Annal:2008 World Fantasy Award for Collection

Tiny Deaths

Robert Shearman

• 2008 WFA–Collection winner
• Score: 10.58

Analyzing the complexity, absurdity, and blessedness of seemingly ordinary people, this debut collection examines the metaphysical assumptions surrounding death. From the end of a relationship to the meaning behind its title, this anthology continually surprises and subverts, utilizing topics such as alien intelligence, reincarnation, imaginary children, and even conversations with Hitler’s childhood pet. Engaging and diverse, this compendium offers a fascinating perspective on mortality.

Dagger Key: and Other Stories

Lucius Shepard

• 2007 IHG–Collection winner
• 2008 WFA–Collection nominee
• Score: 16.57

Lucius Shepard’s new story collection may well be his best yet. In nine novellas and stories, he traces a long-dead pirate’s murderous possession of a Caribbean islander, explains a grand tantric conspiracy, pits a fugitive killer against the malignant energies of the Dragon Griaule, exposes a small Pennsylvania town to a morally fraught extradimensional excursion…and there’s much more.

Written in Shepard’s characteristically brilliant moody prose, these are amongst the finest dark fantasies on offer today.

Hart & Boot & Other Stories

Tim Pratt

• 2008 WFA–Collection nominee
• Score: 6.58

Hart & Boot & Other Stories collects thirteen stories of love, death and monsters, including new story “Komodo,” a tale of lizards, sex magic and dangerous men. The title story, “Hart & Boot,” was chosen by Michael Chabon for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories: 2005.

Plots and Misadventures

Stephen Gallagher

• 2008 WFA–Collection nominee
• 2007 IHG–Collection nominee
• Score: 12.58

In this, his second collection of short fiction, award-winning author and screenwriter Stephen Gallagher delivers his unique take on the weird, the wonderful and the downright strange. These are tales in which the world is very much as we know it, but charged with a sense of the wonders that lie in wait just beneath the surface of our everyday reality. Grisly goings-on in a tattoo parlour…A bereaved girl’s poetic revenge…Hunting fairies with pickup truck and cattle prod…Along with The Blackwood Oak, a novella making its first appearance between these covers, the stories have been drawn together from sources as diverse as Weird Tales, Subterranean, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Winter Chills, and The Dark.

Portable Childhoods

Ellen Klages

• 2008 WFA–Collection nominee
• Score: 6.58

Emerging from a unique and powerful voice, this innovative collection offers a tantalizing glimpse of what lies hidden just beyond the ordinary, skirting the border between childhood and adulthood. Mysticism, heroism, cruelty, and compassion thread through these multifaceted tales—which range from the origins of the Manhattan Project to a culinary object-lesson, from 1950s corruption to a slight glitch in Creation. Collected here for the first time and including an excerpt from her breakout first novel The Green Glass Sea, these stories are timeless and delightful, chilling and beautiful.

Secret Files of the Diogenes Club

Kim Newman

• 2008 WFA–Collection nominee
• Score: 6.58

From the 1860s to the present, these are the accounts of the Diogenes Club, whose agents solve crimes too strange for Britain’s police, protecting the realm and this entire plane of existence from occult menaces, threats born in other dimensions, magical perfidy and the Deep Dark Deadly Ones. Kim Newman continues the series began in The Man From the Diogenes Club, revealing more of the secrets of the British Empire’s most secret service.