July Newsletter

Everybody!

I forgot to mention a few things in my last newsletter:

The Missing was nominated for an International Horror Guild Award in the category of novel for 2007.

Jul 20, 11 am, Burlington, Massachusetts: I'll be at the ReaderCon 19 Conference on Imaginative Literature to help present the Shirley Jackson Award. In recognition of the legacy of Shirley Jackson’s writing, the Shirley Jackson Awards have been established for outstanding achievement in the literature of psychological suspense, horror, and the dark fantastic. Jonathan Lethem is the host, and there will be lots of amazing guests. For more info, visit the SJA website.

July 23. Wednesday. 7-9 pm. Leading authors read from Shirley Jackson canon to commemorate 60th anniversary of “The Lottery”. KGB Bar at 85 East 4th Street (just off 2nd Ave), in New York City. An evening of live readings from Ms. Jackson’s work is sure to unsettle audience members. The event will be co-hosted by Ellen Datlow and Matthew Kressel. The cover charge is $5 per person. Proceeds from the event will benefit the Shirley Jackson Awards. Shirley Jackson (1916-1965) wrote such classic novels as The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, as well as one of the most famous short stories in the English language, “The Lottery”. Authors reading are: F. Brett Cox, Jeffery Ford, Jack Ketchum, Carrie Laben, John Langan, Sarah Langan, Peter Straub, David Wellington, and Jack Womack.

My next story out is "Fenstad's End," which was partly the inspiration for The Missing/Virus. You can pre-order it here

I've been bad about updating the Mystery Site. That means, everybody who submitted a suggestion over the last two months gets a free copy of "The Lost"-- a signed, limited edition chapbook. If that means you, please reply to this with your address. And please send in more suggestions. I'll update again in September, and this time the winner will receive "The Lost" and the latest issue of the St. John's Humanities Review, which includes my essay, "Why I Write Horror."

New stuff online:
"Why I Write Horror":
A podcast reading of "The Lost"
Remember, only you can review my books on Amazon. Because if I do it, it's cheating.

I hope everybody has a wonderful summer. Thanks for your attention.

Sincerely,
Sarah Langan

Best News Ever!

Deltron II, The Automator Strikes Back!

Fangoria Weekend of Horrors, and other Summer News

I'm delighted to be a guest at the above convention, and plan to stalk George Romero repeatedly and often.

I'm on the writer's panel this Sunday at 3:30pm in the Imperial Ballroom. The convention is located at: Crowne Plaza Meadowlands, 2 Harmon Plaza, Secaucus, NJ; 201-348-6900). Post panel I'll be signing and selling books. Should be much fun, so if you're in the area, come on down.

Also of note: a podcast of my chapbook, "The Lost" is live at dreadcentral. Thank Johnny Butane for the good work, curse me for all that line-botching! The story takes place at Filene's Basement on Long Island, where I once worked, and from which my feet are still recovering.

I've got a new interview up at HorrorBound, a very cool literary journal dedicated to promoting women in horror. I love them!

My essay, "Why I Write Horror" was just published in the Spring, 2008 issue of the St. John's Humanities Review.

Finally, my last event this summer will take place on July 23, 7-9pm, at the KGB Bar (85 East 4th Street, NYC 10003 ). It's a fundraiser for the Shirley Jackson Award and other, supercoll readers will include: F. Brett Cox, Jeffrey Ford, Jack Ketchum, Carrie Laben, John Langan, Peter Straub, David Wellington, and Jack Womack. It's $5 a head, a wonderful, cause, and also, when do you ever get all of these guys together in one room? This will be amazing, and I'm honored to be a part of it.

That's all, folks. Hope everybody's good!

While grocery shopping yesterday, trying to be a good consumer, I purchased 7th Generation toilet paper. Recycled, no chlorine bleach, etc. Turned out to cost more that $15.00, at which point I promised myself, never again. This reminds me of the incendiary 1960s article about managing finite resources, "Tragedy of the Commons." Basically, we all know we're supposed to buy recycled, and burn less fossil fuels, but this cost more time and money-- we're effectively handicapping ourselves against people who don't bother. Eventually, the conscientious individual sees no results for their sacrifice, and gives up. Net result, despite education and raging hippies, is zero conservation. And so, on this day that gas is now $4 a gallon, and the rich will continue to use it, but the poor won't be able to drive to work, it occurs to me that the tragedy has already happened. Oh, how I wish we had a government that interceded in such things, so that at least we got some tax money out of it, instead of giving it to the Saudis, or borrowing it from the Chinese.

