Alan Baxter is a British-Australian, multi-award-winning author of horror, supernatural thrillers, and dark fantasy. He’s also a martial arts expert, a whisky-soaked swear monkey, and dog lover. He creates dark, weird stories among dairy paddocks on the beautiful south coast of NSW, Australia, where he lives with his wife, son, hound and other creatures.

He is the author of several novels, including the Alex Caine trilogy, Bound, Obsidian and Abduction, The Balance duology, RealmShift and MageSign, the urban horror noir novel, Hidden City, and the horror/crime thriller Devouring Dark. He’s also written several novellas, including the cosmic horror thriller The Book Club, the supernatural noir Eli Carver novella series, Manifest Recall and Recall Night, with a third volume on the way, and the wildly popular gonzo horror novella, The Roo. A new collection of five interconnected horror novellas, The Gulp, came out this year.

Alan has also had more than 80 short fiction publications in journals and anthologies in Australia, the US, the UK, France, Germany and Japan, including The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Daily Science Fiction, and many others. Alan has two volumes of collected short fiction, Crow Shine and Served Cold.

At times, Alan collaborates with US action/adventure bestselling author, David Wood. Together they have co-authored the short horror novel, Dark Rite, four action thrillers in The Jake Crowley Adventures, and the Sam Aston Investigations giant monster thrillers Primordial and Overlord, with a third in that series due any time now.

Alan has been an eight-time finalist in the Aurealis Awards, an eight-time finalist in the Australian Shadows Awards and a seven-time finalist in the Ditmar Awards. From those shortlistings he won the 2014 Australian Shadows Award for Best Short Story (“Shadows of the Lonely Dead”), the 2015 Australian Shadows Paul Haines Award For Long Fiction (“In Vaulted Halls Entombed”), the 2016 Australian Shadows Award for Best Collection (Crow Shine), and the 2019 Australian Shadows Award for Best Collection (Served Cold). He is also a past winner of the AHWA Short Story Competition (“It’s Always the Children Who Suffer”). Alan’s first collection, Crow Shine, also made the preliminary ballot for the 2016 Bram Stoker Award (TM) for Best Collection.

Read extracts from his novels and novellas, and find free short stories at his website – www.alanbaxter.com.au – or find him on Twitter @AlanBaxter and Facebook, and feel free to tell him what you think. About anything.

Nerine Dorman is a South African author and editor of science fiction and fantasy currently living in Cape Town, with short fiction published in numerous anthologies. Her YA fantasy novel Dragon Forged was a finalist in the 2017 Sanlam Prize for Youth Literature, and she is the curator of the South African Horrorfest Bloody Parchment event and short story competition. Her short story “On the Other Side of the Sea” (Omenana, 2017) was shortlisted for a 2018 Nommo award. Her novella The Firebird won a Nommo for "Best Novella" during 2019, and her novel Sing down the Stars won Gold for the Sanlam Prize for Youth Literature in 2019. In addition, she is a founding member of the SFF authors’ co-operative Skolion that has assisted authors such as Masha du Toit, Suzanne van Rooyen, Cristy Zinn and Cat Hellisen, among others, in their publishing endeavours.

Damien Angelica Walters is the author of The Dead Girls Club, Cry Your Way Home, Paper Tigers, and Sing Me Your Scars, winner of This is Horror’s Short Story Collection of the Year. Her short fiction has been nominated twice for a Bram Stoker Award, reprinted in The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror and The Year's Best Weird Fiction, and published in various anthologies and magazines, including the Shirley Jackson Award Finalists Autumn Cthulhu and The Madness of Dr. Caligari, World Fantasy Award Finalist Cassilda's Song, Nightmare Magazine, and Black Static. Until the magazine's closing in 2013, she was an Associate Editor of the Hugo Award-winning Electric Velocipede. She lives in Maryland with her husband and a rescued pit bull named Ripley. Find her on Twitter @DamienAWalters or on her website at http://damienangelicawalters.com.

Scottish rogue author Benjamin Knox writes mind-melting Horror, creepy dark-fairytales and fun pulpy genre fiction. One day he will have that island fortress and army of genetically engineered super-eels he has always dreamed of. For now he could be anywhere, perhaps somewhere near you...

For more strangeness visit: www.benjaminknox.net

"MacLeod’s fiction is full of traps – some physical, some psychological, none easy to wriggle free of."

~ Terrence Rafferty, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

Bracken MacLeod has worked as a martial arts teacher, a university philosophy instructor, for a children's non-profit, and as a trial attorney. His short fiction has appeared in several magazines and anthologies including LampLight, ThugLit, and Splatterpunk and has been collected in WHITE KNIGHT AND OTHER PAWNS and 13 VIEWS OF THE SUICIDE WOODS by ChiZine Publications, which the New York Times Book Review called, "Superb."

He is the author of the novels, MOUNTAIN HOME, STRANDED, and COME TO DUST.

He lives outside of Boston with his wife and son, where he is at work on his next novel.

