Since 2007, the Shirley Jackson Award has recognized "outstanding achievement in the literature of psychological suspense, horror, and the dark fantastic." The inimitable Ms. Jackson wrote a uniquely literary horror; The Haunting of Hill House, for example, and one of our recommended summer speculative reads, combines close psychological characterization of a highly unreliable narrator with a confident weirdness and a Wildean comedy of manners in an evil, not-sane haunted house. Past winners of the Shirley Jackson Award include Fiction Unbound favorites Karen Russell, Neil Gaiman, and Karen Joy Fowler.
On Sunday, attendees at Readercon 26 saw the 2014 Shirley Jackson Award go to Jeff VanderMeer for his novel Annihilation, the first book in his superb Southern Reach trilogy; Daryl Gregory for his novella We Are All Completely Fine; Dale Bailey for the novelette "The End of the End of Everything"; Alison Littlewood for her short story "The Dogs Home"; Helen Marshall for the single-author collection Gifts for the One who Comes After; and Ellen Datlow, editor of the anthology Fearful Symmetries. You can find the complete list of winners and finalists here. You can find news about the upcoming collection of unpublished Shirley Jackson works here. And you can find a reimagined What To Expect When You're Expecting by Shirley Jackson here.
Jeff VanderMeer, whose Annihilation won this year's Shirley Jackson Award. Not pictured: Annihilation, Shirley Jackson.
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