This award was given to 7 books.
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The Gentling Box
by Lisa Mannetti
BRAM STOKER AWARD-FINALIST BEST FIRST NOVEL THE GENTLING BOX by Lisa Mannetti: The philosophies of the Age of Enlightenment create sweeping changes throughout 19th Century Europe, but to Hungary's despised nomads, the gypsies, the world is still a dark and very dangerous landscape. Adversaries both mortal and supernatural lurk in the shadows, waiting to strike without mercy. Imre, a half-gypsy horse trader, understands the danger to his small family all too well. Cursed with a hideously-disfiguring and fatal disease by the vengeful sorceress Anyeta, he watches those around him suffer and fall. Mimi, his wife, who is tricked into cutting off her own arm to create a powerful talisman. His friend Constantin, struck mute by Anyeta's wrath. And Lenore, his and Mimi's young daughter, who has been placed in the greatest jeopardy of all. With his health deteriorating and death imminent, his wife possessed by the witch's ghost and Lenore being groomed for a fate far worse than death, Imre turns to desperate measures and a hellish memory from his childhood—to still the sorceress and end her reign of bloodshed. A presence even more powerful and terrifying to him than Anyeta: the gentling box. ADVANCED PRAISE FOR THE GENTLING BOX: "A keenly conceived and richly executed cornucopia of the blackest magic. Mannetti's prowess as a writer hauls the reader into a shimmering, phantasmagoric demesne of relentless suspense and high-creep-factor chills, and doesn't let go until the final page. This story is a dark work of art." –Edward Lee, author of CITY INFERNAL and BRIDES OF THE IMPALER. "When was the last time you lost yourself in a book? Lisa Mannetti dares you to enter a realm unlike anything you've dreamed of, a world of gallant gypsies and ancient evil, of passionate obsessions … and abject terror. Take that dare. Immerse yourself. The rewards are plentiful. But be warned. Nothing could prepare you for the horror of THE GENTLING BOX." –Robert Dunbar, author of THE PINES and THE SHORE "Mannetti's prose has teeth; sharp teeth that grab on and refuse to let go." –J.A. Konrath, author of FUZZY NAVEL and DIRTY MARTINI ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Lisa Mannetti is a former magazine editor and adjunct college English instructor who discovered she preferred full-time writing to real work when she volunteered to be the family member who cared for her ailing mother. Her short story, "Hungry for the Flesh" (Space & Time, April 2007) was recommended for a Stoker Award. Additional short stories scheduled for publication in 2008 include "The Blow-Up Job" (TRAPS, DarkHart Press) and "Other Rooms" (The Pretty-Scary.net Anthology, November 2008) and "Retro-Fit" in Lovestrology (Ravenous Romance, December 2008). Most recently she served as guest editor for Terrible Beauty, Fearful Symmetry, an anthology scheduled to be published by DarkHart Press in October 2008. She is currently working on a second paranormal novel, The Everest Hauntings. When she isn't writing, Lisa works on her haunted website, The Chancery House (www.thechanceryhouse.com) and constructs macabre gothic greeting cards based on her cemetery photos. She is also a Tarot reader. Lisa lives in the house she grew up in Westchester County in New York with one highly rambunctious cat—Huckleberry Finn—and two charming and exasperating black kittens, The Houdinis: Harry and Theo. You can also visit Lisa's author page at: www.lisamannetti.com.
Year: 2008
Category: First Novel
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Duma Key
by Stephen King
NO MORE THAN A DARK PENCIL LINE ON A BLANK PAGE. A HORIZON LINE, MAYBE. BUT ALSO A SLOT FOR BLACKNESS TO POUR THROUGH... A terrible accident takes Edgar Freemantle's right arm and scrambles his memory and his mind, leaving him with little but rage as he begins the ordeal of rehabilitation. When his marriage suddenly ends, Edgar begins to wish he hadn't survived his injuries. He wants out. His psychologist suggests a new life distant from the Twin Cities, along with something else: "Edgar, does anything make you happy?" "I used to sketch." "Take it up again. You need hedges...hedges against the night." Edgar leaves for Duma Key, an eerily undeveloped splinter of the Florida coast. The sun setting into the Gulf of Mexico calls out to him, and Edgar draws. Once he meets Elizabeth Eastlake, a sick old woman with roots tangled deep in Duma Key, Edgar begins to paint, sometimes feverishly; many of his paintings have a power that cannot be controlled. When Elizabeth's past unfolds and the ghosts of her childhood begin to appear, the damage of which they are capable is truly devastating. The tenacity of love, the perils of creativity, the mysteries of memory and the nature of the supernatural -- Stephen King gives us a novel as fascinating as it is gripping and terrifying.
