Shirley Jackson Award

Spooky season.

Keith Rosson is the author of the novels, Crone, Coffin Moon, The Devil by Name, Fever House, Smoke City, Road 7, and The Mercy of the Tide, as well as the Shirley Jackson award-winning story collection, Folk Songs for Trauma Surgeons.

His short fiction has appeared in Southwest Review, Nightmare, Cream City Review, and more.

He lives in Portland, Oregon.

He is the author of the novels Coffin Moon, The Devil by Name, Fever House, Smoke City, Road Seven, and The Mercy of the Tide.

He also wrote the Shirley Jackson Award-winning story collection, Folk Songs for Trauma Surgeons.

His short fiction has appeared in Southwest Review, Nightmare, Cream City Review, Pank, December, and more.

He lives in Portland, Oregon, and his latest book is Crone, which is set in a quite dystopian, gritty version of that city, full of cigarettes, bad tattoos, and the hardest of hard drugs, as well as maybe, just maybe, a terrifying witch or two.

Annihilation is the first book in his Southern Reach trilogy.

It won both the Nebula and Shirley Jackson Awards, and the source goes so far as to argue it's one of the best American books of the last 15 years.

That's a massive claim.

It earns that praise by fundamentally changing the mechanics of the horror.

The first is Unspeakable Things by Elizabeth Hand.

In case you missed it, I dedicated a Looking Back at Genre History segment to the Nebula Award, World Fantasy Award, Mythopoeic Award, Otherwise Award, International Horror Guild Award, and Shirley Jackson Award winner, Elizabeth Hand, on episode 728.

I've had the good fortune of teaching several of Elizabeth Hand's works in different classes of mine.

Go read Waking the Moon.

Just an Ordinary Day later assembled 54 previously unpublished or collected stories, which significantly enlarged what we had available as a picture of her work.

The Shirley Jackson Awards were established in 2007, and they recognize the best works of horror, psychological suspense, and dark fantasy.

The awards are presented each year at ReaderCon and are now knocking on the door of their 20th year.

So there you go, a bit on Shirley Jackson, her life, her career, her legacy.

Uh, this book, as we said, was published in 2020.

It won several awards or was nominated therefor: the Bram Stoker, the Ray Bradbury Prize, the Shirley Jackson Award, an Alex Award.

It was a finalist for the Locus and the World Fantasy Awards.

Andrew, tell me more about where this book came from.

Um, I, I, I think it's, it's something where, like, the ideas were interesting, but the writing style, um, and the, like, the philosophy of the writer were, were in s- where I'm just like, "This isn't really something that I'm gonna enjoy very much." I did finish something this month, so I did, I did try again, but that's the first one.

I can start with a book I read called The Croning by Laird Barron, which is an author I hadn't really heard anything about before but has, um, I guess won some Shirley Jackson Awards for previous work and was, for this one, was nominated for the Goodreads in the horror category.

So this is a 2012 publication, uh, by Nightshade Books and involves black magic, old cults, and the children of old leech.

So it didn't reference any Lovecraft that I had heard of before, but might have potentially, but it starts out with the story of, uh, Rumpelstiltskin.