Annal:2005 Bram Stoker Award for First Novel
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Bram Stoker Award in the year 2005. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- Bram Stoker Award for First Novel
- Horror books
- Horror authors
- Speculative Fiction books
- Speculative Fiction authors.
- 2005 Stoker–1st Novel winner
- Score: 10.55
Scarecrow Gods is the tale of Maxom Phinxs, a black man tortured and disfigured in Vietnam. Maxom, called the Maggot Man by the Tennessee locals, is feared and reviled because of his appearance. Even so, he takes under his wing a troubled young boy named Danny who’s fighting incest rumors to repair a shattered family, wondering every day if his sister will return to clear it all up.
In southern Arizona, John the New Baptist has created a new religion promising salvation. Most people believe in his strange ways. They don’t understand he is establishing a herd for his personal use. Only Simon, a faithless Alexian Brother, and a homeless man named Billy Bones who speaks in palindromes, anagrams and metaphor realize the evil and engage the Scarecrow Gods—a circle of immense saguaro dressed in Salvation Army clothes who speak wisdom in the wind from pursed coke bottle lips.
Maxom, Simon, Danny and Billy all fight and converge upon the center of evil as each journeys through the world of imagination, the Land of Inside-Out and across America, striving to defeat demons both personal and real to ultimately discover their deserved salvations.
- 2005 Stoker–1st Novel nominee
- Score: 6.55
It’s been almost seven years since the events of Myers Pond. Seven years since a dead child rose from the dead, seeking Timmy Quinn’s help in finding a murderer, a search that left more questions than answers in its terrifying wake. But for Timmy, the dead never leave. They’re everywhere, reaching out to him, and there is nowhere to hide from their quiet desperation.
Following a nightmarish encounter at home, Timmy’s search for peace takes him to his grieving grandmother, and a small harbor town on the South coast of Ireland.
But no peace can exist in a place whose past is colored by hate, betrayal and murder, and it is not long before Timmy realizes his haven has become a cage.
And in the very foundations of an old crumbling factory, the dead are gathering.
Uniting.
To save his life and the lives of those he loves, Timmy Quinn must step behind the Curtain, into the realm of the dead and face something far more terrifying than he has ever encountered before—a monstrous entity known only as The Hides…
Jeremy Robert Johnson, Alan M. Clark
- 2005 Stoker–1st Novel nominee
- Score: 6.55
Angie Smith and Curtis Loew are having dreams they can’t shake. At the heart of each is Angie’s daughter, Kaya. Angie’s dreams end in death, the spreading of hand-shaped bruises across her daughter’s throat. Curtis’ dreams end in something else, something closer to obsession than love.
Angie is worlds away, trying to keep her drug-shattered mind from falling apart, traveling through an American underbelly filled with inhuman shapes, dark whispers and old friends with empty eyes.
Curtis is Kaya’s new neighbor. He’s getting closer to her, and her mentally unstable grandmother, Colleen. He’s had families before, but he’d always made mistakes. Mistakes that led to new names, new towns. But this one time, he swears, things will all work out. He’s got so much love to give.
