[close] I was born in London in 1969, lived in Devon until I was eight, and the next twenty years were spent in Newport. My wife Tracey and I then did a Good Thing and moved back to the country, and we now live in the little village of Goytre in Monmouthshire with our kids Ellie and Daniel. It’s a lovely place – pub, shop, chip shop, school – and we’re very happy here. Two minutes’ walk in any direction and we’re in the countryside, and the area has featured, intentionally or not, in much of my writing.

I’ve been writing ever since I can remember. The first story I recall actually finishing was when I was nine years old. It involved a train hijacking (yeah, a train has about ten thousand doors and is probably the hardest moving vehicle to hijack … but I was nine years old!), and one of the hijackers being clumsy enough to drop his gun. Naturally my hero found the gun and went on a killing spree. Die Hard on the 10:17 from Paddington.

In my teens I began about nine million novels, and finished none of them. They varied from World War Two action adventures to ’70s style disaster novels. Some had spooky elements, some did not, and it wasn’t until I was twenty that I wrote my first horror story, “Black Heart”. I still have it somewhere … and I suspect it will remain hidden away forever!

My first published story was in the UK indie magazine Psychotrope in 1994, and in 1997 Tanjen published my first novel Mesmer. Since then I’ve had over almost thirty books published in the UK and US by Bantam Spectra, Allison & Busby, Night Shade Books, Simon & Schuster, Leisure Books, PS Publishing, Necessary Evil Press, Cemetery Dance and many others, with many more due soon. Check out the Library section for details.

Quite a few of my novellas and novels have been optioned for the screen, including White (written by Stephen Susco), Exorcising Angels, Until She Sleeps, Face, In Perpetuiry, and The Nature of Balance. They’re all ‘in development’ right now, which means anything from ‘We’re trying to find a writer’ to ‘We have major studio interest and it’s only a matter of time’. There are several others projects about to enter such a stage of development. One day …

Late in 2006 I took the plunge into full-time writing and it’s going well. There’s plenty of exciting news on the horizon – new book deals, film options and other stuff – and you’ll find details posted at this site as and when they happen. [close]