Robin Spriggs | |
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Born | 1 April 1974 47) Holy Ghost, New Mexico | (age
Occupation |
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Nationality | American |
Period | Present |
Genre | Fantastique, magic realism, poetry, prose poetry, metafiction, supernatural fiction, dark fantasy |
Notable works | The Untold Tales of Ozman Droom; Diary of a Gentleman Diabolist; Wondrous Strange |
Website | |
robinspriggs |
Robin Spriggs (born April 1, 1974) is an American writer, actor, and poet. Known primarily as a dark fabulist, he is the author of the critically acclaimed The Untold Tales of Ozman Droom,Diary of a Gentleman Diabolist, and Wondrous Strange: Tales of the Uncanny. He is the co-author of The Dracula Poems: A Poetic Encounter with the Lord of Vampires and the creator of Capes & Cowls: Adventures in Wyrd City, a "book-in-a-box" superhero board game based on his illustrated series, Capes & Cowls: The Wyrd City Chronicles.
Spriggs holds degrees in both English and Theatre. He has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, a Bram Stoker Award, a Rhysling Award, and received honorable mention in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror . His fiction and poetry have appeared in such publications as Beyond,The Rhysling Anthology, Cemetery Dance,Going Postal,Space & Time,Terminal Fright,A Season in Carcosa, and the Shirley Jackson Award-winning anthology The Grimscribe's Puppets.
The literary offerings of Robin Spriggs have been well received by critics. Publishers Weekly, in its review of The Untold Tales of Ozman Droom, observed, "Spriggs evokes terror and awe," and "Medium is the message in this dazzling anti-story, a love letter to the weird." [1]
Rue Morgue declared The Untold Tales of Ozman Droom "A hard-to-describe yet highly entertaining compilation . . . an experience weird fiction fans should not pass up." [2]
According to Cemetery Dance magazine, "Spriggs displays a wide range of talents in both form and substance. He's equally comfortable in the short story, short-short and novella lengths. His tone varies from the gently whimsical to the truly nasty. He crosses genre lines with ease, showing strength in all forms of the fantastic, from horror to fantasy to science fiction." [3]
His lyrical prose, with its dreamlike and often frightening depiction of reality, has been compared to the work of such writers as Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Walser, Ray Bradbury, Jorge Luis Borges, Robert Aickman, Flannery O'Connor, and Lord Dunsany. Much of Spriggs's work, in fact, falls into the category of prose poetry, prompting thriller author Harry Shannon to refer to him as "a linguistic acrobat who works without a net." [4]
Noted editor and anthologist Ellen Datlow, in volume 3 of her The Best Horror of the Year, wrote: "Diary of a Gentleman Diabolist by Robin Spriggs is a series of well-wrought interconnected prose poems of the ghostly and uncanny." [5] Internationally distributed fan magazine Fangoria referred to the same collection as "a rather ingenious little grimoire charting—in fractured, dreamlike form—the trip of a seeker, someone who dives head first into the fevered realms of black magic and beyond, encountering all manner of arcane horror and supernatural phenomena."
Due to the cult popularity of his aforementioned Dracula Poems, the long out-of-print book often commands inordinately high prices.
As an actor, Spriggs is best known for his portrayal of Morrison, aka The Ghost, on the second season of PlayStation Network's superhero crime series, Powers , based on the comic book by Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Avon Oeming. Spriggs has also appeared as Captain Franco in the NBC science-fiction series Revolution , created by Eric Kripke and produced by J. J. Abrams, as Chris Amante in the USA Network drama series Necessary Roughness , and as Harley in The CW TV miniseries Containment. His performance in the rural noir Sinkhole was called "terrific" by Variety .
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John William Polidori was an English writer and physician. He is known for his associations with the Romantic movement and credited by some as the creator of the vampire genre of fantasy fiction. His most successful work was the short story "The Vampyre" (1819), the first published modern vampire story. Although the story was at first erroneously credited to Lord Byron, both Byron and Polidori affirmed that the author was Polidori.
Edmond Moore Hamilton was an American writer of science fiction during the mid-twentieth century.
Ramsey Campbell is an English horror fiction writer, editor and critic who has been writing for well over fifty years. He is the author of over 30 novels and hundreds of short stories, many of them winners of literary awards. Three of his novels have been filmed.