And now back to this miserably hot day in June, which is expected to get up to 103 degrees, and surely has nothing to do with global warming.

Pen to Press

I returned last night from teaching a class at the Pen to Press Writer's Conference. It was a lot of work, but also very rewarding. I had a great class of talented, hard-working students who were eager to learn. I was partnered with fellow writer Hank Schwaeble, which proved a lot of fun. We wound-up agreeing on everything, but coming at it from different directions, which I hope served to strengthen the points were were trying to make.

Often, these conferences make professional authors inaccessible. The hoards of unpublished sit in on dry, overcrowded panels, and specifics of their own writing are ignored. This conference was different, and I think useful.

There are some very good reasons to fear flying, but crashing isn't one of them

I’m fickle when it comes to the United States. I mean, come on. It’s embarrassing. We’ve steamrolled past the bad, and entered the absurd. Celebrity Rehab? Wars fought remotely, by man-operated robots? John Mayer, the cheeseball lothario, who dated both Jessica Simpson AND Jennifer Aniston? Oh, come on! He’s totally that guy in high school who winked, then cocked his thumb and index finger like a gun. Come on!

So my visit to the sound editing set of Lion’s Gate’s “The Burrowers” in Toronto was enlightening. First off, the movie is amazing. The best comparison I can make is to John Ford’s “Searchers,” with a modern horror sensibility, and like last year’s “Zodiac,” a movie for grown-ups that will have legs for years to come.

The process of watching it make the journey from script to finished product has been an education. You really have to believe in yourself, your work, and your crew to pull off the magic that is making a movie. But JT has gone a step further, and created something special. Thank God directing was never my calling, because it’s too hard, but I’m very proud of him. You all should stay tuned, because it will undoubtedly make a lot of waves when it is released.

And onto Toronto. I tried not to be impressed when I saw the sound room—it looked like the mother board of an alien spacecraft—lots of consoles and blinking lights. But I was, indeed, impressed. JT sat at the helm like Captain Kirk, and also covered my shredded wheat laptop charger wires from where our rabbit had snacked with electrical tape. During my first few nights in the city, we saw “Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay” – great fun. Not as funny as “White Castle” http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0366551/ but surprisingly good-natured and generous—quite an accomplishment for an angry political invective. We also ate fried lobsters in Chinatown on Spadina Street (so good!), and visited the fancy Spoke Club to celebrate some great career news for Jennifer Evans, the president of Sequentia, a Toronto-based communications firm. After three days, I was thinking: clean, pretty, polite, near the water—I could live here!

The fourth day, I thought: clean, polite, pretty…. hmmm….this is getting monotonous. The fifth day, I began to grasp the problem. The television was weird. Lots of high school sports coverage. The restaurant service was slow—they don’t work for tips. Nobody rushed. Nobody worked crazy hours, either. They believe in this weird lefty pinko commie concept called “quality of living.” In conclusion, Toronto isn’t neurotic enough. By a mile.

By day six, Toronto liked me a lot less too. At the coffee shop where I tried to write, they didn’t offer free refills or have wireless Internet. They also couldn’t understand why any rational human being would want a third cup of coffee. Because I need it, people!

By day seven, I’d fallen out of love, and perhaps it was for this reason that I began to notice that Toronto no longer loved me, either. People were subtlely rude. Not in any way you could pinpoint, but in the small details of common interactions. I was reminded, then, of that episode of “Star Trek,” where, in a mirror dimension, another USS Enterprise exists, only it is savage and war waging. Also, they dress sexier, and Sulu’s got the creepy hots for Uhura, but that’s another story. Anyway, Savage James T. Kirk winds up on the civilized ship, and tries to conceal his identity by impersonating Civilized Kirk, while Civilized Jim perches on the throne of his own bizarro Enterprise. Savage Jim is quickly discovered as an imposter, and thrown into the brig, while Civilized Jim fakes his way through the machinations of the savage world in which he has found himself. When both men return to their proper places, like all good plays, the epilogue informs us that civilized men can fake savagery, but savages cannot pretend to be refined—they’re too ignorant.

It occurred to me that I was the savage in Toronto, and the small social queues, which natives understood and signaled, went right over my head. Hence, I was met with rudeness. American bull in a Canadian China shop, I was missing all the codes, and unwittingly behaving badly.

