2024 Stoker Awards Preliminary Ballot

Superior Achievement in Short Fiction

• “Versus Versus”, Laird Barron (Long Division: Stories of Social Decay, Societal Collapse, and Bad Manners)
• “And She Had Been So Reasonable”, Rachel Bolton (Apex , Nov. 2024)
• “To the Wolves”, Sasha Brown (Weird Horror, Fall 2024)
• “Ten Thousand Crawling Children”, R. A. Busby (Nightmare Magazine, January 2024)
• “Snowblind”, Emilie Dawson (NonBinary Review: “Old Friends,” March 2024)
• “like blood on the mouths of death”, Victor Forna (Nightmare Magazine, May 2024)
• “Two Shows on a Saturday”, Gage Greenwood (Levitating: Stories)
• “She Sheds Her Skin”, Raven Jabukowski (Nightmare Magazine November 2024)
• “Rescue Station”, Nayani Jensen (Northern Nights)
• “Flesh of My Flesh”, Ben Matthews (Spawn 2: More Weird Horror Tales about Pregnancy, Birth, and Babies)

Superior Achievement in a Fiction Collection

• Not a Speck of Light, Laird Barron (Bad Hand)
• A Sunny Place for Shady People, Mariana Enriquez (Penguin)
• Mouth: Stories, Puloma Ghosh (Astra)
• Midnight Lullabies: Unquiet Stories and Poems, Jonathan Maberry (WordFire)
• We’ve Already Gone Too Far, MJ Mars (Paramonster)
• In Those Fading Stars, Andrew Najberg (Crystal Lake)
• All These Steps Lead Down, Nelson W. Pyles (Cold War Radio)
• The Dead Spot: Stories of Lost Girls, Angela Sylvaine (Dark Matter Ink)
• Old Monsters Never Die, Tim Waggoner (Winding Road Stories)
• Love is a Crematorium and Other Tales, Mercedes Yardley (Cemetery Dance)

Superior Achievement in an Anthology

• Bury Your Gays: An Anthology of Tragic Queer Horror, Sofia Ajram (Ghoulish Books)
• Shadowplays, Peter Coleborn & Mike Chinn (PS)
• We Mostly Come Out at Night: 15 Queer Tales of Monsters, Angels & Other Creatures, Rob Costello (Running Press)
• The Mad Butterfly’s Ball, Preston Grassmann & Chris Kelso (PS)
• Discontinue If Death Ensues: Tales from the Tipping Point, Carol Gyzander & Anna Taborska (Flame Tree)
• Long Division: Stories of Social Decay, Societal Collapse and Bad Manners, Doug Murano & Michael Bailey (Bad Hand)
• Howls From the Scene of the Crime, Jessica Peter & Timaeus Bloom (Howl Society)
• Mother Knows Best: Tales of Homemade Horror: A Women in Horror Anthology, Lindy Ryan (Black Spot)
• The Darkest Night, Lindy Ryan (Crooked Lane)
• Scissor Sisters, April Yates & Ray Knowles (Brigids Gate)

Superior Achievement in Long Non-Fiction

• Feeding the Monster: Why Horror Has a Hold on Us, Anna Bogutskaya (Faber & Faber)
• The Routledge Introduction to the American Ghost Story, Scott Brewster & Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock (Routledge)
• American Scary: A History of Horror, from Salem to Stephen King and Beyond, Jeremy Dauber (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill)
• Theology of Horror: The Hidden Depths of Popular Films, Ryan G. Duns, SJ (University of Notre Dame Press)
• I Spit on Your Celluloid: The History of Women Directing Horror Movies, Heidi Honeycutt (HeadPress)
• Horror for Weenies: Everything You Need to Know About the Films You’re Too Scared to Watch, Emily C. Hughes (Quirk)
• The Call Is Coming from Inside the House, Allyson McOuat (ECW)
• No More Haunted Dolls: Horror Fiction that Transcends the Tropes, Cassandra O’Sullivan Sachar, ed. (Vernon)
• The Many Lives of the Purge: Essays on the Horror Franchise, Ron Riekki & Kevin J. Wetmore Jr., eds. (McFarland & Company)
• The Sweetest Taboo: An Unapologetic Guide to Child Kills in Film, Erica Shultz (Self-Published)

