2022 Bram Stoker Awards Winners—presented at StokerCon 2023
Celebrating great contributions from authors of horror and dark fantasy.
The Bram Stoker Awards honor horror fiction in several categories including Novel, Poetry Collection, Anthology, Graphic Novel, and more!
This year’s Bram Stoker Awards were presented by the Horror Writer’s Association (HWA) during StokerCon 2023, the annual convention for authors of the horror genre. Named in honor of the author of the classic horror novel Dracula, the Bram Stoker Awards are presented for superior writing in eleven categories in horror literature—including traditional fiction of various lengths, poetry, screenwriting, graphic novels, young adult, and non-fiction.
The HWA also presents an annual Lifetime Achievement Award to a living person who has made significant contributions to the writing of Horror and Dark Fantasy over the course of a lifetime.
Below, check out the the whole list of winners at this year’s event—and you can even watch the event video! Down the page, you can also find links to learn all the nominations as well.
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2022 Bram Stoker Awards Winners—presented at StokerCon 2023
Superior Achievement in a Novel
The Devil Takes You Home
Gabino Iglesias
(Mullholland Press)
The Devil Takes You Home is a panoramic odyssey for fans of S.A. Cosby’s southern noir Blacktop Wasteland, by way of the boundary-defying storytelling of Stephen Graham Jones and Silvia Moreno-Garcia.
From an award-winning author comes a genre-defying thriller about a father desperate to salvage what's left of his family—even if it means a descent into violence.
Buried in debt due to his young daughter’s illness, his marriage at the brink, Mario reluctantly takes a job as a hitman, surprising himself with his proclivity for violence. After tragedy destroys the life he knew, Mario agrees to one final job: hijack a cartel’s cash shipment before it reaches Mexico. Along with an old friend and a cartel-insider named Juanca, Mario sets off on the near-suicidal mission, which will leave him with either a cool $200,000 or a bullet in the skull. But the path to reward or ruin is never as straight as it seems.
As the three complicated men travel through the endless landscape of Texas, across the border and back, their hidden motivations are laid bare alongside nightmarish encounters that defy explanation. One thing is certain: even if Mario makes it out alive, he won’t return the same.
Superior Achievement in a First Novel
Beulah
Christi Nogle
(Cemetery Gates Media)
“Beulah was inspired by all the stories of haunted and weird houses that I’ve loved,” Nogle told Monster Complex. “It was also inspired by some of the places I lived and some of the wishes I had as a child, for example wishing to have siblings to share my life with.”
Beulah is the story of Georgie, an 18-year-old with a talent (or affliction) for seeing ghosts. Georgie and her family have had a hard time since her father died, but she and her mother Gina and sisters Tommy and Stevie are making a new start in the small town of Beulah, Idaho where Gina’s wealthy friend Ellen has set them up to help renovate an old stone schoolhouse.
Georgie experiences a variety of disturbances—the town is familiar from dreams and she seems to be experiencing her mother’s memory of the place, not to mention the creepy ghost in the schoolhouse basement—but she is able to maintain, in her own laconic way, until she notices that her little sister Stevie also has the gift. Stevie is in danger from a malevolent ghost, and Georgie tries to help, but soon Georgie is the one in danger.
Related: Q&A: Christi Nogle on BEULAH: “I am more scared by things when they aren’t fully lit or fully seen.”
Superior Achievement in a Middle Grade Novel
They Stole Our Hearts
Daniel Kraus
(Henry Holt and Co.)
The heart-pounding sequel to They Threw Us Away, about a group of teddy bears looking for a place to call home…and answers to life’s biggest questions.
The teddies—clever Buddy, brave Sunny, sweet Sugar, and wise Reginald—have managed to find a child. Life with Darling is far better than any they’ve known. But something's not right—the promised bliss of Forever Sleep hasn’t come. And they are kept a secret from Darling’s mother, hidden underneath the child’s bed in the dusty darkness.
Then the inevitable happens: Mama discovers the teddies. And like all adults they’ve met thus far, she responds with fear and anger. The teddies must watch as one of their friends is destroyed. The remaining trio barely escape, thrust back into a world that does not want them.
Disillusioned and lost, the teddies embark on a journey back to the factory where they were created. En route, they find a civilization of discarded teddy bears. The comfort of a town of teddies has its allure…but the need for answers weighs heavy. And there’s something definitely off about these new teddies. Will our heroes accept their strange rules? Or must they dig deep for one more grand adventure to finally learn why they were thrown away?
Superior Achievement in a Graphic Novel
Kolchak: The Night Stalker: 50th Anniversary
James Aquilone (editor)
(Moonstone Books)
This 100+ page, full-color graphic novel features 10 startling stories chronicling the adventures of monster-hunting reporter Carl Kolchak.
