Jared Sandman

SPOILERS AHEAD

Graham Masterton has stated in interviews that he wrote The Manitou, his first novel, in a feverish five-day writing sprint.  Most times when authors rush through a rough draft, it shows in the final product.  Readers may not be able to tell when a novel was written in less than a month, but other writers certainly can.  I must admit, however, that The Manitou doesn’t feel hurried.  That’s a rare feat, indeed.

Anyone who’s read my books can attest that I’m a fan of world mythologies, and I often try to weave other cultures’ monsters and legends into my own stories.  Masterton has been doing this since the 1970s; frankly, no horror writer does it better.  The Manitou reads as a blend between Neil Gaiman’s American Gods and HP Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos.

A woman named Karen Tandy consults her physician about a strange growth on the back of her neck.  When her doctors are stumped, she turns to the narrator, Harry Erskine, a pseudo-psychic who’s more adept at scamming old women out of their money than contacting the dead.  Harry eventually gets a “real” medium involved, and they realize the growth that’s quickly draining the life out of Karen is in fact a growing fetus.  More than that, it’s the reincarnation of a powerful Native American shaman named Misquamacus (“Gesundheit!”).  The Indian seeks revenge against the White Man and will stop at nothing to achieve victory.  Harry teams up with a contemporary shaman, Singing Rock, and the two men battle Misquamacus and the hellish creatures he summons, the Great Old Ones.

The book was turned into a fairly decent movie in 1978, starring Tony Curtis.  I saw it years ago, and by today’s standards it comes off a little hokey.  That’s to be expected.  In my opinion the book’s best sequence revolves around Misquamacus’ “birth” scene.  It’s a seriously disgusting highlight, and one that reminded me of Edward Lucas White’s classic short story, “Lukundoo.”

One glaring logical fallacy involves Misquamacus’ motives.  When he sees the first Dutch ships land on American shores in 1650, he’s so frightened by the White Man that he uses magic to send himself 300+ years into the future to exact his revenge.  He jumps from the seventeenth century straight to the twentieth, skipping over the whole eighteenth and nineteenth centuries — the time period when Native Americans really were conquered and oppressed.  How much more pissed would Misquamacus have been had he actually seen the Indians’ mistreatment?

Masterton is one of my favorite authors, and this novel is the one for which he’s best known.  He’s revisited the Manitou universe in several other books, most recently in Blind Panic.  The Manitou is very entertaining, and lives up to the lofty reputation it enjoys.

My Rating:

This book is AWESOME

SPOILERS AHEAD

Jaws is a great movie, a true cinematic classic.  The book?  Not so much.  Think back to the first time you saw the film.  Picture the best moments, the most quotable lines, the scariest scenes.  Now strip them all away and pretend they never happened.  What’s left?  One boring-ass book by Peter Benchley.

Benchley co-wrote the screenplay with Carl Gottlieb — the two never working directly together — with additional script doctors doing uncredited work on the project as well.  These other writers deserve recognition for elevating the premise-driven notion of a shark terrorizing summer beachgoers into a true study of terror.  Sure, Benchley created the characters of Martin Brody and Quint, but the screenplay really breathed life into them.  Quint’s whole backstory as a survivor of the USS Indianapolis wasn’t in the book, for example.  And Benchley has the shark slowly drown in the novel, while in the movie it’s blown to pieces.  One of those death scenes is way cooler than the other.

The movie’s better than the book in every way.  The 300-page story only gets interesting once Quint’s introduced, 80 pages from the end, and the main characters actually start hunting for the great white shark.  The other 200+ pages are interminable, padded by unnecessary subplots that involve Brody’s wife having an affair and the town mayor getting in over his head with the mob.  The novel is broken up into three main sections.  Benchley could’ve excised the whole second part and not hurt the overall plot.

