2009 Shirley Jackson Award Shortlist

The 2009 Shirley Jackson Awards nominees have been announced. The awards are presented for outstanding achievement in horror, psychological suspense, and dark fantasy fiction.

Novel

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

Novella

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

Novelette

• “Catch Hell”, Laird Barron (Lovecraft Unbound)
• The Night Cache, Andy Duncan (PS)
• “each thing i show you is a piece of my death”, Gemma Files & Stephen J. Barringer  (Clockwork Phoenix 2)
• “Lonegan’s Luck”, Stephen Graham Jones (New Genre 6)
• “Morality”, Stephen King (Esquire)

Short Story

• “The Crevasse”, Dale Bailey & Nathan Ballingrud (Lovecraft Unbound)
• “Strappado”, Laird Barron (Poe)
• “Faces”, Aimee Bender (The Paris Review, Winter ’09)
• “The Jacaranda Smile”, Gemma Files (Apparitions)
• “The Pelican Bar”, Karen Joy Fowler (Eclipse 3)
• “Procedure in Plain Air”, Jonathan Lethem (The New Yorker 10/26/09)

Single-Author Collection

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

Edited Anthology

• Lovecraft Unbound, Ellen Datlow, ed. (Dark Horse)
• Poe, Ellen Datlow, ed. (Solaris)
• British Invasion, Christopher Golden, Tim Lebbon, & James A. Moore, eds. (Cemetery Dance)
• Apparitions, Michael Kelly, ed. (Undertow Publications)
• Exotic Gothic 3, Danel Olson, ed. (Ash Tree)

The awards will be presented at Readercon 21 in Burlington, Massachusetts, July 8-11, 2010, with guest of honor Nalo Hopkinson hosting.