The 2024 Bram Stoker Award: A depressing night for quality children’s fiction

How can underwhelming novels win prestigious international gongs? In mainstream YA and MG awards, such as the Newbery (USA) and Carnegie (UK) Medals, this is just not possible. What makes the Stoker different is that the voting members of the HWA decide who win, the majority of which clearly know little about fiction for kids and teens. 

The 2024 Bram Stoker Award: A depressing night for quality children’s fiction

If you have an interest in quality Young Adult (YA) and Middle Grade (MG) fiction then you will find the 2024 Bram Stoker winners a tad underwhelming. They are a poor reflection in what is supposed to be the ‘best’ in current YA and MG horror fiction, selected by the Horror Writer’s Association (HWA).

Firstly, I commend the committee who curated the Preliminary Ballots, they did good jobs in bringing together some strong contenders for the HWA members to vote upon in the Final Ballots. Unfortunately, the members shot themselves in the foot by voting for two (one was an excellent joint-winner) mediocre novels, in the YA category Adam Cesare’s Clown in a Cornfield 3 and for Middle Grade Robert Ottone’s There’s Something Sinister in Center Field. 

How anybody can believe these two books are worthy of international prizes is totally beyond me, which this article discusses at length. 

Through my work with the Ginger Nuts of Horror website I have read every book featured on all the YA and MG Bram Stoker Awards from the last decade, reviewing everything since 2017 for the Young Blood section of the site, which I solely curate. Professionally, I have worked as a school librarian since 1994 and since committing to horror book reviewing a decade ago have enjoyed shining a light on terrific dark fiction for younger readers, whilst discussing the good, bad and mediocre online. 

Over these years I have reviewed hundreds of YA and MG novels and in 2024 published  The YA Horror 400: an almanac of 400 teen horror novel reviews published between 2008-2024, bringing together many of my favourites. A few months ago, as I do every year, I reviewed all the books on both the current MG and YA sections, the original articles can be read here:

Middle Grade:

Young Adult:

This is how I rated the books on this excellent Middle Grade list :

In this category there were joint winners (which does happen occasionally) with Eden Royce’s superb The Creepening of Dogwood House  deservedly winning with Robert Ottone’s forgettable There’s Something Sinister in Center Field,which was the weakest book on the ballot by some distance. This is the only book on this list of ten I would not recommend for your school library. 

Here are extracts from my original reviews of both novels:

The Creepening of Dogwood House (8/10) – “For anybody who ever thought Middle Grade novels might lack emotional whack then they really need to read The Creepening of Dogwood House to put them on the straight and narrow. This terrific little novel hits home like a steam train, using hoodoo magic to drive a supernatural story rife with family secrets and tragedy.”

There’s Something Sinister in Center Field (2/10) – “At less than 100-pages, novellas rarely make any impact in the book world for children, and there is little in There’s Something Sinister in Center Field to indicate this lack lustred story will be any different.Non-baseball fans will get bored quickly and I doubt the bland conversational style of writing has enough whack to get any genuine baseball fans excited, who would rather be playing the sport than reading about this ghostly and incredibly predictable encounter.”    

This is how I rated the books on the YA list which was significantly weaker than the MG list and lacked true bangers, with the exception of my top pick:

Ann Fraistat’s A Place of Vanishing was the standout novel here, a clever, scary, highly original and nuanced haunted house story, and how it lost to a tired third entry in the Clown in a Cornfield franchise is a sad day for quality fiction. I would be interested to hear some justification from voting HWA members on this, or how many have even read A Place of Vanishing before casting their vote for Cornfield 3? 

Here are some extracts from my original reviews on both books:

“A Place of Vanishing is a clever haunted house novel; backed up with an outstanding setting, sympathetic characters, complex family drama and an unsettling vibe that vibrates from deep inside the foundations of the monstrosity. This horror novel also has much to say about mental health, with the main character being bipolar and recovering from a suicide attempt which led to her family relocating for a fresh start. Libba is a fragile, sensitive, and incredibly well drawn young woman, and her interactions with her younger sister Vivi (who has her own fragilities), single parent mother and potential love interest Flynn help carry the story.”

