Johnny Mains Story Short-listed for British Fantasy Award

Fantasycon is being held next weekend (24th and 25th October) and one of the most exciting things for me is to see how one of the stories in Johnny Mains' upcoming collection, A Little Light Screaming will do as The Girl on the Suicide Bridge is one of the four short-listed nominees for Best Short Story for the British fantasy Awards.



This is a brilliant achievement and I'll be having my fingers crossed till the winners are announced.

Mind you, whether this story wins or not it is still a nominee and that in itself is important.

The full list is:

A Change of Heart, Gaie Sebold (Wicked Women)
The Girl on the Suicide Bridge, J.A. Mains (Beside the Seaside)
Ptichka, Laura Mauro (Horror Uncut: Tales of Social Insecurity and Economic Unease)
A Woman’s Place, Emma Newman (Two Hundred and Twenty-One Baker Streets)

BEST OF LUCK, JOHNNY!

British Fantasy Awards

The British Fantasy Awards were announced at the World Fantasy Convention:

Best Horror Novel (the August Derleth Award): Last Days by Adam Nevill (Macmillan)

Best Fantasy Novel (the Robert Holdstock Award): Some Kind of Fairy Tale by Graham Joyce (Gollancz)

Best Novella: The Nine Deaths of Dr Valentine by John Llewellyn Probert (Spectral Press)

Best Short Story: Shark! Shark! by Ray Cluley (Black Static #29) (TTA Press)

Best Collection: Remember Why You Fear Me by Robert Shearman (ChiZine)

Best Anthology: Magic: an Anthology of the Esoteric and Arcane edited by Jonathan Oliver (Solaris)

Best Comic/Graphic Novel: Saga, Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples

Best Magazine/Periodical: Interzone, Andy Cox (ed.)

Best Small Press (the PS Publishing Independent Press Award): ChiZine Publications (Brett Alexander Savory and Sandra Kasturi)

Best Non-Fiction: Pornokitsch, Anne C. Perry and Jared Shurin (eds)

Best Screenplay: The Cabin in the Woods, Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard

Best Artist: Sean Phillips

Best Newcomer (the Sydney J. Bounds Award): Helen Marshall, for Hair Side, Flesh Side (ChiZine Publications)

British Fantasy Society Special Award (the Karl Edward Wagner Award): Iain Banks / Iain M. Banks

British Fantasy Awards

Congratulations to all the winners of the British Fantasy Awards 2012.

The full list of winners is as follows:

August Derleth Novel: The Ritual by Adam Nevill (Pan)
Robert Holdstock Award for Best Fantasy Novel: Among Others by Jo Walton
Novella: Gorel and the Pot Bellied God by Lavie Tidhar (PS Publishing)
Short Fiction: The Coffin-Maker’s Daughter by Angela Slatter (A Book of Horrors, Jo Fletcher Books)
Anthology: The Weird; editors Jeff and Ann Vandermeer (Corvus Books)
Collection: Everyone’s Just So So Special by Robert Shearman (Big Finish)

Screenplay: Woody Allen, Midnight in Pari
Comic/Graphic Novel: Locke and Key; Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez (IDW Publishing)
The PS Publishing Independent Press Award:Chomu Press
Best Magazine: Black Static
Artist: Daniele Serra
Nonfiction: Supergods: Our World in the Age of the Superhero by Grant Morrison (Jonathan Cape)
Karl Edward Wagner Award: Nicky and Peter Crowther of PS Publishing
BFS/Sydney J Bounds Best Newcomer award: Kameron Hurley

Back from the Dead wins British Fantasy Award for Best Anthology

On returning home from holiday in Bulgaria last week, I was pleased to learn that Back from the Dead, edited by Johnny Mains, won the Best Fantasy Award for an anthology. This was well deserved and an excellent book. Doubly pleased because I have a novelette in the book, The True Spirit.

I have since learned that Noose & Gibbet will be reprinting the anthology as a trade paperback next year with a new cover.

Paul Mudie nominated for Best Artist - BFS Awards

Paul Mudie, who has done every cover for the Black Books of Horror has reached the shortlist for the British Fantasy Award for Best Artist. Congratulations Paul!

These are some of his covers:

Back From The Dead nominated for BFS Award

Back From The Dead, edited by Johnny Mains and published by Noose & Gibbet Press, has been nominated for the British Fantasy Society award for Best Anthology. The short list includes:

Back From The Dead: The Legacy Of The Pan Book Of Horror Stories – Johnny Mains – Noose & Gibbet
End of the Line, The – Jonathan Oliver – Solaris
Mammoth Book of Best New Horror Volume 21, The – Stephen Jones – Robinson & Constable
Never Again – Allyson Bird & Joel Lane – Gray Friar
Zombie Apocalypse! – Stephen Jones – Robinson & Constable

Having a story in Back From The Dead I am obviously hoping that this eventually clinches the award. Well done Johnny!

