animals: a something-of-something, a parliament of owls, a murder of crows--and I had an AHA! moment.

I had wanted to write something about animals turning the tables on humans ever since I read Patricia Highsmith's "Beastly Tales of Animal Murder," particularly "Ming's Biggest Prey," about a Siamese cat that kills her mistress's lover.

What is your writing process like? Did you initially know where the story would take you or was the fable-like style and ending a product of your subconscious?

"A Murder of Crows" began with a scene: a man is burying his wife in the backyard; a tiny lapdog (Chekhov's animal protagonist in "Lady With a Dog") runs out onto the lawn. I sat down to write and the story kind of poured out of me. When I sent the story to David Gates, my first teacher at the Bennington Writing Seminars, he pulled it out of my pile of pale T.C. Boyle imitations, and said "this may not be the sort of story that you want to write, but it may be the sort of story that you do write." Or something like that. Anyway, he helped me get on the road of fantastical fiction.

In the first draft, I had given the story a comic happy ending, but Martha Cooley, my second teacher at Bennington, chastised me for pulling my punches. That's when I realized that the crows would not be able to go on living their happy crow lives after killing the man. So it's Martha's fault that the crows had to die.

How does it feel to be a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Awards? Will we be seeing more fiction from you in the future?

I'm about 2/3 finished with a novel entitled, LIFE CYCLE OF THE STURGEON. It's about Russian history, the concept of the "10th muse," and two women who come to realize that they are mythological creatures.

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Jack Haringa Must Die! reviewed

2008-06-30T09:58:00.000-07:00

Following the light-hearted novels of Christopher Moore and Jeff Strand, humor has become an increasingly popular trend in horror fiction. Kaufmann's collection blends Strand and Moore's comedic horror with heady doses of the dark and twisted.....After the first twenty-five pages, I couldn't wipe the smile off my face. Jack Haringa Must Die is easily the most amusing read I've sat down with in ages. If ever I need a text to dissuade me from misplacing my semicolons, or ending a sentence with a preposition, this is it! An overall recommended book from this montage of Haringa's colleagues.

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Charles Tan Interviews Glen Hirshberg

2008-06-29T07:40:00.000-07:00

What inspired you to write "The Janus Tree"?

As is often the case with me, bits and pieces of the story came from different sources. At the core is my memory of the only actual fist fight I’ve ever had. It occurred in 8th grade, and as in “The Janus Tree,” the thing that made the deepest impression on me wasn’t the completely ridiculous fight but the surprisingly complex personality revealed by the bully I believed I was confronting.

Then there is the astonishing, tragic, fascinating history of Butte, Montana, which really was the richest city in America for a very brief time and is now an environmental disaster area whose inhabitants are still struggling to redefine their hometown decades after the largest mining companies abandoned the region. In my story, I use the name Silver City for Butte. That name actually first appears in a melodramatic but wonderfully colorful and affecting novel called WIDE OPEN TOWN by the Montana writer Myron Brinig, and is meant as an homage of sorts.

Did you have to do a lot of research for the story?

My Silver City is a sort of impressionist’s dream of Butte, and while resemblance is not only inevitable but intentional, the city in the story is my own invention. A number of the historical events mentioned in the story, from the mining laws to the boxers that the narrator researches, are again based on actual events or people. But the formation of this piece came less from pure research than from living in Montana for several years, delving into the incredibly rich past of the whole place, and then letting everything I’d seen and discovered mix itself up with my own memories.

What elements are needed to make a horror story effective? Were you conscious of this when writing "The Janus Tree"?

I don’t believe in any one set of elements that will always make a horror story—or any story, for that matter—effective. For me, each individual piece generates its own set of requirements and poses its own challenges. “The Janus Tree” is driven, I think, partially by the volatile, unpredictable, and increasingly desperate kids at its heart and partially by the scarred and transfigured landscape. Therefore, I devoted much of my writing time on this story to infusing the whole brooding, half-imaginary streets of my Silver City with life. I also tried to give every character the space to develop into layered individuals hopefully capable of seeming disconcerting and sympathetic at the same time.

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Charles Tan Interviews Jim Shepard

2008-06-27T12:48:00.000-07:00

Considering how many books and articles you've listed in your acknowledgments, what's the research process like for you? Do you initially start out knowing these materials will be helpful in your writing or do you simply try to read a lot and realize that they can be mined for stories?

It's really a matter of my reading turning into stories, in that what happens is that I read a lot of weird stuff -- mostly non-fiction -- like a history of plague, or whatever, just out of an interest in the subject, and then some of the details that I encounter continue to seem plangent to me. They give off a little emotional resonance that's simultaneously evocative and mysterious. Details stay with me. And I begin to suspect, or assume, that they're touching on something in my emotional life that I want to further explore. At that point, I begin researching as though writing a story: in other words, looking to fill in the gaps in my knowledge that the narrative requires.

How different is your novel-writing process as opposed to your short-fiction process? What do you think is the strength of the latter?

Novel-writing is much more elaborate and longer-sustained for me, but otherwise it's the same process. But I've recently become more impatient with those aspects of the novel that seem to me like furniture moving: setting things up. I've gotten more attracted lately to the appeal of guerilla tactics, as it were -- get in and get out fast -- no matter how much research I've done.

What were your conscious goals when writing the stories in Like You'd Understand, Anyway?

I just each time wanted to tell a story that held my interest and might hold someone else's, and didn't seem lame, in terms of its emotional complexity.

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Charles Tan Interviews Nathan Ballingrud

2008-06-26T17:19:00.000-07:00

Does your experience as a father have any bearing or impact when you wrote "The Monsters of Heaven"?

In as much as I can't imagine a worse situation than losing your child and knowing you're the one responsible for it, yes. Like many parents, I'm sure, I can't imagine life would be endurable afterwards. Being a parent is the highest responsibility afforded to us. I suspect single parents like myself are particularly sensitive to that. I know I frequently worry about failing her in some fundamental, yet currently invisible, way. The protagonist of this story fails his son on a catastrophic level. To me, it's absolutely the worst thing imaginable, because it brings with it the possibility of the child's continued suffering, and -- possibly even worse -- a sustained, doomed hope for all parties.

