The Bram Stoker Award: Some Concluding Thoughts

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

As I mentioned in the first installment of this four- (now five-) part series, it's unclear how prestigious the Bram Stoker Award is beyond the Horror Writers Association (HWA), whose members bestow the prize to writers (often 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.

It's surprisingly easy to become a member of the HWA. As the organization's website indicates, “You needn’t be an established professional writer to join HWA. Your demonstrated intention to become a professional writer is all that’s required to join HWA at the Affiliate level.” “Demonstrated intention” is indicated by “one minimally paid publication in any of several categories.” There are opportunities, at various other “levels,” for several other types of membership; one need not have written anything at all for the “Associate level” of membership, which is open to “non-writing professionals with an interest in the field (such as illustrators, librarians, booksellers, producers, agents, editors, and teachers).” The question doesn't seem so much who is eligible to join the HWA as who is not allowed.

Nomination for the HWA's annual Bram Stoker Award, “an eight-inch replica of a fanciful haunted house, designed specifically for HWA by sculptor Steven Kirk,” is also an easy process, open to many: “any work of Horror first published in the English language may be considered for an award during the year of its publication.” Currently, “the eleven Bram Stoker Award categories are: Novel, First Novel, Short Fiction, Long Fiction, Young Adult, Fiction Collection, Poetry Collection, Anthology, Screenplay, Graphic Novel and Non-Fiction”—something, it seems, for everyone. To add yet another opportunity to win an award, the HWA recently added a twelfth category: “Short Non-Fiction.”

Any member of the HWA can nominate an author for placement on the preliminary ballot, and a panel of judges prepares a second preliminary “ballot” of potential winners. Then, “two rounds of voting by our Active members . . . determine first the Final Ballot (all those appearing on the Final Ballot are “Bram Stoker Nominees”), and then the Bram Stoker Award Winners.”

One should be skeptical of the value of a prize for “superior achievement” that is often awarded to the members of the organization who vote for the winner, especially when the contest is open to a wide segment of the population of published authors and any member can place a name on the ballot. Outside the HWA, how seriously is the Bram Stoker Award for Novel taken? Is the prize considered prestigious by anyone outside the HWA?

Obviously, the answers to these questions depend on the person (or organization) asked. Authors who've won one—or more—of the awards often boast of their “superior achievement” on their websites or in interviews and plaster their book covers with HWA badges. After all, one of the expressed purposes of the HWA is to promote its authors' works. Many successful horror authors are, after all, HWA members, and members pay dues. Therefore, the HWA itself and its author-members are likely to agree that the Bram Stoker Award is prestigious. Publishers, whose goal is to sell books, are apt to concur, as are other organizations, such as universities, with which a horror author may be affiliated.

On the other hand, fans (as opposed to groupies) are often a lot less impressed with the award; many a Bram Stoker Award winner's prize-winning novel has received low ratings on Amazon and other book-selling websites, and, as we've seen in previous posts, book reviewers and literary critics are often unswayed in their opinions of books and authors by the fact that a writer is a Bram Stoker Award winner. What matter to readers, reviewers, and critics is the reading experience and the quality of the book, not an award by a professional organization to which many of the award winners belong. If readers consider a book to be a stinker, its having won an award won't matter. For a literary critic, such as Harold Bloom, whose disdain for Stephen King is widely known, no number of such awards is going to change his or her mind about the quality and value of the award-winner's work or of horror fiction in general.

Die-hard fans and groupies, for whom a favorite author can do no wrong, are going to love a writer no matter what; whether he or she happens to have been awarded a prize isn't going to have much of an effect on such followers, so, for them, the Bram Stoker Award also isn't likely to matter much one way or the other.

The unavailability of the criteria by which the Bram Stoker Award is awarded also leaves the matter of its prestige open to question. The HWA doesn't publish the criteria its judges use to determine what constitutes “superior achievement,” so there's no meaningful basis for agreeing or disagreeing with their awarding of the prize to any particular author. The awarding of the award is merely a consensus of opinion based on who-knows-what?

Why has Stephen King, one of the most prolific and profitable authors of horror (or any other genre), with 350 million book sales, won no fewer than six Bram Stoker Awards, while his colleague and fellow HWA member, Dean Koontz, also a prolific and highly successful author of horror and dark fantasy, with 450 million book sales to his credit, has never won a single such award? Popularity cannot be equated with quality, of course, but is it really realistic to suppose that Koontz, who's been nominated three times for the award, has never once, in a career spanning half a century, demonstrated “superior achievement” in the writing of a horror novel, while, according to the HWA, King frequently does? It seems absurd that Koontz has been slighted in this way, while other, far lesser-known writers have received an award. What's going on behind the doors and curtain of the HWA? Politics? Nepotism? Cronyism?

King has been declared, by a few promoters, as having eclipsed even Edgar Allan Poe as the best horror writer of all time. While it is undeniably true that King has written far more than Poe wrote, quantity is not the same as quality.

Popular with ordinary readers and with literary critics alike, Poe not only wrote superb horror stories, but he also popularized and greatly improved the horror story, at the same time introducing psychological horror, and he invented the detective story. Both accomplishments are nothing if not “superior achievements.” The invention of an entire genre alone is a peerless feat. In addition, while serving as de facto editors of important literary magazines, he wrote both book reviews and essays in literary criticism and established specific criteria for writing both poetry and short stories that are still influential to this day.

Had the HWA existed in Poe's day, he might have been a member—indeed, he might have been a founder—and he probably would have won Bram Stoker Awards for Short Fiction, Anthology, Poetry Collection, and Lifetime Achievement—and deservedly so.

If the HWA wants its award to become prestigious beyond its own membership, winners, and publishers, the association should adopt a few reforms. Specific criteria should be developed and published, and these standards should lean heavily toward literary excellence. William Shakespeare (Titus Andronicus), Henry James (The Turn of the Screw, “The Jolly Corner”), Nathaniel Hawthorne (Twice-Told Tales), Edgar AllanPoe, Charles Dickens ("The Signal-man"), and other top-flight writers have, after all, written horror stories.

The awards should be occasional, rather than annual (“superior achievement” of any kind doesn't generally occur in a narrow field such as horror fiction, on a dependable, yearly basis).

The judges should be drawn from among scholars, literary critics, and professional book reviewers as well as HWA members. There's probably room for improving the processes for ballot inclusion and nomination, too.

Stephen King's Bram Stoker Awards

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.  

Although the reviewer has read only the first installment, he ventures the opinion that “King has written — so far — his best fiction in years, a Depression-era prison novel that’s as hauntingly touching as it is just plain haunted.” In fact, De Haven gives King's first chapter an “A” grade. 

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”).