Carole Johnstone grew up in Lanarkshire, Scotland. She has been writing as long as she can remember, and is an award-winning short story writer whose work has been reprinted and translated worldwide. She has been published by HarperCollins, Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, and Titan Books, and has written Sherlock Holmes stories for Constable & Robinson.

MIRRORLAND, her debut novel, has sold in 13 territories, and has been optioned by Heyday TV and NBC Universal.

Her second novel, THE BLACKHOUSE, is a gothic thriller and unusual whodunnit set on an isolated Scottish island where nothing is as it seems, and shocking twists lie around every corner. Out Aug 4 2022 in the UK and Jan 3 2023 in the US and CAN.

Carole now writes full-time, and lives with her husband in the Highlands of Scotland, though her heart belongs to the sea and wild islands of the Outer Hebrides.

See carolejohnstone.com for more information and giveaways.

Agent: Hellie Ogden at Janklow & Nesbit UK.

More information on the author can be found at carolejohnstone.com.

Jennifer Brozek is a multi-talented, award-winning author, editor, and media tie-in writer. She is the author of Never Let Me Sleep and The Last Days of Salton Academy, both of which were nominated for the Bram Stoker Award. Her YA tie-in novels, BattleTech: The Nellus Academy Incident and Shadowrun: Auditions, have both won Scribe Awards. Her editing work has earned her nominations for the British Fantasy Award, the Bram Stoker Award, and the Hugo Award. She won the Australian Shadows Award for the Grants Pass anthology, co-edited with Amanda Pillar. Jennifer’s short form work has appeared in Apex Publications, Uncanny Magazine, Daily Science Fiction, and in anthologies set in the worlds of Valdemar, Shadowrun, V-Wars, Masters of Orion, Well World, and Predator.

Jennifer has been a full-time freelance author and editor for over seventeen years, and she has never been happier. She keeps a tight schedule on her writing and editing projects and somehow manages to find time to teach writing classes and volunteer for several professional writing organizations such as SFWA, HWA, and IAMTW. She shares her husband, Jeff, with several cats and often uses him as a sounding board for her story ideas.

"I see story ideas. All the time. They're everywhere. Just walking around like normal ideas. They don't know they're stories."

J. Aaron Parish is a 30-something native Texan who spends his days trying to pound some kind of appreciation for British literature into the skulls of high school seniors. The rest of his time he splits between a second (or third) job, family and trying to pound out a few stories. He has been married since 1998 and has a beautiful daughter and two wonderful little boys.

Lee Clark Zumpe’s nights are consumed with the invocation of ancient nightmares, dutifully bound in fiction and poetry.

Lee’s work has been seen in distinguished genre magazines such as Weird Tales, Space and Time and Dark Wisdom, and in notable anthologies including Horrors Beyond, Corpse Blossoms, High Seas Cthulhu and Cthulhu Unbound Vol. 1. His stories and poems have earned Honorable Mentions in the Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror.

Lee’s inclination toward horror manifested itself early in his childhood when he began flipping through the pages of Forrest J. Ackerman’s Famous Monsters of Filmland and reading Gold Key Comic classics like Boris Karloff Tales of Mystery and Grimm’s Ghost Stories. Throughout the 1970s, Lee also watched his share of “horrible old movies” on Creature Feature, a locally produced horror movie series hosted by Dr. Paul Bearer (Dick Bennick Sr.).

In his teenage years, Lee discovered Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, Ambrose Bierce, Richard Matheson and other masters of the genre.

By day, Lee is an entertainment columnist with Tampa Bay Newspapers. Covering the Tampa area entertainment beat, he has penned hundreds of film, theater and book reviews and has interviewed novelists as well as music industry icons such as Paddy Moloney of The Chieftains and Alan Parsons. His work for TBN has been recognized repeatedly by the Florida Press Association, including a first place award for criticism in the 2007 Better Weekly Newspaper Contest.

Lee earned his bachelor’s degree in English at the University of South Florida in Tampa. The author lives on the west coast of Florida with his wife and daughter.

K.V. Taylor is an avid reader and writer of dark speculative fiction, even though the only degree she holds in is in the history of art. (Or, possibly, because the only degree she holds is in the history of art.) Originally from the Appalachian foothills of West Virginia, she currently lives in the D.C. Metro Area with her husband and mutant cat. In her spare time she enjoys comic books, Himalayan Buddhist art, loud music, her Epiphone, and Black Bush. Her short fiction can be found at kvtaylor.com, and her first novel, /Scripped/, is forthcoming from Belfire Press in June 2011. She edits for Morrigan Books and collects The Red Penny Papers in her dining room.

Her favorite authors include John Steinbeck, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Neil Gaiman, Meghan Brunner, Kurt Vonnegut, William Makepeace Thackeray, Frank Herbert, George R.R. Martin, James Joyce, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Edgar Allan Poe, Oscar Wilde, Warren Ellis, Wendy Pini, Alan Moore, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Bram Stoker. She claims that her favorite book is /Le Morte D’Arthur/ by Sir Thomas Malory, and has a general penchant for Arthurian Romance.

Martin Livings (born 1970) is an Australian author of horror, fantasy and science fiction. He has been writing short stories since 1990 and has been nominated for both the Ditmar Award and Aurealis Award. Livings resides in Perth, Western Australia.

Livings’ short fiction has appeared in the award-winning anthology Daikaiju! (Agog! Press), as well as in Borderlands, Agog! Terrific Tales (Agog! Press) and Eidolon, among many others. His work has been listed in the Year’s Best Horror and Fantasy Recommended Reading, and reprinted in Year’s Best Australian SF and Fantasy Volume 2 (MirrorDanse Books, 2006), Australian Dark Fantasy and Horror, 2006 Edition (Brimstone Press, 2006), and The Year’s Best Australian Fantasy and Horror in 2010, 2012, 2013 and 2015 (Ticonderoga Publications).

His first novel, Carnies, was published by Lothian Books in Australia in June 2006. Carnies was nominated for an Aurealis Award and won the 2007 Tin Duck Award for Best Novel by a Western Australian. His collection of short stories, Living With the Dead, was released in 2012 by Dark Prints Press, and an original story from the collection, “Birthday Suit”, won the Australian Shadows award for Best Short Fiction that year.

Both Carnies and Living With the Dead are available now available through Amazon, along with his techno-thriller novel Skinsongs, zombie spy thriller Sleeper Awake, and the novellas Rope and The Final Twist. His latest novel, An Ill Wind, has just been released on Amazon as well.

https://martinlivings.wordpress.com/

Pete Kempshall lives in Perth, Western Australia. With more than 20 published stories to date, he has been nominated for a number of writing awards - including the Ditmar Award for Best New Talent - and won Best West Australian Professional Short Work at the Australian National Science Fiction Convention in 2011.

Having started his writing career on licensed products such as Doctor Who, he is now focused on horror and dark fiction releases. He works as a writer and as an editor: the 2010 anthology Scenes from the Second Storey (which he co-edited with Amanda Pillar) was nominated for Aurealis and Australian Shadow awards.

Pete blogs about his projects at www.tyrannyoftheblankpage.blogspot.com.

Ivan Ewert was born in Chicago, Illinois, and has never wandered far afield. He has deep roots in the American Midwest, finding a sense of both belonging and terror within the endless surburban labyrinths, deep north woods, tangled city streets and boundless prairie skies. The land and the cycles of the year both speak to him and inform his writing; which revolves around the strange, the beautiful, the delicious and the unseen.

His work has previously appeared in the award-winning anthology Grants Pass, as well as in Close Encounters of the Human Kind, Human Tales, Space Tramps: Full-Throttle Space Tales and Beasts Within 3: Oceans Unleashed, while his culinary writing has appeared in Alimentum: The Literature of Food. An early treatment of Famished, then named Vorare, as well as separate works titled Solstice and Idolwood, appeared in the e-zine The Edge of Propinquity from 2006 to 2011. He was the sole author to span all six years of that publication.

FAMISHED: THE FARM is his first published novel.

Ivan wears a number of creative hats professionally, including graphic design and acting. He is currently working as voice talent on a lyric proposal to the Poetry Foundation, and appeared as himself alongside his family in the award-winning documentary The Suicide Tourist. He designed the book jacket for Industry Talk: An Insider's Look at Writing RPGs and Editing Anthologies, as well as logos for Timid Pirate Publishing and such performing companies as Sage Studio, Lucy's Café, and the Inhabit Theatre.

In previous lives, he has worked as an audio engineer, a purchasing agent, a songwriter, a tarot reader, a project manager and, for a remarkably short stint, an accountant. In his spare time, Ivan occupies himself with reading, gaming, and assisting with the jewelry design firm Triskele Moon Studios. He currently lives near the Illinois-Wisconsin border with his wife of thirteen auspicious years and a rather terrifying collection of condiments and cookbooks.

Ivan can be reached at www.ivanewert.com and on Twitter @IvanEwert.

Amanda Pillar is addicted to writing. Not in the fun kind of way, more in the has-to-get-her-fix kind of way. But that's a good thing, right? It means she's busy working on her next book and has plans for many more to come, all with lots of snark. Because snark.

Amanda has had almost a dozen books published, alongside a variety of short stories, as well as solo and co-editing over half a dozen anthologies. People say it's because she's an 'over-achiever' but, in reality, Amanda doesn't understand the concept of 'relaxation'. (Please feel free to explain it to her. Use small words.) Compounding this issue, Amanda has commenced work on a PhD. Because she's crazy.

Oh, and in her day job, she's an archaeologist. (And no, she doesn't get chased around site by rogue boulders, thank the flying spaghetti monster. She doesn't even want to imagine the OH&S paperwork THAT would cause).