by John Skipp
Gary A. Braunbeck (“Fallen Faces by the Wayside”) is a 7-time Bram Stoker Award-winning writer who has published over 200 short stories, and whose novels include In Silent Graves, Keepers, Mr. Hands, and the forthcoming A Cracked and Broken Path. His Stoker-winning nonfiction book, To Each Their Darkness, is now being used in several creative writing programs. Two of his stories have been adapted into short films, the most recent being “He Didn’t Even Leave a Note.” Follow him at facebook.com/groups/ 4988614289.
Jason V Brock (“The Unity of Affect”) is an award-winning writer, editor, filmmaker, and artist whose work has been widely published in a variety of media (Weird Fiction Review print edition, S. T. Joshi’s Black Wings series, Fangoria, and others). He describes his work as Dark Magical Realism. He is also the founder of a website and digest called [NameL3ss]; his books include A Darke Phantastique, Disorders of Magnitude, and Simulacrum and Other Possible Realities. His filmic efforts are Charles Beaumont: The Life of Twilight Zone’s Magic Man, The AckerMonster Chronicles!, and Image, Reflection, Shadow: Artists of the Fantastic. Popular as a speaker and panelist, he has been a special guest at numerous film fests, conventions, and educational events, and was the 2015 Editor Guest of Honor for Orycon 37. A health nut/gadget freak, he lives in the Vancouver, WA area, and loves his wife Sunni, their family of herptiles, running their technology consulting business, and practicing vegan/vegetarianism.
Mort Castle (“Robot”) has won three Bram Stoker Awards, two Black Quills, a Golden Bot, and has been nominated for an Audie, the International Horror Guild Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the Pushcart Prize. He’s edited or authored 17 books, more than 500 shorter works, and many comic books. Recent titles: Annotated Classics: Dracula; Shadow Show (the graphic novel); and the Leapfrog Fiction contest winner Knowing When to Die, a short story collection. He’s been married for 45 years (to Jane) and a publishing writer for almost 50.
Richard Chizmar (“Ditch Treasures”) is the founder/publisher of Cemetery Dance magazine and the Cemetery Dance Publications book imprint. He has edited more than 30 anthologies and his fiction has appeared in dozens of publications, including Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and The Year’s 25 Finest Crime and Mystery Stories. He has won two World Fantasy awards, four International Horror Guild awards, and the HWA’s Board of Trustee’s award. Chizmar (in collaboration with Johnathon Schaech) has also written screenplays and teleplays for United Artists, Sony Screen Gems, Lions Gate, Showtime, NBC, and many other companies.
Autumn Christian (“Pink Crane Girls”) is the author of two novels (The Crooked God Machine, We Are Wormwood) and a short story collection (Ecstatic Inferno). She’s currently working on a sci-fi novel about an Edgar Allan Poe video game. She is waiting for the day when she hits her head on the cabinet searching for the popcorn bowl and all consensus reality dissolves.
George C. Cotronis (Cover artwork) lives in the wilderness of Northern Sweden. He makes a living designing book covers. He sometimes writes. His stories have appeared in XIII and Lost Signals.
Scott Edelman (“101 Things to Do When You’re Downloaded”) has published more than 85 short stories in such magazines and anthologies as The Twilight Zone, Dark Discoveries, MetaHorror, The Mammoth Book of Monsters, and many others. His collection of zombie fiction, What Will Come After, released in 2010, was a finalist for both the Bram Stoker Award and the Shirley Jackson Memorial Award. His science fiction short fiction has been collected in What We Still Talk About. He has been a Bram Stoker Award finalist six times. Additionally, Edelman worked for the Syfy Channel for more than thirteen years as editor of Science Fiction Weekly, SCI FI Wire, and Blastr. He was the founding editor of Science Fiction Age, which he edited during its entire eight-year run. He has been a four-time Hugo Award finalist for Best Editor.
Cody Goodfellow (“Key to the City”) has written five novels, and co-wrote three more with New York Times bestselling author John Skipp. His first two collections, Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars, and All-Monster Action, each received the Wonderland Book Award. He wrote, co-produced and scored the short Lovecraftian hygiene film Stay At Home Dad, which can be viewed on YouTube. He is also a director of the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival – San Pedro, and cofounder of Perilous Press, an occasional micropublisher of modern cosmic horror. He lives in Burbank, California, and is currently working on building a perfect bowling team.