The movie had a long-lasting impact on the environment itself.  Imbued with a newfound fear of sharks, people started killing the animals in mass.  Ironically, Benchley spent the rest of his life advocating for marine conservation, especially protection for sharks.  First he got folks terrified of the predators, then he tried to teach us that sharks aren’t really mindless killing machines that attack people out of malice.  By then the damage was already done.

I’m trying to think of something I liked about the book, and I’m coming up empty.  It strings you along, promising drama and terror on which it never delivers.  Don’t bother with this one, ladies and gentlemen.  It suuuucks.

My Rating

This book is BULLSHIT

SPOILERS AHEAD

Invasion of the Body Snatchers has been filmed several times:  first in 1956, again in 1978, once more in 1993 and most recently in 2007.  It’s one of those rare archetypal plots that each generation remakes to reflect the issues of their particular era.  Of all the novels I read to review, Jack Finney’s book was the oldest, originally published in 1954.  At that time, the height of the Red Scare, the story of insidious suburban infiltration by Outsiders resonated with American readers.  If your closest neighbors, friends or family members could be secret Commie spies, why not go one step further and consider them extraterrestrials bent on world domination?

The plot focuses on a small town doctor, Miles Bennell, and his high school sweetheart, Becky.  Townspeople start coming to Dr. Bennell in droves, each convinced that their loved ones have been replaced by near-perfect clones.  He refers them to a psychiatrist friend of his, certain he’s dealing with a rare case of mass hysteria.  After discovering one of the “pod people” in another friend’s basement, Miles realizes the truth is far stranger.  Over the next couple of days, the aliens take control of the town then instigate a hunting party to track down Miles and his allies.  Miles and Becky run for their lives, eventually hatching a plan to defeat the oppressors.

This book has some issues, chief among them the characters themselves.  Oftentimes they act on nothing more than lucky guesses or hunches (which miraculously always pay off), and they’re able to craft complex theories based on flimsy data.  Most of the actions they take seem more out of authorial convenience than anything else.  They don’t react the way “real” folks would in a given situation, which makes them feel like pod people from the first page.  At one point the characters pack up and flee town . . . only to spend the night in a motel and head back home the next morning (?!).

I give Finney props for building suspense, especially in the second half of the book.  He does a great job instilling a sense of claustrophobia and inevitability that the protagonists aren’t going to win.  Because the aliens can only assimilate your body when you’re asleep, there’s no fighting against them.  Everyone has to sleep sometime, which only adds to the impending doom.

One annoying habit I noticed was Finney’s apparent eye fetish.  All his characters say things, “with happy eyes” or “with dancing eyes.”  Always with the eyes, over and over.  Find some new shtick, Finney.

I thought the ending was a tad expedient as well.  After realizing humanity will put up a fight, the aliens leave Earth.  They just leave.  Float up into the sky and take their leave.  What the hell? Even the total copout ending for War of the Worlds had some kind of rational, scientific basis.  It wasn’t good, but at least it made sense.

My Rating:

This book is MEH

Last weekend the Shirley Jackson Awards were handed out at Readercon 24.  Congratulations to all the winners and nominees.  (List taken from their website.)

NOVEL

Winner: Edge, Koji Suzuki (Vertical, Inc.)

Finalists:

• The Drowning Girl, Caitlín R. Kiernan (ROC)
• The Devil in Silver, Victor LaValle (Spiegel & Grau)
• Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn (Crown Publishers)
• Immobility, Brian Evenson (Tor)

NOVELLA

Winner: “Sky,” Kaaron Warren (Through Splintered Walls, Twelfth Planet Press)

Finalists:

• 28 Teeth of Rage, Ennis Drake (Omnium Gatherum Media)
• Delphine Dodd, S.P. Miskowski (Omnium Gatherum Media)
• I’m Not Sam, Jack Ketchum and Lucky McKee (Sinister Grin Press/ Cemetery Dance Publications)
• The Indifference Engine, Project Itoh (Haikasoru/VIZ Media LLC)