The Long List - the British Fantasy Awards

The long list of recommendations for the British Fantasy Awards has just been issued.

Pleased to see that Back from the Dead, the Legacy of the Pan Book of Horror Stories made it.

Plus the Sixth and Seventh Black Books of Horror

Prism - Spring Edition

Spent quite a few hours this weekend putting all the material I have been emailed for the next issue together in a standardised format, ready to be sent off. It seems to be shaping up well, with a better balance of reviews this time, and a long but very interesting interview and the usual excellent columns from Ramsey Campbell, Mark Morris and John Probert.  I've only done one review this time - Reggie Oliver's The Dracula Papers, Book One: The Scholar's Tale, which Chomu Press sent me a month or so back. I really enjoyed this book, which is in the pure tradition of the Gothic novel. A long novel, but an enjoyable read every page of the way.

By Tuesday I expect to be able to put Prism to disc and send it off.

Prism - Spring Edition

I spent a lot of time today putting together marterial sent in for the next issue of Prism. It's a bit of a grind getting all the different fonts and styles sent into me changed into one harmonious whole. Not to mention getting images for all the books, films, etc.

I think this will be one of the slimmer issues, so it's probably as well it's buried away inside the BFS Journal. Ha ha. There really is a shortage of reviewers. I'll enter something on the BFS Forum about this. We do need more.

My review

Okay, I'll do it. This is what I wrote about Wine and Rank Poison, before I decided not to use it.

Bull Running for Girls won accolades and a BFA. In many quarters a second collection from Allyson Bird was looked forward to with some eagerness.

Now I don’t know how long Allyson spent writing the stories in her first collection. Several years I presume. There was definitely an impression some time had been spent writing and rewriting them till they had been honed as good as the author could make them.

The stories in this slim volume, bulked up by a big extract from her soon to be published novel, Isis Unbound, have a raw, unfinished feel about them, of having been rushed. The writing is minimalist at times and awkward at others, with characters that are barely sketched in, who rarely, if ever, come alive. Which is a shame, as some of the stories, given more work, had potential. As it is, apart from the overlong, oddly-written opening story set in Russia during the early years of Communism, they barely gripped this reader’s attention and I had to struggle with most of them. Perhaps, in all fairness, she was set a tight schedule to have this collection ready, hence the use of twenty-odd pages of Isis Unbound to pad it out. I don’t know. Perhaps with no back catalogue to draw from for this second volume, and with a novel to be finished, it would have been better to have left this collection till such time as the stories in it had been made ready for publication. As it is, I don’t think this has done anything to help Allyson Bird’s reputation. If you haven’t read any of her stories yet, seek out Bull Running for Girls first. It’s a much better book.

FantasyCon 2011 - Brighton

We're still deciding whether to book for next year's FantasyCon or not. It's in the same venue as this year's World Horror Convention, which was okay, but it's about as far as we'd like to travel for a convention in this country. And the hotel, though it looks majestic enough in photographs, is a bit rundown. How having a FantasyCon so far south will affect membership, I don't know. I have heard that some people won't be going because of the distance involved and the time it would take them to get there. That doesn't bother us too much. We'll drive there as usual. And, after having travelled across Europe regularly to stay at our place in Bulgaria, driving to Brighton is no great deal. That's not even as far as Dover for the ferry!

In the end, I think we'll probably be going.  Though we'll have to make sure we book before the end of the year, when the rates go up.

John Ajvide Lindqvist is one of the Guests of Honour. Author of Let the Right One In, I would be interested to see him there. I haven't read the book yet, though I bought a copy recently, but the original film adaptation was brilliant and I'm looking foward to seeing the English language version, Let Me In, as soon as it's out on DVD. (I missed it at the cinema)

A link to the FantasyCon 2011 is here.

Mind you, if we do go and if there's another fish and chip banquet on the pier - no way, this time. That was one of the worst fish and chip meals I've ever had. And the costliest.

FantasyCon 2010

I shan't be posting much on here for several days after today as I'll be at FantasyCon in Nottingham.

Lin and I'll be driving there, along with several boxes of Charles Black's Black Books of Horror, the 7th volume of which was delivered to us yesterday by the printer. Only had a brief look at the new one so far, but the opening story by Thana Niveau is a cracker: dark, gloomy, unsettling and downright creepy.