J. C. Michael is an English horror author.

His début novel, Discoredia, was published in September 2013 and re-released in 2018 under the new title - Pandemonium. He has featured in the Double Barrel Horror series from Pint Bottle Press and co-authored the novella, You Only Get One Shot, with Scottish writer Kevin J Kennedy.

A number of his short stories have been published in various anthologies from a variety of publishers, as well as within his collection, Everything’s Annoying.

Citing Stephen King, James Herbert, and Clive Barker, as his greatest influences, Michael's work sits firmly within the horror genre.

Paul Michael Anderson is the writer of the collection BONES ARE MADE TO BE BROKEN, which FANGORIA magazine called "endlessly stunning, supremely disquieting" and author Jack Ketchum called "a dark carnival of rigorous intelligence and compassion", as well as the novella HOW WE BROKE with Bracken MacLeod. STANDALONE, his next book, will be arriving summer 2020 from Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing. He lives in Northern Virginia with his wife and daughter.

Anthony Rivera is a Bram Stoker Award-nominated editor committed to finding, developing and nurturing the best talent writing in horror, SciFi, speculative and other dark fiction genres. Tony is the editor-in-chief at Grey Matter Press where it's his hope that authors and readers alike will come to realize the company's products are exceptional examples of the best work being published in genre fiction.

After spending far too much time marketing big-name corporate clients, Tony realized his publishing dream in 2012 when he opened the doors of Grey Matter Press, a Chicago-based independent publishing company producing works of dark fiction. One year later, in 2013, Grey Matter Press released its first volume which was nominated for the prestigious Bram Stoker Award. Other critically acclaimed and award-nominated volumes followed.

In subsequent years, Grey Matter Press has released a succession of acclaimed titles. FANGORIA Magazine has said: "Grey Matter Press has managed to establish itself as one of the premiere purveyors of horror fiction currently in existence.”

Tony's early attraction to the dark and fantastic led him first into the world of marketing. Throughout a career that took him through the fields of news reporting, copywriting, copyediting, publishing, promotions, design and advertising, he ultimately remained focused on what was truly important -- creativity and the words and imagery that drive it.

For more information follow him on Twitter at @janthonyrivera or visit GreyMatterPress.com and follow the publisher on Twitter at @GreyMatterPress or Facebook at Facebook.com/GreyMatterPress.

Letitia Trent is the author of the novels Almost Dark and Echo Lake as well as the poetry collection One Perfect Bird and numerous chapbooks. Her story "Wilderness" is featured in both the anthology Exigencies and The Best Horror of the Year, Volume 8, edited by Ellen Datlow. Her work has been nominated for a Shirley Jackson award. Her work has appeared in Smokelong Quarterly, Fence, Sou'Wester, and 32 Poems, among others, and her nonfiction has appeared in The Daily Beast and The Nervous Breakdown. Trent lives with her husband, son, and three black cats in the Ozarks.

Gwendolyn Kiste is the three-time Bram Stoker Award-winning author of The Rust Maidens, Reluctant Immortals, Boneset & Feathers, And Her Smile Will Untether the Universe, Pretty Marys All in a Row, and The Invention of Ghosts. Her short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Nightmare Magazine, Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, Vastarien, Tor's Nightfire, Black Static, The Dark, Daily Science Fiction, Interzone, and LampLight, among others. Originally from Ohio, she now resides on an abandoned horse farm outside of Pittsburgh with her husband, two cats, and not nearly enough ghosts. Find her online at gwendolynkiste.com

Annie Neugebauer (@AnnieNeugebauer) is a novelist, short story author, and award-winning poet. She has work appearing in over seventy publications, including magazines such as Black Static, Apex, and Cemetery Dance, as well as anthologies such as Bram Stoker Award finalist The Beauty of Death and #1 Amazon bestseller Killing It Softly. She's an active member of the Horror Writers Association, webmaster for the Poetry Society of Texas, and a columnist for LitReactor and Writer Unboxed. You can visit her at www.AnnieNeugebauer.com for blogs, creative works, free organizational tools for writers, and more.

Dan Rabarts is the winner of New Zealand’s Sir Julius Vogel Award for Best New Talent, 2013. His horror, dark fantasy, science fiction, and steampunk short stories can be found at Beneath Ceaseless Skies and midnightecho.com, in Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, Aurealis Magazine, SQ Mag, and in the anthologies Bloodstones, Dreaming of Djinn, Ministry Protocol, Regeneration, and Insert Title Here, among others. The horror flash fiction anthology Baby Teeth - Bite-sized Tales of Terror, which he co-edited with Lee Murray to raise funds for children’s literacy charity Duffy Books in Homes, won the Sir Julius Vogel Award for Best Collected Work, and the Australian Shadows Award for Best Edited Work. His stories have been podcast on the StarShipSofa, Tales to Terrify, Tales from the Archives and Wily Writers’ podcasts. Find out more at dan.rabarts.com.