The Horror Writers Association named the winners of its annual Bram Stoker Awards, given annually to outstanding achievement in horror literature, at the StokerCon convention in San Diego on Saturday.
Tananarive Due won in the novel category for The Reformatory, about a 12-year-old Black boy in 1950 Florida who is sentenced to six months in a haunted reformatory school. In a starred review, a critic for Kirkus praised the book, which also won a Los Angeles Times Book Prize, as “a novel that reminds its readers that racism forges its own lasting, unbearable nightmares.”
Lora Senf won the middle grade novel award for The Nighthouse Keeper, the second installment in her Blight Harbor trilogy, while Trang Thanh Tran took home the young adult novel prize for She Is a Haunting.
The first novel award went to Christa Carmen for The Daughters of Block Island, while author Amy Chu and artist Soo Lee won the graphic novel prize for Carmilla: The First Vampire. Filmmaker Jordan Peele and editor John Joseph Adams took home the anthology award for Out There Screaming.
The Bram Stoker Awards were established in 1987. Past winners include Joyce Carol Oates for Zombie, Neil Gaiman for American Gods, and Gabino Iglesias for The Devil Takes You Home.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