“Clown in a Cornfield 3: the Church of Frendo– Adam Cesare needs to call time of his Clown in a Cornfield series as it has completely run out of gas. Cesare attempts to take the series in a new direction but instead scores a massive own goal by abandoning the location of Kettle Springs and cutting some popular characters (Cole and Rust) from the first two books. A few years ago the original Clown in a Cornfield was a breath of fresh air in the YA horror scene and was a deserved winner of the YA Bram Stoker Award. This third instalment is tired, old hat and a weak conclusion which lacks both clowns and cornfields.”

I realise from my own professional networking that horror is not a genre many school librarians necessarily know much about and so they rely upon prize lists to help in their stock selection process. The Bram Stoker Award should be a major part of the support network, as it is the only major international horror award for YA and MG. However, in reality the HWA is failing to hit this key target, as its voting members repeatedly pick weak titles. 

Here are a couple of further howlers from previous years:

For the 2019 YA Bram Stoker Final Ballot I ranked the books, with the weakest winning:

For the 2022 YA Bram Stoker Award I ranked the books, with the weakest winning:

Overall, the above two solid Final Ballots were overshadowed by weak winners. Considering how powerful some of the books on these lists were (Tiffany D Jackson’s The Weight of Blood was a particular stunner), I am amazed how anybody could justify voting for the eventual winners. To call these two winners the ‘best’ in YA world horror is a total joke.

On the other hand Tiffany Jackson has continued to go from strength to strength, with her latest prize being the prestigious 2025 Margaret A. Edwards Award, which honours her significant and lasting contribution to writing for teens. Tiffany would have been a very worthwhile Stoker winner to perhaps take the prize into the wider educational world. Many of the other authors, including Liana Gardner, Amelinda Berube, Kate Alice Marshall and Ann Fraistat would have done the same. 

It goes without saying that school libraries are severely cash strapped and so they should be able to trust the HWA to provide them with strong shortlists to develop their stock. Giving awards to such weak winners as Ottone (twice) and Nzondi does not inspire trust, in fact it is just the opposite, making this an award to swerve with a dodgy reputation. How do weak novels win? One can only presume those voting know little about YA and MG fiction or have their own personal agendas for who they vote for.

As the enclosed poster indicates, I have nine  of the ten books on display in my school library from the MG section. The HWA should be embarrassed that one of their current MG joint winners is not of sufficient quality to even appear on a poster which promotes horror in a school library in which the genre is widely celebrated.

I have multiple copies of my favourites and have even added a few to other internal reading challenges, particularly Anne Ursu’s Not Quite a Ghost, Mary Averling’s The Curse of Eelgrass Bog  and M. R. Fournet’s Darkness and Demon Song. I always enjoy chatting to kids about horror and the Stoker Award should help harness this enthusiasm and not put school librarians in awkward positions by pushing winners which add little to their library collection. 

This is not about particular ‘taste’ but having the ability to digest a book and then having the knowledge to decide which reader might be attracted to it. This is the reason I struggled with this MG winner: I cannot fathom which youngsters might want to read such a simplistic story, particularly as many of the other titles have serious depth and are challenging literary reads. Voting for Clown in a Cornfield 3 also shows a serious lack of imagination and knowledge of YA horror and I hope it has not triumphed solely due to name recognition and the recent film. 

How can underwhelming novels win prestigious international gongs? In mainstream YA and MG awards, such as the Newbery (USA) and Carnegie (UK) Medals, this is just not possible. What makes the Stoker different is that the voting members of the HWA decide who win, the majority of which clearly know little about fiction for kids and teens. 

The YA and MG categories are different from the others in the HWA award roster in that they are significantly more specialist. I would suggest abandoning voting in these two categories and instead leave it to the committee who selected them. This is about quality children’s fiction, which we want to promote beyond the doors of the HWA, and it is clear little is gained by voting. 

For the last decade, I have been involved in a south London book prize which involves 20+ schools. Our prize has a different theme every year and the shortlist is chosen entirely by a panel of school librarians, after which our job is done, and the winner is then selected by hundreds of children voting. Unfortunately, the Stoker does not work this way, as the voting members still have the ability of forcing books (in addition to the those chosen by the committee) onto the ballot. This is perhaps a great chance to push a mediocre book by a friend forward with quality control disappearing out the window!