But as much as fatherhood impacted this story, I think it was more deeply affected by being a husband. I went through a divorce just before writing the bulk of this story, and that experience was a huge influence. There's nothing like a divorce to make you question your self-worth, and so I sought a kind of catharsis, I think, by writing about a man who was living at the bottom of the barrel, who had failed in his role as a husband and a father in just about every sense. Right or wrong, the means by which many men gauge their own value center around their effectiveness as a family protector, their virility, and their strength. That some or all of these notions may be outdated doesn't change the fact that many still set their scales by them. If these things are lost or undermined, is there any value left? If so, how do you find it? How do you measure it?

"The Monsters of Heaven" uses powerful imagery and juxtaposition. How conscious were you of these elements?

I was very conscious of them. The element of horror fiction I respond to most viscerally is the juxtaposition of horror with beauty. In this I am very much influenced by early Clive Barker. I like to take it a little further, though, and apply it both to characters who might initially seem unsympathetic or even criminal, and to events which taken at face value seem ghastly and unforgivable. In this story specifically, there are two characters whose marriage is dissolving in the wake of their child's disappearance. They want to go on together, ultimately, but in order to do so they must pay a grievous price. Parents have to do this in real life, all the time, on a much smaller scale. Whether it's surrendering custody or simply acknowledging the thousand minor failures in a normal life, they somehow have to come to terms with letting their children down. It's a selfish act that's absolutely necessary for survival.

As for the imagery, well, that's where I have the most fun as a writer. As a reader, I respond to strong, vibrant imagery in a story, maybe more so than to any other sensory detail. Maybe that's because I'm a child of the cinema, or maybe I'm just wired that way. In each of my stories there's usually one image that stands out as a personal favorite, usually because it comes without forethought and signifies that the story has taken on a life of its own; often it's a small detail that doesn't impact the actual narrative at all. In this story it's of the obese man on the tv news stepping out of his house and holding aloft the severed head of an angel. It made me feel like things were happening in the story that were beyond my sphere of influence, and that's always a good feeling.

What was the inspiration behind your story?

Fear. Plain and simple. When I write horror stories I write them because something scares the bejesus out of me. I'm not talking about monsters, of course. Monsters are just the pulpy element that makes the story fun to write and, I hope, to read. I'm talking about losing your family, bankruptcy, illness, powerlessness ... the things that we're all vulnerable to. I'm not afraid of serial killers, for pete's sake; I'm afraid of being inadequate. If written well and honestly, I believe horror stories exploring these more mundane fears can be as scary and disturbing as anything the genre has to offer.

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The Lottery

2008-06-26T17:18:00.000-07:00

"The morning of June 27th was clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a full-summer day; the flowers were blossoming profusely and the grass was richly green."

So opens "The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson, first published in The New Yorker (which you could purchase for 20 cents) 60 years ago today, June 26th, 1948.

Charles Tan Interviews Sarah Monette

2008-06-24T08:54:00.000-07:00

What do you think will readers find most appealing in The Bone Key?

Well, I think it depends on the reader. Many readers find Booth an extremely appealing and sympathetic protagonist; others enjoy the prose style or the ghost stories just as ghost stories. I know that for me, what keeps me writing stories about Booth is the combination of this very articulate but shy and fearful narrator with the kind of classic ghost stories that I can maneuver him into.

In the collection, the story is narrated from the point of view of Booth. When you wrote the first Booth story, did you know it'll lead you to all these different stories?

No, I had no idea. I expected "Bringing Helena Back" to be a one-off experiment. But then I had an idea for another story about the same character, and then another . . . and well, now there are twelve of them (all either published or in press), and I'm working on the thirteenth, fourteenth, and maybe fifteenth.

How have the authors M.R. James and H.P. Lovecraft influenced your work and how did you make your own fiction distinct from theirs?

I love both James and Lovecraft quite madly, Lovecraft for the sheer lush lunacy of his imagination, James for his ability to write highly intellectual, sesquipedalian, decorous prose which nevertheless scares the living daylights out of the reader. I love the way they work by indirection and implication: that they can scare you without wading through blood up to their knees. Where I differ from them, the reason that my stories are more than just pastiches, is that I'm interested in the psychology of haunting--and the psychology of my poor hapless characters. So there's another layer to my stories that mostly Lovecraft and James weren't interested in.

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Charles Tan Interviews Ellen Datlow

2008-06-22T15:26:00.000-07:00

In your opinion, what are the strengths of an unthemed horror anthology? Do you prefer working in a themed or unthemed anthology, at least when it comes to horror?

From the reader’s POV it means that she can approach the anthology with no expectations and can be constantly surprised by each story.

From the editor’s POV, initially at least, anything goes. Instead of worrying that a submission fits the theme she can just enjoy the first flush of submissions. Eventually of course, the acceptance window narrows whatever type of anthology one is editing. You begin to notice patterns and perhaps push for different kinds of stories. At the end of the process the narrowing goes even further and one becomes very picky about what to include.

I enjoy both. I’ve mostly worked on themed anthologies, only relatively recently editing unthemed anthologies in any subgenre of the fantastic. When I edit a theme anthology, I try to expand that theme as broadly as possible which keeps it fresh for me, and hopefully for my readers. If anything, editing an anthology on a theme perceived as “stale” is a challenge, which is why I loved editing my two vampirism anthologies: Blood is Not Enough and A Whisper of Blood.

What was your criteria for accepting stories in Inferno?

First of all, most of the submissions were commissioned, that is, I approached the writers whose work I admire and want to publish, as always leaving some room for serendipity (via word of mouth). I was looking for fresh approaches to horror and a variety of types of horror stories from the quietly disturbing to the visceral. But most importantly, I picked the stories I loved and knew I’d enjoy reading and rereading.

What do you think are the advantages of short horror fiction (as opposed to novels)?

