Fantasy’s biggest night of the year took place in California, but the two names everybody will remember both started out in Liverpool. The 2026 World Fantasy Awards were presented on Sunday 25 October at the World Fantasy Convention in Oakland. Best Novel went to M. R. Carey for Once Was Willem (Orbit), and the Life Achievement award went to Clive Barker, who shares it this year with Joyce Carol Oates. Carey was born in Liverpool in 1959 and Barker in 1952. That’s a fair haul for one city and only seven years’ age gap, and you could argue that a place which also gave us the Beatles and Sir Ken Dodd has always understood that the line between delight and terror is thinner than people think.
Once Was Willem is Carey in his dark-woods mode. It is set in the twelfth-century English village of Cosham, where a twelve-year-old boy named Willem Turling dies. His grieving parents go to the sorcerer Cain Carodoc, who will bring the boy back in return for a piece of his soul. What comes back is not quite their son, and they turn him away. The rest of the book follows Willem and the other “monsters” of the forest as Carodoc’s hold on the village grows and his appetite turns towards its children. It beat a strong shortlist: Martin Cahill’s Audition for the Fox, Giovanni De Feo’s The Secret Market of the Dead, Alix E. Harrow’s The Everlasting and Pat Murphy’s The Adventures of Mary Darling. Comics readers will know Carey as the man who wrote all 75 issues of Vertigo’s Lucifer, had a 40-issue run on Hellblazer and spent six years on X-Men: Legacy. Everyone else will know him from The Girl with All the Gifts, which did for zombie fiction roughly what a cold shower does for a hangover.
Barker’s award comes in a month when he has been rather hard to miss. Saber Interactive’s Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival came out on 8 October with Barker involved in its story from the start, and critics split over it (its PlayStation 5 version sat at 69 on Metacritic in the week of launch). Steam players took a kinder view, with 94 per cent of more than 5,000 user reviews positive by mid-October. Barker himself told Dread Central that the game was “a wake-up call to anyone who’s been involved in the making of a franchise like Hellraiser.” He was rather less fond of the Weinstein-era sequels, many of which, he said, “were created simply to hold onto the rights”, and he added that he would “love to go further in the movies”. For a man who wrote the Books of Blood, wrote and directed Hellraiser in 1987, gave us Weaveworld, Imajica and Nightbreed, and supplied the short story “The Forbidden” that became Candyman, a Life Achievement award looks less like a gesture than a long-overdue receipt. Getting it in the week of Halloween is just good timing.
Above: the launch trailer for Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival, via IGN. If the embed won’t play, it’s here on YouTube.
Joyce Carol Oates may surprise readers who know her mainly from the literary pages, but horror has been claiming her for decades. She has five Bram Stoker Awards, including Best Novel for Zombie, as well as the Stokers’ own Lifetime Achievement award in 1994, and she won a World Fantasy Award for short fiction in 2011 for “Fossil-Figures”. Splitting this year’s honour between the creator of Pinhead and one of America’s most decorated novelists is very World Fantasy, a convention that has never had much time for the idea that fantastic fiction lives in one part of the bookshop.
The rest of the winners: Long Fiction went to Eden Royce for Psychopomp & Circumstance (Tordotcom), and Short Fiction to Renan Bernardo for “The Hungry Mouth at the Edge of Space and the Goddess Knitting at Home”, published in Reactor in August 2025. The Anthology award went to Storyteller: A Tanith Lee Tribute Anthology, edited by Julie C. Day with Carina Bissett and Craig Laurance Gidney (Essential Dreams), which means a third British name gets a share of the night, more than a decade after Lee’s death. Thomas Ha won Best Collection for Uncertain Sons and Other Stories (Undertow Publications), and Kathleen Jennings took Best Artist. The professional Special Award went to Jaymee Goh, Jill Roberts and Jacob Weisman for Tachyon Publications, the small San Francisco press that turned up to the convention with two of the five Best Novel finalists and goes home with an award of its own. The non-professional Special Award went to Wendy Wagner for Nightmare magazine. This year’s judges were Chịkọdịlị Emelụmadụ, Tamsyn Muir, Madeleine E. Robins, Richard Thomas and Ann VanderMeer. The full list is on File 770, taken from the official press release.
So that’s the year’s top fantasy prize to a Liverpool-born writer for a novel about a boy brought back wrong, and a lifetime award to a Liverpool-born writer who built a career on people who should have left the box alone. Somebody on Merseyside ought to put up a plaque, preferably one that doesn’t open.
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