Dallas William Mayr, better known by his pen name Jack Ketchum, was an American horror fiction author. He was the recipient of four Bram Stoker Awards and three further nominations. His novels included Off Season, Offspring, and Red, which were adapted to film. In 2011, Ketchum received the World Horror Convention Grand Master Award for outstanding contribution to the horror genre. A onetime actor, teacher, literary agent, lumber salesman, and soda jerk, Ketchum credited his childhood love of Elvis Presley, dinosaurs, and horror for getting him through his formative years. He began making up stories at a young age and explained that he spent much time in his room, or in the woods near his house, down by the brook: "[m]y interests [were] books, comics, movies, rock 'n roll, show tunes, TV, dinosaurs [...] pretty much any activity that didn't demand too much socializing, or where I could easily walk away from socializing." He would make up stories using his plastic soldiers, knights, and dinosaurs as the characters. Later, in his teen years, Ketchum was befriended by Robert Bloch, author of Psycho, who became his mentor. Ketchum worked many different jobs before completing his first novel (1980's controversial Off Season), including acting as agent for novelist Henry Miller at Scott Meredith Literary Agency. His decision to eventually concentrate on novel writing was partly fueled by a preference for work that offered stability and longevity. Ketchum died of cancer on January 24, 2018, in New York City at the age of 71.

Librarian note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name David Quinn is a comic book writer. His main graphic novel Faust (with co-creator Tim Vigil) was adapted by Brian Yuzna as the 2001 movie Faust: Love of the Damned. The follow-up Faust: Book of M, was nominated for the 1999 Bram Stoker Award for Best Illustrated Narrative. Among other work, he has written runs on Marvel's Doctor Strange and Chaos! Comics' Purgatori and Lady Death. (source: Wikipedia)

John McNee is the writer of numerous strange and disturbing horror stories, published in a variety of strange and disturbing anthologies, as well as the novel 'Prince of Nightmares'. He is also the creator of Grudgehaven and the author of 'Grudge Punk', a collection of short stories detailing the lives and deaths of its gruesome inhabitants, as well as its sequel, 'Petroleum Precinct'. He lives in Scotland, where he is employed as a journalist.

Robert Devereaux made his professional debut in Pulphouse magazine in the late 1980's, attended the 1990 Clarion West Writers Workshop, and soon placed stories in such major venues as Crank!, Weird Tales, and Dennis Etchison's anthology MetaHorror. Two of his stories made the final ballot for the Bram Stoker and World Fantasy Awards. Robert has a well-deserved reputation as an author who pushes every envelope, though he would claim, with a stage actor's assurance, that as long as one's writing illuminates characters in all their kinks, quirks, kindnesses, and extremes, the imagination must be free to explore nasty places as well as nice, or what's the point? His first novel Deadweight interweaves a King-like plot, penile implants, and splatterpunk extremes of sex and violence, managing all the while to be a sensitive, spot-on portrayal of an abused woman incapable of relinquishing her role as victim. Walking Wounded, his next novel, explores the dilemma of a good woman able to heal with her hands, but also to harm even unto death, whose discovery that her husband is cheating on her moves her, against her every humane impulse, to activate his Huntington's Disease and take him down. Robert went on to shock the bluenoses with Santa Steps Out, in which Santa Claus' gradual recall of his prior existence as Pan leads to an affair with the Tooth Fairy, while a voyeuristic Easter Bunny tries to twitch and wiggle his way into Mrs. Claus' good graces. Santa Steps Out, which won much praise for its mythological underpinnings and the breathtaking sweep of its transgressions, also had the honor of being banned in that cultural backwater of intolerance and censoriousness known as Cincinnati. Robert's fourth novel, Caliban, borrows a page from John Gardner's Grendel to retell Shakespeare's Tempest through Caliban's eyes. Robert lives in sunny northern Colorado with the delightful Victoria and their melodious cat Sigfried, making up stuff that tickles his fancy and, he hopes, those of his readers.

Kristopher Triana is the author of Gone to See the River Man, Full Brutal, They All Died Screaming, Shepherd of the Black Sheep, Toxic Love, and more. His fiction has appeared in countless magazines and anthologies and has been translated into multiple languages, drawing praise from Publisher's Weekly, Cemetery Dance, Rue Morgue, Scream, The Ginger Nuts of Horror and others. Full Brutal won the Splatterpunk Award for Best Horror Novel of 2019, and Triana won the award again in 2022 for The Night Stockers, which he cowrote with Ryan Harding. He lives in Connecticut.