The Ladies of Horror Fiction team is pleased to present the 2021 Ladies of Horror Fiction Award Nominees for Best Novella.
The nominees are:
Goddess of Filth, V. Castro
Transmuted, Eve Harms
& This Is How to Stay Alive, Shingai Njeri Kagunda
Waif, Samantha Kolesnik
Salvation Spring, T.C. Parker
Goddess of Filth by V. Castro
“Five of us sat in a circle doing our best to emulate the girls in The Craft, hoping to unleash some power to take us all away from our home to the place of our dreams. But we weren’t witches. We were five Chicanas living in San Antonio, Texas, one year out of high school.”
One hot summer night, best friends Lourdes, Fernanda, Ana, Perla, and Pauline hold a séance. It’s all fun and games at first, but their tipsy laughter turns to terror when the flames burn straight through their prayer candles and Fernanda starts crawling toward her friends and chanting in Nahuatl, the language of their Aztec ancestors.
Over the next few weeks, shy, modest Fernanda starts acting strangely—smearing herself in black makeup, shredding her hands on rose thorns, sucking sin out of the mouths of the guilty. The local priest is convinced it’s a demon, but Lourdes begins to suspect it’s something else—something far more ancient and powerful.
As Father Moreno’s obsession with Fernanda grows, Lourdes enlists the help of her “bruja Craft crew” and a professor, Dr. Camacho, to understand what is happening to her friend in this unholy tale of possession-gone-right.
Published March 30th 2021 by Creature Publishing | Goodreads | Bookshop
Transmuted by Eve Harms
Her doctor is giving her the body of his dreams . . . and her nightmares.
Isa is a micro-celebrity who rarely shows her face, and can’t wait to have it expertly ripped off and rearranged to look more feminine. When a successful fundraiser makes her gender affirming surgery possible, she’s overjoyed—until she has to give up all her money to save her dying father.
Crushed by gender dysphoria and the pressure of disappointing her fans who paid for a new face, she answers a sketchy ad seeking transgender women for a free, experimental feminization treatment. The grotesquely flawless Dr. Skurm has gruesome methods, but he gets unbelievable results, and Isa is finally feeling comfortable in her skin. She even gains the courage to ask out her crush: an alluring and disfigured alchemy-obsessed artist named Rayna.
But Isa’s body won’t stop changing, and she’s going from super model to super mutant. She has to discover the secret behind her metamorphosis—before the changes are irreversible, and she’s an unwanted freak forever.
Transmuted is an outrageous and unapologetically queer body horror tale that will leave you gasping, giggling, and gagging for more.
Published July 15, 2021 by Unnerving | Goodreads | Bookshop
& This is How To Stay Alive by Shingai Njeri Kagunda
In & This is How to Stay Alive by Shingai Njeri Kagunda, Nyokabi’s world unravels after her brother Baraka’s death by suicide. When an eccentric auntie gives Nyokabi a potion that sends her back in time to when Baraka was still alive, it becomes her only goal to keep him that way. Nyokabi learns that storytellers may be the carriers of time, but defying the past comes with its own repercussions.
Published October 2021 by Neon Hemlock | Goodreads | Bookshop
Waif by Samantha Kolesnik
Angela has everything she thought she ever wanted—a successful husband, a lavish house, and a bottomless fortune.
But the sight of a strange man in a grocery store one night reawakens her dormant sexuality and soon Angela embarks on a dangerous descent into the world of underground pornography and back-alley plastic surgery.
As the stakes get higher, long-buried memories resurface and Angela finds herself enamored with Reena, a fetish film performer. With some help from a queer gang called The Waifs, Angela is forced to make the decision between her unhappy upper-class life and the treacherous world of underground film.
Published December 1st 2021 by Grindhouse Press | Goodreads | Bookshop
Salvation Spring by T.C. Parker
She doesn’t know where she’s been, these last few years, or how she came by the scars that mark her body. She can barely remember who she is, a lot of the time.
But Sasha knows Salvation Spring, the tiny nowhere town out in the middle of the desert that calls to her in dreams and haunts her waking life.
Getting there is hard. But what she’ll find there – and what the place will ask of her – will be much, much harder.
Because the Spring isn’t what it seems – far from it. And neither, for that matter, is Sasha.
Not by a long way.
Published May 1st 2021 | Goodreads | Amazon
The Ladies of Horror Fiction Award winners will be announced later this month!
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