About the Editor

Ellen Datlow has been editing science fiction, fantasy, and horror short fiction for more than thirty-five years. She currently acquires short fiction for Tor.com. In addition, she has edited more than fifty science fiction, fantasy, and horror anthologies, including Lovecraft’s Monsters, Fearful Symmetries, Nightmare Carnival, The Cutting Room, the Women Destroy Horror issue of Nightmare Magazine, and The Doll Collection.

She’s won multiple World Fantasy Awards, Locus Awards, Hugo Awards, Stoker Awards, International Horror Guild Awards, Shirley Jackson Awards, and the 2012 Il Posto Nero Black Spot Award for Excellence as Best Foreign Editor. Datlow was named recipient of the 2007 Karl Edward Wagner Award, given at the British Fantasy Convention for “outstanding contribution to the genre”; was honored with the Life Achievement Award given by the Horror Writers Association in acknowledgment of superior achievement over an entire career; and received the Life Achievement Award from the World Fantasy Convention.

She lives in New York and co-hosts the monthly Fantastic Fiction Reading Series at KGB Bar. More information can be found at www.datlow.com, on Facebook (www.facebook.com/EllenDatlow), and on Twitter @ EllenDatlow.

About the Contributors

Dale Bailey’s new collection, The End of the End of Everything, came out in the spring of 2015. A novel, The Subterranean Season, will follow in November. He has published three previous novels, The Fallen, House of Bones, and Sleeping Policemen (the latter, with Jack Slay, Jr.); and one previous collection of short fiction, The Resurrection Man’s Legacy and Other Stories.

His work has won the Shirley Jackson Award and the International Horror Guild Award, and he has been a finalist for the Nebula Award and the Bram Stoker Award. His novelette “Death and Suffrage” was adapted for Showtime Television’s Masters of Horror. He lives in North Carolina with his family.

Adam-Troy Castro’s time on this Earth has included stints in customer service, a fleeting stint as a comic-book artist, and a summer spent lurking in darkness at one of the hidden safety posts in an amusement park house of horrors. As a writer, his twenty-six books include the six volumes of the acclaimed Gustav Gloom middle-grade series.

His short fiction has been nominated for two Hugo, three Stoker, and eight Nebula Awards. His Andrea Cort novel, Emissaries from the Dead, won the Philip K. Dick Award. Castro lives in Boynton Beach, Florida, with his wife, Judi, and an assortment of cats that include Uma Furman and Meow Farrow.

Jack Dann is a multi-award-winning author who has written or edited more than seventy-five books, including the international best-seller The Memory Cathedral, The Silent, and The Rebel: An Imagined Life of James Dean. Other publications include the short novel The Economy of Light and the autobiography Insinuations. An “unexpurgated” edition of The Rebel called The Rebel: Second Chance was published in the spring of 2015.

His short stories have been collected in Timetipping, Visitations, The Fiction Factory, Jubilee, and Promised Land. Concentration, a collection of Dann’s stories about the Holocaust, is forthcoming.

He is the co-editor, with Janeen Webb, of the anthology Dreaming Down-Under, which won the World Fantasy Award, and his anthology Ghosts by Gaslight, co-edited with Nick Gevers, won the Shirley Jackson Award and the Aurealis Award.

Also forthcoming is an anthology entitled Dreaming in the Dark, which will launch the new imprint PS Australia, of which Dann is the publishing director, and a collection of poetry entitled Poems from a White Heart.

Dann lives in Australia on a farm overlooking the sea. You can visit his website at www.jackdann.com and follow him on Twitter @jackmdann and Facebook (www.facebook.com/jack.dann2).

Terry Dowling is one of Australia’s most-respected and internationally acclaimed writers of science fiction, dark fantasy, and horror and the author of the multi-award-winning Tom Rynosseros saga. The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror series has featured more horror stories by Dowling in its twenty-one-year run than by any other writer. Dowling’s award-winning horror collections include Basic Black: Tales of Appropriate Fear (International Horror Guild Award winner for Best Collection 2007), Aurealis Award–winning An Intimate Knowledge of the Night, and the World Fantasy Award–nominated Blackwater Days.

His most recent books include Amberjack: Tales of Fear & Wonder and his debut novel, Clowns at Midnight, which London’s Guardian calls “an exceptional work that bears comparison to John Fowles’s The Magus.” His website can be found at www.terrydowling.com.

Gardner Dozois is the author or editor of more than a hundred books. He was the editor of Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine for almost twenty years and still edits the annual anthology series The Year’s Best Science Fiction, now up to its thirty-second annual collection.

He has won fifteen Hugo Awards as the Year’s Best Editor, thirty-two Locus Awards for his editing work, and two Nebula Awards and a Sidewise Award for his own writing. He has been inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame.

Former film critic and teacher-turned-horror-author Gemma Files is best known for her Weird Western Hexslinger series (A Book of Tongues, A Rope of Thorns, and A Tree of Bones, all from ChiZine Publications). She has also published two collections of short fiction, two chapbooks of speculative poetry, and a story cycle (We Will All Go Down Together: Stories of the Five-Family Coven).