NOVELETTE

Winner: “Reeling for the Empire,” Karen Russell (Tin House, Winter 2012)

Finalists:

• “The Crying Child,” Bruce McAllister (originally “The Bleeding Child,” Cemetery Dance #68)
• “The House on Ashley Avenue,” Ian Rogers (Every House is Haunted, ChiZine Publications)
• “Wild Acre,” Nathan Ballingrud (Visions Fading Fast, Pendragon Press)
• “The Wish Head,” Jeffrey Ford (Crackpot Palace, William Morrow)

SHORT FICTION

Winner: “A Natural History of Autumn,” Jeffrey Ford (Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, July/August 2012)

Finalists:

• “Bajazzle,” Margo Lanagan (Cracklescape, Twelfth Planet Press)
• “How We Escaped Our Certain Fate,” Dan Chaon (21^st Century Dead, St. Martin’s)
• “Little America,” Dan Chaon (Shadow Show: All New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury, William Morrow)
• “The Magician’s Apprentice,” Tamsyn Muir (Weird Tales #359)
• “Two Houses,” Kelly Link (Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury, William Morrow)

SINGLE-AUTHOR COLLECTION

Winner: Crackpot Palace, Jeffrey Ford (William Morrow)

Finalists:

• Errantry, Elizabeth Hand (Small Beer Press)
• The Pottawatomie Giant and Other Stories, Andy Duncan (PS Publishing)
• Remember Why You Fear Me, Robert Shearman (ChiZine Publications)
• The Woman Who Married a Cloud, Jonathan Carroll (Subterranean Press)
• Windeye, Brian Evenson (Coffee House Press)

EDITED ANTHOLOGY

Winner: Exotic Gothic 4: Postscripts #28/29, edited by Danel Olson (PS Publishing)

Finalists:

• 21^st Century Dead, edited by Christopher Golden (St. Martin’s)
• Black Wings II, edited by S. T. Joshi (PS Publishing)
• Night Shadows, edited by Greg Herren and J. M. Redmann (Bold Strokes Books)
• Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury, edited by Sam Weller and Mort Castle (William Morrow)

SPOILERS AHEAD

Live Girls is the only novel from my reading list that hasn’t been turned into a movie.  Hollywood, what are you waiting for?  There are enough terrible vampire-stripper movies on Netflix to choke a nosferatu, so it’s about time to do it right and make a good one.  You couldn’t ask for better source material than Live Girls.

The setup in a nutshell:  The main character, Davey, lives in New York City and works a dead-end job at a magazine.  His loses a vital promotion to a business rival, and then his girlfriend dumps him.  He goes for a soul-searching walk to Time’s Square, where he wanders into a strip club called Live Girls.  (Keep in mind this was Time’s Square back in the 1980s.  That strip club is probably a Starbucks now.  Or the Disney Store.)  There he meets an alluring woman called Anya, who seduces him and eventually turns him into a vampire.

The rest of the book follows Davey’s exploits as he navigates life as one of the living dead.  Along the way he meets a former reporter from The New York Times, Benedek, who’s working on a story about the peculiar goings-on at Time’s Square.  When the owner of Live Girls, the mysterious Shideh, abducts Davey’s would-be new girlfriend, Casey, Davey is forced to attack the club, save the girl he loves and fight off a horde of angry vampires . . . not to mention even worse creatures that dwell in the basement.

Yes, the book is as cool as it sounds.  It reads like a mash up between Fright Night and From Dusk Till Dawn, with a splash of “Murgunstrumm” thrown in for good measure.  It maintains a high body count, especially once Davey gets ahold on his new powers and starts exacting revenge against those who’ve wronged him.  One clever bit I liked involved what happens to vampires who feast on the blood of junkies.  The side effects aren’t pretty, and speak once again to the drug epidemic of the ‘80s.

