I can hardly believe I’m typing this, but I glanced at my phone yesterday to see a veritable storm of notifications and found, to my utmost joy, that my book DEAR LAURA has made the preliminary ballot for the prestigious 2019 Bram Stoker Awards. It’s listed in the category ‘Superior Achievement in a First Novel’, and if that isn’t something to get printed on a t-shirt and wear around town, I don’t know what is!

The Stokers have been around almost as long as I have, and have become the gold standard for horror writing. To see my name on a list alongside titans like Malerman, Nevill, Tremblay, Ari Aster, Mike Flanagan, Neil Gaiman and Chuck Wendig is bonkers, quite frankly, and I’ll be floating high for weeks as a result of this.

DEAR LAURA being balloted is no guarantee of a win of a Stoker Award, but it does make me glad that I took a punt on the impulse I had to tell Laura’s story and not wait to shop it around to agents or publishers, (novellas are a notoriously hard sell anyway). I like that I had full freedom with Laura and I could present her in a way that I felt did her justice. Even if my little books gets no further in the process, being listed alongside my idols and peers in this way is just fantastic, and a wonderful way to start 2020!

The shortlisted books are announced in February, so fingers crossed for me, gang! In the meantime, if any Active or Lifetime HWA members out there would like to get a copy of DEAR LAURA to read ahead of the shortlist vote, please contact me and I’ll sort one out for you.

And to everyone who has bought, read and reviewed the book so far, and the HWA members who nominated it for the Longlist- THANK YOU!!

You can buy DEAR LAURA HERE.

See the full Preliminary Ballot here