Ramsey Campbell is a British writer considered by a number of critics to be one of the great masters of horror fiction. T. E. D. Klein has written that “Campbell reigns supreme in the field today,” while S. T. Joshi has said that “future generations will regard him as the leading horror writer of our generation, every bit the equal of Lovecraft or Blackwood.”

Says Campbell: “It can be argued that my timidity or at least my restraint is why I remain. I’ve never gone for broke and tried to write the most horrifying tale I can concoct, because I don’t quite see the point. To quote the critic David Aylward, as I very often do: ‘writers [of horror fiction], who used to strive for awe and achieve fear, now strive for fear and achieve only disgust’ – and it seems to me that too much straining for terror is wont to produce nothing more than a disgusting dump. If I can’t approach awe, I’d rather try for the other quality I value most in dark fiction, not exclusively in generic horror – a lingering disquiet. I may have felt that way ever since I first encountered Herman Melville’s ‘Bartleby’ in the 1957 anthology Best Horror Stories and didn’t feel cheated out of any of the pocket money I’d saved up to buy the book. Soon I found the quality in work such as the novels of Thomas Hinde and Samuel Beckett, not to mention films such as Last Year in Marienbad and Los Olvidados. I see no reason why fiction packaged as horror can’t achieve these effects of disturbance and dislocation. One definition of good art is that it makes you look again at things you’ve taken for granted, and that can certainly be true of horror.” Ramsey blogs at Ramsey Campbell.com.

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Scott Campbell searches for challenges that will increase his skills for the battles to come. The slush pile underneath PseudoPod Towers is a worthy opponent. Scott started as an associate editor at PseudoPod in 2016, he become Web Wrangler in 2021, and ascended to Assistant Editor in 2022. He is an invaluable resource for not only his assistance with reviewing stories but also helping to build all the blog posts and ensuring our website and bios are up to date.  

He also writes, directs, and performs for the queer (in every sense of the word) cabaret The Mickee Faust Club. He also write far too infrequently at the official online home of the Sleep Deprivation Institute (and pop culture website) Needcoffee.com. He lives in Florida with absolutely no pets.

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Shannyn Campbell graduated from the University of Wollongong’s Creative Writing Program with Distinction (no, that’s not the one from the Monty Python sketch). She lives in Wollongong and spends her days as a Disability Support Worker. Her most recent work has been writing episodes for the web series Wolfgang, where a bunch of millennia werewolf’s battle boredom during their monthly quarantine.

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VG Campen lives in a kudzu-infested corner of North Carolina with one spouse and various animals.  After decades of reading, she began writing speculative fiction and horror.  It’s never too late to start!  Her work has published in venues including Pseudopod, Analog, Tales to Terrify, and Metaphorosis.  She is, of course, working on a novel.

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Isabel Cañas is a Mexican-American speculative fiction writer, a PhD candidate in late medieval Islamicate literature, and a 2018 graduate of Clarion West. Her recent work can be found in Lightspeed Magazine and Nightmare Magazine.

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Matt Cardin is a writer, editor, musician, and college professor and administrator living in North Texas. With a Ph.D. in leadership and a master’s degree in religious studies, he focuses frequently on the intersection of religion, horror, art, and creativity. His books include the weird and cosmic horror fiction collections To Rouse Leviathan (2019), described by Thomas Ligotti as “a breviary of gruesome mysteries” that is “a worthy descendant of a distinguished line of supernatural horror”; Dark Awakenings (2010), which Publishers Weekly praised as a “thinking-man’s book of the macabre” with “unusual philosophic depth”; and Divinations of the Deep (2002), which launched the New Century Macabre fiction imprint for Ash-Tree Press. He also wrote the free ebook A Course in Demonic Creativity (2011).  His editorial projects include Horror Literature through History: An Encyclopedia of the Stories That Speak to Our Deepest Fears (2017), Ghosts, Spirits, and Psychics: The Paranormal from Alchemy to Zombies (2015), and Mummies around the World: An Encyclopedia of Mummies in Religion, History, and Popular Culture (2014). In 2015 he received a World Fantasy Award nomination for editing Born to Fear: Interviews with Thomas Ligotti. He is also co-editor of the literary horror journal Vastarien. (more…)

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Jeff Carlson was born on the day of the first manned moon landing and narrowly escaped being named Apollo, Armstrong or Rocket.  His father worked for NASA Ames at the time.  His granddad on his mother’s side was a sci fi fan whose library included autographed copies of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy.  Both men were strong, early influences — and in the high tech 21st Century, it’s easy to stand with one foot in reality and the other in thriller novels.

Jeff is the international bestselling author of Plague Year, Interrupt and The Frozen Sky, hailed by Publishers Weekly as “Pulse pounding.”

To date, his writing has sold in seventeen languages worldwide.  Jeff’s novels have been translated into Czech, Dutch, German, Hungarian, Japanese, Spanish, Romanian, Russian and Turkish.  His short stories and nonfiction have also appeared in most of those languages as well as Esperanto, Estonian, French, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Polish and Portuguese.

He lives with his wife and sons in California.

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Siobhan Carroll is a Canadian author whose short stories have appeared in venues like Lightspeed and Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year anthologies. A scholar as well as a writer of speculative fiction, she typically uses the fantastic to explore dark histories of empire and the environment. Her novelette “For He Can Creep” was recently adapted as an episode of SO4 of Netflix’s Love, Death & Robots. You can read more on her website at http://voncarr-siobhan-carroll.blogspot.com/ .

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