I think that short horror fiction is usually a better form for horror, especially supernatural horror fiction. I’ve said this many times and will repeat it. It’s much easier for a reader to suspend her disbelief in the supernatural for the length of a story up to novella than for an entire novel length piece of work. And of course, in short horror fiction you can experience a short sharp shock which is impossible in a novel. Third, short stories are more convenient to read if you have limited time. I only bring novels to read on long trips. I just don’t have the time to read them otherwise (of course, that might be because I’m constantly reading short stories for various original and reprint anthologies).

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Charles Tan Interviews M. Rickert

2008-06-19T18:00:00.000-07:00

What was the inspiration for "Holiday"?

Many years ago I wrote a poem that revolved around the idea of a young beauty queen child having been killed by her parents. On several occasions I set aside this particular poem to be included in a submission packet, or I thought I did, but when I checked the packet prior to sending it out, that particular poem would be missing, though it always showed up later. Rather than focus on whether the strange disappearance and reappearance of this poem was caused by a trickster ghost or a subconscious act on my part, I thought about what I knew for sure. Eventually, I decided it was unethical for me to suggest that this child was killed by her parents when I had nothing to base the assumption on other than gossip. I tucked the poem into the “Do Not Send” file where it was soon joined by all the poetry I ever wrote because I discovered that I am not a poet, though that is another story, for another cup of tea.

When I assembled my short stories I realized that I had written, over the years, many that featured dead or missing children. The publication of my collection seemed a good time to break free of that theme and move on to others. I issued myself an edict. No more dead children stories.

Then she came back. I don’t often have ideas for stories; they generally come to me as voices. I’ll just sit down and start writing, sometimes several pages in different voices until one sticks. This day, I wrote, “She says her name is Holiday, but I know she is lying.” Then I wrote a few more lines, realized what it was about, folded it up, tucked it into a desk drawer and tried to forget about it (her).

It stayed there for a long time, until, after a cross country move, I came across the haunted paragraph and, desperate for something to write, gave myself permission to write one more, final, dead child story. But before I did, I needed to do some research. I read every book our local library has on this particular case, including the one written by her parents. In the end, I have no idea who killed her. I thought I’d have a hunch, but I don’t.

I wrote “Holiday” for the dead kids. Not just the famous ones, but the others as well, the kids whose skin color correlates with less news coverage, those whose names we don’t remember. I’m not happy with the ending of this story, but I’m not happy with the beginning of it either. It’s that kind of story.

What for you is more terrifying: the story wherein the horror is internal or external? How has this influenced your writing?

What terrifies me most is the inner beast, the unspoken thoughts, the secret deeds, the unbearable legacy of damage humans have done to each other, the way we pretend none of it has occurred, or if we admit that it has, it is an anomaly, an enigma, a strange crack in the perfect world, when, in fact, the bad things we do to each other defines us.

Humans have the ability to consider existence, time, and space. That so many, in the light of this potential for creation, choose destruction instead, terrifies me. This is why I write horror the way I do. When I have met the monster, its name has always been Human.

Were there any elements of the story that scare you in real life (i.e clowns, ghosts, criminals)?

I’m not afraid of snakes, even rattlers, even when I almost stepped on one, or spiders, though I do prefer they stay outside, or lightening, or bears but once, when I was hiking alone in the high Sierras, a man passed me going the other way on the trail and he sent a shiver down my spine that I remember all these years later. I thought, at the time, how happy I was that there was a group of German tourists hiking not far behind me. That’s what I’m scared of most of all, the stranger whose proximity turns my blood to ice, and, most especially, the one who doesn’t, but should.

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Charles Tan Interviews Christopher Fowler

2008-06-18T18:45:00.000-07:00

You've been writing for a long time and never seem to tire writing about horror. What's the appeal of the genre for you?

I think horror and horrified amusement are a natural reactions to the modern world. No lives are ever certain, and this uncertainty makes us fearful. I always think of Ms Jackson herself as someone who wrote more about uncertainty and why we should be afraid than what we should be afraid of. As times change our fears change, so there's always something new to write about. And it's cathartic to dissect your fears in public.

When writing stories that combine horror and humor, do you initially plan these out or do you find that the latter is merely an extension of the former? How effective a tool has humor been for you?

A sense of humor is a key tool in my survival kit. Some stories naturally suggest a humorous approach (as in my story 'The Night Museum' in 'Old Devil Moon' - written, I should point out, long before a similarly titled movie). There are some subjects that would lose strength if they weren't taken seriously. But humor can be used to make a point. I wrote a story called 'Night After Night Of The Living Dead' that used humor to set up an unexpectedly serous ending.

Were there any particular aspects of horror that you attempted to nurture when writing the stories in Old Devil Moon?

Each collection I write allows me to try new angles, and 'Old Devil Moon' gave me a chance to test some types of story I'd never tackled before. Being gruesome is easy. It's harder to create a tale that leave behind a disturbing feeling, a ghost-trace of something that lingers. I also wanted to take several stories in entirely unexpected directions, but wanted to mix them with other more conventional tales, so that the reader would come away from the collection with the sense of having experienced many different aspects of the horror story, both traditional and experimental. I think it's the most varied collection I've yet written. One day I hope I'll be able to put all my most extreme and unusual stories in one big 'Best Of' anthology!

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Charles Tan Interviews Peter Crowther

2008-06-17T16:46:00.000-07:00

Not a lot of mainstream publishers are in the business of publishing stand-alone novellas. What made the company decide to publish novellas?

Publishing standalone novellas was the raison d'etre of the company when I started it back in 1998. The novella (20,000 to 40,000 words) is, for me, the perfect length with which to develop characters. It's not as brief as the short story but it can still be read easily in one sitting. Our first four novella-length books appeared in the summer of 1999, our entire output for that year: in 2000 we published five more, again as our entire output. Last year, we managed to put out some thirty books, mainly novellas but also including full-length novels, collections, anthologies and four issues of our digest magazine, Postscripts. But I still consider the novella to be our 'bread-and-butter' work.

I'm impressed with the diversity of authors under your wing. What's your criteria for picking up others? Do the authors approach your company, you seek them out, or both?

