Sunday, August 9, 2009

Horror Writers Association Bram Stoker Award

The Horror Writers Association (HWA) annually presents the Bram Stoker Award for outstanding horror writing. The Bram Stoker Award is given for superior achievement rather than for best of year. The awards have been presented since the association’s incorporation in 1987. Since 2005, the awards have been presented in eight categories – novel, first novel, short fiction, long fiction, fiction collection, poetry collection, anthology, and nonfiction. In 2008, Stephen King won the award for Duma Key.

The Horror Writers Association also occasionally presents a Lifetime Achievement Stoker for individuals whose entire body of work has substantially influenced Horror. Stephen King and Richard Matheson are two authors reviewed on the Carpebiblio website that have received a Lifetime Achievement Stoker.

In addition to the Bram Stoker Award and Lifetime Achievement Award, the Horror Writers Association also occasionally presents awards to fields other than writing that support the horror genre. These include the HWA Specialty Press Award; the HWA Librarian of the Year Award; and the HWA’s Volunteer Service Award.

Wednesday, August 5, 2009

epistolary novel

I was working on a review of Dracula, and came across the term epistolary novel. Having a librarian for a wife can come in handy. She dug out her Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, and handed it to me. It turns out an epistolary novel is a novel written in the form of a series of letters exchanged among the characters of the story with extracts from their journals sometimes included.

So Dracula would be an epistolary novel since the entire story is told using journal entries, letters, and newspaper clippings. Another epistolary novel would be The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. One advantage of this style of story telling is it allows the author to write the story using several different character voices without losing the reader. While in Dracula the style hindered the interaction of the characters and did not provide a lot of dialogue, this was not the case in The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.