Annal:2005 International Horror Guild Award for Novel
From AwardAnnals
Results of the International Horror Guild Award in the year 2005. 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.
- 2005 IHG–Novel winner
- 2006 WFA–Novel nominee
- Score: 16.55
Imagine becoming a best-selling novelist, and almost immediately famous and wealthy, while still in college, and before long seeing your insufferable father reduced to a bag of ashes in a safety-deposit box, while after American Psycho your celebrity drowns in a sea of vilification, booze, and drugs.
Then imagine having a second chance ten years later, as the Bret Easton Ellis of this remarkable novel is given, with a wife, children, and suburban sobriety—only to watch this new life shatter beyond recognition in a matter of days. At a fateful Halloween party he glimpses a disturbing (fictional) character driving a car identical to his late father’s, his stepdaughter’s doll violently “malfunctions,” and their house undergoes bizarre transformations both within and without. Connecting these aberrations to graver events—a series of grotesque murders that no longer seem random and the epidemic disappearance of boys his son’s age—Ellis struggles to defend his family against this escalating menace even as his wife, their therapists, and the police insist that his apprehensions…
The Historian: A Novel
- 2005 IHG–Novel nominee
- Score: 6.55
If your pulse flutters at the thought of castle ruins and descents into crypts by moonlight, you will savor every creepy page of Elizabeth Kostova’s long but beautifully structured thriller The Historian. The story opens in Amsterdam in 1972, when a teenage girl discovers a medieval book and a cache of yellowed letters in her diplomat father’s library. The pages of the book are empty except for a woodcut of a dragon. The letters are addressed to: “My dear and unfortunate successor.” When the girl confronts her father, he reluctantly confesses an unsettling…
Beyond Black: A Novel
- 2006 Orange shortlist
- 2005 IHG–Novel nominee
- Score: 12.56
A paragon of efficiency, Colette took the next natural step after finishing secretarial school by marrying a man who would do just fine. After a sobering, do-it-yourself divorce, Colette is at a loss for what to do next. Convinced that she is due an out-of-hand, life-affirming revelation, she strays into the realm of psychics and clairvoyants, hungry for a whisper to set her off in the right direction. At a psychic fair in Windsor she meets the charismatic Alison.
Alison, the daughter of a prostitute, beleaguered during her childhood by the pressures of her connection to the spiritual world, lives in a different kind of solitude. She cannot escape the dead who speak to her, least of all the constant presence of Morris, her low-life spiritual guide. An expansive presence onstage, Alison at once feels her bond with Colette, inviting her to join her on the road as her personal assistant and companion.
Troubles spiral out of control when the pair moves to a suburban wasteland in what was once the English countryside and take up with a spirit guide and his drowned therapist. It is not long…
- 2005 IHG–Novel nominee
- Score: 6.55
Set in a university managed by a Kafkaesque bureaucracy, The Stone Ship follows the adventures, misalliances, and misdeeds of the suicidal Shipton and the ghost who saved his life; and who demands a favor in return. As Shipton’s experiences within the university are played out on the fringes of an administration that destroys lives with paperwork, rioting librarians hunt for students and academics dwell in the half-light of scholarly delusions.
The Horrific Sufferings of the Mind-Reading Monster Hercules Barefoot: His Wonderful Love and His Terrible Hatred
- 2005 IHG–Novel nominee
- Score: 6.55
A stormy night in 1813. Two babies are born to prostitutes. One child is a healthy girl; the other, a hideously deformed boy.
This is the picaresque fable of the love that grows between the mute monster Hercules, who possesses the power to read minds, and the beautiful Henriette—a love that will entwine their fates forever. Carl-Johan Vallgren paints a cast of grotesqueries in a magical and atmospheric tour of nineteenth-century Europe: the swags and tails of the Bordello, where Hercules is born; the squalor of the asylum, where he finds only pain; the sinister grandeur of the Jesuit monasteries in which he finds both shelter and peril; and the phantasmagoria of the freak show with which he travels. The Horrific Sufferings of the Mind-Reading Monster Hercules Barefoot tells a tale of social oppression,official corruption, and religious persecution, but is, at its heart, an amazing love story. Moving, uplifting, at times dark and macabre, this novel stretches the bounds of imagination, presenting the bizarre as the everyday and leading you through it like a child wide-eyed in wonder at a carnival.
