My Macabre Weekend at StokerCon
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“Mommy, are they having a Dracula party?”
The little girl asking the question is dressed head-to-toe in pink. So is her older sister and their mother. All three are wearing t-shirts adorned with the face of royalty. Queen Taylor, Empress Swift—she’s in town to serve up the Pittsburgh portion of her universe-conquering Eras tour. Later, we’ll hear the thrum and throb of her bassline from across the Ohio River. Some of us will even venture from the safety of our hotel to stand in the parking lot of the Heinz Stadium and listen to her distortedly shake it off. It will be a mingling of worlds quite at odds with the scene outside this elevator.
Here, the delineation couldn’t be clearer. Of the twenty or so people waiting for a ride down to the lobby of the Pittsburgh Sheraton, roughly half are like the pink family: a mix of adults and kids, all gloss and glitter and Swiftie cheer. The rest of us are… well… different. We’re mostly in black, and the prints on our shirts are of a far more lurid nature. One woman is wearing a beautiful gothic dress, ornamented with what look to be real crow feathers. My sneakers are striped like Freddie Kruger’s sweatshirt, complete with faux blood-spatter.
Some of the Swifties look at us with outright alarm, but a few recognize us for what we are. Just another set of fans, like them. And despite our funereal get-up, we’re no less cheerful.
You see, the little girl is right. We are having a Dracula party.
StokerCon® is named for the man who wrote Dracula. Bram Stoker, maker of the modern vampire, a writer assured his place on horror’s Mount Rushmore. It’s a fitting appellation for the annual conference of the Horror Writers Association. The HWA is a nonprofit organization of writers, publishers, agents, and industry-adjacent folks like me, all dedicated to promoting horror writing and the culture that surrounds it. StokerCon brings us from all over the world to meet up and talk comfortably about the stuff that relegates us to the “weird side character” role in other walks of life.
This is my first StokerCon, and I’m in a slightly awkward position. In 2020, I fully embraced pandemic cliché and launched a podcast. Every week, I speak to a different horror author about their work, their life, and the things that scare them. It’s taught me two important lessons: horror people are much nicer than you would expect, and you can contact anyone from the computer in your spare bedroom if you try hard enough and if they have a book to sell. I’ve already spoken to many of the people here, but never met any of them in the flesh. So I look around and recognize scores of people who, until now, have been only Twitter icons or pixilated faces at the other end of a video call. I feel like the new kid at a school full of my famous penpals.
For everyone else, it looks like a school reunion without the gritted teeth and passive aggression. Many of these people know each other from previous events, or they’ve forged bonds in the trenches of small presses and debut novels. StokerCon, to be clear, is not a fan convention. This is not Comic Con, and there’s no cosplay that I can see. It’s primarily a professional gathering of writers and horror industry folk, who’ve converged here to network, promote their books, and enjoy a few days of socializing in an otherwise solitary working life. Most of them have not been in the same room for a long time and they are obviously thrilled to reconnect.
Covid has disrupted things. Plans to host the first UK-based StokerCon in 2020 were shelved. The 2021 event was made fully virtual, and though 2022 went ahead, I get the impression that it felt compromised, with a high portion of guests still participating via their computers. This year, over six hundred people have gathered in Pittsburgh at the height of summer. Sure, there are hundreds still beaming in from their virtual elsewheres, but the atmosphere in the hotel is thick with affection.
Previous events have taken place in more obviously horror-associated locations. 2017 was held aboard the very haunted Queen Mary in Long Beach. The following year centered on Providence, the home of H.P. Lovecraft. Even 2022’s stripped-back version took place in Denver, with a pre-conference tantalizer held at the Stanley Hotel, the inspiration for Stephen King’s The Shining. Pittsburgh, city of steel, pierogies, and American blue-collar pragmatism seems a distinctly un-whimsical choice by comparison. Then again, it is the home of George Romero and his shuffling zombies. The clawing hand in this year’s logo is a tribute to the city’s history with the undead.
On the morning after my arrival, before the conference formally begins, I’m in a cab heading to the Monroeville Mall. It’s an unimpressive cream and gray building huddled just off Route 22, but it’s infamous to horror fans as the setting of Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. This is where the survivors flee for some capitalism-skewering end-of-days fun. Back in the real world, it’s also the location for the Living Dead Museum.
I’m no zombie nut, but it would seem perverse to come all this way and not celebrate the city’s most famous horror-son. Plus, I’ve been invited along by a band of fellow Brits, one of whom—a cheerful, bearded Scot called John—is infectiously excited by this Romero breadcrumb trail. It’s one of those endearingly modest museums, but to its credit, it does pack a lot into its few rooms. We wander for fifteen minutes, gurning for group selfies next to life-size plastic ghouls and an impressive reproduction of the cabin from Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead. I don’t feel like I’ve been especially enriched by the museum itself, but it does the job of cementing our little group of five Brits abroad. By the time we leave the mall, I’ve managed to buy a Steelers shirt to wear during the wait for my lost luggage, and I’ve made friends.
