2025 is coming to an end...and that means its awards eligibility post season! The most joyous time of the year (maybe???). I always make a few posts around social media for this, and inevitably my friends and family who aren't enmeshed in the literary scene say, "HEY! What's this about? Can we nominate you for all the awards? Every single one of them?" And I have to reply, "Unfortunately, no...unless you're a member of HWA or SFWA or an editor at this or that magazine." And then they are sad (My mother and some very dedicated aunts want to see me get a fancy golden literary trophy of some sort), but such is life.

But I do use this moment to explain to friends/family what these posts are about and why they matter...which I'm going to do here (In case you are one of my very supportive aunts!).

So every year, most writers who have published anything will put together an awards eligibility post listing their Short Stories, Novelettes, Novellas, and Novels. They break them down into these categories because that is how most major awards break them down. This allows people who are able to nominate for awards (members of HWA for the Stokers. Members of SFWA for Nebula Awards...etc...) to get them on their radar and maybe throw them on an awards recommendation list (for HWA, that means going to an online form and writing in your favorite works of horror and dark fantasy each year. You can find it here:https://horror.org/how-to-recommend-a-work/). There is also the Pushcart Prize, which a number of members in the literary community are able to nominate for (mostly editors from different magazines, but there are some other people who get to nominate also...which I've never fully grasped.) There are many other awards that fall somewhere between the two (Hugos, The Shirley Jackson Award, Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, etc...). Some of them are juried. Some of them are editor nominated. Some of them are fan nominated. Our Eligibility Posts help get the word out for all of these (at least they did when social media was still a functioning thing for writers) and now you know of their significance. Important literary stuff right there.

If you are a member of any of these voting bodies, don't forget to tell them what your favorite reads of the year were when it comes time! It's always nice to support your fellow writers however you can :)

Below you will find my Eligibility List for the year...it's also on all of my socials, but this list can have links! Feel free to check out any stories you might have missed...or just skim over this because I know you all read every single word I put out into the world and for that I am eternally grateful (again, thank you to my very dedicated aunts!).

Short Stories:

Drown Haunted in Flash Fiction Online

For When The Night Is Behind You and the Depths are Ahead in Three-Lobed Burning Eye

When You’ve Hit The Poison Ivy Thicket, You’ve Gone Too Far forthcoming in Fantasy

The Last Night and the Last Morning in Nocturne Magazine.

Drinkers in Out There: a SANS Press Anthology

Same Barn. Same Groom. in The Joining: Tales of Wedding Horror

Maybe Someday I'll Stop Writing About A House On The Border Of A Swamp in Milk Candy Review

Dead Wood in Chthonic Matter Quarterly

What It Means To Be Haunted in Bridge Eight

The Church of Our Lords. The Church of Dogs. in One Day We Will Die: Strange Stories Inspired by the Music of Neutral Milk Hotel.

Dredging the Bay in Haunted Ecologies (Original to the collection)

Growth/Decay in Haunted Ecologies (Original to the collection)

Novelettes:

The Final Sight in The Writhing, Verdant End published by Cursed Morsels Press (Dec 2025)

To Tend a Grove in Haunted Ecologies published by Journalstone (Feb 2025)

Short Story Collection:

Haunted Ecologies published by Journalstone (Feb 2025)

And that's everything!

This month I am so pumped to have Jeff Ford stopping by to share with us five of his favorite short stories! Jeff is one of my favorite short story writers of all time, so I've been super excited to see who he picks. I spent this past month reading his collection, Big Dark Hole, and it did not disappoint. Jeff does this thing where he puts he and his wife, Lynn, into stories where they encounter dark supernatural happenings...and they are simply the best. Often wicked funny with a beautiful emotional core in there. I think my favorite so far is “Monster Eight” in which Lynn and Jeff have to deal with a sort of sad local monster…who turns out to be far more dangerous than they originally though (this one will make you lol a lot too 🙂 ). My favorite of Jeff's stories is still “The Blameless,” which is in his collection, A Natural History of Hell, in which a married couple get invited to a neighborhood party/exorcism of one of their young neighbors. Its so funny and so sad and so perfect. Do yourself a favor and check out his stuff if you haven't already!

