2018 Shirley Jackson nominees

The 2018 Shirley Jackson nominees have been announced, see the list here! They give these out at Readercon and Chaos made the good point that if we read them, we can tell the authors who are there in person if we liked them, so I might try to read the short fiction despite my general lack of enthusiasm for horror. Although there is one novelette I've already read and liked, Maria Dahvana Headley's "Adriftica" from Robots vs Fairies, which I wouldn't have described as horror, so who knows, maybe it's more accurate to say I'm extremely picky about horror, or that I don't actually know what is or isn't horror, and also the Shirley Jacksons apparently include "psychological suspense" and "the dark fantastic", the latter of which I assume is how "Adriftica" got in. I started thinking about which of my other 2018 short fiction recs might possibly count as horror and there are some (beyond the one that I actually described that way) so I guess that gives me something of a field to see the nominees as coming from.

The Loneliest Girl in the Universe

The Loneliest Girl in the Universe, Lauren James, 2018. YA SF, the sort of thing with a verrry contrived situation that's obviously setting up A Twist and so you're going along guessing and wondering if the twist is going to be worth it, if you're going to like how it plays out once you finally get there. I wasn't so into it! Some of the later contrivance broke my suspension of disbelief, and I was more interested in some of the other aspects of the set-up and some of the other possibilities for what kind of story could be told with that set-up. Really fast read, though.