While the literary world spent Monday night congratulating itself on discovering that science fiction exists, horror’s most blood-spattered prize was handed out with much less fuss. The 2026 Splatterpunk Awards were announced on 7 November at KillerCon 2026 in Austin, Texas. The awards recognise “superior achievement” in splatterpunk and extreme horror fiction, which is to say books you should not read over breakfast.
Best novel went to The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones (Saga Press). It is a vampire novel set on the Montana plains, told largely through a Lutheran pastor’s journal from 1912. Jones, best known for The Only Good Indians and the Indian Lake trilogy, has become one of the most consistently admired names in American horror, and this book gives him one more trophy for the shelf. The cover, with its enormous unblinking bison, also deserves a prize of its own.
Best novella went to Strange Stones by Edward Lee and Mary SanGiovanni (Clash Books). Lee has been making readers queasy for nearly four decades, so the only surprise is that he had time to share the writing. Best short story went to Wrath James White for “The Tripps”, from The End of the World As We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand. Captain Trips, the superflu that wipes out most of humanity in King’s novel, was never going to be gentle subject matter, and White is not known for going gentle.
The best collection award has a pleasing circularity to it. It went to This Is Splatterpunk: The John Skipp Primer by John Skipp (Fungasm Press). Skipp, with his writing partner Craig Spector, was one of the original splatterpunks of the mid-1980s, when a gang of young horror writers decided that the genre had become too polite and set about hosing it down with arterial spray. Giving a splatterpunk award to the man who helped make splatterpunk a thing in the first place is a bit like the Hugos honouring a Gernsback, and every bit as deserved. Best anthology went to Stories From the Motel Sick, edited by Michael Allen Rose (Roshambo Publishing). It wins the weekend’s prize for best pun, and we’d quite like to check in, though not necessarily to stay.
The Splatterpunk Awards are not the Booker and have no wish to be. There is no televised ceremony, no Mary Beard and no £50,000 cheque. In their own corner of the genre, though, they mean a good deal, and this year’s list is a strong one: an acclaimed literary horror novelist, a couple of veterans, a founding father and a motel you would think twice about booking. Horror has always been good at making a home in places polite society would rather not look.
Source: File 770; KillerCon awards.
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