Annal:1996 World Fantasy Award for Novel

The Prestige: A Novel

Christopher Priest

• 1996 WFA–Novel winner
• 1995 JT Black-Fiction winner
• 1996 Clarke shortlist
• Score: 26.46

In 1878, two young stage magicians clash in the dark during the course of a fraudulent séance. From this moment on, their lives become webs of deceit and revelation as they vie to outwit and expose one another.

Their rivalry will take them to the peaks of their careers, but with terrible consequences. In the course of pursuing each other’s ruin, they will deploy all the deception their magicians’ craft can command—the highest misdirection and the darkest science.

Blood will be spilled, but it will not be enough. In the end, their legacy will pass on for…

All the Bells on Earth

James P. Blaylock

• 1996 Mythopoeic-Adult finalist
• 1996 WFA–Novel nominee
• Score: 12.46

In the dead of night, a man climbs the tower of St. Anthony’s Church, driven by a compulsive urge to silence the bells. In a deserted alley, a seemingly random victim is consumed by a torrent of flames. And in the deceptive light of day, a mail-order businessman named Walt Stebbins receives a bizarre artifact—a glass jar containing the preserved body of a bluebird.

Things like this don’t usually happen in a town like Orange, California. Ordinary people do not expect to face evil—real evil—in their own backyards. But as Walt Stebbins unravels the mystery of…

The Silent Strength of Stones

Nina Kiriki Hoffman

• 1996 Nebula nominee
• 1996 WFA–Novel nominee
• Score: 12.46

It is a season of many wonders, with many secrets ripe for discovering …and some best left in shadow, unexplored. Summer has come to Sauterelle Lake. And inquisitive young Nick is discovering many things he doesn’t want to know: About a pretty girl with hypnotic eyes who talks to his soul… About a wild creature—a wolf—whose features shine with an intelligent, un-lupine knowing… About a strange, inhospitable family occupying a cabin that is meant to be empty. This summer, nature’s magic is not the only sorcery traveling on the wind. And the real trick will be surviving until the autumn.

Expiration Date

Tim Powers

• 1996 Nebula nominee
• 1996 WFA–Novel nominee
• Score: 12.46

Powers has created a strange and wonderful Los Angeles in which to set this novel: a city full of ghosts—and full, too, of unpleasant characters who extend their lives and enhance their power by catching and absorbing the ghosts of the recently dead.

Young Koot Parganas is growing up in Los Angeles in the 1990’s, but his parents won’t let him do anything normal. His weirdo parents venerate the spirits of dead Mahatmas. At the age of eleven, Koot has disobeyed his parents, broken into a plaster bust of Dante, stolen the small glass vial concealed inside it, and…

Red Earth and Pouring Rain: A Novel

Vikram Chandra

• 1996 WFA–Novel nominee
• Score: 6.46

Vikram Chandra’s Red Earth and Pouring Rain is an unforgettable reading experience, a contemporary Thousand and One Nights—with an eighteenth-century warrior-poet (now reincarnated as a typewriting monkey) and an Indian student home from college in America switching off as our Scheherazades. Ranging from bloody battles in colonial India to college anomie in California, from Hindu gods to MTV, Chandra’s novel is engrossing, enthralling, impossible to put down—a remarkable meditation on quests and homecomings, good and evil, storytelling and redemption.

Requiem

Graham Joyce

• 1996 WFA–Novel nominee
• Score: 6.46

After the sudden death of his wife, Tom Webster travels to Jerusalem in search of a friend from his college days. The haunted city, divided by warring religious factions, offers him no refuge from his guilt and grief. As he is wandering through the streets and the archaeological sites, a mysterious old woman appears to Tom and delivers messages that seem beyond his comprehension. But a fragment of the Dead Sea Scrolls that had been kept hidden by an old Jewish innkeeper appears to offer the key to understanding the apparition. Driven to the edge of insanity, Tom…