(The Best novel candidates, by the way, are:
American Gods, Neil Gaiman (Morrow)
Black House, Stephen King & Peter Straub (Random House)
From the Dust Returned, Ray Bradbury (Morrow)
The Lost, Jack Ketchum (Leisure)
And the Bram Stoker Award is given by the Horror Writers Association, and is the most gorgeous award: a small house, with tentacles, and a little door covering the award, which opens and closes and then falls off and has to be superglued back on and doesn't open or close any more.)
... so I changed "stonkers" to "big books" or something like that and rolled over & went to sleep.
Woke up this morning, and realised I'd been unfair to Dallas Mayr, who writes under the name of Jack Ketchum, and is nowhere near as well-known as he ought to be. You can read about Jack at The Official Website of Jack Ketchum. He writes powerful stuff that makes you wince and worry and turn pages fast.
I met Dallas when were both guests at NEcon, the strangest assembly of Horror writers in the world. It's half-way between a summer camp and a convention: 200 people, most of them writers, gather in a small Rhode Island Campus, where they complain about the food and the heat. They eat pizza, discuss publishers, and make fun of each other mercilessly. There's a website over at www.campnecon.com which says it all better than I ever could. If you go and poke around there you can find lots of embarrassing photos of me, including ones taken at the 2000 NEcon, when I was midway on American Gods, and not getting a haircut till it was done.