John Howard (author)

For other people with the same name, see John Howard (disambiguation).

John Howard is an English author, born in London in 1961. His fiction has appeared in anthologies, magazines, and the collections The Silver Voices,[1] Written by Daylight, and Cities and Thrones and Powers. The majority of Howard's stories have central and eastern European settings; many are set in the fictional Romanian town of Steaua de Munte. The Defeat of Grief[2] is a novella set in Steaua de Munte and the real Black Sea resort of Balcic; Numbered as Sand or the Stars attempts a 'secret history' of Hungary between the World Wars.

Secret Europe is a collection jointly written with Mark Valentine comprising 25 short stories set in a variety of real and fictional European locations. Ten of the stories are by Howard and fifteen by Valentine. The expanded edition published in 2014 added an introduction and an extra story by Mark Valentine.

Howard contributed a story to Dreams of Ourselves, an anthology published in tribute to the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa. Contributors and editor used Pessoa heteronyms, with the authors' names only revealed in the sealed envelope supplied with each copy of the book.

Since 2003 John Howard has occasionally collaborated on short stories with Mark Valentine. Six have featured Valentine's long-running series character The Connoisseur, an occult detective whose real name is never revealed. All 23 tales of The Connoisseur, including the collaborations, were reprinted in The Collected Connoisseur (Tartarus Press, 2010).[3]

John Howard has written essays for numerous magazines including Book and Magazine Collector, Supernatural Tales, Wormwood, Studies in Australian Weird Fiction, and All Hallows for the Ghost Story Society. He contributed essays to the Fritz Leiber special issue of Fantasy Commentator (No. 57/58, 2004) and to the books Black Prometheus: A Critical Study of Karl Edward Wagner (Gothic Press, 2007), Fritz Leiber: Critical Essays (McFarlane, 2008), and The Man Who Collected Psychos: Critical Essays on Robert Bloch (McFarlane, 2009), all edited by Benjamin Szumskyj. Most of these essays were included in Touchstones: Essays on the Fantastic (2014), which was a British Fantasy Award nominee the following year. In 2013 Howard took over the review column Camera Obscura in Tartarus Press' journal Wormwood.

Bibliography

Books: Story collections and novellas

Books: Nonfiction

Other formats

Stories in anthologies and magazines

Essays (uncollected)

Introductions and afterwords

Stories in collaboration with Mark Valentine

Edited

References

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 12/1/2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.