The comic book anthology Kolchak: The Night Stalker: 50th Anniversary celebrates the classic 1970s TV series. Edited by James Aquilone and featuring original stories by lots of writers—including David Avallone, Jonathan Maberry, Peter David, R.C. Matheson, Kim Newman, Gabriel Hardman, Steve Niles, Rodney Barnes, Tim Waggoner, James Aquilone, Nancy A. Collins, and James Chambers—Kolchak: The Night Stalker: 50th Anniversary features several brand-new stories for fans of the classic show.
“It seems the fandom for the character is stronger than ever,” remarked Aquilone. “I wanted to create something very special for the anniversary: a look at the life of my favorite monster hunter, from his childhood to his last case…the ultimate Kolchak story, full of creatures, frights, and the reporter’s iconic wit.”
Find Kolchak: The Night Stalker: 50th Anniversary at Monstrous Books
Related:
Superior Achievement in a Young Adult Novel
The Triangle
Robert P. Ottone
(Raven Tale Publishing)
The world, as we know it, is over. Sea level rise has all but finished off life on Earth.
Born with a gift for engineering and technology, Azlynn and her father Merrill spend their days running a small shop in the flotilla community of Coral Cove. They scavenge shipwrecks, sunken vessels, and what precious little remains of the world before the planet drowned. With her best friend Ellis, they do their best to support their community, while struggling to survive.
When a group of scouts sent by The Order, a mysterious and powerful northeastern cabal, goes missing in the nearby Bermuda Triangle, Merrill is tasked with finding them. Unbeknownst to him, Azlynn and Ellis have snuck aboard to join in on the mission to find out what lurks within The Triangle.
The ancient, cosmic truths they discover may be more terrifying than they ever imagined…
Superior Achievement in Long Fiction
“The Wehrwolf”
Alma Katsu
(Amazon Original Stories)
Alma Katsu, the visionary author of The Fervor, The Hunger, and The Deep, brings readers a terrifying short story about monsters among men—and the thin lines that divide them.
Germany, 1945. In the waning days of World War II, the Nazis have been all but defeated. Uwe Fuchs, never a fighter, feels fortunate to have avoided the front lines as he cared for his widowed mother.
But Uwe’s fortune changes when Hans Sauer, the village bully, recruits him to join a guerilla resistance unit preparing for the arrival of Allied soldiers. At first, Uwe is wary. The war is lost, and rumor has it that Hans is a deserter. But Hans entices him with talk of power, brutality, and their village’s ancestral lore: werewolves.
With some reluctance, Uwe joins up with the pack and soon witnesses their startling transformation. But when the men’s violent rampage against enemy soldiers takes a devastatingly personal turn, Uwe must grapple not only with his role in their evil acts but with his own humanity. Can he reclaim what this group of predatory men has stolen from him?
Or has he been a monster all along?
In her interview with Monster Complex, Katsu shared with us what she appreciates about horror fiction:
“Horror is very truthful. Terrible things happen in real life, things for which there is no rational explanation, and usually you just get a bunch of platitudes to try to ease the pain. Horror helps readers investigate that pain and hopefully learn something from it. It helps us face our fears.”
Related: Q&A: Alma Katsu on THE FERVOR: “Horror is very truthful. Terrible things happen in real life.”
Superior Achievement in Short Fiction
“Fracture” (from the anthology Mother: Tales of Love and Terror)
Mercedes M. Yardley
(Weird Little Worlds)
About the horror anthology Mother: Tales of Love and Terror
Mothers protect, nurture, love, and adore—but what if they are more than just their title? The collection Mother: Tales of Love and Terror includes 33 stories and poems that examine what motherhood is and explore mothers of all kinds. With more than 300 pages of horror, dark fantasy, science fiction, and poetry, readers will see the motivations and compulsions that make up a mother—both good and evil. Whether they are robot mothers, evil stepmothers, or sociopathic mothers-to-be, these stories illuminate what’s really going on inside of that woman we think we know so well—Mother…
This book also includes 14 brand-new art plates from award-winning illustrators around the world and an introduction by editors Willow Dawn Becker and Christi Nogle.
Superior Achievement in a Fiction Collection
Breakable Things
Cassandra Khaw
(Undertow Publications)
Cassandra Khaw’s dynamic and vibrant debut collection, Breakable Things, explores the fragile and nebulous bonds that weave love and grief into our existence. This exquisite and cutting collection of stories showcases a bloody fusion of horrors from cosmic to psychological to body traumas.
