Big Machine

Author: LaValle, Victor
Format: Hardcover
Type: Horror Novel
Page Count: 384pp.
Pub. Date: August 11, 2009
Publisher: Spiegel and Grau

Winner of the 2009 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel

Ricky Rice is a middling hustler with a lingering junk habit, a bum knee, and a haunted mind.

A survivor of a suicide cult, he scrapes by as a porter at a bus depot in Utica, New York, until one day a mysterious letter arrives, summoning him to enlist in a band of paranormal investigators comprised of former addicts and petty criminals, all of whom had at some point in their wasted lives heard what may have been the voice of God.

Infused with the wonder of a disquieting dream and laced with Victor LaValle’s fiendish comic sensibility, Big Machine is a mind-rattling mystery about doubt, faith, and the monsters we carry within us.

Midnight Picnic

Author: Antosca, Nick
Format: Trade Paperback
Type: Horror Novella
Page Count: 188pp.
Pub. Date: February 15, 2009
Publisher: Word Riot Press

Winner of the 2009 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novella

In the morning, Bram finds the bones of a murdered child.

At noon, the murdered child begs for his help.

And by nightfall, they have killed a man together and set off into the afterlife, where nothing is what it was, and death is only the beginning of punishment. An eerie story about the nature of death and the self, Midnight Picnic inhabits an American landscape made strange and unfamiliar.

From the author of the cult novel Fires, Midnight Picnic is a haunting and disturbing experience.

“Morality”

Author: King, Stephen
First Appeared in: Esquire
Format: Print Magazine
Type: Horror Novelette
Pub. Date: June 2009
Also Available in: Blockade Billy
Author: King, Stephen
Format: Trade Paperback
Type: Horror Novella and Novellette
Page Count: 144pp.
Pub. Date: May 25, 2010
Publisher: Scribner

“Morality” — Winner of the 2009 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novelette

No summary for “Morality” is available.

Summary for Blockade Billy:

From New York Times bestselling author Stephen King comes the haunting story of Blockade Billy, the greatest Major League baseball player to be erased from the game.

Even the most die-hard baseball fans don’t know the true story of William “Blockade Billy” Blakely. He may have been the greatest player the game has ever seen, but today no one remembers his name. He was the first — and only — player to have his existence completely removed from the record books. Even his team is long forgotten, barely a footnote in the game’s history.

Every effort was made to erase any evidence that William Blakely played professional baseball, and with good reason. Blockade Billy had a secret darker than any pill or injection that might cause a scandal in sports today. His secret was much, much worse . . . and only Stephen King, the most gifted storyteller of our age, can reveal the truth to the world, once and for all.

Originally published through Cemetery Dance Publications on April 20, 2010 as a $25.00 limited-edition hardcover, Stephen King and Cemetery Dance have made an arrangement with Scribner to make available a less expensive hardcover edition of Blockade Billy, with an on-sale date of May 25th, the same date the audiobook goes on sale.

The Scribner edition will be available in all U.S. and Canadian retail outlets. Both the Scribner book and the Simon and Schuster audiobook will feature a bonus short story called “Morality”.

“The Pelican Bar”

Author: Fowler, Karen Joy
Type: Horror Short Story
Available in: Eclipse 3: New Science Fiction and Fantasy
Editor: Jonathan Strahan
Format: Trade Paperback
Type: Horror Anthology
Page Count: 240pp.
Pub. Date: October 1, 2009
Publisher: Night Shade Books

“The Pelican Bar” — Winner of the 2009 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Short Story

To observe an eclipse is to witness a rare and unusual event. Under darkened skies the sun becomes a negative image of itself, its corona transforming the landscape into a strange space where anything might happen, and any story may be true . . .

In the spirit of classic science fiction anthologies such as Universe, Orbit, and Starlight, master anthologist Jonathan Strahan (The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year) presents the non-themed genre anthology Eclipse: New Science Fiction and Fantasy.

Here you will find stories where strange and wonderful things happen — where reality is eclipsed by something magical and new.

Continuing in the footsteps of the multiple-award-nominated anthologies Eclipse One and Eclipse Two, Eclipse Three delivers new fiction by some of the genre’s most celebrated authors, including Karen Joy Fowler’s story of a family’s desperation and a rebellious young woman’s strange incarceration; Ellen Klages’s fable of a practical girl, an unusual tortoise, and an ancient mathematical puzzle; Pat Cadigan’s story of a mysterious photograph and two friends’ journey through space and time in order to solve its riddle; Jeffrey Ford’s tale of a legendary sword imbued with the power to turn flesh to coral, and of the artist that wields it; Daniel Abraham’s story of divine providence, sacred oaths, and the omens that indicate whether a man is fit to be king; and Caitlin R. Kiernan’s chronicle of an astronaut whose memories of a lover lost to an alien intelligence haunt her.