Vampire literature covers the spectrum of literary work concerned principally with the subject of vampires. The literary vampire first appeared in 18th-century poetry, before becoming one of the stock figures of gothic fiction with the publication of Polidori's The Vampyre (1819), which was inspired by the life and legend of Lord Byron. Later influential works include the penny dreadful Varney the Vampire (1847); Sheridan Le Fanu's tale of a lesbian vampire, Carmilla (1872), and the most well known: Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897). Some authors created a more "sympathetic vampire", with Varney being the first, and Anne Rice's 1976 novel Interview with the Vampire as a more recent example.
Occult detective fiction is a subgenre of detective fiction that combines the tropes of the main genre with those of supernatural, fantasy and/or horror fiction. Unlike the traditional detective who investigates murder and other common crimes, the occult detective is employed in cases involving ghosts, demons, curses, magic, vampires, undead, monsters and other supernatural elements. Some occult detectives are portrayed as being psychic or in possession of other paranormal or magical powers.
The Bram Stoker Award for Best Poetry Collection is an award presented by the Horror Writers Association (HWA) for "superior achievement" in horror writing for a poetry collection.
Speculative poetry is a genre of poetry that focusses on fantastic, science fictional and mythological themes. It is also known as science fiction poetry or fantastic poetry. It is distinguished from other poetic genres by being categorized by its subject matter, rather than by the poetry's form. Suzette Haden Elgin defined the genre as "about a reality that is in some way different from the existing reality."
Bruce Boston is an American speculative fiction writer and poet.
Joseph Hillström King, better known by the pen name Joe Hill, is an American writer. His work includes the novels Heart-Shaped Box (2007), Horns (2010), NOS4A2 (2013), and The Fireman (2016); the short story collections 20th Century Ghosts (2005) and Strange Weather (2017); and the comic book series Locke & Key (2008–2013). He has won awards including Bram Stoker Awards, British Fantasy Awards, and an Eisner Award.
"The White People" is a horror short story by Welsh author Arthur Machen. Written in the late 1890s, it was first published in 1904 in Horlick's Magazine, edited by Machen's friend A. E. Waite, then reprinted in Machen's collection The House of Souls (1906).
Theodora Goss is a Hungarian-American fiction writer and poet. Her writing has been nominated for major awards, including the Nebula, Locus, Mythopoeic, World Fantasy, and Seiun Awards. Her short fiction and poetry have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including Year's Best volumes.
Jessica Amanda Salmonson is an American author and editor of fantasy and horror fiction and poetry. She is a trans woman. Prior to her transition in the 1970s, Jessica Amanda was married, and later divorced. She has two children.
Capes & Cowls: Adventures in Wyrd City is an expandable "book-in-a-box" superhero board game based on Capes & Cowls: The Wyrd City Chronicles by Robin Spriggs. Prior to its commercial release by Wyrd House Press in 2006, the game had been in private circulation, according to publisher Jazz Lieberman, “for well over a decade.”
Horror comics are comic books, graphic novels, black-and-white comics magazines, and manga e.g the best focusing on horror fiction. In the US market, horror comic books reached a peak in the late 1940s through the mid-1950s, when concern over content and the imposition of the self-censorship Comics Code Authority contributed to the demise of many titles and the toning down of others. Black-and-white horror-comics magazines, which did not fall under the Code, flourished from the mid-1960s through the early 1980s from a variety of publishers. Mainstream American color comic books experienced a horror resurgence in the 1970s, following a loosening of the Code. While the genre has had greater and lesser periods of popularity, it occupies a firm niche in comics as of the 2010s.
Kyla (Lee) Ward is an Australian writer of speculative fiction, poet and actor. Her work has been nominated multiple times for the Ditmar Award, the Aurealis Award, the Australian Shadows Award, the Bram Stoker Award and the Rhysling Award. She won the Aurealis Award in 2006 for her collaborative novel Prismatic.
Sofia Samatar is an American educator, poet and writer. She is an Assistant Professor of English at James Madison University. In 2013, she published the award-winning fantasy novel A Stranger in Olondria.
Abyss & Apex Magazine (A&A) is a long-running, semi-pro online speculative fiction magazine. The title of the zine comes from a quote by Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), "And if you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." The stories and poetry therefore follow the pattern of "how would humans react?" if a new technology or a type of magic or supernatural power affected them.
Uncanny Magazine is an American science fiction and fantasy online magazine, edited and published by Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas, based in Urbana, Illinois. Its mascot is a space unicorn.
Somewhere Beneath Those Waves is a collection of speculative fiction short stories by American writer Sarah Monette. It was first published in trade paperback by Prime Books in November 2011.