This weekend, I attended the Bram Stoker Awards banquet, which was held in the luxurious Newark Airport Hilton in lovely Newark, NJ. Admission was free for me, as it was for my guest, Doug Cohen, as we were masquerading as “press.” Delighted the with publicity afforded HWA and the Stokers by my SCI FI Wire interviews with the novel nominees earlier this year, HWA President Gary Braunbeck invited me to come out to the event (in gratitude, and in the hopes, no doubt of getting more free publicity) free of charge, and went so far as to accommodate my request to bring along a guest. And not only were we admitted free, but we also received free tickets to the banquet (a $30 value!), which was surprisingly good, especially considering that our pre-banquet options were the rather ominious: meat, fish, vegetarian. We had the meat, which turned out to be a really nice cut of steak (filet mignon, I think); this was followed by a completely decadent chocolate-mousse cake sort of thing, which probably contained more calories than I usually eat all day.

Doug and I showed up on Friday night, though that seems to have been a mistake, as I guess most people just come in for Saturday (the day of the banquet). Friday really wasn’t even worth the eight bucks it cost to park at the hotel. That first night was very, very sparsely attended. There was but one panel (on horror criticism, which Doug and I were quickly bored by), and a meet and greet reception sort of thing. It was an open bar, so I guess it might have been well worth it if you’re a drinker, but as a non-drinker it didn’t do much for me. However, we did meet a few new people, including Mario Acevedo, author of The Nymphos of Rocky Flats. He gave me a vampiric pose when I took his picture, which you can see in my Stokers flickr photoset.

Doug’s sick of hearing this already, but Friday night was otherwise a disappointment due to the absolutely horrendous chicken caesar salad I had in the hotel bar/restaurant. The bar had popcorn baskets on the table, and when my salad showed up and I started eating it, it seemed to me as though they may have cooked the chicken in the popcorn butter. Seriously, it was totally smothered in butter. Quite revolting, I assure you. Not to mention that it probably rendered my healthy choice of dinner somewhat less healthy than I’d intended.

Since the Stokers were in Newark, Doug and I stayed at my place and commuted back and forth; I only live about twenty minutes away. Doug gaped at my stacks of books and complained about my couch being uncomfortable.

Saturday was much more entertaining. There didn’t seem to be much going on early in the morning (there was an HWA business meeting for like three hours first thing), so Doug and I didn’t show up until around noon, at which time we planned to attend a reading given by Chris Cevasco. We walked in just in time, no doubt to the relief of Chris, who otherwise would have been reading to an empty room, though since we had both heard this story read already (at Lunacon), Chris delayed for a bit, chatting with us, until a few other stragglers arrived, including Devin Poore, one of my Balticon traveling companions.

After Cevasco’s reading, F. Brett Cox came in to read, so we all stuck around for that. Afterward, we all wandered toward food. Over lunch, we debated the merits of Naomi Novik’s His Majesty’s Dragon (and Doug’s review of it, which is in the new issue of Paradox). (For the record, I’m very pro, Doug’s very con on the book.)

At some point, our friend Elizabeth wandered over and sat with us as we finished up with lunch, then we all adjourned to her panel, “After the Edit,” on which she served as the voice of the production department, with Eliani Torres, serving as the copyediting spokesperson.

After, we all loitered in the lobby for a while, where we watched as an attractive young woman walked in and out of the hotel as a man with a handheld video camera recorded her. This puzzled us for a while until we figured out that she was a reporter for The Horror Channel, and was apparently covering the event. Those shots, I assume, were establishing shots to show her arriving on the scene. When she was doing this, she was dressed in regular clothes, but when I saw her later (and determined she was a reporter), she was all gothed up in a tight black miniskirt/dress sort of thing, along with the requisite black eyeliner.

After this was more sitting around and chatting before the big Pre-Banquet/Author Signing (a sort of second meet and greet reception, also with free booze). There, I met David Morrell (who later won a Stoker for his novel Creepers); I’d interviewed David for SCI FI Wire, so it was nice to meet him in person. He was very personable and we had a nice conversation. Also met Nate Kenyon, a young, new author (his first novel, Bloodstone is available now). Nate gave Doug and I copies of his book (and a cool pen, which was handy, as I didn’t bring one with me), and expressed delight at the fact that I work at F&SF (“Oh, I love that magazine,” he said.) I offered to give him one of the copies I had with me, but being the fan that he is, he already had it.

The evening concluded with the award ceremony and banquet. I’ve already said that the banquet itself was pretty good, and while the award ceremony wasn’t stellar, it was mostly entertaining. I was glad to see Joe Hill take home two Stokers, and he was on hand to pick them up (and gave some great acceptance speeches). I just interviewed him as well, though I didn’t get a chance to meet him at the event. One of the coolest bits about the ceremony was Peter Straub’s Lifetime Achievement Award: both for Doug Winter’s introduction and Straub’s acceptance. Both of them mentioned an apparently famous quote that Straub once said to Stephen King (early in their careers). The two of them were out gathering firewood (for a barbeque, I think), when Straub says: “We’re the Hammett and Chandler of the genre.” King sets down a big branch at an angle, then smashes his foot down on top of it, snapping it in half, then looks up at Straub and says:: “I know.”

After the awards were all given out, we all fled the room and got into a conversation with Darrell Schwiezter, which meandered from SF/Horror/Fantasy in general to pulps, and all over the place. Also met Neil Clarke of Clarkesworld Books (one of the best SF/Fantasy/Horror bookstores on the net), who seemed to be a really sharp guy, and after chatting with him, it’s no surprise that he runs his bookshop so well. As the conversations died down, people started poking through the nearby freebies table. There, I thrust a copy of F&SF into the hands of one of the people from The Horror Channel. The issues I had were of the June 2006 issue, which includes Laird Barron’s “Hallucigenia,” and that great horrific cover.

At this point, we all kind of dispersed, being rather wiped and not up for hanging around for the parties being held in the suites upstairs. We returned home to the villa de John and promptly crashed.