“Khaw packs a gruesome punch with the 23 bite-size horror stories ... the distinctive authorial voice and uncanny atmospherics will surely find some fans.” (Publishers Weekly)
“A remarkable collection of tales from one of the most versatile and vital voices of their generation. Horrifying and beautiful!” (Christopher Golden, author of Road of Bones)
Khaw talked to Nightfire about what influenced her horror style:
“When I was a lot younger, like under the age of 10, my parents used to insist that I watch horror movies with them. The Blob, John Carpenter’s The Thing, Critters, all that old-school goodness. They wouldn’t let me close my eyes through any of it. I still have nightmares about certain scenes from Freddy Kreuger. And I have this nagging suspicion that is precisely why I often veer towards such a gore-filled style; I’m still exorcising the images from when I was a kid.
“As for my voice, huh, that’s an interesting one. I don’t know, per se. There are a whole lot of possibilities here. I grew up in Malaysia and that was a country steeped in ghost stories, in legends about otherworldly things that might, because they felt like it, pop all the bones from your body and lay them neatly down beside your shrunken corpse, in the idea the dead were there, minding their own business, utterly disinterested in you except when they’re not, and god help you then. I suspect some of the musicality of my work comes from that because good ghost stories always have a certain bit of rhythm to them, you know?
I know John Hornor Jacobs’ Southern Gods cemented that: that book taught me to listen to the heartbeat of horror. Richard Kadrey’s Butcher Bird was another formative influence too, the Black Clerks in particular. I loved them. I love how calm, passive, and cordial they are, in stark contrast to what they did. I loved their bargains. The way it was all okay until it wasn’t.
And the work of the Pang brothers! All the Asian horror movies I’d watched as I got older! Shutter! The Eye! The comedic ones and the terrifying ones! Those all tie into my writing today, I think. They’re why my horror is rarely about triumph, no matter how grim, and more about surviving just one more day.”
Superior Achievement in a Screenplay (tie)
The Black Phone
Scott Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill
(Blumhouse Productions, Crooked Highway, Universal Pictures)
In this psychological thriller, a shy but clever 13-year-old boy named Finney Shaw is abducted by a sadistic killer and trapped in a soundproof basement where screaming is of little use. When a disconnected phone on the wall begins to ring, Finney discovers that he can hear the voices of the killer’s previous victims. And they are dead set on making sure that what happened to them doesn’t happen to Finney.
Find The Black Phone on Amazon
Stranger Things: Episode 04.01 “Chapter One: The Hellfire Club”
The Duffer Brothers
(21 Laps Entertainment, Monkey Massacre, Netflix, Upside Down Pictures)
The fourth season of the science fiction horror drama Netflix TV show Stranger Things is set in March 1986, eight months after the events of the third season. The season involves three plots: a series of mysterious teen murders haunts the town; Eleven goes to a secret facility in Nevada to regain her powers and must confront her past; at a Soviet prison camp, the inmates are forced to battle a Demogorgon.
Superior Achievement in a Poetry Collection
Crime Scene
Cynthia Pelayo
(Raw Dog Screaming Press)
Cynthia Pelayo sings a song for the least of us, the victim we want to forget as soon as possible, the one who disappeared before ever really appearing. With a fairy tale gaze and a heart bigger than the world, her siren song insinuates itself past our defenses, past the hardened calluses and apathy we’ve erected to protect ourselves from the everyday horror of another missing girl.
Pelayo relates the familiar story, poem by poem; a body is found, a brutal crime investigated, clues take us in circles, and lead us nowhere. We are on an epic journey, the hero’s journey, and it must play out to the end in all its painful, ticking moments.
Pelayo imbues her hero, Agent K, with the entirety of our dedication and that crumb of hope we’ve been hiding, saving for later. We will need to save for years, for decades, if we want to come out the other side. The job takes its toll, the answers are never complete and whys fracture, crack and spread. Still there is no turning away. We must bear witness, though it changes and contorts us.
Pelayo talked to Nightmare magazine about how her writing is influenced by how she grew up in ahouse that her parents said was haunted:
“Growing up, yes, there was curious activity in our house. We’d hear people running back and forth upstairs when there was no one there, the doors slamming, and when I asked my father about it, he told me not to talk about those things, that speaking of those things gives it power, whatever that “it” was. We did have an exorcism in the house, and there’s other strange activity that occurred there during my upbringing, but in my adulthood, I’ve tried replicating that. I’ve been unable to.
[snip]
“In terms of my relationship with writing horror, I suppose in a way many of my characters struggle with belief, or maybe they want to believe. They want to believe that there is something greater, that there is some grand answer to justify why all of these awful things happen. So I include the fantastical and the supernatural into my writing to serve as an answer for my characters.
