Geoff Brown aka G.N. Braun is an Australian writer and twice Australian Shadows Award finalist-editor raised in Melbourne’s gritty Western Suburbs. He is a trained nurse, and holds a Cert. IV in Professional Writing and Editing, as well as a Dip. Arts (Professional Writing and Editing). At graduation, Brown was awarded ‘Vocational Student of the Year’ and ‘2012 Student of the Year’ by his college. He writes fiction across various genres, and is the author of many published short stories. He has had numerous articles published in newspapers, both regional and metropolitan. He is the past president of the Australian Horror Writers Association (2011-2013), as well as the past director of the Australian Shadows Awards. He was an editor and columnist for UK site This is Horror, and the guest editor for Midnight Echo #9. His memoir, Hammered, was released in early 2012 by Legumeman Books and has been extensively reviewed. It has been expanded on for rerelease in 2019. He is the co-founder/director of Cohesion Press and Asylum Ghost Tours.

One evening when I was only a small boy, my father allowed me to stay up late with him and watch NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD on television. He fell asleep, but I waited for the end. I couldn’t believe they’d let the lead guy die after all that. I was horrified. Later that summer we went to the drive-in, which was a big deal in Norwalk, Connecticut in the 1970s. Everyone went. We all piled into the Bomb, our old station wagon, and saw lots of movies there. There was a swing set right up front where a many of the little kids congregated. We got a kick out of that, especially during GREASE, because there was a similar set-up in the movie. One night, though, there was a double-feature that I’ll never forget. Demon Seed scared me, and the unforgettable images still haunt me. The film that followed, though, ruined me for good. ALIEN. I don’t think I walked past my attic door after dark that entire summer for fear the alien would snatch me up and away. Soon I couldn’t even go to the beach. JAWS waited for us. Of course, this was also the time I discovered my father’s treasure trove of old horror comics, most of which I still have safe and sound. My imagination was on fire. We went to some of the early science fiction conventions in New York. I found Fangoria, and used Tom Savini’s Grande Illusions book in an attempt to make my own monsters at home, and experimented with that for several fake-bloodstained years. Eventually, though, I realized my favorite part was in dreaming up the ideas. In all truth, I was better in that regard than in any of my make-ups. During middle school I put out a xeroxed fanzine Castle Gore that I sold to my classmates for a quarter an issue. Inside, alongside my reviews of whatever movies were coming out, I put some of my own short stories. By the time I was thirteen I’d completed my first novel . . . novella, really . . . about a time-traveling teenager who saves the world from a monster bred in a Victorian scientist’s lab. He used a flying go-kart to do so. Songwriting found me. For years I toured with rock n’ roll bands, opening for national acts, and all the while, writing lots of lyrics, poems, and short stories. Winding up at Emerson College, I truly found myself. My short stories were finally professionally published in some of the local academic literary magazines, and also my script He’d Hoped For Mars won the Latent Image Magazine screenwriting contest, but was turned into a successful short film, scored by Aaron Logan at nearby Berklee College of Music. After college I moved to Los Angeles, taking an internship with Ridley Scott. That was a phenomenal time in my life, and I learned so much. I worked on many big budget films, and got to see how those films I grew up with really came together. Of course, being in that hotbox, I wrote lots of scripts. Had an option or three, and produced a couple of low-budget films while I was at it. Something happened, though. The movies of the scripts often came out so differently than the original ideas. Budget compromises. With writing stories, well, the only limit is your imagination. You’re not limited to how much money you have, or time, or your location, or the skill of the CG artists on your team. Shifting gears to prose has not been easy. I had hundreds of rejections from top markets until I began to place my stories. That is not an exaggeration. It was harder to place a pro-level fiction piece than find financing for my first film. I love the challenge, and few things have been as satisfying. My journey continues, of course. All these years later, we finally have the release of my novel NERVES from Bad Moon Books in the winter of 2012. In the meantime, there’s lots of short stories appearing soon, and several movie projects, too. Thanks for reading. Best, John Palisano

Tim Curran lives in Michigan and is the author of the novels Skin Medicine, Hive, Dead Sea, Resurrection, The Devil Next Door, and Biohazard, as well as the novella The Corpse King. His short stories have appeared in such magazines as City Slab, Flesh&Blood, Book of Dark Wisdom, and Inhuman, and anthologies such as Shivers IV, High Seas Cthulhu, and Vile Things. For DarkFuse and its imprints, he has written the bestselling The Underdwelling, the Readers Choice-Nominated novella Fear Me, Puppet Graveyard as well as Long Black Coffin. Find him on the web at: www.corpseking.com.

I write horror and some very dark thrillers. So I invariably wake up in the middle of the night, because I've figured out yet another twisted way to mess with my already screwed up characters. I'm interested in some weird stuff. That's probably also one of the reasons I write horror. I'm deep, dark and seriously twisted.

