The joy of losing a Stoker

No, seriously

Hello, everyone! I’m back after ten days in California and I had an absolute blast at residency. Great people. Great conversations. Amazing students/writers. Solid events/workshops/panels. Always a good time. In any case, on Saturday night I was applauding at graduation instead of being at StokerCon with a bunch of friends watching other friends win Stokers. This year, House of Bone and Rain was a nominee in the novel category and holy shit because check out the other nominees: Stephen Graham Jones, Gwendolyn Kiste, Josh Malerman, and Paul Tremblay. We’re talking movies and New York Times bestsellers and dozens of translations and options and awards and a lot of books sold. Now listen to this. Gwendolyn, who won the little haunted house this year, already has three Stokers. That’s a legend in the making. Stephen has four. Paul has a trio at home. Josh and I each have one. I won’t get into everything these fantastic authors have accomplished or how many other awards they’ve won, but you can look all that up in two seconds and you’ll see it’s a lot.

Okay, so now that you know that this year the novel category was FUCKING STACKED, you might start to understand that I was genuinely surprised when I made the final ballot. Do you know how many amazing horror novels were published in 2024? We had marvelous books from Ronald Malfi, Adam Neville, Scott Carson (Michael Koryta), Donyae Coles, Tim Lebbon, Chuck Tingle, Christopher Golden (another author with a couple of Stokers at home), and dozens of others. I encourage you to look them up and read them. They all deserve your attention. And that’s the thing for me. These authors–and Paul, Gwendolyn, Stephen, and Josh–are fucking rockstars. The fact that I walk among them constantly blows my mind. When things aren’t going my way, I remember just how good they are and I shut the fuck up and get back to work.

Listen, Josh will win more Stokers. He writes novels at breakneck speed and the more successful he gets, the harder he goes at this thing and I love that about him. Gwendolyn will win more Stokers. She’s always working on something and keeps getting better with every novel. Paul will win more Stokers because he’s a master of the genre. He’ll be self-deprecating as fuck every time he wins and he will continue to be one of my favorite people because of that. Stephen will win more Stokers (one next year for The Buffalo Hunter Hunter). He also probably wrote an award-winning novella for Ellen Datlow in the time it took me to write this post. I will win more Stokers (this isn’t a confidence exercise or anything like that; when I won, racists lost their minds and I fucking love that, so I’ll keep hustling to stand there again and quote myself: “Stay salty, motherfuckers”).

Now let me tell you about something that makes me happy. It’s not that each of us will win again. It’s not that I expect the folks mentioned in the second paragraph to win their first or third or tenth Stoker. It’s not that I expect to watch Hailey Piper and Eric LaRocca and Rachel Harrison and Delilah Dawson and Alma Katsu and Cynthia Pelayo and Laird Barron and Tananarive Due and Kaaron Warren and Wrath James White and Brian Evenson and Brian Keene and Adam Cesare and V Castro and Gemma Amor and Nuzo Onoh and Owl Goingback and John Langan and Nicholas Kaufmann and Mercedes Murdock Yardley and Sarah Read and Michael Wehunt and Zoe Stage and John Urbancik and Clay McLeod Chapman and Michael Cisco and Lindy Ryan and Cindy O’Quinn and Mary SanGiovanni and T. Kingfisher and Christopher Buelhman and Agustina Bazterrica and Grady Hendrix and Mariana Enriquez and Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Lisa M. Wood and Tim Waggoner and Pedro Iniguez and Stephen King and Linda Addison and Bracken MacLeod and Joe Lansdale (my man has like, a dozen little houses) and so many others win Stokers. No, what makes me happy is that we’re all gonna do that shit together and we’ll get to celebrate our genre and each other every single time.

For years I worked and couldn’t get published. For years I struggled to get my career off the ground. For years I didn’t get reviews in big venues or stars from places like Library Journal or rave reviews in the New York Times. Now I get to be part of the New Golden Age of Horror and my work gets mentioned along giants like Stephen, Josh, Gwendolyn, and Paul. So yeah, it is an absolute joy to “lose” a Stoker when I’m in the company of the folks that make horror the great thing it is right now. Oh, and the absolute best part? None of us is done writing. Hell, we’re just getting started.