Nightmare Carnival

Katherine Dunn’s third novel, Geek Love, was a finalist for the Bram Stoker Award and for the National Book Award. Dunn is a prize-winning boxing journalist and teaches fiction in the Pacific University MFA Writing program.

Jeffrey Ford is the multi-award winning author of the novels Physiognomy, Memoranda, The Beyond, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, The Girl in the Glass, The Cosmology of the Wider World, and The Shadow Year.

His short fiction has been published in numerous journals, magazines, and anthologies and has been collected in The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant, The Empire of Ice Cream, The Drowned Life, and Crackpot Palace.

Glen Hirshberg’s novels include The Snowman’s Children, The Book of Bunk, and Motherless Child, the latter recently reissued in a new, revised edition by Tor, with two sequels to follow. His short fiction has been collected in The Two Sams, American Morons, and The Janus Tree. He has won the Shirley Jackson Award and three International Horror Guild Awards.

With Peter Atkins and Dennis Etchison, he cofounded the Rolling Darkness Revue, a reading/live music/performance event that tours the West Coast every fall and has also made international appearances.

He lives in the Los Angeles area with his wife, son, daughter, and cats.

Stephen Graham Jones is the author of fifteen novels and five collections. Most recent are Not for Nothing, The Least of My Scars, and The Gospel of Z. Up soon are After the People Lights Have Gone Off, Once Upon a Time in Texas, and, with Paul Tremblay, Floating Boy and the Girl Who Couldn’t Fly.

Jones has had some two hundred stories published, many reprinted in best-of-the-year annuals. He’s won the Texas Institute of Letters Award for fiction, the Independent Publisher Book Award for Multicultural Fiction, and an NEA fellowship in fiction. He teaches in the MFA programs at CU — Boulder and UCR — Palm Desert.

He lives in Colorado, and really likes werewolves and slashers and hair metal.

For more information, see DemonTheory.net or @SGJ72 on Twitter.

Joel Lane was a British novelist, short story writer, poet, critic, and anthology editor. Although most of his short fiction was dark fantasy or horror, his two novels From Blue to Black and The Blue Mask were more mainstream.

He won the World Fantasy Award in 2013 for his most recent collection, Where Furnaces Burn, and he won the British Fantasy Award twice. His short stories have been collected in five volumes. He died in 2013.

Livia Llewellyn is a writer of dark fantasy, horror, and erotica. A 2006 graduate of Clarion, her fiction has appeared in ChiZine, Subterranean, Sybil’s Garage, Pseudopod, Apex Magazine, Postscripts, Nightmare Magazine, and numerous anthologies, including The Best Horror of the Year. Her first collection, Engines of Desire: Tales of Love & Other Horrors, was published in 2011. Engines received a nomination for the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Collection, and “Omphalos” received a Best Novelette nomination. You can find her online at LiviaLlewellyn.com.

Nick Mamatas is the author of several novels, including most recently Love Is the Law and The Last Weekend. His short fiction has appeared in Supernatural Noir, West Coast Crime Wave, and The Best American Mystery Stories 2013. He has written about martial arts and professional wrestling for The Smart Set, The Village Voice, and Clarkesworld Magazine. With Masumi Washington, Nick coedited the essay collection The Battle Royale Slam Book—featuring work by Sam Hamm, John Skipp, Brian Keene, and others — about the novel by Koushun Takami and the related film and manga projects.