Right now we have a big inventory so we're not really considering unsolicited material for our book-lines . . . though we still happily look at stories for Postscripts. But, of course, every now and again, an author will email us with an interesting outline of something he or she has written and we'll ask them to let us see it. That happened with the Dead Earth book by Justice and Wilbanks. But mainly we approach the authors we'd like to see something from and ask them to try us with a novella -- those authors can be household names or complete newcomers: I'm pleased to say our customers seem to trust us now and, generally speaking, they buy the titles from the newcomers almost as readily as the ones from the Big Guns. I guess there's a perceived quality in our output and that's a wonderful feeling. We believe it's there, naturally, but it's what the punters think that counts in the long run.

What's the appeal of genre fiction for you?

I grew up reading science fiction and horror -- it's the best material in which to lose oneself. But that's not to say I don't enjoy other areas of literature: I love Richard Ford's work (Rock Springs is one of the all-time great short story collections); Avery Corman's The Old Neighborhood, John Irving's The Cider House Rules and Ford's The Sportswriter are three of my Desert Island Books (and I'd be hard-pressed to decide which of John Updike's Rabbit quartet should be included as a fourth . . . and then, as a fifth, Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird); I adore reading Robert B. Parker's Spenser novels (almost a guilty pleasure!) and I loved William Least Heat-Moon's Blue Highways, Max Shulman's Dobie Gillis stories, Hemingway's, John Cheever's, Ed Gorman's and Daphne DuMaurier's short stories ('The Killers', 'The Swimmer', 'Render Unto Caesar' and 'The Birds' respectively are exemplars of the short-form) and so on. And I also feverishly devour old comicbooks (most usually those from DC -- particularly their Strange Adventures and Mystery In Space titles). But horror and SF is where my heart lies and, though I've loved and championed the work -- both novel-length and short story -- of many writers, there are two authors who, for me, take the cake: Ray Bradbury and Stephen King. Bradbury's novel Something Wicked This Way Comes says all there is to say about the relationship between a boy and his father: it should be available on prescription. By the same token, his Dandelion Wine (which we're particularly pleased to have re-published recently . . . with a wonderful Intro from King himself -- both of my heroes between two covers!) . . . that book can still bring tears to my eyes more than thirty years since I first read it (and I've read parts of it many many times in between).

And Stephen King . . . well, his work is maligned almost as much as it's revered -- go figure. Those early King titles have still not been surpassed, his mid-period work (notably the harrowing Pet Sematary) takes some beating and even much of his recent work shows an artist still able to flick all the switches when he really wants to. But it's King's ability to document the minutiae of American Small-town Life that will be what he's best remembered for over the years and, yes, the centuries to come. He's the Mark Twain and the Homer of his generation. And I don't make such claims lightly. Go re-read 'Salem's Lot -- it looks like a book about vampires but it's much much more. And his 'Hearts In Atlantis' segment of the book of that title is, along with Connie Willis's 'The Winds from Marble Arch', one of the all-time best novellas/short novels -- 'Atlantis' should have netted King the Pulitzer, in my book, but the self-appointed cognoscenti and the literati know best, of course (a pox on both their houses, say I).

Our fundraising anthology, Jack Haringa Must Die! is now available. Price: $10

Charles Tan Interviews Zoran Zivkovic

2008-06-15T12:48:00.000-07:00

What made you decide to use the format presented in 12 Collections?

Many prose books of mine share that format. Ursula LeGuin called it a "mosaic-novel": A whole that is bigger than the mere sum of its constituent parts. An amalgam, not just a conglomerate. I find the term quite appropriate. The stones my literary mosaics are made of can be read and, hopefully, enjoyed, individually, but their true meaning emerges only when seen in entirety of the big picture. This is particularly evident in "Twelve Collections": The final, twelfth collector collects collections, as if giving a frame to the picture...

The color purple recurs repeatedly in 12 Collections. What is the significance of the color purple?

It is the pivotal leitmotif of my mosaic-novel. As the author I am not entitled, of course, to interpret my own book, but I guess it wouldn't be improper if I tell you that "the color purple" has strong intertextual references to a number of capital works of the contemporary world literature — certain novels of Umberto Eco, Orhan Pamuk, Milan Kundera, Haruki Murakami...

What are the elements that comprise a good story? How conscious are you of these elements when writing?

There are many elements that comprise a good story. It takes two long semesters to teach my students about them. (I am a creative writing professor at the Faculty of Philology of the University of Belgrade.) But if I had to determine the greatest virtue a work of prose should aim to, I would say it's the impeccable internal harmony. Use only as many words as required. No more, no less. Add or take one, and the beauty isn't perfect any more...

I am quite unconscious of these elements when writing. Fortunately, my subconscious, the very source of my creative imagination, is very much aware and in control of them...

Our fundraising anthology, Jack Haringa Must Die! is now available. Price: $10

Charles Tan Interviews Conrad Williams

2008-06-11T11:25:00.000-07:00

What made you decide to write The Scalding Rooms?

I had written a novella set in that universe in 2001 and had always intended to return to write a sequel. I wanted to write more about the Mowers, and felt they could have a more prominent role. I also wanted to write about a father and his relationship with his child. I had become a father in 2002 and this was pretty much the first thing I wrote about that father/son axis.

Butchery and the slaughter house seems to be a recurring theme. What made you cling to this idea and did you have to do a lot of research?

I read a book by Eric Schlosser called 'Fast Food Nation'. There's a jaw-dropping sequence in that about abattoir accidents. I thought it would make for a great setting, a slaughterhouse that was filled with broken tools and broken men. The Schlosser book and a number of articles and documentaries on abattoirs really stoked my imagination. It's a pretty grim subject. I take much more care to find out the provenance of the meat I eat these days...

Did you determine early on that The Scalding Rooms would be a novella or did you simply write until it was finished? How do you determine the length your fiction will be?

I set out to write a novella, and to this end I had a main idea for the story, and one or two sub-strands. For a novel I usually find I come up with three central elements and any number of offshoots. That said, I would happily have written a novel if the story had demanded to be taken into that sort of territory. But I think, generally, ideas suggest themselves to you in the form they end up as. I'm working on some ideas now that I hope will go towards a novel set in Howling Mile. I've had some very good reaction for the two books so far. I think it's time to go large.

