Person Biography:
Craig Spector, a renowned author, screenwriter, and musician, has had a lifelong fascination with the macabre. This interest began at a tender age, when he was severely burned in a household accident at just ten months old. As a young boy, he would draw skeletons and severed heads, a testament to his early fascination with the darker side of life.
Spector's academic background is equally impressive. He graduated cum laude in 1982 with a Bachelor of Arts in Professional Music from the prestigious Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts. He later attended the Atlanta College of Art in Atlanta, Georgia, before moving to New York City, where he worked as a street messenger before launching his writing career.
Spector is perhaps best known for his work as a horror novelist, co-writing several acclaimed novels with his former writing partner, John Skipp. Together, they penned the novels "The Light at the End," "The Cleanup," "The Scream," "Dead Lines," "The Bridge," and "Animals," as well as the novelization of the 1985 horror film Fright Night. Skipp and Spector were key figures in the "splatterpunk" horror fiction movement of the 1980s, and they also served as editors for the horror anthologies "Book of the Dead" and "Still Dead: Book of the Dead 2."
In addition to his writing career, Spector has also made appearances in several films, including Death Collector, Nightbreed, and A Nightmare on Elm Street: The Dream Child. He and Skipp collaborated on the script for the latter film, and they appeared together in bit parts in the former two.
After parting ways with Skipp in 1993, Spector went on to pursue a solo writing career. His first solo novel, "To Bury the Dead," was published in 2000, followed by "Underground" in 2005, which won the prestigious Le Prix Masterton award for best foreign horror novel in 2008. His third solo novel, "Turnaround," was published in 2010.
Spector was also the founder and Chief Creative Officer of Stealth Press, an Internet-enabled publishing company that specialized in reprinting classic horror titles by notable authors such as Ray Bradbury, Peter Straub, Clive Barker, and others. He parted ways with the company in 2002.
In addition to his writing and publishing endeavors, Spector has also pursued a career in music. He co-wrote the script for the made-for-TV disaster film Volcano: Fire on the Mountain in 1997 and the feature film adaptation of the novel "Animals" in 2009. From 1998 to 2008, he played in the band Smash-Cut with fellow authors and musicians P.G. Sturges and Richard Christian Matheson.
Today, Craig Spector resides in Virginia Beach, Virginia, where he continues to write and pursue his passions.
