The Ladies of Horror Fiction team is pleased to present the 2021 Ladies of Horror Fiction Award Nominees for Best Collection.
The nominees are:
The Dangers of Smoking in Bed: Stories, Mariana Enríquez, Megan McDowell (Translator)
Sometimes We’re Cruel, and Other Stories, J.A.W. McCarthy
Unfortunate Elements of My Anatomy, Hailey Piper
The Ghost Sequences, A.C. Wise
SEEDS, Tabatha Wood
Never Have I Ever, Isabel Yap
The Dangers of Smoking in Bed: Stories by Mariana Enríquez, Megan McDowell (Translator)
Following the “propulsive and mesmerizing” (New York Times Book Review) Things We Lost in the Fire comes a new collection of singularly unsettling stories, by an Argentine author who has earned comparisons to Shirley Jackson and Jorge Luis Borges.
Mariana Enriquez has been critically lauded for her unconventional and sociopolitical stories of the macabre: populated by unruly teenagers, crooked witches, homeless ghosts, and hungry women, they walk the uneasy line between urban realism and horror. The stories in her next collection are as terrifying as they are socially conscious, and press into being the unspoken — fetish, illness, the female body, the darkness of human history — with unsettling urgency. A woman is sexually obsessed with the human heart; a lost, rotting baby crawls out of a backyard and into a bedroom; a pair of teenage girls can’t let go of their idol; an entire neighborhood is cursed to death by a question of morality they fail to answer correctly.
Written against the backdrop of contemporary Argentina, and with resounding tenderness towards those in pain, in fear, and in limbo, this new collection from one of Argentina’s most exciting writers finds Enriquez at her most sophisticated, and most chilling.
Published January 12th 2021 by Hogarth Press | Goodreads | Bookshop
Sometimes We’re Cruel and Other Stories by J.A.W. McCarthy
A town where people go missing and inexplicably return as cruel versions of themselves.
A not-quite-human mother races against time to build a new body for her ailing daughter.
Lovesick ghosts inhabit the body parts of living people in a world where the only other choice is amputation.
Published August 17, 2021 by Cemetery Gates Media | Goodreads | Bookshop
Unfortunate Elements of My Anatomy by Hailey Piper
Love twisted into horrific shapes, nightmares driven by cruel music, and a world where what little light remains fractures the sky into midnight rainbows in eighteen stories tracing the dark veins of queer horror, isolation, and the monstrous feminine.
The universe unwinds to the tune of a malicious ice cream truck jingle in “We All Scream.” “The Law of Conservation of Death” dictates that a ghost pursue his prey across her every reincarnation. Superstitions thrive even in the distant future and across the stars when a colony shuttle mounts a witch trial in “Hairy Jack.” And try to “Forgive the Adoring Beast” as it scavenges a world of dead gods for tokens of bloody affection. Including two new short stories and a never-before-published novelette, Unfortunate Elements of My Anatomy digs deep inside and clings to the beating nightmare heart you always knew was there.
Published May 7th 2021 by The Seventh Terrace | Goodreads | Bookshop
The Ghost Sequences by A. C. Wise
From A.C. Wise, the acclaimed author of Wendy, Darling, comes a brand new collection of horror stories, The Ghost Sequences.
“A haunting is a moment of trauma, infinitely repeated. It extends forward and backward in time. It is the hole grief makes. It is a house built by memory in-between your skin and bones.”
A lush and elegant collection of tales – many having appeared in various “Best Of” anthologies – teeming with frightful and tragic events, yet profoundly and intimately human. These chilling tales will engross and enthrall.
For readers of Kelly Link, Carmen Maria Machado, and Angela Carter, this is a must have collection of ghostly tales set to deliver a frisson of terror and glee.
Published October 19th 2021 by Undertow Books | Goodreads | Bookshop
SEEDS by Tabatha Wood
It begins with a seed. A dream. An idea, planted and encouraged to grow. A thought that buries deep down inside and puts out monstrous roots. Until, at last, the bloom erupts and showers the land with life.
It begins with a seed…
The menopause brings some unusual and unexpected changes, a woman wakes up after a party in a body that isn’t hers, a teen’s life changes forever when they embrace the truth about who they are, and a lone mother tries to bury her traumatic past but instead grows a terrible future…
An unsettling selection of quiet horror and dark speculative fiction brought together in a brand new collection from Australian Shadows Award-winner, Tabatha Wood.
Published October 16th 2021 by Wild Wood Books | Goodreads | Bookshop
Never Have I Ever by Isabel Yap
“Am I dead?” Mebuyen sighs. She was hoping the girl would not ask. Spells and stories, urban legends and immigrant tales: the magic in Isabel Yap’s debut collection jumps right off the page, from the joy in her new novella, “A Spell for Foolish Hearts” to the terrifying tension of the urban legend “Have You Heard the One About Anamaria Marquez.”
Published February 9th 2021 by Small Beer Press | Goodreads | Bookshop
The Ladies of Horror Fiction Award winners will be announced later this month!
No comments:
Post a Comment