"Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers" is a 2015 urban fantasy/horror story by Alyssa Wong. It was first published in Nightmare magazine.
Jenny is a magical being living in New York City, where she feeds on the negative emotions and thoughts of the people she meets on dating sites. When her latest date's negativity is much stronger than she had anticipated, she finds that lesser negativity no longer satisfies her, and she begins seeking out worse and worse situations.
"Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers" won the Nebula Award for Best Short Story of 2015 [1] and the 2016 World Fantasy Award—Short Fiction, [2] and was a finalist for the 2015 Bram Stoker Award for Short Fiction. [3] Kirkus Reviews described it as "an innovative twist on the vampire mythos." [4] Tangent Online commended the story's "premise and (...) narrative voice", as well as its prose, but overall faulted it for being "watered down" and "longer than (...) it needed to be." [5]
Kim James Newman is an English journalist, film critic and fiction writer. Recurring interests visible in his work include film history and horror fiction—both of which he attributes to seeing Tod Browning's Dracula at the age of eleven—and alternative fictional versions of history. He has won the Bram Stoker Award, the International Horror Guild Award, and the BSFA award.
The Bram Stoker Award for Best Non-Fiction is an award presented by the Horror Writers Association (HWA) for "superior achievement" in horror writing for non-fiction.
Thomas Ligotti is an American horror writer. His writings are rooted in several literary genres – most prominently weird fiction – and have been described by critics as works of philosophical horror, often formed into short stories and novellas in the tradition of gothic fiction. The worldview espoused by Ligotti in his fiction and non-fiction has been describe as pessimistic and nihilistic. The Washington Post called him "the best kept secret in contemporary horror fiction."
Caitlín Rebekah Kiernan is an Irish-born American published paleontologist and author of science fiction and dark fantasy works, including 10 novels, series of comic books, and more than 250 published short stories, novellas, and vignettes. Kiernan is a two-time recipient of both the World Fantasy and Bram Stoker awards.
William Browning Spencer is an American novelist and short story writer living in Austin, Texas. His science fiction and horror stories are often darkly and surrealistically humorous.
Ellen Datlow is an American science fiction, fantasy, and horror editor and anthologist. She is a winner of the World Fantasy Award and the Bram Stoker Award.
Stephen Graham Jones is a Blackfoot Native American author of experimental fiction, horror fiction, crime fiction, and science fiction. Although his recent work is often classified as horror, he is celebrated for applying more "literary" stylings to a variety of speculative genres, as well as his prolificness, having published 22 books under the age of 50. 31.5 linear feet of Jones' works are held in the Sowell Family Collection in Literature, Community, and the Natural World, part of the Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library at Texas Tech University.
Douglas Clegg is an American horror and dark fantasy author, and a pioneer in the field of e-publishing. He maintains a strong Internet presence through his website.
Tim Waggoner is the author of numerous novels and short stories in the Fantasy, Horror, and Thriller genres.
Steve Rasnic Tem is an American author. He was born in Jonesville, Virginia.
Stephen Jones is an English editor of horror anthologies, and the author of several book-length studies of horror and fantasy films as well as an account of H. P. Lovecraft's early British publications.
Lisa Morton is an American horror author and screenwriter.
Lucy A. Snyder is an American science fiction, fantasy, humor, horror, and nonfiction writer.
Brimstone Press was an Australian independent publisher of dark fiction. Brimstone Press was established in 2004 by Angela Challis and Shane Jiraiya Cummings and was based in Western Australia.
Linda D. Addison is an American poet and writer of horror, fantasy, and science fiction. Addison is the first African-American winner of the Bram Stoker Award, which she won five times. The first two awards were for her poetry collections Consumed, Reduced to Beautiful Grey Ashes (2001) and Being Full of Light, Insubstantial (2007). Her poetry and fiction collection How To Recognize A Demon Has Become Your Friend won the 2011 Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Poetry Collection. She received a fourth HWA Bram Stoker for the collection The Four Elements, written with Marge Simon, Rain Graves, and Charlee Jacob. Her fifth HWA Bram Stoker was for the collection The Place of Broken Things, written with Alessandro Manzetti. Addison is a founding member of the CITH writing group.
Joshua "Josh" Viola is a science fiction/fantasy/horror writer best known for Denver Moon, The Bane of Yoto and his publishing company Hex Publishers. He is a 2021 Splatterpunk Award nominee and a 2022 Colorado Book Awards winner.
Usman T. Malik is a speculative fiction author from Pakistan. His short fiction has been published in magazines and books such as The Apex Book of World SF, Nightmare, Strange Horizons, Black Static, and in a number of "year's best" anthologies. He is the first Pakistani to win the Bram Stoker Award for Short Fiction (2014) and has won the British Fantasy Award (2016). He has been nominated for the World Fantasy Award (2016), nominated again for the Stoker Award (2018), has twice been a finalist for the Nebula Award, and has been nominated for multiple Locus Awards.
Alyssa Wong is an American writer of speculative fiction, comics, poetry, and games. Wong is a recipient of the Nebula Award, World Fantasy Award, and Locus Award.
"The Function of Dream Sleep" is a fantasy short story by American writer Harlan Ellison, first published in his 1988 anthology Angry Candy. Ellison stated that it was inspired by an actual dream.
Billie Sue Mosiman was an American writer. Mosiman was known for her novels and over 200 short stories that encompassed the genres of horror, science fiction, fantasy, thrillers and suspense fiction.