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2006 Bram Stoker Award Winner |
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Taken from the mythologies and histories of humankind, it 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.
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2006 Bram Stoker Award Winner |
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On a cold October night, five people gather in a run-down motel on the Jersey shore and prepare to break into the Paragon Hotel. The once-magnificent structure is now boarded up and marked for demolition. They are "creepers": urban explorers with a passion for investigating abandoned buildings and their dying secrets. Reporter Frank Balenger joins them to profile this highly illegal activity for the New York Times. But he isn't looking for just another story, and soon after they enter the rat-infested tunnel leading to the hotel, he gets more than he bargained for. Danger, fear, and death await the creepers in a place ravaged by time and redolent of evil.
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2005 Bram Stoker Award Winner |
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Willy Patrick, the respected author of the award-winning young-adult novel In the Night Room, thinks she is losing her mind?again. One day, she is drawn helplessly into the parking lot of a warehouse. She knows somehow that her daughter, Holly, is being held in the building, and she has an overwhelming need to rescue her. But what Willy knows is impossible, for her daughter is dead. On the same day, author Timothy Underhill, who has been struggling with a new book about a troubled young woman, is confronted with the ghost of his nine-year-old sister, April. Soon after, he begins to receive eerie, fragmented e-mails that he finally realizes are from people he knew in his youth?people now dead. Like his sister, they want urgently to tell him something. When Willy and Timothy meet, the frightening parallels between Willy?s tragic loss and the story in Tim?s manuscript suggest that they must join forces to confront the evils surrounding them.
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2004 Bram Stoker Award Winner |
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A woman commits suicide for no apparent reason. A week later, her son, fifteen-year-old Mark Underhill, vanishes. His uncle, novelist Timothy Underhill, searches his hometown of Millhaven for clues that might help unravel this horrible dual mystery. He soon learns that a paedophilic murderer is on the loose in the vicinity, and that shortly before his mothers suicide, Mark had become obsessed with an abandoned house where he imagined the killer might have taken refuge. No mere empty building, the house whispers from attic to basement with the echoes of a long-hidden true-life horror story, and Tim Underhill comes to fear that in investigating its unspeakable history, Mark stumbled across its last and greatest secret: a ghostly lost girl who may have coaxed the needy, suggestible boy into her mysterious domain.
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2003 Bram Stoker Award Winner |
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The college winter break is over, and Caleb Prentiss faces yet another semester of higher education. Struggling with alcoholism and frustrated by his irrelevant classes, Cal seeks solace in the arms of his scholastic-conscious girlfriend and in somnambulistic conversation with a mystifying college radio DJ. But Cal's ennui is shattered when he discovers evidence of a murder which occurred in his room over the Christmas recess. Obsessed with unearthing the particulars of this gruesome and haunting event, Cal wanders down the grotesque hallowed halls of a university gone mad. Run-ins with the two hard-nosed campus security guards, relationship hurdles with both friends and lovers, and enigmatic signals from the Dean's icily eminent wife force Caleb to question his place in the bizarre night classes of higher education. Even as he gets ever closer to the truth, Caleb is plagued by the supernatural occurrence known as stigmata: his hands bleed in imitation of the wounds of Christ whenever someone close to him dies. And Cal's hands are bleeding a lot these days.
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2002 Bram Stoker Award Winner |
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Released from prison shortly after the accidental death of his wife, ex-con Shadow finds himself free, but bereft of all the things that gave his previous life meaning. As he bids his farewell to the fragments of that life, an eerie stranger named Mr. Wednesday offers him employment. Wednesday needs someone to act as aid, driver, errand boy, and, in case of Wednesday's death, someone to hold a vigil for him. Shadow consents and finds himself drawn unsuspectingly into a cryptic reality where myth and legend coexist with today's realities. Mr. Wednesday, trickster and wise man, is on a quest. The old gods who came over to this country with each human incursion have weakened as their followers have dwindled and are now threatened with extinction by the modern gods of technology and marketing. Wednesday travels from deity to deity, rounding up help for what will be last battle. He engages ancient Russian gods, Norse legends, Egyptian deities, and countless others who have found their way to America in the past 10,000 or so years. Shadow never quite understands what his role is in all of this, but he experiences visions and dreams which promise that he is far more than Wednesday's factotum.