In 1999, Files won the International Horror Guild’s Best Short Fiction Award for her story “The Emperor’s Old Bones.” Five of her short stories were adapted as episodes of the Showtime TV series The Hunger, produced by Ridley and Tony Scott. Her next novel, Experimental Film, will be available from CZP in November 2015.

Jeffrey Ford is the author of the novels Vanitas, The Physiognomy, Memoranda, The Beyond, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, The Girl in the Glass, The Cosmology of the Wider World, and The Shadow Year.

His story collections include The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant, The Empire of Ice Cream, The Drowned Life, and Crackpot Palace. Ford has published more than one hundred short stories, which have appeared in numerous journals, magazines, and anthologies ranging from The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction to The Oxford Book of American Short Stories.

He is the recipient of the World Fantasy Award, Nebula Award, Shirley Jackson Award, Edgar Allan Poe Award, Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire, and Hayakawa Award. His fiction has been translated into nearly twenty languages.

In addition to writing, he’s been a professor of literature and writing for thirty years and a guest lecturer at Clarion Writing Workshop, the Stone Coast MFA Program, the Richard Hugo House in Seattle, and the Antioch University Writing Workshop. He lives in Ohio and currently teaches at Ohio Wesleyan University.

Christopher Fowler is the award-winning author of more than forty novels and short-story collections, including the Bryant & May mysteries, recording the adventures of two Golden Age detectives in modern-day London.

The recipient of the 2015 Dagger In The Library, his latest books are the Ballard-esque thriller The Sand Men and Bryant & May: London’s Glory. Other works include screenplays, video games, graphic novels, and audio plays. He writes a weekly column in The Independent on Sunday. He lives in King’s Cross, London, and Barcelona.

Three-time International Horror Guild Award Winner Glen Hirshberg’s novels include The Snowman’s Children, The Book of Bunk, and Motherless Child, which was recently republished in a new, revised edition by Tor. Good Girls, the second book in the “Motherless Children” trilogy, will be published in 2016.

He is also the author of three widely praised story collections: The Two Sams (a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2003), American Morons, and The Janus Tree. In 2008, he won the Shirley Jackson Award for the novelette “The Janus Tree.”

With Peter Atkins and Dennis Etchison, he co-founded the Rolling Darkness Revue, an annual reading/live music/performance event that tours the West Coast of the United States every fall and has also made international appearances.

He lives in the Los Angeles area with his wife, son, daughter, and cats.

Brian Hodge is the author of ten novels and is working on three more as well as nearly 120 shorter works and five full-length collections. His first collection, The Convulsion Factory, was ranked by critic Stanley Wiater among the 113 best books of modern horror.

Recent and forthcoming works include In the Negative Spaces and The Weight of the Dead, both stand-alone novellas; Worlds of Hurt, an omnibus edition of the first four works in his Misbegotten mythos; an updated hardcover edition of Dark Advent, his early post-apocalyptic epic; and a new collection tentatively titled Echoes from the Void.

He lives in Colorado, where he also likes to make music and photographs; loves everything about organic gardening except the thieving squirrels; and trains in Krav Maga and kickboxing, which are of no use at all against the squirrels.

Connect with him through his website (www.brianhodge.net) or Facebook (www.facebook.com/brianhodgewriter).

Carole Johnstone’s fiction has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies published by ChiZine, PS Publishing, Night Shade Books, TTA Press, and Apex Book Company, among many others. In 2014, she won the British Fantasy Award for Best Short Story. Her work has been reprinted in various “best of” anthologies.

Her 2014 novella, Cold Turkey, was published by TTA Press. She is presently at work on her second novel while seeking fame and fortune with the first—but she just can’t seem to kick the short-story habit.

More information on the author can be found at carolejohnstone.com.

Stephen Graham Jones is the author of fifteen novels and six short-story collections. The most recent are Not for Nothing, After the People Lights Have Gone Off, and Floating Boy and the Girl Who Couldn’t Fly (with Paul Tremblay).

Jones has had more than two hundred stories published, many reprinted in best of the year annuals. He’s won the Texas Institute of Letters Award for fiction, the Independent Publishers Award for Multicultural Fiction, and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in fiction. He teaches in the MFA programs at CU Boulder and UCR–Palm Desert.

He lives in Boulder, Colorado, with his wife and kids. For more information visit his website demontheory.net, or you can find him on Twitter @sgj72.

Caitlín R. Kiernan was recently hailed by the New York Times as “one of our essential authors of dark fiction.” A two-time winner of both the World Fantasy and Bram Stoker awards, she has published ten novels, including The Red Tree and The Drowning Girl: A Memoir. She is also the recipient of the Locus and James Tiptree, Jr. awards. Her short fiction has been collected in thirteen volumes, including Tales of Pain and Wonder, The Ammonite Violin & Others, A is for Alien, and The Ape’s Wife and Other Stories.

Subterranean Press has released a two-volume set collecting the best of her short fiction, Two Worlds and In Between and Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea. She is currently working on a screenplay, her next novel, Interstate Love Song: Murder Ballads, and a volume of juvenilia, “Cambrian Tales.”