It was with a happy heart that I got on the plane back to New York, where I belonged. It was with a less happy heart that I was seated next to a man who picked both his nose and ears and ate them for more than a half hour. Mid-forties, wedding band, seemingly normal, save the ridiculous amount of carry-on bags he brought with him (what was this, a bus to Cartagena, Columbia?). At first, I ignored. Then, no kidding, I gagged. Looking right at me, he continued. Finally, I said, “Please stop!” He didn’t. I suspect he had some kind of compulsive disorder, because the problem seemed out of his control. I’m not one to judge crazy people, as I’m a little nuts myself, but I do wish he’d chosen an illness more socially acceptable. Like freebasing cocaine. I wondered if he was Canadian, but knew he could not possibly be. It was with a heavy heart that I saw which newspaper he was reading: “The New York Post.” Soon afterward, I switched seats. Even the steward understood, and winked at me, as if to say, “That guy is really gross!”

As I write this, happily ensconced in my beloved Brooklyn, I wonder: What does all this mean? I don’t know. But if Canadians imagined my savagery as 10% as gross as Dr. Fingers’, I apologize to them en masse. I also think there is such as thing as too laid back.

And so, in celebration of my awesome, but kind of gross country, I give you the antidote to John Mayer: James McMurtry Oh, he is good, so good. Listen and repeat, until you start pretending you’re a cowboy.

Shirley Jackson Final Ballot Announced

Everybody!

Great news. After much reading, and piles of books so high I feared I would be toppled, the SJA Final has been established. It's a stellar list of excellent fiction, and I'm proud to be associated with it. Go buy what you haven't read. Not a clunker in the pack.

Shirley Jackson Award Final Ballot:

NOVEL
Baltimore, Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden (Bantam Spectra)
Generation Loss, Elizabeth Hand (Small Beer Press)
Sharp Teeth, Toby Barlow (William Heinemann Ltd)
The Terror, Dan Simmons (Little, Brown)
Tokyo Year Zero, David Peace (Knopf)

NOVELLA
12 Collections, Zoran Zivkovic (PS Publishing)
Illyria, Elizabeth Hand (PS Publishing)
The Mermaids, Robert Edric (PS Publishing)
"Procession of the Black Sloth," Laird Barron (The Imago Sequence and Other Stories, Night Shade Books)
The Scalding Rooms, Conrad Williams (PS Publishing)
"Vacancy," Lucius Shepard (Subterranean #7, 2007)

NOVELETTE
"The Forest," Laird Barron (Inferno, Tor)
"The Janus Tree," Glen Hirshberg (Inferno, Tor)
"The Swing," Don Tumasonis (At Ease with the Dead, Ash-Tree Press)
"The Tenth Muse," William Browning Spencer (Subterranean #6, 2007)
"Thumbprint," Joe Hill (Postscripts #10, March 2007)

SHORT STORY
"Holiday," M. Rickert (Subterranean #7, 2007)
"The Monsters of Heaven," Nathan Ballingrud (Inferno,Tor)
"A Murder of Crows," Elizabeth Ziemska (Tin House 31, Spring 2007)
"Something in the Mermaid Way," Carrie Laben (Clarkesworld, March 2007)
"The Third Bear," Jeff VanderMeer (Clarkesworld, April 2007)
"Unique Chicken Goes in Reverse," Andy Duncan (Eclipse One, Night Shade Books)

COLLECTION
The Bone Key, Sarah Monette (Prime Books)
The Entire Predicament, Lucy Corin (Tin House)
The Imago Sequence and Other Stories, Laird Barron (Night Shade Books)
Like You'd Understand, Anyway, Jim Shepard (Knopf)
Old Devil Moon, Christopher Fowler (Serpent's Tail)

ANTHOLOGY
At Ease with the Dead, edited by Barbara and Christopher Roden (Ash-Tree Press)
Dark Delicacies 2, edited by Del Howison and Jeff Gelb (Running Press)
Inferno, edited by Ellen Datlow (Tor)
Logorrhea, edited by John Klima (Bantam Spectra)
Wizards, edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois (Berkley)

Missing wins Bram Stoker Award

Everybody! Great news! On Saturday, March 29 at the World Horror Convention in Salt Lake City, Utah, The Missing won the Bram Stoker Award for superior achievement in a novel.