My only objection with the book dealt with its treatment of Anya.  She’s a critical character in the story, because she’s the one who changes Davey’s life and ushers him into the world of the undead.  He’s totally enamored with this enchanting siren for the first half of the book, yet Anya suddenly drops out of the story and doesn’t surface again until the climax.  It felt like a jarring omission.  Shideh and Anya could’ve been the same person, and it wouldn’t have substantially affected the plot.  Despite Anya being treated as an afterthought, there’s an implication (never directly stated) that she escaped Live Girls during Davey’s final siege.  I know Garton has published a sequel called Night Life, so perhaps he was saving Anya’s story for another book.  That’s my hope anyway.

Overall, Live Girls is a treat.  I don’t read a lot of vampire fiction because it’s largely derivative, but Garton found a fresh twist on an old tale.  Based on my thorough enjoyment of this novel, I’ll certainly pick up Night Life in the future.

My Rating:

This book is AWESOME

SPOILERS AHEAD

Carrie is Stephen King’s first published novel, but not the first he wrote.  Counting unpublished work (at the time), it would’ve been his fourth overall.  Those others — what became known as the Bachman books — were trunk novels, and Carrie deserved to be trunked alongside them.  ‘Salem’s Lot should’ve been King’s first published book, as it’s miles ahead of Carrie in terms of storytelling and assurance of voice.  I won’t rehash the plot for you, as I’m sure you’re familiar with it:  girl with telekinesis, locker room period, prom night bloodbath, et cetera.

Had Carrie been published today, no doubt it would’ve been released as a YA book rather than an adult novel.  Editors would have made King tone it down, and I’m not sure it would have had the same impact on popular culture that it currently enjoys (thanks in large part to Brian De Palma’s classic movie).  Carrie is actually a novella that’s been padded to novel length by supplemental material like “non-fiction” book snippets and newspaper clippings that frame the story of Carrie White.  These numerous excerpts don’t add to the plot; in fact, they detract from the story’s momentum.

King did a fabulous job building reader sympathy for poor Carrie.  Everybody knows someone like Carrie from high school (or perhaps the male equivalent of Carrie).  The frumpy, the awkward, the chubby or generally dispossessed.  He gets the reader on Carrie’s side, based on her mistreatment by the other students at school, plus the emotional and psychological abuse she suffers at home from her religious zealot of a mother.  Margaret White is frightened of her daughter and believes the girl’s telekinetic powers come from the devil.  As such, she treats Carrie much like a leper and tries in vain to pray the evil out of her little girl.

My favorite scene comes when Carrie puts on her prom dress for the first time.  She cannot afford to buy a fancy outfit, so she uses her considerable skills as a seamstress to make her own dress.  Once her mother sees the finished costume, she starts calling Carrie a harlot.  Carrie takes this outburst in stride, even uses her mind powers to gently sweep her ranting mother out the door.  Carrie’s not gonna let the haters bring her down, not that night.

Except they do – in spectacular fashion.  And there’s hell to pay.

One writing quirk that struck me is King’s use of similes.  He has a knack for finding the right comparison or turn of phrase needed to bring a sentence alive.  To see it on display at so young an age — King was 25 or 26 when he wrote Carrie — took me by surprise.  At one point he describes tiles pinging off a roof “like startled pigeons.”  Perfect.  Just perfect.  King’s ability to conjure sublime figures of speech can be matched only by Joe Lansdale.

On the other hand, King also has an aggravating tendency to employ run-on parentheticals for internal dialogue.  Characters’ thoughts often break into the narrative itself, interrupting individual sentences.  He used this technique a lot in his early career but doesn’t rely on it so much anymore, preferring instead to italicize internal dialogue.

Another oddity I noticed is how many times men slap women in the story.  Seems every time something frightening happens, a woman gets all hysterical and a man has to smack some sense into her, 1940s-style.  I’ve never seen a female react like that in real life.  By the end of the book it becomes almost comical.  If you haven’t read the novel before, count how many times this happens.  You could make a drinking game out of it.