Our fundraising anthology, Jack Haringa Must Die! is now available. Price: $10

Charles Tan Interviews Christopher Golden

2008-06-09T18:03:00.000-07:00

How did you end up collaborating with Mike Mignola? Can you describe what the writing process was like?

Mike and I have known each other for years, and speak fairly often. For ages, I'd heard details from him about a "vampire graphic novel" he planned to write. Out of the blue one day, he phoned me up and said he had come to the conclusion that he wouldn't ever have the time to do it, and would I like to write it as a novel. Of course I said yes. Mike sent me his notes and outline, which I revised, filling holes and adding sequences, fleshing out characters. Once we had agreed on the story, I set about writing. Every twenty pages or so I would send him the work in progress and we'd go over it on the phone, making changes, debating the fine points. There were places where he had specific visions he was passionate about, and I wanted to make sure he got precisely what he wanted, while in other places I pursued my own instincts. But the end result is very much a combination of our sensibilities and interests.

Did the artwork always come first (and how did it influence your writing) or were there instances where your prose affected the way Mignola illustrated the book?

Actually, other than a few sample drawings Mike did for the publisher when we were in the process of selling it, the illustrations were always done AFTER. Once a certain segment of the book had been completed, Mike would go and do illustrations for that section. We had talked about a number of different ways of approaching the art, but in the end Mike was determined that the illustrations should provide a counterpoint, a punctuation of sorts. Most illustrated novels feature art that is simply--though often beautifully--a repetition of the information in the text. Mike wanted most of the art in Baltimore to add emphasis and atmosphere, to work in tandem with the text instead of just presenting the events or ideas in a different medium.

What do you think will readers find appealing in Baltimore?

I'd like to think they'll enjoy it because its unique. To my knowledge, there's literally nothing else like it. We approached it through our love of the gothics, keeping Stoker and Shelley very much in mind, but also Melville and Poe and a million folk tales and legends we've read. On the other hand, we wanted to make sure the language was accessible for modern readers who might find some classic gothic lit a bit daunting. Beyond that, there's a definite human commentary in the story, though I'll leave that for others to parse. And, of course, readers are also treated to an amazing cover and over 150 interior illustrations by one of the great artists of our time. Mignola is a true original.

Our fundraising anthology, Jack Haringa Must Die! is now available. Price: $10

Charles Tan Interviews Barbara and Christopher Roden

2008-06-04T11:32:00.001-07:00

What in your opinion sets At Ease with the Dead apart from other horror anthologies?

One thing that sets it apart is the fact that since Ash-Tree is a small press doing limited editions, we have the freedom to include any authors we please, without the constraint of a marketing department telling us that we need to include certain 'big names' in order to ensure sales. This means that we're free to choose the best of the stories submitted to us, whether they're by established authors or new writers. We also choose not to 'theme' our anthologies, which gives writers the freedom to write what they choose, in a variety of styles. And since we are not necessarily looking for 'horror', we're able to include a wider variety of supernatural/macabre/weird fiction.

What was the editing process like? How did both of you decide which stories made it to the anthology and which didn't?

The editing process was time-consuming, because we both read every story submitted and jot down our thoughts on whether or not we think it should be on a final list for consideration. At Ease With the Dead is our fourth anthology, and the previous two received award nominations, while its immediate predecessor, Acquainted With the Night, won IHG and World Fantasy awards. Given that precedent, we knew that the stories we chose for At Ease With the Dead had to live up to those in the previous books, which meant that we already had a certain benchmark in place. While the process of submitting for our anthologies is somewhat open, in that word of mouth gets round, the majority of the stories were submitted by writers whom we'd invited to take part.

As far as deciding which stories were included goes, we have both read enough work in the genre over the years that we know what we like, and which stories are sufficiently original or thought-provoking that we want to include them. On the rare occasions when one of us particularly likes a story and the other doesn't, we talk the matter over, but the fact that one of us sufficiently likes the story enough to want to include it usually wins out.

What were your criteria for what constitutes a good horror story?

Basically, if the story is well written, and incorporates the supernatural enough that it moves us in some way - either because it is frightening, or because it illuminates something about human nature - then we're happy to put it on our final list. If a story stays in the mind after the last page has been read, then we feel it warrants serious consideration. Above all, however, it has to be well written and well considered, with an indication that the 'horror' genre means more to the writer than just a chance to go for the gross-out.

Our fundraising anthology, Jack Haringa Must Die! is now available. Price: $10.

Charles Tan Interviews Carrie Laben

2008-06-01T18:59:00.000-07:00

Where did the idea for "Something in the Mermaid Way" originate?

It's based on a true story - in a sense. I was reading Jan Bondeson's The Feejee Mermaid and Other Essays in Natural and Unnatural History (an excellent book, by the way) and found an illustration of a mermaid in a German museum that according to the caption was made from a human fetus and a fish tail. There was no explanation in the text, so of course I started wondering how the heck that could happen. What circumstances could possibly exist in which it would be preferable to use a fetus rather than a monkey?

Is "Something in the Mermaid Way" your first professional story sale? What does it feel like to get published--and have your story nominated for the Shirley Jackson Awards?

It is my first pro sale - I had a couple of pieces show up in small zines along the way, but this feels very different. I'm not ashamed to admit that I'm enjoying the attention immensely. Working with Nick Mamatas and the other folks at Clarkesworld has also been wonderful - they run a tight ship there.

I've been a bit surprised by the praise that the story has gotten - before I started submitting it, I was worried that people would find it gratuitous, or think it was all about the shock value. Of course I fantasized about being nominated for awards, but I assumed that would come much later. Now I just have to move on to fantasizing about winning awards, I guess.

What is your writing process like and what was the biggest challenge?

"Something in the Mermaid Way" was actually written fairly atypically for me, in that I wrote the first draft in one sitting, edited it in one sitting, and submitted it right away. Usually I have to let stories steep for some time before I'm happy with them (although given the results, maybe I should try the lightening-fast approach more often!) The biggest problem for me is letting stories go. I don't mind rejections, but I'm a huge perfectionist and if I let a story go out and notice even a tiny flaw later I'm very embarrassed. This is good up to a point, but it slows me down when I take it to extremes, especially when I'm working on longer projects. I'm trying to finish a novel right now and it's taking far too long, because there's always something that I could go over one more time.

