-->
skip to main | skip to sidebar

Friday 2 November 2007

Good Things Happen While We Sleep

Woke up this morning to an email from Ellen Datlow telling me that, at the World Fantasy Convention in Saratoga Springs last night, The Box won the IHG Award ("Outstanding Achievement in the field of Horror and Dark Fantasy") for Best Short Story.

How about that?

Ellen was kind enough to step up and accept it on my behalf, and to read out the miserable three lines of speech I'd provided her with. Lucky for everyone present that my sanity-preserving strategy always entails being convinced that I'm never going to win anything. Otherwise it would have been a hour-long monologue with a song and an encore, probably via satellite link.

The Box appeared in the Retro Pulp Tales anthology from Subterranean Press. The story's set in the 1950s. The 'box' of the title is a helicopter crash simulator, and the narrative centres on the experiences of WWII veterans retraining for civilian life.

It was a good night all round for Bill Schafer's indie imprint - Lords of the Razor and Subterranean magazine both scored awards, for anthology and periodical respectively. And I get to suck up a little more shared karma juice because I've a novella in one (The Butterfly Garden) and a story (The Plot) in issue 5 of the mag.

Gonna go back to sleep now and see if the gods will cough me up a speedboat.

3 comments:

Stephen Melling said...

Well done Mr Gallagher. Can't be much room left on yer shelves!

Caroline Callaghan said...

And a very worthy winner "The Box" is, if I may say so. Probably the finest ghost story I've read in years ...

Chris said...

Congrats!

The IHG was a damn good result for the UK in general - both Conrad Williams and Paul Finch won too.