Annal:2003 International Horror Guild Award for First Novel
From AwardAnnals
Results of the International Horror Guild Award in the year 2003. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- International Horror Guild Award for First Novel
- Horror books
- Horror authors
- Speculative Fiction books
- Speculative Fiction authors.
Jinn: A Novel
- 2003 IHG–1st Novel winner
- Score: 10.53
It is May 1943. On the remote island of Bougainville, in the South Pacific, a squad of United States Marines beats their way through the thick jungle. They’ve landed to do battle with the Japanese soldiers on the island, but in short order, they begin to realize that the forbidding battleground holds an ancient secret a hundred times more terrifying than any enemy army—especially when they start finding the bodies.
Flash-forward to July 2008. In the slums—and the skyscrapers—of Boston, a new kind of depraved serial killer is stalking human prey and terrifying…
- 2004 WFA–Novel nominee
- 2003 IHG–1st Novel nominee
- Score: 12.54
“Have you seen a split cranium, growing flowers like a window box? I saw that, a mere hour ago…”
Fleeing the ghosts of their past, a healer and a killer escape from the ruined Copper Country to the city of Ashamoil. But as they salvage new lives from the debris of the old, they will discover that the ghosts of the past are also the ghosts of the future. As tragic and comic destinies play out in the city, art will infect life, dream and waking fuse, and splendid and frightening miracles will bloom.
- 2004 WFA–Novel nominee
- 2003 IHG–1st Novel nominee
- 2003 Stoker–1st Novel nominee
- Score: 18.54
Jeff VanderMeer’s last book, City of Saints & Madmen, explored the limits of literary fantasy, garnering raves from critics, including a starred review in Publishers Weekly. Now, with Veniss Underground, VanderMeer explores the limits of love, memory, and obsession in a far future SF novel that combines the grotesque and the sublime in a rousing adventure-mystery.
On a far future Earth where vast deserts—ecological disaster areas—surround walled city-states slowly losing their grip on advanced technology, the mysterious Quin manipulates…
- 2003 Hammett nominee
- 2003 IHG–1st Novel nominee
- Score: 12.53
Jane Doe was a promising anthropologist, an expert on shamanism. Now she’s nothing, a shadow: after faking her own suicide, she’s living under an assumed identity in Miami with a little girl to protect. Everyone thinks she’s dead. Or so she hopes.
Then the killings start, a series of ritualistic murders that terrifies all of Miami. The investigator is Jimmy Paz, a Cuban-American police detective. There are witnesses, but they can recall almost nothing of the events, as though their memories have been erased—as if a spell has been cast on each of them. Equally…
The Dante Club: A Novel
- 2004 Historical Dagger shortlist
- 2003 IHG–1st Novel nominee
- Score: 12.54
In 1865 Boston, the literary geniuses of the Dante Club—poets and Harvard professors Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James Russell Lowell, along with publisher J. T. Fields—are finishing America’s first translation of The Divine Comedy and preparing to unveil Dante’s remarkable visions to the New World. The powerful Boston Brahmins at Harvard College are fighting to keep Dante in obscurity, believing that the infiltration of foreign superstitions into American minds will prove as corrupting as the immigrants arriving at Boston…
- 2003 IHG–1st Novel nominee
- Score: 6.53
Mark Siegel’s Echo and Narcissus is a tragicomic downbound train powered by hi-octane rock ‘n’ roll voodoo. From the John Fogarty swampedelic riffs of Part One, to the Jim Morrison Lizard King squalor of Part Two, to the Elvis-in-a-gold-jumpsuit decadence of Part Three, this novel chronicling the lives and hard times of Max, the wasted guitarist with a mind too nimble for his own good, and Echo, his naive yet wise child bride with pipes of gold, covers more quintessential American pop culture terrain than anything by Salmon Rushdie or Don DeLillo. Siegel…
