Last week we listed the nominees for the 2016 Manly Wade Wellman Award, and in a bit of prescience, displayed the cover of John G. Hartness’ Raising Hell, for no good reason other than we like John and thought his cover looked pretty cool.
We could have just as easily featured a different front cover—but we’re glad we didn’t! Because wouldn’t ‘ya know it? John won!
The awards ceremony was held Saturday night, July 18, 2016, as part of the ConGregate 2016 convention at the Radisson Hotel High Point. Raising Hell was voted the winner from an initial list of over 100 titles. The Manly Wade Wellman Award is sponsored by the The North Carolina Speculative Fiction Foundation.
Raising Hell is the first novella in the Quincy Harker, Demon Hunter Series published by Falstaff Books. In the vein of Constantine and Supernatural, this dark fantasy pits a slightly-more-than-ordinary hero and a host of sidekicks and cohorts against forces bent on setting loose a great evil upon the world, starting right in Harker’s home town of Charlotte. Raising Hell is available digitally wherever e-books are sold, and in print as part of the collected Quincy Harker: Year One collection. Audiobooks are available on Audible.
The Manly Wade Wellman Award for North Carolina Science Fiction and Fantasy covers science fiction and fantasy novels published the previous year by North Carolina authors. Founded in 2013, the award is voted on by the combined membership of North Carolina science fiction and fantasy conventions (illogiCon, ConCarolinas, ConTemporal, and Con-Gregate).
The award is named after North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame inductee Manly Wade Wellman, who set his fantasy and horror stories in the Appalachian Mountains, drawing on folklore from that region. Perhaps his best-known series is the fantastic Silver John, which features a virtuous folk-ballad-singing young hero who battles supernatural forces of evil in the North Carolina mountains, defending the innocent and timid. Wellman generously extended aid to emerging writers, teaching classes in creative writing in the Evening College of the University of North Carolina and guiding many of his students to fruitful careers. He was awarded the North Carolina Award for Literature in 1978.
Falstaff Books is a digital and print publishing company based in Charlotte dedicated to bringing to life the best in fantasy, science fiction, horror, mystery, and dramatic literature. Falstaff Books exists to discover new voices and nurture them to success.
Book #5 in the Quincy Harker series, Heaven Sent, is scheduled for release on July 29. Man in Black, the sixth book in Hartness’ Black Knight Chronicles series of urban fantasy novels, will hit stores August 15.
John G. Hartness is a comedic fantasy and horror author living in Charlotte with his wife Suzy and a very spoiled and demanding cat. He is a graduate of Winthrop University, a past President of the Charlotte Writers’ Club, and his novel Paint It Black was named “Best Horror Novel†in 2014 by the Electronic Publishing Industry Coalition. His comic timing can be heard bi-weekly on the Authors & Dragons role-playing podcast.
John is the author of the EPIC-Award-winning series The Black Knight Chronicles from Bell Bridge Books, the Bubba the Monster Hunter comedy/horror series, the Quincy Harker, Demon Hunter novella series, and the creator and co-editor of the Big Bad anthology series, among other projects. John is a member of the International Thriller Writers (ITW), Horror Writers Association (HWA), and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA).