Stephen Volk is probably best known for the notorious BBC drama Ghostwatch (called by some the most terrifying drama ever seen on TV) and as creator and lead writer of the award-winning ITV drama series Afterlife starring Andrew Lincoln and Lesley Sharp. He wrote ITV’s three-part chiller Midwinter of the Spirit starring Anna Maxwell Martin and David Threlfall, and has penned numerous feature screenplays, including ghost story The Awakening starring Rebecca Hall and Dominic West, and Ken Russell’s Gothic, while his other TV work includes Channel 4’s Shockers. His play The Chapel of Unrest premiered at the Bush Theatre starring Jim Broadbent and Reece Shearsmith. He is the winner of two British Fantasy Awards and a BAFTA. His stories are collected in Dark Corners, Monsters in the Heart and The Parts We Play. His three novellas comprising The Dark Masters trilogy (Whitstable, Leytonstone and Netherwood) will be published by PS in late 2018.
Robert Shearman has written five short story collections, and between them they have won the World Fantasy Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, the Edge Hill Readers Prize, and three British Fantasy Awards. He began his career in the theatre, and was resident dramatist at the Northcott Theatre in Exeter, and regular writer for Alan Ayckbourn at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough; his plays have won the Sunday Times Playwriting Award, the World Drama Trust Award, and the Guinness Award for Ingenuity in association with the Royal National Theatre. A regular writer for BBC Radio, his own interactive drama series The Chain Gang has won two Sony Awards. But he is probably best known for his work on Doctor Who, bringing back the Daleks for the BAFTA-winning first series in an episode nominated for a Hugo Award. His latest book, We All Hear Stories in the Dark, is to be released by PS Publishing next year.
Trained as a journalist, Gemma Files has also been a teacher, screenwriter and film critic. She broke onto the horror scene when her story “The Emperor’s Old Bones” won the 1999 International Horror Guild Award for Best Short Fiction. She is the author of the Hexslinger series (A Book of Tongues, A Rope of Thorns and A Tree of Bones), We Will All Go Down Together: Stories of the Five-Family Coven and Experimental Film, which won both the 2016 Shirley Jackson Award and 2016 Sunburst Award for Best Novel. She has also published two collections of short fiction and two chapbooks of speculative poetry, and will soon add three more short fiction collections to that list—two (Spectral Evidence and Drawn Up From Deep Places) from Trepidatio Publishing, one (Dark Is Better) from Cemetery Dance Graveyard Editions. Five of her stories were adapted as episodes of The Hunger, an erotic horror anthology TV series from Ridley and Tony Scott’s Scott Free production company.
Kit Power lives in Milton Keynes and writes dark genre fiction. These two facts may or may not be connected. His novel, GodBomb!, and novella collection, Breaking Point, have been published by The Sinister Horror Company, and he blogs regularly for Gingernuts of Horror. He’s also a serial podcaster. His debut collection A WARNING ABOUT YOUR FUTURE ENSLAVEMENT THAT YOU WILL DISMISS AS A COLLECTION OF SHORT FICTION AND ESSAYS BY KIT POWER is now available.
Tim Lebbon is a New York Times bestselling author of over forty novels. Recent books include Relics, The Family Man, The Silence and the Rage War trilogy of Alien/Predator novels. He has won four British Fantasy Awards, a Bram Stoker Award and a Scribe Award. The movie of his story Pay the Ghost, starring Nicolas Cage, was released Halloween 2015. The Silence, starring Stanley Tucci and Kiernan Shipka, is due for release in 2018. Several other movie projects are in development in the US and UK.
Benjamin Percy is the author of four novels—most recently The Dark Net—as well as two short story collections and a book of essays. He writes for DC Comics (Green Arrow, Teen Titans) and Dynamite Entertainment (James Bond), and his fiction and non-fiction have been published in Esquire, Time, GQ and the Paris Review. His honours include the Whiting Award, the Plimpton Prize, an NEA fellowship, two Pushcart Prizes, and inclusion in Best American Short Stories and Best American Comics.
Mild-mannered laboratory technician by day, Laura Mauro was born in south-east London and currently lives in Essex under extreme duress. Her work has appeared in Black Static, Interzone, Shadows & Tall Trees and a variety of anthologies. Her debut novella, Naming the Bones, was published in 2017. She is currently studying towards a Master’s in Modern and Contemporary Literature, which mostly involves pretending to have read James Joyce’s Ulysses. In her spare time she collects tattoos, dyes her hair strange colours and blogs sporadically at www.lauramauro.com.
Ray Cluley’s short fiction has appeared in various magazines and anthologies and has been reprinted in Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year series, Steve Berman’s Wilde Stories 2013: The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction, and in Benoît Domis’s Ténèbres series. He has been translated into French, Polish, Hungarian and Chinese. He won a British Fantasy Award for Best Short Story and has since been nominated for Best Novella and Best Collection. That collection, Probably Monsters, is available from ChiZine Press.
Tim Lucas is the author of two well-received novels, Throat Sprockets (1994) and The Book of Renfield: A Gospel of Dracula (2005), as well as the Saturn Award-winning Mario Bava: All the Colors of the Dark (2007) and Studies in the Horror Film: Videodrome (2008). Since the early 1970s he has written for nearly all the major magazines devoted to fantastic cinema, as well as Film Comment, Cahiers du Cinéma and Sight & Sound, for which he wrote a monthly column for nearly a decade. He also edited and co-published 184 issues and two Special Editions of Video Watchdog: The Perfectionist’s Guide to Fantastic Video (1990–2017), which raised the bar for critical and journalistic standards in genre film writing. In October 2016, at the Vista Theatre in Los Angeles, Joe Dante directed a live table reading of his as-yet-unproduced Roger Corman biopic script The Man with Kaleidoscope Eyes, starring Bill Hader as Corman (with a special appearance by Corman himself)—an event billed as “The Greatest Film Never Made”. A prolific audio commentator for DVD and Blu-ray discs, his forthcoming publications include The Secret Life of Love Songs (a novella) and a monograph on the 1968 Poe anthology film Spirits of the Dead.