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2001 Bram Stoker Award Winner |
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A coming of age story surrounding three sixteen year old friends in the summer of 1963. are doing their own thing, when they get news that the circus is on town. This one is a little bit different, in that it claims to have a vampire in tow. As it turns out, the claim is correct, and the vampire babe leads to escapades and death.
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2000 Bram Stoker Award Winner |
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Ned Dunstan returns home to Edgerton, Illinois, a raffish and atmospheric Mississippi River city, as his mother, Star Dunstan, lies dying. Impelled to trace his tangled paternal lineage after Star's death, Ned finds himself caught up in a web of murder and other heinous crimes, not only in the present but also in a past that his elderly great aunts Nettie, May, and Joy would prefer remained undisturbed. The aunts, whose remarkable gifts include teleportation and telekinesis, frustrate his search for knowledge, partly to protect their own secrets and also to shield Ned from the mysterious and omnipresent force that seems to dodge his every step. He is aided in his efforts to discover the mysteries of his birth by a doppleganger who may or may not be his twin, and also by a lovely young woman, Laurie Hatch. She is the estranged wife of Stewart Hatch, an Edgerton scion whose own history is inexorably linked with Ned's and with the entire Dunstan family.
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1999 Bram Stoker Award Winner |
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Four years after the sudden death of his wife, forty-year-old bestselling novelist Mike Noonan is still grieving. Unable to write, and plagued by vivid nightmares set at the western Maine summerhouse he calls Sara Laughs, Mike reluctantly returns to the lakeside getaway. There, he finds his beloved Yankee town held in the grip of a powerful millionaire, Max Devore, whose vindictive purpose is to take his three-year-old granddaughter, Kyra, away from her widowed young mother, Mattie. As Mike is drawn into Mattie and Kyra's struggle, as he falls in love with both of them, he is also drawn into the mystery of Sara Laughs, now the site of ghostly visitations and escalating terrors. What are the forces that have been unleashed here, and what do they want of Mike Noonan?
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1998 Bram Stoker Award Winner |
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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 story sets up a powder keg of tension in the characters of a politically important pregnant woman, two Nazi leaders who have very different military and personal agendas, a charismatic Jewish scholar, a dozen German shepherds and their trainers, over a hundred Jews released from a concentration camp, and two powerful African natives. The richly imagined setting for the explosion is a tiny island near Madagascar, covered with eerie rain forest and unusual animals, and replete with mystical traditions. The result is a novel with horrific incidents, intense feelings, and suspenseful action--all rendered in a fluid, dreamlike style, as if written in the haze of a tropical fever.
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1997 Bram Stoker Award Winner |
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Welcome to Cold Mountain Penitentiary, home to the Depression-worn men of E Block. Convicted killers all, each awaits his turn to walk the Green Mile, keeping a date with "Old Sparky," Cold Mountain's electric chair. Prison guard Paul Edgecombe has seen his share of oddities in his years working the Mile. But he's never seen anyone like John Coffey, a man with the body of a giant and the mind of a child, condemned for a crime terrifying in its violence and shocking in its depravity. In this place of ultimate retribution, Edgecombe is about to discover the terrible, wondrous truth about Coffey, a truth that will challenge his most cherished beliefs...and yours
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1996 Bram Stoker Award Winner |
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The story centres on Quentin, an extremely disturbed thirty-something part-time student, caretaker, convicted sexual predator and serial killer whose one goal in life seems to be the capture and mutilation of individuals for the purpose of creating a "zombie", a person who will answer only to Quentin, and will, upon zombification via crude medical procedure, fulfil Quentin's every desire without question.
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1995 Bram Stoker Award Winner |
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A group of unhappy people go on a budget cruise on a rundown freighter. An accident while they are overtaken by a fog bank causes them to have to abandon ship, whereupon they discover the nightmare has just begun. A tale of shipwreck survivors being "rescued" by what turns out to be ghost ship of The Flying Dutchman type.
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1994 Bram Stoker Award Winner |
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Tim Underhill, a thriller writer who has been summoned back to his hometown of Millhaven, Wisconsin at the urgent request of an old friend. Millhaven is steeped in secrets, some more grisly than others.
