Craig Spector

Author, screenwriter, and musician Craig Spector developed an interest in the macabre at a very early age: he was severely burned in a tragic household accident when he was only ten months old and did drawings of skeletons and severed heads when he was a little boy. Spector graduated cum laude in 1982 with a B.A. in Professional Music from the Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts and went on to attend the Atlanta College of Art in Atlanta, Georgia. He moved to New York City, New York and worked as a street messenger before getting his writing career off the ground. Spector co-wrote the acclaimed horror novels "The Light at the End," "The Cleanup," "The Scream," "Dead Lines," "The Bridge," and "Animals" with former writing partner John Skipp. (The duo also penned the novelization of the 1985 horror picture Fright Night (1985)) Skipp and Spector were two of the key writers involved in the "splatterpunk" horror fiction movement of the 80's. They served as the editors for the well-received horror zombie short story anthologies "Book of the Dead" and "Still Dead: Book of the Dead 2." Moreover, the pair appear together in bit parts in the films Death Collector (1988), Nightbreed (1990) and collaborated on the script for A Nightmare on Elm Street: The Dream Child (1989). Skipp and Spector split up in 1993. Spector has since gone on to a solo writing career; his first solo novel "To Bury the Dead" was published in 2000. His second solo novel "Underground" was published in 2005 and won the Le Prix Masterton for best foreign horror novel in 2008. His third solo novel, "Turnaround", was published in 2010. Spector was the founder and Chief Creative Officer of Stealth Press, an Internet-enabled publishing company that specialized in quality hardcover reprints of titles by such notable authors as Ray Bradbury, Peter Straub, Clive Barker, Dennis Etchison, John Shirley, William F. Nolan, Peter Atkins, and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro. He parted with this company in 2002. Spector co-wrote the script for the made-for-TV disaster feature Volcano: Fire on the Mountain (1997) and the feature film adaptation of the last Skipp & Spector, Animals (2009). From 1998-2008 he played in the band Smash-Cut with fellow authors/musicians P.G. Sturges and Richard Christian Matheson. Craig Spector lives in Virginia Beach, Virginia.