The 2019 Bram Stoker Awards® Preliminary Ballot

The Horror Writers Association (HWA) has announced the Preliminary Ballot for the 2019 Bram Stoker Awards®.

Works on this ballot are not referred to as “nominees” or “finalists”. Only works appearing on the Final Ballot may be referred to as “nominated works” and their authors as “finalists”.

2019 Bram Stoker Awards® Preliminary Ballot

Superior Achievement in a Novel

• Owl Goingback – Coyote Rage (Independent Legions Publishing)
• Cody Goodfellow – Unamerica (King Shot Press)
• Curtis M. Lawson – Black Heart Boys’ Choir (Wyrd Horror)
• John R. Little – The Murder of Jesus Christ (Bad Moon Books)
• Josh Malerman – Inspection (Del Rey)
• S.P. Miskowski – The Worst is Yet to Come (TrepidatioPublishing)
• Michael J Moore –  Highway Twenty (Hellbound BooksPublishing LLC)
• Lee Murray – Into the Ashes (Severed Press)
• Adam L.G. Nevill – The Reddening (Ritual Limited)
• John F.D. Taff – The Fearing (Grey Matter Press)
• Chuck Wendig – Wanderers (Del Rey)

Superior Achievement in a First Novel

• Gemma Amor – Dear Laura (Independently Published)
• Andrew Cull – Remains (IFWG Publishing International)
• Nicholas Day – Grind Your Bones to Dust (Excession Press)
• Eric J. Guignard  – Doorways to the Deadeye (JournalStone)
• Steven Hopstaken and Melissa Prusi – Stoker’s Wilde (Flame Tree Press)
• Michelle Renee Lane – Invisible Chains (Haverhill HousePublishing)
• Cody T Luff – Ration (Apex Book Company)
• Rachel Eve Moulton – Tinfoil Butterfly (MCD x FSG Originals)
• Sarah Read – The Bone Weaver’s Orchard (TrepidatioPublishing)
• Caitlin Starling – The Luminous Dead (Harper Voyager)

Superior Achievement in a Young Adult Novel

• Amelinda Bérubé  – Here There Are Monsters (Sourcebooks Fire)
• Ann Dávila Cardinal – Five Midnights (Tor Teen)
• Shea Ernshaw – Winterwood (Simon Pulse)
• Sara Faring – The Tenth Girl (Imprint)
• Liana Gardner – Speak No Evil (Vesuvian Books)
• Dawn Kurtagich – Teeth in the Mist (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers)
• Kate Alice Marshall – Rules for Vanishing (Viking Books for Young Readers)
• Nzondi – Oware Mosaic (Omnium Gatherum)
• Peter Adam Salomon – Eight Minutes, Thirty-Two Seconds (PseudoPsalms Press)
• Jacqueline West – Last Things (Greenwillow Books)

Superior Achievement in a Graphic Novel

• Cullen Bun – Bone Parish Vol. 2 (BOOM! Studios)
• Cullen Bunn – Bone Parish Vol. 3 (BOOM! Studios)
• Donny Cates – Redneck Volume 3: Longhorns (Image Comics)
• Neil Gaiman – Neil Gaiman’s Snow, Glass, Apples (Dark Horse Books)
• Rob Guillory – Rob Guillory’s Farmhand Volume 1: Reap What Was Sown (Image Comics)
• Jeff Lemire – Gideon Falls Book 2: Original Sins (Image Comics)
• Jeff Lemire – Gideon Falls Volume 3: Stations of the Cross(Image Comics)
• Marjorie Liu – Monstress Volume 4: The Chosen (Image Comics)
• Alessandro Manzetti – Calcutta Horror (Independent Legions Publishing)
• Gou Tanabe – H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness Volume 1 (Dark Horse Manga)

Superior Achievement in Long Fiction

• J.S. Breukelaar – Like Ripples on a Blank Shore (Collision: Stories) (Meerkat Press, LLC)
• Ray Cluley – Adrenaline Junkies (The Porcupine Boy and Other Anthological Oddities) (Crossroad Press)
• Pam Jones – Ivy Day (Spaceboy Books LLC)
• Victor LaValle – Up from Slavery (Weird Tales Magazine #363)(Weird Tales Inc.)
• Alessandro Manzetti – The Keeper of Chernobyl (Omnium Gatherum)
• Matt Serafini – Rites of Extinction (Grindhouse Press)
• Farah Rose Smith – Anonyma (Ulthar Press)
• Anna Taborska – The Cat Sitter (Shadowcats) (Black Shuck Books)
• Sara Tantlinger – To Be Devoured (Unnerving)
• Richard Thomas – Ring of Fire (The Seven Deadliest) (Cutting Block Books)
• Kaaron Warren – Into Bones Like Oil (Meerkat Shorts)

