Biographies
Poppy Z. Brite is the long-time pen name of Billy Martin. Since beginning his career in the small-press magazine The Horror Show in 1985, he has published eight novels including Lost Souls, Exquisite Corpse, and the Liquor series, as well as several short story collections and assorted non-fiction work. Brite is also the editor of the erotic horror anthologies Love in Vein and Love in Vein 2. He has recently completed Water if God Wills It, a non-fiction book about religion and spirituality in the works of Stephen King. In addition to writing, he runs the online curio shop PZBaubles New Orleans, specialising in vintage Tarot cards, quirky jewellery, religious objects, and more. He lives in New Orleans with his husband, the artist Grey Cross, and their cats.
Andy Davidson is the Bram Stoker Award-nominated author of In the Valley of the Sun, The Boatman’s Daughter, and The Hollow Kind. His novels have been listed among NPR’s Best Books, the New York Public Library’s Best Adult Books of the Year, and Esquire’s Best Horror of the Year. His short stories have appeared online and in print journals, as well as numerous anthologies, most recently the Shirley Jackson Award-winning Hideous Book of Hidden Horrors from Bad Hand Books and Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year Volume 15. Born and raised in Arkansas, he makes his home in Georgia, where he teaches creative writing. He lives with his wife, Crystal, and a bunch of cats.
Aaron Dries is a Bram Stoker and Shirley Jackson Award-nominated, and Ditmar, Australian Shadows and Aurealis Award-winning author based in Canberra, Australia. His novels include House of Sighs, The Fallen Boys, A Place for Sinners, Where the Dead Go To Die (with Mark Allan Gunnells), plus the novellas The Sound of His Bones Breaking, the highly acclaimed Dirty Heads, and Vandal: Stories of Damage with Kaaron Warren and J.S. Breukelaar. Cut to Care: A Collection of Little Hurts was described by author Paul Tremblay as “heartbreaking, frightening, and all too real”. Dries is one host of the popular podcast, Let the Cat In, and co-founded Elsewhere Here Productions. His fiction, art, and films have been celebrated domestically and abroad. Aaron Dries is represented by the Annie Bomke Literary Agency and can be contacted at X @AaronDries / Insta and Threads on aarondries / TikTok @aarondries_writer and on Bluesky on @aarondries.bsky.social
Paul Finch is an ex-cop and journalist turned bestselling author. He first cut his literary teeth penning episodes of the TV drama, The Bill, and has written extensively in the horror, fantasy and historical epic genres, including for Doctor Who. However, he is best known for his crime/thriller novels, of which there are twelve to date, including the Heckenburg and Clayburn series with HarperCollins (the first Lucy Clayburn novel, Strangers, making the Sunday Times Top 10) and two stand-alone novels with Orion. Paul lives in Lancashire with his wife and business partner, Cathy.
Christina Henry is a horror and dark fantasy author whose works include The House that Horror Built, Good Girls Don’t Die, Horseman, Near the Bone, The Ghost Tree, The Girl in Red, The Mermaid, Lost Boy, the Chronicles of Alice series (Alice, Red Queen and Looking Glass) and the seven-book urban fantasy Black Wings series. Her short stories have been featured in the anthologies Cursed, Twice Cursed, Giving the Devil His Due and Kicking It. She enjoys running long distances, reading anything she can get her hands on and watching movies with samurai, zombies and/or subtitles in her spare time. She lives in Chicago with her husband and son. You can visit her on the web at christinahenry.net.
Laurel Hightower is a bourbon-loving native of Lexington, Kentucky. She is the Bram Stoker-nominated author of Whispers in the Dark, Crossroads, Below, Every Woman Knows This, Silent Key, and the upcoming The Day of the Door, and has more than a dozen short fiction stories in print.
Verity Holloway lives in East Anglia. She is the author of the novels The Others of Edenwell, Pseudotooth, and Beauty Secrets of the Martyrs, the graphic novel Gore, and The Mighty Healer, a biography of her quack doctor ancestor. She writes folklore features for Hellebore Zine and her short fiction has appeared in British Fantasy Society Horizons, The Shadow Booth, and The Ghastling, among others. Find her at verityholloway.com and on Twitter/X as @verity_holloway.