Janet Harriett (“What Goes Up Must Come Down”) is a writer and freelance editor. Her stories have been published in Not Our Kind: Tales of (Not) Belonging and Weirdbook, and she made a nonfiction guest appearance in For Exposure: The Life and Times of a Small Press Publisher discussing her experiences as Apex Publications’ senior editor. Find her online at janetharriett.com.
Erik T. Johnson (“The Immigrants”) is the first Written Backwards DARWA Voice Award-winner whose fiction pops up in cool places, such as Space & Time Magazine, Tales of the Unanticipated, Qualia Nous, and all three volumes of the Chiral Mad series. He has published three novellas, most recently in I Can Taste the Blood (along with Josh Malerman, Joe Schwartz, J. Daniel Stone, and John F.D. Taff). He’s definitely going to have a book of short stories published in the near future and he’s working on a novel and in a coal mine, going down down down. Kick Out the Jams, do other stuff when it suits you, yeah alright.
Erinn l. Kemper (“Gumi-Bear”) lives in a small town in Costa Rica on the Caribbean Sea where she operates a vacation rental, runs with her dog on the beach, watches the howler monkeys at happy hour, and plans to write her second novel from her hammock. Erinn has sold stories to Cemetery Dance Magazine, Black Static, Dark Discoveries and [NameL3ss] and appears in anthologies including, The Library of the Dead, A Darke Phantasique, and Shadows Over Main Street 2. Visit her website at erinnkemper.com for updates and sloth sightings.
Stephen King (“I Am the Doorway”) is an author of more than 50 novels of contemporary horror, supernatural fiction, suspense, science fiction, and fantasy, which have sold more than 350 million copies worldwide. King is the recipient of the Bram Stoker Award, World Fantasy Award, British Fantasy Society Award, the O. Henry Award, the Edgar Award, and nominated for the Nebula Award, among others. The National Book Foundation awarded him the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2013. He is also the recipient of the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement, the Canadian Booksellers Association Lifetime Achievement Award, the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America, and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Horror Writers Association.
Marc Levinthal (“The Pretty Puppets”) is a writer and musician from Pasadena, California. He is the author of the novel Other Music (forthcoming from Dark Regions Press, and the co-author of The Emerald Burrito of Oz (with John Skipp). His short fiction has appeared in Aboriginal Science Fiction, The Magazine of Bizarro Fiction, and anthologies such as Mondo Zombie, Amazing Stories of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and Thirteen: Stories of Transformation.
John R. Little (“The Goldilocks Zone”) is the author of 16 books. He has been nominated for the Bram Stoker Award four times and has won once, for the novella Miranda. One of his books, Ursa Major, is currently in pre-production to become a major motion picture. He has been publishing dark fiction for more than 30 years and has enjoyed his fans’ reception to each one. John’s story in this anthology is one of his own personal favorites. He encourages you to connect with him on Facebook or visit his website at johnrlittle.com
Josh Malerman (“The Jupiter Drop”) is the author of the novels Bird Box (ECCO/HarperCollins, 2014) and Black Mad Wheel (ECCO/HarperCollins, 2017) as well as the novella Ghastle and Yule and a score of short stories such as “The Bigger Bedroom” (Chiral Mad 3), “Danny” (Scary Out There), and “I Can Taste the Blood” (I Can Taste the Blood.) He's also the guitarist/songwriter for the rock band The High Strung, whose song “The Luck You Got” is the theme song for Showtime's hit series Shameless.
Tom Monteleone (“The Star-Filled Sea is Smooth Tonight�
��) has published more than 100 short stories and 40+ books. He is a 4-time winner of the Bram Stoker Award in four different categories—novel, collection, anthology, and nonfiction—and he’s pretty sure no one else has ever done that. Many of his novels have been optioned for films; he’s written scripts for stage, screen, and TV. He also wrote the bestselling The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Writing a Novel (now in a 2nd edition). Submerged is his latest novel. With his wife, Elizabeth, he lives in Maryland. Despite losing much of his hair, he still believes he is dashingly handsome—humor him.
B.E. Scully (“Dog at the Look”) lives in a crooked red house that lacks a foundation in the misty woods of Oregon with a variety of human and animal companions. Scully is the author of numerous novels, short stories, poems, and articles. Published work, interviews, and odd scribblings can be found at bescully.com.
