Амброз Бирс - Flight or Fright - 17 Turbulent Tales

Tom Bissell(1974-) was born in Escanaba, Michigan. He is the author of nine books, including the New York Times -bestselling The Disaster Artist (written with Greg Sestero) and Apostle . His work has been awarded the Rome Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He lives in Los Angeles with his family.

Ray Bradbury(1920-2012) was the author of more than three dozen books, including such classics as Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, Dandelion Wine, and Something Wicked This Way Comes, as well as hundreds of short stories. He wrote for theater, cinema, and TV, including the screenplay for John Huston’s Moby Dick and the Emmy Award-winning teleplay The Halloween Tree, and adapted for television sixty-five of his stories for The Ray Bradbury Theater. He was the recipient of the 2000 National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, the 2007 Pulitzer Prize Special Citation, and numerous other honors.

Roald Dahl(1916-1990) was born in Cardiff of Norwegian descent. He joined the RAF at the age of twenty-three and began writing for adults after being injured in a plane crash during World War II. Sitting in a hut at the bottom of his garden, he went on to write some of the world’s best-loved children’s stories, including Matilda , Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and The BFG . Today, his stories have been translated into 60 languages and he has sold more than 250 million books. Many of these stories have also been adapted for stage and screen, including the 1971 film classic, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory , Wes Anderson’s acclaimed Fantastic Mr Fox , Steven Spielberg’s The BFG and the multi-award-winning Matilda The Musical from the RSC with music by Tim Minchin. Dahl died in November 1990.

James L. Dickey(1923-1997) was an American poet and novelist best known as the author of Deliverance , which was adapted as a major motion picture in 1972. Dickey had a cameo in the movie as a sheriff. He served as a radar operator in a night flier squadron in the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II and served again in the U.S. Air Force during the Korean War. After receiving a bachelor’s degree in English and Philosophy from Vanderbilt, he returned to complete an M.A. in English at the same institution. He taught at the Rice Institute and the University of Florida, and spent several years writing advertising copy. He started publishing collections of his poetry in 1960, and was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a National Book Award for Poetry, as well as being named poetry consultant for the Library of Congress. After serving as a visiting lecturer throughout most of the 1960s, he became a professor of English and writer-in-residence at the University of South Carolina in 1969. He was appointed the eighteenth United States Poet Laureate in 1966 and was invited to read at President Jimmy Carter’s inauguration in 1977. His reading of his poem “The Moon Ground” was broadcast on television on the day of the Apollo 11 moon landing in July 1969.

Arthur Conan Doyle(1859-1930) was a physician who created Sherlock Holmes, a consulting detective who appeared in dozens of short stories and four novels. Doyle also wrote historical novels and adventure stories featuring Professor Challenger. He wrote about the Boer War and other issues related to the African continent, but became fascinated by spiritualism, an interest that put him into conflict with the likes of Harry Houdini and Joseph McCabe. His autobiography, Memories and Adventures , was published six years before his death.

Cody Goodfellow(1970-) has written seven solo novels and three with NY Times -bestselling author John Skipp, and two of his four collections of short fiction, Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars and All-Monster Action , received the Wonderland Book Award. He wrote, co-produced and scored the short Lovecraftian hygiene film Stay-At-Home Dad . As a hierophant of the Esoteric Order of Dagon, he presides over several Cthulhu Prayer Breakfasts each year. He recently played an Amish farmer in a Days Inn commercial, and has appeared in the background on numerous TV programs, including Aquarius , American Horror Story : Roanoke , G.L.O.W ., You’re The Worst , Kirby Buckets , Kevin Hart’s Guide to Black History and videos by Anthrax and Beck. He is also a cofounder of Perilous Press, an occasional micropublisher of modern cosmic horror. Despite what you may have read elsewhere, he actually lives in Portland, Oregon.

Joe Hill(1972-) is the #1 New York Times- bestselling author of The Fireman , NOS4A2 , and, most recently, Strange Weather . As he lives part of his life in the United Kingdom and part of his life in the States, he spends quite a bit of the time in the air, musing about all the hideous things that could happen to a person at 30,000 feet.

Stephen King(1947-) made his first professional short story sale in 1967 to Startling Mystery Stories . In the fall of 1971, he began teaching high school English classes at Hampden Academy, the public high school in Hampden, Maine. Writing in the evenings and on the weekends, he continued to produce short stories and to work on novels. In the spring of 1973, Doubleday & Co., accepted the novel Carrie for publication, providing him the means to leave teaching and write full-time. He has since published over 50 books and has become one of the world’s most successful writers. King is the recipient of the 2003 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, the 2014 National Medal of Arts and the 2018 PEN America Literary Service Award.

E. Michael Lewis(1972-) is an aviation and ghost story enthusiast who studied creative writing at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma. His short stories appear in The Horror Anthology of Horror Anthologies (Megazanthus Press), Exotic Gothic 4 (PS Publishing), and Savage Beasts (Grey Matter Press). He’s also on Facebook and Twitter. He is a lifelong native of the Pacific Northwest, the father of two sons, and the chief attendant of two cats, who are also brothers.

Richard Matheson(1926-2013) is the author of many classic novels and short stories. He wrote in a variety of genres including terror, fantasy, horror, paranormal, suspense, science fiction and western. In addition to books, he wrote prolifically for television (including The Twilight Zone,Night Gallery,Star Trek) and numerous feature films . Many of Matheson’s novels and stories have been made into movies including The Shrinking Man, I Am Legend, Somewhere in Time, and What Dreams May Come . His many awards include the World Fantasy and Bram Stoker Awards for Lifetime Achievement, the Hugo Award, Edgar Award, Spur Award for Best Western Novel, multiple Writer’s Guild awards, and in 2010 he was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame.

David J. Schow(1955-) has had his short stories selected for over 30 volumes of “Year’s Best” anthologies across four decades and has won the World Fantasy Award, the ultra-rare Dimension Award from Twilight Zone magazine, plus an International Horror Guild Award for Wild Hairs (his compendium of “Raving & Drooling” columns written for Fangoria ). His novels include The Kill Riff , The Shaft , Rock Breaks Scissors Cut , Bullets of Rain , Gun Work , Hunt Among the Killers of Men , Internecine , Upgunned and The Big Crush (forthcoming). His short stories are collected in Seeing Red , Lost Angels, Black Leather Required , Crypt Orchids , Eye , Zombie Jam , Havoc Swims Jaded , DJSturbia , and a career compendium, DJStories . He has written extensively for films ( The Crow , Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III , The Hills Run Red ) and television ( Tales from the Crypt , Perversions of Science , The Hunger , Masters of Horror ). His other nonfiction work includes The Art of Drew Struzan and The Outer Limits Companion . A follow-up volume, The Outer Limits at 50 , won the 2015 Rondo Hatton Classic Horror Award for Best Book. As expert witness you can see him talking and moving around on documentaries and DVDs for everything from Creature from the Black Lagoon , Incubus and The Shawshank Redemption to Scream and Scream Again , Beast Wishes and The Psycho Legacy . He is also the editor of the three-volume Lost Bloch series for Subterranean Press and Elvisland by John Farris. He co-produced supplements for such DVDs as Reservoir Dogs , From Hell , I, Robot , The Dirty Dozen Special Edition and Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe . He was the recipient of the very first J.F. Gonzalez Lifetime Achievement Award, and thanks to him the word “splatterpunk” has been in the Oxford English Dictionary since 2002. He lives and works in his beloved Los Angeles. Google him, by all means.