F. Paul Wilson and Simon Clark presented the award, and were awesome.
My tongue-tied acceptance is here.

Hooray! Thanks for all your good wishes. The race was a close one, and if you're thinking of picking up a book at your local shop, you ought to check out The Terror, Heart-Shaped Box, or The Witches Trinity. Or in fact, any of the below. Those with asterisks won:

Superior Achievement in a NOVEL
THE GUARDENER'S TALE by Bruce Boston (Sam's Dot)
HEART-SHAPED BOX by Joe Hill (William Morrow)
*THE MISSING by Sarah Langan (Harper)
THE WITCH'S TRINITY by Erika Mailman (Crown)
THE TERROR by Dan Simmons (Little, Brown)


Superior Achievement in a FIRST NOVEL
I WILL RISE by Michael Louis Calvillo (Lachesis Publishing)
*HEART-SHAPED BOX by Joe Hill (William Morrow)
THE MEMORY TREE by John R. Little (Nocturne Press)
THE HOLLOWER by Mary SanGiovanni (Leisure Books)


Superior Achievement in LONG FICTION
*AFTERWARD, THERE WILL BE A HALLWAY by Gary Braunbeck (Five Strokes to Midnight)
ALMOST THE LAST STORY BY ALMOST THE LAST MAN by Scott Edelman (Postscripts)
GENERAL SLOCUM'S GOLD by Nicholas Kaufmann (Burning Effigy Press)
THE TENTH MUSE by William Browning Spencer (Subterranean #6)
AN APIARY OF WHITE BEES by Lee Thomas (Inferno)


Superior Achievement in SHORT FICTION
THE DEATH WAGON ROLLS ON BY by C. Dean Andersson (Cemetery Dance #57)
LETTING GO by John Everson (Needles and Sins)
THE TEACHER by Paul G. Tremblay (Chizine)
THERE'S NO LIGHT BETWEEN FLOORS by Paul G. Tremblay (Clarkesworld)
CLOSET DREAMS by Lisa Tuttle (Postscripts #10)
*THE GENTLE BRUSH OF WINGS by David Niall Wilson (Defining Moments)


Superior Achievement in an ANTHOLOGY
*FIVE STROKES TO MIDNIGHT edited by Gary Braunbeck and Hank Schwaeble (Haunted Pelican Press)
INFERNO edited by Ellen Datlow (Tor)
DARK DELICACIES 2: FEAR edited by Del Howison & Jeff Gelb (Carroll & Graf/Avalon)
MIDNIGHT PREMIERE edited by Tom Piccirilli (Cemetery Dance Publications)
AT EASE WITH THE DEAD edited by Barbara & Christopher Roden (Ash-Tree Press)

Superior Achievement in a COLLECTION
*PROVERBS FOR MONSTERS by Michael A. Arnzen (Dark Regions Press)
THE IMAGO SEQUENCE by Laird Barron (Night Shade Books)
OLD DEVIL MOON by Christopher Fowler (Serpent's Tail)
*5 STORIES by Peter Straub (Borderlands)
DEFINING MOMENTS by David Niall Wilson (Sarob Press)


Superior Achievement in NONFICTION
ENCYCLOPEDIA HORRIFICA by Joshua Gee (Scholastic)
THE PORTABLE OBITUARY: HOW THE FAMOUS, RICH & POWERFUL REALLY DIED by Michael Largo (Harper)
*THE CRYPTOPEDIA: A DICTIONARY OF THE WEIRD, STRANGE & DOWNRIGHT BIZARRE by Jonathan Maberry & David F. Kramer (Citadel Press / Kensington)
STORYTELLERS UNPLUGGED by Joe Nassise and David Niall Wilson (Storytellers Unplugged/)


Superior Achievement in POETRY
*BEING FULL OF LIGHT, INSUBSTANTIAL by Linda Addison (Space and Time)
HERESY by Charlee Jacob (Bedlam Press [Necro Publications])
*VECTORS: A WEEK IN THE DEATH OF A PLANET by Charlee Jacob & Marge Simon (Dark Regions Press)
PHANTASMAPEDIA by Mark McLaughlin (Dead Letter Press)
OSSUARY by JoSelle Vanderhooft (Sam?s Dot Publishing)


In other news, my short story "Phantom" is about to be released from Cemetery Dance as a limited edition Chapbook. I've got extra copies, so send in your Mystery Site of the Month entry for May, and if you win, I'll mail you two free copies! Rules: site can't be an advertisement or personal website, and none of that racy stuff!

Hope everybody's great!

Sincerely,
Sarah Langan