The 2016 Bram Stoker Awards® Preliminary Ballot Announced

The Horror Writers Association (HWA) is pleased to announce the Preliminary Ballots for the 2016 Bram Stoker Awards®. The HWA (see www.horror.org ) is the premier writers organization in the horror and dark fiction genre, with over 1,300 members. We have presented the Bram Stoker Awards in various categories since 1987 (see https://horror.org/awards/stokers.htm ) The HWA Board and the Bram Stoker Awards® Committee congratulate all those appearing on these Preliminary Ballots. Notes about the voting process will appear after the ballot listing. 2016 Bram Stoker Awards® Preliminary Ballot    Superior Achievement in a Novel Fenn, J. Lincoln – Dead Souls…

January 2017 The Seers Table and changes to Diverse Works Inclusion Committee

Before we dive into this month's column, we're pleased to announce that Andrew Wolter, Lauren Candia and Michael Gonzales recently joined the Diverse Works Inclusion Committee. We'd also like to bid a fond farewell to exiting committee members Tom Calen and Ari Drew - we thank them for their invaluable service, and we also extend gratitude to our newest DWIC members for stepping up. The Seers Table! Kate Maruyama, Diverse Works Inclusion Committee Member Happy New Year! One of my New Year’s resolutions is to step outside my reading comfort zones (I tend to go to the same authors over…

2016 Bram Stoker Awards Timeline

The Bram Stoker Awards® Please note the Preliminary Ballot for the 2016 Bram Stoker Awards will be announced on January 20, 2017. The main timeline is as follows: January 15: The Bram Stoker Awards Recommendation Sheet (https://horror.org/private/stokers/2016recs.php) closed to new Recommendations at midnight U.S. Pacific Time (Recs will not be accepted after this time). On the 17th, the Juries will forward their Submission choices to the Bram Stoker Awards Committee Co-Chairs. January 20: Announcement of Bram Stoker Awards Preliminary Ballots – announced on the HWA website, via Special IM, and on the HWA Facebook page. In accordance with Rule VIIi…
2016 Lifetime Achievement Award Committee Appointed

2016 Lifetime Achievement Award Committee Appointed

In accordance with the rules regarding the Lifetime Achievement Award (LAA) process, HWA President Lisa Morton has appointed the 2016 LAA Committee: Ramsey Campbell Erinn Kemper Monica Kuebler John Little (chair) Joseph Nassise The Committee will immediately begin discussions to determine 2016's recipient(s). If you would like to suggest someone for consideration to receive the 2016 LAA, please first review the rules and list of former winners. When you are sure your suggested recipient meets the requirements and has not previously received the LAA, please contact Committee chair John Little at john.little@telus.net (please note "LAA Suggestion" in your subject line).

An Interview with Vincenzo Bilof

From Detroit, Michigan, Vincenzo Bilof has been called “The Metallica of Poetry” and “The Shakespeare of Gore.” With a body of work that includes gritty, apocalyptic horror (The Zombie Ascension Series), surrealist prose (The Horror Show), and visceral genre satire (Vampire Strippers from Saturn), Bilof’s fiction remains as divisive and controversial as it is original. He likes to think Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and Charles Baudelaire would be proud of his work. More likely, Ed Wood would have been his biggest fan. HWA: Where did the concept/inspiration for 'Visions of a Tremulous Man' originate? VB: No matter how I answer…

Horror Writers Association Poetry Page Holiday Shopping Guide 2016

This year has seen a number of excellent poetry collections released by HWA members. To help those wondering what to buy for gift giving, the HWA Poetry Page is please to share a handy shopping guide with you. To start, 2016 saw the release of the third volume of the HWA Poetry Showcase. Edited by David E. Cowen (more on him later), the third volume is the first to be available as an electronic chapbook and also in paperback!   Volume I and Volume II also make great holiday gifts!!     David E. Cowen released The Seven Yards Of…

