Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman
It's unclear
how prestigious the Bram Stoker Award is beyond the Horror Writers
Association (HWA), whose members bestow the prize to writers (mostly
among their own ranks) for “superior achievement” in the genre.
The prizes were first awarded, in a variety of categories, in 1987.
Winners receive a statuette made by Society Awards, the same firm
that makes the Emmy Award, the Golden Globe Award, and the GLAAD
Media Award.
Four HWA members have won multiple Bram Stoker Awards for the novel.
Stephen King won for Misery (1987), tying with Robert R, McCammon, the author of Swan Song; for The Green Mile (1996); for Bag of Bones (1998); for Lisey's Story (2006); for Duma Key (2008); and for Doctor Sleep (2013).
The award was conferred on Peter Straub for The Throat (1993); Mr. X (1999); Lost Boy, Lost Girl (2003); In the Night Room (2004); and A Dark Matter (2010).
Robert R. McCammon took home the Bram Stoker Award for Swan Song (1983), which tied with King's Misery; for Mine (1990); and for Boy's Life (1991).
The prize went to Sarah Langan for The Missing (2007) and Audrey's Door (2009).
In the absence of specific HWA criteria for determining who should and should not receive a Bram Stoker Award for his or her novel, we'll take a look, backward in time, in this post, to see how the critics of the day assessed King's prize-winning novels. In future posts, we'll consider the other multiple award winners' “superior accomplishments.”
While the HWA's secret criteria for determining “superior achievement” appear to vary from one HWA member to another (candidates for inclusion on ballots in votes for nominations are made both by members and, on a separate ballot, by judges), Amazon customers' reviews give a pretty good idea why readers rate the books they review. Interestingly, Amazon customers apparently often disagree with HWA's assessments of the Bram Stoker Award winners' “superior achievement” in the genre.
We may never know what's “superior” about King's achievement in having written Misery, but, whatever it was deemed to have been, it was enough for him to be awarded one of the two 1987 prizes for such accomplishment with regard to the novel. The best we can do, perhaps, in attempting to surmise what the HWA organization found to be of “superior” quality concerning King's novel, is to recall what a professional critic wrote about it.
Here's what John Katzenbach of The New York Times had to say, in part, about the novel in his May 31, 1987, review, “Summer Reading: Sheldon Gets the Ax.” The novel is “different” from others of its genre in that it has a limited cast of characters (two, in fact) and a restricted setting (“the confines of a single house”—indeed, almost exclusively . . . one room”). (Has Katzenbach ever read Edgar Allan Poe's “The Cask of Amontillado” or “The Tell-Tale Heart”?)
In addition, Katzenbach finds King's implicit allusions to The Arabian Nights “sophisticated” storytelling: “But the novel functions as well on a more sophisticated level. Mr. King evokes the image of Scheherazade.” The critic also enjoys King's characterizations of protagonist Paul Sheldon and his psychotic nemesis, Annie Wilkes, the novelist's suggestion “that real torture can solve the problems of writer's block,” and its many cliffhangers.
Again, we have no idea what went through the minds of the HWA judges who decided Misery was an example of “superior achievement” in the horror genre, but, if Katzenbach provides any insight, such accomplishment has a lot to do with rehashing elements as old, or older than, Poe; suggesting an allusion to another, older work of literature; writing characters interesting to one's readers (fairly standard); and evoking an unusual—one might say, in the case of Misery's idea that torture is inspiring, an absurd—theme. Oh, yes, Kazenbach likes King's “cliffhangers,” too.
Although the techniques Katzenbach zeroes in on are typical of the genre, exhibiting nothing truly “different” in horror fiction, King's apparently virtuoso performance topped those of Ray Garton (Live Girls), Kevin Nunn (Unassigned Territory), and Chet Williamson (Ash Wednesday), and was matched only by Robert R. McCammon (Swan Song), who shared the 1987 Bram Stoker Award for the novel. It seems Katzenbach, like King's readers and the HWA itself, is easily impressed.
What about The Green Mile (1996)? What made this particular novel a “superior achievement” worthy of the HWA prize for what is essentially the best horror novel of the year? We don't know for sure, of course, given the association's tight-lipped stance on divulging its criteria—at least online—so, again, the best we can do is to get the take of a professional critic of the day.
In his book review of King's prison horror story for Entertainment Weekly, “The Green Mile (Entire),” Tom De Haven says that, having read the introductory chapter of the novel, which was serialized, he was “hooked” by the many questions it raised. Raising questions, it seems, was King's biggest ploy in maintaining readers' suspense:
Is Coffey innocent? I don’t know. Just as I don’t know what happens
to the other prisoner on death row, a timid Frenchman named Eduard
Delacroix, who has befriended a small brown mouse with an eerily
unrodentlike intelligence. Nor do I know what mayhem vicious prison
guard Percy Wetmore is going to inflict. (He’s going to do
something, though. Bet on it.) Is this going to turn into a gore
story or a ghost story? Or both? I don’t know that, either.
To the impressive list of plot cliches, the use of literary allusions, characterization, abundant cliffhangers, and a dubious theme, we can now add to King's repertoire his ability to raise suspenseful questions. In fact, this last technique is the primary one De Haven credits for “hooking” him. Is it enough to build a novel on? At the time he wrote his single-installment book review, even De Haven couldn't say for sure, but, apparently for the HWA, whose judges, hopefully, read more, this was enough to designate King's work as one of “superior achievement” in the field. No wonder The Green Mile beat out Poppy Z. Brite's Exquisite Corpse, Owl Goingback's Crota, and Peter Straub's The Hellfire Club.
