Guests
Adam Niswander is the author of The Shaman Cycle, a series of novels telling of a Great Gathering of Native American medicine-people, who are called on to put down ancient Lovecraftian evils brought forth from olden days by careless modern men. The Charm relates the story of a demon dust-devil freed from a centuries-long imprisonment by a careless Arizona archeologist.
Born 2nd December, 1937, Brian Lumley came into the world just nine months after the most obvious of his forebears — meaning of course a "literary" forebear, namely, H.P. Lovecraft — had departed from it.
By his pre-teens Lumley had read Dracula and some other horror classics, but having followed the adventures of Dan Dare: Pilot of the Future in the British Eagle comic, his first love was Science Fiction. Then, in his early teens "as a result of reading Robert Bloch's Lovecraft pastiche Notebook Found in a Deserted House in a British SF magazine" he became more surely attracted to macabre fiction, an attraction that has lasted a lifetime.
David Prior has long believed that it's a director's duty to know first hand every job on a film set, which is how he justifies his rather bizarre list of credits.
While he has produced and directed several feature length documentaries for DVD, AM1200 is his first major fiction work.
Edward Morris is a 2005 British Science Fiction Association Award nominee whose work has appeared in Murky Depths, Interzone, AeonSF, Arkham Tales and many other markets around the world. He currently freelance-writes and -edits out of SE Portland.
Upon graduating from Temple University's film school, Frank discovered that, although he could use phrases like "mise en scene" in mixed company, he hadn't learned much about making films (film schools are hardly the place for such things).
Joseph S. Pulver, Sr., a life-long fan of pulp horror, fantasy, hard noir, and science fiction, found himself exiled from a happy anonymity as of 1999 when Chaosium, Inc. published his highly acclaimed Cthulhu Mythos novel Nightmare’s Disciple. His effectively chilling fiction and verse has appeared in collections including The Book of Eibon, Nameless Cults, Lin Carter’s Anton Zarnak, Occult Detective, Rehearsals for Oblivion, Cthulhu’s Creatures, and many others. He has received several honorable mentions in Ellen Datlow’s Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror.
Jovanka Vuckovic is the Editor-in-Chief of Rue Morgue Magazine, the world's leading horror in culture and entertainment publication. She has been featured as a genre expert on many documentaries and television shows and has contributed essays to several publications and books on the subject of genre cinema. Vuckovic bleeds horror and adores H.P. Lovecraft so much she even has a portrait of him tattooed on her flesh.
Julia Fair started her career working on the most successful independent film of all time, THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT. As the “history fabricator” for the “Sticks and Stones” special that aired on the Sci-Fi channel, Julia helped to create the “legend” upon which the Blair Witch was based. From there she wrote/produced one of the first dramatic online webisodic series, THE STRAND (www.strandvenice.com).
Laird Barron's work has appeared in places such as The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, SCIFICTION, Inferno: New Tales of Terror and the Supernatural, Lovecraft Unbound! and The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy. It has also been reprinted in numerous year's best anthologies. His debut collection, The Imago Sequence & Other Stories, was recently published by Night Shade. Mr. Barron is an expatriate Alaskan currently at large in Washington State.
Author/illustrator Lynn Cesar is a native of New York City, having studied fine art and illustration there. Her first mature work was in holography, producing several of the field's first animated holograms (including one of a pterodactyl flying at the viewer through the film plane).
Mars is a multi-instrumentalist who began performing professionally at the age of 13. He has played with symphony orchestras as well as jazz, goth, and metal bands on tours through Europe, Canada, and the US. Having grown weary of the road, Mars turned his attention to composing film scores, founding Dead House Music -- dedicated to providing high quality original scores to genre films.
Maryanne Snyder is a poet and author from Seattle, whose wide-ranging interests include the history of weird fiction. Among her favorite authors are Poe, Oscar Wilde, Lovecraft, and Clark Ashton Smith. She is currently collaborating with Wilum Pugmire on a collection of strange stories, the first of which, "The House of Idiot Children", appeared in the January/February issue of Weird Tales.
Michael Shea was born in Los Angeles—in Culver City, across the street from the huge north wall of MGM Studio's main lot. There, the billboard-size movie ads greeted his infant eyes, and taught him awe and a love of grand narratives. An inveterate hitch hiker before, during, and after his college years, he encountered, in a flophouse up in Juneau, Alaska, a book of pure Fantasy entitled The Eyes of The Overworld.
