Annal:2002 International Horror Guild Award for Novel
From AwardAnnals
Results of the International Horror Guild Award in the year 2002. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- International Horror Guild Award for Novel
- Horror books
- Horror authors
- Speculative Fiction books
- Speculative Fiction authors.
- 2002 IHG–Novel winner
- Score: 10.52
Dale Stewart’s life has become a shadow of what it once was. A respected college professor and successful novelist, he sabotaged his career and his marriage with an obsessive love affair that ended badly.
With darkness closing in on him, Dale decides to return to his boyhood home in Illinois. Drawn by a recurring nightmare that has plagued him since his youth—and a troubling certainty that something is waiting for him there—he hopes to exorcise his demons.
In the last hours of Halloween, he reaches the outskirts of the dying town of Elm Haven. There, he moves into the abandoned farmhouse that was once the home of his closest boyhood friend, the strange and brilliant Duane McBride, who lost his young life in a grisly “accident” back in the terrible summer of 1960. Hoping to find peace in isolation, he settles in for the long, harsh winter.
But Dale is not alone. Soon after he arrives, cryptic messages begin appearing mysteriously on his computer screen while he struggles to work on his novel. He sees black dogs roaming the grounds. And an old enemy has reemerged, a bully who seems as determined to persecute Dale as he was in childhood.
- 2002 IHG–Novel nominee
- Score: 6.52
In The Darkest Part of the Woods, Campbell introduces readers to the Price family, whose lives have for decades been snarled with the fate of the ancient forest of Goodmanswood. Here, Dr. Lennox Price discovered a hallucinogenic moss that quickly became the focus of a cult-and though the moss and the trees on which it grew are long gone, it seems as if the whole forest can now affect the minds of visitors.
After Lennox is killed trying to return to his beloved wood, his widow seems to see and hear him in the trees-or is it a dark version of the Green Man that caresses her with leafy hands? Lennox’s grandson heeds a call to lie in his lover’s arms in the very heart of the forest-and cannot help but wonder what the fruit of that love will be.
And Heather, Lennox’s daughter, who turned her back on her father’s mysteries and sought sanctuary in the world of facts and history? Goodmanswood summons her as well…
- 2002 IHG–Novel nominee
- 2002 Stoker–Novel nominee
- Score: 12.52
As children, they played the Dark Game.
When Nemo Raglan’s father is murdered in one of the most vicious killings of recent years, Nemo must return to the New England island he thought he had escaped for good, Burnley Island…and the shadowy farmhouse called Hawthorn. But this murder was no crime of human ferocity. What butchered Nemo’s father may in fact be something far more terrifying…Something Nemo and his younger brother, Bruno, and sister, Brooke, have known since childhood.
There are secrets buried on Burnley Island.
Within the rooms of Hawthorn, beautiful Brooke Raglan has begun to go mad. She sees faces at the windows and wanders the night, trying to find what she believes is a monster.
Bruno Raglan has wiped the memory of a terrible event from his mind. Now he compulsively picks apart Hawthorn and discovers that within its walls lies a forbidden secret.
As he unravels the mysteries of his past and a terrible night of his childhood, Nemo witnesses something unimaginable, and sees the true face of evil while Burnley Island comes to know the unspeakable horror that…
From a Buick 8: A Novel
- 2002 IHG–Novel nominee
- 2002 Stoker–Novel nominee
- Score: 12.52
The state police of Troop D in rural Pennsylvania have kept a secret in Shed B out back of the barracks ever since 1979, when Troopers Ennis Rafferty and Curtis Wilcox answered a call from a gas station just down the road and came back with an abandoned Buick Roadmaster. Curt Wilcox knew old cars, and he knew immediately that this one was…wrong, just wrong. A few hours later, when Rafferty vanished, Wilcox and his fellow troopers knew the car was worse than dangerous—and that it would be better if John Q. Public never found out about it.
Curt’s avid curiosity taking the lead, they investigated as best they could, as much as they dared. Over the years the troop absorbed the mystery as part of the background to their work, the Buick 8 sitting out there like a still life painting that breathes—inhaling a little bit of this world, exhaling a little bit of whatever world it came from.
In the fall of 2001, a few months after Curt Wilcox is killed in a gruesome auto accident, his 18-year-old boy Ned starts coming by the barracks, mowing the lawn, washing windows, shoveling snow.…
- 2002 Barry-British nominee
- 2002 IHG–Novel nominee
- Score: 12.52
When the discovery of a mass grave in northern Maine reveals the grim truth behind the disappearance of a religious community, private detective Charlie Parker is drawn into a violent conflict with a group of zealots intent on tracking down a relic that could link them to the slaughter. Haunted by the ghost of a small boy and tormented by the demonic killer known as Mr. Pudd, Parker is forced to fight for his lover, his friends…and his very soul.
- 2003 WFA–Novel nominee
- 2002 IHG–Novel nominee
- Score: 12.53
1843 is the “last year of the world,” according the Elias Fitcher, a charismatic preacher in the Finger Lakes district of New York State. He’s established a utopian community on an estate outside the town of Jeckyll’s Glen, where the faithful wait, work, and pray for the world to end.
Vernelia, Amy, and Catherine Charter are the three young townswomen whose father falls under the Reverend Fitcher’s hypnotic sway. In their old house, where ghostly voices whisper from the walls, the girls are ruled by their stepmother, who is ruled in turn by the fiery preacher. Determined to spend Eternity as a married man, Fitcher casts his eye on Vernelia, and before much longer the two are wed. But living on the man’s estate, separated from her family, Vern soon learns the extent of her husband’s dark side. It’s rumored that he’s been married before, though what became of those wives she does not know. Perhaps the secret lies in the locked room at the very top of the house—the single room that the Reverend Fitcher has forbidden to her.
Inspired by the classic fairy tales “Bluebeard”…