Jim Horlock considers himself less of an odd duck and more of a wobbly goose. He loves all things dark and weird, and you can find his dark weird stories at The NoSleep Podcast, Crystal Lake Publishing, Eerie River and elsewhere. There might be one in the room with you right now. He also has a short horror collection of his own coming soon from Quill & Crow Press, and his first horror novel, Masks, is on the way too. Jim is a ghost collector, a cryptid enthusiast, and a wiki-hole spelunker. He also appreciates a good hat.
Gwendolyn Kiste is the three-time Bram Stoker Award-winning author of The Rust Maidens, Reluctant Immortals, Boneset & Feathers, Pretty Marys All in a Row, and The Haunting of Velkwood. Her short fiction and non-fiction have appeared in outlets including Lit Hub, Nightmare, Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, Vastarien, Tor Nightfire, The Lineup, and The Dark. She’s a Lambda Literary Award winner, and her fiction has also received the This Is Horror award for Novel of the Year as well as nominations for the Premios Kelvin, Ignotus, and Dragon Awards. Originally from Ohio, she now resides on an abandoned horse farm outside of Pittsburgh with her husband, their excitable calico cat, and not nearly enough ghosts. Find her online at gwendolynkiste.com.
Annie Knox is an author based in London. Working primarily in genre fiction, she focuses on horror and all of its subgenres. Her previously published works include Incorporeal Tax, featured in The Perfectly Fine Neighbourhood, and A Sister’s Love, featured in Terrors from the Toybox. Her favourite books include the Monstrumologist series, Salem’s Lot, and Jurassic Park (yes, it was a book). Recently Annie started her own company, Snake Bite Books, looking to create a home for horror with an emphasis on interesting stories, deep emotion, and fun spookiness. Aside from writing scary stories, she is an amateur boxer!
Sarah Langan is an award-winning novelist and screenwriter. Her most recent novels are A Better World (April 2024) and Good Neighbors (February 2021), which Gabino Iglesias at NPR called: “One of the creepiest, most unnerving deconstructions of American suburbia I’ve ever read.” She’s won three Bram Stoker Awards for her fiction. Her previous novels are The Keeper, The Missing, and Audrey’s Door. She has an MFA from Columbia University, an MS in Environmental Health Science/Toxicology from NYU, and lives in Los Angeles with her husband, the writer/director J.T. Petty, their two daughters, and two maniac rabbits. Mailing List: sarahlangan.com/contact.
Tim Lebbon is a New York Times bestselling writer from South Wales. He’s had over forty novels published to date, and hundreds of novellas and short stories. His latest novel is Among the Living. He has won a World Fantasy Award and four British Fantasy Awards, as well as Bram Stoker, Scribe and Dragon Awards. He’s recently worked on the new computer game Resurgence, acted as lead writer on a major Audible audio drama, and he’s co-writing his first comic for Dark Horse. The movie of his novel The Silence debuted on Netflix in April 2019, and Pay the Ghost was released Halloween 2015. Tim is currently developing more novels, short stories, audio dramas, and projects for TV and the big screen. Find out more at: timlebbon.net.
Will Maclean has been writing professionally for over fifteen years. As a comedy writer, he has written sketches, one-liners and gags for many of the leading lights of British comedy, such as Al Murray, Peter Serafinowicz, Tracey Ullman, and many others. He’s also written a great deal of children’s TV, writing for well-loved characters such as Shaun the Sheep and, on one occasion, Cookie Monster. He is perhaps best known as the author of McKitterick Prize-nominated novel The Apparition Phase, a 1970s set ghost story which utilises many of the tropes of popular hauntology. It was Will’s idea to place one single word inside each of the one thousand limited edition Goldsboro editions of the book which, when put together, will make a short story, a stunt which generated worldwide interest in the novel. He’s almost finished a new book, and, if his agent’s reading this, it’ll be with you soon, Alex, jeez.
Tim Major is a writer and freelance editor from York. His books include Jekyll & Hyde: Consulting Detectives, Snakeskins, Hope Island, three Sherlock Holmes novels, short story collection And the House Lights Dim and a monograph about the 1915 silent crime film, Les Vampires. Tim’s short fiction has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, and has been selected for Best of British Science Fiction, Best of British Fantasy and The Best Horror of the Year. Find out more at timjmajor.com.
