TRAIL OF SHADOWS … wins the Webster Award, what???
Mike Allen / Tuesday, May 19th, 2026 / No Comments »Ravencon, Richmond’s long-running science fiction convention, established an award in 2018 to honor the memory of (Roanoke-born!) author, bookseller, essayist, and sf fan extraordinaire Bud Webster. Its full name is the Clarence Howard “Bud” Webster Award for Best Virginian Author, and as you might surmise, it is exclusively awarded to Virginia authors, usually but not necessarily for tomes in the science fiction, fantasy, and horror genres. The award factors in a popular vote via an online poll, but a panel of volunteer judges has the final say.
Last month, my Weird Haunted Appalachia novel Trail of Shadows won the Webster Award. This fact still shocks me, in the best possible way. I was there at the ceremony, but did not at all expect my name to be the one inside the envelope. (And I for sure did not win the popular vote. In fact, my fellow nominee Dennis M. Myers won that, and received a trophy of his own, which was also awesome.)
Most wonderful for me: Bud was a friend and confidant, which gave this event the feel of a touching reunion. Bud and I first connected when I recruited his side-splittingly funny short story “The Slithery Dee” for my first-ever anthology project, New Dominions, and that connection grew into a friendship.
I had the honor of writing a tribute to Bud for Locus Magazine after his death in February 2016. I want to share a couple excerpts from that piece, which ran in the March 2016 issue.
My much-missed friend Bud Webster was a natural storyteller of the gather-’round-and-let-me-spin-you-a-yarn kind well before he made his mark as a published writer. He was hilarious, both on the page and in person.
(One of his tamer anecdotes involved a street encounter with a proselytizer, who approached Bud to ask, “Have you found Jesus?” Bud replied, “Have you poor bastards lost him again? Check under the refrigerator, sometimes he rolls.”) . . .
For all his irreverent humor, Bud’s reverence for the sf of his youth ran deep. It formed the generous core of everything he gave to our field. He often said that his goal as a writer was to craft stories the late Groff Conklin would have anthologized. Later he would write a reference work about Conklin, whom he also discussed in “Anthopology 101,” his long-running column full of entertaining explorations of seminal anthologies from sf’s past. . . .
All that research positioned him as the go-to guy when SFWA came to him with a request for help updating its list of author estates, a responsibility Bud not only accepted but vastly expanded. He delivered his calls for authors to put their posthumous literary rights in order with the same affable humor and earnestness that made his stories such a delight. It meant a lot to him that he was able to travel to D.C. to receive his Service to SFWA Award in person.
There was so much I didn’t get to touch on in that piece, including his witty poetry and his stints as a poetry editor for Helix and as a secretary of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association (at least some of that my “fault” for roping him into that corner of the sf world); nor did I get to go into the short-lived tongue-in-cheek Two-Fisted Writers of America (TFWA) organization that he and I co-founded, pretty much an excuse for Southwest Virginia-based folks who would now be called “creatives” to get together for parties. The highlight was tribute to another late Roanoke writer, Nelson Bond, a hero to both of us, wherein Anita presented Nelson with a cake decorated with the cover of his first book, Mr. Mergenthwirker’s Lobblies, and Bud shared tributes to Nelson written by some of his biggest fans, including Harlan Ellison.
Thank you, Ravencon, for reconnecting me to those memories.
