I am always filled with joy when people win awards for works that I really enjoyed. Alan Moore won the first-ever Bram Stoker Award in the category of “Superior Achievement in a Graphic Novel.” That’s a long and pretentious title, and what it really boils down to is the fact that Neonomicon (the work that won the award) was sufficiently fucking creepy to win. Neonomicon is the only work on the nomination list that I have actually read, and so I can’t say if I think that Moore won fairly or not (though I really want to get around to Anya’s Ghost).

The decision might disturb some readers of the comic. That’s fair. I have sat down to write about Neonomicon several times since the first issue came out a couple years ago. I can never make the words come out correctly. The comic’s extreme violence, particularly its sexual violence, always leaves me feeling incredibly uncomfortable; at the same time, I know there is something brilliant going on in it. I have a nagging feeling that it is Moore’s best writing about the form of comics since Watchmen, and more than that, it is smart commentary on horror fiction and comics.

In any case, Moore had a really clever acceptance speech. A little bit is excerpted below; click this link for the whole thing.

 The Bram Stoker is, to me, a priceless token of appreciation from a group of people for whom I have limitless respect and admiration, these being my fellow workers at this darkest of all coalfaces. The landscape of imagination, and especially it’s less hospitable far boundary, is perhaps the most important human territory of all, and so to feel acknowledged by a lineage of fine writers which extends from the Great Old Ones of the past to the still unrevealed giants yet to come means more to me than I can readily express.