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: Stephen King
Title: Bag of Bones
Published By: Scribner
Stephen King's most gripping and unforgettable novel, Bag of Bones, is a story of grief and a lost love's enduring bonds, of a new love haunted by the secrets of the past, of an innocent child caught in a terrible crossfire.
Set in the Maine territory King has made mythic, Bag of Bones recounts the plight of 40-year-old bestselling novelist Mike Noonan, who is unable to stop grieving even four years after the sudden death of his wife, Jo, and who can no longer bear to face the blank screen of his word processor.
Now his nights are plagued by vivid nightmares of the house by the lake. Despite these dreams, or perhaps because of them, Mike finally returns to Sara Laughs, the Noonans' isolated summer home.
He finds his beloved Yankee town familiar on its surface, but much changed underneath -- held in the grip of a powerful millionaire, Max Devore, who twists the very fabric of the community to his purpose: to take his three-year-old granddaughter away from her widowed young mother. As Mike is drawn into their struggle, as he falls in love with both of them, he is also drawn into the mystery of Sara Laughs, now the site of ghostly visitations, ever-escalating nightmares, and the sudden recovery of his writing ability. What are the forces that have been unleashed here -- and what do they want of Mike Noonan?
Author: Chaz Brenchley
Title: The Tower of The King's Daughter
Published by: Orbit
This is fantasy exactly as it should be: ambitious, highly coloured and supremely confident in its grip on the reader's attention. The Kingdom of Outremer is settling down from its bloody inauguration some 40 years ago, with sinister enemies making those on the borders nervous. The Kingdom's conscience (and most loyal defender) is The Society of Ransom, and the Ransomer's remote border stronghold of Roq de Rancon is a place of ancient magic. Marron has recently entered the brotherhood and sworn allegiance, while Julianne, daughter of the King's Shadow, is en route to her wedding in Elessi along with Elisande, her mysterious companion. All three will play a significant role in the cataclysmic events about to overtake Outremer.
Author: Graham Joyce
Title: The Tooth Fairy
Published by: Pocket Books (UK), Tor(US)
In the English Midlands of the 1960s, three young boys are grappling with the typical trials and tribulations of coming-of-age. But one of them, Sam Southall, has a particularly unique problem. One night after putting a tooth under his pillow, he awakes to find a disgusting, horrifying beast in his bedroom. Identifying itself as the Tooth Fairy, it is as shocked as Sam to find that Sam can see it, since it has always been able to move invisibly through the human world.
Thus begins the complex friendship between Sam and this beast. The Tooth Fairy is at turns friendly, violent, and sexual. One moment he can be showing Sam the wonders of the constellations with a telescope, and the next he can be showing him how to masturbate in the middle of Sunday School class. Or, if the Tooth Fairy is in a particularly dark mood, he may just physically hurt Sam for telling others about the Tooth Fairy.
Author: Graham Joyce
Title: Requiem
Published by: Tor Books
After the sudden death of his wife, Tom Webster travels to Jerusalem in search of a friend from his college days. The haunted city, divided by warring religious factions, offers him no refuge from his guilt and grief. As he is wandering through the streets and the archaeological sites, a mysterious old woman appears to Tom and delivers messages that seem beyond his comprehension. But a fragment of the Dead Sea Scrolls that had been kept hidden by an old Jewish innkeeper appears to offer the key to understanding the apparition. Driven to the edge of insanity, Tom believes the spirit of Mary Magdalene is trying to reveal the hidden history of the Resurrection, and he struggles to reconcile the distant past with his own future before the threads of his identity unravel.
Author: Michael Marshall Smith
Title: Only Forward
Published by: Bantam
Call him Stark. If you have to. If you're lucky, you won't call him at all. Because if you do, it means you've got trouble. Big trouble. And the problem is that before Stark is done fixing something, a whole lot of other things usually get broken. Like laws and lives--and anyone who gets in the way. It's that attitude that's earned him his latest assignment: finding a missing VIP named Fell Alkland. The authorities believe Alkland has been kidnapped. Stark doesn't. He hasn't stayed alive this long without learning the basics of survival in a world hurtling straight to hell: Things are always more complicated than they seem. And when a job seems too easy, that's when something really ugly is about to happen. For Fell Alkland is about to become Stark's worst nightmare, a nightmare where anything can happen at any time--where friends can become enemies in a heartbeat and your most secret fear a soul-screaming reality. And the worst of it is that for this nightmare you don't even have to be asleep.
