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Literary Titan Silver Book Award
Celebrating the brilliance of outstanding authors who have captivated us with their skillful prose, engaging narratives, and compelling real and imagined characters. We recognize books that stand out for their innovative storytelling and insightful exploration of truth and fiction. Join us in honoring the dedication and skill of these remarkable authors as we celebrate the diverse and rich worlds they’ve brought to life, whether through the realm of imagination or the lens of reality.
Award Recipients
Blame the Devil by Joe Colicchio
Visit the Literary Titan Book Awards page to see award information.
Creature of Secret Sorrows
Creature of Secret Sorrows, by Dianne L. Hagan, returns to Cadence, New York, a town where history is never inert and the dead have unfinished claims on the living. When Randy Nichols disappears during a rockhounding walk, the search leads Marian Greene and her neighbors to a brutally lynched body in the woods. What begins as a murder investigation widens into a confrontation with ancestral violence, hidden family lines, supernatural guardians, and the damage passed down through the Hayward legacy. The mystery coils around Randy’s grief for his newly found mother, Madison’s fractured family, and the apparition of the asanbosam, a creature that seems less interested in terror than in justice.
I was struck by how Hagan refuses to separate the procedural from the spiritual. Cadence is full of police work, interviews, evidence, and old documents, but it is also a place where lake drums, bears, legends, and restless souls press against ordinary life. That mixture could have felt ungainly in a lesser book, but here it gives the story its pulse. The supernatural elements are not decorative fog; they are moral weather. They make visible what polite history tries to bury.
My strongest reaction was to the novel’s emotional density. Hagan writes community with breadth: meals, jokes, old resentments, marriages, griefs, and arguments all crowd the page. At times, the large cast demands attention, especially for readers new to the series, but the reward is a world that feels inhabited rather than staged. Randy’s tenderness, Madison’s jagged survival, and Marian’s weary courage give the horror a human temperature. I appreciated that the book is not content with simply exposing evil; it asks what repair might look like after truth has done its bruising work.
I would recommend Creature of Secret Sorrows to readers who enjoy supernatural mystery, psychological thriller, Black horror, historical suspense, ancestral trauma fiction, and community-centered crime novels. Fans of Stephen King’s small-town supernatural stories may recognize the sense that an entire place can become a haunted witness, though Hagan’s focus is more intimate, more reparative, and more explicitly tied to racial history. This is a dark, sinewy mystery with a conscience.
Pages: 320 | ASIN : B0GZK9V7MX
Recipient of the Literary Titan Book Award
Wolf Magick: Secret Myseries of Draakensky
Wolf Magick: Secret Mysteries of Draakensky, by Paula Cappa, is a richly atmospheric supernatural romance built around inheritance, shapeshifting, old Celtic power, and the pull of a place that feels alive. Marc Sexton is trying to build a future with Charlotte Knight, but his family’s wolf legacy keeps breaking into the present. Charlotte, newly settled at Draakensky Windmill Estate, isn’t just moving into Marc’s world. She’s being claimed by it, spiritually, artistically, and emotionally.
What gives the novel its strongest identity is the way the everyday and the mystical sit side by side. Marc runs The Grackle Bar and Grill, deals with family pressure, wedding plans, work stress, and public scrutiny, while shadow wolves, ancestral guilt, Otherworld powers, and old blood covenants gather around him. Charlotte’s life as an artist matters just as much as Marc’s magickal inheritance. Her drawings, visions, and instincts make her more than a romantic partner; she becomes a participant in the mystery. When Marc tells her, “You, Charlotte, are Draakensky,” it feels like the heart of the book clicking into place.
Cappa’s prose leans into mood, texture, and ritual. The forest, windmill, river, ravine, owls, hares, crows, horses, and wolves all feel charged with meaning. Draakensky itself speaks in the interludes, and those sections give the estate a strange, watchful personality. The book is lush and sensory, with scenes that often feel painted rather than simply described. That fits Charlotte’s artistic point of view and gives the novel a romantic, gothic pulse.
The relationship between Marc and Charlotte is the emotional anchor. Their love is passionate, but it’s also tested by secrecy, fear, family expectations, and the terrifying question of what Marc’s wolf identity might cost them. The wolf mythology has a strong communal force, too. The cry “We are wolf” captures the book’s larger movement from private fear to shared power. This is a story about lovers, yes, but it’s also about lineage, belonging, sacrifice, and choosing what kind of inheritance deserves to survive.