On a positive note, it has been encouraging to see the HWA attempting to make inroads into libraries and reading with its Summer Scares programme. This year both the YA and MG sections are strong, three of the six books were covered in my own YA Horror 400 almanac, including Devils Unto Dust (Emma Berquist), The Getaway (Lamar Giles) and Hide and Seeker (Daka Hermon). The Scares list never duplicates the Stoker Ballot and it is good to see strong unrecognised novels getting well deserved publicity. However, the lack of Stoker winners on these shortlists is equally telling. 

You can find out more about the excellent Summer Scares programme here:

Wouldn’t it be amazing if genuine young people got excited about the Stoker Award, or we heard of displays in school libraries, or kids attempting to read all the titles on an annual shortlist? Or if we had a strong winner we could get behind? This will only happen if they have quality horror which will connect and resonate with readers. This is much more important than a closed group voting for each other who are not interested in the wider educational picture, which is encouraging young people to become lifelong horror fans. 

Another thing YA and MG Stoker lists always have in common (irrespective of whether they’re great or mediocre novels) is the fact that they are almost always entirely American. Perhaps it is time the HWA rebranded their prize the ‘American’ Superior Achievement in a Young Adult Novel as non-American authors being nominated (forget winning) is as rare as hen’s teeth. If you come from the UK, where there is a strong teen horror scene, this is particularly noticeable. If you are promoting an award as ‘international’ then you really need to include non-American writers and for the last few years Ginger Nuts of Horror has repeatedly flagged this concern by releasing our own An Alternative British YA Stoker list. 

In the UK there is a new generation of very popular YA horror writers including Kat Ellis (Harrow Lake and Wicked Little Deeds), Amy McCaw (Mina trilogy), Kathryn Foxfield (Good Girls Die First, It’s Behind You, and Tag You’re Dead) and Cynthia Murthy (Last One to Die, Win Lose Kill Die and The Midnight Game), none of which have had any Stoker recognition, with some of these books even being republished in the USA with new titles. It may well be that the publishers of these authors do not engage with the Stoker selection process, or that the authors themselves do not see any value in getting involved, which would be a shame. 

Also, in the UK we have an incredibly successful series of standalone horror novels written under the RED EYE brand, which I guarantee every school library in the UK automatically buys, but once again the YA Stoker list has never given this incredible twelve book series any recognition. This is the closest brand the UK has to match the Point Horror heyday of the nineties. 

Children and teen book awards are usually fairly localised affairs and centred around countries or smaller regions, but big UK national awards such as the Carnegie Medal have in recent years gone from being British prizes to international, this is to increase diversity and as a result Americans such as Jason Reynolds and Elizabeth Acevedo have won. The HWA could look at the blueprint which has made major strides in becoming truly international, but to do this the book selection process would need to be more rigorous to eliminate weak selections appearing on their ballots. 

One cannot help feeling that the YA and MG sections feels slightly tacked onto much more prestigious categories and it is hard to see them getting out of their shadow without the HWA giving the awards their own identity. I would love to see the children’s sections have their own ‘brands’ which spreads far and wide through school libraries with posters and buzz around the shortlist with proper media interest, shortlisted authors getting excited, and cool tweets. 

In the UK, the YA Book Prize is a notable example of a successful award which has picked up a lot of interest in schools and has been sponsored by prominent book-trade magazine The Bookseller. Would it not be wonderful if a YA horror award had a fraction of this national attention? (maybe even a complete rebrand to coincide with Halloween time!) The HWA already has the Summer Scares summer booklist recommendations, which I have seen featured on big sites such as Book Riot picking up more publicity than the YA and MG Stokers themselves. 

Eden Royce’s The Creepening of Dogwood House win was a rare ray of sunlight for children’s horror fiction in an otherwise depressing night in the MG and YA categories. 