Author: Ramsey Campbell
Title: The Long Lost
Published by: Tor Books
During a weekend in the country, David and Joelle Owain explore an abandoned village - and discover that its last living inhabitant is distantly related to David. Lacking other family, the young couple embrace Gwendolen, and soon the independent old woman has set up housekeeping near their home. Gwendolen keeps a watchful - perhaps too watchful - eye on the Owains. Joelle feels that Gwendolen is judging them, their friends, and their business associates. At the Owains' annual barbecue, Gwendolen serves special cakes, made from a secret recipe. Before long that recipe is the only secret left unrevealed. One party guest, Bill, a TV star, finds that his hidden contempt for other people can no longer be contained - it spills uncontrollably from his mouth until one of his victims brutally slashes Bill's face, forever ending his television career. Another of the Owains' friends, the driver of a commuter train, long-convinced that his wife is having an affair, kills her supposed lover and himself in a horrible train crash. A third man decides his family must not suffer the shame of his bankruptcy and the criminal charges sure to follow - even if he has to kill them to keep them safe.
Author: Graham Joyce
Title: Dark Sister
Published by: Tor Books
Maggie, an unfulfilled, restless housewife in England, comes to terms with her nascent, otherworldly power amidst a disheveled and antagonistic domestic life. Her archaeologist-husband Alex is subtly dominating, which makes for an unfulfilling marriage. So, Maggie buries herself in the chaos of her small children, until a chance discovery both liberates her and invokes catastrophe.
During a routine cleaning of a chimney fireplace, she discovers an herbalist's journal; soon after, her life unfurls wildly and runs horribly aground. It seems that the owner of the journal was not just an herb woman, but also a witch with real powers. Inspired by this forgotten woman, Maggie begins to dabble in the arts of Wicca. The gifts it brings her are powerful--a sense of freedom, purpose, even clairvoyance. But every gift has its counterbalance, and Maggie's newfound telepathy allows her to see things she might have wanted to remain hidden. Even more ominously, it seems that in unearthing the journal, Maggie has awakened deep tragedies from an abandoned time, and the evil that now stalks her and her family might be insatiable and unstoppable.
Author: Jonathan Carroll
Title: Outside the Dog Museum
Published by: Orb Books
Harry Radcliffe is a brilliant prize-winning architect---witty and remarkable. He's also a self-serving opportunist, ready to take advantage of whatever situations, and women, come his way. But now, newly divorced and having had an inexplicable nervous breakdown, Harry is being wooed by the extremely wealthy Sultan of Saru to design a billion-dollar dog museum. In Saru, he finds himself in a world even madder and more unreal than the one he left behind, and as his obsession grows, the powers of magic weave around him, and the implications of his strange undertaking grow more ominous and astounding....
Author: Ramsey Campbell
Title: Midnight Sun
Published by: Random House
“Trees grow”, wrote the dying Edward Sterling in the frozen earth of the forest in Stargrave, England, that became his burial ground. As his grandson Ben learns, in Campbell's beautifully poetic horror novel, the elder Sterling was answering a call from a primordial species of snow that devours humans. Ben becomes a conduit for the gluttony of this creeping arctic cold, slowly losing his reason with each victim that the entity claims, as he succumbs to its promise of immortality in exchange for the lives of his neighbors. This icy menace can succeed only through manipulating Ben's consciousness, and he cooperates--until it hunts his family. Campbell´s ( Ancient Images ) artful use of metaphor paints a frightening portrait of a world tilting into chaos and the price that must be paid to save it. This absorbing novel again demonstrates the author's mastery of the horror genre.
Author: Dan Simmons
Title: Carrion Comfort
Published By: Warner Books
The second novel by World Fantasy Award-winner Simmons ( The Song of Kali ) is a 636-page epic that draws on a variety of genres--horror, science fiction, political thriller, Hollywood roman a clef. It centers around a small number of “mind vampires” who can subjugate other people to their wills, read their minds, experience through their senses. The immensely powerful vampires use others, often bloodily, and often in frivolous “games” (hunting human prey, chess games with human pieces, and so on). Opposing them are Saul Laski, a psychologist and concentration-camp survivor, who is devoted to tracking down the Nazi vampire von Borchert; Natalie Preston, whose father inadvertently and fatally crossed the path of a pawn of the ancient, dotty vampire Melanie Fuller; Sheriff Bobby Joe Gentry, dragged in while investigating the multiple murders that marked the departure of Melanie Fuller from Charleston; and a host of other normals and vampires whose lives impinge on those of the principals.
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