Annal:2008 Bram Stoker Award for Fiction Collection

Just After Sunset: Stories

Stephen King

• 2007 Stoker–Collection winner
• Score: 10.57

Stephen King—who has written more than fifty books, dozens of number one New York Times bestsellers, and many unforgettable movies—delivers an astonishing collection of short stories, his first since Everything’s Eventual six years ago. As guest editor of the bestselling Best American Short Stories 2007, King spent over a year reading hundreds of stories. His renewed passion for the form is evident on every page of Just After Sunset. The stories in this collection have appeared in The New Yorker, Playboy, McSweeney’s, The Paris Review, Esquire, and other publications.

Who but Stephen King would turn a Port-O-San into a slimy birth canal, or a roadside honky-tonk into a place for endless love? A book salesman with a grievance might pick up a mute hitchhiker, not knowing the silent man in the passenger seat listens altogether too well. Or an exercise routine on a stationary bicycle, begun to reduce bad cholesterol, might take its rider on a captivating—and then terrifying—journey. Set on a remote key in Florida, “The Gingerbread Girl”…

Gleefully Macabre Tales

Jeff Strand

• 2007 Stoker–Collection nominee
• Score: 6.57

Gleefully Macabre Tales compiles 32 of Jeff Strand’s most twisted blends of cringe-worthy horror and ghoulish humor, with a couple of serious pieces thrown in just to mess with you.

This collection includes tales from his three chapbooks and numerous other stories both popular and obscure. It also includes two of his entries in the World Horror Convention gross-out contest. But you don’t want to read them.

So if you’re looking to laugh, gasp, gag, or do all three at the same time, making sort of a weird sound that hurts your lungs and elicits odd glances from nearby pedestrians, don’t miss Gleefully Macabre Tales!

Mama's Boy: and Other Dark Tales

Fran Friel

• 2007 Stoker–Collection nominee
• Score: 6.57

Nothing good comes of the closest ties in Mama’s Boy and Other Dark Tales, the new collection from Fran Friel and Apex Publications. Things can go especially awry when the tie in question is the one binding mother and son. This collection contains 14 tales, including the Stoker Award nominated novella “Mama’s Boy.”

Mr. Gaunt: and Other Uneasy Encounters

John Langan

• 2007 Stoker–Collection nominee
• Score: 6.57

From award-nominated writer John Langan comes a collection of uneasy meetings. A frustrated professor and his graduate student assistant accompany a group of soldiers to a remote Scottish island to learn what is buried there. A man plays an audiotape left for him by his late father and is initiated into a family story of monstrous deeds. A student learns frightening lessons in a surreal tutoring center. A young couple struggles to make their stand against a group of inhuman pursuers in a ravaged landscape. And, in a new story, an artist discovers a mysterious statue whose completion becomes his obsession.

The Number 121 to Pennsylvania

Kealan Patrick Burke

• 2007 Stoker–Collection nominee
• Score: 6.57

The lonesome sound of a long forgotten train draws an old man to memories of a horrific past…A journalist makes the mistake of visiting a website where real-life executions are the order of the day…At the foot of an old tree, an insidious evil awaits two boys digging for treasure…A browbeaten salesman finds hope and a possible escape from the banality of his world when he returnshome to find a fairytale beanstalk sprouting from his garden…A man resists the social pressure to quit smoking and puts himself at an unimaginable risk…A high school student accepts a dare to ask out the ugliest girl in school and enters a world of pain and violence…A bunch of barflies doomed to murder sinners get together for one last drink in a dying town…

These are some of the passengers, headed for a ride through the dark uncharted regions of the heart and mind, on a train unbound by any law but its own.

All Aboard The Number 121 to Pennsylvania.

There will be no stops.