Table of Contents:

• The Pelican Bar by Karen Joy Fowler
• A Practical Girl by Ellen Klages
• Don’t Mention Madagascar by Pat Cadigan
• On the Road by Nnedi Okorafor
• Swell by Elizabeth Bear
• Useless Things by Maureen F. McHugh
• The Coral Heart by Jeffrey Ford
• It Takes Two by Nicola Griffith
• Sleight of Hand by Peter S. Beagle
• The Pretender’s Tourney by Daniel Abraham
• Yes We Have No Bananas by Paul Di Filippo
• Mesopotamian Fire by Jane Yolen and Adam Stemple
• The Visited Man by Molly Gloss
• Galapagos by Caitlin R. Kiernan
• Dolce Domum by Ellen Kushner

Love Songs for the Shy and Cynical

Author: Shearman, Robert
Cover Art: Rachel Goodyear
Format: Hardcover
Type: Horror Short Story Collection
Page Count: 240pp.
Pub. Date: December 31, 2009
Publisher: Big Finish Productions Ltd

Winner of the 2009 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Single-Author Collection (tie)

The first love song in the world, as composed by a pig in the Garden of Eden . . .

The Devil, alarmed when his hobby of writing romantic fiction begins to upstage his day job . . .

A man finding love with someone who has an allergy to his happiness, another losing love altogether when his wife gives him back his heart in a Tupperware box . . .

By turns macabre and moving, horrific and laugh-out-loud funny, Robert Shearman’s short stories come from a place just to the left of the corner of your eye. Following his World Fantasy Award-winning Tiny Deaths, this new collection puts a bizarre twist on the love story.

What is love, why does it hurt so much, and how is it we keep coming back for more?

Sometimes poignant, sometimes cruel — but always as startling and fresh as Shearman’s fans have come to expect.

Table of Contents:

• Love Among the Lobelias
• Roadkill
• Sweet Nothings
• Pang
• This Creeping Thing
• 14.2
• Your Long, Loving Arms
• At the Crease
• Luxembourg
• Sharp
• Be of Good Cheer
• Jolly Roger
• Crumble
• George Clooney’s Moustache
• Love in a Time of Sharing
• Not About Love
• One Last Love Song

Tunneling to the Center of the Earth: Stories

Author: Wilson, Kevin
Format: Hardcover
Type: Horror Short Story Collection
Page Count: 240pp.
Pub. Date: March 31, 2009
Publisher: Harper Perennial

Winner of the 2009 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Single-Author Collection (tie)

Kevin Wilson’s characters inhabit a world that moves seamlessly between the real and the imagined, the mundane and the fantastic.

“Grand Stand-In” is narrated by an employee of a Nuclear Family Supplemental Provider — a company that supplies “stand-ins” for families with deceased, ill, or just plain mean grandparents. And in “Blowing Up On the Spot,” a young woman works sorting tiles at a Scrabble factory after her parents have spontaneously combusted.

Southern gothic at its best, laced with humor and pathos, these wonderfully inventive stories explore the relationship between loss and death and the many ways we try to cope with both.

Table of Contents:

• Grand Stand-In
• Blowing up on the Spot
• The Dead Sister Handbook: A Guide for Sensitive Boys
• Birds in the House
• Mortal Kombat
• Tunneling to the Center of the Earth
• The Shooting Man
• The Choir Director Affair (The Baby’s Teeth)
• Go, Fight, Win
• The Museum of Whatnot
• Worst-Case Scenario

Poe: 19 New Tales Inspired by Edgar Allan Poe

Editor: Datlow, Ellen
Format: Trade Paperback
Type: Anthology
Page Count: 352pp.
Pub. Date: January 6, 2009
Publisher: Solaris

Winner of the 2009 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Edited Anthology
Nominated for the 2009 Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in an Anthology
Winner of the 2009 Black Quill Award for the Best Dark Genre Anthology: Reader’s Choice

Compiled by multi-award winning editor, Ellen Datlow, this collection commemorates the second centenary of Edgar Allan Poe’s birth.

It features Poe — inspired tales by some of the finest talents in the field, including Kim Newman, Pat Cadigan, Sharyn McCrumb, Lucius Shepard, Laird Barron, Suzy McKee Charnas and others.

This all-star line-up has several Hugo, Edgar, Tiptree and British Fantasy Award winners

Table of Contents:

• Introduction by Ellen Datlow
• Illimitable Domain by Kim Newman
• The Pickers by Melanie Tem
• Beyond Porch and Portal by E. Catherine Tobler
• The Final Act by Gregory Frost
• Strappado by Laird Barron
• The Mountain House by Sharyn McCrumb
• The Pikesville Buffalo by Glen Hirshberg
• The Brink of Eternity by Barbara Roden
• The Red Piano by Delia Sherman
• Sleeping with Angels by M. Rickert
• Shadow by Steve Rasnic Tem
• Truth and Bone by Pat Cadigan
• The Reunion by Nicholas Royle
• The Tell by Kaaron Warren
• The Heaven and Hell of Robert Flud by David Prill
• Flitting Away by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
• Kirikh’quru Krokundor by Lucius Shepard
• Lowland Sea by Suzy McKee Charnas
• Technicolor by John Langan