Dear insane readers and drooling rabble-rousers. I’m back on this Stoker® kick and ready with a challenge, should you have the cajones to accept it.

It’s daunting.

It’s craaaaazy.

It’s potentially expensive.

And it’s going to take the next 108 days of your life.

What am I suggesting?

Read on to find out. Look, the way it sits (if my math is correct), the Final Ballot for the Bram Stoker® Awards is sitting pretty with 57 pieces of work for your perusing pleasure. To be more exact, let’s make a little list, m’kay?

The official (but possibly flawed) Dreadful Tales Stoker® Award nominee info-sheet:

When it comes to the 2012 Bram Stoker® Awards, Dreadful Tales doesn’t fool around. We know a lot of the ladies and gents that with both be in attendance, and are nominated, and we looooove to blather on and on about who we this should or will win.

This is our Oscar night. It’s the biggest horror-centric awards show existing, and you know damned well we plan to represent either physically, or in spirit.

So here’s the deal: Below, you’ll find a lot of numbers. They may be wrong, but we like to this of it as more of an approximation or a goal.

So what are we looking at in terms of Stoker® Award Nominees, this year?

Total Books: 42
Total Comic/Graphic Novels: 5
Total Short Stories: 5
Total Screenplays: 5

Total Nominees: 57

When you look at it that way, it sounds pretty cool, doesn’t it?

Now look at this:

If you take into account the Amazon.com, goodreads, and publisher page counts, then average the short fiction nominees out to be approx 10 pages each, and level out the Screenplays at around 110 per film, and 60 per TV show, you’re left with…

Total Page Count: 12,895

Doesn’t sound too appealing anymore, does it? That’s a lot of pages, homies! How the hell??? That works out to roughly 2 days per book if you start today, and I don’t know about you guys, but it takes me about a week to read through 400 pages… and that’s on a good run!

But wait! THERE’S MORE! It’s about to get a lot worse for those of you who, like m’self, tend to have no choice but to live on Mr. Noodles and Chef Boyardee for sustenance.

If you take your bargain hunting butt-cheeks to the interwebz, snag Kindle copies if they’re available, shop second-hand, and wish Dark Regions Press would sell Gene O’Neill’s The Blue Heron on Kindle instead of in a limited edition… you’re looking at:

Total cost: $631.12 CDN.
($614.83 USD with a 0.9742 exchange rate*)
(£406.89 GBP with a 0.6447 exchange rate*)
(*exchange from Canadian Dollars)

So why am I telling you all of this?
Because I’m proposing a challenge where Dreadful Tales and all of its readers do our duty to the genre, and become fully informed with regard to this year’s nominated works! I, for one, am going to do everything I can to read every single offering on this list, and review every piece before June 13th, 2013, and I want some damned company, y’all!

There’s no sign-up sheet for this challenge. It’s just a friendly one. But you can bet I won’t be holding your hand and cooing to you that it’s okay if you don’t want to try. No. That’s a quitter’s mentality. I say DO IT! Get off your lazy asses and sit your lazy asses back down with a good old horror novel!

If enough people get involved, I’m sure we can hook something fun up and, well, who knows what will happen? The Stoker® Awards are in firm standing within the genre. They’re not going anywhere. Maybe we’ll be recognized for our effort by the illustrious Jeff Strand on the Award webcast? Maybe Rocky Wood will decide to open a “crazy-bastard-membership qualification to the HWA? Maybe we’ll just work out our eyes and brains until they’re “strong like ox”?

Or maybe I’m just pushing my luck.
Well… whatever. I’m doing it.

Join me, won’t you?

C.

(if you need help finding any of the titles on the Final Ballot, we’ll do our best to update the list with links and/or more information soon)