2018 Shirley Jackson nominees

[psocoptera]

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.

Comments

[elysdir]

A conversation I had a few times back in the day:

Me: I don’t like horror, but I do like dark fantasy.

Other person: What’s the difference between horror and dark fantasy?

Me: Dark fantasy is horror that I like.

:)

[psocoptera]

Heh. Basically. :) But, okay, not to embroil you in a genre argument you didn't want to have, but do you think horror needs to be on the fantasy side of sff, like does it have to have an element of the magical/inexplicable, or can entirely "explained" or science fictional works be horror? (Thinking specifically of written stuff because I feel like science fiction horror dramatic works are definitely a thing.) I'm thinking of books like Andromeda Strain or Coma, or this story from Uncanny last year that I described as "mysterious, unexpected, and/or upsetting shit in space", The Utmost Bound. (Hm, maybe the inexplicable element in non-supernatural horror is just "how could someone do something like that", hmmm.)