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1993 Bram Stoker Award Winner |
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When thirty year old Father Peter Carenza seemingly wields lightning in fending off a mugger in Brooklyn, he is summoned to the Vatican. There we discover that, three decades ago, forces within the Vatican secured a DNA sample from the Shroud of Turin and decided to try to clone Christ. Now their dream is approaching fruition but they quickly discover that they can not control their own creation. And when Peter's behaviour starts to become somewhat odd, there's little anyone can do to stop him, not even the Vatican's own ruthless assassin.
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1992 Bram Stoker Award Winner |
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Zephyr, Alabama, is an idyllic hometown for eleven-year-old Cory Mackenson, a place where monsters swim the river deep and friends are forever. Then, one cold spring morning, Cory and his father witness a car plunge into a lake, and a desperate rescue attempt brings his father face-to-face with a terrible vision of death that will haunt him forever. As Cory struggles to understand his father's pain, his eyes are slowly opened to the forces of good and evil that are manifested in Zephyr. From an ancient, mystical woman who can hear the dead and bewitch the living, to a violent clan of moonshiners, Cory must confront the secrets that hide in the shadows of his hometown, for his father's sanity and his own life hang in the
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1991 Bram Stoker Award Winner |
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"What happened to those children of the sixties who learned the language of hatred, who swore oaths upon their bloodstained manifestos and vowed to never surrender?" Most went on to other lifestyles. But Mary Terrell, a.k.a. "Mary Terror," did not change. Her insanity deepened into schizophrenia, and in the late '80s she still calls herself "freedom fighter for those without rights in the Mindfuck State." Hallucinating, heavily armed, and possessed by the delusion that an infant son will restore the good ol' days with her ex-lover, Mary steals a baby. But the child's mother is a strong, resourceful woman, and she recruits an ex-radical to help her. What ensues is a hair-raising chase across the American Midwest in wintertime, toward a final confrontation in which both "mothers" proclaim, "He's mine."
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1990 Bram Stoker Award Winner |
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Our world is populated by a vanishingly small population of psychic "vampires," individuals who can enter the mind of others to control their thoughts and actions. These creatures are sociopaths, amoral monsters who casually foment violence, commit mental and physical rape, and destroy lives in order to play their "games." Three such vampires, old colleagues in sociopathology, have decided to end their decades-long game with one another by attempting mutual homicide, using innocent bystanders as their weapons. The resulting mass murder brings together our protagonists, a psychiatrist and survivor of the Chelmno death camp, a young black college student whose father was a victim of the vampires, and a Southern sheriff whose demeanor belies a keen intelligence. These characters uncover a sinister cabal of "vampires" whose games seem to be leading toward the ultimate finale, destruction of the world itself.
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1989 Bram Stoker Award Winner |
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Clarice Starling, a precociously self-disciplined FBI trainee, is dispatched by her boss, Section Chief Jack Crawford, the FBI's most successful tracker of serial killers, to see whether she can learn anything useful from Dr. Hannibal Lecter. Lecter's a gifted psychopath whose nickname is "The Cannibal" because he likes to eat parts of his victims. Isolated by his crimes from all physical contact with the human race, he plays an enigmatic game of "Clue" with Starling, providing her with snippets of data that, if she is smart enough, will lead her to the criminal. Undaunted, she goes where the data takes her. As the tension mounts and the bureaucracy thwarts Starling at every turn, Crawford tells her, "Keep the information and freeze the feelings." Insulted, betrayed, and humiliated, Starling struggles to focus. If she can understand Lecter's final, ambiguous scrawl, she can find the killer. But can she figure it out in time?
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1988 Bram Stoker Award Winner |
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Paul Sheldon finishes a book he's proud of, unlike the bestselling Misery series he's been churning out. On his way home, he crashes and is "saved" by his number one fan. Annie Wilkes turns out to be horrifyingly insane, torturous, homicidal and more than a bit suicidal. The book centres on two characters isolated in the Colorado high country. Sheldon struggles mightily to get free.
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1988 Bram Stoker Award Winner |
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An ancient evil roams the desolate landscape of an America ravaged by nuclear war. He is the Man with the Scarlet Eye, a malevolent force that feeds on the dark desires of the countless followers he has gathered into his service. His only desire is to find a special child named Swan -- and destroy her. But those who would protect the girl are determined to fight for what is left of the world and their souls. In a wasteland born of rage, populated by monstrous creatures and marauding armies, the last survivors on earth have been drawn into the final battle between good and evil that will decide the fate of humanity.
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Novels winning the Bram Stoker Award
