Annal:2006 Bram Stoker Award for Fiction Collection

Destinations Unknown

Gary A. Braunbeck

• 2006 Stoker–Collection winner
• Score: 10.56

A brand new collection of original dark fiction concerning itself with people, cars, and the open road.

American Morons: Stories

Glen Hirshberg

• 2006 IHG–Collection winner
• 2007 WFA–Collection nominee
• 2006 Stoker–Collection nominee
• Score: 22.56

Two traveling college students confront their disintegrating relationship and the new American reality in a breakdown lane along the Italian Superstrade. A woman chases the ghost of her neglectful father to a vanished amusement park at the end of the Long Beach pier. Two recently retired teachers learn just how much Los Angeles has taken from them.

In these atmospheric, wide-ranging, surprisingly playful, and deeply mournful stories, grandkids and widows, ice cream-truck drivers and judges, travelers and invalids all discover — and sometimes even survive — the everyday losses from which the most vengeful ghosts so often spring.

Basic Black: Tales of Appropriate Fear

Terry Dowling

• 2006 IHG–Collection winner
• 2006 Stoker–Collection nominee
• Score: 16.56

It’s dark in here… Not just with the absence of light, but with things made for the dark, things that work best when the wind is in the trees and the sun has gone from the sky.

There’s a carnival, of course—and such a one!—and a six-sided mirror room on a rainy evening. There’s a model of a ship made from bone, a hotel room with the hint of a clown’s face on the wall, a gun that grows its own bullets (you know they do!). All waiting among these bits of darkling shimmer, in this sharp narrow place, this careful trap.

A trap? You see how it is. This is your next step on the lonely road. The next wrong door you open. The next game you play on the midnight board, with forgotten rules and the sharpest of pieces…

The Commandments

Angeline Hawkes

• 2006 Stoker–Collection nominee
• Score: 6.56

The collection opens as Rev. Sutton Conway acquires a biblical artifact – a copy of the Ten Commandments written in Hebrew-Phoenician script dated at 2500 years old. Ten stories, each formulated around a commandment, then unfold, followed by the conclusion.

The Empire of Ice Cream

Jeffrey Ford

• 2007 WFA–Collection nominee
• 2006 Stoker–Collection nominee
• Score: 12.57

Mixing the mundane with the metaphysical, the pairings of the everyday and the extraordinary in this collection of short fiction yield supernatural results—a young musician perceives another world while drinking coffee, a fairy chronicles his busy life in a sandcastle during the changing tide, a demonic 16th-century chess set shows up in a New Jersey bar, and Charon, the boatman of hell, takes a few days vacation. Storylines both conventional and outlandish reveal humdrum routines as menacing, or imaginary worlds as perfectly familiar. Allusions to authors such as Edgar Allan Poe and Jules Verne reinforce the fantasy tradition in these tales, while understated humor and moments of sadness add a quirky unpredictability.