Year: 2008
Category: Novel
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The Nightmare Collection
by Bruce Boston
The Nightmare Collection is a brand new poetry collection from the Bram Stoker Award winning poet of Pitchblende, and Shades Fantastic. The prolific SFPA Grandmaster brings us sixty poems collected from places like Asimov's SF Magazine, Dark Wisdom, Strange Horizons, Talebones, Weird Tales, and includes new works as well. Advance Praise for The Nightmare Collection "The Nightmare Collection is a stunning showcase of vivid prose. Alluring and provocative, emotive and often amusing, this is storytelling of the highest order. Boston once again demonstrates why he is the undisputed master of dark poetry." -- Michael McBride, author of the God's End trilogy and Bloodletting. "Bruce Boston is a sorcerer -- he can conjure the most powerful and visceral emotions out of a few words. The Nightmare Collection is horror poetry at its very finest...and creepiest. It's a midnight waltz of surreal images. Highly recommended!" -- Jonathan Maberry, Bram Stoker Award author, fiction and nonfiction, for Ghost Road Blues an The Crytopedia
Year: 2008
Category: Poetry
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American Gods
by Neil Gaiman
Shadow is a man with a past. But now he wants nothing more than to live a quiet life with his wife and stay out of trouble. Until he learns that she's been killed in a terrible accident. Flying home for the funeral, as a violent storm rocks the plane, a strange man in the seat next to him introduces himself. The man calls himself Mr. Wednesday, and he knows more about Shadow than is possible. He warns Shadow that a far bigger storm is coming. And from that moment on, nothing will ever be the same...
Year: 2002
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The Lovely Bones
by Alice Sebold
On her way home from school on a snowy December day in 1973, 14-year-old Susie Salmon ("like the fish") is lured into a makeshift underground den in a cornfield and brutally raped and murdered, the latest victim of a serial killer--the man she knew as her neighbor, Mr. Harvey. Alice Sebold's haunting and heartbreaking debut novel, The Lovely Bones, unfolds from heaven, where "life is a perpetual yesterday" and where Susie narrates and keeps watch over her grieving family and friends, as well as her brazen killer and the sad detective working on her case. As Sebold fashions it, everyone has his or her own version of heaven. Susie's resembles the athletic fields and landscape of a suburban high school: a heaven of her "simplest dreams," where "there were no teachers.... We never had to go inside except for art class.... The boys did not pinch our backsides or tell us we smelled; our textbooks were Seventeen and Glamour and Vogue." The Lovely Bones works as an odd yet affecting coming-of-age story. Susie struggles to accept her death while still clinging to the lost world of the living, following her family's dramas over the years like an episode of My So-Called Afterlife.Her family disintegrates in their grief: her father becomes determined to find her killer, her mother withdraws, her little brother Buckley attempts to make sense of the new hole in his family, and her younger sister Lindsey moves through the milestone events of her teenage and young adult years with Susie riding spiritual shotgun. Random acts and missed opportunities run throughout the book--Susie recalls her sole kiss with a boy on Earth as "like an accident--a beautiful gasoline rainbow." Though sentimental at times, The Lovely Bones is a moving exploration of loss and mourning that ultimately puts its faith in the living and that is made even more powerful by a cast of convincing characters. Sebold orchestrates a big finish, and though things tend to wrap up a little too well for everyone in the end, one can only imagine (or hope) that heaven is indeed a place filled with such happy endings. --Brad Thomas Parsons
Year: 2002
Category: First Novel
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Harry Potter: Book 3Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban
by J. K. Rowling
During his third year at Hogwarts School for Witchcraft and Wizardry, Harry Potter must confront the devious and dangerous wizard responsible for his parents' deaths.
Year: 1999
Category: Best Work for Young Readers
Rank: Winner
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The Green MileThe Green Mile
by Stephen King
Read this history-making serial novel -- from cliffhanger to cliffhanger -- in its entirety. When it first appeared, one volume per month, Stephen King's The Green Mile was an unprecedented publishing triumph: all six volumes ended up on the New York Times bestseller list -- simultaneously -- and delighted millions of fans the world over. 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.
Year: 1996
Category: Best Novel
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