John Langan is the author of two collections, The Wide, Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies (Hippocampus) and Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters (Prime), and a novel, House of Windows (Night Shade). With Paul Tremblay, he co-edited Creatures: Thirty Years of Monsters (Prime).

One of the founders of the Shirley Jackson Awards, he lives in upstate New York with his wife, younger son, and a houseful of animals.

Livia Llewellyn is a writer of horror, dark fantasy, and erotica, whose fiction has appeared in ChiZine, Subterranean, Apex Magazine, Postscripts, Nightmare Magazine, and numerous anthologies. Her first collection, Engines of Desire: Tales of Love & Other Horrors, was published in 2011 by Lethe Press and received two Shirley Jackson Award nominations, for Best Collection and Best Novelette (for “Omphalos”). Her story “Furnace” received a 2013 Shirley Jackson Award nomination for Best Short Fiction. Her second collection will be published by Word Horde Press in 2016. You can find her online at liviallewellyn.com.

Adam L. G. Nevill was born in Birmingham, England, in 1969 and grew up in England and New Zealand. He is the author of the supernatural horror novels Banquet for the Damned, Apartment 16, The Ritual, Last Days, House of Small Shadows, No One Gets Out Alive, and Lost Girl.

In 2012, The Ritual was the winner of the August Derleth Award for Best Horror Novel, and in 2013 Last Days won the same award. The same two novels were awarded Best in Category: Horror by R.U.S.A. Adam lives in Devon and can be contacted through www.adamlgnevill.com.

Kim Newman is a novelist, critic, and broadcaster. His fiction includes The Night Mayor, Bad Dreams, Jago, the Anno Dracula novels and stories, The Quorum, The Original Dr. Shade and Other Stories, Life’s Lottery, Back in the USSA (with Eugene Byrne), The Man from the Diogenes Club, Professor Moriarty: The Hound of the d’Urbervilles, and An English Ghost Story under his own name and The Vampire Genevieve and Orgy of the Blood Parasites as Jack Yeovil.

His nonfiction books include Nightmare Movies, Ghastly Beyond Belief (with Neil Gaiman), Horror: 100 Best Books (with Stephen Jones), Wild West Movies, The BFI Companion to Horror, Millennium Movies, and BFI Classics studies of Cat People, Doctor Who, and Quatermass and the Pit. He is a contributing editor to Sight & Sound and Empire magazines, has written and broadcast widely, and has scripted radio and television documentaries. His stories “Week Woman” and “Ubermensch!” have been adapted into an episode of the TV series The Hunger and an Australian short film, respectively; he has directed and written a tiny film, Missing Girl; and he co-wrote the West End play The Hallowe’en Sessions. Following his Radio 4 play Cry Babies, he wrote episodes for Radio 7’s series The Man in Black and Glass Eye Pix’s Tales from Beyond the Pale. He scripted (with Maura McHugh) the comic book miniseries Witchfinder: The Mysteries of Unland, illustrated by Tyler Crook.

His official website is www.johnnyalucard.com. His forthcoming fiction includes the novels The Secrets of Drearcliff Grange and Angels of Music. He is on Twitter as @AnnoDracula.

Sofia Samatar is the author of the novel A Stranger in Olondria, winner of the Crawford Award, the British Fantasy Award, and the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel. She also received the 2014 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. She co-edits the online journal Interfictions and lives in California.

Peter Straub is the author of seventeen novels, which have been translated into more than twenty languages. They include Ghost Story, Koko, Mr. X, In the Night Room, and two collaborations with Stephen King, The Talisman and Black House. He has written two volumes of poetry and two collections of short fiction, and he edited the Library of America’s edition of H. P. Lovecraft’sTales and the Library of America’s two-volume anthology American Fantastic Tales. He has won the British Fantasy Award, eight Bram Stoker Awards, two International Horror Guild Awards, and three World Fantasy Awards. In 1998, he was named Grand Master at the World Horror Convention. In 2006, he was given the Horror Writers Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2008, he was given the Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award by Poets & Writers. At the World Fantasy Convention in 2010, he was given the WFC’s Life Achievement Award.

Steve Rasnic Tem’s latest novel, Blood Kin (Solaris), alternating between the 1930s and the present day, is a Southern Gothic/horror blend of snake handling, ghosts, kudzu, and Melungeons. It won the Bram Stoker Award.

His previous Solaris novel was Deadfall Hotel. Recently published, was In the Lovecraft Museum, a stand-alone novella from Drugstore Indian Press, an imprint of PS Publishing. In late 2015 or early 2016, Centipede Press will be presenting the best of his uncollected horror stories in Out of the Dark: A Storybook of Horrors.

Also in 2016, Solaris will present his dark SF novel Ubo, a meditation on violence as seen through the eyes of some of history’s most disreputable figures.

A. C. Wise’s fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Shimmer, Apex, The Best Horror of the Year Volume 4, and Year’s Best Weird Fiction Volume 1. Her first collection will be published by Lethe Press in fall 2015. In addition to her writing, she co-edits the webzine Unlikely Story. Find her online at www.acwise.net.