Awards & Praise

Lists

2019 Locus Recommended Reading List Selection (for A Sick Gray Laugh)

LitReactor “The Best Horror Novels of the Last Decade” List Selection (for A Sick Gray Laugh)

Awards

Winner of the 2015 Bram Stoker Award® for Superior Achievement in a First Novel for Mr. Suicide

Nominations

Nominee for the 2016 Shirley Jackson Award (Novella category, for The Sadist’s Bible)

Nominee for the 2016 Bram Stoker Award® for Superior Achievement in Long Fiction for The Sadist’s Bible

Nominee for the 2015 Bram Stoker Award® for Superior Achievement in a Fiction Collection for The Mirrors

Nominee for the 2013 Shirley Jackson Award (Novella category, for Children of No One)

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Praise

Advance praise for Mothwoman: “With this new take on legendary cryptid Mothman, Cushing (A Sick Gray Laugh) dives head-first into the surreal horror and humor lurking just below the surface of 2020 America…[F]ans of weird horror and surreal psychological fiction will find plenty to enjoy.” — Publishers Weekly

Advance praise for Mothwoman: “A dizzying story about one individual’s confrontation with the transient nature of reality, and what this encounter strips away within her. A sharp, quirky adventure that overlaps alien abduction, horror, conspiracy, cryptids and existential dread in a way that only Nicole Cushing could manage to pull off.” — Brian Evenson

“Nicole Cushing comes in smart and hard, skilled and strange times three. Many aspire. But you can’t fake this kind of weird.” — New York Times Bestselling Author John Skipp

“…an intense and uncompromising literary voice..”  — Rue Morgue , in naming Nicole one of thirteen “Wicked Women to Watch”

“Novels don’t come much more transgressive than this one, folks. Got a taboo? Watch Nicole Cushing grin while she dances all over it. In other hands that might be reason enough for the witty Mr. Suicide to exist. But this is more and better than that — a truly nightmare world, richly imagined, told to us in a canny, subversive second-person voice that makes you, the reader, the hero of this tale, like it or not. That it also manages to be ultimately life-affirming is yet another wonder.” — Jack Ketchum , in reference to Mr. Suicide

“If you haven’t read her work, you’re depriving yourself of a treat.” — This is Horror (review by Shane Douglas Keene)

“This tale of a damaged and murderous child is the most original horror novel I’ve read in years. Cushing’s prose is rapid-fire, grisly, and passionate.”
–Poppy Z. Brite, author of Exquisite Corpse and Lost Souls , in reference to Mr. Suicide

“The confidence and expertise so blatantly evident in Nicole Cushing’s writing is astonishing.”– Thomas Ligotti, in reference to Children of No One

“Nicole Cushing’s stories grab you by the throat — and don’t let go until they have slapped you around a bit. I know of few writers of contemporary weird fiction whose stories pack the raw emotional power that hers do…”  — S.T. Joshi , in reference to The Mirrors