I’m glad of them when we get back to the hotel. The place has filled up and it’s nice to have a face to nod to across the crowd. Most attendees are in the early-to-mid stage of their careers. Some have a handful of published novels; others are still working on their first. But sprinkled among them, like supernovas in an intricate constellation, are the “big names.” At the bar is Paul Tremblay, author of A Head Full of Ghosts and Cabin at the End of the World. There’s Ellen Datlow, famed editor of anthologies, the Anna Wintour of horror. Rumor has it that Joe R. Lansdale will make an appearance. In his forty year career, the hardboiled Texan outlaw-king of many genres has written every kind of grotesque story: crime, suspense, and the weird western, as well as outright horror. He’s a legend, and he’s here!
If all of this makes me sound like an over-sugared fanboy, well, that’s not wrong. It’s surreal to be in the presence of the flesh-and-blood bodies belonging to the paperback names. To the uninitiated, such names may mean little, but for horror fans like me, they are the equivalent of movie stars.
Yet from the first night to the final goodbye, StokerCon is amazingly egalitarian. Maybe other horror festivals are different. Maybe when the crowd features more fans and fewer colleagues, the red velvet rope makes an appearance. I wouldn’t know, because there are not enough events in the UK and transatlantic flights are not cheap. I’ve heard good things about Texas’ Ghoulish Book Festival, and the Merrimack Valley Halloween Book Fest looks like a real good time. But I’m glad I saved my pennies for this trip. Here, guests of honor give their required speeches and book readings, but as soon as their brief dominion ends, they leap back into the free-for-all at the bar. Much like a heavy metal gig, where the violence of the mosh-pit obscures a very real community and care, a horror conference may sound daunting, but it couldn’t be more of an embrace.
Over overpriced IPAs, Paul Tremblay talks me through his Jekyll-and-Hyde life as a high school math teacher whose novel has just been adapted for film. By the sound of things, a solid grasp of trigonometry comes in handy when trying to navigate Hollywood’s many angles. I strike up a chat with John Langan (critically acclaimed author of The Fisherman) and Weird Fiction scholar Michael Cisco. What begins as some brief remarks about the legacy of the late Peter Straub turns into a two hour salon. We colonize a glass-fronted workspace and talk about horror: the books we love, the ones that changed our lives, and a lot about Stephen King. King comes up often. Everyone has their King-adjacent story. The lucky few reminisce excitedly about getting him to blurb their books. He exists in a space several atmospheric layers above this event, and it’s refreshing to find that even my heroes have heroes.
On Friday evening, several of us decamp to a tiki bar for a party thrown by the publisher Tor Nightfire. I’m told to be outside when a cab arrives, which whisks me across the city to the Squirrel Hill neighborhood. This is my first time outside the hotel in nearly forty hours, and the short walk to the bar is a stark (if useful) reminder that most of the world is wholly unconcerned with whether ghosts are real, or whether Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining does justice to the novel. In fact, the interior of the tiki bar is comically at odds with the tenor of the conversation taking place.
I sit amongst faux-tropical cheer, eating lukewarm chicken wings and drinking elaborately overdecorated cocktails, while Nat Cassidy and Rachel Harrison—two of the best horror writers of this generation—give me advice on whether my idea for a novel is too horrific to publish. A writer’s wife tells me the all-too real, all-too horrible story about the New York landlord that inspired her husband’s latest book. I feel like I’m part of some modern, kohl-rimmed version of Truman Capote’s gossip circle.
At the end of the night, seven of us pile into an SUV driven by Clay McLeod Chapman, the author of one of last year’s biggest hits, Ghost Eaters. I call him the Phil Dunphy of the horror family as he jokes about the pressure of driving the next generation of horror writers back to the hotel. He’s not wrong. If he crashes, the world will be spared a few nightmares.
None of this is to sound smug or self-satisfied. Everywhere I look, other people are having their own enriching experiences. One attendee stands awkwardly at the edge of a chatty circle. My heart goes out to him, but when I look again, he’s been dragged into the gaggle, smiling shyly but happily amongst the great and the good. And while all of this is happening, the Swifties flit among us like tropical fish. As the weekend draws on, the juxtaposition just gets funnier and funnier. We never quite mix, but members of each camp begin to share wry smiles. We understand each other. Ours are communities built on a deep care for words, symbols, and the rhythm of storytelling.
StokerCon is half book appreciation event, half academic-style conference. There are so many events that the timetabling app we’re encouraged to use quickly becomes a color-blocked puzzle of impossible commitments. Seen from above, the hotel must look like a game of PacMan, with delegates rushing through corridors to collect panel discussions like pellets. That said, most of us would love to come face to face with a ghost.
The weekend’s schedule caters to every possible permutation of the dark arts. Panels range from the weighty (“Perspectives on Mental Health in Horror”) to the weird (“Feral Children and Monstrous Parents”) and the wonderfully whimsical (“Cryptids! Legends of Strange Creatures in North America”). “Horror University” sessions are devoted to the craft and practicalities of writing. Friday’s “Librarian Day” is focused on educating library professionals on how to promote horror in their work. It may sound dry, but sessions such as “Brains! Brains! Brainstorming Ways to Engage your Community” and “The Rising Popularity of Extreme and Erotic Horror” hint that these are not your typical librarians. On top of this, there is a whole raft of author readings, keynote speeches, and the “Final Frame” film competition.
