Announcing Winners for LA S11 | Round 1 | Fantasy

Nathan Slake has spoken...

Announcing the Winner and Runners up for Round 1 of the Lunar Awards: Fantasy

Photo by Tim Rebkavets on Unsplash

Zachary Roush here. The stories came in and Nathan Slake read ALL of your entries.

Thank you authors for all of your hard work-in writing amazing stories-and bravery-in submitting them.

We writers are all working in the dark, hoping for the right time to bring our stories into the light. It’s no small step to share your work with total strangers. Fantasy is probably one of the best genres ever because there’s so much variety and freedom — which is a blessing and curse in itself.

Congrats to our winner and runner up. I hope you never stop writing. Same goes for all other writers here! Never give up.

Without further ado, here’s Nathan with our Winner and Runner’s Up…

Lunar Awards Winner: Qallupilluk by Clara MacGauffin

In midwinter the ocean plays at being rock.

That’s how Qallupilluk opens. It’s a strong, confident line, setting the tone and style for the remainder of this ~1500 word piece. The Qallupilluk, in Inuit folklore, is a sea-dwelling monster that carries a pouch on its back to store the children it snatches–those who have wandered too far and found themselves alone on the ice. This is the boogeyman of the arctic, passed on as a cautionary tale from generation to generation. But where an author might be tempted to lean heavily into a fantasy creature feature, or tell this from the perspective of a child, here we tread carefully into cultural horror told more from a viewpoint of omniscient mythic folklore mixed with moments of direct second-person. It is a deft, fable-like telling, and I was absorbed from start to finish, finding myself highlighting specific lines that did considerable work to sustain the narrative. Take the following: “...in the dark mouth of a crack, in the place the tide has hollowed thin beneath the drifted snow,” and “Alone means if you vanish, there is no witness to say where the ice opened—because the ice will swear it never opened at all.” This is a story where a landscape of water and ice becomes animate and is central to the tale.

In the closing lines, we are told that “The ice does not soften for innocence. The tide does not slow because you are small. And what lives beneath does not need you to believe in it in order to reach for you.”

I love the brooding caution that pervades this piece. I’m drawn to the style of writing and the choices made. This was the clear winner for me from this round of submissions.

Runner-Up: Forever Girl by J. Kyle Turner

I selected this piece quite early on as a highlight across all submissions. What stands out here is the sparsity of the prose. In contrast to Qallupilluk, and although of similar length, here we have a clear and concise fairy-tale told from a limited third-person perspective. The story centres on Anna, who sets out to rescue children from a witch in the forest. Losing a game to the witch, Anna becomes trapped, but not in the manner you might expect: instead of torture or terror, Anna is subject to simple chores, living her days collecting firewood and cooking meals, and although she still wishes to escape, the witch’s spells prevent it. Eventually, the witch dies and … well, I won’t say any more than that because the enjoyment of this story is of course in the unfolding of the tale.

Closing remarks

With so many entries this round, and with the length of stories ranging from very short to very (very!) long, it was incredibly difficult to rank and select pieces for final consideration. I want to thank all authors for the time and effort they put into their submissions. From Elves and Brownies, to houses full of the plague and where time skips forward, there was a rich variety of stories and characters to be had. It was a lot to read, but I enjoyed it all, so I hope you keep forging ahead with your fantasy and craft.

~ Nathan

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