Superior Achievement in Short Non-Fiction

• “Bad Blood: Serial Killers, True Crime, and the Racial Imaginary In Shadow of a Doubt”, Joceline Andersen (Canadian Journal of Film Studies, Spring 2024)
• “Screamin’ in the Rain: The Orchestration of Catharsis in William Castle’s The Tingler”, Michael Arnzen (What Sleeps Beneath)
• “All is the Fear and Nothing is the Love: The Phantom of the Auteur in Dario Argento’s Opera”, Claire Donner (Severin Films)
• On Melting: Essays Against the Body, Chris Kelso (Control)
• “The Horror of Donna Berzatto and Her Feast of the Seven Fishes”, Vince Liaguno (You’re Not Alone in the Dark)
• “The H Word: My Father, My Private Monster”, Haralambi Markov (Nightmare Magazine, May 2024)
• “Hidden Histories: The Many Ghosts of Disney’s Haunted Mansion”, Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock (Disney Gothic: Dark Shadows in the House of Mouse)
• “Those Who Eat and Those Who Get Eaten: Cannibalism and Capitalism in Melville’s Typee and ‘The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids’”, Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock (Gothic Melville)
• “Jackson and Haunting of the Stage”, Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr. (Journal of Shirley Jackson Studies, Vol. 2 No. 1)
• “Blacks in Film and Cultivated Bias”, Lisa Wood (No More Haunted Dolls: Horror Fiction that Transcends the Tropes)

Superior Achievement in Poetry

• Weird Worlds, Colleen Anderson (Weird House )
• Necessary Poisons, Andrea Blythe (Interstellar Flight)
• The Dark Between the Twilight, Jamal Hodge (Crystal Lake)
• Mexicans on the Moon: Speculative Poetry from a Possible Future, Pedro Iniguez (Space Cowboy)
• Medicine, Kayleigh Marinelli (Plan B)
• Fox Spirit on a Distant Cloud, Lee Murray (The Cuba Press)
• A Few Mythic Paths, Mari Ness (Porkbelly)
• Melancholia: A Book of Dark Poetry, Sumiko Saulson (Bludgeoned Girls)
• Bestial Mouths, Brenda S. Tolian (Raw Dog Screaming)
• Imitation of Life, L. Marie Wood (Falstaff)

Superior Achievement in a Graphic Novel

• Loving, Ohio, Matthew Erman, art by Sam Beck (Dark Horse)
• The Fox Maidens, Robin Ha (HarperCollins Children’s)
• Tender, Beth Hetland (Fantagraphics)
• Beneath The Trees Where Nobody Sees, Patrick Horvath (Penguin Random House)
• Death Strikes: The Emperor of Atlantis, Dave Maass, art by Patrick Lay (Dark Horse)
• The Old Willis Place, Scott Peterson & Mary Downing Hahn, art by Meredith Laxton & Sienna Haralson (HarperCollins Children’s)
• Hound, Sam Romesburg & Sam Freeman, art by Rodrigo Vázquez (Mad Cave Studios)
• H. P. Lovecraft’s The Call of Cthulhu, Gou Tanabe (Dark Horse)
• The Deviant, James Tynion IV, art by Joshua Hixson (Image)
• Chrysanthemum Under The Waves, Maggie Umber (Maggie Umber)

Superior Achievement in a Screenplay

• Heretic, Scott Beck & Bryan Woods (A24, Shiny Penny, Beck/Woods)
• Nosferatu, Robert Eggers, Henrik Galeen, & Bram Stoker (Focus Features, Maiden Voyage Pictures, Studio 8)
• The Substance, Coralie Fargeat (Working Title Film, Good Story, Blacksmith)
• Immaculate, Andrew Lobel (Black Bear, Fifty-Fifty Films, Middle Child Pictures)
• Oddity, Damian McCarthy (Keeper Pictures, Shudder)
• Woman of the Hour, Ian McDonald (AGC Studios, BondIt Media Capital, Vertigo Entertainment)
• Longlegs, Osgood Perkins (C2 Motion Picture Group, Creature Features, Oddfellow Entertainment)
• I Saw the TV Glow, Jane Schoenbrun (A24, Fruit Tree, Smudge Films)
• Abigail, Stephen Shields & Guy Busick (Project X Entertainment, Radio Silence Productions)
• Cuckoo, Tilman Singer (Fiction Park, Neon, Waypoint Entertainment)

The final ballot will be announced on or around February 23, 2025. Winners will be honored at a gala during StokerCon 2025, to be held June 12-15, 2025 in Stamford CT. For more information, see the Stoker Awards website.

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