Bad Moon Books, of Garden Grove, California, and Hippocampus Press of New York, New York will both receive the Horror Writers Association’s Specialty Press Award for 2011. The award will be presented during the gala Bram Stoker Awards™ Banquet to be held this year in Salt Lake City on March 31.
The annual Specialty Press Award recognizes a publisher outside the mainstream New York City publishing community that specializes in dark-themed fiction. Winners are typically “small presses” specializing in limited editions, small print runs, or the work of new and relatively unknown authors. The winner of the award is determined by a majority vote of the HWA Board of Trustees.
Roy Robbins’s Bad Moon Books emphasizes horror and publishes novels, novellas, single-author collections, and poetry. They publish both finely-bound limited editions and trade editions, and their authors have included Clive Barker, Bruce Boston, Kealan Patrick Burke, Michael Louis Calvillo, Scott Edelman, John Everson, Nate Kenyon, Gregory Lamberson, John Little, Lisa Mannetti, Lisa Morton, Gene O’Neill, Gord Rollo, John Skipp and Cody Goodfellow, David Niall Wilson, and many others.
Bad Moon was started by Robbins, who is also a genre specialist bookseller, in 2007; their first title was Vampire Outlaw of the Milky Way by Weston Ochse. Since then, four of their books have won Bram Stoker Awards™, and their books have also received Black Quill Awards and numerous Bram Stoker Awards™ nominations.
Derrick Hussey’s Hippocampus Press specializes in classic horror with an emphasis on the works of H. P. Lovecraft and other pulp writers of the 1920s and 1930s. They publish novels, collections, anthologies, non-fiction and poetry, mostly in trade editions, and they also publish the periodicals Dead Reckonings and the Lovecraft Annual. Authors published by Hippocampus include Algernon Blackwood, Ramsey Campbell, Lord Dunsany, Thomas Ligotti, H. P. Lovecraft, H. L. Mencken, A. Merritt, Adam Niswander, W. H. Pugmire, Clark Ashton Smith, Jonathan Thomas, and other authors, both classic and contemporary.
Hussey started Hippocampus in 1999 with S. T. Joshi’s annotated edition of Supernatural Horror in Literature by H. P. Lovecraft. In 2010, Hippocampus Press received a Nightmare Award, and their publications have also won a Black Quill Award and been nominated for two International Horror Guild Awards, the Spectrum Award, and the Bram Stoker Award. They have also published a five-volume edition of Lovecraft’s essays, the “Lovecraft’s Library” series (classic works which inspired Lovecraft), and the definitive two-volume biography of Lovecraft, I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft, by S. T. Joshi.
Past winners of the Specialty Press Award include Dark Regions Press, Tartarus Press, Delirium Books, Earthling Publications, PS Publishing, and Bloodletting Press. Cemetery Dance won the first Specialty Press Award in 1997.
