Annal:2006 International Horror Guild Award for Collection

American Morons: Stories

Glen Hirshberg

• 2006 IHG–Collection winner
• 2007 WFA–Collection nominee
• 2006 Stoker–Collection nominee
• Score: 22.56

From the author of the acclaimed novel The Snowman’s Children and the award-winning collection The Two Sams comes American Morons, a new collection of dazzling and haunting tales…

Two traveling college students confront their disintegrating relationship and the new American reality in a breakdown lane along the Italian Superstrade. A woman chases the ghost of her neglectful father to a vanished amusement park at the end of the Long Beach pier. Two recently retired teachers learn just how much Los Angeles has taken from them.

In these atmospheric, wide-ranging, surprisingly playful, and deeply mournful stories, grandkids and widows, ice cream-truck drivers and judges, travelers and invalids all discover — and sometimes even survive — the everyday losses from which the most vengeful ghosts so often spring.

Basic Black: Tales of Appropriate Fear

Terry Dowling

• 2006 IHG–Collection winner
• 2006 Stoker–Collection nominee
• Score: 16.56

This brand new collection of fiction from the author who has been called “Australia’s finest writer of horror” by Locus magazine and “Australia’s premier writer of dark fantasy” by All Hallows and “one of the best prose stylists in science fiction and fantasy” by The Year’s Best Fantasy 4.

It’s dark in here…

Not just with the absence of light, but with things made for the dark, things that work best when the wind is in the trees and the sun has gone from the sky.

There’s a carnival, of course—and such a one!—and a six-sided mirror room on a rainy evening. There’s a model of a ship made from bone, a hotel room with the hint of a clown’s face on the wall, a gun that grows its own bullets (you know they do!).

There’s a train, too, that train, called up by a harmless holiday prank. There’s the ultimate maze, a dream of blind gladiators, a truly unforgettable cabinet of wonders. Here you’ll find the most deadly tomb of all and, yes, revealed at last—the truth behind what ghosts really are! All waiting among these bits of darkling shimmer, in…

The Lost District and Other Stories

Joel Lane

• 2006 IHG–Collection nominee
• Score: 6.56

Joel Lane follows his award-winning collection The Earth Wire (1994) with a still darker and more subversive assemblage of strange tales. The Lost District links the hidden places in urban and small-town landscapes to the hidden places in human lives. Set in a post-industrial hinterland of the present, the near future, and the imagined, these stories portray human encounters with the unknown: sexual discovery, drug-inspired visions, the lonely paths of madness, and the shadowy realm on the other side of death.

Here you will read of a porn film actor whose scars reveal the forces controlling his life; an underground factory where outsiders pay a terrible price in order to belong; a musician haunted by the madness of a dead singer; a neighborhood fading into corrupt echoes of itself; and a man who literally follows his ex-lover to the end of the world.

These 24 stories (including 6 published here for the first time) range from grim urban horror tales to weird erotic fantasies and bitter allegories of loss and exploitation. The lovers, loners, fetishists,…

Map of Dreams

M. Rickert

• 2007 WFA–Collection winner
• 2006 IHG–Collection nominee
• Score: 16.57

Set in a reality where nightmares do not fade upon waking, this anthology skims along the surface of life and dips just beneath, revealing the hidden machinations that fuel dreams. These underlying myths and fantasies exist not as musty old stories but as ancient truths that have come to illuminate the modern human condition. The title story touches on themes of grief, redemption, and time travel; “Cold Fire” ventures into love and obsession; and “Peace on Suburbia” introduces readers to a Christmas with an entirely different kind of savior. These and 13 other tales are framed by four interludes—Dreams, Nightmares, Waking, and Rising—that guide readers through a world that is at once familiar and eerily off-kilter.