David Black is an award-winning journalist, novelist, screenwriter, and producer. His novel Like Father was named a notable book of the year by The New York Times and listed as one of the seven best novels of the year by The Washington Post. The King of Fifth Avenue was named a notable book of the year by The New York Times, New York magazine, and the Associated Press. He divides his time between upstate New York and Manhattan.
Douglas Brode is a novelist, screenwriter, playwright, film historian, and multiaward-winning working-journalist. He teaches courses in popular culture and modern media at the Newhouse School of Public Communications, Syracuse University. The most recent of his more than thirty books on film and television is Rod Serling and The Twilight Zone: The Official 50th Anniversary Tribute, coauthored with Carol Serling.
Loren L. Coleman is the author of twenty-six novels, with short fiction work appearing in many Tekno Books anthologies. He began watching The Twilight Zone (in syndication) as young as five years old, which may explain a lot about his life. Today, when not locking himself away in a small room to invent worlds and create people from the mysterious ether of his imagination, he coaches youth sports, manages Catalyst Game Labs (a pen-and-paper game company), and occasionally sets out in search of the perfect martini. His personal Web site can be found at www.lorenlcoleman.com.
M. Tara Crowl grew up in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and recently graduated from film school at the University of Southern California. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles.
Peter Crowther is the recipient of numerous awards for his writing, his editing, and, as publisher, for the hugely successful PS imprint. As well as being widely translated, his short stories have been adapted for TV on both sides of the Atlantic and collected in The Longest Single Note, Lonesome Roads, Songs of Leaving, Cold Comforts, The Spaces Between the Lines, The Land at the End of the Working Day, and the upcoming Things I Didn’t Know My Father Knew. He is the coauthor (with James Lovegrove) of Escardy Gap and author of the “Forever Twilight” SF/horror cycle (Darkness, Darkness and Windows to the Soul already available, and Darkness Rising due in summer 2010). He lives and works with his wife and business partner, Nicky, on the Yorkshire coast.
Loren D. Estleman has published more than sixty novels and two hundred short stories in the areas of suspense, historical western, and mainstream. He has won seventeen national writing awards, including five Spurs, four Shamuses, and the Elmer Kelton Award, bestowed by the German Association for the Study of the Western. In addition, he has been nominated for the Edgar and the American Book Award. In 2002, his alma mater, Eastern Michigan University, presented him with an honorary doctorate in Humane Letters. He lives in Michigan with his wife, author Deborah Morgan.
John Farris has been called “the best writer of horror at work today” and was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Horror Writers Association in 2001. His thirty-nine titles have sold twenty-two million copies worldwide in twenty-five languages. His most recent novels are You Don’t Scare Me and High Bloods. He wrote and directed the cult-classic film Dear, Dead Delilah, and has written many other screenplays. He had a short-lived career as a playwright in his twenties. His only produced play, The Death of the Well-Loved Boy, Farris fondly recalls as having received “the worst reviews since Attila the Hun.” He lives near Atlanta, Georgia. Please send favorable reviews and notes of appreciation to kingwindom@gmail.com.
A graduate of Yale University, Peter Farris has collaborated on numerous screenplays with his father, John Farris. Their script You Don’t Scare Me was optioned by New Films International and is currently in preproduction. Peter’s first novel, a racing satire called The Eggshell, was described by legendary motorsports journalist Monte Dutton as a work that would make him “the Salman Rushdie of NASCAR nation.” While waiting for an editor brave enough to buy The Eggshell, Farris has written a second novel and is hard at work on a third. He lives in Cobb County, Georgia, with his girlfriend, Heather, and a black cat named Grimm.
David Gerrold is the author (and father of) The Martian Child, the basis for the 2007 movie starring John Cusack, Amanda Peet, and Bobby Coleman. He’s also known as the creator of Star Trek’s Tribbles, Land of the Lost’s Sleestak, and his own much more terrifying Chtorrans in The War Against the Chtorr. He’s published more than fifty books, including When HARLIE Was One, The Man Who Folded Himself, and Jumping Off the Planet. In his spare time, he redesigns his Web site, www.gerrold.com.
