In recent years he has predominantly been writing horror.Įver since he was a teenager Chris has loved unsettling and creepy stories, with fond memories of buying comics like 'Strange Tales' and 'House of Mystery', watching classic BBC TV adaptations of M R James ghost stories every Christmas and reading assorted weirdness by everyone from Edgar Allen Poe to Ray Bradbury. Has been nominated for many awards including the Edgar Awards, the UKLA Children's Book Award and the Carnegie Medal. He has written several books for children & young-adults, both fiction and non-fiction, and He currently has a weekly strip cartoon called 'Payne's Grey' in the New Statesman.Ĭhris has been a published author since 2000. Chris worked as an illustrator and cartoonist for twenty years, working mainly for magazines & newspapers (these include The Times, The Guardian, The Independent, The Economist and the Wall Street Journal) before becoming a writer. He now lives in Cambridge with his wife and son where he writes, draws, paints, dreams and doodles (not necessarily in that order). He spent his teens in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, before moving to Manchester, London and then Norfolk. He decided then “that my ambition was to write and illustrate my own book”. He was an avid reader of American comics as a child, and when he was eight or nine, and living in Gibraltar, he won a prize in a newspaper story-writing competition.

His latest novel, Through Dead Eyes, was published by Bloomsbury this year.His father was in the army and so he moved around a lot as a child and lived in Wales. Chris’ novel The Dead of Winter is also a Gothic thriller with a meta-fictional twist, which recalls the fictional worlds of Jane Eyre and The Woman in Black. Mister Creecher is an inspired rewriting of Shelley’s classic Frankenstein, by way of Charles Dickens. Chris’ work has also attracted a number of children’s fiction award nominations, with Mister Creecher recently long-listed for the UKLA children’s fiction award. Lovecraft and Hammer Horror, to name a few. You go into that dark space willingly.'Ĭhris Priestley’s unsettling and macabre ghost story collections – The Tales of Terror – are a series of uncanny portmanteau narratives, an uncanny concoction of all things Gothic from M.R. It also acknowledges the transgressive attraction the evil can have.

The Gothic is an acknowledgment of that blurred line between the fear of death and the thrill of fear. I don’t think this is always the dismal exercise it seems. 'I think that some people – maybe most people – do not want to look into the shadows.

The Dead of Winter by Chris Priestley