John Everson

I share a deep purple den in Naperville, Illinois with a cockatoo and cockatiel, a disparate collection of fake skulls, twisted skeletal fairies, Alan Clark illustrations and a large stuffed Eeyore. There’s also a mounted Chinese fowling spider named Stoker courtesy of fellow horror author Charlee Jacob, an ever-growing shelf of custom mix CDs and an acoustic guitar that I can’t really play but that my son likes to hear me beat on anyway. Sometimes my wife is surprised to find me shuffling through more public areas of the house, but it’s usually only to brew another cup of coffee. In order to avoid the onerous task of writing, I record pop-rock songs in a hidden home studio, experiment with the insatiable culinary joys of the jalapeno, design book covers for a variety of small presses, lose hours in expanding an array of gardens and chase frequent excursions into the bizarre visual headspace of ’70s euro-horror DVDs with a shot of Makers Mark and a tall glass of Newcastle. For information on my fiction, art and music, visit John Everson: Dark Arts at www.johneverson.com or MySpace at www.myspace.com/johneverson.