The Seers Table – December 2016

The Seers Table! Kate Jonez, Member of the Diverse Works Inclusion Community As we brace ourselves to face the approaching cold season we need to support and celebrate diverse authors more than ever before. Please enjoy these recommendations from The Seers’ Table. Linda Addison recommends: Tonya Liburd is a multi-talented writer to keep an eye on, her fiction has been long listed in the 2015 Carter V. Cooper (Vanderbilt) Exile Short Fiction Competition. She shares a birthday with Simeon Daniel and Ray Bradbury, which may tell you a little something about her. Her passions are music (someday!) and of course,…

Members New Releases 2017

Welcome to the showcase of member publications! Select a book cover to purchase or learn more about it or the author. You can view the wall of amazing cover art from past years by using the dropdown in the menu above. And members, please sign into the members-only area to submit upcoming releases. Thank you!

HWA Announces Contents of Its Next Anthology, HALLOWS’ EVE

An exciting line-up of bestselling and critically-acclaimed authors will share the table of contents with some of the horror genre’s best new voices in the Horror Writers Association’s next anthology, Hallows’ Eve. Co-edited by Ellen Datlow, past winner of HWA’s Lifetime Achievement Award, and Lisa Morton, one of the world’s leading authorities on Halloween, Hallows’ Eve presents sixteen never-before-published tales that explore every aspect of the darkest holiday. In addition to stories about scheming jack-o’-lanterns, vengeful ghosts, otherworldly changelings, masks that cover terrifying faces, murderous urban legends, parties gone bad, cult Halloween movies, and even trick or treating in the…

The Seers’ Table November 2016

The Seers Table! Janet Holden, Member of the Diverse Works Inclusion Community Autumn is upon us and the nights are growing darker. All the more reason to crack open a good book and read by the fire. Here are our suggestions for this month: Kate Maruyama recommends: Nisi Shawl is an African-American writer, editor, and journalist. She is best known as an author of science fiction and fantasy short stories, but her fantastic fiction enters that horror zone in the spirit of Octavia Butler and reflects real-world diversity of gender, sexual orientation, race, colonialism, physical ability, age, and other sociocultural…

Happy Halloween from HWA!

Happy Halloween from the Horror Writers Association (HWA)! As horror writers, of course we treasure Halloween, but we also understand the concerns of some educators in regards to the holiday. Halloween has a rich history that goes back over a thousand years, encompassing elements of folklore, literature, sociology, and pop culture. In the 21st century it is celebrated as a secular festival with playful costumes, parties, and fictitious scares. We urge educators to consider Halloween's literary and historical side; it's a perfect time to interest students in such classics as: "The Black Cat" by Edgar Allan Poe "Young Goodman Brown"…
Halloween Haunts: A Condemned Man, A Halloween Memory by Steve Rasnic Tem

Halloween Haunts: A Condemned Man, A Halloween Memory by Steve Rasnic Tem

Back then, for me, it was all about masks. For Halloween, sure, but I'm also talking about day-to-day.  This all started with the perception that people seldom said what they really felt about anything.  I wasn't sure why, but apparently there was something impolite about frankness, and politeness was something we took pretty seriously in my part of the South.  The only person I knew whose face invariably expressed whatever passed through his head was the town's developmentally disabled fellow who sat on a bench by the drugstore when he wasn't out with his burlap sack collecting roadside treasures.  Whether he…
Halloween Haunts: Halloween Defines Fall, At Least for Me By John F.D. Taff

Halloween Haunts: Halloween Defines Fall, At Least for Me By John F.D. Taff

I have found, in 25 years of fiction writing now, that the surest way to a feeling of verisimilitude in a story is to process the experiences in my life and put them down on paper.  I refer to this process as strip-mining my childhood, and so far, it's been very good to me. Not only has this practice helped me to work my way through past experiences, both good bad, it has also lent an air of reality to a lot of the scenes I have written.  Write what you know is, perhaps, the oldest saw in the art…
Halloween Haunts: Emotional Realism in Extreme Horror Fiction by Nicole Cushing

