AUTHOR BIO

Born in Chicago, the summer of '68. My dad owned a drugstore. My mom was my full-time mom. I had a little sister I loved to torment. I attended Catholic schools, including an all-male high school. An altar boy who volunteered to serve at funerals, I contemplated becoming a priest. Instead, I left home for Grinnell College in Iowa. Everything changed.

I started to write.

At college I worked as a cook's assistant, I learned to clean a tip-skillet and make moussaka for five hundred friends. I sold trees in the summer. I loaded trucks on a warehouse dock. I bused tables at a jazz club. The opportunity arose to study abroad, but I did it back in Chicago, as a fellow at the Newberry Library, living on Rush and Division. I won a story-writing contest. One day at the library, I touched an F. Scott Fitzgerald manuscript.

I knew I had to be a writer.

I tackled grad school in English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, studied Eighteenth Century British Literature and wrote my thesis on Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. But I wanted to write fiction. I met a woman I loved in Intro to Old English. She didn't know what she was getting into. We moved back to Chicago and got married.

I found a job in social services. I wrote stories at night.

By daylight I helped people with mental disabilities find housing and jobs. I had a client who thought the Devil was stabbing him with pitchforks. Another bit two hospital orderlies and insisted he was a werewolf. During a West Side home visit, a pack of pit bulls chased me. Gangbangers refused to let me park my car on their street. Cops mistook me for a knife-wielding schizophrenic (also a client of mine) and nearly shot me.

At home, I started a novel.

I’m the author of the critically-acclaimed dark thrillers Skin River, Bone Factory, and The Mirror’s Edge. My new novel of terror, Pitch Dark, is coming in April ’11.