Nancy Holder is the New York Times bestselling coauthor of the dark fantasy series Wicked, which has been picked up by Dream-Works. She also writes the young adult horror Possessions series. She has received four Bram Stoker Awards for her supernatural fiction and has written many books set in the Smallville, Saving Grace, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer universes. A true Disney geek, she can frequently be seen in the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror gift shop, purchasing more bath towels for her Disney-themed house. She lives in San Diego with her daughter, Belle, the cats, David and Kittnen Snow Vampire, Panda, a psychic Cardigan Welsh Corgi, and by the time this book comes out, they will have another dog, the Pembroke Corgi Tater Tot, la Comtesse de Pommepomme-Yip.
Lee Lawless is the author of several award-winning plays, two screenplays, and a vast compendium of postmodern rock and roll music. In addition to her avant-garde short films and visual artwork, Lawless was a contributing editor of The Weekly World Wiretap e-zine and Harlem Today magazine. She plays guitar, cowrites and sings for the apocalypse-rock outfit Universal Truth Machine, and lives in a possibly haunted historical building in Harlem, New York City.
One of Jane Lindskold’s earliest story sales was “Good Boy” in the anthology Journeys to the Twilight Zone. Since then, she has published more than sixty short stories and twenty-some novels. Her novels include the six volumes of the “Wolf Series” and the three books in the “Breaking the Wall” series. She lives in New Mexico with her husband, archaeologist Jim Moore, and assorted small animals.
Jean Rabe is a book hoarder, a museum patron, a student of Egyptian symbolism, and a goldfish fancier. She is also the author of twenty-seven novels and more than five dozen short stories. When she’s not writing or editing, she delights in tossing tennis balls and tugging on old socks with her three dogs. Visit her at www.jeanrabe.com.
Kristine Kathryn Rusch is a bestselling, award-winning author who has written under a variety of names in fantasy, science fiction, mystery, and romance. Her latest novel, Diving into the Wreck from Pyr, is based on the award-winning novellas first published in Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine.
Robert J. (Bob) Serling is Rod Serling’s older brother and a prolific author himself, with twenty-five published nonfiction and fiction works, mostly dealing with the airline and aerospace industries. Among his seven novels is the bestselling The President’s Plane Is Missing. Before becoming a full-time freelance author, he was aviation editor of United Press International and at age ninety-two is regarded by his peers as the dean of aviation writers. He served as technical advisor on Rod’s acclaimed TZ episode “Odyssey of Flight 33.”
Rod Serling (1924–1975) worked in the television area for twenty-five years, developing, in addition to the landmark Twilight Zone series, Night Gallery and The Loner, and countless drama anthologies, including Requiem for a Heavyweight and Patterns. During his career he won more Emmy Awards for dramatic writing than anyone in history. He also wrote the screenplay for the very first Planet of the Apes film, which embodied everything Serling was interested in as a writer. He continued to write for television while teaching in Ithaca, New York, until his death in 1975, leaving an indelible imprint on television that would inspire countless future writers and artists.
Susan Slater is the author of six published mysteries—four in the Ben Pecos Indian series, The Pumpkin Seed Massacre, Yellow Lies, Thunderbird, and a novella, A Way to the Manger, and two stand-alones, Flash Flood and Five O’Clock Shadow. Her novel 0 to 60 is women’s fiction and has been optioned for a feature film. Susan lives thirty miles west of Taos and writes full-time.
Dean Wesley Smith is the bestselling author of over ninety novels and hundreds of short stories. Some of his first sales were to the Twilight Zone magazine and its sister publication, Night Cry, in the 1980s. He is best known for his work on Star Trek, Men in Black, and Spider-Man novels, and is currently writing thrillers under another name.
Norman Spinrad is the author of some twenty or so novels, five or six dozen short stories, a classic Star Trek episode, a couple of flop movies, an album’s worth of songs, political columns, film criticism, literary criticism, mini-cookbooks, autobiography, and a bunch of assorted other stuff. The latest to be written is a new and literarily revolutionary novel called Welcome to Your Dream-time, in which you, the reader, are the viewpoint character, and sections of which have been published in a weird assortment of magazines as free standing short stories. The latest to be published is He Walked Among Us, a novel so far ahead of itself that it had to wait until it had become something of the fave rave of a radical viral Internet distribution experiment before any traditional publisher would bring it out in paper.