Our fundraising anthology, Jack Haringa Must Die! is now available. Price: $10.

Charles Tan interview with Laird Barron

2008-05-30T11:53:00.000-07:00

How would you describe your particular style of writing? Any notable influences?

Much of my work in The Imago Sequence & Other Stories is composed of traditional noir and thriller elements. I like to manipulate certain aspects of narrative, to play with structure, to defy reader expectations at crucial moments -- thus the supernatural intrusions, the allusions to the unknown. However, at heart these stories are powered by classic pulp and crime tropes. I admire and am influenced by John le Carré, Martin Cruz Smith, Robert Parker, and William Goldman, among a slew of others. I'm also particularly fond of Peter Hoeg's Smilla's Sense of Snow. I recall closing the book at the end and staring out the window, thinking, How did he get away with that? Here we have an elegant, yet thoroughly by the numbers mystery-thriller that suddenly turns on you and smacks you across the face with a finale straight out of Lovecraft's playbook. I decided right there this was the kind of thing I'd like to do.

Your fiction tends to feature an other-worldly horror that is reminiscent of Lovecraft. What for you is the appeal of such "alien" visions?

I experience recurring nightmares. My dreams are vivid, so I'm often able to transfer highlights to paper. "The Imago Sequence" novella originated from such a nightmare. I woke up shaking and cramping from adrenaline, as if I'd just been running for my life. This was around 4 A.M and I made my hapless wife listen to the whole nightmare; then I schlepped off to the office and jotted the details into a note pad. A few months later I had the story in the mail. Certainly the process of translating visceral and often nonsensical dream imagery into a coherent narrative is cathartic.

A measure of my fascination with externalized, macrocosmic aspects of horror is derived from youthful encounters with the more titillating passages of the Bible. When mining the Bible for the fantastical, artists usually reach for Book of Revelation. For my money, nothing in all of the dark fantastic competes with the fearsome images conjured by a rousing sermon from the Old Testament. Nor, to my way of thinking, has Lovecraft ever constructed a more alien or otherworldly pantheon than the beings which populate Christian mythology. The cosmic horror mode addresses my desire to rationalize and codify philosophical and spiritual beliefs, to make peace with my overactive subconscious.

"Procession of the Black Sloth" debuted in in your collection The Imago Sequence and Other Stories. Was this an old story (and underwent changes and revisions) or did you write it particularly for your collection? What made you decide to include it?

"Procession of the Black Sloth" is a novella written exclusively for the collection. Because The Imago Sequence and Other Stories is comprised of reprints, Night Shade Books wanted an original piece. I felt obligated to provide buyers with material more substantial than a short story, or even a middleweight novelette. The story originated from a brief passage of another, much more traditional novella of mine. A character in this unfinished novella is telling a ghost tale set in modern Hong Kong. The story threatened to become so complicated and so divergent, I lifted the passage and let it roll.

"Procession of the Black Sloth" does not follow the Lovecraftian mode prevalent throughout the rest of the collection. The story was a tremendous challenge in that it's probably my most ambitious piece from a technical perspective. Normally, my work is layered, but here I pushed myself to exceed the limitations I'd set in the noir pieces by attempting to tackle and execute a stylistically unorthodox narrative on a larger scale. On the surface I endeavored a cinematic approach in an homage to classic horror authors and filmmakers, something I think is readily apparent from the most cursory review. However, my inspiration was almost exclusively Asian horror cinema. I'm a fan of Takashi Miike and Kiyoshi Kurosawa. Miike's Audition and Gozu, and Kurosaw's Cure made an impression on me and these films acted as cynosures as I battled to hammer the novella into a comprehensible shape. I was under deadline, so after coming home from the day job I'd stick out writing until two in the morning, settling for three or four hours sleep. Weekends, I chopped away at it practically around the clock. Consequently, I submerged emotionally and cognitively into the project. Nightmarish in itself, the narrative seeped under my skin and transported me into a weird head space for the two months of its creation. I'm glad it's over.

My other motivation for including a piece divergent from the eldritch theme, was due to my conception of the book as analogous to a concept album. "Procession of the Black Sloth" is a segue into the storytelling mode I'm currently pursuing -- more intimate tales, and tales more overtly tied to the ghostly, the weird, and the psychological. Some of these new stories will explore more of the alien and the cosmic, but much of what I've had to say in the collection is out of my system. I'm excited to shift in new directions. "Procession of the Black Sloth" is a precursor to that progression.

SJA Benefit Anthology Now Available

2008-05-29T13:56:00.000-07:00

Jack Haringa Must Die! (104 pp) is now available from Merricat Publications. Proceeds from the book will benefit the Shirley Jackson Awards.

Go here for more information concerning the book and how to order a copy.

Shirley Jackson Awards fund raiser at KGB bar

2008-05-28T13:26:00.000-07:00

THE SHIRLEY JACKSON AWARDS

Press Release
For Immediate Release
Contact: JoAnn F. Cox
Awards Administrator
admin@shirleyjacksonawards.org

Leading authors read from Shirley Jackson canon to commemorate 60th anniversary of “The Lottery”
Event takes place July 23rd at KGB Bar in New York City
Peter Straub and Jack Ketchum among readers

Boston, MA (May 200 – In honor of Shirley Jackson, Ellen Datlow will be hosting a reading of Shirley Jackson’s work by award-winning and leading authors of the dark fantastic and horror on July 23rd at the KGB Bar in New York City. Proceeds from the event will benefit the Shirley Jackson Awards.

Shirley Jackson (1916-1965) wrote such classic novels as The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, as well as one of the most famous short stories in the English language, “The Lottery.” “The Lottery” was first published on June 28, 1948 in The New Yorker.

Ms. Jackson’s work continues to be a major influence on writers of every kind of fiction, from the most traditional genre offerings to the most innovative literary work. National Book Critics Circle Award-winning novelist Jonathan Lethem has called Jackson “one of this century’s most luminous and strange American writers,” and multiple generations of authors would agree.