Halloween Haunts: Emotional Realism in Extreme Horror Fiction by Nicole Cushing

  First things first: let’s acknowledge the elephant in the room. Extreme horror fiction hasn’t always enjoyed the best reputation. Despite the commercial success of books like Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho and Jack Ketchum’s The Girl Next Door, the field is often seen as only catering to a niche audience. Despite a pedigree that arguably extends at least as far back as the Marquis de Sade, the field is often seen as a playground for recent generations of subliterate hacks. Perhaps that’s why so little has been said about how to write extreme horror fiction skillfully: so many people…
Halloween Haunts: Exorcism for Fun and Profit by Loren Rhoads

Halloween Haunts: Exorcism for Fun and Profit by Loren Rhoads

I read The Exorcist early in high school.  My mom was a school librarian and didn’t place any limits on what I read, figuring that if it was too mature for me, I just wouldn’t understand it. She limited what I could watch, though.  I wasn’t allowed to see The Exorcist in the theater, but I could read the novel.  Long after everyone I knew was terrified – or claimed they were terrified – by the movie, I checked the novel out of the public library. The part that struck me more than anything else was Blatty’s introduction, in which…
Halloween Haunts: The Real Creeps, or How to Create Horror Non-fiction Shorts by Lisa Morton

Halloween Haunts: The Real Creeps, or How to Create Horror Non-fiction Shorts by Lisa Morton

One of my favorite pieces of advice for new writers looking to make more sales is to consider trying some non-fiction. As an author who is known for both fiction and non-fiction, I periodically get requests for articles from editors who tell me that for every 300 short story submissions they receive, they get…well, zero non-fiction submissions. I think many writers have this notion that non-fiction requires a different skill set, or doesn’t provide the emotional satisfactions they get from fiction. My answer to that: Then you’re doing it wrong. Certainly some non-fiction is intended to be first and foremost…
Halloween Haunts: It’s Not a Season, It’s a Lifestyle by Greg Chapman

Halloween Haunts: It’s Not a Season, It’s a Lifestyle by Greg Chapman

You all know my tale of woe. I am forced to live without the true spirit of Halloween because I live on the other side of the world. :( But instead of crawling into my coffin when October comes around and crying myself to sleep, I bring the Halloween alive through fiction and art – all year round. I may live in a town without any bonafide haunted houses, or urban legends (yeah pretty boring right?), but that doesn’t mean I can’t create my own. I paint and draw and write all year round. Mostly I do it to relieve…
Halloween Haunts: It Was a Different Time by JG Faherty

Halloween Haunts: It Was a Different Time by JG Faherty

Recently, I had the opportunity to go on a vacation with a group of friends. Five couples, and 2 of them had their daughters with them, ages 17 and 19, respectively. One day, while sitting on the beach, conversation turned to the topic of Halloween. I mentioned that “back in our day,” Halloween was very different. Sure, we went to parties, dressed in costumes, and as kids even got into our share of shenanigans on “Gate Night” or “Mischief Night.” But even growing up in the 1970s and 1980s was a very different time than now. We had no fear…

Interview with Cynthia (Cina) Pelayo

Cynthia (Cina) Pelayo is an International Latino Book Award winner. She is the author of Loteria, Santa Muerte, and The Missing and holds a Master of Fine Arts from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She lives in Chicago with her husband and son. With the publication of her new collection, POEMS OF MY NIGHT, Cynthia Pelayo constructs a narrative in her poetry in response to the work of Jorge Luis Borges that examines the themes and subsequent consequences of insomnia, death, and blindness. To help celebrate the release of this fascinating collection, the HWA Poetry Page is…
Halloween Haunts: Meet Joe Pipe by Pete Mesling

Halloween Haunts: Meet Joe Pipe by Pete Mesling

I grew up in a small town in North Dakota. I’d say the population was around 16,000 to 18,000 back then. In a town that size, there aren’t a lot of celebrities, but there are generally a handful of legends, or myths. Joe Pipe was one such legend among my circle of friends. Stories about his past varied some. He’d suffered a horrific injury when he got his leg caught in a power takeoff, according to some versions. Others had it that he’d left his mind in Vietnam and come back something of a husk. Me, I like to think…