Carrie is a proper revenge fantasy, and the final act of the story is one prolonged retaliation sequence.  When Carrie finally decides to fight back against her bullies, all hell breaks loose.  She punishes not only her classmates at the prom, but the whole town of Chamberlain.  The body count is tremendous, several hundred die in the ensuing chaos, and Carrie herself takes a personal toll.

I feel about Carrie the same way I feel about another of King’s novels, Misery.  If Carrie had remained a novella, I think it would’ve had greater impact.  Of course it likely never would’ve been published at that length, so perhaps not.

My Rating:

This book is MEH

SPOILERS AHEAD

This isn’t my first Jack Ketchum book.  I’ve read Off Season, Right to Life, Red and a couple others, so I know to expect a story from Ketchum that’s gut-wrenching and grim.  The Girl Next Door certainly fits the bill, probably the bleakest of the novels I read last week.  I saw the movie when it came out a few years back — complete with Ketchum cameo as a carny — so I was already familiar with the plot.  A faithful adaptation of the novel, it was very good for a low-budget indie flick.

Quick synopsis:  A young woman is tormented by neighborhood boys in 1950s suburbia.  Teenage Meg and her younger sister Susan move in to the Chandler household after their parents die in a car crash.  Single mother Ruth Chandler has three sons of her own, so she considers the girls an additional burden.  Meg quickly forms a friendship with the boy next door (the book’s narrator), Davey.  Over the course of a summer, the Chandlers’ disregard for the girls escalates from neglect to full-blown abuse.  Eventually Meg is chained up in the basement, beaten for entertainment and left to starve (and worse) while all the neighborhood kids watch out of twisted fascination.  Ruth Chandler even urges them to join in and use Meg to act out their sickest fantasies.

Ketchum writes in the afterword that the novel is based loosely on real-life events that happened in 1965.  I don’t find that hard to believe, especially after recent news out of Cleveland involving the abduction and torture of three young women over a decade.  Truth is always stranger than fiction.

If Lord of the Flies portrays what happens to children free of adult supervision, The Girl Next Door depicts what happens when kids are encouraged by a parental figure to act like animals.  The main character, Davey, never directly participates in Meg’s exploitation, though he’s well aware of what’s going on next door.  It takes him two months to grow a conscience (finally!) before he resolves to help Meg and Susan escape their captors.  Sadly, that escape attempt doesn’t go as planned, which leads to the most depressing ending since John Fowles’ The Collector.

Ketchum gets the reader invested in Meg and Davey’s blossoming relationship, and he takes great care to make Meg a three dimensional person, not merely an object of desire that the other boys see.  We like Meg; we root for Meg; we want to see her triumph over her kidnappers . . . and then turn on them with suitable retribution.  This never happens, which leaves readers in the lurch.  What’s a revenge fantasy without the vengeance?  If you want to see that, pick up Dean Koontz’s Intensity.

I have two minor quibbles with the story itself.  First is with Meg’s sister Susan.  The girl is underutilized, used only as leverage against Meg.  For example, if Meg refuses her cruel treatment, punishment will befall Susan.  This forces Meg to endure the most atrocious behavior out of love for her sibling.  Susan, however, is never brought to life as her own character.

The other issue I have is a bit broader.  The book is told from Davey’s point of view, much later in his life as he looks back at the terrible events from the summer of 1958.  This gives him time to reflect on the choices he made, and for him to realize what monsters they were as children.  He knows he should’ve acted sooner to help Meg.  This is the only right way to tell the story; otherwise, the reader would have zero sympathy for Davey.  No, my objection comes when young Davey finally decides to help Meg.  He has a guilt dream about Meg that almost (but not quite) makes him tell his parents about what’s happening at the Chandler house.  This is the moment when our protagonist — I won’t use the word hero, because there are no heroes in his book — goes from reactive to proactive.  This is a big deal, big enough that a mere nightmare doesn’t do it justice.  I would’ve liked to see some more dramatic event impel Davey into action:  having the other kids force him to hurt Meg, for instance.