Wolf Magick is best read as an immersive supernatural tale with a strong romantic core and a deep interest in old-world magick. It takes its time with meals, weather, art, family conversations, folklore, and landscape because all of those things are part of the spell. The result is a book that feels earthy, dramatic, and intimate, with wolves at its edge and ancestral secrets running beneath nearly every scene.
Pages: 380 | ASIN : B0GYXX9MMT
Blood Echoes
Aaron Ryan’s Blood Echoes follows Tracie Vossler, an ex-Marine turned prison security guard, as she becomes entangled in the horrifying mystery surrounding identical twins Elias and Gabriel Brickert. Set largely inside Airway Heights Corrections Center and told through shifting timelines, the novel begins with a murder that should be impossible and then widens into something far stranger: occult rituals, demonic possession, body-swapping, institutional panic, and a mother’s desperate fight to protect her daughter, Lela. What starts as a prison thriller curdles into supernatural horror, with blood evidence, security footage, and human memory all becoming unreliable witnesses.
I was most compelled by the novel’s atmosphere. Ryan gives Airway Heights a clammy, pressurized quality; the prison never feels like a backdrop so much as a sealed lung trying to breathe around something rotten. Tracie’s voice is brash, bruised, funny in the wrong places, and sometimes jagged enough to cut through the melodrama. Her fixation on burgers, cigarettes, nail appointments, and her daughter’s teenage moods keeps the story tethered to ordinary life even as the plot begins to levitate into the occult. That grounding matters because without it, the supernatural machinery could have felt too gaudy; with it, the horror feels personal, almost domestic.
The book also has a maximalist streak. It piles on murders, rituals, possessions, confessions, betrayals, legal fallout, and emotional wreckage with very little interest in restraint. The momentum is hard to deny. Ryan writes like someone determined to shove every locked door open, and the result is messy in a way that often feels alive. I especially appreciated how the novel refuses to let Tracie remain a clean heroine. Her love for Lela is luminous, but her choices grow morally murky, and the ending leaves a residue of grief rather than the neat click of a solved case.
I think this would be a great book for readers who enjoy supernatural horror, prison thrillers, demonic possession stories, occult suspense, body-swap horror, and psychological thrillers. Fans of Stephen King’s The Green Mile may recognize the charged prison setting and the sense that something otherworldly has slipped into a place already built for suffering, though Ryan’s novel is more lurid, more frantic, and more openly demonic. Blood Echoes is a grim and feverish book about blood ties, borrowed bodies, and the terrible cost of surviving evil.
Pages: 332 | ASIN : B0GXN2TMD5
Writing A Literary Horror Novel
Blame the Devil follows a wounded outsider in 1967 Jersey City, as she discovers her terrifying identity as an Avenging Angel and confronts an ancient evil hiding behind the face of ordinary authority. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
The inspiration for the story was real life. With one exception (which I won’t mention for it would be a spoiler) the evil Victor Varde is a spot-on duplicate of a child molester from my old neighborhood who has haunted me since eighth grade. From that starting point, I felt it was important that I be patient—giving the plotline room to breathe and make shifts, and allowing the physical characteristics, stories, and inner lives of each of the novel’s characters to achieve fullness.
Donna’s journey is both painful and increasingly powerful. How did you approach writing her as more than either a victim or a hero?
I had a couple of things in mind. One, I wanted to avoid a pair of opposing cliches: abused girl as unadulterated victim, and abused girl as super-hero. The second thing was that, obviously, she had to evolve. “A” and “Z” couldn’t be the same. Again, how this change would happen only became clear to me over time. Her nurse Livvy Gomez was key in this, and, potentially, an undervalued character.
The evolution of Donna is very much aligned with what Anne Lamott describes as watching a Polaroid develop—stick around with the story long enough and more and more details, windows, and trap doors emerge.
The novel gives its supernatural horror a very grounded, neighborhood-level presence. Why was it important for evil to feel ordinary before it became cosmic?
It was the way the novel evolved. When I first put fingers to key, I did not have an intention of writing a literary horror novel. A couple of things moved me in that direction. One, was a simple matter of what I’ve written before—that is an exploration of life through the compact landscape of the Jersey City Heights/Plateau of my youth. I had a “been there, done that” recognition. So the realistic was in the groundwork.
Additionally, I had, from the beginning, been describing Victor Varde in demonic terms. From that, the move to going all in on the supernatural came to me quickly. A couple of early readers of the manuscript were against this, arguing that I had a good naturalistic novel in front of me. But the supernatural level was appealing, even compelling. I couldn’t resist going there and engaging the metaphysical questions which have followed me for decades.
When and where will the book be available?