Now here’s Jeff:

The stories mentioned below are five of my favorites. They aren’t my top five of all time as that list continuously shifts depending on the hour of the day I consider it. I hope if you check these stories out you enjoy them. I also hope you’ll pick up a copy of my new collection due out in February – The Pandemonium Walts. It’s got 17 stories that have appeared in Ellen Datlow’s Horror anthologies, Asimov’s, McSweeney’s, Conjunctions, etc. And there is a new story, “The God of Ghosts.” The wonderful cover is by Derek Ford and there is an interview with me in it conducted by Kelly Link. It will eventually be on amazon, but you can currently pre-order at Lethe Press. Pandemonium Waltz | Lethe Press

“The Hunter Gracchus” by Franz Kafka (in The Complete Stories)

I love the imagination in “The Hunter Gracchus.” There is so much suggested with minimal concrete description. It’s darklybookshop.org/p/books/the-complete-stories-franz-kafka/9c5ee68be1a3bb76?ean=9780805210552&next=t poetic. A fragmented story about a Hunter who has died, fallen from a great height, in the mountains of the Black Forest, stalking a deer. His boat pulls up to the port of Riva, where Gracchus has shown up to report his own death. He has a meeting with the Mayor and there is ritual. The story is dreamlike in the writing. An entry in the log of Gracchus’ voyages beyond death. As you read the story you have a sense that by the end he has traveled far and wide, but at the same time you know he’s prevented from making any ultimate progress A very tragic and weird character. The dark, underworld feel of the story permeates everything in it. It’s mysterious and, in some way, affecting. I often thought the idea, if extended, might make a great novel or graphic novel. There were two versions of this story, one by the title above and another with that title and the words “A Fragment” after it. I do think Kafka was contemplating this for a novel, the first chapter of which was to be about Gracchus meeting with the Mayor of Riva. Sometimes I daydream that novel and other chapters for it.  It’s ironic that the end makes a full circle back around to the beginning. The last line is a beaut --

“I am here. I don’t know any more than that. There’s nothing more I can do. My boat is without a helm—it journeys with the wind which blows in the deepest regions of death.”

“The Tumor With a Human Face” by Junichiro Tanizaki (in Gold and Silver)

I have a great fondness for Japanese fiction – Akutagawa, Murakami, Abe, Rampo, Yamada, Yoshimura, Kawabata, Suzuki. The Japanese authors have such a unique take on fiction, especially horror stories. I think Akutagawa wrote one of the great horror stories of all time – “The Hell Screen.” But the one I’ll write about here is by my favorite Japanese writer, Junichiro Tanizaki. The tale is “The Tumor With A Human Face.”

         The plot tells about an aging Japanese film star, a once beautiful woman named Yurie, who’s had a very fortunate career. She learns that there is a film making the rounds of the secondary movie theatres in Tokyo, starring her. A weird horror/fantasy that many who write about it describe as also a great work of art. The only problem is, she cannot recall making the movie. By all reports she’s quite young in it. The plot of the film is crazy – about a young, beautiful prostitute, Ayame, who entices one of her customers to kidnap her and take her to America. In the town where the story takes place, Nagasaki, there is a beggar who plays the flute, who is in love with Ayame. She’s repulsed by him. The plot to kidnap her is involved, very dream-like. She’s supposed to hide on a cargo ship in a crate. The American lover doesn’t have the money to buy her out of prostitution. To get the crate to the cargo ship, the American needs an accomplice. The only one he can find is the flute player. The flute player will do it, but makes a deal that if he is successful, he gets to use Ayame’s body for a night in any way he chooses. When Ayame catches wind of this part of the plan, she calls it off. The flute player’s face appears to her as that of a demon’s. So she and her Western lover play a trick on the flute player. The flute player, distraught, curses her, and jumps off a cliff. While she’s hiding in the crate aboard the ship, a tumor forms on her beautiful knee. Knees must have been a big deal back in the day in Japan, because it’s proclaimed in the story that Ayame has one amazing set of knees. The tumor grows larger and larger and turns into a face.

         I won’t tell you more than that in fear of ruining the story. But the tale carries on after the plot of the film and is about Yumie trying to discover the origin of the movie – The Tumor With A Human Face. The writing is wonderful. You get all the creepiness of Japanese horror in a very elegant Western infused style. Tanizaki was greatly influenced by Flaubert. A very interesting and interestingly structured piece. There’s something in there about the differences of story telling in film and prose.