We are happy to announce that Mike Mignola will be Artist Guest of Honor at this year's festival.
Mike Mignola was born on September 16, 1960 in Berkeley, California and grew up in nearby Oakland, the eldest son of a tough and leathery cabinetmaker. His fascination with ghosts and monsters began at an early age (he doesn’t remember why); reading Dracula at age twelve introduced him to Victorian literature and folklore, from which he has never recovered.
Raised in rural Louisiana, Philip Simon headed to the Pacific Northwest after college and has been with Dark Horse Comics since early 2000, editing horror and sci-fi manga titles such as Blood+, Eden, MPD-Psycho, Octopus Girl, and Who Fighter. Philip helped launch Dark Horse's manhwa line and is currently co-editing Dark Horse's Mangettes program, featuring CLAMP. His wide range of projects over the years has included art books, a superhero series, more manga titles (such as the multiple award-winning Blade of the Immortal), archival collections, and adaptations of The Evil Dead and Pigeons from Hell. He is also Dark Horse's Robert E. Howard line editor, currently steering Conan the Cimmerian, Kull, and Solomon Kane. He digs zombies.
A prolific author in many genres, Richard A. Lupoff first encountered Howard Phillips Lovecraft on a Sunday morning in the First Baptist Church of Bordentown, New Jersey. The year was 1946. The young reader was eleven years old. The Olde Gentleman had been dead for nine years, but Richard didn’t know it.
Robert Lloyd Parry is an art historian and actor based in Cambridge, England. Since 2005 he has been touring the UK and Ireland with two one-man shows based upon stories from M R James "Ghost Stories of an Antiquary." He was recently awarded the Dracula Society’s Hamilton Deane Award for his production "Oh, Whistle…"
Robert M. Price has been nursing an unwholesome obsession with the work of H.P. Lovecraft for some forty years now, having discovered the Old Gent's tales in their Lancer paperback incarnation.
Ron Hilger is a Northern California native who has organized such Clark Ashton Smith related events as "The CAS Centennial Conference" in 1993 and "The CAS Plaque Dedication" in 2002. Hilger has also edited, with Scott Connors, Red World of Polaris (Night Shade Press, 2003) and The Averoigne Chronicles, currently in preparation from Donald M. Grant Publishers.
S. T. Joshi (b. 1958) is a leading authority on H. P. Lovecraft, Ambrose Bierce, H. L. Mencken, and other writers, mostly in the realms of supernatural and fantasy fiction. He has edited corrected editions of the works of Lovecraft, several annotated editions of Bierce and Mencken, and has written such critical studies as The Weird Tale (1990) and The Modern Weird Tale (2001). His award-winning biography, H. P.
Scott Allie writes and edits for Dark Horse Comics and Glimmer Train Press. His writing includes the horror comic The Devil's Footprints, set in his hometown of Ipswich, Mass.—with a sequel coming in 2008—and the forthcoming Solomon Kane series. Other work includes tributes to H.P. Lovecraft, contributions to Star Wars comics and Buffy the Vampire Slayer prose, and a series of self-published horror comics called Sick Smiles, from Aiiie! Comics.
Scott Connors has been twice nominated for the International Horror Guild Award for his scholarly and critical writings. Along with Ron Hilger, he is editing the definitive edition of Smith's fantastic tales for Night Shade Books, the fourth volume of which is now at the printers.
Shawna Gore has been working at the Dark Horse Comics factory of joy and entertainment since 1997. After serving as Dark Horse's publicist for five years, she left the comics industry and briefly flirted with a career in music before regaining her sanity and accepting an offer to rejoin the Dark Horse staff as an editor.
Before an audience at last year’s festival, scholar S.T. Joshi declared W.H. Pugmire and Stanley C. Sargent are “two of the finest authors of Cthulhu Mythos fiction,” and later told a group of authors that Sargent’s “Black Brat of Dunwich” is among the top ten Mythos stories ever written.
Wilum Hopfrog Pugmire is an eccentric recluse who dreams in Seattle, Washington. His books include Sesqua Valley and Other Haunts, Dreams of Lovecraftian Horror, and The Fungal Stain. He is currently writing a new collection for Hippocampus Press, and collaborating on a book of weird fiction with Maryanne K. Snyder; the first of their stories, "The House of Idiot Children", appeared this year in Weird Tales.