Tony Jones 

Praise for the YA Horror 400 almanac, published in 2024:

“The YA Horror 400 is a spectacular resource for lovers of horror and YA fiction. It’s a comprehensive guide to the past 15+ years of YA horror with reviews and author insights on over 400 YA horror novels and books, including my ‘We Mostly Come Out at Night’. I cannot recommend this book highly enough to YA horror readers. 10/10!” ROB COSTELLO (YA author and editor of We Mostly Come Out at Night & The Dancing Bears)

“The YA Horror 400 is such a good and constructive push for YA horror.” JEREMY DE QUIDT (YA author of The Wrong Train & The Toymaker)

“An amazing teen horror guide, with fabulous features like fear factor ratings and ‘If You Like This Try” recs. Perfect for librarians, teachers, and anyone who wants to live their best YA horror life” ANN FRAISTAT (YA author of What We Harvest & A Place for Vanishing)

“A must have for anyone looking to help connect younger readers to the best genre in the world. Expertly compiled by Tony Jones” PHIL HICKES (Middle Grade author of the Aveline Jones and Shadowhall Academy series)

“So excited that my books have been featured here. Teachers and librarians – this is the PERFECT resource for you!” LORIEN LAWRENCE (Middle Grade author of The Stitchers series)

“If you’ve ever wished there were an easily accessible almanac of YA horror, I’ve got great news, Tony Jones, who has been reviewing and supporting my work since I first started and is one of my biggest professional cheerleaders has released his YA Horror 400 almanac! I was lucky enough to have had the opportunity to contribute to it, too. What a cool project! Go Tony!” AMY LUKAVICS (YA author of Daughters Unto Devils & The Ravenous)

“I want to alert English teachers and librarians to the most definitive resource I’ve ever seen highlighting the best YA horror novels since 2008. 400 of the best dark fiction for readers 9-15+ . Where do you go for advice yourself to know what to purchase? It’s all here. What do you give a middle-grade reader or teen with a taste for the darker side? This … and let them pick and choose their own! CLIFF McNish (YA author of Breathe & The Hunting Ground)

“Librarians! Bloggers! Readers! Educators! I am wildly pleased to see The Call on, and between, the covers of THE YA HORROR 400 by Tony Jones. Reviews of brilliant books, author interviews. Scares aplenty.” PEADAR Ó GUILÍN (YA horror/fantasy author of The Call duology)”

“Great news for teen horror fans! The YA Horror 400 is out! A massive horror almanac w/ fab features including fear factor ratings, articles, notes from authors and much more. Absolutely perfect for librarians, teachers and anyone who reads YA horror.” BRYONY PEARCE (YA author of Savage Island & Raising Hell)

“The YA Horror 400 is a fabulous resource for librarians, parents, and fans of horror kidlit.” Lora Senf (Bram Stoker Award winning author of The Blight Harbor series)

“I highly recommend the YA Horror 400: an almanac of 400 teen horror novel reviews published between 2008-2024 by Tony Jones, featuring reviews of the best YA and middle grade horror (including my own novel Channel Fear”. LISA RICHARDSON (YA author of Channel Fear)

“Teachers, librarians, readers… This brand new almanac from horror guru Tony Jones is all you need to navigate your way through YA spookiness, gore and thrills. SJ Wills (YA author of the Bite Risk series)

For fans of Young Adult (YA) Horror and Middle Grade (MG) Horror, the Young Blood section of book reviews on the Ginger Nuts of Horror website is a treasure trove worth exploring. This curated segment delves into the darker side of youthful literature, offering insights into the chilling narratives that have captivated young readers.

The beauty of YA and MG horror lies in its ability to tackle complex themes such as fear, identity, and resilience, all while maintaining an accessibility that appeals to younger audiences. Readers can expect reviews that highlight not only the spine-tingling plots but also the emotional depth and character development that are essential to these genres.

The Ginger Nuts of Horror Review Website showcases a diverse array of titles, from debut authors to established names, making it easy for fans to discover hidden gems and upcoming releases. The reviews are penned by passionate contributors who share a deep love for horror, ensuring that each piece is both informative and engaging.

By checking out this section, readers can stay ahead of the curve on the latest trends in YA and MG horror, enriching their reading experience and connecting with a community that shares their enthusiasm for all things eerie and unsettling. Whether you seek thrills or thoughtful narratives, Young Blood has something for everyone.