Curdle Creek by Yvonne Battle-Felton won the prestigious Novel category at the 2024 Shirley Jackson Awards presented at Readercon 34 in Burlington, Mass., on July 19.
Billed as a surreal American gothic novel “for fans of ‘The Lottery’ and The Hunger Games,” Curdle Creek is the story of Osira, a 45-year-old widow who follows the strict conventions of a remote all-Black town stuck in the past and governed by ominous rituals, including a one in-one out population policy. Forced to jump into a well as a test of allegiance, Osira is transported to another time and another realm where she must answer for crimes committed by Curdle Creek.
Tananarive Due, who won the 2023 Shirley Jackson Award for her novel The Reformatory, called Curdle Creek “a thoughtful, sinister tour-de-force.”
Another big winner was Eden Royce who won the Novella category for Hollow Tongue, a story about a woman who returns to her childhood home amid the memories of her father’s abuse and her mother’s reticence to leave him. Royce is having a banner year. In June, she won a Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Middle Grade Novel for The Creepening of Dogwood House.
Here’s the complete list of 2024 Shirley Jackson Awards winners, according to ShirleyJacksonAwards.org.
NOVEL: Curdle Creek by Yvonne Battle-Felton.
NOVELLA: Hollow Tongue by Eden Royce.
NOVELETTE: The Thirteen Ways We Turned Darryl Datson into a Monster by Kurt Fawver
SHORT FICTION: “Three Faces of a Beheading” by Arkady Martine from Issue Fifty-Eight of Uncanny Magazine.
SINGLE-AUTHOR COLLECTION: Midwestern Gothic by Scott Thomas.
EDITED ANTHOLOGY: Why Didn’t You Just Leave edited by Julia Rios and Nadia Bulkin.
The 2024 Shirley Jackson Awards honor the legacy of author Shirley Jackson by recognizing the best work published during 2024 in the literature of psychological suspense, horror, and the dark fantastic. A jury of professional writers, editors, critics, and academics vote on the awards.
Shirley Jackson, who died in 1965, is the author of classic novels The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle and the chilling short story “The Lottery.”
LIONEL RAY GREEN 
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