Jennifer Brozek, photo by M. Dutta Jennifer Brozek is a 2x Bram Stoker Award Nominee, most recently for Last Days of Salton Academy. Your specialty seems to be YA. Yes, it has turned into that, but that wasn’t always the case. In the past, I did a lot of tie-in fiction for Shadowrun (cyberpunk with magic) and Battletech, which was Young Adult, but Shadowrun was not. I’ve had the most acclaim for my YA work, and every YA novel I’ve…
Locus is one of the few magazines I read cover to cover. It’s packed full of news, interviews, conventions reports, color pics, enticing ads, and especially reviews of interest to me. For over 40 years it’s provided the most reliable and comprehensive coverage of the SF field on the market. The June issue is crammed full of good stuff, including: A lengthy interview with John Kessel (The Moon and the Other) Winners of the Nebula and Bram Stoker Awards Complete US and…
A few weeks back I gave you the list of preliminary ballots for The Horror Writers Association (HWA) 2016 Bram Stoker Awards. Not only is this award the most awesome visually, but any of the works honored by making the preliminary cut are more than worthy of your cold-weather binging. However, on February 23rd the HWA announced the finalists for the Stoker in each category. So if you were having trouble deciding where to begin, this should help narrow the…
Just when it seemed like the bleakness of winter would give rise to a whole lot of cabin fever weirdness, The Horror Writers Association (HWA) swoops in to save us by announcing the Preliminary Ballots for the 2016 Bram Stoker Awards. In case you’ve got to believing that horror was the avocation of an over-imaginative (and slightly dark) few, the HWA dispels that notion by being the premier writer’s organization in the horror and dark fiction genre, with over 1,300 members….
Back as a starving college student when I haunted the used book stores, I came across a dusty hardcover edition of Peter Straub’s Ghost Story, thus discovering the only book that ever scared the crap out of me. Of course as a lifelong devotee of the horror genre, I had certainly read stories that gave me the creeps before then. But with Ghost Story I was introduced to a whole new threshold of terrifying. Why? Because Straub had the ability…
Virtually anyone who writes dark fantasy, horror, thrillers, or any other type of fiction with violent or disturbing subjects, sooner or later gets asked the question, “How do you write that kind of stuff?” While it may be couched as a question, it usually sounds like and is intended to be a moral judgement along the lines of, “That’s awful stuff, and only awful, dangerous, twisted people write that stuff (or so I believe), and I don’t think you’re awful,…
Nancy Kilpatrick’s previous anthologies include Evolve: Vampire Stories of the New Undead, Outsiders, and Tesseracts Thirteen. Her other books include The Goth Bible and her 2000 collection The Vampire Stories of Nancy Kilpatrick. Her most recent offering, co-edited with author Caro Soles (The Danger Dance), is a promising collection of original short stories inspired by the great Edgar Allan Poe. Dedicated to master dream-weaver, Edgar Allan Poe! nEvermore! Tales of Murder, Mystery and the Macabre is an homage to the…
Robert Bloch isn’t a name that gets tossed around much these days. Even before his death in 1994, he was primarily known as the author of Psycho, and this one fact overshadowed most of his other accomplishments. But Bloch was also the author of hundreds of short stories, and over 30 novels, virtually all of which are out of print today. He was one of the most gifted and prolific short story writers in the horror field, and his best…
One of the many delights of the World Fantasy Convention, as I reported last week, is meeting the small publishers doing marvelous work in the industry. Seeing their catalogs of books spread out before you on a table in the Dealers Room can be quite a revelation. That was certainly the case with Valancourt Books. As they proclaim proudly on their website, Valancourt Books is an independent small press specializing in the rediscovery of rare, neglected, and out-of-print fiction. They have…
In May, the 2013 Bram Stoker award-winners were announced, creating a nice summer reading list for us genre enthusiasts. The Bram Stoker Awards were instituted in 1987 by the Horror Writers Association and cover eleven literary categories, recognizing “superior achievement” in dark fantasy and horror writing. Though he didn’t ultimately win the category “Superior Achievement in a Novel” in which he was a finalist, Christopher Rice’s work The Heavens Rise piqued my interest. I’ve been keeping an eye on Rice…