Authors who will read from Ms. Jackson’s work are:

F. Brett Cox's most recent stories appeared in Black Static and Postscripts. His newest story, "She Hears Music Up Above," is forthcoming in the original anthology from Prime Books, Phantom. With Andy Duncan, he co-edited Crossroads: Tales of the Southern Literary Fantastic. He is a juror for the 2007 Shirley Jackson Awards.

Jeffrey Ford is author of the novels The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque and The Girl in the Glass, and the story collection, The Empire of Ice Cream. In 2008 he will have out a new novel, The Shadow Year, and a new collection, The Drowned Life.

Jack Ketchum is the author of many novels, including Joyride, Red, Only Child, and Hide and Seek. His book of two novellas was just released by Leisure, and his collection of memoirs, titled Book of Souls, is about to be published by Bloodletting Press.

Carrie Laben’s story “Something in the Mermaid Way,” is a nominee in the short story category for the 2007 Shirley Jackson Awards. Another story is just out in the anthology Phantom. She is currently working on her first novel, in which most of the nicer characters are rats.

John Langan's collection, Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters, is forthcoming from Prime Books. His novella, "How the Day Runs Down," or, as he likes to call it, "my zombie Our Town," will appear in John Joseph Adams's massive zombie anthology, The Living Dead, in September. He is a juror for the 2007 Shirley Jackson Awards.

Sarah Langan’s first novel, The Keeper, was a New York Times Editor's Pick. Her second novel, The Missing, won the Stoker Award for outstanding novel of 2007. Her third novel, Audrey's
Door, is slated for publication in early 2009. She's currently at work on a collection of short stories. She is a juror for the 2007 Shirley Jackson Awards.

Peter Straub is the author of seventeen novels, including Ghost Story, Koko, Mr. X, In the Night Room, and two collaborations with Stephen King. He also has written two volumes of poetry and two collections of short fiction, and he edited the Library of America’s edition of H. P. Lovecraft’s Tales. He has won many awards for his writing and in 1998, was named Grand Master at the World Horror Convention. In 2006, he was given the Horror Writers Association’s Life Achievement Award.

David Wellington is the author of Monster Island, 13 Bullets, 99 Coffins, and the forthcoming Vampire Zero. His work is serialized online for free at www.davidwellington.net.

Jack Womack is the author of Ambient, Terraplane, Heathern, Elvissey, Random Acts of Senseless Violence, Let’s Put the Future Behind Us, and Going, Going, Gone. He was in 1994 a co-winner of the Philip K. Dick Award for Elvissey.

An evening of live readings from Ms. Jackson’s work is sure to unsettle audience members. The event will take place at KGB Bar, well-known for its regularly held readings of poetry and non-fiction, and for the Fantastic Fiction reading series, co-hosted by Ellen Datlow and Matthew Kressel. KGB is located at 85 East 4th Street (just off 2nd Ave) New York City.

Readings from Shirley Jackson’s work will begin at 7pm and end by 9pm. The cover charge is $5 per person.

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. The 2007 Shirley Jackson Awards will be presented on Sunday, July 20th 2008, at Readercon 19, Conference on Imaginative Literature, in Burlington, Massachusetts.

Websites: http://www.ShirleyJacksonAwards.org
http://www.kgbbar.com/bar
______________________________________________________________
Media representatives who are seeking further information or interviews should contact JoAnn F. Cox.

Charles Tan interviews Lucius Shepard

2008-05-26T16:52:00.000-07:00

How did the story "Vacancy" come about?

Vacancy grew slowly at first, like most of my stories. Five years back, I had a kind of video clip image of a man sitting on one of those lounging chairs with an aluminum frame at night in a used car lot on Ridgewood Ave in South Daytona where I used to live. He would look up now and again and stare at something across the street.

The image stuck with me and a couple of weeks later I wrote the first few pages, trying to fix Cliff's character, using a friend of mine, a minor Hollywood actor who I went to high school with as the model, and deciding that what he was staring at was the Vacancy sign of the Celeste Motel; but beyond that I could not go. I set it aside and didn't come back to it for a year or so. Then I wrote a few more pages and figured out two or three more things. Then I stalled again.

I picked up the story now and again over the next few years and just couldn't finish it. Then Ellen Datlow called me up and asked if I could write her a novella in two weeks. Sure, I said, and picked up Vacancy again. This time I seemed to know a lot more about the story--not everything, there were still surprises, but a lot. And after that it went fairly easily.

In some of your stories, you've mentioned the Philippines but it plays a bigger role in "Vacancy". Why that particular country and did you have to do much research or was it based on personal experience?

I was in Manila once for about a week, waiting for friend to meet me and then go on to Thailand together. I stayed in very cheap hotel with a zoo of lizards and bugs in every room. I did a lot of walking around and the city appealed to me. I walked through one neighborhood where almost every morning they had shit-fights, hurling feces at each other over back fences. It impressed me as a very effective and reasonable way of settling one's differences. I drank a lot, got hustled by bar girls, and was able to use my Spanish. What's not to like? My friend arrived and we went off to Thailand, I thought I'd return to Manila, but India took too much of my time--maybe that frustration is why it pops up in my fiction now and then. And maybe my experience in Manila played into Vacancy.

What in your opinion are the elements that make a story not only good but powerful and effective?

I really don't know how to answer that and I'm not sure I want to know. For me, I guess, every story that works well is grounded in experience--in those stories there's a depth that comes across, a surety with the basic materials, a substantiality that speaks through the characters and gives the story weight, even when I'm writing about something that couldn't possibly happen. But I don't think about my work analytically. I just try to write until the emotions of the characters impinge upon me, until I get a hit of emotion. Then I know I'm there, where the story wanted to me to take it.

Our fundraising anthology, Jack Haringa Must Die! is now available. Price: $10.

Charles Tan interviews with the Shirley Jackson Nominees

2008-05-25T18:56:00.000-07:00

Charles Tan is conducting interviews with some of our Shirley Jackson Awards nominees. Tomorrow night, (Monday, May 26th) we'll post the first of the interviews.

