2010 Shirley Jackson award nominees are out – which I’m selfishly extra-excited to see this year because Kakaner and I have scheduled a week this summer to go gallivanting off to Readercon, where the awards are presented. Awwww yeah. (This will be my first-ever con, for the record.)
Dribs and drabs of thought –
- More title synchronicity (“A / Dark Matter”) – as with “Palimpsest” for the 2010 Hugo noms.
- Joey Comeau!! Did not expect to see him there. (He’s better known as the word-provider for A Softer World, though Kakaner and I have been sorta following his standalone prose since he started with Lockpick Pornography back around… 2005?)
- Clearly I really need to pick up Haunted Legends, though I’ve kind of spiralled out of my horror anthology phase.
- I also need to look into Karen Joy Fowler at some point. See her name everywhere, know nothing about her work.
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Go to:
Have you read “One Blood Thing After Another”?
:D
Haven’t found the time yet, but it’s been on my to-read list ever since he started publishing chapters. Have any thoughts about it to share?
I really liked it! It’s a really quick read. I think I would have sped through it even if it were a longer work. It was genuinely unsettling in a surreal and grotesque way. I haven’t read a lot of horror so I am not quite sure why it creeped me out so much because some of it did seem obvious, but maybe the anticipation helped with the atmosphere?
I’ll definitely have to add it to my list then! Thanks for the recommendation.
It was genuinely unsettling in a surreal and grotesque way.
Can’t ask for more than that. :)
You’re going to Readercon! Soooo jealous. I’ve never been to a con. I hope there will be pictures and a full report!
Re: Karen Joy Fowler, she’s definitely worth checking out. I read her collection Black Glass, which was unexpected and uncanny. And The Jane Austen Book Club is wonderful, not the chick-lit it’s marketed as.
There will be pictures galore, and hopefully some mostly coherent words to go with them! Are there any cons in your radius in the UK?
Black Glass, which was unexpected and uncanny
Mmmm, WANT. Even the title is lovely. Thanks for the rec.
And here’s my “whut!” moment for the day – I had never made the connection between her and The Jane Austen Book Club. I’ll have to pick it up sometime, even if only to spite the reviewers on Amazon whining about expecting genteel floof only to encounter *l’horreur* UNADVERTISED LESBIANS and SERIOUS ISSUES in it.
LOL! You can’t put Jane Austen and LESBIANS in the same book!! KJF does write in several genres, so she’s likely to pop up in the most unlikely places.
I’ll have to have a look out for UK cons for sure. I can be, like, the UK con reporting branch of Black Letters ;-)