Although Jim Argendeli (“Once again, Stephen King delivers”) says that Bag of Bones is “standard fare for a Stephen King novel,” he also finds the book “business as usual” and full of “cliches.” Its saving grace, Argendeli implies, is King's ability to suggest questions by which he maintains readers' suspense.
Apparently, there is nothing new here, either, as De Haven mentions this trick as one that's been in King's bag at least as early as 1996 and, in fact, suggesting questions through incidents and other means is as old as fiction itself, as are the “plot twists” and “red herrings” that Argendeli singles out as responsible for keeping “you rapidly turning the pages to discover the answers” to the questions King has implied.
Was King's use of ancient literary techniques and “business as usual” enough to make Bag of Bones the winner of the HWA's 1998 Bram Stoker Award for Novel? If so, it's difficult to see how his performance in having written Bag of Bones represents “superior achievement” and why it won over Dean Koontz's Fear Nothing, S. P. Somtow's Darker Angels, and Thomas Tessier's Fog Heart.
For The New York Times reviewer Jim Windolf (“Scare Tactician”), King's 1998 Bram Stower Award winner, Lisey's Story, succeeds where “its fraternal twin,” Bag of Bones, failed because the former novel's characters, “Lisey and Scott make much better novel subjects than their 'Bag of Bones' counterparts,” being “loopy and dramatic,” rather than, as in Bag of Bones, simply chewing “up creaky plot machinery.”
A novel that investigates who an author is while he (the author in Lisey's Story is male) is writing, doesn't merely have intriguing (i. e., “loopy and dramatic”) characters, but it's also chock full of “solid descriptions . . . indelible images . . .” interrupted sentences, italics, alternating points of view, and even verse.
Haven't other writers used the same devices for centuries? There seems to be nothing, in Windolf's catalog of King's “tricks” that set King apart from those of his peers who lost the 1998 Bram Stoker Award for Novel to him. The reason Lisey's Story is a winner, in the eyes of HWA's judges, remains a mystery.
In 2008, King won the HWA's Bram Stoker Award for Novel yet again, this time for Duma Key. Why was this novel considered a “superior achievement” in the field of horror fiction while the losing contenders—Gary Braunbeck's Coffin County, Nate Kenyon's The Reach, and Gregory Lamberson's Johnny Gruesome—were judged as inferior works?
In “Dark Art,” New York Times book reviewer, James Campbell, sings the praises of King's Duma Key, despite King's inability to meet the challenge of describing paintings in words: “The difficulty of evoking the wonder of graphic art that cannot be viewed has confounded many writers before King.”
Although the novel's painter, Edgar Freemantle, thinks of his own works as “reheated Dalí,” Campbell finds it “hard to square that comparison with the descriptions of four [of the character's] recent works,” one of which King, via Freemantle, describes as “a dead seagull . . . found on the beach,” which Freemantle then magnified to “pterodactyl size.” (Either King doesn't think much of Dalí or he hadn't seen many of the surrealist's paintings, if he confuses Dalí's work with that of Freemantle.) If it's not King's poor descriptions, perhaps it was his “overextended” plotting or “flimsy” characterization that endeared Duma Key to the HWA judges.
In 2013, King's novel Doctor Sleep, a sequel to The Shining (1977), won the Bram Stoker Award for Novel. There's no telling why the HWA judges judged this novel as being worthy to receive King's seventh such award, but Margaret Atwood's review of the novel, “Shine On: Stephen King's 'Shining' Sequel, 'Doctor Sleep',” suggests some reasons the book may have been recommended.
It's full of “wordplay and puns and mirror language,” she notes; it offers a mix of good and bad in each character; it includes “all [the] virtues of his best work” (namely, he knows his way around “the underworld”); his fiction connects with (feeds upon?) earlier American literature (especially earlier horror stories), and it's “about families” (but, of course, not all of the families are human).
For Atwood, King is the Norman Rockwell of American letters, stemming from the same “literary taproot” that runs through the literature of Edgar Nathaniel Hawthorne, Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Henry James, and Ray Bradbury. King may not be the “Lincoln of our Literature,” as William Dean Howells called Mark Twain, but, hey, it's all food. Good enough, at least, for the HWA to have awarded King his sixth Bram Stoker prize.
Scholars may contend, as Dr. Harold Bloom certainly does, that King writes nothing more than the modern equivalents of Victorian “penny dreadfuls,” but what does the Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University know?
Whom are we to believe, the HWA, or Bloom, who, in writing of the bestowal of a different award on King, evaluates the horror author's contributions to American letters this way:
The
decision to give the National Book Foundation's annual award for
“distinguished contribution” to Stephen King is extraordinary,
another low in the shocking process of dumbing down our cultural
life. I've described King in the past as a writer of penny dreadfuls,
but perhaps even that is too kind. He shares nothing with Edgar Allan
Poe. What he is is an immensely inadequate writer on a
sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph, book-by-book basis. The
publishing industry has stooped terribly low to bestow on King a
lifetime award that has previously gone to the novelists Saul Bellow
and Philip Roth and to playwright Arthur Miller. By awarding it to
King they recognize nothing but the commercial value of his books,
which sell in the millions but do little more for humanity than keep
the publishing world afloat. If this is going to be the criterion in
the future, then perhaps next year the committee should give its
award for distinguished contribution to Danielle Steel, and surely
the Nobel Prize for literature should go to J. K. Rowling (“Dumbing
down American readers”).
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