This week on Weird Fiction Review, we’re giving our best congratulations to this year’s Shirley Jackson Award nominees! As many of you might already know, this year’s nominees were announced earlier this month. The SJAs have a history of spotlighting talented authors and noteworthy writing, and this year is no exception. Like last year as well, many of the nominated authors are friends of WFR and have had their material featured on this site in the past year. Of particular note is the fact that three of the authors considered under Single-Author Collection – Will Ludwigsen (for In Search Of and Others), Nathan Ballingrud (North American Lake Monsters), and Kit Reed (The Story Until Now) – had stories from their nominated collections reprinted on our site since last year.
And now, we can add a fourth author to that list: Christopher Barzak. We’ve just reprinted “A Resurrection Artist” from his collection Before and Afterlives, published last year by Lethe Press. Barzak is a master of fantasy with a strong grasp of character and language, and oftentimes his writing possesses a glimmer of supernatural weirdness to it. “A Resurrection Artist” is an excellent demonstration of Barzak’s ability as an author and the quality of his collection as a whole. It asks a strange, yet fundamental question of his characters – what can we make of death when it’s conquered? – while making the process and state of deathliness glimmer with strangeness, shock, and even beauty.
Once again, best of luck to all the SJA nominees this year, and we hope that all of our readers acquaint themselves with Barzak’s story and collection, just as we hope they do the same for all of this year’s honored writers and stories.