TORONTO, Ont. — Edo van Belkom this weekend won the Aurora Award at the 61st annual World Science Fiction convention held in Toronto.

The author of the popular Mark Dalton serialized novels published in Truck News won Canada’s top prize for speculative writing for his editing of the young adult horror anthology Be Very Afraid!

Published by Tundra Books in 2002, BE VERY AFRAID! features 14 stories about teenagers facing some of their deepest and darkest fears, from the perils of the internet to the dangers of dieting, from wanting to fit in to the awkwardness of developing sexuality. Be Very Afraid! is a sequel to Be Afraid! published by Tundra Books in 2000, which was an Aurora Award nominee and short listed for the Canadian Library Association’s Young Adult Book of the Year.

Contributors to BE VERY AFRAID! include: Michael Arruda, Randy D. Ashburn, Loren L. Barrett, Mark A. Garland, Ed Greenwood, Tanya Huff, Michael Kelly, David Nickle, Tom Piccirilli, Edmund Plante, Michael Rowe, Robert J. Sawyer, Edo van Belkom and Sheri White.

The Aurora Awards are voted on by open ballot by Canadian science fiction, fantasy and horror readers and fans. They are awarded in 10 categories to the best English and French language works published by Canadian authors in the previous calendar year.

It is the second time Edo has won an Aurora Award. He won the Best Short Form Work in English award in 1999 for his short story “Hockey’s Night in Canada” (which has just been reprinted for the third time in the Key Porter Books anthology Words On Ice.) Edo’s most recent novel Scream Queen is currently available in bookstores across North America.

Also recently available is Edo van Belkom’s horror/fantasy novel Army of the Dead.

After five years in publishing limbo, van Belkom’s long lost gaming novel is back from the dead and finally in print.

Army of the Dead is a novel of war and peace, crawling with freshly resurrected zombies who have no other purpose in unlife but to kill.

Based on the Dragon Dice battle game, Army of the Dead was originally scheduled for a January 1997 release, but when TSR (the books original publisher) ran into distribution problems, the publication date of the book was postponed. Shortly after, TSR was bought out by rival gaming company Wizards of the Coast and the book was canceled altogether.
Now, thanks to Sean Wallace of Prime Books of Canton, Ohio, and SFR Inc., the current rights holders to the Dragon Dice game Army of the Dead is available in an attractive trade paperback edition featuring elegant cover art by Paul Jaquays.

The book is available from Amazon.com, horror specialty bookseller Shocklines.com, the publisher at primebooks.net or directly from the author at vanbelkom@compuserve.com