- - - - The First August Van Zorn Prize for the Weird Short Story has been awarded to Jason Roberts, of San Francisco, for his story "7-C." The Prize consists of $3000.00 and publication in the forthcoming McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories, due from Vintage in November. We received more than 600 entries to the contest, among them a number of beautifully disturbing or disturbingly beautiful tales, but the winning story stood out in the grace and assurance of its narrative voice, the cleverness of its fundamental conceit, and the steady, unflinching, and persuasive rigor with which its story-telling logic, at once moving and chilling, unfolds. Mr. Roberts, an established writer of non-fiction but a newcomer both to fiction and to the weird story in particular, volunteers regularly at 826 Valencia, a circumstance that drove him to submit his entry under the pseudonym "Linden Abe," a moniker derived at least in part, apparently, from the names of two of the cast members of the old Barney Miller TV show. In addition to his concern that his entry might be viewed in a different light or with favoritism by the judges, who knew him, Mr. Roberts felt sufficiently uncertain about his first attempt at fiction writing to wish to shield himself in this way. The fact that August Van Zorn himself was a pseudonymous writer, as is Leon Chaim Bach ( http://michaelchabon.com/vanzorn_about.html), the leading American Van Zorn scholar, seemed to encourage Mr. Roberts in his noble intentions. The relative unlikeliness of the name Linden Abe (an American cousin of the author of Woman in the Dunes?) alerted the judges at once to the possibility that they were dealing with a nom de plume. Our concern at first was not that the author might be someone known to us but that, because the story was so very good, its author might be employing a pseudonym in order to circumvent the fourth guideline laid down for entrants: "The winning story will not have been published previously in any form or medium. In addition, its author will not previously have published a novel or a collection of stories." We were afraid, in other words, that we might be dealing with a ringer. Some of us, less charitably, thought that he might be some kind of a nut. In a series of inquiries and email exchanges reminiscent of certain scenes from the recent film Shattered Glass, with the key difference that we wanted not to punish but to reward our quarry, the editors of MECoAS attempted to track down the "real" Linden Abe, penetrating the rather elaborate series of blinds and chicanes that Mr. Roberts had erected to conceal his identity. A careful search of Google indicated that 1) if there was a Linden Abe, he had left no trace in the Worldwide Web and 2) there are a surprising number of websites devoted to the old Barney Miller TV show. Our repeated attempts to reach and question Abe through his (in itself suspect) Yahoo.com email address, the only contact information we had for him, finally produced the admission that "Linden Abe" was, indeed, a pseudonym. Abe provided us with his "real name," Jay Plummer, along with an address and telephone number in Capistrano Beach, CA, where purportedly he lived in a house with his aunt and a very deaf uncle, to whom we might have to speak clearly, though without shouting, if we called. This second layer of identity rang false in a number of regards, including a transposed digit in the telephone number and the continuing doubtfulness of such an accomplished story's having been written by someone who, like "Jay Plummer," had (again according to Google) no apparent prior publications or literary associations, no postings to, say, H. P. Lovecraft usenet groups, or to usenet groups devoted to astronomy (a science which plays a key role in the plot of "7-C" and which Mr. Abe claimed to have studied), no evident connections to academe or observatories or telescope clubs. It wasn't impossible to imagine that Linden Abe was Jay Plummer, but it felt untrue. Finally, after an awkwardly vague phone conversation, Mr. Roberts acknowledged his identity and his authorship of the story. He had been concerned not only about the appearance of impropriety, given his steady service as a volunteer at 826 Valencia, but also about the embarrassment he would suffer thereafter if his story turned out to be, as every writer fears, really bad, and we had hated it and therefore chose to taunt him with its worthlessness whenever he came around. Since, in fact, Mr. Roberts and his short story meet or exceed all the guidelines for the prize as set forth in the original announcement, we are pleased to bestow the prize on him, and to announce the advent of a promising new voice in the literature of horror
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