Superior Achievement in Short Fiction

• Greg Chapman – “The Book of Last Words” (This Sublime Darkness and Other Dark Stories) (Things in the Well Publishing)
• Gwendolyn Kiste – “The Eight People Who Murdered Me (Excerpt from Lucy Westenra’s Diary)” (Nightmare MagazineNov. 2019, Issue 86)
• Jess Landry – “Bury Me in Tar and Twine” (Tales of the LostVolume 1: We All Lose Something!) (Things in the Well Publishing)
• John R Little – “Anniversary” (Dark Tides: A Charity Horror Anthology) (Gestalt Media)
• Brooke MacKenzie – “The Elevator Game” (Who Knocks? Magazine Issue #2)
• Cindy O’Quinn – “Lydia” (The Twisted Book of Shadows) (Twisted Publishing)
• Ben Serna-Grey – “Where Gods Dance” (Apex Magazine Issue #118)
• Tim Waggoner – “A Touch of Madness” (The Pulp Horror Book of Phobias) (LVP Publications)
• Jack Westlake – “Glass Eyes in Porcelain Faces” (Black Static Issue #70) (TTS Press)
• Gordon B. White – “Birds of Passage” (Twice-Told: A Collection of Doubles) (Chthonic Matter)

Superior Achievement in a Fiction Collection

• James Chambers – On the Night Border (Raw Dog Screaming Press)
• Ted Chiang – Exhalation: Stories (Knopf)
• Brian Evenson – Song for the Unraveling of the World (Coffee House Press)
• Brad C. Hodson – Where Carrion Gods Dance (Washington Park Press)
• Kat Howard – A Cathedral of Myth and Bone: Stories (Gallery/Saga Press)
• L.S. Johnson, – Rare Birds: Stories (Traversing Z Press)
• Kate Jonez – Lady Bits (Trepidatio Publishing)
• John Langan – Sefira and Other Betrayals (Hippocampus Press)
• Sarah Read – Out of Water (Trepidatio Publishing)
• Paul Tremblay – Growing Things and Other Stories (William Morrow)

Superior Achievement in a Screenplay

• Ari Aster – Midsommar (B-Reel Films, Square Peg)
• Guy Busick and Ryan Murphy – Ready or Not (Mythology Entertainment)
• The Duffer Brothers – Stranger Things (Season 3, Chapter Eight: The Battle of Starcourt) (Netflix)
• Robert Eggers and Max Eggers – The Lighthouse (A24, New Regency Pictures, RT Features)
• Mike Flanagan – Doctor Sleep (Warner Bros., Intrepid Pictures/Vertigo Entertainment)
• Dan Gilroy – Velvet Buzzsaw (Netflix)
• Dan Hageman and Kevin Hageman – Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (1212 Entertainment, CBS Films, DDY, Entertainment One, Rolling Hills Productions, Sean Daniel Company, Starlight International Media)
• Issa López – Tigers Are Not Afraid (Filmadora Nacional, Peligrosa)
• Jordan Peele – Us (Monkeypaw Productions, Perfect World Pictures, Dentsu, Fuji Television Network, Universal Pictures)
• Teresa Sutherland – The Wind (Soapbox Films, Divide/Conquer, Mind Hive Films)

Superior Achievement in an Anthology

• Patrick Beltran and D. Alexander Ward – The Seven Deadliest (Cutting Block Books)
• Jennifer Brozek – A Secret Guide to Fighting Elder Gods (Pulse Publishing)
• Octavia Cade – Sharp & Sugar Tooth: Women Up to No Good (Upper Rubber Boot Books)
• Ellen Datlow – Echoes (Gallery/Saga Press)
• Christopher Golden and James A. Moore – The Twisted Book of Shadows (Twisted Publishing)
• Eric J. Guignard – Pop the Clutch: Thrilling Tales of Rockabilly, Monsters, and Hot Rod Horror (Dark Moon Books)
• Eugene Johnson and Steve Dillon – Tales of the Lost Volume 1: We All Lose Something! (Things in the Well Publishing)
• Stephen Jones – Best New Horror #29 (PS Publishing)
• Darrell Schweitzer – Mountains of Madness Revealed (PS Publishing)
• Robert S. Wilson – Nox Pareidolia (Nightscape Press)

