V. Castro and Hailey Piper scored multiple nominations on the Final Ballot of the 2021 Bram Stoker Awards. The authors each have a novel and a shorter work of fiction competing for the premier writing honors in the horror genre.

The Horror Writers Association released the Final Ballot on February 23. Winners in all 12 categories will be announced May 14 during StokerCon in Denver, Colorado.

Castro’s Queen of the Cicadas is among five finalists for Superior Achievement in a Novel, and her story Goddess of Filth is a finalist for Long Fiction.

Piper’s Queen of Teeth is among six finalists for Superior Achievement in a First Novel, and her story “Recitation of the First Feeding” is also a finalist for Long Fiction.

The novel category is stacked with the return of Stephen Graham Jones for My Heart Is a Chainsaw. Jones is aiming for back-to-back wins after The Only Good Indians took home the 2020 Bram Stoker Award.

Another strong contender is The Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix, which already received the Goodreads Choice Award for Best Horror Novel in 2021. Hendrix won a 2017 Bram Stoker Award for Non-Fiction with Paperbacks from Hell.

Cynthia Pelayo’s highly acclaimed novel Children of Chicago is also a finalist. An Amazon Editors’ Pick, Children of Chicago is Book 1 of her Chicago Saga. Last year, Pelayo’s poetry collection Into the Forest and All the Way Through and a contribution to Southwest Review titled “I Need to Believe” made the 2020 Final Ballot.

The other finalist is Chuck Wendig’s The Book of Accidents. A Goodreads Choice Award nominee, The Book of Accidents is Wendig’s second novel in three years to reach the Final Ballot. Wanderers was a finalist in 2019.

Other authors with multiple works on the Final Ballot are:

> Lee Murray with “Permanent Damage” for Short Fiction and Tortured Willows: Bent. Bowed. Unbroken. (along with co-authors Christina Sng, Angela Yuriko Smith, and Geneve Flynn) for Poetry Collection;

> Cindy O’Quinn with “A Gathering at the Mountain” in Short Fiction and “One and Done” for Short Non-Fiction; and

> Kevin J. Wetmore Jr. with Eaters of the Dead: Myths and Realities of Cannibal Monsters for Non-Fiction and “Devil’s Advocates: The Conjuring” for Short Non-Fiction.

To view the complete 2021 Final Ballot, visit the Bram Stoker Awards by clicking HERE.

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