“Wakefield” by Nathaniel Hawthorne (in Twice Told Tales)

I taught Early American Literature for about 20 years at a Community College in New Jersey. While in the thick of it I discovered a lot of authors and works that came to be favorites of mine. It’s about a man named Wakefield, who lives in London with his wife. One day he tells his wife that he has to go into the country for business and will be gone for a brief time. He’s got an umbrella and a small bag with him. She escorts him to the door, they make their goodbyes, and he goes around the corner to the next block over and rents an apartment. He stays there for twenty years, occasionally putting on a costume or growing a beard and spying on his wife. After all that time, when his wife has thought him long dead and his accounts have been settled. When it’s clear to him he hasn’t much longer to live, he returns one evening, quietly opening the door and stepping in. The two resume their marriage till the ends of their lives.

All of what I describe in the first paragraph here is given away to the reader in the first paragraph of the story. Only then does the story begin. An odd structure, a story composed of scattered maybe-clues and speculations, incidents of mundanity and others of grand import. There’s a part that takes place far into his years of self-imposed exile. He stops outside his old house and spies through the window. There is a great fire going in the fireplace and his wife’s shadow, Hawthorne calls it a “grotesque shadow,” is cast on the wall. Widow Wakefield appears to be dancing merrily. The distorted images of her nose, her chin, and her cap, seem to me to be witch-like. I once discussed this part of the story with my writing professor, John Gardner. I told him, “By this point, Wakefield is so delusional he thinks his wife’s a witch.” He said, “But what if she really is a witch? That would change the story, wouldn’t it?” This incident signaled to me the depth of the piece. For a short, ingeniously condensed and ingeniously written piece, there’s a lot to think about here.

Scholars believe that this story is somehow linked to the story, “Bartleby, the Scrivner” by Melville

The Pedersen Kid by William Gass (in The Heart of the Heart of the Country)

This story can be found in Gass’s short story collection, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country. The setting for this one is Winter, out in the Mid-west, some far flung farmland. It’s snowing and the farm’s helper, Big Hans, discovers a kid frozen in the snow. It’s the Pedersen Kid from a nearby farm. From living in the farm country in Ohio, I know nearby farms aren’t always nearby, as the fields that separate them can be miles by miles. The protagonist of the story is the kid, Jorge, who lives on the farm with his Ma and Pa and Big Hans. The Pedersen kid is laid on dough Ma has rolled out on the kitchen table and he is rubbed down with snow to offset frostbite and to revive him. Jorge thinks the kid is dead and that Ma and Big Hans are wasting their time. Ma tells Jorge to wake his father up and ask for the old man’s whiskey bottle. Jorge knows when he’s asked his father will crack him in the head and that’s exactly what happens. Then Ma remembers the location of one of the dad’s bottles. She gets it and gives the Pedersen kid a few slugs. The kid starts to come around and is put in Hans’s bed. He’s delirious but manages to tell them there is a man with a gun at their house. No one wants to go, least of all Jorge, but the old man and Hans know they have to see if they can help the Pedersens. Pa and Hans and Jorge strike out into the snow, which by now is driving down at a great rate, hoping to get to the nearby farm and rescue anyone they can. And here is where the story really kicks in. The blizzard becomes this sense of distortion in the story. The kids thoughts are revealed sometimes in a hallucinogenic manner, and the language of their description mixes with the sound and descriptions of the storm. The linear nature of the story begins to fray. Jorge is separated from Hans and his father at the Pedersen’s place and now the storm is raging and they can hear gunshots.

This is William Gass’s first published story and probably his most easily accessible fiction. The natural descriptions in it are truly wonderful;. The storm becomes a kind of monster. But what is even more frightening is the fact that none of the characters know what’s going on nor does the reader. They’re basically blinded by the snow. There is a great sense of dread created due to lack of knowing. I doubt many people would consider this a Horror story, but for me it seems a quintessential Horror story. I feel like I have to read this one a few more times to get everything.  

“The Saint” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (in Strange Pilgrims)

This story can be found in the collection Strange Pilgrims. Marquez seems to be Marquez in this story, or at least he’s drawing on his time in Rome and in studying film. It’s told in the first person and it’s about a fellow Colombian, an older man who had been a neighbor of the protagonist’s back home. The old guy is carrying a box, big enough to hold a Cello. He opens it and shows it to the narrator. He’s carrying around his daughter’s body. The tombs where it had been interred in Colombia flooded and the bodies all had to be relocated. In the process, it’s discovered that the girl’s body hasn’t deteriorated even though it had been buried for years. The old man traveled with her to Rome in order to get an audience with the Pope and ask him to ordain her a saint. The Vatican blows him off at every turn but the old man can’t give up. He comes in and out of the lives of the film and music students. There is a real sense of the passage of time in this story. The characters are great from the housekeeper in the boarding house where the students stay, to the Opera singer who communicates through song with the zoo’s Lion at daybreak. There’s Vespa riding, and conversations about film theory, drinking and prostitutes. And always the old man and his case.  

