Annal:2004 International Horror Guild Award for Novel

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Results of the International Horror Guild Award in the year 2004. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:

The Overnight

Ramsey Campbell

A bookstore can be a wonderful, welcoming place of both commerce and curiosity. That’s the goal for Woody, an American recently transferred to England to run a branch of Texts. He wants a clean, orderly store and lots of sales to show his bosses when they arrive from the States for a pre-Christmas inspection. Not easy given the shop’s location in a foggy strip mall.


And things keep going wrong. No matter how often the shelves are put in order before the doors are locked at night, when the staff returns in the morning, books are lying all over the floor, many…

 

Mortal Love: A Novel

Elizabeth Hand

A tragedy that occurs in a hospital for the insane in Frankfurt, Germany, will have repercussions across decades and eras. Several weeks after the death of a female patient in a terrible fire, the poet Algernon Swinburne follows a mysterious woman through the shadows toward a remarkable event at once enthralling, stimulating, and terrifying beneath the streets of London. Years later, at the start of a new century, a struggling young artist, Radborne Comstock, is introduced to a ravishing beauty who immediately becomes his muse, his desire, and his greatest…

 

In the Night Room

Peter Straub

In his latest soul-chilling novel, bestselling author Peter Straub tells of a famous children’s book author who, in the wake of a grotesque accident, realizes that the most basic facts of her existence, including her existence itself, have come into question.

Willy Patrick, the respected author of the award-winning young-adult novel In the Night Room, thinks she is losing her mind–again. One day, she is drawn helplessly into the parking lot of a warehouse. She knows somehow that her daughter, Holly, is being held in the building, and she has an…

 

Kings of Infinite Space: A Novel

James Hynes

Paul Trilby is having a bad day. If he were to be honest with himself, Paul Trilby would have to admit that he’s having a bad life. His wife left him. Three subsequent girlfriends left him. He’s fallen from a top-notch university teaching job, to a textbook publisher, to, eventually, working as a temp writer for the General Services department of the Texas Department of General Services. And even here, in this world of carpeted partitions and cheap lighting fixtures, Paul cannot escape the curse his life has become. For it is not until he begins reach out to the…

 

A Handbook of American Prayer: A Novel

Lucius Shepard

A man walks into a bar. A dispute ensues, and the bartender kills him. He’s sentenced to ten years for manslaughter. In prison, the convict, Wardlin Stuart, writes prayers addressed to no god in particular. Inexplicably, his prayers—whether it’s a request for a girlfriend or a special favor for a fellow inmate—are answered, be it in days or weeks. When his collection of supplications, A Handbook of American Prayer, is published by a New York press, Stuart emerges a celebrity author.

Settling into a new life in Arizona, he encounters a fundamentalist…

 
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