I’m hoping it will be available by early 2027.
Author Link: Instagram | Book Review
The Light Reapers: A Good Day to Die
The Light Reapers: A Good Day to Die, by Gary Hickman, is a post-apocalyptic military horror thriller that follows Priest and the Light Reapers as they face a world overrun by infected monsters, ruthless human enemies, and the rising threat of the Trinity, three intelligent, terrifying beings with plans that reach far beyond simple survival. The story moves from brutal rescue missions and underground battles to safe zones that may not be safe at all. At its core, though, this is a book about loyalty. Who gets saved. Who gets left behind. And what it costs to keep fighting when the world keeps giving you reasons to stop.
Hickman writes like he wants the reader strapped into the passenger seat of an armored vehicle with no seatbelt. The action comes fast, loud, and bloody, but there is more going on here than gunfire and monsters. Priest is written as a man shaped by rage, grief, and purpose, and that mix gives the book its emotional weight. He’s not soft, and the story never pretends he is. Still, the quieter moments, especially the ones built around Dora, Doc, Vivian, Lia, and the larger Reaper family, give the violence somewhere to land. I liked that. Without those moments, the book could have become one long firefight. Instead, it has breath between the explosions.
Hickman’s choices are bold, sometimes harsh, and often intentionally uncomfortable. This isn’t a gentle post-apocalyptic novel. The horror is physical, but it is also moral. The monsters are frightening, yet the human betrayals can feel even uglier. I found myself thinking a lot about how the book treats obedience, power, and protection. The Trinity wants control. The Reapers survive because they choose each other. That contrast works well. The dialogue can be blunt and rough around the edges, but it fits the world and the people living in it. These are soldiers, survivors, killers, parents, lovers, and friends trying to hold a line in a ruined world. They don’t speak in polished speeches. They snap, joke, curse, grieve, and keep moving.
I would recommend The Light Reapers: A Good Day to Die to readers who enjoy gritty military science fiction, post-apocalyptic horror, and action-heavy thrillers with a strong found-family thread. It will especially appeal to readers who like their heroes damaged but loyal, their villains monstrous in more ways than one, and their survival stories soaked in danger from the first page to the last. This is a violent, emotional, high-stakes genre novel, and it fully commits to the brutal, high-stakes story it sets out to tell.
Pages: 381 | ASIN : B0GZZ51ZBW
Architect: The Goodpasture Chronicles (Book 3)
Architect by R.J. Halbert is a supernatural fantasy novel with strong threads of mystery, family drama, faith, and time travel. As the third book in The Goodpasture Chronicles, it follows the Keane family after Zach returns from an ancient world, while Akolo’s story continues across years, grief, love, and strange divine purpose. The book moves between the haunted pull of the Goodpasture house and a much older world of temples, artifacts, kings, and impossible choices. At its heart, though, this is a story about home. Not just the house you live in, but the people, memories, wounds, and hopes that make a place matter.
I enjoyed the way Halbert lets the supernatural sit right beside the ordinary. One moment, I was reading about portals, ancient power, storms, and voices in the wind. The next, I was with a family trying to eat breakfast, survive school, clean up a chicken coop, or figure out how to talk to a teenager who feels deeply hurt. That balance gives the book its warmth. The fantasy elements are big, but the emotions are close to the ground. I also liked how the writing gives different characters room to be confused. Nobody has all the answers, and that feels honest. Zach is trying to piece together memories. Ariel is angry and scared. Lyana and Ian are doing their best while clearly not knowing what “best” even means anymore. That uncertainty makes the story feel lived-in instead of staged.
I was also struck by the author’s choice to build the book around legacy. Akolo’s long journey could have been only a fantasy device, but it becomes something sadder and richer. Immortality is not treated like a prize. It’s heavy. It costs him. It stretches love and loss over time until both become almost unbearable. That gave the book more weight than I expected. The faith language is direct, but the sincerity worked for me more often than not. The book is not trying to be detached or ironic. It believes in healing, restoration, and purpose, and it says so plainly. There is something refreshing about that.
I would recommend Architect most to readers who enjoy faith-centered supernatural fantasy, especially stories where mystery and suspense are tied to family history and emotional healing. It will probably land best for those who have read the earlier books, since this feels like a closing movement in a larger piece of music. Readers who like time travel, ancient history, haunted houses, hidden identities, and redemptive endings will find a lot to enjoy here. I came away feeling that the book is less about solving every strange event than about learning to trust that broken stories can still be gathered into something whole.
Pages: 258 | ASIN: B0GXNW6X9V
