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Stoker Finalists Named

The finalists for the Stoker ballot have been named! It’s unbelievable that Women in Horror Month is already drawing to an end and it will soon be Stoker time! As in past years, we at ML will make a heroic effort to review the finalists (I hope that’s not a surprise, guys). Yes, our reviewers are heroes. Any finalists who happen to be reading this… Please contact us at monsterlibrarian@monsterlibrarian.com so we can get this (heroic) party going!

And now:

“We are proud to present a particularly notable slate of nominees this year, showing the horror genre is strong and popular,” Rocky Wood, the HWA’s President, said.

IMPORTANT: Voting begins on 2/28 and ends on 3/15. Only Active and Lifetime members can vote.

The nominees are:

Superior Achievement in a Novel

      Joe Hill – NOS4A2 (William Morrow)
      Stephen King – Doctor Sleep (Scribner)
      Lisa Morton – Malediction (Evil Jester Press)
      Sarah Pinborough and F. Paul Wilson – A Necessary End (Thunderstorm/Maelstrom Press)
      Christopher Rice – The Heavens Rise (Gallery Books)

Superior Achievement in a First Novel

      Kate Jonez – Candy House (Evil Jester Press)
      John Mantooth – The Year of the Storm (Berkley Trade)
      Rena Mason – The Evolutionist (Nightscape Press)
      Jonathan Moore – Redheads (Samhain Publishing)
      Royce Prouty – Stoker’s Manuscript (G.P. Putnam’s Sons)


Superior Achievement in a Young Adult Novel

      Patrick Freivald – Special Dead (JournalStone)
      Kami Garcia – Unbreakable (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers)
      Geoffrey Girard – Project Cain (Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers)
      Joe McKinney – Dog Days (JournalStone)
      Cat Winters – In the Shadow of Blackbirds (Harry N. Abrams)


Superior Achievement in a Graphic Novel

      Ed Brubaker – Fatale Book Three: West of Hell (Image Comics)
      Caitlin R. Kiernan – Alabaster: Wolves (Dark Horse Comics)
      Brandon Seifert – Witch Doctor, Vol. 2: Mal Practice (Image Comics)
      Cameron Stewart – Sin Titulo (Dark Horse Comics)
      Paul Tobin – Colder (Dark Horse Comics)


Superior Achievement in Long Fiction

      Dale Bailey – “The Bluehole” (The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, May/June 2013)
      Gary Braunbeck – “The Great Pity” (Chiral Mad 2, Written Backwards)
      Benjamin K. Ethridge – “The Slaughter Man” (Limbus, Inc., JournalStone)
      Gregory Frost – “No Others Are Genuine” (Asimov’s Science Fiction, Oct./Nov. 2013)
      Greg F. Gifune – House of Rain (DarkFuse)
      Rena Mason – East End Girls (JournalStone)

Superior Achievement in Short Fiction

      Michael Bailey – “Primal Tongue” (Zippered Flesh 2, Smart Rhino Publications)
      Patrick Freivald – “Snapshot” (Blood & Roses, Scarlett River Press)
      David Gerrold – “Night Train to Paris” (The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Jan./Feb. 2013)
      Lisa Mannetti – “The Hunger Artist” (Zippered Flesh 2, Smart Rhino Publications)
      John Palisano – “The Geminis” (Chiral Mad 2, Written Backwards)
      Michael Reaves – “Code 666” (The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, March/April 2013)


Superior Achievement in a Screenplay

      Fabien Adda and Fabrice Gobert – The Returned: “The Horde” (Ramaco Media I, Castelao Pictures)
      Brad Falchuk – American Horror Story: Asylum: “Spilt Milk” (Brad Falchuk Teley-Vision, Ryan Murphy Productions)
      Bryan Fuller – Hannibal: “Apéritif” (Dino De Laurentiis Company, Living Dead Guy Productions, AXN: Original X Production, Gaumont International Television)
      Daniel Knauf – Dracula: “A Whiff of Sulfur” (Flame Ventures, Playground, Universal Television, Carnival Films
      Glen Mazzara – The Walking Dead: “Welcome to the Tombs” (AMC TV)


Superior Achievement in an Anthology

      R.J. Cavender and Boyd E. Harris (ed.) – Horror Library: Volume 5 (Cutting Block Press)
      Eric J. Guignard (ed.) – After Death… (Dark Moon Books)
      Michael Knost and Nancy Eden Siegel (ed.) – Barbers & Beauties (Hummingbird House Press)
      Joseph S. Pulver, Sr. (ed.) – The Grimscribe’s Puppets (Miskatonic River Press)
      Anthony Rivera and Sharon Lawson (ed.) – Dark Visions: A Collection of Modern Horror, Volume One (Grey Matter Press)