Nitpickings aside, this was a great book.  It’s an emotionally draining read, and afterward makes you feel like you’ve just run the gauntlet of a street gang.

My Rating:

This Book is AWESOME

After reading about 2,100 pages over the past week, I’m getting my thoughts in order and have started formulating individual reviews.  I don’t use a rating system for books; instead I categorize them by how they made me feel when I finished them.  My personal barometer looks like this:

Awesome – I loved the book and will harangue others into reading it.

Meh – I finished it with a shrug.  Others might like it, but it wasn’t for me.

Bullshit – Didn’t care for the book at all, had major issues with either the plot or the writing itself.

*             *             *             *

SPOILERS AHEAD

Let’s start with the obvious:   The Exorcist movie is better than the book.  Way better.  The strange thing is that Blatty wrote them both.  Hell, the author won an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay based on his own novel.  A few years ago Blatty re-released the book for its fortieth anniversary and took the opportunity to polish it up and make some small fixes that had bothered him.  I read the original version from the 1970s, so I cannot speak to how the versions differ.  If anyone’s compared and contrasted the two narratives, I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comment section.

My issues with the story stem from dual sources:  too many characters don’t add value to the plot, and too much action takes place “off screen.”  The main characters are Chris MacNeil, a movie star, and her 11-year-old daughter Regan, neither of whom is particularly endearing.  In fact the girl is a tad annoying and never quite comes together as her own person, rather remains defined by her mother (and later by the demon Pazuzu).  Regan is only treated as Chris MacNeil’s kid, daughter of a famous actress.

Chris is far too narcissistic for us to be emotionally invested in her plight.  Long after her daughter exhibits signs of severe physical and psychological distress, Chris is still debating whether to take Regan to the hospital or accept a movie gig in Europe.  Seriously?  What sort of mother would vacillate like that?  Besides a bad one, I mean.

Beyond that the story’s padded unnecessarily by other characters and subplots that water down the urgency of the main narrative.  We don’t care about Chris’ drunk director boss, or the two housekeepers, or Chris’ personal secretary, or that bumbling detective Kinderman who can’t keep his mouth shut.

The only other people who matter are Father Karras, the young psychiatrist-priest who’s lost his faith, and Father Merrin, the experienced priest who once fought the same demon that’s possessed Regan.  A lot of people claim Karras is the titular exorcist; I believe the title refers to Merrin, because during the scenes of exorcism at the end of the book Blatty differentiates between the two priests as “the exorcist and the psychiatrist.”  Your interpretation may differ, and I could be mistaken.  Merrin himself is only utilized for about thirty pages, a shame since he’s the most interesting character in the story.

The narrative itself could’ve been much more dynamic.  Too many of the pivotal scenes take place out of sight, and none is told from Regan’s point of view.  Two of the most important sequences in the entire book are off limits to the reader.  During the exorcism, for instance, Merrin tells Karras to leave him alone with the demon; when Karras returns later, Merrin’s dead beside Regan’s bed.

Are you kidding me? I sat through almost 400 pages to get to the exorcism, the point of the whole damn book, and we don’t even get to see Merrin and the demon fight to the death?  By this point Blatty’s lost my trust as a storyteller (the kiss of death for any writer).

Then Blatty slings that same weak shit again after Karras takes up the fight against Pazuzu.  The story cuts to the other characters listening downstairs to the sounds of struggle in Regan’s bedroom.  Then they hear the CRASH of a windowpane and look outside to find Karras’ mangled body on the steps below.

Really? I wanted to hurl the book across the room.  That’s six hours of my life I can’t get back.

Add to this Blatty’s weird use of language at times.  For example, at one point he has a character set down a vase or something “on a table the color of sadness.”  What color is sadness, exactly?  Is it like a tartan?  For that matter, how does a rainbow taste?  Regular readers may not notice quirks like this, but for any writer it’s like a thumb in the eye.

