Bram Stoker Awards
The Horror Writer's Association presents the Bram Stoker Awards for Superior Achievement, named in honor of Bram Stoker, author of the seminal horror work, Dracula. To ameliorate the competitive nature of awards, the Stokers are given "for superior achievement," not for "best of the year," and the rules are deliberately designed to make ties fairly common. The first awards were presented immediately following the incorporation of the HWA in 1988 (for works published in 1987), and they have been presented every year since, in June. For more information, visit: http://www.horror.org/stokers.
Here are the winners in the novel category:
2007 The Missing by Sarah Langan
The remote town of Corpus Christi, Maine, will be changed forever in a heartbeat. The nightmare is awakened when third-grade schoolteacher Lois Larkin takes the children on a field trip to Bedford. There in the abandoned woods, a boy unearths an ancient horror; a contagious plague that transforms its victims into something violent, hungry ... and inhuman.
2006 Lisey's Story by Stephen King
Lisey's husband, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Scott Landon, has been dead for two years at the book's start, but his presence is felt on every page. Lisey hears him so often in her head that when her catatonic sister, Amanda, begins speaking to her with Scott's voice, she finds it not so much unbelievable as inevitable. Soon she's following a trail of clues that lead her to Scott's horrifying childhood and the eerie world called Boo'ya Moon, all while trying to help Amanda and avoid a murderous stalker.
2005 TIE: Creepers by David Morrell
On a cold October night, five people gather in a run-down motel on the Jersey shore and begin preparations to break into the Paragon Hotel. Built in the glory days of Asbury Park by a reclusive millionaire, the magnificent structure – which foreshadowed the beauties of art deco architecture – is now boarded up and marked for demolition. The five people are "creepers," the slang term for urban explorers, but danger, terror and death await the creepers in a place ravaged by time and redolent of evil.
AND Dread In the Beast * by Charlee Jacob
Taken from the mythologies and histories of humankind, this novel follows the trail of the Mother Spirit of the worst that the world is capable of producing. From the catacombs of ancient Rome where a blasphemous sect twisted the message of the early Christians--to modern America with its obsession with violence, deities and saints, and the reincarnations of beasts battle over sublime and profane, where the very reasons for existence for us all may lie in the unthinkable.
2004 In the Night Room by Peter Straub
Willy Patrick finds her life intersecting with that of a stranger, Timothy Underhill, when she experiences an eerie event involving the death of her daughter and Timothy receives communications from dead people he had known in his youth.
2003 Lost Boy, Lost Girl by Peter Straub
The suicide of a woman and the disappearance of her teenage son, Mark, draws the boy's uncle, Timothy Underhill, back to his hometown of Millhaven, where his investigation uncovers a neighborhood haunted by a serial killer.
2002 The Night Class by Tom Piccirilli
When he returns to college after winter break, Cal Prentiss is stunned to discover that someone was brutally murdered in his dorm room while he was gone, and as he sets out to find the truth about the horrible crime, he comes face to face with a dark evil.
2001 American Gods by Neil Gaiman
Days before his release from prison, Shadow learns that his wife has been killed in an accident. On the plane ride back home for the funeral, he meets the enigmatic Mr. Wednesday, who offers Shadow a job. Shadow accepts but soon discovers that Mr. Wednesday is far more dangerous than he could ever have imagined, and Shadow is now caught in up a war for the soul of America.
2000 The Traveling Vampire Show by Richard Layman
On a hot summer day in 1963, teenagers Dwight, Rusty and Slim (a.k.a. Frances), travel to Janks Field to go to the adults-only, one-night-only Traveling Vampire Show starring "Valeria, the only known vampire in captivity," never expecting what happens.
1999 Mr. X by Peter Straub
Every year on his birthday, Ned Dunstan experiences a seizure in which he is forced to witness scenes of ruthless slaughter perpetrated by a mysterious and malevolent figure in black whom Ned calls Mr. X. This year Ned learns from his mother, who is on her death bed, the name of his long-absent father and other disturbing information about his own identity and that of his entire fantastic family.
1998 Bag of Bones by Stephen King
Plagued by vivid nightmares of the summer house he had shared with his late wife, grieving widower Mike Noonan returns to his former Maine getaway, only to find a town in the grip of a ruthless millionaire and tormented by a series of ghostly visitations.
1997 Children of the Dusk * by J. Berliner & G. Guthridge
In 1938, the High Command of Nazi Germany adopted a plan for expelling all the Jews of Europe to the island of Madagascar, off the southeast coast of Africa. The plan was abandoned. Children of the Dusk asks, "What if … the plan were carried out?"
1996 The Green Mile by Stephen King
Set in the 1930s at the Cold Mountain Penitentiary's death-row facility, this is the riveting and tragic story of John Coffey, a giant, preternaturally gentle inmate condemned to death for the rape and murder of twin nine-year-old girls. It is a story narrated years later by Paul Edgecomb, the ward superintendent compelled to help every prisoner spend his last days peacefully and every man walk the green mile to execution with his humanity intact.
1995 Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates
Quentin P. is 31 years old, single, and the son of a well-respected college professor. He has his own apartment in the university town where he lives and attends classes at a local technical college. He is also a convicted sex offender (now out on parole) and a serial killer. In Oates's riveting novel the reader is cunningly drawn inside Quentin's mind as he carefully plans and carries out a gruesome murder.
1994 Dead In the Water * by Nancy Holder
The shipwrecked, vacationing passengers of the ill-fated freighter Morris are picked up by the H.M.S. Pandora and sail into a cruise of metaphysical terror, madness and death.
1993 The Throat by Peter Straub
The conclusion of the Blue Rose Murders Trilogy draws Tim Underhill back to his hometown, where he will help a friend accused of murdering his wife clear his name. See also: Koko and Mystery.
1992 Blood of the Lamb * by Thomas F. Monteleone
A young priest from a Brooklyn parish becomes the center of a religious upheaval when he discovers that he has miraculous powers and is informed by a secret Vatican tribunal that his powers are the result of a scientific experiment.
1991 Boys Life by Robert R. McCammon
Twelve-year-old Cory Mackenson's father finds a dead man handcuffed to a car's steering wheel that has plunged into Zephyr's Lake in 1964, and they realize that all is not as it seems in their quiet town.
1990 Mine by Robert R. McCammon
Laura Clayborne faces a terrifying journey into a world of madness and obsession when her newborn son is taken from the hospital by Mary Terrell, a battered survivor of the radical Sixties who now lives in her own hallucinatory world of murderous rage.
1989 Carrion Comfort by Dan Simmons
Three elderly friends with the power to feed off emotions generated during murders meet every year to discuss their game--an ongoing competition of mass murder and vampirism.
1988 Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris
FBI Academy trainee Clarice Starling hopes that Dr. Hannibal Lecter, a criminally insane psychiatrist imprisoned in a Boston hospital, can lead her to the serial killer known only as Buffalo Bill.
1987 TIE: Misery by Stephen King
Paul Sheldon, author of a series of historical romances, wakes up in a secluded farmhouse in Colorado with broken legs and Annie Wilkes, a disappointed fan, hovering over him with drugs, ax and blowtorch, and demanding he bring his heroine back to life.
AND Swan Song by Robert R. McCammon
In a nightmarish, post-holocaust world, an ancient evil roams a devastated America, gathering the forces of human greed and madness, searching for a child named Swan who possesses the gift of life.
* = Unavailable or Out of Print