John Shirley is an American writer, primarily of fantasy, science fiction, dark street fiction, westerns, and songwriting. He has also written one historical novel, a western about Wyatt Earp, Wyatt in Wichita, and one non-fiction book, Gurdjieff: An Introduction to His Life and Ideas. Shirley has written novels, short stories, TV scripts and screenplays—including The Crow—and has published over 84 books including 10 short-story collections. As a musician, Shirley has fronted his own bands and written lyrics for Blue Öyster Cult and others. His newest novels are Stormland and Axle Bust Creek.
Splatterpunk is a movement within horror fiction originating in the 1980s, distinguished by its graphic, often gory, depiction of violence, countercultural alignment and "hyperintensive horror with no limits." The term was coined in 1986 by David J. Schow at the Twelfth World Fantasy Convention in Providence, Rhode Island. Splatterpunk is regarded as a revolt against the "traditional, meekly suggestive horror story". Splatterpunk has been defined as a "literary genre characterised by graphically described scenes of an extremely gory nature."
Living Dead is a blanket term for the loosely connected horror franchise that originated from the 1968 film Night of the Living Dead. The film, written by George A. Romero and John A. Russo, primarily focuses on a group of people gathering at a farmhouse to survive from an onslaught of zombies in rural Pennsylvania. It is known to have inspired the modern interpretation of zombies as reanimated human corpses that feast on the flesh and/or brains of the living.
Edward Winslow Bryant Jr. was an American science fiction and horror writer sometimes associated with the Dangerous Visions series of anthologies that bolstered The New Wave. At the time of his death, he resided in North Denver.
Joe Richard Lansdale is an American writer and martial arts instructor. A prose writer in a variety of genres, including Western, horror, science fiction, mystery, and suspense, he has also written comic books and screenplays. Several of his novels have been adapted for film and television. He is the winner of the British Fantasy Award, the American Horror Award, the Edgar Award, and eleven Bram Stoker Awards.
Mark V. Ziesing is a small press publisher and bookseller. Active as a bookseller from 1972 to present, Ziesing was active in publishing from the mid-1980s into the late 1990s. The Ziesing publishing imprint specialized in science fiction, horror, and other forms of speculative fiction. Originally based in Willimantic, Connecticut and in partnership with his brother, he published two books by Gene Wolfe under the Ziesing Brothers imprint. He later published books by Philip K. Dick, Stephen King, Harlan Ellison, Howard Waldrop, Bruce Sterling, Joe R. Lansdale, and Lucius Shepard, among others. In 1989 he returned to his home state, to Shingletown, California, where he and his wife Cindy continue to operate a catalog-based book selling business under the name Ziesing Books.
David J. Schow is an American author of horror novels, short stories, and screenplays. His credits include films such as Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III, The Crow and The Hills Run Red. Most of Schow's work falls into the subgenre splatterpunk, a term he is sometimes credited with coining. In the 1990s, Schow wrote Raving & Drooling, a regular column for Fangoria magazine. All 41 installments were collected in the book Wild Hairs (2000), winning the International Horror Guild's award for best non-fiction in 2001.
Bizarro fiction is a contemporary literary genre which often uses elements of absurdism, satire, and the grotesque, along with pop-surrealism and genre fiction staples, in order to create subversive, weird, and entertaining works. The term was adopted in 2005 by the independent publishing companies Eraserhead Press, Raw Dog Screaming Press, and Afterbirth Books. Much of its community revolves around Eraserhead Press, which is based in Portland, Oregon, and has hosted the annual BizarroCon since 2008. The introduction to the first Bizarro Starter Kit describes Bizarro as "literature's equivalent to the cult section at the video store" and a genre that "strives not only to be strange, but fascinating, thought-provoking, and, above all, fun to read." According to Rose O'Keefe of Eraserhead Press: "Basically, if an audience enjoys a book or film primarily because of its weirdness, then it is Bizarro. Weirdness might not be the work's only appealing quality, but it is the major one."
Elizabeth Spilman Massie is an American author. She lives outside Waynesboro, Virginia with illustrator Cortney Skinner.
Ray Garton Jr. is an American author of horror fiction for adults and young adults.
Electric Gumbo: A Lansdale Reader is one of the rarer compilations of Joe R. Lansdale's short works. It has only been published once, exclusively by the Quality Paperback Book Club in trade paperback form in 1994.
Book of the Dead is an anthology of horror stories first published in 1989, edited by John Skipp and Craig Spector and featuring a foreword written by George A. Romero. All the stories in the anthology are united by the same premise seen in Romero's apocalyptic films, depicting a worldwide outbreak of zombies and various reactions to it. The first book was followed three years later by a follow-up, Still Dead: Book of the Dead 2, with a new group of writers tackling the same premise, though the second book put the stories in order according to their imagined chronology of the zombie takeover.
Steven R. Boyett, also known as DJ Steve Boyett, is a writer and disc jockey based in Northern California.
Simon McCaffery is an American author of speculative fiction. Trained as a journalist and magazine editor, he was an Honorable Mention recipient in the L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future contest twice before he began publishing short fiction in a variety of professional science fiction, horror and mystery publications in the 1990s, including Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, Tomorrow SF, and Space and Time. He was a contributor in the anthology, Other Worlds Than These, edited by John Joseph Adams, alongside authors Stephen King and Ian McDonald. His fiction has also been collected in anthologies including the "Book of the Dead" series edited by Splatterpunk authors John Mason Skipp and Craig Spector, 100 Wicked Little Witch Stories, ''Mondo Zombie", and The Haunted Hour.
Linnea Sinclair is an American writer of Science Fiction Romance, Fantasy romance and Paranormal romance. Sinclair's Gabriel's Ghost was the winner of the 2006 RITA Award in the Best Paranormal Romance category. She has used the pseudonym Megan Sybil Baker. Formerly, she has been a news reporter and a private detective.
The Light at the End is a 1986 vampire novel by John Skipp & Craig Spector which became a New York Times bestseller and is often credited as the book that started the splatterpunk movement.
Peter Giglio is an American novelist, editor, and screenwriter.
Adam Cesare is an American author of horror novels and short stories. He attended Boston University, where he studied English and film.
Jeff Strand is an American author, best known for his works of horror-comedy. He has written novels, short stories, screenplays and comedy sketches. In addition to his adult-oriented horror works, Strand also writes young adult fiction. He has been nominated for the Bram Stoker Award five times, winning the award for the first time in 2022 in the long fiction category for his novella Twentieth Anniversary Screening.
