The British Fantasy Awards are presented each year at Fantasycon. The awards are by a ballot of the BFS membership, if you are new to the genre the winners could be viewed as a recommended reading list. Listed on these pages are the winners of the Best Novel by year, for a listing of past award winners in all categories, please click here.
Author: Ramsey Campbell
Title: The Influence
Published By:Tor Books
“You needn't die unless you choose to..”
For the Faraday family these words hold the key to a nightmare that starts one bleak September evening in Liverpool. When the family matriarch, Queenie, dies, she is buried wearing a locket containing her eight-year-old granddaughter Rowan´s hair. Soom afterwards Rowan makes a new friend, the curiously old-fashioned Vicky, under whose influence Rowan starts to turn against her own family, becoming cold, haughty and withdrawn. Only her mother, Alison, suspects the horrifying truth - that Queenie has fulfilled her evil prophecy and returned to live in Rowan´s body. But will anyone believe her? And if they do, how can they break the evil “influence” that holds Rowan´s body and soul in the balance?
Author: Ramsey Campbell
Title: The Hungry Moon
Published by: MacMillan
Set in Northern England, in the small bleak town of Moonwell, edged by moors pitted with treacherous mineshafts. To Moonwell comes the preacher Godwin Mann, whose particularly intolerant brand of fundamentalism appeals to the inhabitants. They rally almost as one behind him and ostracize and persecute the few independent souls who do not. Mann descends into the pit in which the ancient malignant being worshipped by the Druids millenia past is said to dwell. Intending to exorcise the demon and claim the land for God, he is instead overwhelmed. What emerges from the pit is the monstrous creature, clothed now in the flesh of Mann, and it is only the town's pariahs who can see that something is radically wrong, that an evil has been unleashed on the community. Slowly Moonwell is isolated from the world, as telephone lines break down, a cloud cover brings continuous darkness, watches and clocks stop, roads mysteriously lead nowhere. And within this isolation, the monster's power grows unimpeded
Author: Stephen King
Title: IT
Published by: Viking
A promise made twenty-eight years ago calls seven adults to reunite in Derry, Maine, where as teenagers they battled an evil creature that preyed on the city's children. Unsure that their Losers Club had vanquished the creature all those years ago, the seven had vowed to return to Derry if IT should ever reappear.
Now, children are being murdered again and their repressed memories of that summer return as they prepare to do battle with the monster lurking in Derry's sewers once more.
Author: T.E.D Klein
Title: The Ceremonies
Published by: Viking
The Ceremonies really is a magnificent work of horror, but it is not for everyone. If you like action on top of action, you may find yourself bogged down and discouraged by this novel. At over 500 pages, it is rather long, and it can seem even longer than it really is to readers seeking quick thrills. Klein builds this novel quite slowly and tediously, creating an atmosphere of impending doom that grows in short increments from one page to the next. It is not the awful events that make this horror novel work; it is the atmosphere of dread and suspense. One cannot help but detect a little bit of Lovecraft in Klein (and not just because one of the characters is called the Old One), although both men's style differs considerably. The power that stands to be unleashed by the completion of “the ceremonies” described here is gargantuan, an awesome, world-destroying creature called up from the depths of the earth, a creature too ancient to even be labeled evil.
Author: Ramsey Campbell
Title: Incarnate
Published by: Time Warner
The horror started when a 'controlled' experiment in prophetic dreaming got wildly out of control. It was aborted - but not before some dark door to a screaming shadow-world of nightmare had been opened and left ajar. Now, as a bitter winter holds the country in its corpse-cold grip, a monstrous presence begins to invade the lives of the original participants. Creatures glimpsed fleetingly in the original group dream eleven years ago are drawing them inexorably into a dreadful vortex of hallucination, insanity - and worse. One by one the dreamers succumb to the diabolical force that threatens much more than mere lives. Only Molly, a young television production assistant, decides to fight to understand the true nature of the horror before it can absorb her forever...
Author: Peter Straub
Title: Floating Dragon
Published by: Putnam
The terrors afflicting the sleepy town of Hampstead, Connecticut, were beyond imagination. Sparrows dropping dead from the trees like rotten fruit, disfiguring diseases spreading like wildfire, inexplicable murders and child drownings shattering the lives of the citizens - never can such a list of horrors have afflicted one town. But the evil madness had a long history. A catastrophe had struck Hampstead every thirty years since its foundation 300 years before - yet only Graham Williams, a writer and descendant of one of the original founders, had looked into the 'black summers' and their mysterious origins. When he discovers that descendants of the three other original settlers are back living in the town, he knows it will be the blackest summer yet
Author: Gene Wolfe
Title: The Sword of The Lictor
Published by: Timescape
The third Book of the New Sun, in which Severian betrays another employer and flees north towards the Pelerines and the war with the Ascians, contains some of the most surreal episodes in the Book, such as Severian's encounter with Typhon, a two-headed tyrant from the distant past. It also provides a setup for Severian's trials in the fourth book: towards the end of Sword he is stripped of his most powerful possessions -- Terminus Est and the Claw.
Author: Stephen King
Title: Cujo
Published by: Viking
The Cambers´ once-friendly St. Bernard turns into a killer after being bitten by a rabid bat. Donna Trenton´s husband is in New York trying to contain a disastrous ad campaign. Feeling abandoned by her workaholic husband, who is frequently out of town, Donna Trenton embarks on an affair with a local handyman. Left to fend for herself, she takes her ailing Pinto to Joe Cambers´ garage for repairs only to be trapped with her son Tad in the sweltering car by the monstrous dog.
Author: Ramsey Campbell
Title: To Wake the Dead (The Parasite in the US)
Published by: Millington
“Rose Tierney thought she had no contact with the occult. Until she begins to have weird out of body experiences years after using a oujiboard. ” The novel, renamed The Parasite, was published a month later in the USA with a somewhat different ending.
Author: Tanith Lee
Title: Death's Master
Published By: Hamlyn
This is a novel set in the shadowy world between Earth from the Underearth, lorded over by the Night's Master, a demonic figure who spreads fear and confusion throughout the Earth. It is a colourful patchwork built from smaller stories that combine together to create the whole, and though the smaller stories themselves are satisfying it is the greater unifying tapestry that is most impressive. Lee manages to weave a story both invigorating and magical, but never whimsical, for her fantastic visions are darker than those you usually come across. Tragedy is a common theme throughout, and many of the stories end in tragedy, though often with a later reconciliation. As it comes to its closing passages the momentum that carried the story onwards is exposed for what it truly was and the Night's Master is left to make a decision that comes about through his earlier actions.
A beautifully written collection of fables that flows seamlessly, building into a work of great power that stays with you long after you have read it. Definately a book to be savoured more than once and one that should find a comfortable place on many shelves.
For the all latest genre news please visit our News Section
or if you prefer sign up for our weekly email news digest:
The Newsfeed
Advertising with the BFS is a great way of reaching the very heart of the genre market in the UK (and beyond...) Advertising space is available in all BFS publications. Full details here
A new limited edition chapbook written by World Fantasy Award winner STEPHEN JONES!.