There are lots of interesting talks, interviews, discussions, readings, etc at the convention - as usual - though as usual I have managed not to volunteer for any of them!

Awards - Part 2

It now appears that Chris Barker's comments on Horror Watch that Mark Samuels' blog is now private, blocking people accessing it, is wrong. It is open again, complete with Mark's entry about awards. Link

I have posted the response I wrote on my blog as a reply.

Awards

It's interesting that the first new entry to appear for ages on Chris Barker's Horrorwatch site is a lengthy quote from Mark Samuels' blog where Mark criticises the voting process of the British Fantasy Awards. Like Mark, Chris Barker does, of course, appear to be a little obsessed with awards, even though he regularly disparages them. (What's that? He "doth protest too much, methinks"?)

Mark, though, does come out with some interesting points - points which I have sometimes thought about myself - mainly that so many of the publications which are shortlisted these days come from very small POD operations. That's so unlike when these awards were first created back in the 70s. Then the market was totally different. Anthologies of horror stories - even those devoted to new stories, not reprints - were fairly common and a number of paperback publishers were regularly publishing them in their tens of thousands - or more: Pan, Fontana, Sphere, Corgi, Tandem, and others. And these were just the UK. The novels and short stories that were voted on were all available in every town in all the multitude of small, independent bookshops that proliferated then; even most newsagents had racks of them, not to mention railway stations, market stalls, a whole multitude of places.One of my regular activities on my way home from work in Preston was to look in on a bookstall on Preston Ralway Station every Friday to see what the latest paperbacks were. There was always a really good choice.

The small press then only existed as companies such as Arkham House - a mammoth compared to today's.

So, when it came to awards, the books were easly available to everyone and were undeniably professional. Now most nominees seem to be published in their low hundreds - if even that in many cases.

Perhaps there should be a categorisation, dividing the professional from the non- or semi-professional? Perhaps any nominees should be stories or novels where the author was paid professional rates, not nominal amounts or by free copies of the publication. That, though, would exclude some superb work. Perhaps there should be a demand that any nominees have been published in minimum quantities. Of course, that would be hard to prove and open to abuse.

Or, perhaps, better still, we should treat the whole thing as a bit of fun and stop worrying about it. After all, how many of us could list the winners of these awards over the past few years without looking them up?

To my mind too much rancour has already been expended on this issue. I don't think M. R. James, H. P. Lovecraft, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood or most of the other greats in the past ever received any awards for their stories. I don't think that has affected their reputations.

Lets get a bit of perspective on this. And if someone wins whose book or story we didn't think deserved it, why rain on their parade? Is it really worth making ourselves sometimes look envious, whether we are or not? The only reputation that suffers then is our own.

By the way, if someone would like to comment on this there'll be no censorship providing other people aren't libelled. You can say what you like about me, of course; I don't care. I am in a position to defend myself if I want to. Others aren't. Please bear that in mind.

British Fantasy Awards - Shortlist

Stephen Theaker just posted up the BFA shortlist on the society's forum. This is it:

Best Novel
BEST SERVED COLD, Joe Abercrombie (Gollancz)
FUTILE FLAME, Sam Stone (House of Murky Depths)
ONE, Conrad Williams (Virgin)
THE NAMING OF THE BEASTS, Mike Carey (Orbit)
UNDER THE DOME, Stephen King (Hodder & Stoughton)

Best Novella

OLD MAN SCRATCH, Rio Youers (PS)
ROADKILL, Rob Shearman, from Roadkill/Siren Beat (Twelfth Planet) and Love Songs for the Shy and Cynical (Big Finish)
THE LANGUAGE OF DYING, Sarah Pinborough (PS)
THE WITNESSES ARE GONE, Joel Lane (PS)
VARDOGER, Stephen Volk (Gray Friar)

Best Short Story

CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR, Justin Carroll, in Dragontales: Short Stories of Flame, Tooth and Scale, ed. Holly Stacey (Wyvern)
GEORGE CLOONEY’S MOUSTACHE, Rob Shearman, in The BFS Yearbook 2009, ed. Guy Adams (BFS)
MY BROTHER’S KEEPER, Nina Allan, Black Static #12
THE CONFESSOR’S TALE, Sarah Pinborough, in Hellbound Hearts, ed. Marie O’Regan and Paul Kane (Pocket)
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU WAKE UP IN THE NIGHT, Michael Marshall Smith (Nightjar)

