Ronald Malfi is the bestselling, award-winning author of many novels and novellas in the horror, mystery, and thriller genres. In 2011, his novel, Floating Staircase, was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award for best novel by the Horror Writers Association, and also won a gold IPPY award. Perhaps his most well-received novel, Come with Me (2021), about a man who learns a dark secret about his wife after she's killed, has received stellar reviews, including a starred review from BookPage, and Publishers Weekly has said, "Malfi impresses in this taut, supernaturally tinged mystery... and sticks the landing with a powerful denouement. There’s plenty here to enjoy." His most recent novels, Come with Me (2021) and Black Mouth (2022), tackle themes of grief and loss, and of the effects of childhood trauma and alcoholism, respectively. Both books have been critically praised, with Publishers Weekly calling Black Mouth a "standout" book of the year. These novels were followed by Ghostwritten (2022), a collection of four subtly-linked novellas about haunted books and the power of the written word. Ghostwritten received a starred review from Publishers Weekly, which called the book a "wonderfully meta collection...vibrantly imagined," and that "Malfi makes reading about the perils of reading a terrifying delight." Among his most popular works is December Park, a coming-of-age thriller set in the '90s, wherein five teenage boys take up the hunt for a child murderer in their hometown of Harting Farms, Maryland. In interviews, Malfi has expressed that this is his most autobiographical book to date. In 2015, this novel was awarded the Beverly Hills International Book Award for best suspense novel. It has been optioned several times for film. Bone White (2017), about a man searching for his lost twin brother in a haunted Alaskan mining town, was touted as "an elegant, twisted, gripping slow-burn of a novel that burrows under the skin and nestles deep," by RT Book Reviews, and has also been optioned for television by Fox21/Disney and Amazon Studios. His novels Little Girls (2015) and The Night Parade (2016) explore broken families forced to endure horrific and extraordinary circumstances, which has become the hallmark for Malfi's brand of intimate, lyrical horror fiction. His earlier works, such as Via Dolorosa (2007) and Passenger (2008) explored characters with lost or confused identities, wherein Malfi experimented with the ultimate unreliable narrators. He maintained this trend in his award-winning novel, Floating Staircase (2011), which the author has suggested contains "multiple endings for the astute reader." His more "monstery" novels, such as Snow (2010) and The Narrows (2012) still resonate with his inimitable brand of literary cadence and focus on character and story over plot. Both books were highly regarded by fans and reviewers in the genre. A bit of a departure, Malfi published the crime drama Shamrock Alley in 2009, based on the true exploits of his own father, a former Secret Service agent. The book was optioned several times for film. Ronald Malfi was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1977, the eldest of four children, and eventually relocated to Maryland, where he and his wife, Debra, currently reside along the Chesapeake Bay with their two daughters. When he's not writing, he's performing with the rock back VEER, who can be found at veerband.net and on Twitter at @VeerBand Visit with Ronald Malfi on Facebook, Twitter (@RonaldMalfi), or at http://www.ronaldmalfi.com.

Nate Southard is moody, shy, lanky, bald, and has bad skin. When he isn’t writing, he’s probably cooking Thai food or fried chicken. Seriously, he has something like fifty fried chicken recipes. It’s ridiculous. He recently discovered coffee-flavored ice cream, and it’s ruling his entire world. Did you know if you mix it with chocolate ice cream, you can kinda make mocha ice cream? Nate does! Nate lives in Austin, Texas. He sucks at skateboarding. Nate Southard's books include Will the Sun Ever Come Out Again?, Scavengers, This Little Light of Mine, Red Sky, Just Like Hell, Broken Skin, and He Stepped Through. His short fiction has appeared in such venues as Nightmare Magazine, Cemetery Dance, Black Static, Thuglit, and LampLight. His short story "Going Home, Ugly Stick in Hand" received an honorable mention in Ellen Datlow's The Year's Best Horror, and he earned a Bram Stoker Award nomination for his story "In the Middle of Poplar Street."

John Bruni was born on July 25, 1978 in Elmhurst, Illinois. He attended local schools from kindergarten all the way through college, where he spent time as a journalist for the Elmhurst College Leader, writing comic book reviews, an occasional feature article, and a series of regular columns as THE STRAIGHT with his Primitive Underbelly partner, Jesse “GonZo” Russell (whose story, “Bear’s Tale, Abridged” appears serialized in all three issues of TABARD INN). He was also the poetry editor of the campus literary/art magazine, MIDDLEWESTERN VOICE, for a whole two weeks, during which time he chose none of the poems that were published. He has worked several jobs, among them selling ad space for a local newspaper publisher. He was not very good at this (in fact, one might say he was dismal) and was quickly shown the door, but he managed to place a few stories with a couple of their publications (COLLEGE NEWS and CHICAGO COMMUTER) before he left. He also worked selling season tickets for the Drury Lane theater in Oakbrook, which he was much better at, and he toiled away at Sears, selling shoes for almost two miserable years. He was unjustly fired from the library featured in his "Tales from the Library" columns in issues one and two of TABARD INN. He worked as a teleconference operator and in tech support for about a decade, but the company fired him after they discovered his books. He now works in repair for a telecom company, where he is much happier. He likes to think he’s a professional writer, and he is getting paid for his work more and more often these days. With two hundred publications to his name, his most recent outing is the novel, AND JESUS CAME BACK, from Rooster Republic. He also has collection of short stories called TALES OF QUESTIONABLE TASTE, published by StrangeHouse Books, who also published his novel, POOR BASTARDS AND RICH F*CKS. His novella, DONG OF FRANKENSTEIN, was published by New Kink. He has a novel, STRIP, which was originally published by Melpomene, the mystery and crime imprint of MUSA. It has been re-released by Riot Forge. His shorter work has also appeared in several anthologies, such as ZOMBIE, ZOMBIE, BRAIN BANG! from StrangeHouse, A HACKED-UP HOLIDAY MASSACRE from Pill Hill, and the critically acclaimed VILE THINGS from Comet Press. You can also read his work in issues of SHROUD, MORPHEUS TALES, CTHULHU SEX, OVER MY DEAD BODY!, THE REALM BEYOND, TALES OF THE TALISMAN, AOIFE'S KISS, LIQUID IMAGINATION, and a variety of other grand publications. He is also very proud of his first foray into comic books; thanks to Leo Perez and Jon Lennon of CheeseLord Comics, one of his real life stories was adapted into a one-page strip for the August 2011 issue of PRODUCT OF SOCIETY. One of his poetry reviews has also been published in the Winter 2006 issue of BIBLIOPHILOS (vol. XII, no. 4), but his contributors copies got lost in the mail, and this issue has sold out. If anyone out there has a copy of this magazine, please get in contact with him at editor@talesofquestionabletaste.com. He is willing to pay top dollar for it. Very briefly, he was the editor and publisher of TABARD INN: TALES OF QUESTIONABLE TASTE. He still has boxes and boxes of back issues cluttering up his house. If you're interested in taking some of them off his hands, he would greatly appreciate it, as he needs the space. John Bruni is kind of creeped out by writing about himself in the third person, so he’s going to stop now. Besides, the screaming of kidnapped children in his cellar is distracting him . . and he must do something about this immediately. He can be followed on Twitter @tusitalabruni; on his blog, www.talesofunspeakabletaste.blogspot.... and he was also a horror movie reviewer at www.forcedviewing.com. If you are living in the past, you can also find him on MySpace at www.myspace.com/tabardinn, but be warned, he is never there.