Authors, just like parents, aren’t supposed to have favorites. We’re supposed to love all our creations equally. But we do have a pecking order and Hellbound is pretty high on mine. Some worlds are just fun to write about. The characters, the monsters, the aesthetic—they all mesh to create one hell of a playground. Hellbound was one such perfect storm. I finally got to use some monsters that had been lurking in the back of my mind for years. The plot was something I was dying to give a go. And...

One of the most terrifyingly beautiful dangers of my homeland Australia is the funnel-web spider. Pitch black, glossy, and over an inch long; it’s not an arachnid to be messed with, as one man famously learned. Finding one at the bottom of his pool, he waited several hours to ensure it was dead and scooped it out. Fun fact: funnel-web spiders can survive completely submerged for up to 30 hours. And it didn’t appreciate being disturbed. This volume of Night Terrors is full of people who also...

What happens when someone truly monstrous is no longer bound by any rules of the living world? The first book in this series saw how longtime murderer Wyatt Hawthorn stirred the ghost of his victim into becoming a killer himself. For this installment, it only makes sense to up the ante and have the horrifying serial killer wreak havoc even as a ghost. And after our road trip to Ontario, we head back south of the boarder—to Detroit. The once vibrant and bustling Motor City seems like the...

Ghosts, demons, and monsters are truly terrifying, but they are also far away from us. They are fiction, and even if we encounter a strange occurrence, or an unexplained event in real life, our minds will always tend to look for a logical explanation. Was it a ghost? Maybe. But maybe it was the wind. There’s comfort in knowing something strange has a rational explanation. But what about the monsters that are real? For this novel, I wanted to merge a supernatural threat with one just as...

In this book, Shane does a little more traveling, a little more hunting and, well, let’s not be coy about it, a little more killing. There’s a tad bit more to this one, though. Someone to keep your eye on. I won’t say who or why, though I will say this: We’re about to say hello to an old friend. But this particular chapter in Shane’s life is drawing to a close. Not that Shane is retiring, mind you. No, let me put you at ease about that. Shane’s still got a few good years left in him. And he’s...

We finally come to the end of the Shadow King’s story. We now arrive at the ultimate resolution that sees the fight between Lazarus and Shane explode. This one really plays off the idea of things never always being as they seem. For better or for worse, Shane fills in a lot of blanks with intuition and deduction. But maybe that’s not always enough when dealing with a being like Lazarus who has been around for centuries. We wanted to bring back some familiar faces here, characters we didn’t get...

I’m always amazed by the things children come up with. They will tell the most messed up stories in the sweetest tones you’ve ever heard—pure nightmare fuel wrapped in an innocent bundle. Little girls have introduced me to dolls with the most horrific backstories I’ve ever heard while playing tea party. An eight-year-old I regularly babysat would point at random mundane objects and explain how approaching them would guarantee grizzly deaths. She just works it in between discussions of cotton...

As a child, the concept of appearances being deceiving or untrue seemed to pop up in all the books I read and cartoons I watched. It made sense. We often take situations at face value and do not recognize they are not what they want us to believe. Armed with this knowledge, I grew complacent, arrogant even. I would see one subterfuge and feel like it’s done. Riddle solved. All was good so long as I kept my eye on that one discovered deception. But how about things that do seem off at first...

Let me tell you about a strangely calm night from years ago. It was a new moon, and all my neighbors had gone to bed oddly early. No passing cars, no breeze; even the nocturnal birds were silent. It was so uncharacteristically dark and quiet. Then I woke to something tapping on my window. I’m not completely paranoid, so I reasoned it was some stray wildlife. Ignoring it, I kept my eyes closed and went back to sleep. That’s when I heard the whispers. You see, what made it more intriguing was...

Have you ever had a moment when you realized you needed to get the hell out then and there? That instant you just knew you couldn’t waste a minute more to second-guess yourself? There’s a labyrinth of man-made canals that connects to the ocean near my house. Water visibility is, on good days, maybe a foot. It didn’t exactly look inviting. Still, people go in it. Because, why not? No harm in having a swim, especially on a hot summer’s day, right? I used to think so, too. But I haven’t gone back...