Winning The Black List Award for Horror Novels
I’m grateful for the opportunity. (Also: whoo-hoo!)
So how did this happen?
Well, I want to get my novels published.
A simple desire.
A complicated journey.
This year, I entered one of my novels in a contest.
My unpublished novel, A Box Came for You, was selected as the winner in the Horror category for The Black List’s 2025 Unpublished Novel Award. [link]
The judges in the Horror category were novelists Tananarive Due and Victor LaValle.
There were seven genres. Different judges selected a novel in each of the seven genres. Here are the other winners.
CHILDREN’S & YOUNG ADULT | More Than Quiet by Terah Tsuyako Summers
CRIME & MYSTERY | Us Honest Crooks by Roslyn Ray
LITERARY | White Flame by Cam Terwilliger
ROMANCE | We Meet Again by Jessica Ellis
SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY | Gates to Nowhere by Simon Nagel
THRILLER & SUSPENSE | Pressure by Rua Morrow
What’s my novel about?
A Box Came for You is a 65,000-word horror novel about Mitch Siebold, a naïve young man from a troubled Michigan family, who moves to an LA apartment to start a new life when he opens the wrong moving boxes and releases a vengeful spirit bent on his humiliation.
I thought of A Box Came for You while I was helping my son move into a new apartment in the summer of 2021.
At the time, I was trying to come up with a simple and affordable concept for a horror movie that my brother Michael Barringer, a filmmaker, might make one day. I wanted the story to involve a young person going through a rite of passage, and I wanted the young person to battle a monster in order to make it through that rite of passage.
As I was helping my son unpack, it hit me.
Boxes!
Boxes are simple. Boxes are easy on the filmmaker’s budget. Boxes represent the rite of passage experienced by a young person leaving home and moving out to live on their own.
Wouldn’t it be cool if someone took the wrong boxes and unleashed a curse?
A young man has to face his past to overcome an evil curse and move on with his life.
I wrote the first draft of Box in the fall of 2021. It was the first novel I wrote after resolving to take a sabbatical away from teaching in order to focus on writing (see “My Sabbatical at Three Years”).
When thinking about the concept as the seed of a screenplay, I wanted, initially, to keep the story simple and affordable to film, but I left those limitations far behind as I developed the story for a novel.
I had too many fun ideas, and I couldn’t be hamstrung by the demands of low-budget filmmaking. I was writing a novel. Readers would want a fully developed novel with the concept taken as far as I could take it.
So I just went for it.
Here’s the link to the first chapter posted on this website: A Box Came for You.
How did I submit to the contest?
The Black List has historically been a site for screenwriters to comment on each other’s screenplays and for industry people to find scripts written on spec. Franklin Leonard started it in 2005.
The Black List expanded to include unpublished novels in 2024. They offer contests every year for screenwriters. The Unpublished Novel Award was one of the first contests they hosted for novelists, and this year was the first year they held the Unpublished Novel Award.
This summer, I uploaded my novel, A Box Came for You, to The Black List website. I paid (and still pay) $30/month to host the project. I filled out the forms and uploaded the PDFs of the novel: a 100-page preview PDF and a PDF of the full novel.
I paid $150 for a professional evaluation of the first 100 pages handled anonymously through The Black List. Once I had the evaluation, I could, according to the rules, enter my manuscript into any relevant Black List contest without additional fees.
So I did. I entered Box in the Unpublished Novel contest in the summer.
And then I waited until the fall.
The Black List indicated that semi-finalists would be notified in September and the winners in December.
September came . . . and September went.
I was thinking, “Oh, crap. I didn’t even make the semi-finals.”
I was grumpy. I was very grumpy. I’d been so hopeful that recognition from a contest hosted by The Black List would help me immensely, and here I’d blown it. Ugh.
Resilience is necessary for surviving the tumultuous life of a writer. You have to temper the ups (“I’m going to submit my work to a contest! Yay!”) and weather the downs (“I didn’t even make the first cut. Argh.”). You need humility and self-respect. You need self-respect to shield yourself against the rejections, but you need humility to keep your successes from going to your head.
And you have to resist becoming bitter . . . not because bitterness makes others uncomfortable but because bitterness infects your work.
So, as the days went by in October, I had to make peace with not making the semi-finals. I had to tell myself to suck it up, summon hope for a better tomorrow, and get back to work.
That’s the writer’s solution for every setback.
Use failure as a starting block for the next race.
Ready.
Set.
Get back to work.
And maybe treat yourself to a cappuccino and a pumpkin cinnamon roll.
So I got back to work.
I edited past novels. I worked on the finale of a new novel. I kept going.
On October 10, I got an email from The Black List. I guess I made the semi-finals after all. No. Wait. There was some mention of congratulations . . . and a check . . . and the other winners.
I wasn’t a semi-finalist. I was a winner.
My novel Box had been chosen as the winner in the Horror category by the judges Tananarive Due and Victor LaValle, both celebrated horror novelists.
I couldn’t believe it. I’d just hardened my heart against the past and sharpened my focus on the future, and here was something good happening in the present.
I felt weird, like my emotions were riding a bumper car. Then I felt good. Then—let’s admit it—I felt pretty great.
What happens now?
After I was informed that I was a winner, I paid a past student of mine, Michael Shepherd, a professional photographer, to take my author photos (Michael, whom I’d taught when he was in middle and high school, took photos of me on the Davidson College campus and in a studio), and I updated my author website (new photos, edited pages)—all to persuade agents/publishers, visiting my site because of the award, to take an interest in my work.
On December 2, The Black List announced the winners online and in an article posted on LitHub, and from here on out, to some extent, I get a measure of publicity.
This means I wait, passively, to field queries from any interested agents and publishers.
This also means I can query, actively, agents and publishers.
And I can promote the award on social media.
So what do I want?
I want to get this novel published.
A simple desire.
A complicated journey.
To get this novel published, I’ll be using success as a starting block for the next race.
So I’ll get ready . . . and get set . . . and keep going . . . and going.
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