Superior Achievement in a Fiction Collection

      Nathan Ballingrud – North American Lake Monsters: Stories (Small Beer Press)
      Laird Barron – The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All and Other Stories (Night Shade Books)
      James Dorr – The Tears of Isis (Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing)
      Caitlin R. Kiernan – The Ape’s Wife and Other Stories (Subterranean)
      Gene O’Neill – Dance of the Blue Lady (Bad Moon Books)
      S. P. Somtow – Bible Stories for Secular Humanists (Diplodocus Press)


Superior Achievement in Non-Fiction

      Barbara Brodman and James E. Doan (ed.) – Images of the Modern Vampire: The Hip and the Atavistic (Fairleigh Dickinson)
      Gary William Crawford (ed.) – Ramsey Campbell: Critical Essays on the Modern Master of Horror (Scarecrow Press)
      William F. Nolan – Nolan on Bradbury: Sixty Years of Writing about the Master of Science Fiction (Hippocampus Press)
      Jarkko Toikkanen – The Intermedial Experience of Horror: Suspended Failures (Palgrave Macmillan)
      Robert H. Waugh (ed.) – Lovecraft and Influence: His Predecessors and Successors (Scarecrow Press)

Superior Achievement in a Poetry Collection

      Bruce Boston – Dark Roads: Selected Long Poems 1971-2012 (Dark Renaissance Books)
      Helen Marshall – The Sex Lives of Monsters (Kelp Queen Press)
      Marge Simon and Sandy DeLuca – Dangerous Dreams (Elektrik Milk Bath Press)
      Marge Simon, Rain Graves, Charlee Jacob, and Linda Addison – Four Elements (Bad Moon Books/Evil Jester Press)
      Stephanie M. Wytovich – Hysteria: A Collection of Madness (Raw Dog Screaming Press)

HWA’s voting members will now vote on this Final Ballot, with voting closing on March 31 (only Active and Lifetime Members are eligible to vote).

The Bram Stoker Awards® will be presented at the 27th annual Bram Stoker Awards® Banquet held during the WORLD HORROR CONVENTION 2014 in Portland, Oregon, on May 10th. Purchase of tickets to both the convention and the banquet are open to the public. The awards will also be live-streamed online for those who cannot attend in person.

Posted on February 26, 2014 by , Reply

“I’d Like To Submit A Request For Review”

Monster Librarian receives a lot of requests for review. In addition to mainstream and independent publishers, there are many teeny tiny small presses and self-published authors who request reviews. I’m sharing this information especially for them.

Everyone who works on the site is a volunteer. They all have busy lives and they donate their valuable free time to reading and reviewing.  We can’t review everything we are requested to review. Even when we do plan to review a book, it can be awhile before the book is read, reviewed, edited, and posted. To those of you patiently waiting for reviews, thank you for your patience.

Here’s how we handle review requests. When someone requests a review, I send the request on to our reviewers, and if any of them are interested, then they tell me and I let the person who contacted me know who to send it to.

So if you want to get your book reviewed, you’ve got to hook them with your request, and you have to do it fast. I don’t know about you, but in my personal email account I am overwhelmed with email, most of which isn’t very important. I don’t read every one that I get, and many of those I do get I just take a few seconds to look at, to see if they’re a.) important or b.) interesting. So there isn’t much time to get my attention, and if someone wants me to read what they’ve sent, they have to do it pretty fast. I think most people handle the clutter in their inboxes like that. There isn’t time for more without having your life consumed by email.

I bring this up because I have received a number of requests in the past few weeks for “an anthology of horror short stories”. Occasionally that’s expanded to something along the lines of  “a collection of unique/original/chilling/entertaining/frightening short stories”.  Describing a book this way is pretty generic.  Describing the contents in detail isn’t necessary, just tell us what makes your book stand out enough that we should take time out of our lives to read and review it. If you can’t get it across in a brief paragraph, your request isn’t going to stand out and it probably isn’t going to provoke a reviewer’s interest.  There are plenty of people who DO write requests that tell us what makes their book unique who still don’t get reviewed because of the limited time and energy our reviewers have available, or because it doesn’t fit their interests.

I love to be able to write someone who has requested a review and tell them that we have a reviewer who is interested in reviewing the book. If you would like to be one of those people, please keep in mind that providing us with information about the book that will hook a reviewer makes that much more likely.

We do have a FAQ for authors, located here, which tells you, among other things, what information we need from you to forward a request. Thanks for taking a minute to consider how best to structure a review request, and have a great day!

 

 

Posted on January 15, 2014 by , Reply

It’s Elementary: Sherlock Holmes in the Horror Genre

Sherlock Holmes is one of the most beloved characters in fiction. He’s not particularly lovable, or even likable; in fact, he’s a depressed, drug-addicted, arrogant, misogynistic, obnoxious know-it-all. Even his  creator tried to kill him off. There’s just something about him that draws people to read about Holmes and his faithful chronicler, Watson, and to visit and revisit the characters. Holmes can’t be contained to just the stories Arthur Conan Doyle wrote anymore, most of which are now in the public domain. He belongs to his readers, the visitors to Baker Street.

 

Or does he?

