Breakable Things bags Bram Stoker award

Malaysian-born horror and science fiction writer Cassandra Khaw won the Bram Stoker Awards Superior Achievement in a Fiction Collection for Breakable Things, a collection of short stories. Khaw's win was announced among others on 17 June during StokerCon 2023 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Every year, the Horror Writer's Association, an organisation of writers and publishers of horror and dark fantasy, presents the Bram Stoker Awards for Superior Achievement, named for the author of Dracula. The awards were set up almost as soon as the HWA was established in 1987.

The awards are bestowed to works in thirteen categories, including novels, first novels, short fiction, graphic novels, young adult fiction, and middle-grade fiction (added in 2022). The award is an eight-inch replica of a haunted house, designed by sculptor Steven Kirk. Any work of horror first published in English may be considered during the year of its publication.

The first recipient of the Stoker under the Fiction Collection category was Harlan Ellison for The Essential Ellison, in 1987. Other winners include Stephen King (Four Past Midnight; Just After Sunset; Full Dark, No Stars), Dan Simmons (Prayers to Broken Stones), Ray Bradbury (One More for the Road), and Joyce Carol Oates (The Doll-Master and Other Tales of Terror; The Corn Maiden and Other Nightmares; Black Dahlia and White Rose: Stories (tied with Mort Castle's New Moon on the Water)).

Touted as a "dynamic and vibrant debut collection", Breakable Things "showcases a bloody fusion of horrors from cosmic to psychological to body traumas" – another addition to Khaw's substantial body of horror and dark fantasy work. The stories are mostly drawn from the start of Khaw’s career.

"Don’t Turn on the Lights", a unique take on an urban legend, opens the collection. Among the other stories are "Recite Her the Names of Pain", a woman's quest for answers from a siren; "A Priest of Vast and Distant Places" is about a clergyman who can talk to aeroplanes; and in "Mothers, We Dream", a sailor pays a terrible price for salvation. The title story, "Some Breakable Things", about a father's ghost haunting his child, was written after Khaw learnt of their own father's passing.

Strange Horizons, a weekly magazine of and about speculative fiction, calls the collection "blood-soaked but tender", while sci-fi, fantasy, and horror magazine Locus describes it as "superbly strange and beautiful". Publishers Weekly acknowledges the "gruesome punch" of the 23-story collection, despite calling it "powerful but slightly uneven".

Khaw's short fiction can be found in various places, including magazines Fantasy & Science Fiction and Lightspeed, and Tor.com. Their work has been or is being translated to Catalan, Turkish, Russian, Bulgarian, French, and Spanish. Their novella, Nothing but Blackened Teeth, was a finalist for several awards, including the Stoker. The Salt Grows Heavy, a novella about a mermaid and a plague doctor who flee a collapsed empire and end up in a nightmarish forest, is their latest published work.

Besides short stories and novellas, Khaw also writes for video games and tabletop role-paying games (RPGs). They are a scriptwriter for games company Ubisoft.