Indies dominate Shirley Jackson Awards shortlists

The shortlists for this year’s Shirley Jackson Awards have been announced, featuring a host of titles published by small presses.

Including categories for novel, novella and short stories, the awards were set up in memory of The Haunting of Hill House (Penguin Modern Classics) author to honour literature that takes in “psychological suspense, horror, and the dark fantastic”.

This year sees books from small UK publishers on the shortlists, including Dead Ink, Comma Press, and Unsung.

In the novel category, Everything Under by Daisy Johnson (Jonathan Cape) will compete with In the Night Wood by Dale Bailey (John Joseph Adams Books/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), Little Eve by Catriona Ward (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), Social Creature by Tara Isabella Burton (Double Day/Raven Books) and We Sold Our Souls by Grady Hendrix (Quirk Books).

The awards will be presented on 14th July 14 at Readercon 30, Conference on Imaginative Literature, in Quincy, Massachusetts.

The rest of the shortlists are:

Novella
Judderman, DA Northwood (Dead Ink Books/Cinder House Publishing)
The Atrocities, Jeremy C. Shipp (Tor.com)
The Only Harmless Great Thing, Brooke Bolander (Tor.com)
The Sea Dreams It Is the Sky, John Hornor Jacobs (HarperCollins)
The Taiga Syndrome, Cristina Rivera Garza (Dorothy, a Publishing Project)

Novelette
"Adriftica," Maria Dahvana Headley (Robots vs. Fairies)
"Blood and Smoke, Vinegar and Ashes,” D.P. Watt (The Silent Garden)
Ghostographs: An Album, Maria Romasco Moore (Rose Metal Press)
"Help the Witch," Tom Cox (Help the Witch)
"The Black Sea," Chris Mason (Beneath the Waves – Tales from the Deep, April 2018)

Short fiction
“Back Seat,” Bracken MacLeod (Lost Highways)
“Hell,” David Hansen (The Charcoal Issue of Fairy Tale Review, March 2018)
“How to be a Horror Writer,” Tim Waggoner (Vastarien: A Literary Journal vol 1., issue 2 – Summer / Grimscribe Press)
“The Astronaut,” Christina Wood Martinez (Granta 142: Animalia)
"The Woman Dies," Aoko Matsuda, translated from the Japanese by Polly Barton (online edition of Granta 144: genericlovestory)

Single-Author Collection
All the Fabulous Beasts, Priya Sharma (Undertow Publications)
Drawn Up from Deep Places, Gemma Files (Trepidatio Publishing)
Garden of Eldritch Delights, Lucy A. Snyder (Raw Dog Screaming Press)
Quartier Perdu, Sean O'Brien (Comma Press)
The Human Alchemy, Michael Griffin (Word Horde)

Edited Anthology
Chiral Mad 4: An Anthology of Collaborations, edited by Michael Bailey and Lucy A. Snyder (Written Backwards)
Robots vs Fairies, edited by Navah Wolfe and Dominik Parisien (Saga Press)
The Silent Garden: A Journal of Esoteric Fabulism, edited by The Silent Garden Collective (Undertow Publications)
This Dreaming Isle, edited by Dan Coxon (Unsung Stories)
Tiny Crimes: Very Short Tales of Mystery and Murder, edited by Lincoln Michel and Nadxieli Nieto (Black Balloon)