Marge Simon (“The Fourth Law” and the poetry within this anthology) lives in Ocala, Florida and is married to Bruce Boston. Her stories have appeared in Daily Science Fiction, The Pedestal Magazine, Morpheus Tales, and more. She has won the Strange Horizons Readers Choice Award, the Bram Stoker Award for Poetry, the Rhysling Award, and the Grand Master Award from the SF Poetry Association. She has work in anthologies such as Chiral Mad 3 and Scary Out There. More information at margesimon.com.
John Skipp (“Hopium Den”) is a Rondo Award-winning filmmaker (Tales of Halloween), Bram Stoker Award-winning anthologist (Demons, Mondo Zombie), and New York Times bestselling author (The Light At The End, The Scream) whose books have sold millions of copies in a dozen languages worldwide. His first anthology, Book Of The Dead, laid the foundation in 1989 for modern zombie literature. He’s also editor-in-chief of Fungasm Press, championing genre-melting authors like Laura Lee Bahr, Violet LeVoit, Autumn Christian, Danger Slater, Cody Goodfellow, and Devora Gray. From splatterpunk founding father to bizarro elder statesman, Skipp has influenced a generation of horror and counter-culture artists around the world. His latest book is The Art Of Horrible People.
Lucy A. Snyder (“Executive Functions”) is the five-time Bram Stoker Award-winning author of 10 books and over 80 published short stories (some of which are collected in While the Black Stars Burn). Her writing has appeared in Apex Magazine, Nightmare Magazine, Pseudopod, Strange Horizons, The Library of the Dead, and Best Horror of the Year, Vol. 5. She is faculty in Seton Hill University’s MFA program in Writing Popular Fiction and holds an MFA from Goddard College. Learn more at lucysnyder.com or follow her on Twitter at @LucyASnyder.
Darren Speegle (“The Cosmic Fair”) is the author of five short story collections, the latest of which, A Haunting in Germany and Other Stories, was released in February by PS Publishing. His short fiction has appeared in various venues, including Subterranean, Postscripts, Clarkesworld, Crimewave, The Third Alternative, Dark Discoveries, Cemetery Dance, and Subterranean: Tales of Dark Fantasy. His horror novel, The Third Twin, will be a 2017 Crystal Lake Publishing title. Also look for Darren’s human evolution themed anthology, Adam’s Ladder, in 2017 from PS.
l.a. spooner (Fiction artwork) currently lives and works in the South of England. Having graduated from the University of Portsmouth with a first class degree he is now a full time illustrator working under two aliases; ‘Carrion House’ for his darker work and ‘Hoodwink House’ for his work aimed at a younger audience. He believes that the job of putting someone else’s words into a visual form, to accompany and support their text, is a massive responsibility as well as being something he truly treasures.
Dyer Wilk (“It Can Walk and Talk, and You’ll Never Have to Worry About Housework Again”) is an author, illustrator, and poet living in Northern California. His short fiction has been anthologized in Lost Signals, Trouble In The Heartland: Crime Fiction Based on the Songs of Bruce Springsteen, and the forthcoming Semi-Colonic Irrigation. He is currently at work on a novel.
f. paul Wilson (Introduction) is the genre-hopping and New York Times Bestselling author of the Repairman Jack series, The Adversary Cycle, LaNague Federation, and young adult novels featuring Repairman Jack. He is the author of more than sixty books spanning science fiction, horror, medical thrillers, and some that defy genre, including The Tomb, The Keep, Harbringers, Nightworld, Black Wind, Virgin, and most recently, Panacea. Most of Paul’s short stories are collected in Soft & Others, The Barrens & Others, and Aftershock & Others. He is the recipient of the Promethus Award, the Porgie Award, the Bram Stoker Award, the Inkpot Award, the Pioneer Award, the Grandmaster Award, and the Horror Writers Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award, among others.
Orion Zangara (Poetry artwork) is an illustrator and comic-book artist who lives in Sterling, Virginia. He is a graduate of The Kubert School, an art trade school with a concentration in sequential art, founded by his grandfather, Joe Kubert. Currently he is illustrating a trilogy graphic novel called The Stone Man Mysteries written by Jane Yolen and Adam Stemple for the Lerner Publishing Group. And he finds it very strange describing himself in the third person! You may find him at orionzangara.com.