I feel Blatty used the screenplay to take another crack at the story, this time more successfully.  He cut out the boring parts, streamlined the cast of characters and made the remaining scenes more dramatic.  The issues I have with the book simply aren’t in the film.  Do yourself a favor – skip the book and pop in the DVD instead.

My Rating:

This book is BULLSHIT

Normally I don’t write book reviews, because they’re as plentiful as weeds and just as useful.  Check out my profile on Goodreads to view the handful of “reviews” I’ve done in the past.  You’ll notice I don’t comment on books I didn’t like, mostly because I tend not to finish those that didn’t resonate with me.

Last week I sifted through my to-be-read pile and realized there were several titles present that I should have read by now.  We all have those type of books, the “classics” you promised yourself to get around to one day and never have.  (For me, Ghost Story, Dracula and Rosemary’s Baby are still on that mental checklist.)  I set out to remedy that situation, so I pulled seven classic horror novels from the stack and have read one per day for the past week.

Every day I’ll write up a new review of each novel, warts and all.  If you’re looking for an in-depth critique, you’re better served elsewhere.  These are more my impressions, the stream-of-conscious thoughts I jotted down while reading the stories:  the things that struck me hardest, either as a reader or as a writer.  My criteria for choosing is that each book had to be short enough to read in a day — so no hernia-inducers like The Stand — only one book per author and preferably something scary.

I had a similar list when I was in junior high school; back then the classics included Psycho, I Am Legend, The Haunting of Hill House and Something Wicked This Way Comes, among others.  I went about tracking down each novel as though it was a scavenger hunt, and I greedily devoured them all.  It’s actually a fun exercise that I recommend to everyone.  At the very least it’s a great way to knock down your TBR pile to a manageable size.

Find out which ones left me saying, “This book is AWESOME!” and which ones made me shout, “This book is BULLSHIT!”  Feel free to add your own remarks about the books, or to admit which classic horror novels you’ve neglected so far.

Here’s my final list; reviews are forthcoming later this week.

The Exorcist – William Peter Blatty

The Girl Next Door – Jack Ketchum

Carrie – Stephen King

Jaws – Peter Benchley

Live Girls – Ray Garton

The Manitou – Graham Masterton

Invasion of the Body Snatchers – Jack Finney

The Bram Stoker Awards were handed out a couple of weeks back, at the World Horror Convention in New Orleans.  Congratulations to all the winners.  (List taken from SF Signal.)  In addition Robert McCammon and Clive Barker were honored with the Lifetime Achievement Awards given out by the HWA.

• Superior Achievement in a NOVEL: The Drowning Girl by Caitlín R. Kiernan
• Superior Achievement in a FIRST NOVEL: Life Rage by L.L. Soares
• Superior Achievement in a YOUNG ADULT NOVEL: Flesh & Bone by Jonathan Maberry
• Superior Achievement in a GRAPHIC NOVEL: Witch Hunts: A Graphic History of the Burning Timesby Rocky Wood and Lisa Morton
• Superior Achievement in LONG FICTION: The Blue Heron by Gene O’Neill
• Superior Achievement in SHORT FICTION: Magdala Amygdala? by Lucy Snyder
• Superior Achievement in a SCREENPLAY: The Cabin in the Woods by Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard
• Superior Achievement in an ANTHOLOGY: Shadow Show edited by Mort Castle and Sam Weller
• Superior Achievement in a FICTION COLLECTION (tie):
  • New Moon on the Water by Mort Castle
  • Black Dahlia and White Rose: Stories by Joyce Carol Oates
• Superior Achievement in NON-FICTION: Trick or Treat: A History of Halloween by Lisa Morton
• Superior Achievement in a POETRY COLLECTIONL Vampires, Zombies & Wanton Souls by Marge Simon