We continue our series of blogs presenting the 2008 Shirley Jackson Awards Nominations.
This year the 2009 Shirley Jackson Awards will be presented at ReaderCon 21 on July 8-11, 2010 at the Burlington Marriott Hotel in Burlington, Massachusetts.
The Award Ceremony will be Sunday morning, July 11, 2010. The host for this year’s awards will be noted author Nalo Hopkinson.
Best Novella
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The Language of DyingAuthor: Pinborough, Sarah |
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Nominated for the 2009 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novella A woman sits beside her father’s bedside as the night ticks away the final hours of his life. As she watches over her father, she relives the past week and the events that brought the family together . . . and she recalls all the weeks before that served to pull it apart. There has never been anything normal about the lives raised in this house. It seems to her that sometimes her family is so colourful that the brightness hurts, and as they all join together in this time of impending loss she examines how they came to be the way they are and how it came to just be her, the drifter, that her father came home to die with. But, the middle of five children, the woman has her own secrets . . . particularly the draw that pulled her back to the house when her own life looked set to crumble. And sitting through her lonely vigil, she remembers the thing she saw out in the fields all those years ago . . . the thing that they found her screaming for outside in the mud. As she peers through the familiar glass, she can’t help but hope and wonder if it will come again. Because it’s one of those night, isn’t it dad? A special terrible night. A full night. And that’s always when it comes. If it comes at all. |
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Midnight PicnicAuthor: Antosca, Nick |
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Nominated for the 2009 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novella In the morning, Bram finds the bones of a murdered child. At noon, the murdered child begs for his help. And by nightfall, they have killed a man together and set off into the afterlife, where nothing is what it was, and death is only the beginning of punishment. An eerie story about the nature of death and the self, Midnight Picnic inhabits an American landscape made strange and unfamiliar. From the author of the cult novel Fires, Midnight Picnic is a haunting and disturbing experience. |
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“Sea-Hearts”Author: Lanagan, Margo |
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Nominated for the 2009 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novella Journey beyond the borders of the real with six all new novellas from the most exciting speculative fiction authors working in Australia today – Margo Lanagan, Terry Dowling, Paul Haines, Louise Katz, Trent Jamieson and Cat Sparks. |
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ShrikeAuthor: Crisp, Quentin S. |
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Nominated for the 2009 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novella Brett Stokes is already middle-aged and yet feels that his life has not begun. In an attempt to make sense of his existence he travels to the provincial town of Otani in Japan, hoping that, through his writing, he will obtain the insight that he lacks. But in Japan it is late autumn and, closeted within the garden of the lately widowed Mrs Kunisada, the motley collection of arboreal reds and yellows works upon Stokes’ imagination, until reality itself becomes spectral. As the strange season unfolds, and Stokes meditates upon the meaning of life, death and literature, the power of the Shrike gradually takes centre-stage. Introduction by Lisa Tuttle. |
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VardogerAuthor: Volk, Stephen |
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Nominated for the 2009 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novella Welcome to Shewstone House Hotel. One of those quiet places. An oasis of calm to escape the stresses and anxieties of modern living. Where a non-paying guest waits for his next victim . . . BAFTA-winning writer Stephen Volk outraged the critics with his first screenplay, Ken Russell’s Gothic, and shocked an unsuspecting nation with his notorious BBC TV Halloween hoax Ghostwatch. His gripping supernatural drama series Afterlife was called “Terrific television” (The Guardian) and “Unmissable” (Mail on Sunday). Vardoger is his long new novella and it’s fully as cunning and frightening as any of his previous work . . . |
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The Witnesses are GoneAuthor: Lane, Joel |
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Nominated for the 2009 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novella The Witnesses Are Gone is a first-hand account of a journey into the underworld in all the wrong places. Martin Swann, its narrator, moves into an old house and finds a box of videocassettes in the garden shed. One of them has a bootleg copy of a morbid and disturbing film by a little-known French director, Jean Rien. Martin’s search for Rien’s other films, and for a way to understand them, draws him away from his home and his lover into a shadow realm of secrets, rituals and encroaching decay. An encounter with a schizoid film journalist in Gravesend leads to a drug-fuelled vision in Paris — and finally to the Mexican desert where a grim revelation awaits him. The Witnesses Are Gone updates the Orpheus myth for a world losing touch with reality. Blending supernatural horror with eroticism and warped comedy, it takes a look behind the screen on which our collective nightmares play. |
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- The 2009 Shirley Jackson Award Nominations for Best Novel
- The 2009 Shirley Jackson Award Nominations for Best Novella
- The 2009 Shirley Jackson Award Nominations for Best Novelette
- The 2009 Shirley Jackson Award Nominations for Best Short Story
- The 2009 Shirley Jackson Award Nominations for Best Edited Anthology
- The 2009 Shirley Jackson Award Nominations for Best Single-Author Collection
- Presenting the 2009 Shirley Jackson Award Winners
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