TAYLOR GRANT is a two-time Bram Stoker Award Nominated Author, professional screenwriter, and award-winning filmmaker. His work has been seen on network television, the big screen, the stage, the web, newspapers, comic books, national magazines, anthologies, and heard on the radio. As an author, he has shared pages with Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, Clive Barker, Blake Crouch, Kelley Armstrong, Joe R. Lansdale, Peter Straub, Bentley Little, and many of the top writers in speculative fiction. He wrote and produced the hit comic adaptation "Rot & Ruin," based on the New York Times Bestselling series, which became the #1 horror comic for WEBTOON, the largest digital comics publisher in the world, with over 75 million active readers. His fiction has been published by Random House, Cemetery Dance, National Lampoon, Crystal Lake Publishing, WEBTOON, Moonstone Books, and many more.

Born and raised in Michigan, the youngest of five boys, John Paul Allen is described as "Hard to nail down, hard to put down, John Paul Allen's words will envelop your senses and fill your mind with worlds and people too real not to believe." (William Cook - Blood Related). Coming to horror and writing later than most he has quickly become known for his knack of crossing lines in order to tell a story. His published works include the novella Monkey Love, short story collection Dark Blessings, short stories Weeping Mary and House Guest. Allen's novel Gifted Trust (originally published in 2002) was recently released as a major revised version and his short, Little Miss is part of the the Fresh Blood Old Bones anthology.

Charles Day is the Horror Writer Association's Mentor Program Chairperson, Co-Chair for the NY/LI Chapter, and a member of the HWA Library committee. He is also a member of the New England Horror Writers Association, the American Library Association and the Young Adult Library Services Association. He is also the Bram Stoker Award® nominated author of THE LEGEND OF THE PUMPKIN THIEF. His 2013 published books are the recent release of REDEMPTION, co-authored with Mark Taylor, DEEP WITHIN, and the first book in his Adventures of Kyle McGerrt trilogy, a YA western heroic fantasy, THE HUNT FOR THE GHOULISH BARTENDER. His forthcoming publications and projects in development for 2014 include a comic book series based on the ADVENTURES OF KYLE McGERRT trilogy, THE LEGEND OF THE PUMPKIN THIEF comics series, and his first middle-grade series, THE UNDERDWELLERS, and his third YA novel, IMMORTAL FAMILY. On the publishing business side of things, Charles is the co-founder with Taylor Grant with Evil Jester Comics and founder/owner of Evil Jester Press and Hidden Thoughts Press (mental wellness collections,) He’s also an artist and illustrator who is passionate about creating the many characters he’s brought to life in his published or soon to be published works. You can find out more about his upcoming writing projects, check out his illustrations and art, or find out what he’s cooking up next with that evil dude-in-the-box, the evil Jester, by visiting his Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/charles.day.92

Graham Masterton was born in Edinburgh in 1946. His grandfather was Thomas Thorne Baker, the eminent scientist who invented DayGlo and was the first man to transmit news photographs by wireless. After training as a newspaper reporter, Graham went on to edit the new British men's magazine Mayfair, where he encouraged William Burroughs to develop a series of scientific and philosophical articles which eventually became Burroughs' novel The Wild Boys. At the age of 24, Graham was appointed executive editor of both Penthouse and Penthouse Forum magazines. At this time he started to write a bestselling series of sex 'how-to' books including How To Drive Your Man Wild In Bed which has sold over 3 million copies worldwide. His latest, Wild Sex For New Lovers is published by Penguin Putnam in January, 2001. He is a regular contributor to Cosmopolitan, Men's Health, Woman, Woman's Own and other mass-market self-improvement magazines. Graham Masterton's debut as a horror author began with The Manitou in 1976, a chilling tale of a Native American medicine man reborn in the present day to exact his revenge on the white man. It became an instant bestseller and was filmed with Tony Curtis, Susan Strasberg, Burgess Meredith, Michael Ansara, Stella Stevens and Ann Sothern. Altogether Graham has written more than a hundred novels ranging from thrillers (The Sweetman Curve, Ikon) to disaster novels (Plague, Famine) to historical sagas (Rich and Maiden Voyage - both appeared in the New York Times bestseller list). He has published four collections of short stories, Fortnight of Fear, Flights of Fear, Faces of Fear and Feelings of Fear. He has also written horror novels for children (House of Bones, Hair-Raiser) and has just finished the fifth volume in a very popular series for young adults, Rook, based on the adventures of an idiosyncratic remedial English teacher in a Los Angeles community college who has the facility to see ghosts. Since then Graham has published more than 35 horror novels, including Charnel House, which was awarded a Special Edgar by Mystery Writers of America; Mirror, which was awarded a Silver Medal by West Coast Review of Books; and Family Portrait, an update of Oscar Wilde's tale, The Picture of Dorian Gray, which was the only non-French winner of the prestigious Prix Julia Verlanger in France. He and his wife Wiescka live in a Gothic Victorian mansion high above the River Lee in Cork, Ireland.