Annal:2006 World Fantasy Award for Collection

The Keyhole Opera

Bruce Holland Rogers, Michael Bishop

• 2006 WFA–Collection winner
• Score: 10.56

Award-winning author Bruce Holland Rogers lives and writes in Eugene, Oregon, the tie-dye capital of the world. His previous short fiction collections include Flaming Arrows and Thirteen Ways to Water. In 2004, his story “Don Ysidro” won the World Fantasy Award for short fiction.

Since January 2002, for five dollars a year, subscribers in sixty countries have been receiving short-short stories by Bruce Holland Rogers in their email boxes. The stories are an unpredictable mix of literary fiction, science fiction, fairy tales, mysteries, and work that is hard to classify. Many of the stories in The Keyhole Opera began as subscription stories and went on to be published in magazines and anthologies.

20th Century Ghosts

Joe Hill

• 2005 IHG–Collection winner
• 2005 Stoker–Collection winner
• 2006 WFA–Collection nominee
• Score: 26.55

Imogene is young, beautiful, kisses like a movie star, and knows everything about every film ever made. She’s also dead, the legendary ghost of the Rosebud theater, and one afternoon in 1945, a boy named Alec Sheldon will have an unforgettable encounter with her…in the dark…

Arthur Roth is a lonely kid with a head full of big ideas and a gift for getting his ass kicked. It’s hard to make friends when you’re the only inflatable boy in town…

Francis is unhappy. Francis is picked on. Francis doesn’t have a life, a hope, a chance. Francis was human once, but that’s behind him now. Francis is an eight-foot tall locust, and all of Calliphora, Nevada will shudder to hear him sing…

John Finney is in trouble. The kidnapper locked him in a basement, a place stained with the blood of half a dozen other murdered children. With him, in his subterranean cell, is an antique phone, long since disconnected…but it rings at night, anyway, with calls from the dead…

Eric is a twentysomething burnout, who just lost a girlfriend and a job. Once, though, he was the Red Bolt, and with…

To Charles Fort, with Love

Caitlín R. Kiernan

• 2006 WFA–Collection nominee
• 2005 IHG–Collection nominee
• Score: 12.56

To Charles Fort, With Love is award-winning fantasist Caitlín R. Kiernan’s third collection of short fiction, a haunting parade of the terrible things which may lie beyond the boundaries of science, the minds which may exist beyond psychology, and the forbidden places which will never be located in any orthodox globe. To quote the object of Kiernan’s affection, meta-poet and arch-enemy of dogma Charles Hoy Fort, “The little harlots will caper, and freaks will distract attention, and the clowns will break the rhythm of the whole with their buffooneries—but the solidity of the procession as a whole: the impressiveness of things that pass and pass and pass, and keep on and keep on and keep on coming.” A deceptively even dozen, this collection includes Kiernan’s celebrated stories “Onion” and “Andromeda Among the Stones,” as well as a number of more obscure pieces. Though Kiernan was recently praised as “the new Lovecraft,” these stories stand as testimony that she will never be merely the “new” anyone, that hers is a unique and demanding voice entirely unlike any other.

Magic for Beginners

Kelly Link

• 2006 WFA–Collection nominee
• 2005 IHG–Collection nominee
• 2005 Stoker–Collection nominee
• Score: 18.56

Magic for Beginners is the highly anticipated second collection of stories from Kelly Link, author of the cult favorite Stranger Things Happen. Here she unfurls an engaging, funny and magical selection of stories with riffs on marriage, cannons, convenience stores, superheros, zombies, and apocalyptic poker parties. Many stories have never before been published; others have previously been published in McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, Conjunctions, and The Dark, but are collected here for the first time.

In the Palace of Repose

Holly Phillips

• 2006 WFA–Collection nominee
• Score: 6.56

In the Palace of Repose is a collection of nine such stories, ranging from the delightfully fantastic “In the Palace of Repose,” to the delicately horrific “One of the Hungry Ones,” to the hauntingly literary “The Other Grace.” Here indeed are young women, and young men, who have seen too much, and who have been abandoned to wrestle alone with the strange, the wonderful, the terrifying. Some triumph, some tragically fail. Most struggle on beyond the boundaries of their stories, carrying their wonders and horrors into their lives, into their worlds—worlds, and lives, startlingly like our own.