 

The estate of Arthur Conan Doyle approached the publisher of the soon-to-be-released anthology In The Company of Sherlock Holmes, co-edited by Leslie Klinger and Laurie R. King, and attempted to extract a license fee, threatening to discourage distributors from carrying the book unless the fee was paid. Klinger sued the Conan Doyle estate in federal court, asking for a judgement that Sherlock Holmes and a variety of characters and elements from the Holmesian universe were in the public domain and that reference to them does not require that a license fee be paid to the Conan Doyle estate. The judge mostly agreed with Klinger. You can read that story here.

 

What’s important about this is that people don’t just want to read the original stories. They want new takes. There’s a tradition of Sherlock Holmes pastiches– homages to the Master Detective. Some are very good, and some are a lot of fun to read. And many of these fall into the horror genre. Did Arthur Conan Doyle deserve to profit from his creation? Absolutely. But should his estate be bullying writers and publishers a hundred years later, even after the majority of the stories have entered the public domain? It doesn’t make sense to me. It’s past time to explore characters that just can’t stay in the pages of their original stories, and see what new writers can do. Want to check out some of the horror genre’s takes on the Great Detective?  Here are some possibilities.

 

Victorian Undead  by Ian Edginton, illustrated by Davide Fabbri . Victorian Undead is a graphic novel that collects the comic books for this limited series of  six issues, which pit Sherlock Holmes and Watson against zombies, led by Professor Moriarty. It is followed by Victorian Undead II, in which the duo go up against Dracula. The Monster Librarian, a zombie fan, really enjoyed this series. Be warned, there is a fair amount of gore, which is not exactly a signature of the Holmes oeuvre, so this is probably a better way to introduce a zombie-loving reader to Sherlock than a Sherlock lover to the horror genre.

 

   Gaslight Arcanum: Uncanny Tales of Sherlock Holmes  edited by J.R. Campbell and Charles Prepolec.  This is the third volume in a series of anthologies that introduce the supremely rational Holmes to the supernatural and horrific. You can read our review here. Gaslight Grimoire: Fantastic Tales of Sherlock Holmes and Gaslight Grotesque: Nightmare Tales of Sherlock Holmes precede this volume in the series. While these books have both excellent and not-so-excellent stories, there are definitely more winners than losers, and there are some fantastic authors included. Gaslight Arcanum includes a fantastic story by Kim Newman. This is a good volume to offer to both Holmes lovers and horror lovers, so if your library doesn’t have it already, you might consider it for its appeal to both mystery and horror readers.

 

   Sherlock Holmes: Revenant by William Meikle. William Meikle grew up in Scotland reading Sherlock Holmes, and you can really tell. Read our review here. It’s not long, but it gets the point across. Again, keeping in mind that you can’t please everyone all of the time, this is a great story appreciated by lovers of both Holmes and the supernatural.

 

  Shadows Over Baker Street (Sherlock Holmes) edited by Michael Reaves and John Pelan. Here you’ve got a collection of stories in which Sherlock Holmes and company encounter the gods and creatures of the Cthulu mythos. I am admittedly not a fan of Lovecraft, so I haven’t picked this up, but it’s an intriguing concept and when the two come together in the right way, could make for some really effective storytelling. This might be a way to introduce Lovecraft and Lovecraftian fiction to a new audience– like Sherlock Holmes, the Cthulu mythos has moved beyond the original stories to reach its tentacles out in many directions.

 

The Canary Trainer: From the Memoirs of John H. Watson by Nicholas Meyer. Nicholas Meyer’s pastiches are considered to be some of the best. Preceded by The Seven-Per-Cent Solution and The West End Horror, The Canary Trainer pits Holmes against The Phantom of the Opera.

 

Dust and Shadow: An Account of the Ripper Killings by Dr. John H. Watson by Lynsay Faye. Naturally, as a horror review site, we couldn’t leave out Jack the Ripper.  The combination of Sherlock Holmes and Jack the Ripper is a tempting one for many authors, so there are quite a few pastiches that take on this theme. Faye’s 2009 debut novel received great reviews, so if you’re looking for a pastiche that pits Holmes against the Ripper, this one is a good choice.

 

  Sherlock Holmes and the Horror of Frankenstein by Luke Kuhns, illustrated by Marcie Klinger. Now, frankly, I don’t know anything about this book, but it appears to be a graphic novel, and just the cover makes me want to open it up. Frankenstein and Sherlock Holmes– what a perfect combination! It’s just out, so if you decide to try it out I would love to find out what you think of it.

 

This is not anywhere near the number of pastiches of varying quality out there that you can check out, and I’ve shared just a few of them here (so please don’t feel indignant if I left one of your favorites out). There are many short stories as well, including Neil Gaiman’s excellent “A Study in Emerald”. For more suggestions, you can visit this blog post at Tor.com, which did a project a while back titled “Holmes for the Holidays”.  Enjoy!

 

Posted on January 6, 2014 by , Reply
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