The Horror Writers Association has announced the nominees for the 2025 Bram Stoker Awards which recognize achievement in horror writing. The award has a variety of categories including screenplay, graphic novel, nonfiction and age categories for fiction. Here are the nominees for the youth categories:
SUPERIOR ACHIEVEMENT IN A MIDDLE GRADE NOVEL NOMINEES
Bob knows that he is the biggest, strongest and smartest bear in the world, and he made sure that everyone in the forest knew that too. Bob loved to talk about himself and brag endlessly about his brawn and his brains. Then Bill came to the neighborhood. Bill loved to ask others about themselves. He asked lots of questions and got lots of answers. Bob spent his time making fun of Bill and explaining that he was still the top bear. Everyone loved chatting with Bill and one another, so when blustery Bob showed up to ask who the “biggest, strongest and smartest Bear in the whole wide world” no one noticed. But Bill did, and Bill started asking Bob questions about himself. And it turns out that even braggy blowhards like Bob like to be asked about themselves and need a few friends too.
Told in an engaging way with speech bubbles and simple lines, this picture book shows that curiosity about others works far better than bragging or selling yourself to them. The contrast between Bob the Bear and Bill the Badger could not be more clearly drawn. I enjoyed that rather than a comeuppance in the end, Bob changed his ways and started finding out about others too. The illustrations are bright and merry, the speech bubbles colored to make them all the more clear for young readers.
Bullying Bear meets bright Badger in this book. Appropriate for ages 3-5.
Forty is a paper fortune teller dropped on the ground when the school bell rang. She’s not sure what to do until she meets Chip, a partially eaten potato chip who plans to escape to Canada in order to not be completely eaten by the kids. When the two discover a bolt on the ground that has fallen off of the playground slide, they decide they must venture across the huge playground to fix it before someone gets hurt. But their journey is full of dangers, happily Forty’s fortunes seem to come true! Perhaps they can manage to get the bolt replaced before the bell rings for recess or the fortunes run out.
This picture book offers a graphic novel feel that makes it marvelously modern while focusing on timeless schoolyard elements of playground equipment, basketballs, potato chips, gum and fortune tellers. The text is superb silliness, leaning hard into the fortunes being whacky and then coming to life. Readers will delight in realizing they have no idea what is coming next. The illustrations create a friendly vibe, using interesting perspectives that add to the wild situations the story has created.
A mad and magical playground adventure. Appropriate for ages 4-6.
Waking Brain Cells 