Mark Morris (Editor) has written and edited over fifty novels, novellas, short story collections and anthologies. His script work includes audio dramas for Doctor Who, Jago & Litefoot and the Hammer Chillers series. Mark’s recent work includes the Obsidian Heart trilogy, the original Predator novel Stalking Shadows (co-written with James A. Moore), the official novelisation of the Doctor Who sixtieth anniversary special Wild Blue Yonder, and the anthologies New Fears (winner of the British Fantasy Award for Best Anthology) and New Fears 2 as editor. He’s also written award-winning audio adaptations of the classic 1971 horror movie Blood on Satan’s Claw and the M.R. James ghost story ‘A View from a Hill’. His novel That Which Stands Outside was published in 2024 by Flame Tree Press.
Luigi Musolino was born in 1982 in the province of Turin, where he lives and works. He is the author of several short story collections of weird fiction, horror and rural gothic. His first novel Eredità di Carne was published by Acheron Books in 2019 and the novella Pupille was published by Zona 42 in 2021. He has translated works by Brian Keene, Lisa Mannetti, Michael Laimo and the autobiographical writings of H.P. Lovecraft into Italian. His latest publication in Italy, Un buio diverso – Voci dai Necromilieus, is published by Edizioni Hypnos. His works have also been published in the United States, Canada, Russia, Ireland, Hungary, Spain and South Africa. In 2022 Valancourt Books published the collection A Different Darkness and Other Abominations, a finalist in the 2023 World Fantasy Awards.
Kurt Newton’s short fiction has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including Weird Tales, The Dark, Vastarien, and Cosmic Horror Monthly. His most recent collection of short stories, Bruises, was published in 2023 by Lycan Valley Press. Dreadful Seasons, a collection of young adult horror, is scheduled to be published in late 2024 by PsychoToxin Press. He makes his home in the northeast corner of Connecticut, where nothing really scary ever happens.
Nicholas Royle is the author of five short story collections – Mortality, Ornithology, The Dummy and Other Uncanny Stories, London Gothic and Manchester Uncanny – and seven novels, most recently First Novel. He has edited more than two dozen anthologies and is series editor of Best British Short Stories for Salt, who also published his White Spines: Confessions of a Book Collector and follow-up volume Shadow Lines: Searching For the Book Beyond the Shelf. In 2009 he founded Nightjar Press, which continues to publish original short stories in the form of limited edition chapbooks. Forthcoming is Royle’s third short story collection for Confingo Publishing, Paris Fantastique.
David J. Schow is a multiple award-winning West Coast writer. The latest of his ten novels is a hardboiled extravaganza called The Big Crush (2019), and the newest of his ten short story collections is Suite 13 (2024). He has been a contributor to Storm King Comics’ John Carpenter’s Tales for a Halloween Night since its very first issue, as well as three multi-issue graphic novels for John Carpenter’s Tales of Science Fiction – The Standoff (2020), HELL (2021-22) and The Envoy (2024). He has written extensively for film (The Crow, Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III, The Hills Run Red) and television (Masters of Horror, Mob City, Creepshow), and his non-fiction works include The Outer Limits Companion (1998), The Art of Drew Struzan (2010) and The Outer Limits at 60 (2023). Thanks to him, the word ‘splatterpunk’ has been in the Oxford English Dictionary since 2002.
Paul Tremblay has won the Bram Stoker, British Fantasy, and Massachusetts Book awards and is the nationally bestselling author of Horror Movie, The Beast You Are, The Pallbearers Club, Survivor Song, Growing Things and Other Stories, Disappearance at Devil’s Rock, A Head Full of Ghosts, and the crime novels The Little Sleep and No Sleep Till Wonderland. His novel The Cabin at the End of the World was adapted into the Universal Pictures film Knock at the Cabin. He lives outside Boston with his family.
P.C. Verrone is a writer of page and stage. His fiction has appeared in FIYAH Magazine and has won accolades from the Bridport Prize and Black Creatives Fund (We Need Diverse Books/Penguin Random House). His theatrical work has been featured on Off-Broadway and regional stages. His play Crocodile Day, a Native American reimagining of Peter Pan, was published by Playscripts in 2023. He was a Many Voices Fellow at the Playwrights’ Center. He holds a BA from Harvard University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Rutgers University. He currently lives in Newark, New Jersey with his husband. Find him at pcverrone.com.