This isn’t the only time Marquez used a death anomaly like this. In Love and Other Demons, the tomb of Sierva Maria is broken open by an earthquake and her voluminous hair flows out of the tomb, attached securely to her skull. It’s a miracle. 22 meters of hair. This is based on a story his grandmother told him when he was a boy, but it became the inspiration tor “The Saint” and Love and Other Demons. There are so many amazing stories to be discovered in Marquez’s work. These, and The Chronicle of a Death Foretold are some of my favorites.

…and here’s a little bit from Lethe’s website about Jeff’s next collection:

"In Pandemonium Waltz, award-winning author Jeffrey Ford leads readers through a dizzying sequence of tales that blend fantasy, horror, and dark wonder with his trademark wit and literary grace.

From a traveling waltz exhibition whose performers might not be entirely human, to a sun-scorched hunt for a cannibal that unearths something far worse, to a splatter-slick monster hunt that exposes the fault lines of a divided America—Ford’s stories cross boundaries of genre and expectation. Each is a mirror turned slightly askew, revealing the marvelous and the monstrous just beyond the frame of the familiar.

Ford has long refused to choose between fantasy, science fiction, or horror, insisting instead that “somewhere down there, it all turns to bullshit.” The result is fiction that is fearless, unpredictable, and alive with imagination—a testament to storytelling itself and the spell it casts over those who listen.

Pandemonium Waltz gathers some of Ford’s most haunting and exhilarating recent work: tales of metamorphosis, obsession, and the uneasy price of wonder."

The man drags himself across the parched ground, crawling towards my stall. My booth is the only structure for miles. The warped boards and leaning sign rise out of the desert landscape, interrupting the flat skyline like a lone tower at the end of the world. The surrounding ground is bare dirt, tufts of grass burned black from the Faltering all those years ago. Vultures circle. Vultures always circle.

“Water,” the man cries as he nears.

I do not have water.

I only have one thing.

“Sorry friend, just books. They’ll get you through though. Nourish the soul.”

“Books?” the man gasps through cracked lips.

“Yes. I’ve got whatever you want. Cozies and Thrillers and Epic Fantasies and…”

“Which will nourish longest?” The man cuts me off, eyes narrowing.

I run a palm over the stacks I’ve organized on the shelf-like top of my stall, thinking about the novels and short story collections that carried me through the mires of life. Books were my only companions when the cities fell and the oceans devoured and the cults arose and the slime-things chased me across the wastelands. Through each apocalypse, I kept my tiny library strapped to my back. Little else weighed down my step.

“This, this will truly fill you,” I say, selecting a dystopian novel with a glimmer of hope in the final chapter. I hold it out to the man who lies crumbled at the base of my booth. He snatches the paperback from my hand, peels the cover off, and sticks the pages into his mouth. 

He begins to chew.

“That’s not what I meant by nourish,” I say, trying to snatch the book back, but the man has rolled away, my stall a dividing wall between us.

“There’s no other definition of that word,” the man says, beginning to crawl away, wads of paper thick on his tongue, no moisture to help digestion.

I want to tell the man he is wrong, but I have very few words left. If the stories stitched beneath the covers aren’t enough, I don’t know what else I have left for him. I look down at the remainder of my books, wondering which will nourish me through these last days.

Maybe I don’t understand the meaning of the word after all.

Pretty quiet on the events front, but I am doing one cool reading with Alyssa Alessi, Christa Carmen, and Cat Scully in the historic haunted house, the Loring Greenough House out in Jamaica Plain on 12/21 @ 5 PM Here's a link: https://loring-greenough.org/house-event/the-darkest-night-a-bookish-solstice-2/

And I have a story forthcoming in this month's issue of Fantasy Magazine, which goes live on December 26th! It's a little one about a haunted highway in the post apocalypse...when there are no longer cars :)

OHHHHHHH…and my novelette, The Final Sight, comes out in the split collection, The Writhing, Verdant End, TOMORROW (12/9)…so that’s wicked exciting!

And that's it for this month! I hope everyone is doing well over your way and that you all have a fun, story-filled December. Thanks for stopping by!

-Corey