“Yet, I wish I had an answer. I think ultimately, for me, there is no grand answer to life and why there’s so much evil. There is no simple solution. This is chaos, and we’re all just trying to hold on to something. We’re all just trying to make meaning of something, and that’s what that house where I grew up taught me.”
Superior Achievement in an Anthology
Screams from the Dark: 29 Tales of Monsters and the Monstrous
Ellen Datlow
(Tor Nightfire)
A bone-chilling anthology, Screams from the Dark contains 29 all-original tales about monsters.
From werewolves and vampires, to demons and aliens, the monster is one of the most recognizable figures in horror. But what makes something, or someone, monstrous? Award-winning and up-and-coming authors like Richard Kadrey, Cassandra Khaw, Indrapramit Das, Priya Sharma, and more attempt to answer this question.
These all-new stories range from traditional to modern, from mainstream to literary, from familiar monsters to the unknown … and unimaginable. This chilling collection has something to please—and terrify—everyone, so lock your doors, hide under your covers, and try not to scream.
Contributors include: Ian Rogers, Fran Wilde, Gemma Files, Daryl Gregory, Priya Sharma, Brian Hodge, Joyce Carol Oates, Indrapramit Das, Siobhan Carroll, Richard Kadrey, Norman Partridge, Garry Kilworth, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Chikodili Emelumadu, Glen Hirshberg, A.C. Wise, Stephen Graham Jones, Kaaron Warren, Livia Llewellyn, Carole Johnstone, Margo Lanagan, Joe R. Lansdale, Brian Evenson, Nathan Ballingrud, Cassandra Khaw, Laird Barron, Kristi DeMeester, Jeffrey Ford, and John Langan.
Find Screams from the Dark: 29 Tales of Monsters and the Monstrous on Amazon
Superior Achievement in Non-Fiction
Writing in the Dark: The Workbook
Tim Waggoner
(Guide Dog Books)
“Since horror is what I write the most—and because I’ve been a horror fan all my life,” Waggoner told Monster Complex, “I decided to write a how-to-write horror book sharing everything I’ve learned about writing in the genre throughout my career.”
Like Tim Waggoner’s Bram Stoker Award-winning Writing in the Dark, a manual for how to write horror fiction, this workbook covers a wide variety of topics, ranging from monster, idea, and plotline creation to avoiding clichés and developing the art of suspense.
The workbook, however, foregrounds practice over discussion to help writers master these concepts. Both texts stand on their own while working together to provide you with the direction and tools you need to maximize your own wealth of examples, exercises, and tutorials in Writing in the Dark: The Workbook are designed to inspire and stretch the imagination.
Waggoner draws from his own experiences in addition to other professional writers, among them Laird Barron, Maurice Broaddus, Nadia Bulkin, Ramsey Campbell, Mort Castle, Tananarive Due, Christopher Golden, Grady Hendrix, Daniel Kraus, Joe R. Lansdale, Elizabeth Massie, Graham Masterton, Seanan McGuire, John Shirley, and many an introduction by Michael A. Arnzen, Writing in the Dark: The Workbook will resonate with young authors who are just getting started on their careers as well as veterans of the horror genre and craft.
Superior Achievement in Short Non-Fiction
“I Don’t Read Horror (& Other Weird Tales)” (Interstellar Flight Magazine)
Lee Murray
(Interstellar Flight Press)
Lee Murray, Guest Editor of IFP’s Horror Novella Call, On Reading Horror
At its simplest, horror serves to elicit fear, mankind’s oldest and strongest emotion.
Interstellar Flight Magazine publishes essays on what’s new in the world of speculative genres. In the words of Ursula K. Le Guin, we need “writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope.”
More about the Bram Stoker Awards
Watch the 2022 Bram Stoker Awards Ceremony | HorrorWriters
Streamed live Jun 17, 2023, this video shows the awards being presented at StokerCon 2023 in Pittsburgh. The event was hosted by Kevin Wetmore Jr., and welcomed keynote speaker Lisa Morton.
About the Horror Writers Association
A nonprofit organization of writers and publishing professionals around the world, the Horror Writers Association is dedicated to promoting dark literature and the interests of those who write it.
HWA was formed in the late 1980s with the help of many of the field’s greats, including Dean Koontz, Robert McCammon, and Joe Lansdale. Now with members from countries all around the world, it is the oldest and most respected professional organization for the much-loved writers who have given readers the most enjoyable sleepless nights of their lives.
One of HWA’s missions is to encourage public interest in and foster an appreciation of good Horror and Dark Fantasy literature. HWA is also dedicated to recognizing and promoting diversity in the horror genre, and practices a strict anti-harassment policy at all of its events.
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