Superior Achievement in Non-Fiction

• Eleanor Beal and Jonathan Greenaway – Horror and Religion: New Literary Approaches to Theology, Race, and Sexuality (University of Wales Press)
• Harriet E.H. Earle – Gender, Sexuality, and Queerness in American Horror Story: Critical Essays (McFarland)
• Robert Eighteen-Bisang and Elizabeth Miller – Drafts of Dracula (Tellwell Talent)
• Brandon R. Grafius – Reading the Bible with Horror (Lexington Books/Fortress Academic)
• Alexandra Heller-Nicholas – Masks in Horror Cinema: Eyes Without Faces (University of Wales Press)
• John B. Kachuba – Shapeshifters: A History (Reaktion Books)
• Lisa Kröger and Melanie R. Anderson – Monster, She Wrote: The Women Who Pioneered Horror and Speculative Fiction (Quirk Books)
• Dawn Stobbart – Videogames and Horror: From Amnesia to Zombies, Run! (University of Wales Press)
• John C. Tibbetts – The Furies of Marjorie Bowen (McFarland)
• Stephen Volk – Coffinmaker’s Blues: Collected Writings on Terror (PS Publishing)

Superior Achievement in Short Non-Fiction

• Mathias Clasen – Evolution, Cognition, and Horror: A Précis of Why Horror Seduces (Journal of Cognitive Historiography Vol 4, No 2)
• Gavin F. Hurley – Between Hell and Earth: Rhetorical Appropriation of Religious Space within Hellraiser (The Spaces and Places of Horror, Vernon Press)
• Gwendolyn Kiste – Magic, Madness, and Women Who Creep: The Power of Individuality in the Work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Vastarien: A Literary Journal Vol. 2, Issue 1)
• Vince A. Liaguno – Slasher Films Made Me Gay: The Queer Appeal and Subtext of the Genre (LGBTQ+ Horror Month: 9/1/2019, Ginger Nuts of Horror)
• Craig Ian Mann – The Beast Without: The Cinematic Werewolf as a (Counter)Cultural Metaphor (Horror Studies Journal Volume 10.1)
• Karen J. Renner – The Evil Aging Women of American Horror Story (Elder Horror: Essays on Film’s Frightening Images of Aging, McFarland)
• Kelly Robinson – Film’s First Lycanthrope: 1913’s The Werewolf (Scary Monsters Magazine #114)
• Tim Waggoner – Riding Out the Storms (Writing in the Dark)
• Valerie E. Weich – Lord Byron’s Whipping Boy: Dr. John William Polidori and the 200^th Anniversary of The Vampyre(Famous Monsters of Filmland, Issue #291)
• Aaron Worth – From the Books of Wandering: Fin-De-Siècle Poetics of a Supernatural Figure (The Times Literary Supplement)

Superior Achievement in a Poetry Collection

• Linda D. Addison and Alessandro Manzetti – The Place of Broken Things (Crystal Lake Publishing)
• Octavia Cade – Mary Shelley Makes a Monster (Aqueduct Press)
• Frank Coffman – The Coven’s Hornbook & Other Poems (Bold Venture Press)
• Amanda Crum – Tall Grass (Independently Published)
• Deborah L. Davitt – The Gates of Never (Finishing Line Press)
• Donna Lynch – Choking Back the Devil (Raw Dog Screaming Press)
• Zoe Mitchell – Hag (Indigo Dreams Publishing)
• Michelle Scalise – Dragonfly and Other Songs of Mourning (LVP Publications)
• Marge Simon and Bryan D. Dietrich – The Demeter Diaries (Independent Legions Publishing)
• Kyla Lee Ward – The Macabre Modern and Other Morbidities (P’rea Press)
• Stephanie M. Wytovich – The Apocalyptic Mannequin: The Definition of Body is Buried (Raw Dog Screaming Press)

The Final Ballot will be announced on February 23, 2020.