Sallow Bend hits the Bram Stoker Awards® preliminary ballot, and other news!

Gung hei faat choi! Happy lunar new year to all who observe it - here’s hoping the new year of the Rabbit is full of good health and good fortune for you and yours. I have to say, the Year of the Rabbit has started with a bang for me.

I was absolutely floored this morning to see my latest novel, Sallow Bend, on the preliminary ballot for the Bram Stoker Awards®. This is the longlist, so it's not a finalist yet, but it's a huge step all the same. I've got all my fingers crossed that it makes it through to the next round, when it will officially become a finalist. This will be my third shot at such a prestigious achievement. Previously, Crow Shine and The Gulp both made the preliminary ballot for Superior Achievement in a Fiction Collection, but neither made it through to the shortlist. Third time lucky? Here's hoping. Then again, look at the rarified company this book is currently keeping (including Stephen King, holy shit...).

(If any HWA voting members haven't read Sallow Bend yet and would like a copy, please hit me up and I'll get one to you right away.)

Here's the full preliminary ballot for Novel:

The 2022 Bram Stoker Awards® Preliminary Ballot
Superior Achievement in a Novel

Baxter, Alan – Sallow Bend (Cemetery Dance Publications)
Iglesias, Gabino – The Devil Takes You Home (Mullholland Press)
Ihli, Noelle W. – Ask for Andrea (Dynamite Books)
Katsu, Alma – The Fervor (G.P. Putnam’s Sons)
King, Stephen – Fairy Tale (Scribner)
Kiste, Gwendolyn – Reluctant Immortals (Saga Press)
Kraus, Daniel – The Ghost That Ate Us: The Tragic True Story of the Burger City Poltergeist (Raw Dog Screaming Press)
Malerman, Josh – Daphne (Del Rey)
Nix, Gwendolyn – I Have Asked to Be Where No Storms Came (Crystal Lake Publishing)
Roberts, Nick – The Exorcist's House(Crystal Lake Publishing)
Ward, Catriona – Sundial (Tor Nightfire)

And here's the full ballot with all categories.

Huge congratulations to everyone across the board - what an amazing display of dark fiction talent. I'm honoured to be one small part of it.

I also recently received my copy of Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year, volume 14, and was blown away to see my story “Out on a Rim” (from The Gulp) on the list of Honorable Mentions in the back of the book. It’s a real bucket list thing for me as a horror writer to have a story included in that series one day, but getting one onto the HMs list is almost as good - a real treat. It genuinely is the premier anthology every year for horror fiction, collecting the cream of the previous year’s short stories. If you read no other anthology (ideally you’d read a bunch!) you should definitely be grabbing that one.

I don’t have a great deal of other news to share at this point. The start of the year, school holidays, Chinese New Year (where my kung fu school gets really busy with lion dance and other festivities) means the writing stuff always takes a back seat during January/early-February. But I will be getting back into it full steam very soon.

One thing I have been doing is a new serialised story (it’ll probably end up a novella) over at Patreon. I’m posting one new short chapter every week or so until it’s finished exclusively for patrons at the Monster level and above. I’m writing it as a I go, so it’s quite experimental, but I’m having a lot of fun with it so far. Once I send this newsletter out, I’m off to post the third installment.

Otherwise, there’s a few irons in a few fires, so I’ll keep you up to speed as things develop. If you’re an audiobook fan, the amazing Joe Hempel has just finished recording Sallow Bend and that should be out very soon.

What I’ve Been Enjoying

I’ve been loving some awesome TV, movies and books lately. Let’s start with books.

I was lucky enough to read an early copy of The Merry Dredgers, the new one by Jeremy C. Shipp, as they asked me if I would consider a blurb for it. I was more than happy to and it’s a great book. Here’s what I said about it:

"A story of sibling love, powerful friendship, terrible tragedy, and suspicious cultists, all delivered with Shipp's signature dreadful whimsy. Do you dare enter the mouth of the goblin? It'll change you..."

I also loved Kealan Patrick Burke’s new one, Guests. Imagine some kind of cross between The Shining and The Thing and you’re sort of close. It’s great.

With TV, I recently binged the Star Wars series, Andor. It’s a genuinely great espionage/radicalisation story that just happens to be set in the Star Wars universe. It’s superb. And I also swallowed the new Wednesday series currently on Netflix. Just the right balance of whimsy and macabre, they’ve done a stellar job with that one.

And then movies. Glass Onion was an absolute blast and I hope there are many more Benoit Blanc mysteries to come. (They really need to not call it a Knives Out film, as it’s totally a Benoit Blanc film.)

But by far the stand out for me recently has been Deadstream, which is showing on Shudder. I've been thinking about it a lot since I saw it. It's a great addition to the horror canon. It takes the best of things like Evil Dead, Blair Witch, Paranormal Activity, and twists them up with modern "engagement culture" and influencer tropes in the best ways. It's genuinely brilliant. I think it’s destined to be a real classic. I might watch it again later, in fact.

Okay, that’s all from me for now. I’ll get another newsletter out soon.

Wishing you health and prosperity in all things.

Alan