18 September 2006

Christopher Fowler's Fantasy Award

Bantam, part of Random House, has been promoting author Christopher Fowler on its dust jackets for his US editions and on its website as having won a World Fantasy Award for Best Novel for Full Dark House.

In fact, that book won the August Derleth Award for Best Novel in 2004. That honor is sometimes called the "British Fantasy Award" because it's given by the British Fantasy Society. But it ain't the World Fantasy Award, given at the World Fantasy Convention. Fowler's own website has it right, as does his British publisher.

I suspect this misunderstanding crept into Bantam's copy years ago and just got replicated from one file to another. It's the sort of glitch that some poor junior editor and production associate will have to fix on every cover, and then see pop up again in some future memo.

A bigger question is: How exactly is Full Dark House a fantasy?

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