CPAOD Bios: John Everson

John Everson is a Chicago-based "multi-writer". Fiction in the horror veins, music journalism for newspapers and magazines, music for pop bands, and serial killer plays. He is also the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of the Leisure Books novels Covenant (2008), Sacrifice (April, 2009) and The 13th (November 2009). His fourth novel, Siren, will be released in 2010.

Over the past 15 years, John's short fiction has appeared in more than 50 magazines, including Space & Time, Dark Discoveries and Grue, as well as in a couple dozen anthologies, with recent appearances including Horror Library Vol. 3, A Dark and Deadly Valley, Damned, and Kolchak: The Night Stalker Casebook. His stories have also been translated and published in Polish and French. A wide selection of his short fiction has been collected in three short story collections - Needles & Sins (Necro Books, 2007), Vigilantes of Love (Twilight Tales, 2003) and Cage of Bones & Other Deadly Obsessions (Delirium Books, 2000). "Letting Go", one of the short stories from Needles & Sins was nominated for a 2007 Bram Stoker Award.

Aside from being a regular CPAOD reviewer, he had a poem in issue #7 and a short story in issue #10.

John is also the editor of the anthologies Sins of the Sirens (Dark Arts Books, 2008) and In Delirium II (Delirium Books, 2007) and co-editor of the Spooks! ghost story anthology (Twilight Tales, 2004).

In 2006, he co-founded Dark Arts Books (www.darkartsbooks.com) to produce trade paperback collections spotlighting the cutting edge work of some of the best authors working in short dark fantasy fiction today. He is also a digital artist and musician -- some of his dark techno songs serve as the soundtrack to the horror fiction CD-ROM anthologies Bloodtype and Carnival/Circus, and in 2003 he scored Martin Mundt's comedic serial killer stage play "The Jackie Sexknife Show" in Chicago.

John shares a deep purple den in Naperville, Illinois with a cockatoo and cockatiel, a disparate collection of fake skulls, twisted skeletal fairies, Alan Clark illustrations and a large stuffed Eeyore. There's also a mounted Chinese fowling spider named Stoker courtesy of Charlee Jacob, an ever-growing shelf of custom mix CDs and an acoustic guitar that he can't really play but that his son Shaun likes to hear him beat on anyway. Sometimes his wife Geri is surprised to find him shuffling through more public areas of the house, but it's usually only to brew another cup of coffee. In order to avoid the onerous task of writing, he holds down a regular job as a medical association department director, records pop-rock songs in a hidden home studio, experiments with the insatiable culinary joys of the jalapeno, designs photo collage art book covers for a variety of small presses, loses hours in expanding an array of gardens and chases frequent excursions into the bizarre visual headspace of '70s euro-horror DVDs with a shot of Makers Mark and a tall glass of Newcastle.

email: john (at) johneverson.com
url: www.johneverson.com

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