The World Fantasy Awards for 2008 were held quite recently.
The nominees for Best Novel were as follows:
Territory by Emma Bull
Ysabel by Guy Gavriel Kay
Fangland by John Marks
Gospel of the Knife by Will Shetterly
The Servants by Michael Marshall Smith
The winner was Guy Gavriel Kay, a Canadian author with ten novels under his belt. A majority of those are tales set in an alternative medieval Europe. Since his first appearance in 1984 with The Summer Tree, the first of three in The Fionavar Tapestry all of his work has been critically well received. Tigana, set in an Italy of two moons, has achieved classic status. The financial success of his other novels has varied, but Ysabel has been the most successful for him to date. Of interest is that it is his first contemporary set novel, an urban fantasy, though it has links with The Fionavar Tapestry as some characters reappear.
Set in the streets of Provence, the protagonist, a fifteen-year-old boy, on one special night, encounters mythical figures from a history different to our own. The "gods walk among us" idea isn't a new one but Kay has merged it with the ideas of folklore and the powerful influence history has on modern society and modern lives. Its freshness is greatly enhanced by strong characters and Kay's reputable eloquence of prose. Though Ysabel has been around for a year in one edition or another, it is still on the rise and bestseller beckons in mass-market paperback.
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The International Horror Guild Awards were also in the last few weeks.
The nominees for Best Novel were:
Grin of the Dark by Ramsey Campbell
Generation Loss by Elizabeth Hand
The Missing by Sarah Langan
Season of the Witch by Natasha Mostert
The Terror by Dan Simmons
U.S. writer Dan Simmons took the prize with his huge Artic novel that is as much a historical adventure as it is a supernatural horror. Set on an 1845 expedition to find the North-West Passage two ships and crew are trapped in the ice and there they stay for close to two years. The hardship of this alone is enough for a good book as Dan Simmons is more than proficient to tell it. But Simmons adds an even darker element as something unknown is brutally killing the crew and leaving some pretty nasty corpses. Simmons makes this a novel of duel survival, from a deadly frozen landscape and the terror that tracks them in the darkness and ice on last bid trek to escape.
Dan Simmons is an extraordinarily versatile author having written instant classics in horror like Song of Kali and Carrion Comfort and science fiction like the four novel Hyperion Cantos. He's also a successful writer of mainstream literature, crime and short fiction. I'm currently half way through his Illium/Olympus cycle, a mega-epic that merges post-humanist societies with Greek gods and the Trojan War as played out on Mars. It's very ambitious, but like everything else he does, his no mucking around prose style together with his rich knowledge and intelligence pulls it off quite successfully.
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