Watch this space!

(Our fundraising anthology, Jack Haringa Must Die! is now available. Please e-mail MerricatPublications@gmail.com to order a copy. Price: $10.)

Note from a Juror on the SJA

2008-05-03T06:58:00.000-07:00

Dear friends of the SJA,

With the SJA final ballot announced (phew!), now seems like a good time to talk about the Shirley Jackson Awards, why they were established, how they work, and what our goals are.

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.

A few of us got together and decided that such a new award might draw more attention to our vibrant, dynamic genre. The Stokers (happily for me) honor a slightly different kind of horror fiction, and I suspect that the final ballot of IHG, the other juried award, will look quite different from our own. All the finalists for all the awards deserve the recognition they receive, and it is our earnest hope that the SJA will expand dark fiction readers’ conceptions of horror. In fact, we hope people who’ve never read what’s traditionally considered horror will seek out our nominees, because it’s not about the confines of genre. It’s about these splendid works that transcend their labels. The dark fiction market is growing, and fortunately, there is more than enough room for all of us.

And onto the manner in which nominees were selected. The jury (F. Brett Cox, John Langan, Paul Tremblay, and I) read widely and often. We read until our eyes were bleary. We read the recommendations of the advisory board, we read the submissions from publishers, we solicited material, heard about somebody who heard from somebody about a good book, and tracked it down. We begged, borrowed, and stole material. Okay, we didn’t steal. Well, maybe that other Langan. Anyway, we’re writers, too, so we took it seriously, because it’s important.

When we were ready, we voted privately among the four of us, and arrived at our stellar final ballot. We disqualified our own fiction, but we did consider the fiction written or edited by advisors. Ellen Datlow volunteered to withdraw her anthology Inferno in order to preserve the reputation of the award, and prevent catcalls of favoritism, but we jurors agreed that the disqualification of such a work from consideration would ultimately harm the reputation of the SJA. It’s too good not to consider, and if we truly want our final ballot to reflect the best work of the year, our consciences could not allow us to disqualify it.

I imagine this will happen again, and often. Our excellent and growing list of advisors will no doubt edit and produce some of the best fiction of the year—that’s why they’re our advisors. While jurors will rotate over the years to keep the award fresh, our commitment to impartiality will remain constant, and we take that job seriously.

And so, this year, we’ve come out with what, collaboratively, we believe is the best fiction in the tradition of Shirley Jackson, to be published in 2007. Read the nominees. I dare you to disagree!

Thanks again for your support; it means a lot.

Sincerely,
Sarah Langan

2007 Shirley Jackson Awards Finalists and Award Ceremony Location Announced

2008-05-02T11:45:00.000-07:00

Nominees Announced for Inaugural Year of The Shirley Jackson Awards

Boston, MA (May 2008) -- 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.

The Shirley Jackson Awards will be voted upon by a jury of professional writers, editors, critics, and academics, with input from a Board of Advisors. The awards will be given for the best work published in the preceding calendar year in the following categories: Novel, Novella, Novelette, Short Story, Single-Author Collection, and Edited Anthology.

The nominees for the 2007 Shirley Jackson Awards are:

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)

Shirley Jackson (1916-1965) wrote such classic novels as The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, as well as one of the most famous short stories in the English language, "The Lottery." Her work continues to be a major influence on writers of every kind of fiction, from the most traditional genre offerings to the most innovative literary work. National Book Critics Circle Award-winning novelist Jonathan Lethem has called Jackson "one of this century’s most luminous and strange American writers," and multiple generations of authors would agree.

The Shirley Jackson Awards will be presented on Sunday, July 20th 2008, at Readercon 19, Conference on Imaginative Literature, in Burlington, Massachusetts.

Website: ShirleyJacksonAwards.org

Media representatives who are seeking further information or interviews should contact JoAnn F. Cox.

2007

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We're now closed to publisher submissions to The Shirley Jackson Awards for works published in 2007. Thank you to all of the publishers who submitted works for consideration.

Eligibility Rules

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1. Works must have elements of psychological suspense, horror, or dark fantasy to be considered.

2. The Shirley Jackson Awards will be presented annually for each year beginning January 1 and ending on December 31. Awards are given for work appearing for the first time in English during that calendar year.

3. Determinations of nominations (the final ballot) and final recipients are made solely by the Jury.

4. Members of the Advisory Board recommend works to the Jurors but do no nominate or vote on works.

5. General eligibility concerning the judges and advisory board members:

a. Judges’ works are not eligible during the calendar year for which they are serving as judges.

b. Advisory Board members’ works are eligible.

6. Only book and magazine (both online and print) publishers may formally submit works to the jury. Please contact Administrator JoAnn Cox for details admin at shirleyjacksonawards.org

7. Awards will be made in the following categories:
a. Novel: A work of fiction at least 40,000 words in length.
b. Long Fiction (Novella): fiction between 17,500 and 39,999 words in length.
c. Mid-Length Fiction (Novelette): fiction between 7,500 and 17,499 words in length.
d. Short Fiction: fiction 7,499 words or less.
e. Collection: At least 40,000 words, consisting of at least 3 fictional works by a single author. A collection may contain nonfiction, illustrations, or collaborative works; however at least half of the collection’s contents must be fiction.
f. Anthology: At least 40,000 words, consisting of at least 3 stories by 3 or more authors. An anthology may contain nonfiction, but its content must be at least half fiction. In addition, to be eligible for this award, no less than half of the material contained in the anthology must be original, that is, unpublished prior to its appearance in the anthology.

8. Each category must have three qualified nominees in order to be in contention for an awards year. If three nominations cannot be made for the Awards year, the category will be dropped for that year.

9. The final ballot should contain no more than five works per category. In the event that two works are tied for 5th place, the jurors may revote to break the tie or may include both works on the final ballot, for a total of six items in the category. In the event more than two works are tied for 5th place, the jurors will revote to break the tie. The form of the revote will be at the discretion of the jurors.

10. Special Awards may be given at the discretion of the Jury and shall be announced at the same time the final ballot is made public.