Best Anthology

CERN ZOO: NEMONYMOUS 9, ed. D.F. Lewis (Megazanthus)
DRAGONTALES: SHORT STORIES OF FLAME, TOOTH AND SCALE, ed. Holly Stacey (Wyvern)
HELLBOUND HEARTS, ed. Marie O’Regan and Paul Kane (Pocket)
SONGS OF THE DYING EARTH: STORIES IN HONOUR OF JACK VANCE, ed. George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois (HarperVoyager)
THE MAMMOTH BOOK OF BEST NEW HORROR 20, ed. Stephen Jones (Constable and Robinson)

Best Collection

CYBERABAD DAYS, Ian McDonald (Gollancz)
JUST BEHIND YOU, Ramsey Campbell (PS)
LOVE SONGS FOR THE SHY AND CYNICAL, Robert Shearman (Big Finish)
ONCE & FUTURE CITIES, Allen Ashley (Eibonvale)
THE TERRIBLE CHANGES, Joel Lane (Ex Occidente)

PS Publishing Award for Best Small Press

NEWCON PRESS (Ian Whates)
SCREAMING DREAMS (Steve Upham)
SUBTERRANEAN PRESS (William Schafer)
TELOS PUBLISHING (David Howe)
TTA PRESS (Andy Cox)

Best Comic/Graphic Novel

FABLES, Bill Willingham and Mark Buckingham (Vertigo)
FREAKANGELS, Warren Ellis and Paul Duffield (Avatar & warrenellis.com)
LOCKE AND KEY, Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez (IDW)
THE GIRLY COMIC, ed. Selina Lock (Factor Fiction)
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE CAPED CRUSADER? Neil Gaiman and Andy Kubert (DC)

Best Artist

CHARLES VESS, for work including Neil Gaiman’s Blueberry Girl
LES EDWARDS, for work including the cover of Cemetery Dance #62
SHAUN TAN
STEVE UPHAM, for work including the Estronomicon Sketchbook Special
VINCENT CHONG, for work including covers for The Witnesses are Gone (PS) and Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 20 (Constable and Robinson)

Best Non-Fiction

ANSIBLE LINK, David Langford (http://news.ansible.co.uk)
CASE NOTES, Peter Tennant, Black Static
IT LIVES AGAIN! HORROR MOVIES IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM, Axelle Carolyn (Telos)
JOHN SCALZI, WHATEVER (http://scalzi.com/whatever)
KNOWING DARKNESS: ARTISTS INSPIRED BY STEPHEN KING, George Beahm and various artists (Centipede Press)

Best Magazine

BLACK STATIC, ed. Andy Cox (TTA)
CEMETERY DANCE, ed. Richard Chizmar (Cemetery Dance)
INTERZONE, ed. Andy Cox (TTA)
MIDNIGHT STREET, ed. Trevor Denyer (Immediate Direction)
MURKY DEPTHS, ed. Terry Martin (The House of Murky Depths)
THEAKER’S QUARTERLY FICTION, ed. Stephen Theaker and John Greenwood (Silver Age)

Best Television

BATTLESTAR GALACTICA (Sci Fi/Sky 1)
BEING HUMAN (BBC3)
DOCTOR WHO (BBC1)
LOST (ABC/Sky 1)
TORCHWOOD: CHILDREN OF EARTH (BBC1)

Best Film

AVATAR, dir. James Cameron (Twentieth Century Fox)
CORALINE, dir. Henry Selick (Focus)
DISTRICT 9, dir. Neill Blomkamp (Tristar)
LET THE RIGHT ONE IN, dir. Tomas Alfredson (EFTI)
WATCHMEN, dir. Zack Snyder (Warner)

I have a terrible confession to make: I haven't read any of the nominees in any of the fiction categories. Nor have I had any of the magazines listed under that category either. It's not till we get to Best Artist that I could legitimately vote for anyone. As for Best Television, I have never watched Lost apart from one episode a couple of years ago, I can't stand Torchwood, while Doctor Who, though occassionally good, is far from what I would class as "Best" TV. Which leaves Being Human and Battlestar Galactica. Unfortunately for BG, I thought the finale weak compared to the rest of the series. If this had been before I watched the final series I would have voted for it straight away. While Being Human, though it has its moments, I would hate to say represents the "Best". I suppose it is the best of what choices I have to vote for, but that's all. As for films, that's for once much easier. Without a doubt, though I loved District 9 and Watchmen, it has to be Let the Right One In. No question about it. One of the very best vampire films ever, let alone over the past twelve months. And is the very type of vampire film I was bemoaning for when I wrote about watching Daybreakers yesterday.

So that's my voting revealed to you, what there is of it!