Saturday night’s award ceremony is the centerpiece of the weekend. As Saturday tips towards late afternoon, people start slipping away to get gussied up. Horror prom, as I hear it called repeatedly, deserves the finest of macabre couture. Hence my bloodstained sneakers.
The Bram Stoker Awards are the Oscars of horror writing. Science fiction and fantasy have their Hugos and their Nebulas and the Arthur C. Clarke Award; we have the Stokers, with both a better trophy (a cute little haunted house) and a better philosophy. The HWA is keen to eschew competitiveness between authors, so none of the awards are given for “best of the year.” Instead, writers are recognized for their “Superior Achievement” in the novel, first novel, short fiction, anthology, screenplay, or a range of other categories. 2011 saw the introduction of an award for the Young Adult Novel, and I’m delighted to be present in Pittsburgh for the first ever award for Superior Achievement in the Middle Grade Novel.
Unlike other genre award bodies, who have seen political infighting between progressive and conservative branches, members of the HWA and the Bram Stoker Award Committee appear very much united in celebrating the diversity of horror. Here, there is none of the controversy that tainted the Hugos in 2020. StokerCon is not plagued by Sad Puppies getting their boomer sci-fi pants in a twist about supposed “woke” bias. Over the course of the weekend, I do hear some half-hearted grumbling about the potential influence of cliquishness in the nominations, but there is no hint of any ill will between those on the ballot and those watching from the cheap chairs.
Quite the opposite, actually. When Cynthia Pelayo wins the award for Superior Achievement in a Poetry Collection for Crime Scene, she takes the stage to huge applause. She’s brimming with emotion, almost bent double at the lectern, but her voice grows stronger as she continues. She concludes her speech with the proud assertion that she is the first Puerto Rican winner of a Stoker award and sings out “Que Bonita Bandera.” Cue cacophony.
Ninety minutes later, her fellow countryman Gabino Iglesias is announced as the recipient of Superior Achievement in the Novel. The Devil Takes You Home is a blistering border noir—it’s bleak, bloody, and a deserving winner. He takes to the stage confidently, with no speech prepared but a lot to say. After many grateful and well-received anecdotes, he lifts a piece of paper. It’s the full list of nominees.
“Look at this,” he says. “There are a lot of women of color on here. There’s a bunch of Queer writers on here. There’s a whole lot of Black and Brown and Asian and non-binary folks on this list. That makes people angry. That makes racists uncomfortable. To them, I want to say: this is the future. Stay salty, motherfuckers.”
The room erupts.
Full disclosure: I miss most of the ceremony. After reading as many shortlisted books as possible, picking my favorites, and selecting a suitably gothic-yet-smart outfit (I tried for vampire punk but ended up closer to well-dressed manservant), I end up at the bar, talking to writers who, over the course of forty-eight hours, had become my friends.
I spend much of the evening with John, my Romero-loving friend from the museum, and a writer called Chris. Chris is a fan of my podcast, and over wince-inducing sips of cheap red wine, we arrange for him to be a guest and to partner up as transatlantic writing buddies. He attended my panel on the use of tropes in horror, where one of the participants made a comment about haunted houses that has set off an inspiration bomb in Chris’ mind. He’s regaling me with a spin on the trope that is so genuinely audacious that I wouldn’t dare to spoil it here. Just wait for the book. His trust in sharing his idea with me—an acquaintance of only three days—is a testament to the strange alchemy of conference friendship, when concentrated time in the company of people who share your precise passions allows you to leap over the labored bonding process in a single bound. Since then, he’s finished his novel. I have yet to write a word of mine.
Following the last award, the official schedule ends early—it is a Sunday, after all—but upstairs, the real shindig is only just getting started. Brian Keene is a cornerstone of the horror community: writer of relentlessly brutal books, eviscerator of internet trolls, and the recognized emcee of StokerCon’s traditional afterparty. As the bar staff start cleaning glasses in earnest, small groups trickle up to Brian’s room. I follow, sheepish, because I don’t know Brian. I’ve never spoken to the man and suddenly I’m back at school again, standing at the front door of a party, hoping the cool kids won’t chase me away.
They don’t, of course. There’s a jubilant anarchy inside Brian’s hotel room. Writers cover every available surface. Music thumps loud enough that I hope the other guests have been left deafened by their concert. It all spills out into the hallway—my hallway. I will get little sleep tonight and tomorrow’s long sequence of interconnecting flights will be an ordeal worthy of its own horror story.
But tonight, I don’t care. Tonight, this hotel room is the central axis of a very niche world. Here, we are all the misfits, the spooky kids, the Halloween people. We’ve come together to celebrate the stuff that makes other people look away. In the coming days, I’ll return home to the periphery, but tonight I get to be part of it.
Not even Taylor Swift can compete with that.
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