If horror movies keep you awake, you should try reading a horror story. You may not know it yet, but we have an excellent selection of horror fiction at the store. Here are just some of them.

(Note: The Bram Stoker Awards are awarded annually in the United States by the Horror Writers Association for Superior Achievement in the horror genre and are named after Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula.)

The Traveling Vampire Show by Richard Laymon
2000 Stoker Award Winner for Novel

The Traveling Vampire Show

Come and see–
the one and only known Vampire in captivity!

–Valeria–
Gorgeous! Beguiling! Lethal!

This stunning beauty, born in the wilds of Transylvania, sleeps by day in her coffin. By night she feeds on the blood of strangers.

See Valeria rise from the dead!
Watch as she stalks volunteers from the audience!
Tremble as she sinks her teeth into their necks!
Scream as she sups on their blood!!!

Where: Janks Field, 2 mi south of
Grandville on Route 3
When: One Show Only - Friday, midnight
How much: $10

(Nobody under age 18 allowed)

For three local 16-year olds, two boys and a girl, this is a show they can’t miss. Even though the flyers say no one under eighteen will be admitted, they’re determined to find a way. What follows is a story of friendship and courage, temptation and terror, when three friends go where they shouldn’t go, and find much more than they ever expected.

Swan Song by Robert McCammon
1987 Stoker Award Winner for Novel, tied with Stephen King’s Misery

Description: An ancient evil roams the desolate landscape of an America ravaged by nuclear war. He is the Man with the Scarlet Eye, a malevolent force that feeds on the dark desires of the countless followers he has gathered into his service. His only desire is to find a special child named Swan — and destroy her. But those who would protect the girl are determined to fight for what is left of the world and their souls.

In a wasteland born of rage, populated by monstrous creatures and marauding armies, the last survivors on earth have been drawn into the final battle between good and evil that will decide the fate of humanity….

Boy’s Life by Robert McCammon
1991 Stoker Award Winner for Novel

Nightmare Chronicles by Douglas Clegg
1999 Stoker Award Winner for Fiction Collection

Description: It begins in an old tenement with a horrifying crime. It continues after midnight, when a young boy, held captive in a basement, is filled with unearthly visions of fantastic and frightening worlds. How could his kidnappers know that the ransom would be their own souls? For, as the hours pass, the boy’s nightmares invade his captors like parasites — and soon, they become real.

Thirteen nightmares unfold: A young man searches for his dead wife among the crumbling buildings of Manhattan…a journalist seeks the ultimate evil in a plague-ridden outpost of India…ancient rituals begin anew with the mystery of a teenage girl’s disappearance…and in a hospital for the criminally insane, there is only one doorway to salvation…But the night is not yet over, and the real nightmare has just begun.

Wither by J. G. Passarella
1999 Stoker Award Winner for First Novel

Description: The college town of Windale, Massachusetts is proud of its colonial heritage — including the legend of a dark witches’ coven dating back three hundred years. No one in Windale actually believes in witches, or imagines that the blood-chilling history of the Salem era could repeat itself. But three people, unknown to one another, are experiencing vivid nightmares of palpable horror. They alone can sense that a dreadful presence is working its way into their waking lives — and is coming for them.

On a crisp autumn night deep in the New England woods, a young woman’s harmless channeling ritual unwittingly opens the floodgates to terrifying forces that have, until then, lived only in dreams: a breed of demonic creatures with the power to shatter an unsuspecting town.

The Night Class by Tom Piccirilli
2002 Stoker Award Winner for Novel

Lost Boy Lost Girl by Peter Straub
2003 Stoker Award Winner for Novel

Description: A woman commits suicide for no apparent reason. A week later, her son– fifteen-year-old Mark Underhill–vanishes. His uncle, novelist Timothy Underhill, searches his hometown of Millhaven for clues that might help unravel this horrible dual mystery. He soon learns that a pedophilic murderer is on the loose in the vicinity, and that shortly before his mother’s suicide, Mark had become obsessed with an abandoned house where he imagined the killer might have taken refuge. No mere empty building, the house whispers from attic to basement with the echoes of a long-hidden true-life horror story, and Tim Underhill comes to fear that in investigating its unspeakable history, Mark stumbled across its last and greatest secret: a ghostly lost girl who may have coaxed the needy, suggestible boy into her mysterious domain.

In the Night Room by Peter Straub
2004 Stoker Award Winner for Novel

Description: Willy Patrick, the respected author of the award-winning young-adult novel In the Night Room, thinks she is losing her mind–again. One day, she is drawn helplessly into the parking lot of a warehouse. She knows somehow that her daughter, Holly, is being held in the building, and she has an overwhelming need to rescue her. But what Willy knows is impossible, for her daughter is dead.

On the same day, author Timothy Underhill, who has been struggling with a new book about a troubled young woman, is confronted with the ghost of his nine-year-old sister, April. Soon after, he begins to receive eerie, fragmented e-mails that he finally realizes are from people he knew in his youth–people now dead. Like his sister, they want urgently to tell him something. When Willy and Timothy meet, the frightening parallels between Willy’s tragic loss and the story in Tim’s manuscript suggest that they must join forces to confront the evils surrounding them.

Oddest Yet: Even More Stories To Chill The Heart by Steve Burt
2004 Stoker Award Winner for Work for Young Readers, tied with Cliver Barker’s Abarat

Dark Delicacies edited by Del Howison, Jeff Gelb
2005 Stoker Award Winner for Anthology

Creepers by David Morrell
2005 Stoker Award Winner for Novel

Description: On a cold October night, five people gather in a run-down motel on the Jersey shore and prepare to break into the Paragon Hotel. The once-magnificent structure is now boarded up and marked for demolition. They are “creepers”: urban explorers with a passion for investigating abandoned buildings and their dying secrets. Reporter Frank Balenger joins them to profile this highly illegal activity for the New York Times. But he isn’t looking for just another story, and soon after they enter the rat-infested tunnel leading to the hotel, he gets more than he bargained for. Danger, fear, and death await the creepers in a place ravaged by time and redolent of evil.