Weird Tales: 100 Years of Weird

Jonathan Maberry is a New York Times bestselling author, five-time Bram Stoker Award winner, four-time Scribe Award winner, Inkpot Award winner, and comic book writer. His vampire apocalypse book series, V-Wars, became a Netflix original series. He writes horror, science fiction, epic fantasy, thrillers, and more. He is the president of the International Association of Media Tie-in Writers and the editor of Weird Tales magazine.

R. L. Stine has more than 400 million English-language books in print, plus international editions in thirty-two languages, making him one of the most popular children’s authors of all time. Besides Goosebumps, he has written series including Fear Street, Rotten School, Mostly Ghostly, the Nightmare Room, Dangerous Girls, and Just Beyond. Stine lives in New York City with his wife, Jane, a former editor and publisher.

Laurell K. Hamilton is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter novels, as well as the Meredith Gentry series.

Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) was the author of more than three dozen books, including Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, and Something Wicked This Way Comes, as well as hundreds of short stories. He wrote for the 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.

Victor LaValle is the award-winning author of The Ecstatic, Big Machine, and Slapboxing with Jesus. Big Machine was the winner of an American Book Award and the Shirley Jackson Award in 2010, and was selected as one of the best books of the year by the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, the Nation, and Publishers Weekly. He teaches writing at Columbia University and lives in New York.

Robert E. Howard (1906–1936) was an American author who wrote pulp fiction in a diverse range of genres. He is well known for his character Conan the Barbarian and is regarded as the father of the sword and sorcery subgenre. Born and raised in the state of Texas, Howard spent most of his life in the town of Cross Plains.

Hailey Piper is the Bram Stoker Award–winning author of Queen of Teeth, The Worm and His Kings, Your Mind Is a Terrible Thing, Unfortunate Elements of My Anatomy, Benny Rose, the Cannibal King, and The Possession of Natalie Glasgow. She is a member of the Horror Writers Association, with dozens of short stories appearing in various publications. She lives with her wife in Maryland, where their paranormal research is classified. Find her on Twitter via @HaileyPiperSays

H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) was an American author who achieved posthumous fame through his influential works of horror fiction. Virtually unknown and only published in pulp magazines before he died in poverty, he is now regarded as one of the most significant twentieth-century authors in his genre. He was born in Providence, Rhode Island, where he lived most of his life. His relatively small corpus of work consists of three short novels and about sixty short stories.

Tennessee Williams (1911–1983), born Thomas Lanier in Columbus, Mississippi, won Pulitzer Prizes for his dramas A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Other plays include The Glass Menagerie, Summer and Smoke, The Rose Tattoo, Camino Real, Suddenly Last Summer, Sweet Bird of Youth, and Night of the Iguana. He also wrote a number of one-act plays, short stories, poems, and two novels, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone and Moishe and the Age of Reason. He died at the age of seventy-two.

James Aquilone was raised on Saturday-morning cartoons, comic books, sitcoms, and Cap’n Crunch. Amid the Cold War, he dreamed of being a jet fighter pilot but decided against the military life after realizing it would require him to wake up early. He had further illusions of being a stand-up comedian, until a traumatic experience onstage forced him to seek a college education. Brief stints as an alternative rock singer/guitarist and child model also proved unsuccessful. Today he battles a severe chess addiction while trying to write in the speculative-fiction game.